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Series Description
We are pleased to announce a new compilation of work, Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1-3, by artist, filmmaker, and writer Zach Blas. In celebration of the compilation release, we present a Zach Blas double-bill on VDB TV, featuring the third part of the compilation, Modeling Paranodal Space, alongside a newly-produced VDB interview with Blas by Chicago-based artist and educator Lee Blalcok, recorded in the fall of 2019.
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Modeling Paranodal Space is part three of Zach Blas's Contra-Internet Inversion Practice series. Contra-Internet Inversion Practice confronts the transformation of the internet into an instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism. Invoking a practice of utopian plagiarism, Contra-Internet Inversion Practice experiments with queer and feminist methods to speculate on internet futures and network alternatives.
Zach Blas is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose practice spans technical investigation, research, conceptualism, performance, and science fiction. Currently a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, Blas has exhibited internationally, including at the Walker Art Center, Gwangju Biennale, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Whitechapel Gallery. His work has addressed fantasies of artificial intelligence, biometric capture, time travel, policing as mysticism, the crystal balls of Silicon Valley, and dildos.
In this interview, Blas begins by talking through the range of influences that he was drawn to during his youth. These include the Appalachian craft culture from his West Virginian childhood, the films of Bruce LaBruce, Derek Jarman, and Gregg Araki, and exposure to computing technologies during his education. Ultimately, Blas is interested in working through queer histories of technology. He discusses his Contra-Internet project at length, which is in many ways a continuation of the cyberfeminist project, and a desire to produce an expanded definition of the internet. With reference to the utopian theories of José Esteban Muñoz and Ricardo Dominguez, Blas asks the questions: How can we read something a different way? And how can we push against the idea of the internet as a totality with no outside? These questions as to the potential of art and technology, and their intersection with queerness, are at the core of Blas’s practice.
Interview conducted by Lee Blalock in October 2019
Resources
Conversations, Zach Blas: Contra-Internet, Mousse Magazine
Toying with the Future: AI, Fantasy, and Zach Blas's Icosahedron, Conversation with Jennifer Rhee, The Walker, June 2019
Contra-Internet, Zach Blas, Dis Magazine
The Queer Deep Web of Zach Blas, Zachary Small, Hyperallergic, November 2017
About VDB TV
VDB TV is an innovative digital distribution project which provides free, online streaming access to curated programs of video and media art. Sourced from the historically significant archives of the Video Data Bank, VDB TV will include work from early video pioneers active in the 1960s and 70s, through to emerging contemporary artists. VDB TV offers viewers across the United States and beyond access to rare video art, the opportunity to engage with programs conceived by a wide range of curators, and original writing, all while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work.
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