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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Zach Blas draws upon an array of aesthetic, theoretical and political tendencies to create projects such as the Fag Face Mask: a “collective mask” amalgamating the facial recognition data of multiple individuals to create an opaque ‘face’ that cannot be recognized by increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software. A part of his Facial Weaponization Suite series, Fag Face Mask is both a physical manufactured object and, in the video Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face (2012), a digitally animated, speaking icon. In the video and accompanying text on his website, Blas argues that “these masks intersect with social movements’ use of masking as an opaque tool of collective transformation,” explicitly tying his artistic project to radical politics. This paper considers both the physical and digital inscriptions of Fag Face Mask in the context of Blas’s overall artistic/critical practice and especially the global surveillance capitalism the mask comments on and attempts to subvert. I consider the collective queer opacity promised by the mask in relation to its actual circumstances of artistic production, gauging the potential of the mask for enabling radical mass politics against the realities of mass-production in an art/media landscape suffused by capitalist social relations and means of production, creating a tension between the intentions of the artist and the political economy of the art itself. This paper interrogates the boundaries between plastic and digital arts, asking how the regimes of material production that structure digital art in particular might be navigated by anti-capitalist artists, activists and scholars alike.
Reinventing Digital Materialism: Queer Art Towards Revolutionary Politics
Zach Blas draws upon an array of aesthetic, theoretical and political tendencies to create projects such as the Fag Face Mask: a “collective mask” amalgamating the facial recognition data of multiple individuals to create an opaque ‘face’ that cannot be recognized by increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software. A part of his Facial Weaponization Suite series, Fag Face Mask is both a physical manufactured object and, in the video Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face (2012), a digitally animated, speaking icon. In the video and accompanying text on his website, Blas argues that “these masks intersect with social movements’ use of masking as an opaque tool of collective transformation,” explicitly tying his artistic project to radical politics. This paper considers both the physical and digital inscriptions of Fag Face Mask in the context of Blas’s overall artistic/critical practice and especially the global surveillance capitalism the mask comments on and attempts to subvert. I consider the collective queer opacity promised by the mask in relation to its actual circumstances of artistic production, gauging the potential of the mask for enabling radical mass politics against the realities of mass-production in an art/media landscape suffused by capitalist social relations and means of production, creating a tension between the intentions of the artist and the political economy of the art itself. This paper interrogates the boundaries between plastic and digital arts, asking how the regimes of material production that structure digital art in particular might be navigated by anti-capitalist artists, activists and scholars alike.
Bio
Sam Hunter is a PhD student in UCLA’s Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. His research interests include the history of the queer Internet, multi-format screen culture, and revolutionary media theory and praxis.
Contact: huntersl444@gmail.com | 614.395.8003