Hemispheric Digital Constellations
Picture this: Activists from all over the world, who have never met in person, gather at the website of the Mexican government for a virtual sit-in organized by the Electronic Disturbance Theater to support the Zapatista rebellion.
Or this: A group of outraged New Yorkers denounces pervasive surveillance by performing mute versions of classics such as Waiting for Godot and 1984 in front of surveillance cameras in subway stations.
Or, in Argentina, an artist collective uses Google's logo to commemorate the assassination of two young activists and to demand justice.
Or, the case of Cuban-American performance artist, Coco Fusco, who reenacts a real-life episode of labor abuse involving a maquiladora (assembly line factory) worker for online viewers.
This digital book explores ways in which artists and activists use different platforms such as the Internet, surveillance cameras, cell phones, and theater, to educate and mobilize people in response to critical situations. In the examples presented in this book, artists and activists craft events online and offline to disseminate information, create communities of solidarity, and advance proposals for conflict-resolution and autonomy.
How do artists and activists manage
to transform the passive spectators of local and global dramas into
active participants? In what ways do these multilayered performances
expose the different transnational dynamics at play?
Created specifically for a digital media environment, this project proposes a hemispheric framing of local and transnational performances in order to map out the Americas as a network of interrelated cultural practices that are specific to the continent and its histories of oppression and resistance (although many of the practices surveyed here travel and are reproduced in other regions of the world as well, as in the example of the cacerolazos). Such a framing favors not only our understanding of the connections between performance events and their geopolitical contexts, but it also allows for the emergence of transnational connections that have not been sufficiently accounted for in previous histories.
Digital media offers concrete tools to generate multiple readings, invite contributions, and spark critical interventions. I envision this project as a resource for those interested in teaching hemispheric cultural productions as well as a tool for those invested in learning performance tactics that can be appropriated, recycled, and/ or hybridized.
Or this: A group of outraged New Yorkers denounces pervasive surveillance by performing mute versions of classics such as Waiting for Godot and 1984 in front of surveillance cameras in subway stations.
Or, in Argentina, an artist collective uses Google's logo to commemorate the assassination of two young activists and to demand justice.
Or, the case of Cuban-American performance artist, Coco Fusco, who reenacts a real-life episode of labor abuse involving a maquiladora (assembly line factory) worker for online viewers.
This digital book explores ways in which artists and activists use different platforms such as the Internet, surveillance cameras, cell phones, and theater, to educate and mobilize people in response to critical situations. In the examples presented in this book, artists and activists craft events online and offline to disseminate information, create communities of solidarity, and advance proposals for conflict-resolution and autonomy.
How do artists and activists manage
to transform the passive spectators of local and global dramas into
active participants? In what ways do these multilayered performances
expose the different transnational dynamics at play?
Created specifically for a digital media environment, this project proposes a hemispheric framing of local and transnational performances in order to map out the Americas as a network of interrelated cultural practices that are specific to the continent and its histories of oppression and resistance (although many of the practices surveyed here travel and are reproduced in other regions of the world as well, as in the example of the cacerolazos). Such a framing favors not only our understanding of the connections between performance events and their geopolitical contexts, but it also allows for the emergence of transnational connections that have not been sufficiently accounted for in previous histories.
Digital media offers concrete tools to generate multiple readings, invite contributions, and spark critical interventions. I envision this project as a resource for those interested in teaching hemispheric cultural productions as well as a tool for those invested in learning performance tactics that can be appropriated, recycled, and/ or hybridized.
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