Zach Blas: Unknown Ideals - Softcover

Edit Molnįr

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3956795881 ISBN 13: 9783956795886

Publisher: Sternberg Press, 2022

Synopsis

This publication offers an inquiry into Zach Blas's singular practice through a series of newly commissioned essays by Alexander R. Galloway, Pamela M. Lee, Mahan Moalemi, Kris Paulsen, and Marc Siegel; an interview with Zach Blas by Ovul Durmusoglu; and writings by the artist himself. These insightful contributions expand on the technological, queer, filmic, and cultural inquiries that comprise the rich world of Blas's practice, exemplary among his generation of digital artists. Across his works, Blas closely engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, the internet, predictive policing, airport security, biometric recognition, and biological warfare. Blas embraces the media of computation, video, sculpture, and music in his installations, which confront biometric surveillance, the cult of optimization, and the reification of data bodies. Blas uses research-based practices to scrutinize the relationship between digital technologies and the cultures and politics that animate them. Critical of today's corporate internet giants and their ideological fascination with Ayn Rand, Blas extensively considers the beliefs, desires, fantasies, histories, and symbols latent in technical systems as he dwells on the horizons and edges, or what he calls the "outside," of dominant power structures. Reclaiming Rand's phrase the "unknown ideal," Blas points to both the liberatory potentialities and political challenges of the present: he imagines a proliferation of "unknown ideals" in order to dispute Rand's vision of the future. Refusing technological determinism, Blas's work makes space for escape through its celebration of queer ideality.

About this title

About the Author

Edit Molnįr is a curator and Co-director of the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg. Prior to that, she was Director of the Studio Gallery, Budapest (2000-2005), curator at Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle, Budapest (2005-2007); and Director of the Cairo-based Contemporary Image Collective (from 2007 to 2009).<br/> <br/>Marcel Schwierin is a curator, filmmaker, and Co-director of the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg. He has regularly curated for the Werkleitz Biennale, the Goethe-Institut, and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, among others. From 2010 to 2015, he was Curator of Film and Video for transmediale in Berlin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sternberg Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3956795881
• ISBN 13: 9783956795886
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Molnar Edit, Schwierin Marcel