Performing the Digital

Through capitalist models and overly produced material from the analog to the digital, this essay discussed the influence of mass media, reproduction, and a power structure, on page 152, Critical Art Ensemble says “In three sentences Lautreamont summed-up the methods and means of digital aesthetics as a process of copying a process that offers dominant culture minimal material for recuperation by recycling the same images, actions, and sounds into radical discourse.” This explains how powerful and practical the “digital” is. Critical Art Ensemble points out another definition affirming “From the smallest details to the first principle of the digital paradigm, it acts in a manner contrary to the analogic by insisting that orders comes from order (pg 153).” To my understanding, if we are talking as a performative spectacle or art, this order is already produced from a pre existing model. The essay thus imply a connection or a line between author and audience and, if we are talking in terms of performance, the digital theater cannot rely on one individual or a single creator. Critical Art Ensemble then, decentralizes authorship moving “theater” from the stage and onto the streets. They affirm that if there were to not be an “action” or a script there will be no performance. Critical Art Ensemble provides a an example with a work titles “The International Campaign for Free Alcohol and Tobacco for the Unemployed,” in which such “performance encouraged folks to act the message this performance showed, on page 159, “CAE carried out a guerilla performance in Sheffield, UK… in the hope of revealing some of the hidden structures of domination in everyday life. CAE chose a harmless action that took place in a location where the typical activities of the local population would not be disturbed.” Becoming a stage for spectators rather then spect-actors. Similarly, in the text of Brian Edwards, he argues that the digital age, entertainment, and other sources of media have given a raise to populism in the global sense. He focuses on how Donald Trump propelled this seismic symptom that altered entertainment, technology, art, politics and the media. Being trained in television, his rhetoric spread across what it is popular culture and the Untied States politics, where, without the use of the script, his political stand became entertainment and rupturing the “American Century”, on page 32, Edwards says “Twitter itself, and its logic of digital circulation—that which propels a message along a circulatory pathway—operate within the period after the American century. What the “American century” means in this context is what I have called elsewhere a Lucean logic of broadcasting (“After the American Century.”)