Tuesday 1 July 2008

antisocial notworking


'antisocial notworking' is a repository of projects that explore the pseudo-agency of online social platforms. It takes a number of recent software projects as its inspiration to reflect upon the fashion for 'participation' with the arts sector and culture in general. The concern is how the Internet is increasingly charactised as a 'platform' (or collective machine) for 'social' uses, but to question what is meant by the term social in such descriptions. Although social networking platforms rely on user-generated content, what is the nature of this participation? What alternatives (or antitheses) can be identified?

Emergent forms are undoubtedly dissimilar to the ways in which social relations have been traditionally organised, but, in general, appear to reinforce existing power structures. The suggestion of the project is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged. [...] more

We are looking to add examples of existing and new projects to our 'antisocial notworking' repository that address these themes in uncompromising ways.

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