In a recent article published in the Sarai Reader Turbulence entitled 'The Neurobiopolitics and Global Consciousness' I proposed a model by which sovereignty might exert its control over individual contemplation through hegemonic mediated networks of meaning that preferentially select and organize networks in the brain during critical periods of human epigenesis. According to this hypothesis the recent transformation, post-internet, of an intensive network society/culture with its newly evolved, multiplicitous, rhizomatic, synchronous and non-narrative arrangements of phatic stimuli incarcerating attention has produced and configured intensive neural networks in the matter of the brain.

That text was only one side of the story and it was never my intention to stop there. Through a series of recent artistic interventions, I have started to tease apart the other side of the argument. These works include this essay and its predecessor mentioned above, a drawing/poster collaboration I did here in Berlin with Pro-qm bookstore called Resistance is Futile/Resistance is Fertile and a flickering neon sculpture placed upon the roof of the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria which reads, coincidentally, Resistance is Futile/Resistance is Fertile. The Resistance is Futile concerns the production of global consciousness outlined above. The Resistance is Fertile is the subject of this talk.

Artists using their own materials, which sometimes includes their own bodies, methods, apparatti, processes, spaces and non-spaces, and historical precedents produce works which infiltrate visual, auditory and haptic
culture in sometimes-subversive ways that disrupt the existing institutionally generated continuity. In today's market generated aesthetic practice it sometimes means generating a discourse against its very self.  These perturbations form the history of the avant-garde,  not only as a set of objects, non-objects, spaces and feelings but as a condition of the brain-mind-itself. In spite of the denigration of this specific modernist idea, the avant-garde in the throws of post-modernism critique, I would like to revisit this idea with the understanding that it is not to a create linkage between us and them in the grand narrative of time and space but with a conception that understands our new cultural multivalent, polymorphous and pleuri-potentiality. An avant-garde that uncovers, rediscovers, reconfigures, mixes together, collages, generates and assembles differences in the context of many-trafectories.  I would like to use the term the neurobiologic avant-garde as a metaphor that allows for the changing conditions of an intensive folded rhizomatic multi-historical cultural-situation to "inscribe" itself, through the intermediary the mind, upon the matter of the brain. I called this back in 1995 the Cultured Brain and now I call it the Intensive Brain.  How this might happen will be the topic of my talk today.

Future Memory, to use a Deluzian metaphor, through its use of the time-image which is no longer relegated just to cinematic gestures but is found in all forms of art practice, has released the potentialities of a multiplicity of minor fictions, cinemas and art works that were once delineated by a common origin and substituted instead a model in which their art historical precedents can be found in multiple sites of becoming. Time once tethered to the body in a Bergsonian movement image is released into a purely cognitive phantasmagoric realm that in artists hand produce new  optic, haptic, and auditory formations that mutate the conditions of what Jacques Ranciere calls the Distribution of the Sensible. I am using this term gingerly keeping in mind that the effervescence and porosity of the art system in contemporary culture has the potential of making artworks a bomb in the political, economic, social and yes psychobiologic sense. In the end what I would like to show and explicate is the unfinished work that art must continue to do.  In spite of the conditions of global media and the authoritarian recurrent phatic networks it generates, the power of art to spawn new conditions for the emergence of fast-mutations in the cultural landscape and its counterpart the mind-brain, still give us hope for a world filled with difference and not endless repetition.

Contemporary approaches to art and biology reveal to us today the complex relationship between art and science, especially when we turn to controversial technologies such as genetic engineering. In the last two decades we have seen a number of artists leaving the traditional artistic playground to work instead in scientific contexts, for example, in the laboratories of molecular biologists. Today artists create genetically modified organisms – new “life forms” – which are more or less “biofacts” and do not (yet) existent within the framework of Darwinian evolution. As a consequence, artists are addressing the perpetuation of evolution by humans through the creation of new organisms according to aesthetic criteria, processes which the advent of recombinant DNA technology has made possible. With regards to the production of new hybrid life forms in art, the debate seems to be less about the acceptance of new art forms or shifting borders in the art world itself and much more about negotiation processes with respect to the forces shaping society, forces which can lead to the construction of very specific life forms and worlds, thereby excluding others. Living entities that are manipulated and modified in laboratories for specific scientific or economic purposes, will, to a certain extent, be accepted, but not, however, in day-to-day life. This all the more so since, in the course of the mechanisation of the living, it is becoming ever more difficult to determine what is still “nature” and what is already “technology”, what can be regarded as “real” and what is imaginary. With the production of new life forms through art, it would appear that artists today are challenging the reception of what is art / technology and what is nature.