A practical guide for working with data in more ethical, creative and responsible ways
Category Archive: activism
Maggie Kane: On the role of creativity when helping marginalised communities in capitalistic systems
“You have to be creative to operate in this capitalistic system. You have to find all kinds of walk arounds and work with pretty much no assistance from the government”
What make her works so compelling is that they go beyond confronting the audience with uncomfortable ethical questions about the history of museum collections. They also present new counter narratives and new strategies to examine issues of decolonisation
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In this manifesto, climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tyres and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse
The artists who opened their own bank, printed their own money and then bought £1 million worth of predatory debts, which were then blown up in the shadow of London’s financial district
In her talk, art historian and curator Bénédicte Ramade explored the differences between ecological art, environmental art, green art, ecologist art, Anthropocene art, etc.
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The book considers how artists have used cultural practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence
For this dive into new forms of financial delinquency, investigative journalist Anuška Delić discussed with investigative artists from the Demystification Committee and the collective RYBN.ORG
Italian artist Leone Contini’s collaborations with migrant communities open up discussions about local food resilience in the face of the climate crisis
Walls are no obstacle if you have the right technology
This guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture
Part school, part shelter and part folly where people came together to learn how to live in a post-collapse scenario
Angela Washko actively seeks out new ways to facilitate or enter into conversation with individuals and communities who have radically different ideas and opinions in an attempt to create spaces for discussion, productive dissent and complexity
How hackers and hacking moved from being a target of the state to a key resource for the expression and deployment of state power
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life
Using sound art and technocultures to better understand the complexity of rural areas and to challenge discourses of capitalism that marginalise rural territories
A growing movement of soft cultural activism spearheaded by artists, curators and art critics who believe that art has a responsibility to engage directly with Chinese social reality
With fearlessness and humour, the artist weaves uncomfortable threads between the past and present to explore issues such as colonialism, landscapes, social structures and the exercise of power are mediated by technologies
How local and transnational acts of resistance are making use of technologies (such as drones) in order to monitor the impacts of extractive industries and develop micropolitical strategies
The work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo
A participative installation that imitates the functioning of machines and embraces human imperfections and errors started quietly enough but ended up causing controversy and censorship in Hungary
How do the Rave-o-lution of 12 March 2018 in front of the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi and anti-fascist protests in Berlin relate to ancient Dionysian rituals, and why does the soundtrack to these events come from the drums of African Americans?
A book (which you can download for free) explores how maps are created as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education
How do contemporary artists explore Nonuments, the spaces or objects that trigger uneasiness, public debates and polarised opinions
The artist talks about plastic invasion, excavator choreographies on scrapyards and how to stay sane when the world around you is sinking under piles of garbage
Over the years, SUPERFLEX have realized bold works that confront some of modern society’s most unsavoury aspects with free goods, free beers, resistance to social control, calls for solidarity and of course tools!
Artist Dani Ploeger has been looking at the new fences built to toughen “Fortress Europe.” In particular the ones that use heat sensors, sophisticated cameras and other so-called ‘smart’ technologies to shut off “illegal immigrants”
A VR-essay and performance reminds us that organising information is never innocent and that we shouldn’t trust a Silicon Valley giant with its archiving, exhibiting and mapping
“The collective wisdom of more than a hundred grassroots organizers from five continents. It’s everything you need for a DIY uprising of your own”
“How can acts of listening, walking, conversing, cooking, and gardening be related to, or even equated with, the well-established history of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and other recognized art forms?”
Reilly addresses the urgent need in the contemporary art world for curatorial strategies that provide alternatives to exclusionary models of collecting and display. In so doing, she provides an invaluable source of information for current thinkers and, in a world dominated by visual culture, a vital source of inspiration for today’s ever-expanding new generation of curators
In 2005, a group of photographers took a stand alongside the people of the small town of Bil’in, and documented their fight to stop the Israeli government building the infamous West Bank Barrier. Inspired by what they had seen in Bil’in, the group went on to form Activestills, a collective whose work has become vital in documenting the struggle against Israeli occupation and everyday life in extraordinary situations
Man-made virgin forest, plants that remove toxic substances from polluted waters, community urban orchards, mobile library, etc. Today’s short selection will focus on artistic attempts (many of them successful) to restore environmental damage
Alone or with the help of local communities, these artists have cleaned up polluted areas, planted wheat field, provided pollinators with colourful and appetizing flowery landscapes, built hanging and floating gardens, initiated edible and medicinal urban farms, developed schemes for sharing excess food and bred more resilient chicken breeds
I interviewed Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke about The 3D Additivist Manifesto and The 3D Additivist Cookbook for this year’s edition of the Digital Design Weekend 2017 in London
Maya Jay Varadaraj sees the glass bangles worn by married women in India as objects that condone the oppression of women and normalize violence towards them. Her Khandayati project uses household objects to reduce these bangles to dust and then transform them into spinning weapons
The artists and activists of Art the Arms Fair want to raise awareness about the London arms fair and the deadly consequences of selling arms. Hundreds of artists have submitted work, including Guerrilla Girls, Peter Kennard & Darren Cullen
In January 2017, artist Louise Ashcroft invited herself to be an artist in residency at Westfield Shopping Centre. That’s the mega mall in Stratford, East London. Because there’s nothing remotely boring, mass manufactured nor glittery about her work (and also because she is quietly plotting the demise of capitalism), Ashcroft spent her time there undercover, pretending she was only looking for a bit of shopping fun
Sholette lays out clear examples of art’s deep involvement in capitalism: the dizzying prices achieved by artists who pander to the financial elite, the proliferation of museums that contribute to global competition between cities in order to attract capital, and the strange relationship between art and rampant gentrification that restructures the urban landscape
The aim of the gamma-radiation project, is to develop an emergency-infrastructure that can be deployed within minutes, by activating your (covered) webcam from a webpage