This lecture shall give a first person account of how circumstances have dramatically changed for actionist art practice over the last 15 years. I will use examples from my own art practice to show the impossibility to engange in digital and real-life actionism as they are considered criminal under anti-terrorist laws.
In the past, whenever we decided to start a new project, we always thought about possible legal implications in advance. Usually these would be easy to ignore as these implications used to result in small fines for public disturbance, copyright infringement, and your average threatening lawyer's letter. By now, anti-terrorist laws disable us to think freely about projects and issues that touch state authority and terrorism, because thinking terror already consitutes a crime. Hence we changed our strategy and went into the underground with "illegal art", we have decided to publish such projects anonymously and internally we call them our "Secret Projects". We can never be connected to what we artistically do in the underground. But I will present the changing social habitat and legal circumstances affecting the production process for artists by showcasing some of our key UBERMORGEN projects and revealing as little as possible about our "Secret Projects".
In my talk I need to call to attention the many cases of self-censorship that every user on the net takes part in, the immensly negative effects of this lemming-like behavior and the reflection of this downward spiral in the revolting newspeak that has taken over the mass media and the lovely commercial social networks. Because what we are experiencing right now by means of a soft transformation, is a totalitarian take-over while the majority of the artists are focused on career, money and reputation instead of resistance, subversion and reflection.