Zach Blas

Zach Blas is an artist and writer based in London. His work engages technology and politics and has been exhibited internationally at venues including IMA Bristbane; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Currently, Blas is a lecturer in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

In 2014, Hito Steyerl listed Blas as a "FutureGreat" in ArtReview, writing, "While a lot of contemporary technologically oriented art tries to resuscitate the wreckage of Futurism, or overidentifies with strategies of surgical marketing and apple polishing, Blas’s work insists that one doesn’t need to brand oneself into voluntary servitude or to eagerly identify with the aggressor."

Blas earned a BS in film and philosophy from Boston University and then a post-baccalaureate certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Blas earned his MFA from the Design|Media Arts department at the University of California, Los Angeles and his Ph.D from the Program in Literature at Duke University in 2014.

In 2014-15, Blas was an assistant professor in the department of art at the University at Buffalo. His academic writing has appeared in publications including Camera Obscura, and Women's Studies Quarterly.

In 2014, Blas published the essay "Contra-Internet aesthetics in the book You Are Here: Art After the Internet ISBN , edited by curator Omar Kholeif. Composed of video, sculptures, performative lectures, Contra-Internet explores alternatives to the corporate and state-controlled internet, particularly in light of internet censorship during protest movements in the Arab Spring. Rhizome Artistic Director Michael Connor has written that the project imagines "alternatives to the neoliberal internet we know today. The project isn't an argument for unplugging, exactly; more for building or dreaming up alternative infrastructures."

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