The Influencers started as an experimental project in 2004, a now far-off age when YouTube was still non-existent and the remixing of popular culture was a complex practice that smacked of the underground. New artistic and activist ferments were emerging from the first wave of digital euphoria and the growing globalisation of ideas: mass culture, in turn evolving fast, swiftly became the target of ingenious experiments in subversion.
Ten years later, the scene is looking radically different. The explosion of the social networks has released unthinkable creative forces; the most complex digital technologies are now an everyday reality, even for people who resisted the most timid of analogical advances: new cultural, economic, and social models are threatening the traditional structures and consolidating new and more sophisticated hierarchies, material and symbolic alike.
In these last ten years, The Influencers has attempted to narrate these changes through the most meaningful and surprising projects on an international scene with no fixed discipline and in constant motion. It is in these turbulent waters where digital subcultures mix with new forms of activism, artistic experiments, and other adventures, in the least transited parts of the networks or of urban spaces.
The key element was always the experience in the first person of controversial project authors, who have narrated the ambiguities and opportunities of the constant consumption of images, the challenges of new forms of power based on the control of information, the taste for adventure and the paradox of a society that is increasingly controlled and self-controlling. Little by little, we have tried to also involve the public in these experiences, by way of workshops and experimental actions.
Beyond the tendencies of the moment, we have always been interested in forging a sensitivity capable of perceiving truly risky operations, both from an artistic and a social viewpoint. Occasionally we have made incursions into the past to search for affinities between different contexts and put into historical perspective the creative and political challenges that we are facing at present.
Ten years later, what possibilities for intervention in the symbolic fabric of society do these strange forms of creative action have? What stories, what imaginaria can overcome the noise of the information society or the toxins of the industrial production of entertainment? While we continue seeking the answers, we will be trying to keep these questions as open as possible.
The Influencers will be holding its tenth edition from 27 to 29 November at the CCCB