Abstract

Into the locative: grass roots cultural production and the digitalisation of urban borders

Cecelia Cmielewski, Ilaria Vanni

Much research and cultural production in the last ten years have focused on ideas of mobility, liquidity and movement brought about by a new geopolitical model based on the deterritorialized and all comprising networks of Empire, by the erosion of previously stable nation state borders, by migration flows and by seemingly ubiquitous (new) media technologies.

A parallel rhetoric on the power of technologies in levelling inequalities and creating social change has led to the fetishization of the idea of networks in the creation of new forms of belonging.

This paper proposes the hypothesis that the weakening of borders entails counter-processes of re-territorialization, materialization and de-materialization and reconceptualizes new and different kinds of borders. These are often displaced from traditional locations – at the edge of nation states, for instance, only to reappear sometimes in non material forms within cities, on the margins of new geopolitical spaces (EU, ASEAN), or in the form of dispostives as border devices (detention centres, citizenship tests, questions of cultural citizenship).

Similarly, the attention placed on the possibilities of networks needs to be reconsidered critically and in conjunction with our rethinking of borders.

Electronic based art production is heavily reliant on the efforts of artists who are in a privileged position of having the time and resources to investigate and play. Has technology really managed to facilitate networking or activism that has an impact?

It is not necessarily a question of access to technologies. Engaging difference across technologies needs rethinking.

We will present these questions and try to untangle some of the implicit rhetoric with case studies drawn from the grass-roots work produced in Western Sydney (and beyond through international partnerships) by Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE), Noise Youth Festival and other relevant projects from Australia.