Femme Hacking

Femme hacking, n.: to use tacit knowledge of deprivileged structures [femme science] to apply roundabout methodologies of tool-using [hacking] in order to achieve an outcome. Having emerged from academia, I’ve thought a lot about the ways in which knowledge is articulated, permissioned, and authenticated: e.g., one must clearly express a defensible statement; problematized as: how do you know… Continue reading Femme Hacking

Reuse, Repurposing, and Capitalizing on Raised Fist images

Boss Revolution: Logo from IDT Telecom, Inc.

TODAY’s FISTS: Boss Revolution | Underdogs As raised fist images are used over more decades and with a broader variety of political meanings, the attentive viewer notices this icon used for advertising and marketing purposes that may seem to dilute or complicate the original political intentions for which this image is often used. Millenial media… Continue reading Reuse, Repurposing, and Capitalizing on Raised Fist images

Pedagogy: What in Art Makes Change

"Fist" by Frank Cieciorka, 1965

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

Twitter Fist

“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

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

IWW poster, 1914 "The Pyramid of Capitalism"

“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