Bloomsbury Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics

How relevant are Dada strategies to our current moment marked by post-truth politics, information floods and big data? And how can contemporary art highlight the neglected nuances of cultural representation in the present day? While it may feel like we are living in a period of anomaly with the rise of the alt-right, this book shows how the Dada movement’s artistic response to the aggressive nationalism and fascism of its time offers a fruitful analogy to our contemporary political climate. Dada's counter-cultural strategies, such as the distortion of reality and attacks on elites and rationality, have long been endorsed by artistic avantgardes and subcultures. Dada Data details how modern-day movements have appropriated such tactics in their ways of addressing the public on- and offline. Bringing together contributions from scholars in Europe, America and Australia to explore an array of artistic modes of persuasion and resistance, this book relates the Dada movement’s counter-cultural activities to modern phenomena such as post-internet art, information floods and big data mining. With populist politicians continuing to persuade the masses through Dada strategies, Dada Data demonstrates how contemporary art can highlight neglected nuances of our post-truth moment, most especially its cultural representation. It collates images of original propaganda, diverse works from such figures as modernist Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego and contemporary Iranian-American multi-media artist Sheida Soleimani, and other unlikely imagery from around the world to form a rich scrapbook of Dada resources and perspectives that are highly relevant to present day political concerns.