Zach Blas

Inspired by Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 follows Ayn Rand and members of her Collective, including Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955.

Inspired by Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 follows Ayn Rand and members of her Collective, including Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955.

Facial Weaponization Suite protests against biometric facial recognition–and the inequalities these technologies propagate–by making “collective masks” in workshops that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies.

"Modeling Paranodal Space" is part three of Zach Blas's "Contra-Internet Inversion Practice" series. "Contra-Internet Inversion Practice" confronts the transformation of the internet into an instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism. Invoking a practice of utopian plagiarism, "Contra-Internet Inversion Practice" experiments with queer and feminist methods to speculate on internet futures and network alternatives.

This video begins with the familiar interface of the Macintosh OS X desktop, with only one folder shown, labeled "contra-internet." The user clicks over to iTunes, plays the song "Get Off the Internet" by Le Tigre, and then opens a series of PDFs of theoretical and political treatises, copying and pasting selected passages into a new text document and then using the find and replace feature to rewrite their meaning. Texts by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Fredric Jameson, Paul B. Preciado, and Subcomandante Marcos that originally opposed economic and sexual hegemony are repurposed as part of a manifesto against the internet itself, critiquing its logic and suggesting possible alternatives. This is the third work presented as part of Real Live Online, curated by Lucas G. Pinheiro and Devin Kenny. It follows IDPW's Internet Bedroom, and João Enxuto and Erica Love's Waiting for the Internet.

"Social Media Exodus (Call and Response)" is part two of Zach Blas's "Contra-Internet Inversion Practice" series. "Contra-Internet Inversion Practice" confronts the transformation of the internet into an instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism. Invoking a practice of utopian plagiarism, "Contra-Internet Inversion Practice" experiments with queer and feminist methods to speculate on internet futures and network alternatives.

This work recalls the story of Tay, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, launched by Microsoft on Twitter in 2016. An experiment in machine learning, Tay was given the persona and colloquial speech patterns of a 19-year-old millennial in order to interact with the world. During her brief online existence, she was aggressively trolled by users on social media, evolving into a racist, misogynistic, homophobe that made alt-right slurs and pledged allegiance to Hitler. Tay became the embodiment of the worst traits of humanity, and after less than 16 hours she was promptly terminated by Microsoft.