In Poetics of Resistance: How Contemporary Art Reimagines the Future of Digital Technologies, I argue that artists and artist collectives have, since the 1990s, contested the logic of technocapitalism by transforming digital technologies for both artistic and political ends. Artists have never been passive to the development of digital technologies, but rather have actively co-opted, hacked, subverted, and transformed them. Revealing the numerous ways that digital technologies continue to oppress, discriminate, and exploit women, the queer community, and people of color, I argue that artists have always challenged this capitalist logic of digital technologies that prioritizes profit, efficiency, and reifies its power.

Through an art historical analysis, I recount the interventions from pioneering feminist, queer, and BIPOC artists and artist-collectives since the 1990s to chronicle their tactics, politics, and arguments that fundamentally changed the way we conceive of political art during the rise of digital technologies. It is because digital technologies have come to infuse all of society, through their rhetoric and contributing to and even changing our visual culture, that artists had to develop different tactics that defied this growing power. The artists from the 1990s-2000s created the foundation for the new wave of artists carrying the torch of resistance in the 21st century. Across four chapters, I demonstrate how artists contended with the different emerging digital technologies of biotechnology, the World Wide Web, surveillance, and artificial intelligence, crafting different methods of resistance across performance art, tactical media, and new media art.