Contra-Internet (lecture-performance)

In this lecture-performance, artist and writer Zach Blas discusses the emerging militancies and subversions of the Internet, or what he calls “contra-internet practices”. Oriented from a feminist and queer perspective, Blas engages topics of post-capitalism, dildotectonics, utopian plagiarism, and social media exodus, constructing a contra-internet praxis that both refuses the control logic of »the Internet« and builds alternatives to its infrastructure.

The Contra-Internet lecture-performance is a companion piece to Blas’s Silicon Traces trilogy, a series of moving image installations that contends with the beliefs, fantasies, and histories influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. This lecture-performance connects to the artwork Contra-Internet (2015-2019), the prologue to Silicon Traces. Material from the lecture-performance was used in the essay “Contra-Internet”, published in e-flux Journal #74 (2016).

Live performance, single-channel audio-visual presentation (length variable, 45-60 min.), magic marker