December 2010
Since its creation Myspace wants to be the possible showcase of unknown and anonymous artists of all horizons in need of luminous or dark gratification, according to the bad taste of some and the good disgust of others.
The possibility of rubbing shoulders with its beloved artists, known and recognized with all the recognitions that are due to them, let us understand the possibility of having there even a relationship, an almost intimate, exclusive, even privileged relationship, with certain dreamed and fantasized celebrities, so much the proximity seemed real and the common bath, we were told and let believe. Of course, we are not fooled.
The system of the « top of friendships » says enough about the way the said showcase proceeds. Obscure morbid window on the world of transparent artists.
Its will to gather even the most agitated of all sides already left us perplexed about the continuation and the future of a well conformed agitation. Myspace had set up its own police force, its artist-indicators, electronic cops, defenders of all the rules, of good morals, of ethics, of morality and of equality, with only one weapon: the denunciation. To see reproduced on the web -under cover of anonymity and thus exacerbated- the same behaviors and social compartmentalizations of the real life testifies of a total lack of imagination and of the lamentable state of our social relations, which are for many of the pathological.
When anti-art becomes art, it is already too late
This media is carrying an optimistic message: you can too, even if you’re an idiot! It was without counting on a new freedom, an additional freedom which should be offered to me, to you, to us and to all those who wish it, it is within reach, there is only to have a computer -something not obvious in all the parts of the world- and to change everything, to erase its life, its universe, without moving, and all that just in some clicks. Beware of you skeptics and critics of cathodic happiness, the slightest distrust of it and you become an enemy of digital freedom.
Does entertainment have its « revolutionaries? Wouldn’t this additional freedom finally add to the too long list of everything we’ve already lost for more than thirty years?
The frankly authoritarian character of the recent changes made by Myspace, without giving the subscribers the possibility to react, is so incorrect that it was time for us to go laugh somewhere else. Today, after several years of meager practice, we have decided to stop doing this site a favor. More than a service, it feeds on all the information we serve it, so it owes us a little life as it owes a little life to each subscriber it has flouted in its agreement on the synchronization of profiles, signed with Facebook in mid-November 2010 without taking into account the opinion of those who feed it. Contributing to the feed is supporting News Corporation, the biggest and most powerful brainless machine in the world whose boss is Rupert Murdoch. Being satisfied only with what we do ourselves, we took some pleasure in letting our Myspace page die with its top virtual friendships.
Moreover, after a few months of inconclusive and even distressing experience on Face Book and its mediocre interface, we closed our account after having announced two of the three concert actions carried out this year: « bOUCAN » on 16/10/2010 and « tAPAGE eT bROUILLAGE » on 20/11/2010.
To finish with the schizophrenic cathodic prism, we keep in mind our belonging to the clan of the living.
One cannot be against the genetic registration of the population and at the same time give all or part of one’s pedigree to an Internet site that only respects privacy within the framework of the CNIL (La Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés), another super instrument of control. It is not so much the information that you willingly give that comes into play as the information that others take care of divulging little by little for you, about you, spreading precise details about your habits, your ideas when you have them, your activities and other information about you that you do not necessarily want to make public.
The only private sphere that can exist on the Internet is the privacy of advertisers, not ours.
These are the types of attitudes we have observed on virtual social networks and forums. More than attitudes, they are real automatisms that are generated, reflexes, even impulses, that we refuse without any possible discussion:
> The coping at all levels, starting with those who claim to be friends.
> The denunciations at all levels by the guardian-internauts to the administrators of the moral authority guaranteeing the rules of this game based on frustration reserved for ill-intentioned people and friends of all kinds.
> The virtualization of relationships contributes to the breakdown of the struggle against bourgeois power, it is a subtle and very accomplished form of a medium whose primary vocation is to inhibit the ability of individuals to act on themselves. Digital resistance is the perfect expression of this alienation.
These three examples incite us to distance ourselves from these media for which individuals are ultimately not adapted, nor adaptable without psychotropic drugs and some damage. Giving all the means to a population to monitor itself, it becomes extremely policed.
We opted for a blog while waiting for the hypothetical opening of our website, concerned as we are to always inform our friends, close and less close, as well as all the people sensitive to our artisanal approach of art, working-class and free, insubordinate and illegal. A terrorist approach to art, the only one capable of new and irresponsible desires!
more…
We had opted for a blog but its ergonomics had become complex and the information sometimes complicated to find. The format was no longer compatible with what we wanted to see on it. The blog is at the same time a calendar, a directory, a notepad, a diary, a catch-all, sometimes indescribable, even dissuasive, since the very idea that feeds it is reduced to its object: a blog. Its prism left us few possibilities. The agendas’ structure conditioned what we put on it. Its layout made our writings and events consumable, making it difficult to understand our practice as a whole. The imaginary as a possible questioning of sociology, urbanism, politics, architecture, philosophy and everything that concerns individuals and the environment in which we are immersed despite ourselves. Interrogations and criticisms that belong neither to specialists nor to technicians but to those who are interested in these fields.
Art Schock 