RAQS Media Collective

You may find suggestive correspondences regarding RAQs in this array of audio-visual formations, memetic possibilities, and related sights/sites/cites...

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“We decided to ask Raqs and Bow-Wow to collaborate on a "Temporary Autonomous Sarai" (to create) something that was physically modest, intended to be temporary, and programmatically could function as a sarai for the exhibition.” -curator Steve Dietz, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age Walker Art Gallery





Migratory patterns of participation can be traced out in both the physical and virtual routes of RAQs extended collaborators creating in memory if not in one’s immediate experience, a provisional, if thematic, network map (TAZ & OPUS ) While other artists, such as Mark Lombardi, have employed the logic of conspiracy to create narrative cartographies that chart out the complexities of global networks, RAQS prefers to tease out possible correspondences from an intrigued and/or provoked audience.





While sendentary powers have long used road systems and communications networks to efficiently enforce their authority, Global capitalism, combines nomadic strategy within the complex telecommunications networks of cyberspace. The Critical Art Ensemble asks "How can a subject be critically assessed that cannot be located, examined, or even seen?”





One’s environment may be constricted along socio-economic contours which narrow and homogenize psychogeographical experience in a space. "Most believe that survival depends on managed exposure to information overload" notes theorist Tom Sherman Terrain is textual in cyberspace, but as with the 'business as usual' itineraries that move one through a city there are also subtexts, so to speak, waiting to be uncovered in the infoscape.





The Wherehouse, as RAQs describes, “constitutes an assemblage of reflections on time, memory, movement, stasis and location in a world where some people are forced to abandon home, and others can be seen as being imprisoned by their assumptions about the stability of their present location." Cartesian coordinates of x and y give way to z-axes of possibility pursued by nomadic curiosity

associational structures

Atlas of Cyberspaces: website
Critical Art Ensemble: The Electronic Disturbance 2000
Lutz Damnbeck: The Net 2005
Guy Debord: Theory of the Derive 1958
Thomas McDonough: The Derive and Situationist Paris 1996
Mark Lombardi: iCL website
Geert Lovnink Dark Fiber 2002
RAQs' Architecture for a Temporary Autonomous Sarai 2003
RAQS' The Concise Lexicon for a Digital Commons 2002
RAQs' Network of No_Des 2004
RAQs' OPUS 2002
RAQs' The Wherehouse2004
Sarai: New Media Initiative website
Tom Sherman: After the I-Bomb 1999
Monica L. Smith Networks, Territories, and the Cartographies of Ancient States 2005
David Trend Reading Digital Culture 2001
Cedric Vincent's Puzzling the World Sept.2006
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PODCASTS ABOUT:
Eduardo Kac
Laurie Anderson
Andreas Gursky
Feng Mengbo
Michel Rovner
Jeff Wall
Shirin Neshat
Eduardo Kac
Jim Campbell
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Isaac Julien