Online event on Masked Media: 12 September, 2015

Above are details of an upcoming online 12 September event on my new book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence (London: Open Humanities Press, 2025):

Co-organised by Culture Machine and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos in Mexico city, the event is hosted by the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings / Laboratorio de Escrituras Contemporáneas, which is being launching with this discussion of Masked Media.

The idea for the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings emerged from a recent ACLA Seminar titled ‘Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University’. While linked to conversations around infrapolitics (e.g., https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/), its focus is broader: on writing, subjectivity, students, ourselves, and how to respond to the conditions we’re living through today.

To join this event online, email: enlace@17edu.org

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On Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence

If we want a more socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? 

It’s this question that Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, Radical Open Access Collective, and the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums have been testing some of the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge that are enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print through photography and video to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders the anthropocentric, Euro-Western knowledge-making practices of the arts and humanities invisible – ensuring the human is kept ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human. 

Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a 'human-authored' work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational inhuman assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name –  ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media demonstrates how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything from identity politics and the decolonialisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. 

The Commons vs Creative Commons III: Some Problems, Distinctions and Alternatives - Including Signals, CC's Response to AI

This is the third part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * CC and AI * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

IV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/)

Creative Commons has been widely praised for fostering a culture of sharing, remixing and reuse within the framework of copyright law, while still preserving certain rights for creators and content owners. To this end it offers several types of licenses, ranging from the most restrictive (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives, or BY-NC-ND) to the least restrictive (Attribution, or CC-BY), as well as the CC0 public domain legal tool, which enables creators to waive their copyright entirely. These licenses and tools allow authors, artists and educators to share their work (and, importantly, to receive acknowledgment, recognition and respect for it), while granting others varying degrees of freedom over what they can and cannot do with it.

For all these contributions, Creative Commons has several notable limitations. It was founded and championed by liberals such as Lawrence Lessig (2004) and James Boyle (2008), whose goal was to reform IP law, not abolish or radically rethink it. CC was designed to make copyright more balanced and “reasonable” by providing a choice between what Lessig positions as either “property” or “anarchy” (Lessig 2004, 11, 13). With some rights and freedoms being controlled “but not all,” the idea was to ensure copyright does not stifle innovation, business or competition (10). And, without doubt, Creative Commons plays an important role in (digital) culture, with an estimated two and a half billion works now available under some form of CC-license. Yet these licenses and public domain tools remain firmly embedded within the existing structures of copyright regulation. Far from challenging intellectual property (IP) regimes – say, by the kind of illegal or semi-legal tactics adopted by shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub – Creative Commons offers a more flexible approach that protects creatives and users from some of copyright’s extremes, without disrupting its core underlying logic.

Another key limitation is that the decision to apply a CC license, and to select which specific one to use, continues to rest entirely with the “voluntary action” of the original copyright holder (Lessig 2004, 11). As such, Creative Commons may benefit both professional and amateur members of the creative class to which Lessig and Boyle belong – “the new Walt Disneys” (9): artists, academics, designers, film makers, software developers and so forth – whose entrepreneurial opportunities to “flourish” (13) and themselves “Disnify the culture” (10) in turn are otherwise constrained by corporate ownership and control of IP. But it does little to confront deeper, systemic problems around the commodification and marketisation of culture and knowledge.

CC and AI

Rather than helping to produce a common subject, the framework of Creative Commons also assumes an highly individualistic, humanist and liberal model of authorship – and, some argue, of use as well. One exception is the proposed CC Signals initiative that Creative Commons is, at the time of this writing, developing in response to the extraction of large volumes of data from across the public web to train consumer-facing generative AI. As Creative Commons notes, “large AI models are benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into creating and maintaining the commons” while also functioning to deplete these shared resources: for instance, by “reducing the need for people to visit the original sources of information” (Creative Commons 2025b, 11, 9). Each signal – described as a global tool designed to be both machine and human readable – enables the stewards of large collections of content and data to declare their preferences regarding how they should be “used for machine reuse,” and how the machines (and the companies behind them) should give back to the shared knowledge ecosystem (Creative Commons 2025a). The aim, grounded in CC’s conviction that “universal access to knowledge and culture is a human right,” is to encourage people to continue to contribute to that ecosystem of open knowledge in an era of exploitative LLM AI (2025b, 4). And to do so without forcing stewards to adopt the all-or-nothing position of either completely allowing or completely preventing such machine reuse, be it technologically or by expanding copyright to make it more restrictive of AI – precisely the kind of blunt binary choice Creative Commons was originally devised to avoid. CC is careful to emphasize that signals “is not about creating new property rights; it is more like defining manners for machines” and changing social norms that way through coordinated collective action (2025a; 2025b, 25). Yet this only serves to draw attention to another of the shortcomings of the existing Creative Commons licensing model (which is separate from CC signals): it fails to adequately account for collective and nonhuman contributions to creative production, rendering it incompatible with more ontologically radical and heterogenous approaches.

Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons

Despite the impression given by its name – and despite its self-description as an “organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture” as a means of benefiting humanity (Creative Commons 2025b, 3), not to forget its use by many proponents of the commons – Creative Commons does not, strictly speaking, function as a (creative) commons. A commons typically refers to a shared, non-proprietary resource or space that is collectively managed and governed, often without strict adherence to individual ownership models. By contrast, Creative Commons licenses grant rights to users on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the individual copyright holders (or those designated content stewards acting in their stead such as companies).

The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions

Key differences between the commons and Creative Commons include:

• Shared access vs. ownership: The commons challenges notions of exclusive ownership, emphasising collective production, use and protection. Creative Commons recognises and prioritises the rights of the individual copyright holder, placing their control over the work before any consideration of potential users’ rights.
• Community management vs. individual choice: Commons governance involves social processes, negotiations, contracts and sometimes legal frameworks that establish, maintain and actively enforce community-based stewardship. Creative Commons provides a range of licenses and public domain tools for individual authors to select from according to what they consider to be most appropriate for them.
• Social relations vs. licensing framework: Commons involve community relationships, participation and reciprocity. Creative Commons licenses are legal instruments that do not inherently encourage such social dynamics, at least not in the same way, applying only when copyright applies, which is what gives them “bite” (Creative Commons 2025b, 22). (Creative Commons can however be considered part of the larger ecosystem of publicly shared knowledge that includes the likes of Wikipedia, open access, open data licenses and the Wayback Machine, the informal social contract of which is based on a certain degree of reciprocal trust and exchange – or was until advances in AI placed it at risk.)
• Capitalist and colonialist vs. Indigenous and collective: Creative Commons is ill-suited to forms of cultural production that do not align with Western modernist-liberal – some would insist capitalist and colonialist – conceptions of authorship and intellectual property. Many Indigenous populations create culture collectively, treating it precisely as common. This makes it difficult to designate a single copyright holder (or a representative entity able to act as one) as required to apply a Creative Commons license. As a result, CC is limited in its ability to protect Indigenous cultural expressions from appropriation and exploitation by global capital or otherwise avoid repeating the ongoing dynamics of settler colonialism.

Alternatives to Creative Commons

While they are less widely known – perhaps precisely because they present more of a challenge to the dominant intellectual property regime and Western modernist-liberal frameworks – there exists a range of alternatives to Creative Commons and its licenses that are better equipped to support the collective creation, stewardship and protection of the commons. These include: 

• Anti-Capitalist Software License (https://anticapitalist.software/) 

Oriented toward a post-capitalist future, the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL) enables the sharing of software that supports individuals, collectives, worker-owned cooperatives and nonprofits. Use by entities that profit from exploitative labour practices is explicitly restricted, however. The ACSL draws a clear distinction between commerce and capitalism: commercial use of software is permitted, so long as the organisation concerned is not structured along capitalist lines. In this way the ACSL aims to give such non-capitalist actors a strategic “advantage so that they may survive under capitalism – and outlive it.”

• CopyFair License (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License) 

A license designed to allow sharing of resources within the commons while excluding extractive commercial use by private companies. Inspired by ideas of reciprocity and fairness, CopyFair permits use by communities, cooperatives, commons-based enterprises and nonprofit actors, but restricts access to corporations that do not give back to the commons in the required manner.

• Copyfarleft (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft) 

As its name suggests, this is a radical left-oriented adaptation of copyleft and the latter’s aim to provide the users of a work with the freedom to copy, share and modify it, and the authors of a work the right to impose restrictions on its use (i.e., that any modified versions are released under similar, reciprocal, terms). Copyfarleft is designed to build counter-power within the commons by ensuring workers own the means of production. A copyfarleft license makes it “possible for producers to share freely and to retain the value of their labour product … but impossible for owners of private property to make money” by exploiting wage labour or accessing the common stock. Commercial use is therefore allowed, but only for worker-owned commons, collectives and cooperatives.

• CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use (https://constantvzw.org/site/Collective-Conditions-for-Re-Use-CC4r,3483.html?w=https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html)/; CC2r: Collective Commitment to Reuse

A collective, decolonial and trans-feminist commitment to reuse – rather than a license or legal tool – that understands authorship as a collaborative cultural practice, not the outcome of isolated individual creativity. CC4r/CC2r recognises the social and historical context in which creative work emerges and affirms that, in some cases, limiting or refusing reuse may be necessary. Instead of attaching finished permissions at the point of release, it encourages ongoing responsibility, experimentation, evaluation, contestation and revision. (Hence the transition from CC4r to CC2r.)  

• Peer Production License (PPL) (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License)

PPL aligns with the CopyFair approach, though its co-designer Dmytri Kleiner contends that it falls under the Copyfarleft category. It promotes commons-based production through a model grounded in reciprocity. Under the terms of the Peer Production License, only fellow commoners, cooperatives and nonprofit organisations are permitted to use and re-use the common stock – explicitly excluding extractive capitalist use that seeks to profit from the commons without offering something in return.

• Feminist Peer Production License (https://0xacab.org/labekka/f2f/-/blob/no-masters/license-f2f-en.md)

A feminist reworking of the Peer Production License, use for commercial purposes is restricted to cooperatives, non-profits, collectives and self-managed workers’ groups that operate according to feminist principles. Any profits or added value generated through the rights granted by the Feminist Peer Production License must be directed back into efforts aimed at challenging capitalism and dismantling patriarchy.

• Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) (https://localcontexts.org/about/) 

Developed through the Local Contexts project, these labels provide Indigenous peoples, cultural institutions and researchers with practical tools to embed cultural meaning, historical depth and community-defined authority into the presentation and management of cultural heritage materials. These labels are designed to strengthen Indigenous governance and support community-led decision-making around questions of ownership, access and the culturally appropriate use of both historical and contemporary cultural content, as well as future collections of Indigenous culture and data.

Liquidate AI Art

This is the author's cut of my abstract for a talk (online only) I am due to give at the Computer Art Society in London on October 15, 2025.

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Liquidate AI Art
Gary Hall

Liquidate =

to wind up the affairs of an enterprise or business, shut it, close it down, stop it operating, so it’s assets can be sold off to pay its debts

to kill

This talk expands on my recent book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence. It argues for liquidating AI art, not out of a dismissal of such computational technology as a product of the ‘military-industrial-tech complex’ – however techno-fascist, nihilist or just parrot-like it may appear – but rather an insistence that art has always been created by hybrid assemblages of humans and nonhumans. There is no pure, authentic human creativity to distinguish from works generated with technologies like Stable Diffusion

But ‘Liquidate AI Art’ is also a bold provocation in that it references the International Coalition for the Liquidation of Art – whose members included Gustav Metzger, first editor of the Computer Art Society (CAS) bulletin PAGE – and especially Frieder Nake’s assertion in PAGE 18 that ‘there should be no computer art’. For Nake, art should not be divided into commodifiable styles based on the tools used to produce it. Instead, it should function as a radical force capable of disrupting the power structures of the bourgeois art world.

Picking up on this challenge, ‘Liquidate AI Art’ builds on my forthcoming book Defund Culture to show how funding and support in the UK’s creative industries overwhelmingly benefit upper- and middle-class, privately educated, Oxbridge graduates. Such structural inequality cannot be remedied through social mobility initiatives that include more ‘diverse’ groups in a system that has historically excluded them and was constructed in advance (although not by them). What’s needed is a redistribution of resources – e.g. through the liquidation of the UK’s copyright regime – to support radically different ways of thinking and working beyond the white, male, middle-class, liberal humanist norm.

The Commons vs Creative Commons II: On The Undercommons, Latent Commons and Uncommons

This is the second part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * CC and AI * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

iV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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The Undercommons

In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) challenge conventional political, economic and academic structures, arguing that resistance cannot be confined to restoring or reforming institutions such as the university. As far as they are concerned, the North American academy is a site of professionalisation and managerialisation that absorbs and neutralizes radical thought (including Autonomist Marxist theories of the commons and common), turning “insurgents into state agents” (2013, 38). In response, Harney and Moten introduce the concept of the undercommons, which eludes the removal of the place of the commons and commoners through being a nonplace, one “that must be thought outside to be sensed inside” (39). The undercommons is a place of “refuge” (28), where “outcast mass intellectuality” (33) – not just academics but para-academics, precarious workers and those who have left or never entered the university – cultivate a collective intellectual and social life that exceeds the constraints of the university, the state and capital, and in so doing escapes them (30).

Rejecting appeals for inclusion within the university, Harney and Moten advocate fugitive study: a communal, improvisational and performative practice of learning and being together that resists institutional capture and assimilation, never settling into a solid unified identify. This resistance does not seek recognition or legitimacy from the dominant system or its professional-managerial class – not even as critical intellectuals. (Harney and Moten regard the latter as being generally negligent and complacent.) Instead, it involves cultivating alternative forms of shared knowledge, pedagogy and action within fugitive spaces underneath the critical. “[T]o be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (26). Drawing on Marxist philosophy and the legacy of Black radical thought, The Undercommons embraces a politics of abolition and criminal acts over participation in or negotiation with oppressive structures. “[S]teal what one can” – Harney and Moten regard this as “the only possible relationship to the American university today” (26). It is in this spirit that they call for insurgent intellectual and social practices that build new forms of life in the cracks of the system. They even go so far as to consider abolition as ultimately bearing a resemblance to communism, in that it does not call for the “elimination of anything” but rather “the founding of a new society” (42).

Latent Commons

Matsutake mushroom picking

Anna Tsing’s concept of the latent commons, as articulated in The Mushroom at the End of the World, refers to ubiquitous yet often overlooked and undeveloped forms of collaborative survival and resource-sharing that persist within capitalism’s ruins, albeit without the “handrails” of “modernization and progress” (Tsing 2015, 2). These practices do not conform neatly to the dominant economic frameworks and cannot be fully captured by them. Crucially, they are not “exclusive human enclaves” either remaining open to other beings including weeds, pests and diseases – world-making and alienation both being potential attributes of nonhumans as well as humans (Tsing 255, 121, 271). It should be noted that such ontologically heterogenous, relational – and thus site specific rather than universal or scalable (220-221) – forms of commons are being proposed increasingly (see also Blaser and de la Cadena below). These are commons that construct social relations with nonhuman or more-than-human entities and beings as actors and agents and not just objects.

Tsing explores how precarious livelihoods – especially “off-the-grid jobs” such as rare matsutake mushroom picking – cultivate alternate forms of sociality and mutual human and not-human reliance that resist strict privatization and commodification (2015, 33). In contrast to traditional, liberal or radical left visions of the commons, latent commons “don’t institutionalise well” (255). Far from being governed by fixed principles and rules they are informal and flexible. Consequently – again unlike more formal commons – they cannot be easily translated into structures with intentional strategic policies or prescribed behaviours. Instead, they exist in ephemeral, effervescent, “elusive” guises (255), operating within the interstices of capitalism and the law, rather than in direct opposition to them (as distinct from Harney and Moten’s insurgent practices, which also dwell within capitalism’s cracks, but adopt a more antagonistic stance).  

Being “neither properly inside nor outside” of capitalism (278, 134) – and intertwining with “multispecies others without knowing where the world-in-process is going” (264) – latent commons on Tsing’s account do not lead readily to redemptive and “utopian plans for solidarity” (134). They are “here and now, amidst the trouble. And humans are never fully in control” (255). Nevertheless, they signal the potential for collective forms of life that are beyond market logics, even if they are not fully disentangled from capitalist structures and the global supply chains that translate between capitalist and noncapitalist value systems. For Tsing, this is enough to maintain that such shifting polyphonic assemblages – such open-ended gatherings of ways of being – still contain the potential to be “mobilized in common cause” (135). Moreover, whereas many of capitalism’s critics insist on its unity and homogeneity as a system – some, like Hardt and Negri, even claiming “there is no longer a space outside of capitalism’s empire” (65) – Tsing counters that the economic diversity of latent commons “offers a chance for multiple ways forward,” not only and just that one powerful current of progress represented by an over-arching capitalism (65). To reiterate, she does not frame these noncapitalist forms and value regimes as strict alternatives to capitalism, however, so much as practices that exist within capitalist worlds: that both interact with capitalism and are drawn upon by it, even as capitalism remains dependent upon them. “There is room here for imagining other worlds” all the same (282), including “an alternative politics of more-than-human entanglements” (135).

Uncommons

Building on Isabelle Stengers’ idea of “interests in common which are not the same interests,” Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena’s concept of the uncommons challenges the universalising tendencies of the commons by foregrounding the existence of multiple, incommensurable worlds and their practices (Stengers 2005; Stengers 2011, 60; Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, 4). In A World of Many Worlds, they argue that many notions of the commons assume both: a single, shared reality in which resources and governance can be collectively managed; and an ontology in which humans and nature are conceived as being “distinct and detached from each other” (18). Blaser and de la Cadena emphasise how different groups – including Indigenous peoples and those in the global South and global periphery – do not necessarily share the same homogeneous ontological assumptions about what constitutes reality, property, ownership, sustainability or collective life. The relations between these communities can therefore be fraught, even antagonistic. The complexity of the situation is increased by the fact that their divergences extend beyond their different realities and ontologies: they can also include the relation between them, how it is perceived and understood it. This relation, too, can exist in multiple, incommensurable forms and be the subject of “adversarial dispute” and not just “allied agreement” (18). The grounds where the “negotiated coming together” of these “heterogenous worlds” can take place is what Blaser and de la Cadena mean by the uncommons (2018, 4). Politics is again not absent but pluralised, as “these alliances may also be capable of refracting the course of the one-world world and proposing … the practice of a world of many worlds, or what we call a pluriverse: heterogeneous worldings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (4).

The Unknown Common

Roberto Esposito introduces a further layer of complexity. He argues that we currently do not possess even the language to talk meaningfully about the common (without an s) – something that, he suggests, “was effectively excluded:” initially from the “process of modernization” and the invention of the state; and later from the “process of globalization” (Esposito 2013, 89). For Esposito, the common can be understood in terms of neither the public nor private (whether as good or property), the global nor local. The common exists rather as something “largely unknown,” and even resistant, to our established ways of thinking and categorizing the world (89).

Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-Wing

Thanks to movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and Barcelona en Comú in Spain the commons has – in recent decades especially – become closely associated with anti-capitalist politics and the left. Among Marxists, socialists, anarchists and eco-feminists it is perceived: as a space in which to experiment practically with alternative ways of organising resources to capitalism; as a means of reclaiming the common from capitalism and its version of the state; even as prefiguring the cooperative or communist postcapitalist societies the radical left is struggling to create. (By contrast, the work of radical thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy [1991], Giorgio Agamben [1993], and Roberto Esposito [2009] on the politics of community and the common has been criticised for being too philosophical and abstract.) Yet the commons can also take right-wing, conservative and libertarian forms. A country club, hunting lodge, gated community or cryptocurrency network may all function as a commons, while many free software communities align more closely with right-libertarian principles, valuing individual merit, competition and minimal regulation. Advocates of neoliberalism may similarly regard the commons as a more efficient means of producing for the market, since it is free from centralised state control and bureaucracy; while some supranational organisations, including both the World Bank and United Nations, have privatised natural resources such as seas and rainforests under the guise of “protecting biodiversity” and “preserving the common heritage of mankind” (Federici 2016). Ironically, one of the most well-known “commons,” however, is not a commons at all.

Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts: New open access book

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts, edited by Gabriel Menotti and German Alfonso Nunez.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Barbarian Currents is available open access (= it can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/barbarian-currents/

Book description

Contemporary art and media art do not exist in separate worlds. In 20th century Brazil, technology was a key element of artistic imagination. Oswald de Andrade, the father of Brazilian ‘cannibal’ modernism, envisioned the Americas as a cradle of a new society populated by technicised barbarians. The country’s post-war avant-gardes embraced computers and electronic media as transformative forces, capable of realising the promise of a nation in search of its modern identity. Barbarian Currents explores this history through a sociological lens, examining the many intriguing circumstances that have shaped the new forms of cultural and artistic expression.

This pioneering anthology brings together the voices of artists, critics and curators who played a pivotal role in the emergence of technological arts in post-war Brazil. The documents, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, remind us that ‘alternative’ art histories are simply the flipside of dominant narratives. They encourage us to look beyond the lens of Western exceptionalism and reframe our understanding of cultural histories worldwide.

Endorsements

Barbarian Currents rigorously illuminates the way in which Brazil’s relationship with technological progress, modernism and utopia shaped a distinctive trajectory for its media arts. The book offers readers unprecedented insight into how Brazil’s media art scene evolved both within and against the global art world. This is an essential resource for understanding the special character of technological art in the Global South.

José-Carlos Mariátegui, Founder – Director of Alta Tecnología Andina, Lima

This unique book fills an essential gap in media art studies. Compiling an extensive directory of Brazilian artistic production, it reconstructs, through the perspectives of its leading actors, an important history marked by creative experiments between art and industry post-World War II.

Professor Giselle Beiguelman, University of São Paulo FAU-USP

Editor Bios

Gabriel Menotti is Associate Professor and chair of the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies graduate program at Queen’s University, Ontario. He also works as an independent curator in the field of media practices. His most recent books are Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies (2020, co-edited with Virginia Crisp) and Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology (2019).

German Alfonso Nunez is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of Multimedia, Media and Communication at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). His work focuses on the Brazilian artistic field of the post-World War II era. Recently, he worked as a researcher at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, where he organised and edited the commemorative book for the Museum’s 75th anniversary.

Series

The book is published as part of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series edited by Joanna Zylinska: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/media-art-write-now/