Blake Shaw is a hacker working at the intersection of software, critical pedagogy, and telecommunication technologies. His work treats software as a medium for formalizing social relations between people, hacking as the discipline of intervening in such reified relations, and dialectical pedagogy. His work typically involves workshops with grassroots activists to produce software solutions to their problems.
Walter Benjamin allegedly delivered his famous lecture “The Author as Producer” at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris on April 27th, 1934. The Institution itself has since remained a matter of dispute regarding its existence and purpose. Some claim that the Institute never actually existed, that it was merely a fiction created by Benjamin, while others claimed that it was actually an espionage organization controlled by the Soviet Union. Regardless, what we know is that today it does in fact exist, at the very least as a lived fiction, and has been operational at AKI AORA for the last two weeks. The purpose of the Institute is to carry out artistic research on the formation of the contemporary forces of fascism that are seizing hold of power today, and develop poetic means for how these organizations can be combatted. On January 21st, one day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, Blake Shaw and Bikini Wax (Paloma Contreras & José Rodrigo García) delivered an audio-visual performance that combined elements of the lecture format and video art to explain the products of their research, and to deliver to the audience the tools they have developed.
