by Ricardo Dominguez (or someone almost like me)
"To every time its art. To every art its freedom."
- Joseph Olbrich, 1889
"Resistance comes first."
- Giles Deleuze
We are no longer under the sign of natural selection or even artificial selection—we are now under the sign of information selection. Everything on the planet, from indigenous aromas to public spaces to our atoms, is now forced to march into the Intellectual Property filters of globalization. Communication and evolution are little more than informatic-commoditization systems now. The neoliberal matrix that started to emerge fully in the 90's has played itself out on three stages: digital/Virtual Capitalism, genetic/Clone Capitalism and nanotechnology/Particle Capitalism. Each of these stages of technocapital are being integrated via a new "deep harmonization" of the global Intellectual Property agenda: copyright laws, trademark laws and patent laws. A process that starts in the research chambers and ends in ownership enclosures, from patenting technology to patenting life, from patenting information to patenting atom-based reality.
Groups of artists and activists working with post-media tactics have been developing counter-gestures to disturb the neoliberal matrix at each new stage of the technoscape. These projects attempt to open the public debate around the problems that we all face with the invisible enclosure of life. This presentation will outline a few of the artist/activist projects that have emerged since 2000 which have focused on the question of global control of intellectual property. Projects that ask us to reconsider the question: who owns life?