Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism.

ESCAPE THE OVERCODE: Activist Art in the Control Society is a landmark achievement in the open-ended research project conducted by Brian Holmes. Groundswell readers will be familiar with aspects of the work, as well as the fundamental questions it addresses:

How does art become subversive of the social order? How does it undermine normal, legitimate, accepted patterns of behavior, and how does it open up possibilities for the transformation of everyday life? What can subversive art accomplish in the political arena? And what are its limits, how can it exceed them in the future?

ESCAPE THE OVERCODE unpacks the theoretical problems facing autonomist thought, specifically the abstract notions of overcoding and the apparatus of capture, which form the lens Holmes uses to focus the text.

Four major sections comprise the book, and articles range from the underlying technoscientific principles of cybernetics, to cognitive psychology and complexity theory.  It is a necessary toolkit for understanding 21st-century critical cultural production, and in the words of the author, worthwhile for understanding “a complex world and to change it.”

Related posts:

1. Plates and Records: Brooklyn’s Artist/Activist-led Public Supper Club
2. Diagramming Utopia: Paolo Cirio’s “Open Society Structures – Algorithms Tryptic”
3. Art School: Propostions for the 21st Century
4. Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique
5. Out Now! The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Issue #7

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