Connection lost

To unfetter the mind and finally ready it for the challenges of the time… That is, essentially, the call to action that could be read on Dada posters. Dada appointed itself the herald of radical art during radical times, complete with a new language, new forms, and above all, a new vision of art, with new demands.

Dada did not wish to engender an art that was compatible with bourgeois living rooms, art to be admired in museums and salons. Dada didn’t aim for the beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. It didn’t want to cuddle its public, but rather to shake them in order to drag them from their torpor, intervene in their lives, provoke something. It was an art of protest.

Dada was a reaction to the First World War, a catastrophe whose scale was unprecedented. The nations killed each other by mobilizing the entire panoply of technical progress – armored vehicles, machine guns, and asphyxiating gas. The war left 17 million dead and millions more maimed in body or mind. Many of the works of the Dada movement refer directly to this conflict.

Among them is "Military Guards" by Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber, one of 17 Dada puppets made in 1918 in Zurich for an adaptation of the play “The King Stag.” This sentry is a technical being, assembled from geometric forms made of turned wood and covered in metallic paint. Five heads but no face, the incarnation of the modern warfare machine, which no person can escape. Endowed with five legs and five arms, each wielding a bat, the puppet can move in all directions and attack from all sides simultaneously. Thanks to the metal eyehooks that serve as joints, its movements are limitless: an anonymous, ultimate strike force. It is a symbol that unfortunately has lost none of its relevance.

Somewhere in Vilicon Salley, California, four giants smile whenever we connect. They are GAFA, aka Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon – the most coveted and envied villains in the Valley of Vice. More powerful than some G20 countries, they supply us with digital vertigo and salvation; a totalitarian world and liberation; a crazy world, as compelling as an abandoned border station and as insistent as the second hand on a clock, summoning us to be always on, all the time.

Google dominates knowledge, Amazon controls merchandise, Facebook keeps tabs, and Apple takes all.

Tristan Tzara, a visionary like Steve Jobs, but of a different stripe, saw it coming (1920): “The bankers of language will always get their little percentage on a discussion.” It’s time to pay up, comrades of the troubled seas, the deep web, and the sinkhole of commerce. Umba, umba! Let’s rise up, like disjointed puppets, and do the only thing we still can! Let’s give it all we’ve got! Let’s dance!

Let’s dance till we drop, with all modems on. DADA is everything or nothing. Let’s dance like artist Sophie Taeuber danced, back on the tiny stage of the little revolutionary Cabaret Voltaire. Taeuber, who was also the creator of futurist marionettes like “Die Wache” (Military Guards), (re)presented here.

Greil Marcus, the anti-guide of our anti-museum, the DADA-Depot, summed up DADA in these words: “Dada was a prophecy, but it had no idea what it was prophesying, and its strength was that it didn't care.”

Let’s dance a DADA Dance, not so much to transform technology– like the DADAs and art– but to change the terms of its production and perception – like the DADAs and their time. Let’s dance and dance some more to shake up habitual connections and connected lives. Let’s dance and laugh, here at the feet of the demigods who think they’re superhuman: Jobs, Bezos, and Zuckerberg – the prophets of misfortune, larger than life and more DADA than DADA could ever be.