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

Makers: Actors, Artists, … Users

Image from the Interference Archive, Photo by Shaun Slifer

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

People's Park sign, late 1960s, S.F.

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