Text by

JOERG HUBER

“The networked society” – the catchphrase of today’s world. Rejecting the singular and announcing the circular: ecosystems, finance, communication, markets, transport – people, things, and signs en route – all cybernetically interconnected and in a state of flux, globally. The whole, if there even is such a thing, is to be described as a complex framework of systemic forces, in which cost, function and meaning are no longer tan-gibly conveyed, participants are barely visible and responsibility is no longer clearly attributable. On the other hand, the upsurge of a first-person protagonist, who imagines themselves to be master of their own fate, is emerging: the phantasm of “be creative!” as the imperative of neo-liberalism, hiding the fact that the postulated flexibility actually means dispossession.

Accordingly, the lifeworld of individuals and of collectives can be seen as dispositifs: scenes and arrangements, in which architectures, machines, apparatuses, instruments, things and individuals are active, crisscrossing each other, whereby technologies, materials, substances, energies and dynamics are operative.