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Abe Golam Enters the 2004 Presidential Race

WASHINGTON, DC - Abe Golam, Director of the Office of Political and Economic Insecurity of the US Department of Art & Technology, joined the growing field of candidates running for the Presidency of the United States today.

Mr. Golam, in announcing he is forming an exploratory committee, declared his candidacy would "stir up controversy throughout the global computer networks, that 'non-place' where the true battle for democracy in America will be fought and won."

Running as an independent under the Experimental Party, "the party of experimentation," Mr. Golam, legendary info-shaman and digital avatar, discussed his candidacy outside his home in the Electrosphere, where he tried to paint a sharp contrast between himself and President Bush. He also tried to separate himself from other Democratic candidates, and indeed from politicians in general.

It goes without saying, that the Experimental Party, a virtual political party created by a virtual government agency, would have a digital avatar (Abe Golam) as its candidate for President of the United States. There are multiple levels of virtualization coexisting within the complex hierarchy of this multi-tiered organization. The Experimental Party embraces virtualization as a powerful political tool for flaunting the suspension of disbelief, and deconstructing the spectacle of political activity.

With PolyVocal Remix, we are engaging in a joint writing technique that enables the creation of collaborative narrative. In a larger context, we are practicing a form of virtual, on-line theater that has no boundaries, no curtain, no fourth wall, no specific audience, no beginning and no end. We dissolve the boundaries between art and our own identities as artists and socio-political commentators. We insert our narrative into the political sphere, in order to carry out our message.

This is, in fact, how we stay on message.

WRITING AS HACTIVITY: An InterView

Part I

Randall Packer: As far your own practice is concerned, what is hactivism?

Mark Amerika: Hactivism, as far as I can tell, is a fluid term that means many things at once to different people. For me it’s always been a general concept that points to a kind of politically-motivated culture jam that intentionally sets out to intervene in the mainstream discourse so as to show its breaking points ­ if you will, the cultural fault-lines that allow for entry and further manipulation. In GRAMMATRON, (Amerika, 2001) the story where I made my first major cyberspace appearance, I saw this hactivist practice as a way to crack into various discourses that were gnawing at my consciousness over time, particularly this idea of the “literary” and what was then the apex of study around a phenomenon generally referred to as postmodernism. Already, on the net, in places like Alt-X (America, 1997) there was this move toward a kind of Avant-Pop poetics that would take on the forms of the mass media and attempt to subvert these forms from within. You could do this by taking on various literary genres like detective stories, sci-fi fiction, and even porn, and the idea was to “defamiliarize” these forms by breaking down their conventional plots, characters, and predictable use of language. Those of us who affiliated ourselves with the Avant-Pop cultural jam aesthetic started our hactivist practice by creating these “nomo-pomo” fictions and using the Web as a delivery mechanism that challenged the standard distribution systems usually associated with the mainstream publishing world. But then we became much more interested in the media-specific hacks we could generate on the net, particularly with all of the money and hype that followed the dot.com movement around during the height of that so-called new media economic bubble. Accepting the network environment as a many-to-many or peer-to-peer system we were soon able to create an alternative culture that was changing the curve of international culture in “real-time” and this then enabled us to influence the development of the various network practices that were then beginning to emerge.

RP: It sounds as if you’re positioning a hactivist practice as part political program and part artistic methodology.

MA: The thing about hactivism I find so interesting is that it’s constantly oscillating between being an evolving avant-art practice and a tactical political strategy. Too many times we have seen a growing divide between political action and artistic production. I’m not saying that all art has to have a political agenda ­ much of my own recent work in DVD with surround sound is aesthetically driven and not necessarily confrontational in an overt political way ­ but when you look around and see what’s happening in the media culture and the way many civil liberties have been whittled away at here in the US ­ at a certain point you have to just start finding more creative ways to integrate a radical message into your work. The best way to make this happen, when you can start sensing the effects of this kind of radical “poetics” and applied grammatology, is to take on the popular media culture and see what you can do to jar media consumers out of their cloudy complacency. You basically have to start sampling data from the mainstream media discourse and then totally manipulate that data so that it behaves differently or at the very least causes even minor alterations in consciousness so that media consumer who absorbs it perhaps changes behavior. This is what we mean by Avant-Pop.

From top to buttom:

- Abe Golam in the Oval Office artwork by Randall Packer and Mark Amerika

- President issues Executive Order to form US Department of Art & Technologyh and names Randall M. Packer as first Secretary. (photo by Randall Packer)

- Abe Golam button (artwork by Randall Packer and Mark Amerika)

- Official Department Seal The Symbol of Virtualization (artwork by Marcos Novak)

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