There is an unfortunate tradition of critiquing abstract or experimental art and music in solely aesthetic terms, often at the expense of examining its larger social implications. Work in the arts is as necessary as work in other areas for the advocacy of global justice; artistic pursuits remain a powerful avenue and an essential tool for protest and critique.

By presenting this series under the heading "Allegorical Power" (from Jean Baudrillard's notion of the insidiously homogenizing nature of power's allegories), we hope to explore and draw attention to the conditions that propagate centralized power. The external structures of this power (through media saturation, absurdly extreme abuses of civil liberties, and so on) have ballooned remarkably, as well as become more public, in the rush to this most current aggression. From a cultural and social perspective, this puts the ideologies of the dominant power structures (the current United States government, the IMF, the WTO, etc) in a sensitive position, opening these structures to effective attack from multiple cultural angles.

By adding this series to the voices of opposition contesting unchecked centralized power and by placing abstract sound in a political context that opposes the acts of aggression propagated by centralized power—be they militarily or economically conceived—we hope at the very least to offer a forum for viewpoints and creative comment that may simultaneously or subsequently lead to direct action.

Antiopic hopes to provide a space for those artists who are moved to the point where the need for comment is mandatory. This is a proposal open to various interpretations, and we hope to use this series not only for any possible "end results" but also to elicit a thought process on the meaning, or potential, of sound art in the context of and in response to global injustice. The contributions to the Allegorical Power series should be seen as protest.