[-empyre-] welcome and initial ruminations

[Selmin Kara]

Hello everyone from Toronto,



To follow up on Patrick's post, I wanted to drop a note and individually
welcome you to our November discussion myself. We are looking forward to an
engaging month of conversations on documenting digital art activism. We are
also grateful to Tim and Renate for their hospitality, both at the School
of Criticism at Cornell University, where Patrick, Camilla, and I met a few
years ago, and on --empyre.



"Documenting digital artivism" is perhaps a loaded topic, as it points to
an intersection among four different areas of research and practice:
documentary practices and documentation, digital practices and new media,
art, and activism. In my own experience, discussing these four things under
the same framework poses a challenge as people often ask for clarification
especially in relation to what artivism implies or how it can be
distinguished from other modes of activism that entail documentation and
mediation (which are themselves perceived as artistic activities). I am
currently working on 2 articles that deal with the documentation of art
activism, for example – one on the documentation of Ai Weiwei’s “hooligan”
artivism and the other on the documentary videos that came out of Turkish
Gezi protests, which were marked with the rapid spread of art activist
practices among the urban population through the aid of social media. Both
of these projects necessitate thinking documentation, art, and activism
together, but meet with resistance from the audience when I present ideas
about them in public presentations.



The resistance comes from 3 main objections. 1. Some scholars and
practitioners think of art (especially when we consider the popular
network-era-forms of disruptive artivism, such as culture jamming and
hacktivism) as weakening the discourse of activism. In other words,
artistic activities are seen as bourgeois engagements that dilute the
masses' or underprivileged communities' urgent need for social change. 2.
Others think that any form of activism in the age of networks already
contains an artistic element, since almost everything is documented and
documentary practices themselves blur the distinction between art and
politics (hence the question I often receive: “is a documentary on activism
a documentation of artivism?) 3. “The spectacle of revolt” as Sean Cubitt
so eloquently put it -- when describing the effect of social justice
movements -- in the last month’s discussion creates a political aesthetic
of its own when widely disseminated through media. That introduces the
element of spectacle to the equation.



How to approach documentation, art, and activism in the age of networks,
then? Instead of responding to that question with a clear definition, I
suggest opening it up to discussion here. Hopefully, our responses
(criticisms and resistances) will be diverse.


Sincerely,

Selmin


Selmin Kara

Assistant Professor of Documentary and New Media

OCAD University
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