Poetic Reflections on Digital Resistance in the Artistic Work of the Cyber-Shaman

Abstract

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes an extremely critical philosophical perspective on the information age. His philosophy presents the contemporary subject as someone who resides in total exposure through the mechanisms of networks, a kind of “prison of light,” in which social identity is completely laid bare. This is a fetishistic form of recognition; everything that is completely in the light must be understood as something good, which implies diminishing critical potency, difference, and otherness. In this context, Han doubts all forms of social activism on the internet. The philosopher Habermas, with his concept of the Public Sphere, partly agrees, but the thinker Manuel Castells admits possibilities for social intervention through electronic networks. Han’s critique aligns with Debord’s society of the spectacle, in which only appearance is valued, not being. However, it is possible to consider if artivism, art as social intervention, can bring about this difference. The work of Edgar Franco, also known as the Cyber-Shaman, is analyzed; a transmedia artist and university instructor whose work is a digital shamanism grounded in network logic. His work is interpreted through Han’s critique, and the study investigates whether and how the Cyber-Shaman’s performative, graphic, and theoretical productions engage with the accusation that digital activism becomes a narcissistic spectacle in the Freudian sense. When someone questions his artivism, it reveals a proposal for resistance, but one that, paradoxically, plays the game of visibility that it intends to denounce. In the work of Ciberpajé there is a possibility of negativity and silence, but doubt always remains about the true transformation of society.