The Word-Image-Virtual Body

In the present knowledge and innovation society, including creative industries, DIY practices, and citizen science, it is not enough to produce solely a product; it is necessary to sell a story about its groundbreaking appearance and function, which means that the product is well-marketed only at the moment when it is sold in a package together with a story written, performed, or shot about it. This turns into the world of arts; sciences, technologies, and business goes hand in hand with the contemporary storytelling, which is becoming distinctively performative and conceptual; rather than making a stable “textwork,” it directs to textual service, which is integrated in the trendy service economy. Textual services generate novel forms of expanded narrative, shaped by means of new media textuality and novel narrative practices. One of the most attractive modes of today's textual service is a story as application.

After the End of Art

The philosophical concept of end of art opens up the ends of other fields (i.e., the end of science, politics, and economy that are in the present modified into not-just science, not-just-politics, and not-just economy). Contemporary art (considered as the not-just-art, art after the end of art, and would-be-art) enters intense relations with modified science, politics, and economics through processes of interaction, adoption of methodological devices, hybridization, and amalgamation. It is important to acknowledge that art is not a passive and second-grade link in these interactions, but rather contributes artistic innovations to other fields that then become art-like. There are a number of common denominators among the crucial fields of contemporary knowledge society.

Remediating the Social: Impacts of Historical Fascism on Academic Fascism

Remediation is the process whereby the new media (animation, virtual reality, video games, and the internet) define themselves by borrowing from and refashioning traditional media (print, film, video, and photography). This chapter explores how the remediation that is successfully deployed in forming new media contents and adds dynamics to media production can be applied to the understanding of academic fascism as a new field of research in contemporary social theory. Traditional fascism as the movement based on historic fascism (i.e., German, Italian, and Spanish) refashions academic fascism as a new manifestation of contemporary fascism; likewise, the academic fascism impacts the fascism as-we-know-it and contributes to many new devices and procedures that demand the attention of critical theory of society. The researcher as scapegoat Other, academic cleansing, privatization of knowledge, and smart technology (on the place of blood and soil) are the key concepts addressed and analyzed in this chapter.

Remediating the New Media

By applying the researching devices of media studies, art theory, film theory, philosophy, and cultural studies as a theoretical background, this chapter aims to explore the role of remediation in new media production, where the digital procedures enable smooth interaction, remixes, mashups, and hybridization. Remediation brings the dynamics into the institution of contemporary art and electronic literature by stimulating traditional and new media to refashion each other and generate novel hybrids at the intersection of several media (e.g. animated digital textuality which refashions film and video) as well as media contexts. Although the key reference of this chapter is Bolter and Grusin's theory of immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation, the issues of post-remediation theory are addressed as well.

Living in the Art-Like Reality

This chapter aims to address the artification of financial markets and politics in a way of researching art-like procedures in both areas. The events and processes on financial markets resemble art in the sense of unpredictability, disruption, and flexibility; in this, art does not turn out to be an area that would be endangered or even destroyed by neoliberal capitalism; on the contrary, it also applies capitalist logic, in particular when it comes to accumulation, ideology of growth, and the surplus-value making. Art is a machine that consumes and totalizes all available components. There is nothing that could not enter into its drive. Contemporary activist art can also act as an explicit political force. It develops devices to achieve political goals, thereby completely abolishing artistic and aesthetic functions.

The Basic Paradigm Shift in Contemporary Art

The difference between modern and contemporary art, which in the present enters the names of art museums, is based on the notions formed in art theory and art history: whereas modern art is tied to aesthetics, artistic autonomy, author, and the concept of stable and finished artwork, the more fluid and conceptual contemporary art foregrounds the links of the art with the social, politics, economy, everyday life, science, and media. This chapter aims to explore media-shaped contemporary art projects in terms of art services that are algorithmic, cognitive, and conceptual. The service presupposes a problem, a challenge, or an order to be solved or carried out. The artist as a service performer is always faced with a certain task, challenged to solve it in a sequence of steps, chosen as economically as possible. The service therefore ends with a solution of the problem (or its removal) and not with the manufacturing of a finished object.

The Subversive Affirmation as a New Device of Art Activism Deployed in Post-Political Reality

The transition of activist art from the utopian projects of the society as a work of art into its present activistic phase based on artists' serious political engagement implies significant aftermath in extra-artistic reality. Whereas the projects such as social sculpture (Joseph Beuys notion), temporary autonomous zones (Hakim Bey's concept), and total work of art (expression used by K. F. E. Trahndorff and R. Wagner) were accompanied by explicit confidence of artists in the liberating power of artistic creativity, today's activists enter pure political “direct action,” which often fits well to daily engagements of political parties. This chapter addresses the Slovenian case of Janez Janša activists' group deeply involved in daily politics, precisely in the struggle against the politician Janez Janša. In doing so, these activists deploy subversive affirmation as a new subtle political device that enables them an alibi due to their background in elitist institution of art.

The Politics Through Arts and Culture: On Slovenian Literary Nationalism

The expanded concept of work of art that challenges the boundaries of aesthetic theory and directs the attention toward the artistic service as a flexible cognitive activity is useful in the field of politics. Today's societies are faced with the expanded concept of the political that is set at the intersection of politics-as-we-know-it (including the national state and the parliament) and the novel modes of the (post)political including the activities of civil society, international organizations, and the cultural. This chapter refers to the Slovenian literary nationalism as one of the key Slovenian ideological state apparatuses that is at play in today's Slovenian politics and is deeply affected by not-just-political agents from economy, religion, lifestyle, and culture. The criticism of literary nationalism is not directed towards the activity of writing and the literary world but towards institutions that form a literary-ideological, interpretative, and propaganda context of national literary production.