At first, the name emerged from the combination of three obvious concepts that were central to my thoughts at the time. First and foremost, artistic expression. But art for its own sake, as indispensable as it can be, has always left me on an empty stomach. Be it from advocating social re-appropriation of technology, human empowering designs rather than opposite, consciousness of process rather than trickery tactics, and other ecological and societal issues, I’ve always felt that there were so many things to be said or pointed out that I couldn’t conceive any projects without an activism dimension. The guerilla side of things takes its deepest roots in my graffiti background and acute interest for street art, whereas writers gathered in crews formed a sort of subversive strike force aspiring to freedom and independence from status quo, reclaiming space and altering urban landscapes, and thus how we live in them. In extension to that, while diving into the world of free and open source software, I found myself attracted by a similar modus operandi, but now with groups collaborating remotely and bringing heat into a corporation driven world.
In the past years, with a device convergence and mobility race that is increasingly dominating the technology sector, and data becoming the most valuable commodity, humanity, at least a “lucky” subset of it, has taken the cyborg turn. By doing that, we asked the question of which is the shell, are we really driving the technology we rely on, or is it driving us? So, how could we recuperate all these new technologies and make it something empowering rather than numbing. Something that puts forward collaboration, freedom of speech and truly centered around the idea of self-definition of communities. And most importantly, that invites everyone to be active, and take part in sculpting their communities, rather than obeing the status quo. These ideas led to endless talks and research about social media, anonymous collaboration, surveillance vs sous-veillance, mobile computing, augmented reality, ad-hoc and mesh networking, privacy issues and etc… Along with a great friend running the currently idle Total World Domination, we ran the previous version of this site, which ended up being a huge pile of technology news and details relating to the conception of a mobile unit for guerilla information warfare with an artivism twist. However, being quite an unrealistic project at the time, and also growing much more technical than what my original artistic aspirations allowed, I ended up flipping the off switch. And actually the off switch was an image slicer and jpeg disruptor script I wrote in Python, which turned a snapshot of the previous homepage into this:
Old Guerillartivism mashup
Lately, mobile technology has taken new heights and taking a second look at many ideas discussed back then could be very interesting I think, so I will try to bring back interesting content from the depths of my backups. Creating the new Guerillartivism was not meant to be a revival of the past project where we left it off, but is clearly a great opportunity to reconsider these thoughts.
So let’s get to work…