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Spectacular Data was initiated by Derek Simons, Richard Pinet, Andreas Kahre and Sourayan Mookerjea during a series of discussions that began in the summer of 2021, as a a nascent effort to grapple with the global transformation of perceived reality as shaped by a growing array of state, corporate, and AI-generated media, and its impact on the explosive growth of fascist and what might be called ‘fascist-adjacent’ power centres. The central question SpecData seeks to address is: What are the emerging social, political and aesthetic domains in which fascism successfully presents itself, and what crisis does fascism present in this new context?

 

One starting point of the SpecData project was the transformational aesthetics of online fascist and fascist-adjacent iconography, in the broadest possible sense of aesthetics; a fascination with cultural production of all sorts. Others might be related to the totalitarian dimensions of surveillance, to the reinvention of space, value and presence.

 

The project began with a small group of friends and colleagues, academics and artists who share a robust intuition that their political views, particularly those related to fascism, are subject to a vast range of forces that continually sabotage efforts at articulating definitive views. Nevertheless, as Derek Simons wrote, " we maintain, stubbornly perhaps, and in the face of contradictory evidence, that such a thing as human progress is possible and that the present moment may offer a historically unique vantage point from which to glimpse possible forms of effective resistance to fascism’s advances, and that, however improbably, a world may be created in which fascism’s harvest of injustice and horror is overcome by authentic human potential."

 

Optimism such as this may well be a manifestation of privilege, and for that reason, we invite anyone with a shared desire to understand and act on their understanding of these emergent forms of fascism to join and determine the development of SpecData approach.

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When we began to ask again how we might explore the registers of fascism and/or authoritarianism that have emerged in the past decades, including self-avowed fascist movements, accusations of fascism against both the Left and Right, we imagined an event that would provide contributions from different disciplines, artists and academics to gather ideas on the technologies of surveillance, social media, crypto-valuation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).  and the effects of the so–called ‘Metaverse’ on the social agency of individuals and communities, particularly as they relate to concepts of Space, Presence, and Value.

As we discussed specific aspects of this complex, it became apparent that the 1995 ‘Spectacular State: Fascism and the Modern Imagination’ project  could serve as a model, and that the questions it engaged were still, if differently, relevant in the present. Re-orienting the central question to once again explore definitions and practices of fascism, the working title changed to ‘Spectacular Data: Fascism and the Coded Present.’ Exploring these questions just at the time that Open AI presented the first generation of ChatGPT shifted our focus once more to how fascism is now operating in a reality that is being transformed profoundly, rapidly and, like an iceberg’s turning, potentially catastrophic in scope.

What in the 1990s was considered a ‘fertile breeding ground’ for fascism — an environment of uncertainty, friction and fear  — has grown into a global crisis of climate change, mass migration, ideologically-driven violence  and international conflicts on the brink of nuclear war. At the same time, we now encounter disembodied modes of fascism that make effective use of social media, surveillance and algorithms (such as the one Elon Musk proposed to ’capture the communication of 80 percent of humanity’). In short, the emergence of the digital sphere as a social space has created new contexts and opportunities  for fascism, contributing to an atmosphere that seems much more congenial to fascist interests than when we organized the Spectacular State back in 1995. Please see the original program guide below:

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