Critical Art Ensemble Book Projects

Five books written by Critical Art Ensemble.

Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five tactical media artists dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, critical theory, and political activism. Each artist has her or his specialised talents and skills, including performance, book arts, graphic design, computer art, film/video, photography and critical writing. Those skills are used in a tactical manner, recombined according to the demands of each work.

CAE chooses a subject in a specific cultural situation and creates a work within that context, with that particular audience, and within the social space and performative matrix of everyday life. They use the skills and the media that will best address the content and situation, moving to any site - galleries, the internet, the street ? in Europe and North America.

CAE?s practice is about the process of resistance, about creating works and events which reveal and challenge the authoritarian underpinnings of pancapitalism and Western culture. CAE makes events using combinations of traditional and participatory theatre, lecture, dialogue and the written text ? events that demonstrate the necessity of this challenge.

For the past seven years, CAE has focused on biotechnology, its colonising effects and ideological layering, and the biorevolution in global capitalism. The public?s access to the processes of biotechnology is limited; it is only the resultant product that appears as a commodity, resulting in misleading speculation, fear, disinformation and communicative disorder.

Tacticality includes a willingness to be amateurs, to try anything, to resist specialisation, and CAE?s interventions propose to give people reliable information and direct experience of the routinised processes of science so that individuals can come to understand that biotech is within their power to think about and actively influence. In some works, CAE invites public participation (participatory theatre) in doing actual experiments, exploring the performativities of science and theatre. These public experiments demystify the scientific process, encourage amateur explorations, and serve as a public pedagogy about biotech initiatives and business. Throughout the diverse strategies of these works, CAE raises questions concerning democracy, pancapitalism, the utopian promises of biotech, eugenics, and of life itself.

CAE hopes these performances contribute to the development of an informed, critical public discourse on biotechnology.

Titles:
Digital Resistance
Molecular Invasion
Electronic Civil Disobedience
The Electronic Disturbance
Flesh Machine