Against the Grain

This text aims to define a possible approach to the techno-social and artistic context that motivated the call for contributions entitled Counteract: practices of artistic resistance, dissidence, and furtivity. Affirming the need to believe in the possibility of producing modes of existence founded on their own temporalities and spatialities, forged against the grain of power and normalization systems through the use of individual and collective practices – minor gestures (Manning) – this essay contextualises and addresses a set of artistic practices that, by revealing the axes of the exercise of power, its fragilities and potentialities, induce/exert disruptive, productive, and creative driving forces on the plane of realisation of the contemporary post-digital Anthropocene. In this social, artistic, and political context, digitally transmediated and mobilised by information capitalism, configured in a hyper-controlled network of relationships where the capacity to create conditions and experiences of dissent is formatted, conditioned, and blocked by the means themselves, we highlight intermediation as the performative territory where both geopolitical strategies of control and surveillance and the artistic tactics of counter-action that expose and oppose them are choreographed. This essay aims to analyse and emphasise the power, the relevance, and necessity of a set of artistic actions that, by recombining and reorienting the functions of technological means – through a reconfiguration into weapons of political, civil, ideological, and ecological resistance – counteract the status quo, dissent, and resist creatively and productively.