PSFK posted a snippet the other day about ‘altermodern’, Nicolas Bourriaud’s attempt at defining a new aesthetic for 21st-century modernity. Within this movement he picks out technologisation, the impact of global networked culture on our sense of the unknown - ‘History is the last terra incognita’ - along with an awareness of the other, creolisation of cultures and a sense of constant motion.

All well and good. But setting aside the ivory tower quality of new art ‘movements’ for a moment, there are new human movements out there that look a lot like art - and that are completely missing from this obsession with the new modernity. I’m not going to try and claim this is a single movement; at best, I’d characterise it in the tradition of networked behaviour, as P2P culture.

The work I’m describing has a few core qualities:

Re-experiencing cities. London’s Hide&Seek and San Francisco’s SF Zero treat the city as a playground for games without borders. Come Out And Play in NYC does the same. Here in London, Lottie Child’s Street Training takes groups out to climb over, under, around, swing on and otherwise investigate urban structures, to encourage creative and anti/social behaviour and increase participants’ sense of ownership, joy and confidence in their surroundings.

Christian Nold’s biomapping projects map emotional responses against geolocations to create community-centric emergent topographies of specific areas, re-situating the space within frames of meaning created by the people who inhabit it. Ian Sinclair’s psychogeographical investigations, in the tradition of the derive, explore the gaps between urban planning agendas and the lived experience of a city.

Semiotic guerrilla warfare: The Space Hijackers could be described as a self-organising PR machine for human, as opposed to corporate interests. Whether putting on T-shirts that declare ‘EVERYTHING IN STORE HALF PRICE TODAY’ and standing in random shops, buying a tank to drive to an arms fair (’bringing arms dealing to the masses’) or dressing up as Council workmen and installing benches in locations where there should be one, the Hijackers take established semiotic codes and muck about with them. And there’s no apology - as there typically is in the world of ‘high art’ - about the political agenda. Santacon is essentially a bacchanalian riot. Perhaps it’s just a pissup, but then (possibly accidentally) it challenges the narcissistic consumerism of Christmas by sullying the schmaltzy figure of ‘Santa’ with fighting, drinking, pissing in streets and generally running riot. The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army takes an explicitly political stance - and then clowns about at demonstrations. If it were being paid for by a client, this kind of activity would look like PR stunts: but it’s not PR exactly. Or if it is, it’s bottom-up, emergent PR - and what the hell kind of PR is that? But certainly it encodes a recognition that in a society where communications, images, broadcasts and information is increasingly rhetorical in flavour, full of advertorials, pop-ups, media stunts, lobbying and insistent demands on time, attention, sympathy, imagination and cash, the only way to get a word in edgeways is to join forces with others, put on a silly costume and get people to take pictures of you.

Mass participation: We can’t trust parents, companies, governments or broadcasters to get it right on our behalf; that if you want a job done properly, you should do it yourself. Santacon is a mass phenomenon. There are no rules of entry, any more than there are for Street Training. My own arthouseparty took as its defining feature the requirement that there be plenty of ways to join in if you want. This kind of culture models the 1:9:90 principle of social media: if you want to lead, then do it. If you want to be heavily involved, help yourself. If you want to lurk, ignore, or stay on the sidelines, that’s OK too. The mass participation qualities of this work can be more mainstream (witness T Mobile’s recent appropriation of Mobile Clubbing, prompting a flashmob that didn’t even know it was ever anything other than a mobile phone advert), or it can be a surreal response to someting genuinely creepy, such as the masked anti-Scientology protesters pictured above.

Making things yourself: Whether it’s the ‘Buy handmade’ movement so cleverly galvanised by Etsy, activist artists We Make Money Not Art, or graffiti knitters making sleeves for statues, it’s all about hand-made now. Perhaps reacting to the consumer excesses of the last few decades, or simply wanting to feel less passive in our own lives, a lot of the most exciting social and creative stuff I’ve seen in recent years has been about DIY. At Hunga Munga you can ‘Make Stuff, Make Friends, Make A Mess’. Acid Jam (sometimes) gets randoms together to, er, see what they come up with. It’s all out there. Coupled with mass participation as noted above, the DIY flavour of P2P culture echoes the self-help ‘With many eyes all bugs are shallow’ mindset of open-source programming to create social interventions, spaces and happenings that connect people, through their own efforts, to one another.

I’ve been following P2P culture for a while; this is the first time I’ve tried to characterise it in the abstract. I post details of events with this flavour over at Arthouseparty. Some of its practitioners call themselves artists, some of them don’t. They’re activists, they’re just playful, art is dead, what is art? Is this stuff art? Activism? Good old Situationism gone viral? Is there already a buzzword out there? Bourriaud, can you help?