Fist Is Raised

Pedagogy: What in Art Makes Change
Published November 23, 2012 - No Comments
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 a ...
read more
Insurgency and Anarchafeminism
Published November 20, 2012 - No Comments
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/DIW ...
read more
Tactical Media and Disturbance Art
Published November 17, 2012 - No Comments
“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 resi ...
read more
Power is Just a Snack
Published November 15, 2012 - No Comments
Power is going to come up a lot, so it’s worthwhile to think about a bit. One of the ways that I am interested in how activist art manifests is against, alongside, parallel to, and in opposition to P/power. But how does it work? Chomp, Chomp A mental exercise: Imagine a delicious cracker ...
read more
Hierarchical Power, Invisible Users
Published November 9, 2012 - No Comments
“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 w ...
read more
Makers: Actors, Artists, … Users
Published November 5, 2012 - No Comments
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 ...
read more
Activist Art & Participatory Art
Published November 3, 2012 - No Comments
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 ...
read more
Intro To Study
Published November 1, 2012 - No Comments
Over the next three months there will be weekly [ish] posts with writing and readings. Learn with me, talk back to me and each other. To get started and read along, I suggest the following: “Contributions to a Resistance Visual Culture Glossary” by Nato Thompson, http://journalofaesthe ...
read more