All machines are time travel machines.

The current social condition exists in a liquid state. The markers of stability of past centuries have fallen into the black hole of scepticism, dissolving the situated identification of subject or object. Meaning flows simultaneously through a process of proliferation and condensation, while slipping into the contradictions of apocalypse and utopia. The place of power - and that of resistance - rests in an ambiguous, borderless zone. How could it be otherwise when power flows in the transition between nomadic dynamics and sedentary structures, between hypervelocity and hyperinertia?
The last decades have been characterised by the imminent digitalisation (and instrumentalisation) of life. And it is precisely in this virtual architecture that a new geography of power relations has been created: people reduced to data, hyper-surveillance on a global scale, minds fused into a screen reality and authoritarianism emerging from the cracks of fake news. Digital media are simultaneously:
social devices + pervasive communication tools + strategic infrastructure + mediators of behavioural conditioning.

However, this is also where a space has opened up for resistance guided by transversal thinking that does/thinks/acts with others.
I first heard about tactical media around 2015 in Monoskop. And, later on, I remember reading about it while browsing Rhizome's Net Art Anthology and, until then, the idea that it was possible to merge art with activism, the internet, poetry, performance and hacking in one space had never crossed my mind. As I made my way through the subject I discovered the work of Electronic Disturbance Theater and, with it, the work of Ricardo Domínguez.
Domínguez's body of work, besides being housed in diverse spaces of reality, is a continuous back and forth between:

body / collectivity poetry / code

inside the screen / outside the screen useful art / non-utilitarian art

on-street demonstrations / sit-ins protest / performance

This curatorial exercise explores the in-between spaces of these layers to connect them to their historical and aesthetic context while borrowing Monica Mayer's idea of the retro-collective gesture, connecting the nodes back to a situated practice, always from within radical collectiveness. Here we invoke Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, The Thing, *particle group*, Fakeshop, among (many) others to trace various points of departure.
By simultaneously inhabiting the internet and the space away from the keyboard, this exhibition is a timeline, a path that forks innumerable times, an expedition to the ruins of various websites, an open letter to the new generations of internet users, and a navigable desktop for this network that is all of us.

Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 / 2.0, particle group, Ricardo Domínguez

GaIlery QI, Calit2, UCSD, San Diego, EUA.
28 de abril - 3 de junio 2022