 It's academic and it's theater, the place where they both meet. You have to be audience and participant for each other. Intellectual practice is historical practice, it's cultural practice. Everyone, everybody please. Examples of women sharing what it is that you do, sharing how you do that. There's no way you can ignore Latinos anymore. Work from all around the world, you can come and see and talk about it. What time is it now in Kenya? It started out about different people and about different things. A whole sea of llama, theater for everybody, yes, everybody. That's just what should be done. And indeed my understanding of life, relationships, death has already changed. I'll just speak a little bit louder. My name is Frank Henschka and I'm the executive director and director of program together with Antje Öglop, the Siegel Center. We do bridge academia and professional theater, international and American theater. But I think everybody here in the audience has been here. So you can find out more on our website. Our season is starting soon. The Prelude Festival will be coming in the first week of October. We worked very hard. We're just finalizing the program. So I hope you will be able to join us. We have Gormir Castellucci, Kam Le Paage and many, many other things. This is the discovery of Heiner Müller's influential trip in the 70s to the U.S. before he wrote The Hamlet Machine and many, many other things. So I hope you will be able to join us contemporary New York organizing. This will be very interesting producers and artists who are on to something, I think. Something is happening in the scene. So we want to find out. We also welcome Eric Linn, who is a new member of the faculty. And we have Marvin Carlson with us. So thank you for coming. David Saffron also is here. And I now hand over to Peter Ackersall, who also starts with the executive officer here, is at the program, but also being a good friend to and for the Segal Center. So thank you for all you do. And he also came to us with the idea to bring James Harding. And he will say a few words about it. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Frank. So it's a great pleasure to see so many people here at this lunchtime presentation by Professor James Harding. And since I came to the program here nearly three years ago, I think we've been talking about the idea of bringing James up from Washington to present a lecture on his work on surveillance and performance. And we've finally managed to do that. So it's a great pleasure to welcome James to the program. This is a lecture presentation that's co-hosted by the PhD program in theater and the Segal Center. So we thank the Segal Center for joining us in this really interesting presentation. I'm going to introduce James formally and then James will present his paper and then we'll have time for questions at the end. So without further ado, I'll just say a few words about who James is in case you haven't met James before. He's fairly notorious around the performance studies scene. So James N. Harding is the author of the ghosts of the avant-garde, exorcising experimental theater and performance, cutting-edge performances, collage events, feminist artists, and the American avant-garde, and adorno and a writing of the ruins, essays on modern aesthetics and Anglo-American literature and culture. And for many years, I think James' work has been associated with, I think, not only a study of the American avant-garde, but also his co-edited book, Not the Other Avant-Garde, which has been one of the, I think, really important contributions, debates about the avant-garde in the international arena. James is an internationally known theater and performance scholar whose work focuses on the history of experimental theater on post-911 theater and on the intersections of surveillance and performance. And it's this topic that he's going to talk about today. James is going to draw on material from his new book, which is entitled Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance, which will be out with Michigan in early 2017. So we really look forward to reading that book, and we thank you today for your time, and we look forward to hearing your presentation. So thank you very much, James Harding. First of all, I think the mic works out. That's good. I want to thank Peter for hitting me up here at the grad center. I have lots of friends here, Marvin and David, Jean Graham Jones, who's not here right now because she's off in Berlin where I'll be in a couple of weeks. And then I just met Frank, and I want to thank the SQL Center also for cosponsoring this. It's a real pleasure to be here. It's always a pleasure to be in New York, but it's a real privilege and honor to be able to address you all today. Thank you all for coming out during your lunchtime, and I hope that the presentation is worth the sacrifice of your lunch or at least the delay of your lunch. The presentation that I'm giving today comes, it's a shortened version of a very long final chapter to the book, and where I talk about a number of artists who are moving in a direction that I think is required by the post-democratic structures of the Surveillance Society. I'm going to focus on a Russian performance artist by the name of Petro Pavensky and his work and give kind of a profile of some of the most recent work that he's done and use it as a case study for some of the arguments that come at the end of the chapter, and I'll cite those arguments when I get there. The name of my talk, as you can see, is envisioning performance post-democracy, creative activism, a little bit of damage and surveillance in evitable products. It draws its inspiration from a quote from Alain Badeu, who still accepts the idea that found true justice is certainly worth a bit of damage on the side of those who are well off and their servants, and who in the official theater can still find some drama and evidence of these critical facts. I've been pondering that particular quote for quite some time now, and this is where it's led me. This takes up in the middle of the chapter, where I'm actually talking about hacktivism quite a bit, so that's the backdrop to the statements that I'm making here now. Back in 1999, so we're going to go back about 15 years, over 15 years, and then move up to the present. Back in 1999, John McKenzie argued that with the advent of digital technologies, political activism and resistance need to take the form of what he called inner-activity, or hacking that while focused on the inner-activity between humans and computers, not only takes aim at technical systems, but also targets social systems. The implicit points of reference for McKenzie in his discussion of inner-activity is the early work of the critical arts ensemble. Like McKenzie, they too saw a clear path from digital to material political realities. Indeed, if the political dynamics of the Internet provided a microcosmic window into the social dynamics of Western society more generally, then the critical art ensemble's interest in the political significance of hacker communities had a lot to do with their resonance beyond the virtual world as a model of opposition for the sites where the more repressive currents of the virtual and material worlds collude. Sites where today the operational structures of the surveillance society are present and wield immense authority and power. Sites whose numbers increase unabated. In practical terms, the critical arts ensemble's interest in the image of the hacker suggests that they look to hacktivist disruptions of digital technologies in order to find performative models of disruption that in turn could be circuited back and extended to creative activism against the post-democratic structures of surveillance societies more generally. And in this respect, McKenzie's claim, activity, hacking, interactivity all must be understood as effects of performative power and as instruments. Not only echoed the political aesthetic sensibilities of artist-activist groups like the critical arts ensemble, but also offshoots like the electronic disturbance theater. Focusing on the work of this latter group, Catherine Bernard formulated similar arguments just as the new millennium was beginning. Her arguments focused on the electronic disturbance theater's attentiveness to vulnerabilities that might be exploited. Vulnerabilities that in internet technologies hackers take advantage of and that by way of their example opened the door to the models of what the electronic disturbance theater embraced as a radical theatrical practice. That practice in turn points towards what in this talk I want to refer to as performance post-democracy. Bernard's specific concern was with the artistic counters to the commercial structure of cyberspace, but it is the dynamic behind those counters that is of interest to me here. In her 2000 articles, Bodies and Digital Utopia, Bernard argued that through their own unique approach to artistic activism, the electronic disturbance theater definitely demonstrated that cyberspace contains within its structure's resistance tools that might counter the politics of repression. I like tools. People can do a lot with tools, but Bernard's tools are mostly a metaphor, a reminder, as it were, that power inevitably produces its own vulnerabilities and thus also the opportunity with which to resist repressive politics as well. How activists and artists exploit such vulnerabilities, how they hack them is a matter of strategy and choice, which in turn is also a matter of means and ends or goals. But the tools, that is the opportunities, Bernard argues are there. It falls only to those bold and creative enough to take them up to risk a bit of damage and to disrupt the rules of repression's game. At some level, it's unfortunate that Bernard did not explicitly broaden the scope of her discussion beyond the political implications of the work of the electronic disturbance theater and the group called Floating Point Unit Fake Shop to include other artist practitioners who in their own right deserve to be counted among the radical antagonism produced by disproportionate power relations and who, while having some strong conceptual affinities with hackers' communities, at least in the sense of laying hold of the rules of the game solely with the purpose of disrupting it, have exploited power's self-produced vulnerabilities using very different tools of resistance than those literally aligned with hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience. But rather than leaving the statement as an implicit wish that Bernard had somehow written a different article, I want to take this opportunity to update her arguments and draw a rough comparison that uses what is widely considered to be the electronic disturbance theater's most significant act of creative activism from the late 1990s, namely their innovative support of the Zapatistas Rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, as a conceptual frame for understanding the significance of the work of the Russian performance artist and activist Petro Pavlensky. And in particular, for understanding the context of his piece, a threat, Lubyanka's burning door, which began on November 9th, 2015, when he doused the front doors of the Russian Federal Security Service Building, the former KGB building with Petro, set them on fire, and then waited calmly with his back to the flames, holding the gas can in his hands as the authorities descended and arrested him, a lone figure stoically waiting just outside of Lubyanka's literal firewall, a lone figure making no attempt at entry, but making his presence known. Here was a political artist willing to do a bit of damage. My own rhetorical rendering of that moment consciously bridges it to what is arguably the electronic disturbance theater's most important work of creative activism, their development and deployment of flood net in the late 1990s on behalf of the Zapatistas. Indeed, it was the Zapatistas' rebellion in Chappas that provided the impetus for the formation of the electronic disturbance theater in the first place. As is well known, flood net is a distributed denial of service, or DDOS program that operates by exploiting the Java applet reload function on websites. It is thus capable of flooding targeted servers with access requests so numerous that it disrupts the server which cannot process the numerous requests quickly enough and which as a consequence either temporarily crashes or slows to a crawl because it is literally overwhelmed with traffic. In 1998, the electronic disturbance theater had held several Zapatistas' actions using flood net to target websites ranging from those of the Clinton White House. Well, that's the previous Clinton White House, not the one we hope is coming. The Pentagon and those of the Mexican president, Ernesto Zedillo, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As Jill Lane notes in her article, digital Zapatistas, no data was destroyed and no web page was altered. Metaphorically speaking, there was merely an activist mob amassing outside of the targeted server's firewalls and knocking at its entrances in virtual protest. In one iteration, Lane observes, the flood net repeatedly requested non-existent pages from the side of the Mexican government. These requests used names such as justice or human rights and thus compelled the server to produce a study flashing stream of 404 error reply messages stating justice not found on this site and human rights not found on this site. Referring to similar acts of electronic civil disobedience, in a recent book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower's Spy, The Many Faces of Anonymous, Gabrielle Coleman credits the Electronic Disturbance Theater with pioneering a unique brand of virtual settings that combine technical interventions with poeticism and performance art. This combination was in no small part the brainchild of Ricardo Dominguez, who originally was a member of the Critical Arts Ensemble before founding the Electronic Disturbance Theater with Stephen Wright, Carmen Carrasic and Brett Stahlbaum. It was Dominguez who specifically sought to translate the social aesthetics of figures like Bertrand Precht, Augusto Boal and Louis Valdes into a vision for the digital stage. But if I may, I'd like to flip the circuit on Dominguez's vision and return us back to the streets 20 years later. With the advent of surveillance regimes and smart technologies, the streets are now every bit as much a part of the digital stage as they are a part of the material one. It is on those streets that we find Petro Pavlinski, at least temporarily. That Ljubljanka's burning door begins on the streets is easier to establish than determining where the piece ends. For it was calculated as an intervention that extended by design not into virtual spaces but into a dizzying legal maze as Pavlinski effectively laid hold of the arcane rules of the Russian legal game, making a mockery of the charges brought against him, of the trial where he was prosecuted and of the conviction it ultimately yielded. The courtroom is always a venue of performance, but Pavlinski successfully transformed it into an extension of the politically radical performance art that he began on the street with Ljubljanka's burning door and continued throughout the proceedings against him. Like the electronic disturbance theater before him who linked their artistically inspired digital activism to the Zapatistas revolt in Chiapas, Mexico, Pavlinski linked his performance art activism to the cause of anti-Russian activists and artists in the Ukraine and later also to the cause of the Primory Gorillas or as they are often called the Primorsky partisans who were arrested after taking up arms in a revolt against police brutality and corruption in Russia's Primory or Maritime region near the Chinese border. In both instances, Pavlinski allied his work with artists and activists who were willing to do a bit of damage to the principled acts of resistance against police terrorism. This became evident as soon as the prosecutor filed charges against Pavlinski after his arrest. Initially Pavlinski was charged with vandalism but he surprised the court by answering the charges with the demand that they be changed to terrorism. In part, this was a show of support for the Ukrainian film director Oleg Sensov who in 2014 had burnt down the door of the Crimean office of the pro-Putin United Russian Party and who as a result had been sentenced to 20 years in jail on terrorism charges. But Pavlinski's demand was also a strategy that highlighted his own act as something akin to what Baudrillard's has called asymmetrical terror against terror. Before setting the security headquarters on fire, Pavlinski wrote, quote, the burning of Ljubljanka's door is a gauntlet that our society throws into the terrorist threat introduced by the Russian security services which is using its own methods of endless terror to keep power over 146 million people, unquote. What is noteworthy in this public statement particularly when one compares it with the subsequent statements that Pavlinski made upon his release is a literal lack of distinction that Pavlinski makes between the notions of terrorism and surveillance. The latter of which while unmentioned here figures prominently in subsequent statements. I'll discuss those statements momentarily but for now suffice it to note that Pavlinski clearly understands the state's use of surveillance as a key mechanism in its ability to terrorize citizens and in his statements after the trial Pavlinski is precise enough in this regard that one is left with the sense that his earlier demand to be charged with terrorism had as much to do with his use of the basic tools of surveillance like the video and photo cameras that documented the initial event including his arrest as it did with the vandalism itself. In as much as those are the tools that the FSB uses to terrorize the Russian population they were also a part of the artwork's anti-surveillance aesthetic which involved a conceptual hijacking a hacking as it were of the language, tools and institutional structures of state sponsored surveillance. While the use of those cameras as well as the media spectacle that Pavlinski created in the courtroom was as much a part of the performance as the actual burning of Lupianka's doors the prosecutors were loathe to meet Pavlinski's demand but they did change the charges with no identifiable sense of irony of the way that Pavlinski was playing them into his own performance the Russian prosecutors countered not by charging him with terrorism but by shifting the charges against Pavlinski from ideologically motivated vandalism to damaging a cultural heritage site. This new charge was based on a designation that the former FSB building had received in 2007 and the prosecutors literally justified by stating publicly that the FSB building had to be protected because so many leading figures of science and culture had been imprisoned there and hundreds of outstanding cultural figures had been tortured in its cells not only did Pavlinski respond by telling the press that those working in the B building had been methodically destroying Russian culture for nearly 100 years now while at the same time having the gall to publicly declare their building a cultural monument but based on the prosecutor's own reasoning Pavlinski also had his lawyer Olga Denz file a complaint that accused the FSB of illegally replacing the doors in 2008. In the complaint Pavlinski and his lawyer asked the prosecutor general Yuri Chanka to hold the FSB employees accountable since the FSB building had been named an object of cultural heritage in 2007. FSB employees had replaced the doors a year later Pavlinski's lawyer pointed out and they had not procured proper authorization of the federal service for the protection of cultural heritage that was required by law. Not only were the FSB employees thus culpable of the very crime with which Pavlinski was charged but since the doors he burned down were not original and had been illegally installed Pavlinski and his lawyer reasoned he had not in fact damaged a cultural heritage site at all. On the contrary through his act of artistic provocation he had exposed the criminal damage that had been done to Russian culture and heritage by the FSB employees when they changed the doors and by rhetorical extension when they had detained and tortured Russians outstanding cultural figures as well. Not to mention the damaging and chilling effect that the repressive surveillance regimes of the FSB and its predecessor the KGB have had on cultural expression more generally. While all this legal absurd legal wrangling transpired the entrance to the FSB building became its own symbolic sideshow since it was sealed off with corrugated metal literally placing an iron curtain between the public and the KGB's successor the Russian security service. Amid Pavlinski's disruptive performative mastery of the courtroom his initial provocative gesture of setting Lubyanka's doors ablaze led to a nomination for the prestigious Russian Vatsiva Prize a nomination that Pavlinski accepted and that Mikhail Midlund the director of the state-run national center for contemporary arts rejected on the grounds that Pavlinski's peace involved breaches of the law and had caused material damage but for a very short period Pavlinski simultaneously stood as a criminal defendant and as a potential prestigious award recipient all for the same performance piece Midlund's rejection of the nomination did not go unanswered inspired when supposes by Pavlinski's own courage the jury for the Inovatsiva Prize took offense at Midlund's ruling staged a walk out and ultimately clause the director to cancel the prize all together rather than risk the possibility that Pavlinski might receive it while Pavlinski's aesthetically inspired activism may have effectively derailed the Inovatsiva Prize ultimately his status as a rejected nominee was arguably more valuable than the prize itself if Pavlinski's work caused the award system of the Inovatsiva Prize to crash it was having a similar effect on Russia's legal system where the performative aspects of his work were still unfolding the controversy generated by the cancellation of the Inovatsiva Prize increased international attention in Pavlinski's plight in the courtroom as did the fact that he was shuffling back and forth from different courtrooms on different charges for Ljubljanka's burning door he faced charges of damaging the cultural heritage side and for his earlier piece Liberty which is also sometimes translated as freedom he faced charges of vandalism and petty hooliganism after he and other artists built mock barricades and burnt fires on St. Petersburg's Malikonyshevy's bridge these latter actions were conceptualized to demonstrate support for anti-Russian protesters in the Ukraine by staging a reenactment of Kyiv's Medan protests that was impossible to distinguish from a protest of their own in the public eye the two trials quickly bled together into one composite performance spectacle moving back and forth between courtrooms Pavlinski adeptly disrupted the Russian legal process the courtroom proceedings in the latter case where Pavlinski was charged with hooliganism proved to be no less sensational than those of the former after the prosecution brought in a number of witnesses to testify how offended they were by Pavlinski's pro-Ukanian protests on the Malikonyshevy bridge Pavlinski paid three prostitutes to join in with the prosecution's witnesses and testify that they too were offended each one of the prostitutes Pavlinski explained was able to rip through the scenery and demonstrate to everyone reality as it is they are prostitutes whom I paid so that they would come and testify he added and it is the equivalent to the testimony of the other witnesses for the prosecution since they have just as much to do with the case they have exactly the same motive while the prostitutes added a sensational level of farce to the trial that indicted the entire proceedings Pavlinski's goals were clearly larger than his own defense a point that he made abundantly clear when he rejected the court's proposal to drop the criminal charges against him he reasoned that he and his lawyer then still had witnesses that needed to be questioned the witness Pavlinski most wanted to question was a young lawyer by the name of Pavel Yasmin and Yasmin brings us back to some key aspects of surveillance Yasmin has been one of the original investigating detectives who had interrogated Pavlinski after he had been arrested in February 2014 for burning tires on the Malikonyoshevy bridge rather than procuring a confession Yasmin found himself on the receiving end of Pavlinski's mesmerizing vision of the role of activist art in society in fact after spending just over four months interacting with Pavlinski Yasmin considered Pavlinski's vision of political art so compelling that he quit his job at the Russian investigative committee and began preparing to become a lawyer initially Yasmin had hoped to become part of Pavlinski's own defense team but since his involvement a previous involvement with the case disqualified him Yasmin stood ready instead as a witness for the defense the fact that Pavlinski proved to be intellectually adroit enough to flip an interrogator was certainly a stunning turn of events and most accounts of the trial tend to focus on Yasmin's flip as Pavlinski's own piece de resistance especially since it can be pinpointed to a specific moment in the interrogation when Pavlinski was able to get Yasmin to admit that he was merely a tool in a power structure that instrumentalizes people and everything else I like tools obviously you can do a lot with tools but rather than focusing on Yasmin's retooling I want to suggest that it was the orchestrated backdrop to his shift in allegiances that was Pavlinski's real accomplishment and that Yasmin's flip was merely a byproduct although a spectacular one of a much grander retooling a hack as it were that took advantage of the vulnerabilities posed by the availability of the most basic surveillance technologies and that redirected them into an affirmation of a radical political aesthetic one that embraces acts of civil disobedience and disruption and of seeming vandalism and destruction as legitimate forms of activist artistic expression and as moments of creative resistance to oppressive authoritarian or post-democratic political formations one simple fact sets this backdrop into critical relief cultural critics can pinpoint the moment of Yasmin's shift in alleging not because they have access to the investigative committee's files or Yasmin's notes but because Pavlinski secretly recorded the interrogations and then published an edited version of them online as a three act play at a conceptual level the creation of this novel piece of verbatim theater carries slight echoes of Mackenzie's inner activity his notion of redirecting the interaction between humans and computers in such a way that it not only takes aim at technical systems but also targets social systems as well except that in this instance it was the interaction between humans and surveillance technologies that was redirected and yet redirected with similar effects Steve Mann has characterized such redirection as inverse surveillance or what he is more famously called surveillance a dialectical concept Mann's notion of surveillance which is watched from below is the direct antinomy of surveillance which means to watch from above and like Mackenzie's sense that inner activity not only takes aim at technical systems but also targets social systems surveillance targets both surveillance regimes and the social political systems that cultivate and benefit from them or at least this is Mann's argument as a variation of what Mann calls surveillance Pavlinski's intervention in his ambitious recording of his interrogation targeted both Russian security system and its legal system two of the central pillars of the Russian authoritarian state in one sense the term surveillance is a conceptual marker of the vulnerabilities that surveillance regimes inevitably produce and so it always carries with it a reference to the hierarchies of political power and to the asymmetrical use the powerful by the weak in Mann's original conception for example surveillance referred to the recording or monitoring of a high-ranking official by a person of lower authority and in this regard there is much overlap between Mann's notion of acts of surveillance and Pavlinski's notion of his own artistic practice which he is characterized as a deliberate attempt to recapture the initiative for the downtrodden little man in the face of the grinding machinery of Russian state power but where the American media theorist and the Russian actionist part ways is in Mann's belief that surveillance ultimately is a strategy for democratic accountability transparency and objectivity not to mention his rather questionable belief that an ever widening distribution of the means of surveillance will I'm sorry not to mention the fact that his rather questionable belief that an ever widening distribution of the means of surveillance will counteract surveillance society's reinforcement of post democracy perhaps because he works from within a Russian context Pavlinski vision is far less optimistic about the willingness of the powerful to relinquish the tools of authority they like these tools you can do a lot with them so the aim of Pavlinski's artistic practice as he as he amply demonstrated in both of the legal proceedings against him is to suck the authorities into his art deprive them at least temporarily of the ability to control events quickly I missed this this is a Steve Mann's notion of surveillance and then this brings it back up into the courtroom with Pavlinski the goal is to provoke and lure authorities into an engagement on terms with which they are unfamiliar or to be more precise on the terms of a tactical creative activism the political aesthetic of which owes allegiance to neither conventional notions of art or politics to borrow Noah Snyder's somewhat cliched metaphor Pavlinski paints with the mechanisms of power and in as much as his actions abide by neither conventional notions of art or politics they point towards the kind of creative activism that I characterize as performance post democracy while acts of surveillance may contribute to his goals and Pavlinski has been careful to disseminate photos and video footage of all his major interventions particularly when representatives of authority intervene they figure is only one of the many elements on the genuinely radical palette from which Pavlinski draws for his creative activism in this respect I would suggest that amid the sensation of flipping his interrogator and of surreptitiously recording the interrogation it is easy to lose sight of something far more important the moment of creative sedition embraced in the play that Pavlinski produced from the recorded transcripts of his interrogation in that play Pavlinski offers an impassioned defense of as well as an uncompromising assertion of the need for politically unconventional and politically radical works that do not shy away from acts that the authorities may interpret as vandalism acts that are the product of a willingness to take on post democratic formations by doing a bit of damage indeed such works defy even conventional understandings of performance particularly as they pertain to establish theatrical practice quote I have never worked with Pavlinski claims if you imagine a line where at one end there is opera as a means of communication and at the other there is a terrorist act as a means of communication then in terms of the scriptedness of the gesture performance will always be closer to opera and actionism to terrorism that Pavlinski identifies with the aesthetic radicalism of actionism places him with tradition of Russian artistic militancy that he characterizes his artistic practice as a form of terrorism places his back in the courtroom where he had demanded that he be charged with terrorism there when all is said and done Pavlinski had embarrassed the legal authorities so badly that even with convictions against him in both cases they balked at sentencing him to prison and so after seven months of probation while facing charges on two separate accounts Pavlinski was released he emerged from jail only to add a critical code to his performance telling the reporters that he had quote seen the machine from the inside and that he had seen quote in concentrated form the surveillance service he told reporters that he had quote clashed with police surveillance every day that prison is a laboratory it's the same thing in so-called life at liberty the same mechanisms the same methods of control and compulsion that have proven effective in prison he argued are used on the masses unquote Pavlinski's recognition that prison is a laboratory for refining coercive methods of surveillance that then can be widely disseminated to control the public adds an important nuance to our understanding of the role that prisons have in the surveillance society but one additional observation is in order where there is a laboratory the outcomes are uncertain and vulnerabilities exist that might be exploited indeed in such context repression and its radical antagonistic antennae walk together both develop new methods quote the process of determining the limits and forms of political art is still ongoing Pavlinski argued as he was released quote even in prison that did not stop unquote though stated in general terms about political art the immediate point of reference for Pavlinski's comments was his piece Lubyanka's burning door which rather than ending with his arrest on November 9th continued through his incarceration and trial even while he was in jail it did not stop there the piece evolved I would suggest to one of the most compelling works of anti-surveillance political art in the last decade perhaps a moment of reflection is in order because we've moved a long way from the electronic disturbance theater granted almost 20 years separates Pavlinski's Lubyanka's burning door from the electronic disturbance theater's creative intervention in support of the Zapatistas and this does not even begin to address the vast cultural divide separating Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2015-2016 and Ernesto Zasilo's Mexico in the late 1990s and although I suggested that we view the former through the distance conceptual lens of the latter ultimately I am not seeking equivalences here so much as I am piecing together complimentary parts of a larger emerging political aesthetic so in juxtaposing these two very different cultural and historical moments of creative activism I am looking for something more than conceptual similarities that might unite them under the banner of Badeu's call for a new militancy and theatrical practice or even under the banner of what I've called performance post-democracy rather I seek an equation that will link electronic civil disobedience with its contemporary material counterparts and that in doing so will yield something new not in the naive sense of a claim of originality but in the sense of being a combination that can point towards the complex militant forms of creative anti-surveillance activism that will be required in the years to come the forms that will constitute an effective radical antagonism for the 21st century and a creative activism that then legitimately might be called theater's new militancy because it recognizes and responds to indeed is inevitably produced by the new political realities of advanced surveillance societies and post-democratic formations like Pavlinski's own aesthetic practice such creative activism is has little concern with the institutions of art per se the focus of its disruptiveness is elsewhere if it is to function dialectically and exploit post-democracies inevitable vulnerabilities then it must surface where it is not expected to do so with little regard for institutionalized artistic legitimacy in either the present or the future as Susan Buck Morris has argued in her book Thinking Past Terror quote the institutions of cultural power are not threatened by what the artist creates so long as it is done within authorized art world space unquote though her reference is spatial the issue raised by Buck Morris is not so much produced in and for the traditional spaces of theaters galleries and museums the reference in your illusion to authorized art world spaces concerns the extent to which artist quote critical and creative powers are kept isolated from social effect unquote irrespective of whether those powers are applied to artistic expression in the theater in the streets or in the digital by ways of virtual reality that isolation with political efficacy is the great challenge of art in an era of expansive surveillance and increasingly fortified post-democracy and we could do far worse than to conceptualize the art that rises to the challenge at the far end of the authorized unauthorized binary that forms Buck Morris's argument the point is that if the institutions of cultural power are not threatened by art there are the institutions of political power those entrenched and fortified forces of post-democracy in an era of post-democracy art that is authorized is most likely art that is already contained the need is for art that is interested less in pushing the boundaries of art than it is in the radical possibilities of creative political expression that occupies that squats on that tax into unauthorized space art that is motivated by a willingness to burn down the doors that regulate the political order of post-democratic formations art that is willing to be disruptive and is willing to do a bit of damage but if Buck Morris's arguments are valid we might legitimately inquire where one might find the unauthorized spaces of vulnerability that post-democracy inevitably produces and that might be exploited for there one is also apt to find the potential spaces of an effective creative activism like the hackers tap of the return key they are located conceptually at least in the unauthorized command keystrokes and in the digital underbelly of denial of service DOS notifications somewhere in the virtual realms just outside of your server's firewall like the activist arsonist flick of the lighter they are located in the calculated control burn of incendiary demonstrations and in the radical return of pyro techniques to its Greek roots pyro meaning fire and technique meaning made by art somewhere just outside of the Russian security services building like the graffitis artists vandalizing the private property so too are they located in interventions that are without license or permit interventions like the infamous 215 foot penis that the Russian actionist and underground opposition art group viona which is the Russian word for war painted on the little tiny drawbridge in st. Petersburg in 2010 so that when it was raised a giant phallus overshadowed the st. Petersburg FSB building the former KGB headquarters that intervention of course echoed a similar one taken in 1991 in Moscow when the members of ETI which is a Russian acronym for the expropriation of the territory of art spontaneously appeared in red square and laid down and arranged their bodies to spell the word cock they remained there until they were forcibly removed a result that symbolically enacted the emasculation and expropriation of artistic practice ETI leaders like Anatoly Malowski said this act as a saw this act as a gesture towards recovery of public spaces and claim for example that its goal was the desacralization of red square and its transformation into a people's place but whatever its goals so too was it a concession just as the movements name the expropriation of the territory of art takes the sarcastic swipe at the appropriation and neutralization of artistic processes practiced by the state Malowski later admitted that the action was the result of dwindling options for artistic expression quote the only thing left to us he conceded quote were the streets unquote here too we find a faint echo of that pressing question what other options were available the russian security forces made abundantly clear the streets were not really available and were subject to control not even the streets were authorized art space but maybe there is a space here for revision for in moments of political urgency the streets like the information super highway for might offer unauthorized avenues of vulnerability that can be exploited and they may thus can become powerful sites of resistance perhaps a recognition of that possibility ends this talk on a more optimistic note but if those possibilities do exist they come with a price in 2013 some 20 years after ETI's irreverence stunt Pavlinski entered red square himself and rather than dallying about with words he stripped down sat down and nailed his scrotum to the paving stones an act that quickly garnered international attention for shadowing comments he would later make with respect to Ljubljanka's burning door Pavlinski justified his act of public self mutilation not with the claim that the streets were the only thing left to us but rather that the streets like everyone else had become one big prison and part of a vast surveillance complex where the government steals from the people and uses the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus of progressive structures for many in the west this act was a baffling show of masochism but for Russians there was something all too familiar in this provocative act of defiant self mutilation the Russian cultural critic Marat Gurman for example placed it in a long Russian distant tradition of radical antagonism towards authoritarianism that developed in Russian prisons where the inmates nailed their scrotums to the stools when they have lost all hope of being listened to by the prison authorities with his provocative and shocking act in Red Square Pavlinski brought this sensibility out into the open extending it to Russian society more generally unlike the playful and carnivalesque undercurrent of the interventions by ETI in the 1990s or Viona just three years earlier Pavlinski's act signaled the beginning of a much more serious consequential and sober brand of actionism his was an act of radical antagonism that left playfulness behind and took aim at the stark political realities of a post-democratic order that had risen from the rubble of the former Soviet Union's bleak authoritarianism before democracy had even had a chance to cede the point of this action Gurman argued is to show society and the opposition that we've lost that the battle is over they've imprisoned us all and nailed us to the ground Pavlinski's act completely baffled the security forces at Red Square not knowing what to do they draped him with a white sheet turning him into a fleeting reflection of Gandhi until someone could be located who could dislodge the nail and hence dislodge Pavlinski himself who was poised to become a permanent fixture in the Russian cultural political imagination here is elsewhere the blunt materiality of Pavlinski's creative activism which has been a constant in his work since he sewed his lip shots in 2002 outside of St. Petersburg Kazan's Cathedral in Supportive Pussy Riot is a clear reminder that radical antagonism exploitation that powers vulnerabilities or effective creative resistance to repressive surveillance regimes do not require technological wizardry as their vanguard but technological wizardry and blunt materiality might walk hand in hand into the unauthorized spaces of resistance that lie before us in order to do so they will need a bearing that not only identifies unauthorized spaces but that like Pavlinski's own bearing also locates the creative imagination and strength to commandeer them and they will require brazen tactical aesthetics and acts of uncommon resolve without a doubt that walk demands as much courage as it does street smart artistic creativity maybe more however much we may marvel at the bold creativity of activist artists like Pavlinski or of collectives like the critical arts ensemble or the electronic disturbance theater however much we may celebrate the art in unauthorized spaces their creative actionism is the product of a force of conviction a radical antagonism that outweighs concern for existing legal status statutes savvy though they may be with regard to the intricacies of the law or with regard to the machinery of the legal system more generally the work of artists like Pavlinski and the electronic disturbance theater puts them at substantial risk at risk of arrest and incarceration at risk of lengthy and personal devastating legal processes at risk of physical harm the convoy guards for example of the Moscow city court assaulted Pavlinski so while we might celebrate the courage of their imagination we must not lose sight of the fact that artists like these possess a rare courage with regard to the personal consequences they potentially pay for their interventions maybe this is the same courage that makes their art possible maybe too it is the kind of courage that the surveillance society and the era of post democracy require for artistic practice that is of consequence maybe in this era it is the kind of courage that separates art from the institutions and the commercial industry of art if this is the case then I want to suggest that performance post democracy is performance in an era where the rules of the game have in fact changed and the new rules to ecobodryard they are indeed fears a decade ago writing an essay entitled counter surveillance as political intervention focused on the creative activism of early anti-surveillance groups like the institute for applied autonomy trademark and the surveillance camera players all of whom he lauded but none of whom he conceded ever succeeded in moving beyond symbolic conflict into actual physical confrontation settling instead for acts of symbolic resistance with the intention of raising public awareness about modern surveillance regimes they remained unsuccessful argued at moving critiques of surveillance beyond the level of the individual to their larger institutional political origins here again in a moment of critical disappointment with what artists were unable to achieve we discover a longing for what art might be and in particular for what counter surveillance art that is motivated by the courage to engage in physical confrontation might actually achieve a hack, a disturbance even a bit of damage that discards the quixotic and risk the confrontational the closing lines of this talk with the critical eye at the interventions by artists like Pavlinski I know that some might legitimately ask what he actually accomplished and that some might question whether his interventions however provocative they might be ever really rise to the occasion and become something more than symbolic gestures granted there is little that an individual artist or a specific ensemble or collective might achieve on his or her or their own but the choice is I think between symbolic gesture and exemplary act there is I think a choice to walk the walk and lead by example leaving us not with symbolism so much as with the looming question who has the courage to follow a similar path and art should encourage us what are their options remain thank you very much thank you very much everyone and I think we've got a lot to talk about and unfortunately my duties mean that I have to go to a meeting right now so I'll have to take up these questions with you later on this evening but Frank Henchka is going to share the questions for us this afternoon but just to thank you very much for that presentation I was very much taken by the way that you drew us into the complexity of questions about activist performance and what that means I think in some ways there's a interesting mirror of these debates in some of the 1960s interventions where public space was a previous time where art actually did try and transform public space in really significant ways when there were courtroom performances where the courtroom became a theatrical site for parody and protest and also where there were explicit body performances as well and discourses around the body that are associated with much of the radical left of the time I'm also struck by the parallel hackerism of the Chinese and the Russian authorities in recent for example recently hacking into the databases of the professional sports people and the Olympics people and revealing the instance where they've taken drugs that were banned substances and the way that this is not a neutral site it's not a leftist site it's a discourse that is very much a tool of contemporary power across the spectrum of political activism what else can I think there are many many other things I could say but unfortunately I have to leave but so thank you again for your presentations and I'll pass you over to Frank who will chair the questions thank you Peter and he really has to go meeting of the executive officers and so first of all thank you all for coming and as Peter or James said in your lunch time it won't be too long but I think it's always good to have a moment to reflect on what we heard and what we say so I won't speak too much first of all thank you also for your provocative I think sharing of information and experience and observations and we used to hear from the avant-garde from Russia Eisenstein and Mayakovsky and Stravinsky-Ballet there is quite a change that has happened maybe I just one question before we open up so what triggered you to write that book why is that you feel this is the main concern of your research at the moment I mean the motivation for the book in its entirety I was working on a book that's actually about a half done at this particular point I had finished doing quite a bit of work on experimental theater and the notion of blurring art in everyday life and suddenly it occurred to me that people involved in espionage are doing the same kind of things they're orchestrating performances and I was interested because I don't find that to be a particularly politically progressive type of activity and yet it fit the model of a lot of what I was seeing was avant-garde practice and I started working on that project and as I got more deeply involved in it I started running across the stuff with regard to surveillance and at one point I just went hold on I need to look at this and put the espionage stuff on hold and it's still on the back burner and then dove into the deep waters of surveillance studies and started thinking about it from a performance studies perspective and that was the general motivation that got me started on the book it's almost like a playwright who work on one thing, you leave this you start something new in the creative process there's this great sculpture from Ai Wei Wei I don't know if you saw that of the classical great column with the surveillance camera carved out of marble as a symbol perhaps it will be one of the strongest symbols of the time we live in and I think you are right this is certainly what distinguished this decade from others where we live in but let's start right away with questions Bella will go around with the microphone not only so we hear you better this is also live streamed so people will have it and we have it for our archive and maybe you say just one word who you are so people will hear from where the question comes from and they will go directly to him so a question or a comment or a statement my name is Berthe the Pavlensky the interventions certainly are very extreme as you said in terms of his own physical also physical health I was just it occurred to me there is something also this goes beyond the agit pop kind of theater and also where the political the political agit pop of the 20s and 30s were actually also the political structures themselves dictatorial structures made use of that they also created a performance in order to create a reaction can you comment on that please on that connection I hope this answers your question the larger structure of the chapter from which this is drawn Pavlensky is the last case study there but the point of departure is a discussion of a piece that I saw in Frankfurt in the summer of 2015 that the piece is called I regret nothing and the piece is a first person narrative in the voice of Edward Snowden and I talk about one specific moment in the piece that I'm quite taken by there's a lot about the background of Snowden when he was child and stuff like this that is a part of the narrative but at some point he becomes the Snowden we know who begins giving us a lecture about the dangers of state sponsored terrorism and the invasion of privacy and that we need to protect ourselves from this as he does that talk the lights in the theater go up ushers come out with boxes full of all sorts of helmets construction helmets, football helmets, motorcycle helmets old Roman helmets stuff like that and they start passing it out to the audience and so we all know what our cue is we put on hats and we're looking at each other and it's wildly funny and amusing it's also incredibly distracting because while that's going on Thomas Holler the actor who is playing Snowden is in a process of redressing and then suddenly the lights go down and we see that while we've been playing with our helmets he's been putting on a suit of Spanish armor and has a barber's bowl on his head and he mounts a stuffed horse and we get an image of Don Quixote and the really interesting moment there is that it both suggests to us that Snowden really is a kind of quixotic figure in his belief that he could fill behemoths like the NSA or GCHQ and I'm taken by that because that image is so powerful and so moving that it bleeds over into a question about theater itself and the extent to which theater as we know it is, and in other words theater about surveillance becomes quixotic and I use that as a point of departure for a call for this more militant type of artistic practice which is really not concerned with art anymore and the distinction here comes from the surveillance camera players, Bill Brown the founder of the surveillance camera players he once told me in an email correspondence that I need to understand that he is not a political artist he is an artistically inspired activist and I got that email from him when I first started working on the book and it's worked like a bug inside me ever since, I mean it's changed my outlook and so in terms of an adjud prop theater I don't really like to say we can't do that anymore because I don't really work in those kind of binaries what I'm suggesting is that the current historical political situation is calling for a very different kind of practice and I question whether the theater that I know and love is actually capable of facilitating the kind of political interventions that are necessary to address current political realities maybe two more, one and two you have thank you so much for that I was wondering if you could speak a bit about what you mean by this term post-democratic and how that's useful to you in conceptualizing performance in the cultural specific space of Russia but also is it helpful for you more globally? it is actually it's a very tricky maneuver because I don't think Russia is the best example of what I mean by post-democracy what I mean by post-democracy is drawn primarily from a book called post-democracy written by Colin Crouch who used to teach at the University of Warwick it's a very short book he works as an economist as a business scholar and his argument is really about the consequences of neoliberalism and the policies of divestment and taking government services and contracting them out to private contractors and modeling them after business models in such a way that the government is no longer capable of actually even knowing what its own functions are and can't really provide oversight that would regulate those businesses because now we hire consultants to tell us what those government functions are so it's all and his argument and I find it immensely compelling is that this is not just undemocratic it has progressed to a point that we have moved into an era of post-democracy so the idea that we can return to our ideal of democracy is something that he is suggesting is no longer possible and that we have to rethink our political structures I stay awake at night wondering about whether I really agree with him or not but I find it so compelling that I think that I need to kind of contend with the realities that he's describing and the consequences of neoliberalism that's the larger political backdrop of some of the other artists in the chapter that I discuss I'm just so compelled by Plovinsky's act and I have to say that what I'm really compelled by is the inexplicable amount of courage that Plovinsky possesses and the question that I'm really raising at the end is where does that courage come from and I'm also asking isn't that courage necessary for effective political artistic practice today and so I think that I hope that answers your question I think Shizhek's big question who says does capitalism really need democracy anymore or not he thinks this is the fundamental question of the time and he thinks most probably not but Marvin James for a really fascinating provocative exploration it raises a number of concerns and questions that I find it because they require us thinking in rather different ways I find it difficult to even articulate but let me try to get at what concerns me here and it's not a concern about anything you're doing or your interpretation quite the country trying to get my head around the implications of this and my question really is looking at what are now the boundaries or are there any boundaries about this kind of activity and its political and personal implications what's going on here clearly is a kind of performative jujitsu turning the strategies of the system back upon itself in part by converting them or not even converting them but calling attention the fact that they are themselves performative and part of the strategy of that and the risk of it and the necessity for courage as Frank says or danger as Beata has pointed out the risks that are being taken have to do with with what would I say again it's hard to kind of get my vocabulary around this the the maybe something you said earlier James it's not the theater we knew any longer partly it's not because partly it's not the theater that we knew any longer it becomes the collapse of memesis it's not memetic any longer it's the thing itself he is being arrested there is real danger there is real there's a real payoff not only structurally but personally I remember having an argument with Rustam Baruka in Berlin about whether in fact martyrdom is performance and it seems to me that you have here a person who is consciously embracing a kind of martyrdom in order to expose that performative quality not only of the martyrdom itself but of the system in which martyrdom is enacted created and Rustam disagreed with me by the way he said oh no no martyrdom that's going too far that's not performance any longer can I respond to that yeah I guess my question is what are the boundaries are there boundaries or what are the implications of the fall of boundaries let me address the issue of martyrdom and as an example because I think this will really drive it at the question or give you an answer to the question that you're posing what I would say is that those moments of martyrdom that we see now are so frequently indistinguishable from moments where the person who becomes the martyr feels that he or she has nothing left to lose and what I would say is interesting about Pavlinski's self characterization as a terrorist is that if you look at who he is look at the life that he leads I mean he is fully convinced that if they send him to prison he has nothing he hasn't lost anything and what he's chosen instead instead of taking the path of violence against people are these gestures that are attacking the building and they are immensely provocative acts and he's channeling it into creative activism and he's not taking his own life but he nails a scrotum to the pave stones in Red Square he's gone atop the main asylum in Moscow cut off his ear lobe and he's not afraid to do things to his body in order to draw attention but so much of what I'm dealing with in the larger context of that chapter is the extent to which the forces of post-democracy evolve to the extent that people find themselves not facing any other options if they don't whether it is a direct or indirect violence that has been pointed at them they feel like their response is the only possibility that's left it's based in part and I have real troubles with Baudrillard in this respect but it's based in part on Baudrillard's argument that the events of 9-11 were an inevitable product of the processes of globalization and there's a lot that we can criticize but he's working with a dialectic that I find really intriguing the extent to which the forces of post-democracy neoliberalism advance to the degree that someone feels there are no options available or they advance to the degree that somebody says democracy is no longer a possibility we live in a post-democratic era the fundamental question is well what responsibility does an arts practitioner have in an environment that is no longer allowing for democracy and I think that those are the moments where you say what are the boundaries well the boundaries are to rethink the political dynamic that we find ourselves in now my first question would be not what are the boundaries of art but what are the boundaries of the political structures in their willingness to disenfranchise people or segregate and police according to race at some point there's a moment the primary partisans they took up arms against the police because of police brutality and Pavlinski was awarded the Vaklav Havel Prize for this piece and they donated the money to their defense and as a consequence of doing that the prize was retracted they took it back because he was supporting people they saw as terrorists and in fact they were acquitted by the way of any charges of murder but they did take up arms against the police and clearly Pavlinski believes in a kind of armed resistance and I'm not sure I believe but what I would say is at some level I think what he's indicative of is us moving into a very new period historically yeah I think maybe you have still a bit of time to also be here I think we could slowly come to an end I think it is fascinating also we want to know how do you nail onto a stone it's something you know but maybe in between the stones I have an idea but I think what we also can take from this is your question or his question if you do safe art in safe spaces it doesn't even change the institutions how would it have any effect on the society it's a big question and last thing what made me think of there's the big Sundance from Jeep Sitting Bull which he did as self mutilation but for a vision series why he got killed early is because people were afraid because of the dance he would gather the forces of the issue once again and there would be an uprising so in a way there is also a long line of that performing revolution almost again thank you so much really thank you all for coming and please stay in contact you have your email I think through Peter or us and maybe also you have some time here now so thank you so much thank you