WED, 11 March 2015
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Ljubljana

The current meaning of openness, and the rhetoric of decentralisation, freedom and exchange in social media cannot be fully understood without tracing back the practice of networking in the underground artistic contexts over the past decades. This session proposes to analyse the roots of social networking based on both analogue and digital networked art, and connect them with the post-digital critical reflection. Social networking is seen as a practice of community creation, towards the imagination of common spaces of intervention – and identity identification – where symbols, myths and memes are shared. This panel describes the genesis and the creation of a number of grassroots artistic networks between the Eighties and the Nineties, across both Europe and the US, and question the practice of networking today. A common thread connects the network of mail art, Neoism, Luther Blissett and, more recently, in the post-digital era, the Anonymous entity. Such practices of disruption have been “social networks out of the box”, therefore generating viral practices, strategies of networking and “radical play”, both online and offline.