NOTES FOR INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE HANDOUT

IS THERE STILL SOMETHING TO CLAIM ON THE "OUTSIDE"?

WHAT OUTSIDE?

WE WILL CONSIDER SPACES 'OUTSIDE' AND 'INSIDE' THE INSTITUTION. CAN YOU GET THE ART OUT OF THE MUSEUM OR THE MUSEUM OUT OF ART?
OPTIONS:
WORKING WITH CURATOR MICHELLE SPESSA AND DESIGNER ALEX KEATING TO HOLD AN EVENT AT TEMPLE WORKS AT A CERTAIN DATE TO BE DECIDED. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP AND VISIT TO TEMPLE WORKS.
PRINTING IMAGES AND TEXTS TO MAKE POSTERS FROM BLOGS - TO ASSEMBLE A HISTORICAL FIELD OF REFERENCES; TO SET THE 'STAGE' FOR AN INVITED PERFORMANCE. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP
WRITING PRESS RELEASE THAT PRESENTS A CRITICAL VIEW OF THE EVENT.
DEEP RIVER ARTISTS PROJECT SPACE, Los Angeles



FURTHER READING:

INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AND AFTER, edited by John Welchman (jrp/ringer)

The danger to critical thinking is in assuming its ‘canon’ – especially so in the work of Institutional Critique. The critical itself must accommodate criticism. The canon does not resist its own commodification by the culture industry which utilises it. It is also better positioned to understand the industrial ‘real’ of the work of art and artists.

The key text will be Andrea Fraser’s “ From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique”, in which she writes of the necessary failure of an enterprise that purports to stand outside, when language itself is imbricated as layered, forming, and formed by, the institution. She is compelled to articulate the paradoxical nature of a construction as it suggests a critique of an institution that is itself one, of a ‘given’, institutional ‘nature’ - of the individual in neo-liberal society. Isabelle Graw also identifies a paradox in “Beyond Institutional Critique”. Contrary to expectation of disallowing ‘criticism’, institutions that would encourage works which conform to their new model of liberal flat hierarchy institutions, and could be easily accepted experiments with them are, like capital itself, absorbing antagonism to grow stronger. By opting for such contestation as research, teamwork, documentation, and their ‘transparency’, human ‘communication’ is turned to commodity, the whole endeavour to resist tuned to the advantage of the culture industry. Some do remain, however, outside such absorption, Fraser and Graw write of insisting on the critique of institutions while working on new more adequate redefinitions of the redundancy of its terms, reminding that co-optation has always been a fiction of standing on the outside.

It is believed that the critique of DeepRiver as an institution instigated the destruction and de-installation of the work, and that the "rising frustration" was largely due to the critique being made evident in written format via a handout.

AN EXAMPLE OF INSTITUTIONALLY CRITICAL ART AS PRESS RELEASE

Marcel Broodthears
Press Release
"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. 'But it is art' he said 'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.' 'Agreed' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects." Broodthaers, 1964


Institutional Critique


Institutional Critique is an art term that describes the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, for instance galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and Hans Haacke.

In more technical terms, Institutional Critique is an artistic term meant as a commentary of the various institutions and assumed normalities of art and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of art (radical is linguistically understood in its relation to radix which means to get to the root of something). For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of painting and sculpture are often explored as a subject in the field of art, and are then historically and socially mapped out (i.e., ethnographically and or archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, it seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional critique is often critical of how of the distinctions of taste are not separate from aesthetic judgement, and that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility.

Origin

Institutional critique is a practice that emerged out of the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history (i.e., Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. Institutional critique is often site-specific, and perhaps could be linked to the advent of the "earthwork" by minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Institutional critique is also often associated with the developments of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, critical theory and literary theory.



HANS HAACKE


Since his poignant installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, in which he smashed up the marble floor of the German pavilion as an aggressively fractured monument to his homeland, Hans Haacke has become a bankable designer of public memorials. Berlin is home to two of the artist’s larger and more recent such projects – Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg (Memorial Rosa Luxemburg, 2006) in the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and Der Bevölkerung (For the People, 2000) at the Reichstag – so it seems appropriate that the city was recently co-host, with Hamburg, to the biggest exhibition of Haacke’s work to date. Though not officially a retrospective, the show, entitled ‘wirklich’ (real) – Works 1959–2006’, encompasses the full range of the artist’s oeuvre, from his photographs of the late 1950s, through his minimalist works of the 1960s developed after his early affiliation with the German artist group ZERO, to the politicized installations of the 1970s.

Haacke’s interest in closed physical systems, biological growth and random movements manifested itself in works such as Condensation Cube (1963–5), a moisture-filled Plexiglas con-tainer whose appearance altered constantly in relation to its environment. By the end of the 1960s, however, Haacke had shifted his focus to another type of autopoietic system, analysing it in political and sociological terms: the art world. In Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969–70), for instance, Haacke inverted the mores of exhibitive logic and made the visitors to his shows the subject of his work, by quizzing them about aspects of their personal lives and then displaying the results. Shapolsky et al… (1971) took this approach further and presented the findings of Haacke’s research into the underhand business dealings of a New York real-estate company with strong ties to several art institutions, in a work that conflated stripped-down pictorial serialism in the style of Ed Ruscha with an acute awareness of economic underpinnings.

Famously, Haacke’s refusal to withdraw the piece from his solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, led to the exhibition being cancelled. Haacke’s career has, of course, been undergirded by a heroic narrative of institutional neglect and censorship that con-tinues to nourish his credibility as a political artist: on another occasion, his Manet-PROJEKT ’74, which detailed the provenance of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880), was rejected by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since it revealed the Nazi-era career of patron and Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Josef Abs, who had given the painting
to the museum as a permanent loan.

By the end of the 1970s, Haacke’s work had become more aggressively political – albeit in a more allegorical way – and throughout the 1980s the artist required ever-larger spaces to acommodate his ‘factographic’ installations. In A Breed Apart (1978), Haacke reworked an advert for Jaguar cars by British Leyland to accuse the company of supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime by selling it police and military vehicles. In Ölgemälde, Hommage a Marcel Broodthaers (Painting in Oil, Homage to Marcel Broodthaers, 1982), shown at Documenta 7, Haacke hung a portrait painting of Ronald Reagan (executed by the artist), with its intended implications of stately respectability, opposite a large-scale image of a crowd protesting in Bonn against Regan’s lobbying for the deployment of American missiles in Germany.

To this day, Haacke has continued to scrutinize contemporary political issues – attacking com-panies like Philip Morris, Mobil Oil, Mercedes-Benz and Deutsche Bank among others – and thus the art world’s Achilles’ heel: its complete dependency on big money. As Benjamin Buchloh argues in the show’s catalogue, Haacke was never so naive as to expect change to be triggered by his practices, but simply kept asking the right questions in the right place and at the right time. Yet his taut moralism has increasingly tended to overstatement and there is unquestionably a paternalist impulse in the way Haacke often asks the questions and devises the answers in one go, rejecting the option of being more ambivalent, even unsure, about issues.

While ‘wirklich’ constituted a comprehensive archive of Haacke’s many projects, and confirmed his work’s central concerns with processes, site-specific interventions and the delegitimization of idealistic claims for art, the artist’s life-long rejection of the notions of ‘style’ and ‘personal expression’ was somewhat undermined by the very conditions of presentation. A lot of his ‘formalist’ works of the 1960s, for example, showed surprising stylistic consistencies to his better-known and seemingly more topical pieces from the following decades. The Perspex boxes of the 1960s resonate in his later picture boxes, the early kinetic works in recent proposals for monuments. Wide White Flow (1967), a machine piece in which a huge veil-like fabric gently flutters over constant streams of air, even managed to enliven the clunky solidity of newer works.

One of Haacke’s most intriguing pieces remains Seurat’s ‘Les Poseuses’ (small version) 1888-1975 (1975), in which he outlines the work’s changes in ownership along with some biographical data. Using only a few sheets of printed paper and some frames, the piece delivers a perfectly encapsulated history of art distribution and economic change from the late 19th until the late 20th century. The violence of an epoch is present between the lines, and for once it is really left to the viewer to fill in the gaps.

Manfred Hermes

Artists associated with institutional critique include Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Mark Lombardi, Michael Asher, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, since the 60's, Antonio Muntadas, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Andrea Fraser among others since the late 80's or more recently Matthieu Laurette, Graham Harwood, Carey Young, all of whom have typically taken a critical eye to the modern art museum and its role as a public and private institution. The Artout project, started in 2006 by Anton Koslov Mayr, critically investigates the relationship between artists and collectors.

ANARCHI-TECTURE

By the 1970s that state of mind had been tried, tested and expressively rejected by the inhabitants of the vandalised modernist housing projects Matta Clark captured in the photo-piece Window Blow-out (fig.16). Matta-Clark himself was more interested, as he put it in his notebooks, in converting a building into a state of mind. This involved liberating structures from the straightjacket of their maker’s intentions and recycling them as consciousness-altering artworks – ‘making sculpture’, as he wrote in a letter to the New York Department of Real Estate, ‘using the by-products of the land and the people’.




Haake's exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne was cancelled due to the inclusion by Haacke of the work "Manet '74" that connected the funding of the museum to the cultural politics of the Cold War. In 1993 Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik, the Golden Lion for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Haacke's installation "Germania" made explicit reference to the Biennale's roots in the politics of fascist Italy.

Or more crudely Kendell Geers’ performance of throwing a brick through a Johannesburg gallery window, as a response to the systemic institutional violence of apartheid.




Marcel Broodthears ‘Pense bete’


Eduard Manet – Olympia



http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Tn6PheSubWcC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=manet+74,+Haacke&source=bl&ots=ytYELmnoj4&sig=j1NjAR2p9ZcELbzjW7jc0-NHcRs&hl=en&ei=l0vKS6HUFpf00gTGv4C_BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CA0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=manet%2074%2C%20Haacke&f=false

Daniel Buren



Hans Haacke

One of the criticisms of institutional critique is its complexity. As many have noted, it is a practice that often only advanced artists, theorists, historians, and critics can participate in. Due to its highly sophisticated understanding of modern art and society, as part of a privileged discourse like that of any other specialized form of knowledge, it can often leave layman viewers alienated and/or marginalized.

Another criticism is that it can be a misnomer, since it could be argued that institutional critique artists often work within the context of the very same institutions. Most institutional critique art, for instance, is displayed in museums and galleries, despite its critical stance towards them.
Institutional Critique and the internet

Net.art has been a heavy contributor to institutional critique. net.art interventions tackled the praxis of art business and digital culture institutions, from the perspective of curation. net.artists have actively participated in the debate over the definition of net.art within the context of the art market. net.art promoted the modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making. But the question of how this process should be presented and accessible within the art world, either sold in the art market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works made for the web. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical. All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment whereby she claimed that because of the crashed art market and the end of social patronage, rather than work the traditional low-paid jobs out of work artists usually seek, she would sell her body in an artistic act of prostitution.

FRED WILSON

Wilson's unique artist approach is to examine, question, and deconstruct the traditional display of art and artefacts in museums. With the use of new wall labels, sounds, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects, he leads viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. Wilson's juxtaposition of evocative objects forces the viewer to question the biases and limitations of cultural institutions and how they have shaped the interpretation of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display.

For example, for his installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale he employed a tourist to pretend to be an African street vendor selling fake designer bags - in fact his own designs. He also incorporated "blackamoors", sculptures of black people in the role of servants, into the show. Such figures were often used as stands for lights. Wilson placed his wooden blackamoors carrying acetylene torches and fire extinguishers. He noted that such figures are so common in Venice that few people notice them, stating, "they are in hotels everywhere in Venice...which is great, because all of a sudden you see them everywhere. I wanted it to be visible, this whole world which sort of just blew up for me."
Wilson recontextualizes, deconstructs and re-presents the way in which historical institutions or art institutions present historical objects, in particular those of Non-Western origin or indigenous origins. Wilson works with collections that already exist within museums- African Art, Native American Art, Post-Modern Art, etc, etc. He describes the way in which he gains access to a museum (historical or art based) and has the ability to redisplay the cultural objects available to him. Obviously, museums know exactly what they are getting themselves into when they ask Fred Wilson to create an installation using their objects. However, Wilson states that it is not about disrespecting the institution, it is about looking and critically thinking about the meaning and representation of these objects that are interpreted by the museum to the public. This is problematic to how co-optation operates.

It is then not just about having the viewer reconsider notions of representation, race and colonialism. Fred Wilson works within the museum system and ‘becomes’ sublimated. He looks through the basements of museums, storage spaces, has conversations with the security guards, docents, curators and visitors and gains inspiration from it all to create his installations. His interest in existing museum collections is in its fascination with ‘black’ or otherness as some kind of ownership of identity. He challenges the viewer, invokes conversation and questions museumification by creating new connections between objects, and between selected objects and their locations. He described the way museums include all African objects in one plexi-glass vitrine. He asked the audience if the same would be done with say, Modernist Painting. Would they be exhibited on top of one another? Wilson then showed us an image of an installation of a collection he recontextualized using Westernized Paintings and Sculptures. A Giacommeti right next to a Picasso in front of a DeKooning and all on one platform, to exhibit them the same way African objects have been traditionally “showcased”. Through his practice, he has been able to challenge museums to critically think about the way they present the world to others and to become more creative about the way they do this. Wilson redefines notions of culture and power in ways that we need to reconsider, throws it back as the viewers in the ‘wrong place’ [ a difficult one of identifying with repressive norms, the cultural producers, the museums and the co-opted artists. He promises nothing, but challenges everything, including his own identity as a ‘western’ or American artists [representing USA]...





Hans Haacke


A presentation on some examples of the now historical concept of institutional critique, and inheritances.

How does an artist now work in the saturated field of art as it has come to accommodate everything, and vice versa? How does the 'everything' respond, if not 'critically'? Alex Keating will also be present to discuss the website. We will also be asking for the essays to be uploaded. A discussion will also begin about press releases, and their function in view of a critical or uncritical form of writing. Is the press release an obsoleted style of broadsheet or manifesto? Examples will be considered in view of writing a release for the launch of the website and a 'show' that will accompany it as an event. Ideas can be exchanged.




PROFILE: GUSTAVO ARTIGAS

Sally O’Reilly on conflict, spectacle and disaster




In Homo Ludens (1938) the psychologist Johan Huizinge proposed that games are not distinct from work, that they percolate through daily life. This, then, places us all in a great big arena in which a multitude of games are being played out, overlapping and interfering. In fact, politics, economies and cultures could be described as the outcome of negotiations between different rules of conduct, which is why they are contingent and never wholly satisfactory.

This might be one analogy drawn from Gustavo Artigas’s The Rules of the Game II (2000–1), an event which took place in the Tijuana neighbourhood of La Libertad, a crossing point for many illegal immigrants entering the United States, as part of ‘InSite 2000’. Two football teams and two basketball teams from local US and Mexican high schools were invited to play simultaneously on the same court, so not only did each team encounter the usual adversary, but each game was pitched against the other, vying for space. Previously, in The Rules of the Game I (2000–1), Artigas built a handball court with the wall on which the ball is bounced placed right on the Tijuana/San Diego border, creating a particularly tense ‘can we have our ball back please’ situation. Although these represented antagonistic conditions that could be analogous to many situations, this vicinity of a political and geographic boundary steep the piece in immigration issues – essentially the accommodation of the other.





This, however, would be a one-dimensional reading of Artigas’s concerns. In 2001 he was invited to take part in ‘The End of the Eclipse’, a show of Latin-American artists curated by Spanish philosopher José Jiminez at the Fundación Telefonica in Madrid. Artigas’s proposal was a conference at the opening on the subject of artistic identity evaluated from the viewpoint of national identity. Someone who looked and dressed like Artigas took the stand and began speaking on the subject of identity and multiple personality disorder. They then stood down and the speech was continued by another Artigas look-alike – there were five incarnations in all. Artigas talks about the event, DUPLEX, not in the socio-political terms that such a conference would normally dictate, but as an autonomous artwork:

‘The readings made from the work will be discussions on its elements, but my basic problem as an artist, above all else, is to make art...The commentary on the piece was, to say the least, ironic as to this type of classification concept, without ceasing to be a piece. It is curious to think of it as a series of portraits or as a possible multiple portrait.’

So instead of considering conflict as a subject matter, Artigas uses it as a medium in and of itself. He often creates a contestant out of an observer, confounds an expectation or sets up a perverse situation that seems almost heinous. In September he is staging the event Opening in Galeria O, Mexico City, where two gallery spaces are divided by a long wall. Ten American football players will be divided into two teams, one each side of the wall, and, egged on by cheerleaders, they will throw themselves at the wall until it is destroyed. This has obvious connotations of market competition, categorical separation, the desperation of the struggling artist and so on, but the dynamics of the players themselves will also have their own athletic aesthetics, and a savagery which will be beyond the artist’s control.

It seems important that Artigas works with the lexicon of leisure, often construed as a yardstick of wealth or class. There is a tradition of Mexican artists working in this way – Gabriel Orozco’s ping-pong table and Damián Ortega’s house constructed from tortillas, for instance. Yet what seems different here is Artigas’s reliance on participation in a real, contingent way, which is then translated into a mediated gallery presentation – action and evidence are never confused, but held separately as if two very distinct parts of a project.

In Geeta vs. Sage (2001) two female striptease artists were pitched against one another in a mud-wrestling match at the Roxy Rhythm Bar in Melville, Johannesburg. The final gallery presentation comprised a ceramic piece – made by firing the muddy fall-out of the wrestling – and the women’s embroidered robes, as well as photographs and video of the wrestling match. Again, the live context might provide a socio-political situation within which the piece ‘comments’, but there is an undoubtedly internal, formal logic too. Artigas considers the documentation as ‘a kind of second life of the idea’.
GUSTAVO ARTIGAS – rules of the game










NET-CRITICAL Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS M oCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI. Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS MoCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI.




Critical Art Ensemble were pioneers in using the infrastructures of the techno-social space and to use it in a critical capacity to draw attention to the suture of political power, corporate power and art industry and marketability. Writing can be freely pirated from their website http://www.critical-art.net/books/mp/

State intervention into the production and distribution of culture is as enduring as the history of nations is long. Think of Plato’s injunction against poets and painters in his ideal Republic or Stalin’s decree enforcing Socialist Realism in mid-1930s, as well as, of course, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch-hunting of Hollywood radicals in the 1950s. Modern bourgeois societies have evolved two seemingly contradictory modes of state control. One of these is the isolation and overt suppression of select individuals, groups or ideological positions allegedly carried out in defense of the freedom or morality of an alleged majority interest. This type of explicit control reappears cyclically in the United States, especially whenever government or big business is threatened by collective dissent emerging ‘from below’. Its most recent full-scale manifestation took place immediately after World War II when militant labour unions, communists, and other Left radicals, grown strong during the anti-fascist Popular Front years, were systematically eradicated through a combination of legal and extra- constitutional measures. Before it was over, thousands of men and women were investigated, lost their jobs and / or were blacklisted in the name of freedom and democracy. Many of these people worked in the culture industries and academia. While such overt repression is extremely effective in the short-run, the same establishment that unleashed it will eventually denounce tyranny as antithetical to the free society it claims to protect. So even as the hammer of law enforcement was descending on individual radicals and nonconformists, a subtler means for managing dissent was coming to fruition.

ARREST ? TERROR CHARGES

On the morning of 21 May, 2004, Steven Kurtz awoke to find his wife Hope lying unresponsive beside him. Kurtz immediately called paramedics. On arrival, the medical response team took notice of assorted laboratory equipment in the home, including Petri dishes, microscopes and test tubes. Nervously, local police alerted the FBI. The Joint Terrorism Task Force soon descended on the Kurtz home and in a scene reminiscent of the 1971 techno-thriller The Andromeda Strain agents wearing white Haz-Mat (Hazardous Materials) suits cordoned off the house, confiscated the body of Kurtz’s wife, and gathered a variety of materials for scientific analysis. They also impounded the artist’s passport, lesson plans, books, automobile, computers, and his cat.

By the next day the New York’s Commissioner of Public Health officially reported that nothing hazardous was discovered in the home and no danger to the public existed. Hope had died of a heart attack. Nonetheless, the house was under quarantine for six days during which time Kurtz was placed under surveillance for twentytwo hours. FBI agents did not arrest him, but put him up in a hotel, together with collaborator and family friend Claire Pentecost, who recently arrived from Chicago. The agency even purchased Kurtz dinner with the hopes of uncovering more information. At one point Pentecost was taken aside and asked if Kurtz had ever advocated the overthrow of the United States government.

Steve Kurtz

On the Mythology of Terrorism on the Net – some excerpts published on the Net

Herein lies a substantial clue as to why some people fear the disruption of cyberspace. While the organic body may not be in danger, the electronic body could be threatened. Should the electronic body be disrupted, immobilized, or (heaven forbid) deleted, one’s existence in the realm of the social could be drastically effected. One could become a social ghost, so to speak - seen and heard, but not recognized. The validation of one’s existence could disappear in the flick of a keystroke. Once a population has accepted the notion that representation justifies one’s being in the world, then simulacra begins to have direct material effects on the motivations and perceptions of people, allowing the security state and other keepers of information to exert maximum control over the general population. No doubt the erasure of social existence is a threat that strikes terror into people’s hearts. This is, in part, why I believe it has been so easy to deploy the sign of terrorism on the net. This is also why I believe I was accused of terrorism when I suggested using tactics of civil disobedience on the net. Once I moved CD out of the realm of the physical, where disruption is localized and avoidable, for those who accept their data body as their superior, I was suggesting their erasure as a consequence of political objection. What is frightening to me about this scenario is that electronic erasure is perceived as an equivalent to being killed in a bomb explosion. Now the perception exists that the absence of electronic recognition equals death.

With such considerations in mind, those who plan to continue the fight against authoritarianism, and in support of maximum individual autonomy, have two important projects to complete. First, organic being in the world must be re-established as the locus of reality, placing back the virtual in its proper place as simulacra. Only in such a situation can virtual environments serve a utopian function. If the virtual functions and is perceived as a superior form of being, it becomes a monstrous mechanism of control for the class that regulates access to it and mobility within it. The new calls for consolidation and fencing of the Internet are indicators that we are behind in this battle. Second, steps must be taken to separate political action in cyberspace from the signs of criminality and terrorism. The current state strategy seems to be to label anything as criminal that does not optimize the spread of pancapitalism and the enrichment of the elite. If we lose the right to protest in cyberspace in the age of information capital, we have lost the greater part of our individual sovereignty. We must demand more than the right to speak; we must demand the right to act in the ‘wired world’ on behalf of our own consciences and out of goodwill for all.