Search results for 'art'

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Syrian Hands Raised: User Generated Creativity Between Citizenship and Dissent 

As much as images of violence, civil war, and sectarian strife become prominent in the media narrative of the Syrian uprising, little gems of innovative cultural production, artistic resistance, and creative disobedience continue to sprout across the virtual alleys of the Internet. These creative gems are also the germs of a viral peer-production process at work at a grassroots level in the new Syrian public sphere. Such acts of creativity - mash-ups, cartoons, slogans, jokes, songs, and web series - are probably too small and inconsistent in impact compared to the horrific magnificence that shelling, bombing, sniping, and killing scenes that provide daily fodder to global television viewers. It is also challenging to discover them; in fact, as remarked by Tunisian blogger Sami ben Gharbia at the Arab Bloggers meeting in Tunis (3-6 October 2011), Facebook is not the most suitable platform for activists to store, archive, tag, search for content, and give it a context.

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Engineering of Consent 

One of the major challenges facing citizen groups campaigning to prevent, minimize, limit or regulate socially-irresponsible or environment-degrading practices of transnational corporations is how to deal with the corporations' increasing call for 'dialogue' and 'cooperation'. Many transnational corporations say they have seen the error of their ways and have rectified their mistakes. Eager to do their best for 'our common future', they claim to be listen to their critics. Thus 'dialogues' with companies or industry organizations are frequently portrayed as the way ahead for citizen groups seeking corporate accountability, rather than 'confrontational' strategies such as boycotts. What are the dangers and limits of doing so?

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    9-11 and After: A Virtual Case Book 

     The attack on the World Trade Center was--among other things--a stunning media event, and there was no shortage of analysis on mass media coverage. We saw no reason to replicate what others were doing. What no one seemed to be looking at closely was the significance of this ephemeral material that filled the streets and parks in New York below 14th Street or its relationship with the new media that was also flooding our lives.

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      Toward Polymorphous Radio 

      We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.[1]

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      30 Years of Tactical Media 

      This is a short text [1] which appears in "Public Netbase: Non Stop Future. New  Practices in Art and Media" edited by the fine people at the New Media  Center_kuda.org, in cooperation with World-Information Institute / t0. This book was presented at Transmediale 2009 in Berlin.
      http://nonstop-future.org

      Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to  predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept  around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self- aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively  short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass  medium (1995-2005).

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      Video Warriors 

      In 1996, Adams Wood, Jeff Taylor, and A. Mark Liiv were working as activists on a forest defense campaign in Idaho. With a Hi-8 camera, they documented violations of timber sales agreements and confrontations between angry loggers and non-violent protesters as a way to keep people safe, as a tool in legal defense, and as an alternative to mainstream corporate media, which was biased in favor of the timber industry. The activists managed to pull off a 41-day road blockade, and the future founders of Whispered Media were shooting it. They cut their first video and called it ROAD USE RESTRICTED. The succinct but intense twelve-minute video was a great success, becoming part of several activist-run road shows and inspiring many a tree-hugger to haul it out to Idaho, which, says Liiv, "is not on the way to anywhere."

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        Strategies for Tactical Archives: Public keynote lecture and conference, October 27 - 28, 2023 

        The Strategies for Tactical Archives conference investigates how documentation and archiving can feed into living practices of activists, artists and media makers that address the position of communities who feel aggrieved or excluded from the wider public culture.

        The program consists of a public keynote lecture on Friday evening October 27 (starting 19.30) by Sarah Schulman, writer, activist and co-initiator of the ACTUP Oral History Project and author of Let the Record Show - A Political History of ACTUP New York, 1987-1993. This is followed by a one day conference on Saturday October 28 (10-17 hrs.) at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

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        Crisis / Media 

        Sarai-Waag Workshop at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi March 3-5, 2003

        "The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
        - The Inferno, Dante Alighieri

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        A Personal Map of the Resistance Movement in France 

        For many reasons, the 80's, years of the Mitterand socialist government, were years in which grass roots movements got institutionalized and traditional activism was "out". The logic of the Republic (everybody is equal without distinction) allied with traditional individualism and clanic behaviour ("la guerre des chapelles") forbid the emergence of non dominant/non normalized subjectivities. This tradition is still alive today. The 68 generation didn't feel necessary to pass on their knowledge to younger generations. From their point of view, they created new ways to go about the world by themselves, so should the new generations. The notion of alternative and activism became stigmatized. It wasn't a very tactical in those years to position oneself in terms of an alternative. As a result, by the beginning of the 90, the most visible part of the intellectuals and the grass roots movements seams to be lobotomized.

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