Techno: An Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present

Techno music seen as an experimentation to overcome the sociocultural boundaries of the social space.

Techno is one of the more spectacular and mediatized aspects of contemporary culture. But is it more than mere entertainment, more than just an escape from a world that no ideology can claim to finalize? Like any fashion phenomenon, techno is the product of the human need for experimentation and the necessity to go beyond the limits and forms imposed on human existence. In terms of how it has appropriated technology for festive and aesthetic purposes, the techno movement could be considered as a sort of artistic and political laboratory of the present.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 2906571768
• ISBN13: 9782906571761
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Dis Voir Editions
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

collective articulations

Without in any way proclaiming a theme or message, techno, in its loud silence, seems to imply that the old socio-historic figures of meaning no longer make sense, and consequently can no longer fragment or partition the world according to an ethnic or political score that until now has been divided up into separate and opposed identities. As can be easily seen in raves, as well in many contemporary artistic practices, art and politics are no longer separate (as if designating heterogenous fields of operations), but are joined in collective articulations, flexible and ephemeral, forming around common sensations. Such a convergence of the artistic (understood to mean both art and technology) and the political does not neccesarily mean that we have moved toward an aetheticizing of the political (the community as a work of art) or a politicizing of art (a social or critical art). This indicates perhaps that it still remains for us to concieve an art that is no longer merely a representation of the Ideal, to concieve of technology whose ends are not merely economic imperatives, and a political space not grounded in only one Truth. This constitutes a program that rests on the possibility of inventing, singularly and collectively, an existence that no longer diverts from its own finality, and from its free deployment within the horizons of worldliness, cross-bred and deterritorialized, offered to us at present. With all due respect to the defenders of the purity of the Ideal, this may well be, for our time and those of us who share it, both our task and our fate.