Remembering Steve Kurtz (1958–2025) of Critical Art Ensemble, Part 1

Nato Thompson

In 2004, while organizing the exhibition “The Interventionists” at MASS MoCA, I experienced firsthand how the War on Terror entered the lives of artists. One of the participants, Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, had been preparing a work for the show when his wife tragically died of heart failure in their home. When emergency responders arrived, police noticed the laboratory equipment Kurtz used in his artistic practice. The discovery triggered an extraordinary response in the paranoid climate of the time. FBI agents and a terrorism task force descended on the house, treating it as a potential bioterror site. Kurtz was detained, interrogated, and eventually prosecuted.

By the time the exhibition opened, subpoenas were circulating among people connected to the show. While Kurtz became the most visible case, the atmosphere of suspicion extended further. Works by Walid Raad’s Atlas Group were confiscated simply because DVDs in the shipment had Arabic writing on them. It was both frightening and absurd, combining a Chaplinesque quality with very real consequences.

Looking back, what strikes me is not only the persecution itself, but the broader historical shift it coincided with. I watched firsthand how 9/11 and the War on Terror effectively decimated the energy behind the alter-globalization movement that had flourished only a few years before. That movement had taken shape around protests such as the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, fueled by networks like Indymedia and inspired by other movements such as the Zapatistas. Artists were deeply embedded in that ecosystem. They produced interventions, experiments in tactical media, and forms of creative activism that challenged the growing dominance of corporate globalization.

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) played a formative role in that intellectual and artistic landscape. I encountered their writing years earlier while browsing Cody’s Books in Berkeley, moving from the Semiotext(e) shelves of Foucault, Deleuze, and Baudrillard into the Autonomedia section where CAE’s books sat alongside anarchist and experimental theory. Their advocacy for tactical media was electric, blending theory with the impatience of punk. The writing was deeply anti-corporate, suspicious of the art world, and driven by a desire to act directly in the systems shaping everyday life.

The prosecution of Kurtz unfolded squarely within that moment. It was not just a legal ordeal; it was also deeply damaging personally. I watched how much it shook him. I also watched the political climate change around us. Over time, the War on Terror softened in public memory, even as the surveillance and militarization of cities remained firmly in place. Meanwhile, the histories of that earlier activist moment slowly faded from view.

That experience made me aware of how movements that once felt urgent and widely shared can disappear as quickly as the political mood shifts and new technologies reshape public life. What once animated a generation can be swept aside.

The work of Steve Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble belongs to that history, which today seems to have diminished in our collective memory. But in spite of how fragile our histories of resistance are, its urgency has not diminished. On the contrary.

Claire Pentecost

When I tell people that my friend Steve wrote a book while he was dying of pancreatic cancer, they are incredulous. But these people didn’t know Steve.

Before he was diagnosed, Steve would lament that his muse had abandoned him. After his diagnosis and being told repeatedly that he had only months of life remaining, his muse returned. He told me that every day when he sat down to write, the muse was there directing him. This is one of many curious things that make Steve unique: Though most of his work with Critical Art Ensemble was devoted to demystifying power, he always made room for mystery to persist.

Mystery is a necessary ingredient of what he called “epistemological anarchy.” He was talking about that when I met him thirty years ago, modeling a radically open mind, granting status to a panoply of ways to interpret reality. He maintained that we still have to discern between different accounts of reality, but the starting place was always a big tent. He writes extensively about this in his final work, Unreality and Its Discontents. If you miss Steve and his prodigious mind, you will find his voice in this book, a voice of reason grappling with unreason.

Steve was a wondrous combination of principle and appetite. Among his principles, maybe the most outstanding is generosity.

It was just a few months ago that Steve gave a keynote at the Helsinki Biennial. He knew this would be his last public appearance. What impresses me most about this final opportunity to address the public is that, rather than revisit any of the brilliant highlights of CAE’s critical legacy, he urgently pressed for artists to turn to building the world we want. As an exemplar, he spent at least half of the lecture celebrating the work of one of his former students, Brooke Singer. Steve was unfailingly generous right until the end.

Maybe Steve’s appetite is what attached him to life in the here and now, and what made being with him so much the opposite of alienation. And maybe it’s where we find his associate, the imp of the perverse—that thing that makes you go against reason, propriety, good sense. That thing that must be constrained just before it goes so far that it ruins everything. One thing that makes it so hard to accept that Steve no longer shares our plane of existence is that when he was with us, he was so exceptionally alive.

What made him so infectiously alive? Curiosity. Empathy. Courage. Gameness. Lucidity. Humor. And charisma, but a porous kind of charisma. Part of the attraction was that he was always inviting you into his psychic world, inviting you to be a coconspirator in brilliantly gleeful subversion. Far more than most of us, he paid the price for his ideas, and we reap the abundance he was punished for.

Many people turn to the metaphysical as they near death. Steve did it in a way that is consistent with the ethical method he used throughout his lifetime. Through keen observation, panoramic perspective, revelatory analysis, and empathy, he looked at what the metaphysical means to people drastically different from him. He saw the suppression of the metaphysical as a bigger problem than what he confronted in his personal journey. It was typical that he would want to put his own feelings into a much larger context, yielding insights he could share.

Nice enough words but inadequate to the task of remembering the world that was Steve. What I really want to say is, I miss Steve terribly, and I know that many others do too. For thirty years Steve made me feel that he always had my back, and I know that he shined that light on a lot of people. Whenever we parted or hung up the phone, he would say, “I love you, always have and always will.” It’s almost like love thrives eternally on another plane where time does not exist. We’ve always loved Steve, and we always will.

Brooke Singer

I was first introduced to Steve’s work in a small, dark room at the University of Maryland during an Avid video editing demo in the late 1990s. My instructor pulled a copy of Electronic Civil Disobedience, the Critical Art Ensemble’s latest book, from his pocket and read parts of it to us by the glow of the computer monitor—really a fitting scene for an artist/hacker manifesto! Much of it went over my head at the time, but the importance it placed on cultural producers and tech-savviness was clear. That along with its emphasis on collective action and forming small cells of like-minded individuals with eclectic skillsets to make good trouble was a compelling vision, much more than the dot-com consumer orgy that I had escaped the year before in New York.

A year later, I met Steve himself in 1999. I entered the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University, where Steve taught the first-year seminar. There were six of us around a table with him, where he sat with a book (hardly ever opened) and always in the same uniform: a black long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and black sneakers. He was composed and serious but clearly having fun. For two hours, he would spin stories about intellectual histories, technological innovation, power, visual culture, and class struggle. Looking through my notebook from those years, I see references to Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Adorno, Benjamin, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Hayles—difficult and heady stuff that Steve’s narrative skill and wry humor made accessible, relevant, even urgent. There was an atmosphere of excitement and a sense of possibility. Rather than an information dump, it was an invitation to act, to close the persistent gap between theory and practice, between what already exists and what’s possible—something Steve believed that artists were uniquely positioned to do. Conversations that started in the classroom continued at the local bar, The Squirrel Cage, into the early hours of the next day. These ideas were not meant to be confined to the university, but to be pilfered and utilized together through living and doing.

Influences are strange. They take various forms and textures; some are barely perceptible and remain at the level of the subconscious. Others are more acute but not enduring. And then there are some we recognize instantly at first encounter that we embrace and rejoice (“Yes, I have found a home!”). And these continue to grow with us over time.

Steve was my teacher, mentor, friend, and cheerleader. He introduced me to a way of being an artist in the world that I hadn’t known was possible. Today, research-based, transdisciplinary art practice, especially collaborations between artists and scientists, as well as tactical media (although the term is no longer used), are much more commonplace, in large part following the precedent of Critical Art Ensemble. Towards the end of Steve’s life, I griped to him about not getting a grant and being done with art. His response was: “Everybody fights. Nobody quits. It sucks being ahead of your time (most of the time it sucks). Welcome to the club. When they say it’s not art, you’re on the edge. That has been true for over a century now.”

He was a rare voice of playful encouragement and generous inclusion. Thank you, Steve, for taking so many of us to the edge and keeping the party going throughout the resistance.

David Garcia

I first met Steve Kurtz in Rotterdam’s legendary V2 Lab for the Unstable Media in January 1996, where Steve and other members of the Critical Art Ensemble opened The Next 5 Minutes (N5M) festival of tactical media with their performance The Matter of Media.

From the outset, it was clear that CAE made work that cut right through the froth of California tech boosterism to something darker. In their numerous interventions and publications, Steve and CAE not only illuminated the hidden predatory aspects of what we then (quaintly) called “cyberculture,” but also developed powerful rhetorical tools and tactics of resistance. From today’s perspective, it’s hard to overstate Steve and CAE’s prescience.

These early interactions between Steve and the festival organizers marked the beginning of a long-term association. Over the years, he participated generously and played a vital role in shaping and contesting the concept of tactical media. Steve personally attended and contributed to every subsequent edition of the festival, both encouraging and critiquing our practice.

A key staging post in this relationship was the publication in 2001 of CAE’s Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media. This book included, but also went beyond, the question of media and the cul-de-sac of media literacy. It announced a new kind of fluid cultural practice that refused to be domesticated or pinned down by traditional disciplines and categories. It helped those of us still trapped by the constraints of the art or academic worlds to envision a wider constellation of practices in which we could, in Steve’s words, “be any kind of cultural hybrid” and in which “these many roles (becoming artist, becoming activist, becoming scientist, etc.) contained in each individual and group could be acknowledged and valued.”

Steve joined us in 2003 as part of a network of international editors for the fourth and final edition of The Next 5 Minutes. One of his most important interventions was the essay “Framing Tactical Media,” which began with a warning that the very act of naming tactical media would have negative repercussions. He argued that, though initially generative, this act of naming was also

the first step in doing what tactical media feared most—claiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives … But shifts in the symbolic realm are a necessary contribution to an overall agenda of change. Tactical Media functions in the same way. It is only a part of the system of resistance; it is not the system itself.

Steve’s contribution to theorizing the value and limits of tactical media was just one part of an extraordinary life in which he resisted the lure of institutionalization and nostalgia. Through all the well-documented trials and tribulations of his later years, Steve was somehow able to avoid burnout or cynicism, remaining true to the ideal of “becoming.” CAE’s last publication with Steve, Unreality and Its Discontents: The Struggle Against Christian Nationalism, is testimony to how fearless, necessary, and urgent his practice remained to the very end. To me and to many others, Steve’s loss is and will remain devastating.

Rich Pell

Steve on dish duty, 2002.

I took this photograph of Steve Kurtz washing dishes towards the end of a party somewhere in the spring of 2002. His big goofy grin is probably why I took the picture. My mentor, caught in the act of being a normal human. A few years earlier, I had been the student who asks too many questions after class. I was a recently reformed computer hacker who found himself in an art school, within a university, nestled somewhere inside the military-industrial complex. Steve was an art professor who shared my ambivalence toward the university and its long-standing commitment to the war machine. He saw the same dark clouds of authoritarianism gathering as I did. But for him, it was not the time to freak out, but to get to work. And it was also time to play. Those two were never far apart from one another. 

As a student, this was revelatory. The revolution isn’t something you have to run off and join. It is happening right here: tonight, at the bar, in your garage, on the street, in your mind. The situation is urgent, and there is work to be done. But at the end of the day, make time for drunken joy to heal wounds and tighten bonds between friends. In Steve-speak: “The rational and the nonrational need one another.” The work of an artist is not just to say that “another world is possible” but to let us directly experience that world, even if only for a moment—to keep churning, pushing, and experimenting with new ways of being free. And to never give up.

This was not a theoretical exercise. From 2004 to 2008 the FBI attempted to erroneously prosecute Steve for the work of Critical Art Ensemble.1 It would be easy to reflect on that period of time as a cautionary tale, but Steve didn’t allow it to play out like that. For Critical Art Ensemble, the critique only got louder, the projects bigger, and the tactics sharper. For the generation of artists coming into their own during that confusing era of post 9/11 paranoia, this was the very human role model we needed. None of us wanted to be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment, but Steve gave us a reason to believe resistance wasn’t pointless. He had a gift for making these overwhelming and complicated (to me, at least) social, political, and philosophical issues feel approachable. He could cut through them with a clarity and simplicity that gave the journey direction and made the battle seem like it could be won.

A candid moment of post-party dishwashing may not be the most flattering epitaph, but it captures what those who knew Steve well most remember and miss: just how down-to-earth and funny the guy was. For all the heavy theory and philosophy, he never lost track of the real people around him. He could talk with anyone about anything and make them laugh.

Miss you, pal. Love you forever.

 

Lucas Fortunato

Critical Art Ensemble’s work arrived in Brazil at a particularly opportune moment. In 2001, The Electronic Disturbance was published in the Baderna Collection alongside titles by Hakim Bey and the Situationists.2 In step with protests against capitalist globalization, a new collectivism was emerging, marked by the convergence of art and activism. Initiatives such as the Independent Media Center and Tactical Media Brazil were taking shape while underground collectives proliferated in several cities across the country.3

Book about CAE published by Autonomedia, 2026. See →.

In this micropolitical effervescence, CAE’s work reached artists, activists, and researchers interested in art, politics, technology, and communication. Ricardo Rosas, a pioneer in the dissemination of tactical media in Brazil, was among the first to promote CAE’s works, principally on the website Rizoma.net, which at the time circulated all genres of activist production. Over time, academic studies addressing CAE also began to appear.4

My own engagement with CAE’s work was quite significant for permeating both artistic and intellectual activities. Inspired by CAE, I formed a collective at university called Gaya Scienza Integrated Creation and Studies Group, with the idea of fostering cultural creation alongside theoretical production and vice versa.

While CAE worked with molecular interventions, our group practiced what we called the “theater of chaos.” On the theoretical level, CAE was engaged in the critique of computing, biotechnology, and the war industry. Our group took other issues as reference points and developed a global critique of planetary civilization through the lens of political anthropology, culminating in the book Machinapolis and the Chaosmology of Being.5

Years later, already working as a professor, I conducted doctoral research on CAE.6 The thesis argues that, in the history of art-as-revolt, CAE emerges as one of the most expressive artistic war machines. The dissertation was published in Brazil in 2022 and recently released in the US by Autonomedia. The possibility of an artistic war machine is suggested in the “Treatise on Nomadology” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, although the concept itself was not fully developed by the authors. My contribution is precisely to propose a theory of the artistic war machine grounded in philosophy and the historical sociology of art, focusing on the work and trajectory of CAE.

The new book situates CAE historically and presents the arsenals of its artistic war machine—utopian plagiarism, recombinant theater, molecular interventions, electronic civil disobedience—in direct connection with movements of the artistic avant-garde, tactical media, electronic resistance, and bioactivism, offering both examples and contributions that dissect the relationships between art, politics, and the culture of its time. My hope is that those interested in CAE, art, and activism will find the tribute that Steve Kurtz and his partners deserve and the components for assembling one’s own war machine—whether theoretical, artistic, or cultural, in Brazil or around the world.