"The dissertation traces the tactics of appropriation of Barbara Kruger, The Billboard Liberation Front and Shepard Fairey as exemplars of transgression and commodification within the changing commercial conditions of neo-liberalism. Their works, tactics and strategies are emphasized as points of insight into the practices and conditions of subversion as well as the limits of hegemonic containment that reproduces the political and economic structure within which they operated. The dissertation furthers and contributes to the theoretical and methodology of critical cultural studies as it emphasizes the role of the economy and ideology in reproducing the prevailing hegemonic order. Critical cultural studies hinges on the concepts of hegemony as lived discursive and ideological struggles over meaning and communication resources within historically specific and socially structured contexts. This framework emphasizes the poetics of appropriation - the use, meaning and spaces of articulation of visual representations with the politics - the socio-economic and discursive conditions that reproduce the dominant social order."
(Michael Glassco, 2012, University of Iowa)
"The photographs in this exhibit are of actual altered billboards that appeared on the streets of Santa Cruz, California from 1980 to 1985. The photographs have been adjusted for brightness, contrast, and parallax, but no content changes were made.
The billboards were made over by a clandestine network of midnight billboard editors operating under the name of Truth In Advertising, or TIA for short.
This exhibit of their historic work was first presented in 2007 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. The exhibit is made up of 12 billboards presented in the order in which they appeared on the streets of Santa Cruz. The sequence also tells the story of Truth in Advertising, and documents publicity and commentary."
(Bob Stayton)
"Few titles sum up an era and a movement like Spare Rib. When the first issue came out in July 1972, many women were starting to question their position and role in society. The magazine was an active part of the emerging women's liberation movement. It challenged the stereotyping and exploitation of women in what was the first national magazine of its kind. It supported collective, realistic solutions to the hurdles women faced and reached out to women from all backgrounds. Spare Rib became the debating chamber of feminism in the UK. It continued until January 1993 and the full archive of 239 magazines provides a valuable insight into women's lives and this period of feminist activity."
"In early 2006 several activists based in London who are involved in sex worker rights activism, organising within the International Union of Sex Workers in particular, began to conceptualise and organise around the x:talk project–one that would seek to explore and expand the ideas and confidence we have developed in criticising the mainstream human trafficking discourse, drawing on insights we have gained from sex workers', migrant and feminist struggles.
The racist and anti–feminist trafficking rhetoric of 'protection', mainstream anti–trafficking campaigns that reduce women to only passive victims, under the control of organised crime or of cruel men produces and justifies deportation of migrant sex workers and increases the criminalisation and exploitation of workers in the sex industry. It creates divisions between migrants' and sex workers' forms of organisation and resistance.
We found language and communication to be crucial elements to directly challenge and change conditions of work and life, and to come to together and to organise. Communication is in our view central to change. Language is a basic individual and collective power that improves both possibilities to work and possibilities of resistance.
Central to our vision stands the autonomy of all people moving across borders and the dignity of every gender employing their resources in the sex industry. Central to our understanding of gender and social relations is an understanding of sex work as labour. People who sell sex are involved in a labour process in many respects similar to other paid personal services exchanged on market. At the same time we recognise that the ways in which sex work has existed are also deeply interrelated to the ways in which 'female' services, such as caring, domestic, sexual and reproductive activities are supposed to be provided. It is important to consider that the demand for money for sex in a transparent and potentially contractual way is often a break and significant shift in the way women are expected to give these services for no remuneration.
We consider that a feminist analysis and practice is crucial to changing the sex industry. Women represent the majority of workers in the industry and gendered sexualised and reproductive labour have historically constituted a central part in the structures that subordinate and oppress women. The people that have taken the main initiative of this organisation and project are women. Starting from the ground up, in a grass roots way we nevertheless aim to work with the whole industry. Due to the demographics of the workforce in the sex industry, women play a central role in the organisation and are expected to make up a majority of participants in the classes. We/they represent the majority and we/they enjoy the strongest voice at the moment. However issues of gender and transgender difference–at their intersections with racial and sexual issues are taken into account in the development of activities in order to include people from across the industry and from diverse backgrounds.
In contrast to the current mainstream anti–trafficking policies and discourses we work towards the improvement of working conditions in the sex industry; for rights and recognition of workers; the right to change work and not to be forced to stay with the same employer and the right to stay and not to be deported. Our organisation is based on a practice of sex workers self organisation and our projects are primarily built on an activity of networking with those that have already organised similar projects according to these principles."
"I've been following guerrilla gardening on Twitter for quite some time, and have become familiar with the term 'seed bombing' as a result. It's an idea that's always appealed to me – it's a kind of eco–friendly, bee–friendly, slightly radical anti–vandalism activism – but it's just one of those things that I'd never pursued. ...
So how do they work? It's a simple process really – the seeds I bought are encased in a ball of peat–free compost, dried clay and chilli, which are hand–rolled in North London (yes, really, and no, it's not what you're thinking). The dried clay acts as a protective casing from common seed predators (such as ants, mice and birds). When enough rain permeates the clay, the seeds inside begin to germinate – helped along by the nutrients and minerals contained within the balls. So it's like a tiny self–sufficient seeding system. Maya [http://www.mayaproject.org/] have added chili powder to the mix to help to deter predators while the seed ball slowly degrades, and eventually the seeds sprout."
(Lucy Small, 5 April 2013)
"Pedagogical experiments played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, the key hypothesis of our Radical Pedagogy[1] research project is that these experiments can be understood as radical architectural practices in their own right. Radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radice, as something belonging or relating to the root, to its foundations. Radical pedagogies shake foundations, disturbing assumptions rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. This challenge to normative thinking was a major force in the postwar field of architecture, and has surprisingly been neglected in recent years. ...
Architectural pedagogy has become stale. Schools spin old wheels as if something is happening but so little is going on. Students wait for a sense of activist engagement with a rapidly evolving world but graduate before it happens. The fact that they wait for instruction is already the problem. Teachers likewise worry too much about their place in the institutional hierarchies. Curricular structures have hardly changed in recent decades, despite the major transformations that have taken place with the growth of globalisation, new technologies, and information culture. As schools appear to increasingly favour professionalisation, they seem to drown in self–imposed bureaucratic oversight, suffocating any possibility for the emergence of experimental practices and failures. There are a few attempts to wake things up here and there but it's all so timid in the end. There is no real innovation.
In response to the timidity of schools today, the Radical Pedagogy project returns to the educational experiments of the 1960s and '70s to remind us what can happen when pedagogy takes on risks. It's a provocation and a call to arms."
(Beatriz Colomina with Esther Choi, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan and Anna–Maria Meister, 28 September 2012, The Architectural Review)
1). Radical Pedagogy is an ongoing multi–year collaborative research project by a team of PhD candidates in the School of Architecture at Princeton University, led by Beatriz Colomina and involving seminars, interviews and guest lectures by protagonists and scholars. The project explores a remarkable set of pedagogical experiments of the 1960s and '70s that revolutionised thinking in the discipline. Each student is working on one of these experiments and collectively mapping the interconnections and effects of these experiments towards a major publication and exhibition.
Fig.1 Tournaments in the Course 'Culture of the Body', at the Valparaíso School, 1975. Courtesy of Archivo Histórico Jose Vial, Escuela Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
"Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can –– and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments –– and their neighbors.
Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, which matches software geniuses with US cities to reboot local services."
(Filmed February 2012, posted March 2012, TED2012)
"Charity Invisible Children shone the spotlight on the alleged atrocities carried out by Ugandan guerilla group leader Joseph Kony this week. The charity posted an extraordinary film on Vimeo – but soon found itself under as much scrutiny as Kony. "
(Graham Hayday, 8 March 2012, The Guardian)
"In the past 200,000 years, humans have upset the balance of planet Earth, a balance established by nearly four billion years of evolution. We must act now. It is too late to be a pessimist. The price is too high. Humanity has little time to reverse the trend and change its patterns of consumption.
Through visually stunning footage from over fifty countries, all shot from an aerial perspective, Yann Arthus–Bertrand shows us a view most of us have never seen. He shares with us his sense of awe about our planet and his concern for its health. With this film, Arthus–Bertrand hopes to provide a stepping–stone to further the call to action to take care of our HOME.
HOME is the first film that has been made using aerial–only footage. The film marks artist–activist Yann Arthus–Bertrand's feature film directorial debut.
HOME the movie is carbon offset. All of the CO2 emissions engendered by the making of the film are calculated and offset by sums of money that are used to provide clean energy to those who do not have any. For the last ten years, all the work of Yann Arthus–Bertrand has been carbon offset."
(Yann Arthus–Bertrand)
"Founded in 2008, ecopop is an ever–changing social innovations collaboration that creates brands, art, and activism – or brand artivism, as we like to call it."
(Ecopop, LLC.)
"So, some time ago I was shown this video 'The Story of Stuff', a project created by Annie Leonard. She is an environmentalist who worked on international environmental health and sustainability issues, among other things like Greenpeace International, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and others.
This project has, so far, 2 seasons, the first with 7 short animated videos explaining some of our everyday environmental, social and economic problems and how they're related to one another. The second season is more focused on what is behind these social, environmental and economical problems and how we can act on them."
(Letícia Neves, 23 March 2011)
Fig.1 Annie Leonard (9 November 2010). 'The Story of Electronics'
"In the digital age – in which power lies neither in institutions nor on the streets but on the Web, that is, in the communications system – we seek to exchange ideas about the questions of both culture and art, and of society at large and encourage possible answers."
(ART–e–FACT)
Fig.1 Egle Budvytyte 'The Story of The Fish In the Times of Science and Techno mythologies', Video, 09'06, Amsterdam, 2008
Impressum: ART–e–FACT : STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE / / an online magazine for contemporary art & culture ISSN 1845–5301
Publisher: Omnimedia d.o.o., Branimirova 57, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia, ph.+ 385 1 3636–830, + 385 98 350 860, e–mail: info@artefact.mi2.hr, For the publisher: Dalibor Martinis
Editors: Nada Beroš, Trudy Lane, Antonia Majača (editor–in–chief), Dalibor Martinis, Tihomir Milovac, Leila Topić
Guest editors: Žarko Paić, Marina Gržinić, Zoran Erić
"Goldsmiths' Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Computational Studio Arts can be described as 'smart crafting'. Four students talk about their work in this exciting new field of study.
[Janis Jeffries, Professor of Visual Arts in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths explains] 'this is the first year of graduating students in the MFA in Computational Studio Arts. It's the first programme within the University of London which is very much about hands–on programming skills as what you might call 'the new crafts'. ...
'Because of the dynamic relationship between art, science and technology, probably some of the most interesting shows are now at the Science Museum and the Wellcome Foundation. They're really pressurising the conventions of the art world because people are much more engaged.'"
(Laura Taflinger, Creative Choices, UK)
"Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built–in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.
Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non–governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.
Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online."
(The Tor Project, Inc.)
"Over the past 35 years, [International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs] has published one of the most comprehensive collections of documentation and reflection on indigenous peoples' struggle for survival and recognition. IWGIA continues to be at the forefront of reflecting the most significant issues of concern to indigenous peoples. IWGIA's publications are published on a non–profit basis.
...
IWGIA publishes mainly in English and Spanish but its documentation also includes books in French, Kiswahili (East Africa), Tagalok, Ilokano, Bisaya (Philippines), Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Russian, Portuguese, Hindi and Swedish, as well as 13 educational booklets in Danish.
IWGIA publishes the journal Indigenous Affairs, a yearbook The Indigenous World both in English and in Spanish (Asuntos Indigenas and El Mundo Indigena), books, handbooks and reports.
IWGIA's publications are written by indigenous and non–indigenous scholars and activists. Our readers are NGO activists and specialists working with indigenous peoples or related issues, politicians, scholars with a special interest, indigenous activists and organisations, individuals and communities.
IWGIA's documentation and information material contributes to its overall aim of supporting indigenous peoples, as stated in IWGIA's mission statement. IWGIA documents the human rights and overall situation of indigenous peoples, promotes indigenous rights and facilitates and provides for discussions, influences decision makers and puts indigenous issues on the agenda of governments, NGOs, international institutions such as the UN, OAS, Arctic Council, etc., and corporate business world. It also nurtures discussions within academic and intellectual fora and contributes to indigenous peoples' capacity building and sharing of experience."
(IWGIA)
"The Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo newswire seeks to provide accurate, alternative and under–reported news media to the international Indigenous/Autochonous community and others with a concern for human justice and Aboriginal political issues."
(Inteligentaindigena Novajoservo newswire, 09 August 2009)
"From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 – well before the Internet was on most people's radar – and continues to confront cutting–edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.
Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. Sometimes just defending technologies isn't enough, so EFF also supports the development of freedom–enhancing inventions."
(Electronic Frontier Foundation)
"Media art is cross–cutting. It doesn't fit into any one clear genre or medium of creative arts practice. In its broadest sense, media art can occur across visual, performance, sound, video, computer, game, networked, activist, site specific, animation, mobile, AI and Net Art. It can both embrace and subvert conventional art practices. As a result, many artists that work under the 'Media Art,' umbrella don't necessarily recognise themselves as connected in any way. They hold different creative interests, they work in wildly different ways and explore distinct areas of media form, process and subject. Some even find the term 'Media Art,' unhelpful and old fashioned."
(Claire Welsby, InterventTech.net)
[Part of an impassioned plea for support/recognition for Live and Media Arts in the UK. It follows on from an email by Ekow Eshun announcing the closure of the ICA's Live and Media Arts Department.]
"Goksøyr & Martens is a performance project established in 1997 by Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens. They both finished their education at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo in the spring of 2001. Together they have produced performances for galleries, museums and theatre stages in and outside Norway. Amongst those Goksøyr & Martens has worked with are refugees from Kosovo–Albania, a film crew, 17 couples, pupils from the Barratt Dues Music Institute, street musicians, a Swedish television game–show host, Youths from Holmlia youth center, actors from the National Theate and activists from different political youth organizations.
The artistic project of Goksøyr & Martens can be placed into a new avant–garde practise where investigation on language, identity and the contemporary is central. This practice also represents an exchange between the political field and the art field. The result is aesthetics where artistic activism and political activism goes together hand in hand, and where the art object, the art institutions and the role of the artist is constantly discussed."
(Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens)
[Photo: Thomas Brun]
"In February 2007, Brave New Films and a coalition of activists, bloggers and partner groups including MoveOn.org, ColorOfChange.org and The Sierra Club, began to successfully fight FOX's misinformation using the FOX Attacks videos and tools.
To date, the FOX Attacks videos have been seen over two million times and have played a key role in several progressive victories."
('FOX Attacks', Brave New Films)
"The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965–80, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 120 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of media–including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art–the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue."
(July 25, 2007 at 9:00am by MOCA)
"Peter Kennard has spent most of his life in London, and has been considerably more involved than most in the capital's political gatherings during the last 25 years.
...
His two major subjects quickly emerged: armaments and poverty. This was the early eighties with 3 million unemployed, Thatcher in her first term girding her loins for the Falklands War, and the CND at the height of its popularity. Kennard had an audience.
...
'The point of my work is to use easily accessible iconic images, but to render them unacceptable. To break down the image of the all–powerful missile....after breaking them, to show new possibilities emerging in the cracks and splintered fragments of the old reality.'
His belief at this time was that photomontage had the power to show the causes rather than the results. In recent times however, he seems to have had his doubts: 'There is a problem with montage in that you see it everywhere now because of digital technology. There is so much transformed imagery around that people accept constructed images without questioning their meaning. I think my work was losing impact because of that.'"
(David Palmer)
[Short extract from America's Ovation TV on pioneering photomontage activist John Heartfield.]
"Guerilla gardening has been given its name because it's not about going through tonnes of red tape to ask the Government permission to do something with the land they've ignored or forgotten about. Guerilla gardening is about taking matters into your own hands to make your surroundings a better place to live.
As a guerilla gardener you can be part of a fully–fledged green army taking on mighty battles with the city landscape, or a lone warrior of peace making small changes here and there. You can bring green to the urban desert in a full–scale or small–scale way. You can grow a seed in a pot at home then replant it somewhere in your city, or you can join a guerilla gardening association (there are loads around) and take over a bit of wasteground, turning it into a living green community space."
(Magda Knight)
"In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art opened after a renovation; they opened with a big international show on sculpture. In the show there were, I always forget exact numbers, there were almost 200 artists and there were only 15 women, and there were no artists of colour. That was just so blatant and just so in your face. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the curator then made a statement to the press that anyone who wasn't in the show should rethink his career! And that gave us an idea [Laughs] that there was probably a little bit of discrimination going on here. [Laughs]
So, a group of us went up to the museum and organised a very ordinary kind of protest with placards and chants, and at the end of the day we hadn't really accomplished anything except make a lot of people coming in and out of the museum angry. They really didn't want to hear any kind of questioning of the cultural institution of the museum. That's when we realised that most people think that the art world, or at least at that time most people thought the art world was a meritocracy – that whatever ended up in a museum was the best there was. We were not exactly sure at that point how it all worked, but we knew that there was something wrong. And so a group of us decided that day that we were going to figure out some type of technique to expose it and make people think about the issue. And also participate in a dialogue about it.
That's when we decided to have an anonymous organisation and call ourselves Guerrillas, like freedom fighters, and put up anonymous posters in the middle of the night all over Soho, where the galleries were then, that just stated the facts. We put up posters that went after every sub group of the art world. First, we did the male artists that have shows in galleries that didn't show women, because a lot of them had women in their lives who were artists that weren't given the same opportunities. We went after galleries, we went after critics, we went after directors of museums, and we systematically put every separate group in the art world on alert that we were looking at their records and that they better do some explaining. Of course everyone wanted to say it was somebody else's problem. Artists wanted to say it was the galleries' problem. The galleries wanted to say it was the critics' problem. And the critics said, Oh, no, it's the galleries' fault because they never showed any women? Everyone was passing the buck. And we wanted to put them all on alert that they were all participating consciously or unconsciously in a system that discriminated against women and people of colour. And that the art world, as it existed then, in the mid–80s, did not fairly represent American culture."
(Celina, feministing.com)
"In 2005, within its project Gender Stereotypes in Media: Representation of Women in Print Media in South East Europe', Mediacentar Sarajevo have started a comprehensive research on the representational practices, gender stereotyping, strategies and methods of gender discrimination in the media."
(Mediacentar Sarajevo)
Tetsuo Kogawa
The birth of mini–FM is related to the peculiar situation of radio in Japan. ...
Article 4 in the Radio Regulations Book. It permits transmitting without a license if the power is very weak and is intended to accommodate wireless microphones and remote–control toys. ...
At the beginning, I was dubious about the power of this level of transmission. During several tests of small ready–made FM transmitters, however, we found that some of them could cover a half–mile radius. Presumably, the sensitivity of radio receivers had increased beyond the Ministry's estimation when they established the regulation in the 1950s.
The boom was fantastic, in a sense, but it puzzled us. We had intended to establish a free radio station, not to transmit a one–way performance that disregarded listeners as most stations did. During the boom, most mini–FM stations were able to communicate to a handful of people only. Many of these stations seemed to us be naively copying professional radio studio work. To the contrary, we paid attention to constant and serious listeners. We wanted to provide a community of people with alternative information on politics and social change.
The radio station that my students and I had started on the campus re–established itself in the centre of Tokyo when the students finished school in 1983. The new station was called Radio Home Run. Every day, from 8 PM to midnight, one or two groups aired talk or music programmes. Themes depended on who was host and who were guests. The members always invited new guests who were involved in political or cultural activism. Also, listeners who lived close to the station hesitantly began to visit. To repeat the telephone number during each programme was our basic policy. Guests sometimes recorded cassette tapes of our programmes and let their friends listen. Radio Home Run quickly became a meeting place for students, activists, artists, workers, owners of small shops, local politicians, men, women and the elderly.
Theoretically, I had argued that mini–FM stations might be linked together to extend the transmission/reception area. Since the cost of each unit is cheap, one could have a number of radio sets and transmitters to relay to each other quite inexpensively. Radio Home Run was not so eager to do this but some stations succeeded in establishing a very sophisticated network to link together and extend their service areas.[5] Through a number of experiments to remodel the transmitting system, create programmes and pursue a new way of getting together, we came to the conclusion at Radio Home Run that we must work within a half–mile service area. Tokyo is densely populated so even a half–mile area has at least ten thousand inhabitants. This meant that mini–FM could function as community radio. Moreover, we realised that in the process of transmitting we were more conscious of our members than (possible) listeners. The action of transmitting together changed our relationships and feelings in a way that seemed distinct from the effects of other collective actions that did not involve transmitting. Further, we surmised that relationships differed because we were narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. We decided it had something to do with the limited area of our transmission signal.
"Exposing Nazism, and its leaders, to ridicule was [John] Heartfield's main aim in the 30s. 'The Meaning of the Hitler Salute' shows Hitler's right hand accepting a wad of bank notes from a gigantic bourgeois standing behind him. ''Little man requests big donation. Motto: Millions are behind me.
Heartfield was an early pioneer of photomontage. He used it as a political weapon to challenge fascism prior to the 2nd World War. For Heartfield ''New political problems demand[ed] new means of propaganda. For this task photography [possessed] the greatest power of persuasion."
(The Leninist, 1992)
Fig.1 John Heartfield (1932). Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses: Kleiner Mann bittet um große Gaben. Motto: Millonen Stehen Hinter Mir! [The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little man asks for big gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!], 1932 [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works–of–art/1987.1125.8]