Digital Interventions investigates the potential of artistic practices that aim at either creating and safeguarding emancipatory spaces of the digital or challenging and countering the many forms of digital surveillance, exploitation and repression. Claiming that in the post-digital condition the digital always and already permeates our bodies, infrastructures and politics, the volume brings together art practitioners, activists and scholars from the fields of film studies, media studies, dance studies, performance studies, art history, computer science, and sociology to investigate the digital as both the site and the means of digital interventions.
The term "digital interventions" itself is wrapped in fundamental and irresolvable contradictions. The digital sphere is a space of refuge and resistance as anonymity and privacy of communication provide shelter from oppressive violence. And yet, at the same time, the digital sphere is subject to massive surveillance, trolling and disinformation that capture and undermine political expression. With social media participation governed by the attention economy, the internet structured by platform capitalism, and political discourse undermined by algorithms, what are the practices and where are the fissures for artists and activists to intervene? How can complicity be turned into criticality? How do artists, activists and scholars maneuver within and challenge the protean landscape of the digital?
The volume includes contributions by Aram Bartholl, Naomi Boyce, Arantxa Llanos Ciafrino, Florian Cramer, Aria Dean, Sirin Fulya Erensoy, Azadeh Ganjeh, Matthias Grotkopp, Roman Horbyk, Pekka Kallioniemi, Iryna Kovalenko, Joana Moll, Jean Peters, Florian Schlittgen, Veronika Solopova, Simon Teune, and Brigitte Weingart.
