Publisher: Sternberg Press & Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst
Date: January 2022
Blas uses research-based practices to scrutinize the relationship between digital technologies and the cultures and politics that animate them. Critical of today’s corporate internet giants and their ideological fascination with Ayn Rand, Blas extensively considers the beliefs, desires, fantasies, histories, and symbols latent in technical systems as he dwells on the horizons and edges, or what he calls the “outside,” of dominant power structures. Reclaiming Rand’s phrase the “unknown ideal,” Blas points to both the liberatory potentialities and political challenges of the present: he imagines a proliferation of “unknown ideals” in order to dispute Rand’s vision of the future. Refusing technological determinism, Blas’s work makes space for escape through its celebration of queer ideality.