A Neoist Research Project

"A Neoist Research Project" is the first comprehensive anthology and source book of Neoism, an international collective network of mostly anonymous and pseudonymous subcultural actionists and speculative experimenters. It consists of more than one hundred Neoist texts and two hundred images documenting diverse Neoist interventions, Neoist Apartment Festivals, definitions and pamphlets of Neoism and affiliated currents, language and identity experiments, and Neoist memes such as the shared identity Monty Cantsin. From the contents: "Neoist Chair and Chair Action," "Death Mauses Meat Pieces," "Kline Bottle Pieces," "Street performance actions against false infinity," "APT 4, Low Theatre, Montreal," "Neoist Parking Meter Action: Pay Me to Go Away," "Direct Address," "Contract," "The Ceiling Crashes in," "Neoism 101: Thought Projection," "Our Tactics against Stockhausen," "Seven Scripts for One Week of Neoist Activity," "Hypnotic Movement: Concrete Life Examples," "Macmag Virus," "March 24," "Cogito of the pseudo-scientist, experimenting with mild trauma," "Physics," "The Comb," "the gold flag of near neologisms: the striped page," "The White Head," "APT 5," "What is an uh, uh, Apartment Festival," "Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing," "Impractical Seriousness," "Krononautic Divector Field Didaction," "Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the So-Called Millionth Apartment Festival," "3 part action," "Neoist haircut," "non-participation," "Philosopher's Union soapbox stand," "anything is anything," "language constructions," "Dyslexia," "Continuity Poem (cinematic version)," "A note from the editors of SMILE," "Dialectical Immaterialism," "Formula," "The Last Words of Wilhelm Reich, continued," "Theology," "Plenial Wer," "anti-art is art," "Censorship - the oldest of suppressed traditions," "Proletarian Posturing and the Strike which never Ends," "Neoism is simple," "What is Neoism?," "The First Announcement of Neoism," "The Generation Positive and Neoism," "Origins of Neoism Illuminated," "Bread + Pain + Love = Total Sex," " anti-post-actualism++++++," "Western Cell Division," "Akademgorod," "Why Neoists do not drink alcohol," "The Eroticism of Boredom," "The Concept of Monty Cantsin," "Stupid Undergrounds," "Neoism propaganda sheet 1: SMILE," "Lt. Murnau," "Luther Blissett," "SMILE," "Blood, Bread and Beauty," "Plagerism," "The Curse of Originality," "The 56 Laws of Neoism."

Improper Names offers a genealogy and theory of the “improper name,” which author Marco Deseriis defines as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Although such names are often invented to pursue a specific social or political agenda, they are soon appropriated for different and sometimes diverging purposes. This book examines the tension arising from struggles for control of a pseudonym’s symbolic power. Deseriis provides five fascinating and widely varying case studies. Ned Ludd was the legendary and eponymous leader of the English Luddites, textile workers who threatened the destruction of industrial machinery and then advanced a variety of economic and political demands. Alan Smithee—an alias coined by Hollywood film directors in 1969 in order to disown films that were recut by producers—became a contested signature and was therefore no longer effective to signal prevarication to Hollywood insiders. Monty Cantsin was an “open pop star” created by U.S. and Canadian artists in the late 1970s to critique bourgeois notions of authorship, but its communal character was compromised by excessive identification with individual users of the name. The Italian media activists calling themselves Luther Blissett, aware of the Cantsin experience, implemented measures to prevent individuals from assuming the alias, which was used to author media pranks, sell apocryphal manuscripts to publishers, fabricate artists and artworks, and author best-selling novels. The longest chapter here is devoted to the contemporary “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous, which protests censorship and restricted access to information and information technologies. After delving into a rich philosophical debate on community among those who have nothing in common, the book concludes with a reflection on how the politics of improper names affects present-day anticapitalist social movements such as Occupy and 15-M.

How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter—that is, to discriminate—signals from noise, patterns become a highly political issue. Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation, such as class, race, and gender, through defaults and paradigmatic assumptions about the homophilic nature of connection. Instead of providing a more “objective” basis of decision making, machine-learning algorithms deepen bias and further inscribe inequality into media. Yet pattern discrimination is an essential part of human—and nonhuman—cognition. Bringing together media thinkers and artists from the United States and Germany, this volume asks the urgent questions: How can we discriminate without being discriminatory? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How can we queer homophilic tendencies within digital cultures?

Networking means to create nets of relations, where the publisher and the reader, the artist and the audience, act on the same level. The book is a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of media and art projects which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the creation of Italian hacker communities. The Italian network proposes a form of critical information, disseminated through independent and collective projects where the idea of freedom of expression is a central theme. In Italy, thanks to the alternative use of Internet, during the past twenty years a vast national network of people who share political, cultural and artistic views has been formed. The book describes the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today. It builds a reflection on the new role of the artist and author who becomes a networker, operating in collective nets, reconnecting to Neoavant-garde practices of the 1960s (first and foremost Fluxus), but also Mail Art, Neoism and Luther Blissett. A path which began in BBSes, alternative web platforms spread in Italy through the 1980s even before the Internet even existed, and then moved on to Hackmeetings, to Telestreet and networking art by different artists such as 0100101110101101.ORG, [epidemiC], Jaromil, Giacomo Verde, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Correnti Magnetiche, Candida TV, Tommaso Tozzi, Federico Bucalossi, Massimo Contrasto, Mariano Equizzi, Pigreca, Molleindustria, Guerriglia Marketing, Sexyshock, Phag Off and many others.

This book explores the ways in which popular music can criticise political, social and economic structures, through the lens of alternate rock band Manic Street Preachers. Unlike most recent work on popular music, Peters concentrates largely on lyrical content to defend the provocative claim that the Welsh band pushes the critical message shaped in their lyrics to the forefront. Their music, this suggests, along with sleeve art, body-art, video-clips, clothes, interviews and performances, serves to emphasise this critical message and the primary role played by the band’s lyrics. Blending the disciplines of popular music studies, culture studies and philosophy, Peters confronts the ideas of German philosopher and social critic Theodor W. Adorno with the entire catalogue of Manic Street Preachers, from their 1988 single ‘Suicide Alley’ to their 2018 album Resistance is Futile. Although Adorno argues that popular music is unable to resist the standardising machinery of consumption culture, Peters paradoxically uses his ideas to show that Manic Street Preachers releases shape ‘critical models’ with which to formulate social and political critique. This notion of the ‘critical model’ enables Peters to argue that the catalogue of Manic Street Preachers critically addresses a wide range of themes, from totalitarianism to Holocaust representation, postmodern temporality to Europeanism, and from Nietzsche’s ideas about self-overcoming to reflections on digimodernism and post-truth politics. The book therefore persuasively shows that Manic Street Preacher lyrics constitute an intertextual network of links between diverse cultural and political phenomena, encouraging listeners to critically reflect on the structures that shape our lives.

The Neoist Society presents this important document of Neoism for a world hungry for a new revolutionary message. This unusual - trans lingual - edition is an abstract manifesto that allows the user to interpret it in any way that he can. Literally any Neoist from any place or any time can understand it's purely visual message.

This comprehensive bibliography lists nearly 2,200 sources (from 36 countries) of information on mail art from books, magazines, newspapers, and catalog essays between 1955 and 1989.