THE ELEVATOR PITCH

A Statement of Intent


Spectacular Data: Fascism and the Coded Present is 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 is 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 identity.

 

We are, for now, a small group of friends and colleagues, academics and artists who share a robust intuition that our political views, particularly those related to fascism, are subject to a vast range of forces that continually sabotage our efforts at articulating definitive views. Nevertheless, 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.

​

Derek, Richard, Sourayan and Andreas

​​

​