Critical Intelligence in Art and Digital Media

Can digital art practice do more than propagate technical progress and provide affect stimulus in estheticized production-cycles? How can cultural intelligence work to provide an informational context
for others and apply technologies of the imagination to tell another story?

Konrad Becker
reposted from Nettime
(this is a draft posted on the list serve Nettime. Especially for Nick and Stacey and others working with dispersed social media/visualization tools-- what kinds of reflections can 

The creative imperative has become a dominant force. With culture as an economic engine in post-industrial societies, artistic practice diffuses into business practice and the realm of the Creative Industries. In the shift of the economic focus toward a dematerialized value creation, innovation cycles of planned obsolescence and estheticized experience design turn into standard market models.
In creative cities job profiles demand "creativity" for even the most mundane tasks. Dreams, of everyone being an artist, turn into nightmares of internalized gouvernmentality.

Just as Situationist tactics have been appropriated for advertisement, Tactical Media concepts of the 1990's are now Public Relations and viral marketing standards. Dissent is easily appropriated in the new
spirit of capitalism and todays critique is tomorrow's business. Creative Industry appropriations of estheticized boutique activism offer affective relief with a maximum of inconsequentiality. While
effective strategies of resistance and critical interventions need to
build on an understanding of the past, the change from disciplinarian
institutions to a society of control transformed the playing field.

In new control regimes the traditional disciplinarian modes of
preconfigured enforced categories and educational indoctrination
give way to the fluid mining of cognitive response and reaction
flows. Electronic networks and intelligent materials weave into the
fabric of social space and into infrastructures of urban places.
Embedded in ambient Big Data intelligence, proprietary protocols
and orchestrated devices exploit the individual. Density and speed
of digital networking veils paradoxical effects of increasing
fragmentation, segregation and asymmetric relations.

Not merely tickling cultural taste buds but providing a critical instance of reflective intellectual work, artists as agents of intelligence demystify the power of media over matter. New forms of collective practices that intervene in processes seem more interesting than past models of individual genius. A practice that offers a
critical technical intelligence and a critique of representation
by mapping the flows of ideas and power is necessarily based on
cooperation. Are there forms of cooperation outside a creative class
and a digital proletariat modeled on ecstatic internet bubbles?
What are models of critical artistic practice in a fluid field of
post-Fordism? What are potential roles of cultural agents in societies
saturated and structured by powerful communication technologies?