Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde

Dadaist and Futurist parasites did not provoke the bourgeois society of their time from the outside, but contributed to the modern media ecology that they inhabited and used as their host. The avant-garde artists were not simply freaks at the periphery, but constituted an integral part of the media economy of the early twentieth century. (..)

Der Dada 3 1920 John Heartfield mont..

The avant-garde (..)produced feedback loops that fed the products of modern media systems back into the emerging media channels in order to parody, irritate, and accelerate established media practices.This aesthetic of feedback is fundamental for the avant-garde’s parasitic nature, because feedback is parasitical. It is not an original production,but feeds something already existing back into the point of origin, thereby amplifying or modifying this event without adding anything new to it. As Serres also underlines, feedback is a parasitic or mediating circular function.

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The parasitic irritations of the avant-garde did not establish a new revolutionized and utopian world (..)The true value of the avant-garde movements does not lie in their radical transformative agenda, but in the fact that they were relatively unimportant agents within a greater cultural industry and nonetheless constantly injected small irritations into the public discourse

 Arndt Niebisch (2012)

Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication

https://mediarchaeology.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/niebisch-arndt-media-parasites-in-the-early-avant-garde.pdf