Whitewashing piracy

Introduction

The Piracy Cluster arranged a one-day conference in April 2014 at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm called Whitewashing piracy. It was a continuation of the rejected course proposition Learning from Piracy and the conference session with the same name realized in Norrköping June 2013^[1]. While I helped co-organize, Donatella Bernardi and Martin Fredriksson where the main motors. The conference was part of a two-week program called Normalcy^[2] held at the Royal Institute of Art.

The central theme of Whitewashing Piracy is an investigation into the unstable creative agency of networked society that forms between the Commons and property mechanisms. The pirate figure works as a reminder of the normative force of late capitalism^[3]  and harbors a potential of rerouting capitalisms universal claim. The idea is that the pirate can offer a position, through which one can study how creative agency relates to the hegemonic powers of contemporary societies. As the program says, piracy can be seen “as a form of resistance that aims to develop a critical agency within the confines of normalized societies.”^[4] In this case, Whitewashing refers to a neoliberal process of the normalization of property. A normalization that withdraws subversive, vital and critical potential from the Commons. Piracy and hacking that aims at exploring a more open Commons, carries with it a potential for opposition of state capitalist enclosures. On one hand we have a powerful agency that engages in privateering to create commercial and state enclosures. On the other, imaginary pirates, broadly defined, are a kind of resistor, uncovering the alternatives of the Commons. Resonating with the radical pirate spirit, reversing the universal claim of property, the French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously wrote in 1840 - ’Property is theft’^[5]. This paper is a summary of the presentation along with my personal reflections on the subject.

Image from the Whitewashing Piracy conference

How Pre-Colonial Space became the “King of Evil.”

The first presentation was by Sonja Schillings and was titled How Pre-Colonial Space became the “King of Evil.” Colonial Piracy and the Reconfiguration of Race in the Early Eighteenth Century^[6].

Schilling follows in Proudhon's footsteps. Starting with the image of a pirate beach (deep-blue sky, palm trees leaning over powdery sand and calm waters) Schillings unfolds the black pirate discourse as being created in  the early eighteenth century to daze and confuse the general public to disguise colonial violence. It is the dark evil threat of the sea created to cover up the inland expansion that then became European supremacy and colonialism.

The beachline of the pirate beach

The pirate, an “evil” dark sovereign, is an image of evil emerging from the “chaos” of the pre-colonial space. However, beyond the visible beach line, “nature”, that which is unknown and primal, in other words already existing societies were silenced.

We can see this white heart of darkness in the distinction between the pirate and the privateer.^[7] The difference between their acts of plundering and raiding is vague. The constitution of normality lay in legal sanctions and whether they selling under an imperial flag or not. The discourse is a means to cover up the real atrocities. At the heart of darkness, hidden away, there is an ongoing whitewashing of “nature”, a violent streamlining of the other by enforcing “culture”, technology, plans, and measurements. It was appropriation with the aim to create property routes and establishing new property with the logic of colonialism.

My reflection of this is that in a postcolonial discourse, this narrative has a continuation in how this real violence lives on. For instance in the inequality of global capital powers, creating the divide between north and south. This formation continuously reproduces the borders of liberal security and society, as well as its inside and outside. In the hegemony of modernity, liberalism, and global capital, the discourse of property rights, produced through this colonial violence is a genealogy of theft, violence, and racism. In the liberal discourse of property, we accept property rights as a universal law, protected at a high global cost. At this discourse of the unseen, we might find a postcolonial perspective, imaginary piracy, to be a one of a few hopes of resistance of the whitewashed global economy^[8] of theft.

John, Leon, and Annlee: Biopiracy and the Art of Law

In the second presentation, John, Leon, and Annlee: Biopiracy and the Art of Law, Leif Dahlberg plays with the idea of biopiracy. Dahlberg starts in the human biological constitution and how John Locke (the 17th-century philosopher credited with founding liberalism) explained the idea of ownership and law of private property^[9]. According to Locke, property comes about “by the exertion of labor upon natural resources”. But how does technical integration between our bodies and the world change property relations today? Maybe biopiracy can inform how we think about how identities, property, and individual rights form in current society. For me, the technical integration forms a more complex biopolitical^[10] network between the world, technology and the individual body. Moreover, it seems to point to the inherent contradiction in the binary liberal social contract.

Dahlberg continues the investigation of biopiracy through the classical Blade Runner film scene where the replicant called Leon is “interviewed”. It is an interrogation where Leon risks failing to be verified as a human and terminated.

The classical Blade Runner film scene where the replicant called Leon is “interviewed”

The goal of the interrogation is to look for correlations between memories and body responses. The test, if passed, allows a continued existence. The scene ends with Leon executing the interviewer.  

Focusing on biometric memories, Dahlberg next turns his attention to similar narratives of refugees at the edges of fortress Europe. Here, authenticated memories, “personality”-tests in interviews, if passed, can ensure safe passage for a better life inside the liberal society. Parallel to the film Blade Runner, we can ask to what extent we can uphold Locke's binary property relations when a correlation between individual bodies and memories are used as tokens for a safe passage to liberty and continued existence.

I have felt unsatisfied with the focus on liberal pirate politics^[11] that focuses on privacy as a way to deal with global biopolitics and surveillance society, and Dahlberg's talk gives me additional clues to why. It has to do with the breaking down of the relationship between body and identity brought about by technology. In a materialist world view the liberal division between the body and the world is an abstraction that separates us from the historical construction. In the liberal worldview it seems we are situated after the construction of liberal safety. The liberal world is already here, but only for a few. The rest live in the aftermath of the liberal separation of the body, identity, mind, privacy and property, history, and power. Under the thin surface of liberal dichotomies, in the biopolitical world, leaks form new norms. Leaks from previously separated dichotomies between the body and the world, memories and self-ownership and property constitute the biopolitical reality. Liberal dichotomies might be outdated as an explanation of the biopolitical reality, forming a new kind of materiality.

Body safety and survival comes before the civil rights in the hierarchy of needs. That is why civil rights such as privacy are important to a certain extent but also constitutes a discourse with a continued risk of breaking the first safety of the body in the biopolitical context. The reason is that privacy politics is a politic of the individual and can therefore not address the constitutive configuration of leaks and transformation of the body. Placing what unfolds in a constant now, without either a before or an after. The now-ness of property is like a limited space of the self. Again, piracy can be a kind of hope, maybe not a solution, but necessary to find a passage across the border away from surveillance and control. As we will see, sometimes we might prefer to be paperless than non-existing.^[12] The question is what happens to the possibility of identity when it integrates into the material reality of digital networks.

Dahlbergs next example to addresses biopiracy is the artwork Annlee. The example underlines the multidirectional complexity of the relationship between the body as a carrier or medium of memory, identity, ownership, and existence. In 1999, the artist Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought the copyright of a manga figure for $428 and named it Annlee.

Annlee

They then invited other artists to make works using Annlee. First, the act seems to be a kind of open gesture. Building on the new constitution of Annlee several new works came into being, produced by them and other artists in their extended circle. In an enclosing gesture, as they explain was to liberate and terminate Annlee (2001) they transferred the copyright of the character to a company, Annlee Association, that they bought. However, they did not control the real flow of Annlee. This was verified by the appropriation of the character by other artists. Piracy gives hope of life. Annlee was out of the box and alive, paperless, but alive.

You can’t kill Ann Lee.. Go fuck yourself!

At the same time, the gesture ensured control of the genealogy of the artwork, as the artists sold the previously produced work to the Van Abbemuseum. Behind the claim for liberation, there was a rather conventional strategy of ownership.^[13] A smart whitewashing loop, one might argue. Anyhow, it was an act to deactivate some of the capacities of Annlee. In this case, art plays in a borderland of the art world, enabling the flow from biopolitical conditions into a hidden agenda and a logic of liberal property rights. The process uses the liberal legal framework of ownership and authorship. By the smart strategy of the artists, the boundaries between the interior,  exterior and the liberal sphere are restored. However, to create autonomy of AnnLee on the outside, laws of property and identity must be broken. As biopolitical agents, we move between property and identity. The quests are very different depending on if the body is positioned outside or inside of the liberal property sphere. In the biopolitical world, Locke's law of property, originating in the universal separation between the individual body and the world, is not possible. Outside the liberal sphere,  property looks more like identity and memory theft. Property works well inside the liberal hegemony but takes away the bio-piratical possibilities of the leaky biopolitical world outside the liberal sphere.

The Commons, the art world and the spirit of networks

In the third presentation, the curator Kuba Szreder investigates the idea and practical possibilities of the Commons, and how the idea of the commons can inform the art world in the network society^[14]. In this case the Commons refers to the Commons of the Middle Ages. It was separate land outside the state-owned and private land, which offered another kind of subsistence from temporary crop or cattle, without selling goods or labor. Szreder underlines that stable communities made this Commons possible. Stable communities had control over who had the right to be a commoner, giving temporary grants and controlling freeloading^[15], as well as, having the ability to stop theft.

It seems that Szreder argues that the control needed to uphold the Commons is unreachable in the totalizing enclosures of late capitalism. Therefore, the Commons is a broken utopia for the art world network. Property models, authorship, and individuality are hard to transcend because the fundamental openness and insecurity of capitalism. Networked systems are continuously pushing the Commons back.

Szreder loosely builds his following arguments on Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s book The New Spirit of Capitalism^[16]. Based on Weber’s thoughts, the book highlights how the spirit of capitalism is in change.^[17] The spirit of capitalism must assimilate with its critique and live up to certain levels of moral acceptance to be able to function. According to the book, the critique of capitalism is productive and essential to its continued development. As I understand the argument, it seems the capitalist spirit arises out of our inability to configure the relation between individual freedom and common equality. The leftist demand of less rigidity formulated in the quest for liberty in the late 60s transforms into the new flexibility in late-capitalism. In the book, there are two contradicting critiques: the artistic critique that demands freedom and autonomy and the social critique that demands solidarity, security and equality. In the process of forming the new capitalist spirit, the artistic critique is affirmed, but other leftist social demands are left out.  

The change of capital spirit in business management follows the rhetoric of networks. Business managers, military strategists, artists, and revolutionaries, can all use the thinking of Deleuze, to point to how we function as nodes in unstable and changing networks. A kind of unstable openness defines connections in the new knowledge economy.

Cover of Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s book The New Spirit of Capitalism.

In the book, Boltanski and Chiapello describe the Projective City. The projective city is a new image of capital that emerged from their research focused on business management publications.

In The Projective City, individuals are in a constant pursuit of project opportunities. The capitalist spirit is manifested through adaptability, new self-management, opportunism and instrumentalization of personal relations.  

As the top-down enforcement of the earlier stage of capitalism is both inefficient and costly, a new model is needed. For late capitalism to harness the network force, autonomy for the creative agents must be given. With self-organized project teams the cost of control and project resolution can be pushed down the chain. To consumers and workers, self-management is sold as freedom of choice. Project culture is a management culture where managers are embedded, supervising the creative processes and activating the spirit by pushing initiative, personalization, and enthusiasm.

From my perspective the projective city can be seen as a gamification of decentralized social abilities. It is not a big conspiracy, but a model driven by individual desires and tickets of moral acceptance that establishes micro-divisions in the multitude. Network flexibility leads to another interesting consequence. Conflicts between workers and capital move to individual competition between workers for creative possibilities and attention. The neo-management is ways for capital to hedge fund the cost of moral failure by constantly mirroring our moral spirit of what is accepted as freedom of choice. Flexibility creates competitive opportunities and builds on a fundamental insecurity. 

As explained by Szreder: for the production of value to work, the borders of projects and networks are in constant movement and unstable. Furthermore, for the capitalist spirit to work, it must play out locally and globally in parallel. The self-managed project separates itself from the global context of power and networks and constitutes a closed box where rules and flows are different from the outside. The power division of people within the project is not recognized globally and instrumentally excludes some labor, for the project to gain more value. This logic makes it possible for global powers to benefit from the unseen difference and unmapped otherness, that delivers value without overhead to the global context. The locally dysfunctional spirit encapsulated in the project, is part of how networked project culture creates global relationships.

As people are looking for ways to be first in order to gain maximum visibility, project culture can create an unstable arena of backstabbing. Moreover, short-term projects are often intense and pressed for time, which calls for adaptability that can create a certain lack of accountability^[18]. We can see it in the art world where projects are the key format for collaboration and where individuals aim for global recognition. According to Szreder it is the unrecognized work that produces much of the value of the art world, which Yann Moulier Boutang calls “work of pollination”^[19] (the social labor of pollination and labor of love). The individual efforts can be difficult to pinpoint; it is unclear what ideas and work will form the project in the end. 

Defined in Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s book, the network effect brings forward Great men. Great men are strong nodes in the network that create a class system based on visibility. Knowing that the global capitalist spirit of surveillance and visibility works, fixed stars can easily embed themselves in temporary projects. Being part of this nomadic capital they have little stakes in local accountability and easily sacrifice local connections as part of the movement to the next project. When Great men move to the next network or project, global memory is lost. Social mobility and global visibility attract, the rest fades.

The precarity creates room for an exploitation of the unseen, as deception becomes a logical part for projects to harness the spirit of capitalism.  

Szreder next refers to, Gregory Sholettes text “Dark matter - Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere”^[20]. Dark matter is described by Sholette:

Yet, just as the physical universe is dependent on its dark matter and energy, so too is the art world dependent on its shadow creativity. It needs this shadow activity in much the same way certain developing countries secretly depends on their dark or informal economies. ^[21]

According to Sholette, Dark Matter is consisting from many different areas and play an ambiguous role, it is:

all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible. ^[22]

I think the concept of Dark Matter is an intriguing model. Dark Matter can be seen as a backdrop in my investigation of network society and the edge of network creativity. We can imagin Dark matter much as an effect of the spirit of capitalism and the force of unrecognized labor. The continuous dance between trust - distrust, seen - unseen, known - unknown becomes an exploitable playground of experimental capital.

Then Szreder asks how we can respond. Is there any way to foster the spirit of capitalism? One possibility is a revolutionary expansion of the Commons^[23] put forward by Negri and Hardt in The Commonwealth. We can imagine how Dark matter has a potential to form a Counter-Public Sphere. By using the hidden unrecognized potential of collaborative spirits it could form a Commons to counter the spirit of capitalism. This is a solution Szreder discards as being too vague. Maybe the Commons is just nostalgia^[24]. Anyhow, I would like to ask, is the vagueness of the Commons not a product of dark matter? I think that the uncertainty offers a problem of belief because the capitalist spirit continually makes the Commons unseen.

As Sholette say, the potentially of Dark matter is not something fixed.

To paraphrase the cosmologists: there is perhaps no current problem of greater importance  to  cultural radicals than that of  “dark matter.“ Collectives that operate within the contradictions of the bourgeois public sphere, openly and playfully expose its imaginary fault-lines dividing private from public, individual from collective, and the light from the dark matter. But while such groups offer a important models for cultural resistance, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the art collectives and dark activities touched upon in this paper provide a totally satisfactory solution to the radicalization of creativity now or in the future. Instead, these groups and practices are characterized by their overdetermined and discontinuous nature, by repetitions and instability. Their politics privilege spontaneity. Some favor anarchic forms of direct action over sustained organizational models. What is effective in the short term remains untested on a larger scale. ^[25]

However, Szreder proposes something he calls Radical pragmatism. As a curator, accepting his individual position inside the system, his solution is a temporary answer that accounts for possibilities within the project life, passing it with the one-must-survive-argument. It focuses on social networking reputation norms. One example of these ethics is being clear about attribution and using such strategies as “take from takers" and "give to givers”.

Logically Szreder follows the artistic critique of capitalism. It is pragmatic and a kind of managerial ethics of freedom to promote the good within the network. But in this network of projects, stable nodes are unreliable by nature, power corrupts and ethics work as manipulation for enthusiasm (as explained earlier). For me, such a model is an ethics that works on a personal plan that cannot escape the logics of authorship and individuality - considering that the people in power, exactly as in the spirit of capitalism, are Great Men. They are also the people with the most gain, both ethical and political, local to global, that can execute these repetition calls.

On the other hand, Szreder seems to open another possibility, one with leaks, exemplified with the art leaks project^[26]. Here there is a general promise to break the aura of the project culture and the spirit of capitalism. The trust one has given to the system can turn into leaks and so creating a memory of wrongdoing. Maybe, it can form a tangible and uncontrolled dark matter spirit of the Commons. On the border where the trust of the spirit of capitalism fades, there might be something else; memory of darkness, that has the power to turn away from the monitoring forces of state capitalism. I put my trust in a model of gray zones, at the borders of creative networks. Agents of Dark matter are revolutionary assets - sleeping cells to form a Counter-Public Sphere. How to #enforce a spirit of the Commons to create temporal subversive instances must be a question in flux. Even though very unstable, I think that we need a combination of strategies between a withdrawal from the logics of Great Men while still looking for possibilities of the extended commons, leaks and engaging in ethics of dark matter. These are questions I will come back to at the end of this summary.

Another relevant question for me in this context is: who is speaking, what voices resonate in the global orders, and what creativity and memory is activated. The three next presentations, suggests how we can understand the relation between visual art and digital creativity in the network society, in the trajectory of my research between pirates, hackers, and artists.

Hacking strategies in media art

The following presentation, Hacking strategies in media art, by Boris Magrini, explores the relation between the agency of creative hackers and hacking artists in a comparative paper. I think it informs the discussion on creative possibilities on the edge of the art world, and how rules of media attention and personal endeavors work.

Magrini starts by defining hacking as the innovative use of technology. Hacking relates to contemporary creative production and experiments with a variety of material and tools to produce new creative innovation or subversion. In a broad and general definition, hacking is the fundamental act of turning something into something else. For example, through hacking, a microwave oven becomes a biotech laboratory, a game console a 3d scanner - hacking is something that requires skills. Hence, hackers are people who are very efficient with computers as programmers, developers, system admins and other tinkerers. The openness in network society makes it possible to infiltrate computers and engage in malicious activities for both “good” and “bad”. Hacking is a transgressive practice that has formed as a possibility in our networked world.

Hacking is also about contemporary politics and imagination. Hackers are present in both our imagination, in the mainstream of Hollywood movies and have also gained significant real-world media presence, for instance with the events around Wikileaks and Snowden. The tactical media attention made with hacktivist strategies of Anonymous might define a new kind of power in the network logic. Hacking tactics raise risks as wells as possibilities of the personal, social, cultural, economic and technical character.  The  investigations of hackers also form a foundation for discussions about system thinking, user conditions, and hacker ethics. The hacker agency works as a general framework for understanding contemporary creative agencies within the art world and the society at large.

When we look at contemporary historical events, hacking has in many ways been part of the definition of current relations between the creative agency, the economy, and technology. Magrini verifies that artists use hacking tactics to raise interesting issues of social, cultural, economic and technical character with many examples. In my view however, most artists utilize the hacks in order to produce attention to self, rather than contributing anonymously to the general community which is what hackers do.

The first example was the work of the contemporary artist Paolo Cirio. Cirio uses exposure strategies in his art. In the work Face-to-facebook^[27], without any consent, open Facebook profiles were scraped and downloaded.

Paolo Cirio’s work Face-to-facebook

Then an algorithm to match the profile images by facial recognition was applied. On the website “random” people would unwilling be a matched to one another. In the project, Loophole for all ^[28] Cirio built a website for tax evasion, selling very under-priced offshore tax certificates.

Both these works got media attention and exposed  him to various kinds of confrontation and accountability. Cirio utilizes these as logical nodes in the continued process of his work, but there is also a risk involved as his action led to threats by both individuals and companies. In both these works of rerouting hidden network structures, new flows are exposed.

For me, for the work to be credible, accountability is central. It is a trade-off of putting yourself at some risk and the artworks body of resonance in attention cycles. It shows that the artist agency or container is more than an empty shell and that the hacks are more than tokens of artistic attention.

As Magrini found in Cirios statement, the purpose is revelation and to create alternative routes and exposure of otherwise hidden possibilities, by leaking that which is already out there. This statement resembles the rhetorics of freedom of information, for instance seen in the idea of Wikileaks - with the aim to reveal the hidden. Leaks are made possible by the net, exploring unseen possibilities and creating new potential loopholes for more than just a few.

Magrini continues with some further examples linking art projects and art collectives with hacking. The most interesting example is Hackteria^[29]. It is a learning project, not producing artwork but learning processes. For me, Hackteria represents a possibility outside the art world and exposes a way forward for how to utilize network possibilities in a critical pedagogical project. The goal is to empower people to know more about their technological surroundings and in the end be able to make better decisions about the everyday, as well as explore the democratic implications of collaborative and open technologies.

The last note by Magrini was on the role of the institution and to what extent it can respond and understand the potential of hacking artists. On one hand, art institutions need to learn to negotiate with new creative agencies to connect to alternative possibilities. The problem is that institution often plays as a whitewasher of possibilities of open-endedness and subversion, in the creation of new works and artist. # On the other hand, we the artist agency, that in its will to be seen risks decapitating the potential of being an anonymous part of a the community where creativity is generated.

Undoing Property?

London-based artist Marysia ­Lewandowska’s presentation called “Undoing Property?”^[30] was about a reflective and critical publication process. Lewandowska looks for loopholes, for other voices to find a way forward through different forms of publications, for instance in the early works with radical women media archives like the “Women's audio archive”^[31].  “Undoing property?” is also the name of a book that is a collection of texts and the result of a four-year collaboration between Lewandowska and New York-based curator Laurel Ptak^[32].

This is a quote from the intention of the publication:

“Undoing Property? examines complex relationships of ownership that exist inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production, and the public realm today. In its pages artists and writers address aspects of computing, curating, economy, ecology, gentrification, music, publishing, piracy, and much more. Property shapes all social relations. Its invisible lines force separations and create power relations felt through the unequal distribution of what otherwise is collectively produced value. Over the last few years the precise question of what should be privately owned and publicly shared in society has animated intense political struggles and social movements around the world. In this shadow the publication’s critical texts, interviews and artistic interventions offer models of practice and interrogate diverse sites, from the body, to the courtroom, to the server, to the museum. The book asks why propertisation itself has changed so fundamentally over the last few decades and what might be done to challenge this.” ^[33]

I find that this quote from Schoelles Dark Matter ties together with Lewandowska’s work:

“To be seen, seeable, embodied, to block something from anotherʼs view, to take as well as give away the very means of seeing, these are the new terms of battle. With it comes a new horizon filled with possibilities as well as risks.”^[34]

The artistic process to make the other visible by appropriation offers an intriguing problem of integration and medialization, facts and products, and of creating rules of inclusion and exclusion. The intended activation of the network risks becoming infertile, as access fails to be reproduced within the art work or publication. The work becomes a static image of a distant and fading reality. While trying to mediate the voices of others, it seems that the project, the publication, the work and the institution continually push the other back and forward the artist or author, by the logic of authorship and property. For me it stands out how hard it seems to be to find a way through the authorial logic of the art world.

As Lewandowska says, the deadline for the project is either premature or too late, the vital time and space has already occurred. Instead, Lewandowska finds refuge in long lasting conversations and slow processes to try to probe away from the failure of reaching beyond the self-reproducing logic of the art world. A kind of withdrawal? The method of slowing down might work, but authorship, it seems, speeds things up and cuts the connection. The collective is regularly turned into something individual, at least on the surface. A slowdown  might be a way out of the institutional matrix where managers, producers, editor or artist do not get the better of the world through the speed of the project spirit.

One of the illustrations in the book is the technical drawing of Nils Bohlin’s three-point safety belt. By relieving the invention from its private patent, it became part of the public domain and since then the standard in all cars. The act of undoing property allowed an open standard and is a beautiful image of how access can raise the general security in society.

The last example Lewandowska gave was David Hammons and his Selling snowballs performance from 1983. It makes me think about the abundance of snow and the possible abundance of media. I also think about a world where the fixed stars (great men) of a network would melt away. As we once said in Piratbyrån: in a world of abundance, when processes become work and are encapsulated, it is a bit like selling snow to Greenland. ^[35] 

David Hammons, Selling snowballs performance from 1983.

We can connect next presentation with yet another quote from Sholette’s text about Dark matter:

Clearly, more research is needed on how alternative or counter economic forms link up with collective patterns of engaged art making as well as how one measures the relative autonomy of critical art practices in relation to the culture industry. One thing is clear however;  the construction of a counter-public sphere will necessitate that we move away from the longstanding preoccupation with representation and towards an articulation of the invisible.^[36]

The next presentation offers a glimpse into kind of a counter-public sphere that Sholette writes about. It presents a way to engage in an unstable field of collaborative creativity but also touches on the major problem of representing the counter-public. 

Piracy as Friendship  — Exposition of an Exhibition

Geraldine Juárez and Magnus Eriksson talk about the upcoming exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in London in May, called Piracy as Friendship^[37], in their presentation Piracy as Friendship  — Exposition of an Exhibition. As they say in their abstract:

“The central theme is the friendship relations that emerge with piracy and the exchange of media and information in closely-knit groups and how this can form the basis of artistic practices”.

The exhibition is a kind of retrospective of the endeavors of Piratbyrån. It seeks to reflect on and activate the history of Piratbyrån through selected archival Piratbyrån material. The central theme is how piracy and sharing create a group dynamics, promotes relationships, and forms the basis of creative methods and contexts. As Geraldine Juarez says: being neither artwork nor network.

Eriksson starts by telling the story of Piratbyrån. Piratbyrån formed out of the need to activate and destabilize the Swedish debate on file sharing. This was a discussion which over time become a major issue in Sweden. Mostly it evolved around Pirate Bay that Piratbyrån had started as one of their first projects in 2003.

Piratbyrån had grown tired of the binary position and infinite repetitions of for-or-against, legal or illegal, payment or gratis in the pirate debate. To symbolically end these binary enclosures, we^[38] held a ritual with a bonfire on top of the highest mountain in Stockholm on the last day of April 2007. Masked members burned the remaining copies of the book on (anti-)intellectual property called Copy Me that we had published a few years earlier. The video documentation of this ritual, set to the soundtrack of KLF:s What time is Love, found its way to the Raqs Media Collective. Raqs is an Indian art group that was on the way to curate next Manifesta (7) biennial, 2008 in Bolzano / Bozen, Italy, to which we were invited.

As a response to the invitation, Piratbyrån bought an old city bus and renovated it with the money Piratbyrån got from selling t-shirts on the Pirate Bay website and their share of the Manifesta budget. The installation at the exhibition was the bus and a video documentation of the bus ride from Sweden to Italy. The journey was kind of a workshop whose aim was to form collaborative statements based on the group’s experiences, which had been brought by internets abundance of information. It was a temporal space of abundance and endless possibilities far away from any abstract solutions of copyright, and a kind of meta-rational workshop to iterate the internal logic of the Piratbyrån group. This friendship is a key to the central theme of the upcoming exhibition, implied, un-exhibitable.

Eriksson describes the friendship method. During the s23m bus ride, Piratbyrån remixed a text to fit their needs, a method that we often used. In this case The Institutionalization of Friendship^[39] written by Viktor Misiano, about another friendship formation and a bus trip. The friendship formation called Transnational was a group of artists in Ljubljana and Moscow, and formed around the NSK-Embassy. (Strangely enough I was in Moscow back in -95 to meet this group of artists.) While the assembly of the Transnational forms in the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Piratbyrån assembly forms on the Internet in an analogue-digital collapse. For Piratbyrån, the formation and struggles happen in a post-analogue-digital space. For Transnational, it happens in a post-soviet space. While the Piratbyrån trip moves from the north to the south in Europe, the NSK-circle goes from the east to the west in the US.

Eriksson uses the remixed text as a way to understand collaboration, trust, confidence, friendship and creativity that formed in the context of Piratbyrån. He is doing so by quoting from the text, first establishing the particular quality of friendship:

Sociology shows us that the only type of a social link not determined by some regional or family relationship, professional cooperation, ideological solidarity, or erotic attraction is friendship. ^[40]

Friendship is also vital in holding a group together over time and distance:

The specific character of friendship as a form of social relationship is that it does not presume a permanent interaction. Friendships are a type of serial solidarity. The story of friendship is a story of meetings. ^[41]

Accordingly, the story of Piratbyrån is revised through the remixed:

Piratbyrån as a history of friendship, while S23M (and some other projects) is nothing but a conscious attempt to launch a friendship formation project. As one of the S23M discussion participants said: ‘recent internet history is the history of friendships’. ^[42]

The friendship formation is an ethical project of finding trust in the other. The new confidence founded by the internal logic of the group triggers a retreat into the community and is a way out of the lack of critical context in state-capitalist society.

“Friendship is always a discovery: discovery of the Other and at the same time of the Self... The confidential project excludes the possibility of a representative selection of participants... The confidential project is equally indifferent to an external representation: to the artifact and spectacular effects.”^[43] 

There is no way to understand confidential projects from the outside.  

“That’s why an adequate manner of documenting such a project is a detailed description of the process. Concrete work and concrete photos cannot describe the entire experience. Such a project is valuable as lived experience... The main issue lies in the internal, not external, communication... The secret essence of confidential projects is that such projects can ignore the public.” ^[44]

That has to do with that friendship is not about establishing hierarchy but is rather therapeutic:

“Friendship is not a hierarchical form of social relationship: it presumes a complete equality among all parties... The most evident feature of the confidential project is the absence of any thematic program. Such a project is valuable as lived experience... The therapeutic impact of the confidential project is effective because it plunges the participants into extreme situations; it provides them with some threshold experience.” ^[45]

We can understand the role of friendship as a way to steer away from art. As creative explorations emerge around Piratbyrån they take the form of collective rituals. Random processes form through digital and analog artifacts and actors, random investigation of matters of internet-concern and tactical media propaganda. The art-like process creates interesting connections, but are too random to become art. Exploration of internet possibilities and piracy is a way to come together to form creative encounter, without falling into the authorial logic of the artworld.

I associate the exhibition concept with a kind of imaginary, historical, digital, revolutionary museum archive. The exhibitions artifacts are residue from the halted digital revolution. The revolution is first digital, random, imaginary, internal and then transformed into something real, analog, structured, and external - hopefully, to be subverted again. Piratbyrån consists of pranksters concerned with the impact of digital information abundance for cultural meaning and production. The work process is not the destination in art, but part of a real ongoing spectacle; the artifacts are props for a play. “Everyday practices of people in these networks are both wiping out and opening up the old rules and rights to copy – turning the known back into the unknown.” ^[46]

Here Piratbyrån explores the role of creativity that finds its potential outside the art world. Partly it can be seen as separated from the production of artworks and the artist, but it still has great potential to inform the practice of art. It is about the role of a creative agency that exists on an ambiguous border, made up of peers included in the collective network^[47].

Juárez, being the central node of realizing the exhibition, presented the other part of the show that consisted of the artworks but also a networks of friendship, activating different network transients. It is done by an individual to the collective process, in a trans-explorative-sharing-formation, as for instance in the work by Evan Roth, Kopimi Totem, a work that captures the concept of Piraybyråns sharing imperative, KOPIMI^[48]. The Kopimi Totem is a local file-sharing hub. Built as a pyramid, it is a kind of homage to the processes/one of the main processes of Piratbyrån, sharing, and points to how copying, meetings, and connections leave traces and makes individuals carriers of ideas and information. The kopimi pyramid links back to, the implicit friendship between Piratbyrån and KLF ("Kopyright Liberation Front" or "Kings of the Low Frequencies"), as they share the symbolic gesture and trajectories the pyramid, 23 and the K.

Kopimi Totem by Evan Roth to be part of the Piratbyrån and Friends exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery

PB2 & Smiley Riot Shield 2 by James Cauty to be part of the Piratbyrån and Friends exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery

Juárez explains that work with the exhibition is like a continued friendship formation. The formation is a quest to understand and explore gray zones and intersections of activism, art, communities, and technology to reverse the magnet of capital and exploring similar gray zones. As a member of the KLF Jimmy Causes work is included in the exhibition and the relation to the KLF is activated. For us, these relationships represent a kind of ritual connects that warps time and also points to an infinite potential of connectivity that the pirate friendship formation imply. The exhibition temporarily activates a low-frequency connection over space and time between the NSK-assembly, Polymarchs (the Mexican sound system whose visual posters will also be included in the exhibition body), KLF, Raqs, FAT, Furtherfield, and Piratbyrån. It is a space to probe for organization, visual, audio spectrum and resonance between collective and individual bodies.

Piratbyrån Timeline  Part of the Piratbyrån and Friends exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery

Another part of the show is the visualization of the context of the Piratbyrån formation. One thing you can read from the visualization is how the surplus of the unemployed hacker after the dot-com crash was part of building the scene of open protocols where Piratbyrån was formed. The visualization underlines that the innovative power of hackers and pirates can find a way beyond privatizing if the time is right. The crash releases cognitive capital, and the upswing of the economy binds hacker potential to state-capital control and surveillance all over again^[49].

Finally, Juárez says that the precarious conditions of explorative creativity can build friendships but are not ideal for subsistence and refers to a possible future of basic income. Piracy can be both about a liberal perspective taking care of the right of free speech, as well as having a more materialistic approach to finding subsistence and prolonging security and equality.

Precarity, gray zones, dark matter, and "white cubing" play out differently along the way to find relevant creativity in our time. From Szreder's example of the totalizing spirit of capital and the distorted gravitation of projects, and its opposite, the anti-public sphere of Dark Matter. As well as in, Lewandowska's struggle to find a way between undoing property and authorship and the friendship formation of Piratbyrån on the border of the artworld. Lastly, Magrini’s hacking artist, play in the same borderland of attention and activism.

Final Presentations.

Alongside these quests, the Commons form a way to imagine a new virtuality^[50]. The two last presentations, by Samira Ariadad and James Arvanitakis, both focus on the Commons in their presentations. Historically the Commons were special grazing and farming lands. Today, the Commons also have a social-cognitive political potential to form something beyond the normality of capitalism. This vision of the Commons forms between the general intellect and the multitude, and is described by Negri and Hardt in the book Commonwealth.

Both Ariadad and Arvanitakis investigate how to act, understand, facilitate and assimilate the processes of insecurity produced by neoliberal capital and the possibilities given by the Commons. Models for collaboration become more about finding strategies to understand what self-organization needs and could consist of. The process becomes an insecure process of learning to explore gray zones and trying to create a Commons.

Capitalism

Arvanitakis presentation “Commons, Piracy and the Crisis of Property” is about how hard it is to see the exploitative structures of neo-liberalism and, therefore, to challenge them. The reasons for this is that the structures are embedded in our every day, which creates a particular kind of blindness for them. Like in the movie The Usual Suspects, at the end of the film, Söze says: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, he's gone." In the blind spot of the Foucauldian triangle between the normal, power, and truth - private property and enclosures become static, normal, untouchable, and invisible. As discussed above, the liberal discourse cannot start before hiding the violent and current history of property. Therefore, when crises after crises emerge out of the mist of non-transparent systems of capital, it is reduced to local anomalies and individual mistakes rather than seeing the system failure.  

Ariadads presentation about the Commons, points to the work of Mark Fisher and how we can interpret the totalizing spirit of capitalism as realism^[51]. We are so deeply involved in capitalist realism and the flow of capitalist production that we cannot escape it. Rather than a revolution or a full abolition of private property, something vaguer and maybe not yet actualized emerges.

The Commons and basic safety

As Ariadad says, the historical Commons created a possibility for commoners to find subsistence outside patriarchal repression and beyond state and market logic. The commons were closed down in the nineteenth century to force commoners to move to cities to face the workforce demand needed in the expansion of capitalist society.

Arvanitakis talks about how in society, ownership-relations are dependant on a kind of Commons. Property and ownership become especially unclear with new technologies that suggest an expanded context. Arvanitakis takes the car as an example, and what happens when we activate the car by driving. Even if the car is private property, the operating enables a universal principle of safety, that can be considered a Commons. It is an agnostic commons that most people accept and take for granted. Many such commons create a fundamental safety in society, such as the welfare system; hospitals, schools, and universities. When pointing to these relations as security we mean the possibility to operate safely, and that is why enclosures in many ways make the world less operable and safe. Arvanitakis describes the negative impact of intellectual property on research with the narrative: if research was made accessible to a larger degree and patents did not lock in findings, science could benefit a larger part of the population both by lowering prices and enabling better research.

The general question is if there is a possibility to form a commons between the digital and physical integration of our bodies and the network society.

Ariadad’s also describes the contradictory connection between the Commons and capitalism. The Commons is a space and utility that is neither privately nor publicly controlled. It is a third space that can be utilized with common interests in mind, but it can also be exploited for private and capitalist gains. The boundaries of the Commons are in constant flux, state capital enclosures and common forms in contradiction but also in synchronization. It is hard to know how to formulate a clear practice beyond the neo-liberal logic.

Autonomy

In the book Commonwealth, Negri and Hardt describe the contradictory relation between autonomy and capitalism. The important thing here is that we are becoming more autonomous but also more controlled.

“In the biopolitical context capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society as a whole, or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced. This relationship between capital and productive social life, however, is no longer organic in the sense that Marx understood the term because capital is increasingly external and has an ever less functional role in the productive process. Rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and the like.”

Ariadad presents two different but connected approaches on how to tackle these contradictory relations and create more real autonomy beyond the disciplinary regimes: a withdrawal suggested by Franco "Bifo" Berardi and a project rising from Silvia Federici’s works with the Commons.

Bifo investigates if it is possible to create autonomy beyond the disciplinary regimes of capitalism. Bifo sees our digital-physical, electronic-neurotic reality as a dubious space of biopolitics. A recombination of capital is forming from fragmented activities, produced by equally fragmented info-workers^[52]. Here, cognitive overload is caused by the discrepancy between cyberspace and cyber time. Individuals do not stand a chance against the digital real-time processes of the state capital. Consequently an epidemic of depression and panic spreads in the social brain, and we become increasingly unhappy. As I see it, dominant players of capital and power can control us by ordering our reality into a centralized monoculture and interface. For instance Amazon update their software every 17 sec and NSA was granted ridiculous sums of capital to continue to build surveillance machines that can penetrate any selected target. We live in a saturated reality where state and capital have the advantage of cognitive computer power.^[53] 

In order to not to fall into the rhythm of recombinant capital and depression, one method that Bifo suggest is a withdrawal. As... “this digital-financial hyper-abstraction is liquidating the living body of the planet, and the social body.  Only the social force of the general intellect can reset the machine and initiate a paradigm shift, but this presupposes the autonomy of the general intellect, the social solidarity of cognitarians. It presupposes a process of autonomous subjectivation of collective intelligence.”^[54]

For me there can be no direct answer to that question of where, what and how to withdraw. However Silvia Federici's exploration and investigation into the potential of the Commons is an important way forward to create autonomous subjectivation of collective intelligence. ^[55].

Ariadad and Federici's both investigate zones beyond patriarchal systems where it is possible to create safety from the centralized conditional security of state and capital. Federici’s work focuses on women collectives in Chile and other places around the world. It is about how the reorganization of reproductive work into collaborative structures can form commons. A commons that also creates a different safety zones beyond patriarchal control. It means to collaboratively build alternative visions and practices on existing networks, which already make up self-organized commons. Ariadad identifies the edge of state capitalist realism as a space where opportunities to create a commons can occur, and emphasizes that the commons are something that we actively create.

At the same time there is the question on how to extend common safety to more than temporal or local domains. As Federici puts it: how to prevent capital from constantly “capturing the value produced”^[56]

As I understand Ariadad, another of Federici’s quests is an alternative identity politics. The idea can be described from a passage by Negri and Hardt in the Commonwealth:

“The terminological distinction between emancipation and liberation is crucial here: whereas emancipation strives for the freedom of identity, the freedom to be who you really are, liberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become. Politics fixed on identity immobilizes the production of subjectivity; liberation instead requires engaging and taking control of the production of subjectivity, keeping it moving forward. […] Another political task is necessary in order to support the first two tasks, keep the rebellious function of identity moving forward and carry identity politics toward a revolutionary project: to strive for its own abolition.” (331-332)

Final Thoughts

To shortly conclude the piracy sessions I want to point to how Federici’s approach to the Commons is major inspiration for the idea of Trans-piracy^[57], which is also a techno-social learning endeavor aimed at self-organized safety and a hands-on pirate-hacker vision of situated knowledge. A perspective of trans-piracy that takes into account a global feminist perspective local practices seems to be ideal. For me the commodification of centralized state capitalism based on patriarchal dominance and surveillance, constantly fails the complexity and dynamics of that which is emerging, created by networked technology in late capitalism.

Bifo describes how deeply intermingled networked technologies are with our bodies, something that is also present in the philosophy of Donna Haraway, in for instance A Cyborg Manifesto^[58]. It describes a trans-utopia and future where we, as global feminist agents, repurpose the tools of domination by embodying the biotech hybridity. This space already forms from cognitive capitalism, according to Federici. Trans-piracy could be a way to collaboratively investigate our own biopolitical agency and the commons in order to create alternative disciplinary regimes of capital. The surreal global feminist hacker pirate practice against capitalist realism. As performing bodies in digital networks, between market control and centralized real-time communication services, trans-pirates will be on a constant lookout for leaks, subversion and openings  and mutation to stop enclosures. Instead of withdrawal, staying with the trouble^[59], as Haraway puts it. Form a technological commons with the hunted and all the others that do not fit^[60]. Become one part transhuman, one part transmachine, and one part transanimal in a true cyborg vision.