I attended the Digital Humanities Winter Institute at UMD’s MITH, [http://mith.umd.edu] this past week, which meant I learned how to be a better researcher and overall nerd. Firstly, hooray for CUNY GC for co-sponsoring, including making graduate student scholarships available, which meant I could go. I enrolled in the Data Curation for the Digital Humanities… Continue reading #1 Digital Humanities Winter Institute Report-back
Author: femmetech
Pedagogy: What in Art Makes Change
My BIG QUESTION is: how do arts-based cultural works effect change? And the inverse of that is: what is missing in the understanding of the effectiveness of participatory, relational, or socially-engaged art when we want to find cultural resistance within it? What other ways can we think about “effectiveness†or “utility†or the impact of… Continue reading Pedagogy: What in Art Makes Change
Insurgency and Anarchafeminism
 Basically my life is totally great because I decided to make it my part-time job to study how people are collectively, creatively rebellious. Again, this means I look at participatory extralegal systems like socially-engaged, guerilla and performance art, tactical media, forms of DIY/DIWO production cultures, copyleft, and pop-ed. One of my absolute favorite pop-ed/guerilla art… Continue reading Insurgency and Anarchafeminism
Tactical Media and Disturbance Art
“The shift in revolutionary investments corresponds with a shift in the nature of power, which has removed itself from the streets and become nomadic.” — Critical Art Ensemble artist-tacticians, Qud in Rita Raley’s Tactical Media. Tactical Media Enter tactical media, a resistant form of cultural production that uses networked intelligence and digital forms to create… Continue reading Tactical Media and Disturbance Art
Power is Just a Snack
Power is going to come up a lot, so it’s worthwhile to think about a bit. One of the ways that I am interested in how activist art manifests is against, alongside, parallel to, and in opposition to P/power. But how does it work? Chomp, Chomp A mental exercise: Imagine a delicious cracker sandwich, made… Continue reading Power is Just a Snack
Usership, Intersubjectivity, Political Meaning
If the people who are making vernacular, politicized cultural forms are also using these forms and doing so in groups, how do we talk about them? What about when them are us? Users are Experts Steven Wright*, in a 2007 lecture about people using socially-engaged art, points out that they are experts of their… Continue reading Usership, Intersubjectivity, Political Meaning
Hierarchical Power, Invisible Users
“Envisaging an art without artwork, without authorship, and without spectatorship has an immediate consequence: art ceases to be visible as such.†– Steven Wright Part of the confusion between high art, activist art and participatory art and vernacular forms of politicized cultural works lies in determining where resistance emerges from, and against what. Perhaps, as… Continue reading Hierarchical Power, Invisible Users
Where It Lands: Users and Relational Aesthetics
We did an overview of what activist, and socially-engaged / participatory art is and who it is made by in the last posts, so now lets look at some of the ideas artists and makers invoke behind this type of work: users and usership, relationality, intersubjectivity* and groups. Users of the Art/Cultural Experience Activists and… Continue reading Where It Lands: Users and Relational Aesthetics
Makers: Actors, Artists, … Users
Who makes activist/political arts? The individuals and groups who make this kind of cultural production are primarily: movement actors [e.g. activists] within the communities meant to experience and co-create the work; artists, cultural activists, tool-having professionals, also often from within the discourse communities. These groups are far from mutually exclusive and often involve a lot… Continue reading Makers: Actors, Artists, … Users
Activist Art & Participatory Art
What We’re Looking For The first place I began researching was in and around the concepts of “activist art†and “political art,†both of which are colloquial terms that I hear and use regularly.  I was hoping to find a repository where an understanding of the critical importance of the role of those using or… Continue reading Activist Art & Participatory Art