Featuring original essays from prominent media scholars discussing Banksy and Shepard Fairey, foundational texts such as Mark Dery’s culture jamming manifesto, and artwork by and interviews with noteworthy culture jammers including the Guerrilla Girls, The Yes Men, and Reverend Billy, Culture Jamming makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of creative resistance and participatory culture
Category Archive: activism
Finding the Operator presents the documentation of a series of attempts to find out who the operator(s) of a specific government owned CCTV camera is, initially through freedom of information requests and later through the construction of an electronic device that broadcasts messages that can only be read using a CCTV camera
Socially engaged artists need not be aligned (and may often be opposed) to the public sector and to institutionalized systems. In many countries, structures of democratic governance and public responsibility are shifting, eroding, and being remade in profound ways—driven by radical economic, political, and global forces. According to what terms and through what means can art engage with these changes?
advertising
Artist Daniel Mayrit (famous for a photo series which presents the portraits of the most powerful people in the City of London as if they were delinquents caught up on CCTV cameras) demonstrates the absurdity of Spain’s gag laws
The documentary 13th argues that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery except as “punishment for crime,” has not outlawed the practice of slavery. It has merely repackaged it into a ruthlessly efficient system of mass incarceration.
One post about two important stories: a series of excellent webinars dedicated to art&activism and a few words about the origins of Unthanksgiving Day!
social
Short list of publications worth buying/downloading. Because there’s a world out there that refuses to give in to bigots, idiots and predominant dogmas
Focusing on the alliance between Apple and Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, Jack Linchuan Qiu examines how corporations and governments everywhere collude to build systems of domination, exploitation, and alienation
The exhibition questions the underlying myths within design, deconstructs its emerging signs, and examines how technology determines the future landscape of design
Each of the essay in the book explores a different case study: ‘anti-Indianism’ in New Mexico, influence of Israeli policing structures on the LAPD, New York city’s strategy to rely more on invasive policing than on mass incarceration, LA Skid Row as a testing ground for police practices that will be exported to the world, links between criminalization of poverty and real estate speculation, state violence and gentrification in El Salvador, etc.
The exhibition Hormonal at LifeSpace Gallery in Dundee brings together work by three women artists who, each in their own witty way, reflect on the hormone oestrogen and how it is understood socially, politically, technologically and environmentally.
The objects, books, artifacts, gadgets and artworks offer a contemplation on autonomy as a disappearing modus operandi of political action, while workshops, discussions and demos focus on the devices we use every day: How do they work? What individual data traces do they capture? Where do these go, and what kind of control can one regain?
Destructables.org is a DIY repository of projects of protest and creative dissent. The site features user generated step-by-step video and photo/text based instructions for a wide range of dissenting actions, including art actions, billboard alterations, shop-dropping, protest strategies, protest props, methods of civil disobedience, stencil work, and many other forms of public dissent – from the practical and tactical to the creative and illegal. It is a living archive and resource for the art and activist communities
global aCtIVISm (the capitalized letters form the Latin word civis, emphasizing the power of citizens) describes and documents politically inspired art—global art practices that draw attention to grievances and demand the transformation of existing conditions through actions, demonstrations, and performances in public space
British photographer Edmund Clark and counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black have assembled photographs and documents that confront the nature of contemporary warfare and the invisible mechanisms of state control
Spanning the abolitionist movement, early labor movements, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and up to the present antiglobalization movement and beyond, A People’s Art History of the United States is a tool kit for today’s artists and activists to adapt past tactics to the present, utilizing art and media as a form of civil disobedience
The 11th edition of this festival of unconventional and radical art was anchored into the most banal manifestations of our networked society, one that is made of surveillance, social bullying, aesthetics of power, communication guerrilla and disintegration of the space of free speech and ideas that internet was meant to be
YES! !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Love these guys. I didn’t realize how much at first. I knew several of their works. The parcel for Assange, the architectural bug at HeK in Basel, the bot that shops on the darknet. I just didn’t realize these works were from the same 2 people
A broad view on media piracy as well as comparative perspectives on recent issues and historical facts regarding piracy. The book contains a compilation of texts on grass-roots situations whose stories describe strategies developed to share, distribute and experience cultural content outside of the confines of local economies, politics or laws
Authors Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it
This exploration of visual protest since 9/11 isn’t constricted by boundaries nor hierarchies. Online interventions rub shoulders with good old posters, murals with performances, court sketches with design objects. The people who rebel, resist and visually express their opposition are famous artists such as Banksy and Ai Weiwei. More often than not, however, they are anonymous or operate behind pseudonyms
Annie Machon is an intelligence expert and author who worked for 6 years as an intelligence officer for MI5, the UK domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. Together with her ex-partner, David Shayler, she resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes
Media artist and beekeeper Annemarie Maes has been monitoring and working with urban bee colonies since 2009, not only to develop novel art works but also to better understand the connections between city honeybees and urban ecosystems, to raise awareness among citizens about the plight of the pollinating bees and to call for ecological activism
Next week, NOME, one of those too rare galleries exploring art, politics, and technology, is going to open Jacob Appelbaum’s first solo show in Germany. There will be stuffed pandas, portraits of political dissidents and far too many secrets
Pater is a graphic designer who gave himself the mission to create visual narratives about complex political issues. He is not only interested in flying machines of death but also in disaster floods caused by global warming, Dutch sweets that evoke everyday racism, fishermen vs oil tankers, citizen journalism in countries with censorship, digital surveillance, etc
The first issue of The Funambulist Magazine argues that all cities contain a certain degree of militarization. From Lahore to Oakland, CA, the use of walls and other architectural apparatuses of control vary; yet, they all bear witness of the will for architecture to organize bodies in space
CTM’s work combines appealing aesthetics, humour and language with actions that invite people to think, question and reclaim their civil rights. Their most famous project is the Tactical Ice Cream Unit, a truck distributing free ice cream along with propaganda developed by local progressive groups. Another of their initiative saw them launch a bank heist contest…
For 5 years, the Gulf Labor Coalition, a group of artists and writers, has been pressuring Saadiyat’s Western cultural brands to ensure worker protections. Gulf Labor has coordinated a boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and pioneered direct action that has involved spectacular museum occupations. As part of a year-long initiative, an array of artists, writers, and activists submitted a work, a text, or an action
Drone crews, analysts, intelligence officials and military commanders all speak frankly to the author about how armed drones revolutionized warfare–and the unexpected costs to some of those involved
With his public intervention Overexposed, artist Paolo Cirio disseminates unauthorized pictures of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials throughout major cities. Cirio obtained snapshots of NSA, CIA, and FBI officers through social media hacks. Then, using his HD Stencils graffiti technique, he spray-paints high-resolution reproductions of the misappropriated photos onto public walls
The talks from the panel Tracking Drones, Reporting Lives zoomed out from the personal perspective and brought together a data journalist, a documentary director and an artist whose work examines the drone issue
Two of the speakers of the DNL Drone event have or used to have a direct, daily experience of drones.
Asma al-Ghul is a journalist and author from Gaza who writes about human rights, social issues and is never afraid to openly criticize Palestinian ruling authorities. She spoke about everyday life under drone surveillance and sometimes attacks.
The other speaker was Brandon Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who joined the Predator drone Program in 2006 and left in 2011 when he started questioning the ethics of the program and his own role as a soldier
The practice of targeted killing by drones raises many questions: “How many civilians have been killed as collateral damage during these strikes?” “And even if we’re talking about militants, how can the killings be justified when there has been judicial supervision? “If these drones can reach their targets anywhere, then how is the battlefield defined?” “Right now, only 3 countries use drones for targeted killings: the U.S., Israel and the UK. Where will this stop?” “And if these targeted killings are illegal, why does Europe keep silent?”
Facta is an experimental publication orchestrated by Fred Paulino and the Gambiologia group. The first issue of Facta addressed the ‘science of Apocalypse’, the next one looked at people who accumulate, collect and re-purpose. This issue is all about the hacker culture, poetics and ethics in all their guises and deeds
Suohpanterror is an anonymous group of Sami artists who use wit, iconic images and humour as weapons to comment on the issues their people have to face on a daily basis: discrimination, racism, marginalisation, colonialism, dam building, logging, military bombing ranges, as well as exploitation by the tourism and energy industries. And of course, climate change
Short-term, community-based projects–from pop-up parks to open streets initiatives–have become a powerful and adaptable new tool of urban activists, planners, and policy-makers seeking to drive lasting improvements in their cities and beyond. These quick, often low-cost, and creative projects are the essence of the Tactical Urbanism movement
The book and exhibition ‘Networked Disruption’ highlights the mutual interferences between business, art and disruption. Because it brings together the heterogeneous practices of hackers, artists, networkers, whistleblowers, activists and entrepreneurs, the concept is dense in reflections, provocations and references to contemporary society
An invitation to artists, researchers, activists and critical engineers to submit ideas, thoughts, and designs for the future of 3D printing. The submissions should reflect on the current state of additive manufacturing, find the potential encoded into the most challenging 3D printed objects and push 3D printing to its most speculative and radical limits. Once collected, these submissions will form The 3D Additivist Cokbook
The goal of this small and smart web series is to discuss the way biotechnology is changing our society: What are its political, social, and even philosophical implications? What happens when manipulating life becomes as simple as writing a line of code? And more importantly, what does this mean for average citizens and their future?
Karl Philips is a Belgian (h)activist, performance and conceptual artist who casts a critical but always witty glance at society, paying particular attention to cracks in consumerism, town planning, advertising, and turning upside-down their logic