Warren Neidich
Resistance is Futile / Resistance is Fertile
"Resistance is Futile/Resistance is Fertile, a collaborative 'poster' project, is the most recent manifestation of a three part work of the same name which also includes a neon sign installed on top of the Kunsthaus Graz, Aus tria as part of the exhibition Protection, as well as a text appearing in the Sarai Reader Turbulence, entitled 'Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness'. All around us we witness traces of information contraction, global hegemonic tyranny, intolerance, and fear of difference. Are we moving towards a world that is closed to new ideas and new possibilities? What is the role of art and art practice in an overly determined cultural context, one that is moving towards new definitions of cultural capital that relinquishes experimentation and replaces it with duplication and self-reflexive mimesis all for the sake of capital gain. How can we find the means to resist these trends that have implications for the production of the individual and the multitude? Is Resistance Futile? Do we merely accept the consequences of these conditions. Is Resistance Fertile? Can we find new apparatti and mechanisms to resist this condition? The poster that is not a poster but a drawing that evolved in a haphazard way through my derive through the world of books, is dispersed into the symbolic ecology of commercially oriented posters on the street. Here it resides as an irritant of knowledge accumulation. An almost unreadable provocation in the context of highly intense, over affected, attention grabbing announcements. On the street it creates a tangential discourse of the everyday practice for the ambulating masses who may be drawn to it. The Pro qm book store becomes the machinery of the inciting of that provocation and the site in which a form of resistance is produced, the collaborative mechanism, and instituted through the accumulation and dissemination of other knowledge in the form of a bookstore in which the feel of knowledge is possible.'"
( Warren Neidich )