Gestures of Concern (Book)

2017

The complexities of post-modernity tend to dissolve any facile model of direct cause-and-effect in politics, and yet as a democratic polity, we look for the comfort in knowing that political expression can enact change. Protest art, or acts of creative expression intended to resist dominant powers, forces, and structures, models the potential for political expression to create change that is not immediate, direct, or obvious, but rather "moves the social" through expressivity and aesthetics. While these features lend themselves to an analysis guided by affect theory, this sub-discipline within communication studies has tended to lack the methodological specificity to reproduce or expand applications. Daniel Stern's vitality pentad acts as a heuristic by which to study rhetorical objects; these objects are studied due to their expressivity, rather than their appeal to reason. Stern excludes "still" media forms such as photographs and illustrations; however, by looking at the way in which digital artifacts are imbued with movement in its networked path, we can understand that all digital media are time-based. The objects of study speak to the temporal, vital dimensions of digital protest art: Turkey's Vandalina art collective, which places protest stickers on transit cars, demonstrates how force and scale engender feeling of intimacy in public spaces. Iran's Zahra's Paradise, a webcomic-turned-graphic novel, offers differing temporal environments for the reader and weaves its aesthetics into the narrative to create a sense of space and place. Finally, the images of #HandsUpDontShoot, through their directional iii pull across digital networks, illustrates social media's tendency to remix aesthetic features of older media forms. Major insights drawn from this research speak to the political importance of subject formationor interventions thereinand vitality forms as a method for rhetorical criticism, which allows the rhetorical critic to be more specific and methodical in applying affect theory to rhetoric. It also challenges the positivist notion that political expression must result in measurable change in order to be validated. Finally, this project addresses the virtual potentiality of digital data and offers a perspective that sees all digital media as time-based. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Dr. Darrin Hicks, who not only directed this dissertation, giving me invaluable (and sometimes cringe-inducing) revisions that infinitely improved this project, but also acted as a sounding board, friend, and a pretty good tenant. Additional thanks must be given to Dr. Christina Foust for seeing promise in my research and for helping me navigate the dissertation process, the world of academia, and life in general. I am indebted to your mentorship. Thanks to my dissertation committee, including Dr. Joshua Hanan, Dr. Kate Willink, and Dr. Trace Reddell, all of whom saw the import and promise of this dissertation. Thank you to Dr. Armond Towns, who suggested that the case study of #HandsUpDontShoot be expanded to focus on the aesthetic parallels to anti-lynching photography, thus immensely improving that chapter. I am grateful to Dr. Justin Eckstein, who stuck his neck out for me on multiple occasions, which opened up many doors for me. Thanks also for your support and encouragement. Thank you to Dr. Lindsey Thomas, who reviewed Chapter Four and helped with the additionally tedious task of formatting for submission. Thanks to my parents for believing in me and encouraging me to pursue two terminal degrees and not judging me for the pay cut that came with that. Thanks to Eric and Keith, who show me that families don't have to fit into a mold to be loving and full. Finally, all of my love and gratitude to Woody Hoyt for making it all work with 1.5 incomes for three years, for doing basically all of the household chores for a year, for moving with me, and for encouraging, supporting, and loving me even when I was cranky and sleep-deprived. I couldn't have done this without you. TABLE OF CONTENTS .

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019

While artistic practices have been central to political movements throughout the 20th century, much analysis treats these modes of expression as distinct or separate from more traditional forms of civic practices and everyday political participation. Building on discussions of the cultural turn in civic agency (Dahlgren, 2008) and the shortcoming of cultural citizenship (Couldry, 2006), the authors of this paper interrogate the relationship between affect, artistic practices and participatory politics. We discuss the findings from a research project in which the researchers worked with artist-facilitators involved in a community engagement initiative around the 2015 Canadian Federal Election. The investigation made use of an innovative combination of qualitative methods including probe-based research methods to better understand how participatory artistic practices can play a role in the election cycle. Through an account of our investigation conducted with these artists, we explore the role of artistic practices and emotion in navigating the distinctions between politics and the political in everyday life.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019

This research investigated the performances of participatory public art as ways of taking political agency in contemporary democracy. We considered these ‘maximalist’ forms of participation – ‘multi-sited’, as the language of democratic theory suggests, in both the political sphere of art and the formal arena of politics – as ways of doing, acting, and performing citizenship in democratic societies. Drawing upon the ‘cultural turn’ in citizenship studies, we assumed civic cultures as central variables to explain these forms of political agency. Referring to media audience research, we adopted an analytical framework to explore the artists’ civic cultures that are in action in public urban spaces. The analysis focused on performances of citizenship developed in Sardinia (Italy). The research shed light on the artists’ knowledge and values, the multiple layers of audience participation envisaged in their practices of communication, their (dis)trust towards institutions and non-elite a...

Public Art Dialogue

Journal of Arts & Communities, 2017

Ethnic minority artists are often entrapped in cultural spaces that define their representation as ‘marginal’ and limit their visibility and reach. The challenge facing minority artists – like Muslim, Arab or South-Asian American artists, to name a few – lies in creating spaces that would free their plays from being demarcated as ‘marginal’ or ‘subaltern’, and attract a wider audience to view and engage with their issues and concerns. Ethnic theatre initiatives are actively interacting with the wider community to change such narrative by creating new spaces for the distribution of their art, and imbedding civic engagement in the mosaic of that art. This article investigates a new socially-engaged discourse being developed by companies like Silk Road Rising (SRR) in Chicago, whose artists are disseminating their work to new virtual audiences in digital ‘counterpublics’. In particular, the article focuses on the company’s recent direction to harness the online public sphere in the making and distribution of artistic works to challenge cultural, political and institutional limitations. SRR is benefiting from and harnessing new technologies to: firstly, make its projects visible and accessible to a wider audience; secondly, engage its audiences in a participatory process that would effectively render them as ‘spect-actors’; and thirdly, redefine the artistic output of ethnic artists as polycultural, rather than subaltern or marginal.

The Journal of Public Space, City Space Architecture / UN-Habitat , 2020

Contemporary mobile media affords new insights into social and creative practices while expanding our understanding of what kinds of public space matter. With the continual rise of the social in contemporary art which sees relationships as the medium, smartphones have become important devices for individual political expression, social exchange and now contemporary art. This article draws on media studies and contemporary art theories to discuss #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity (2020), a socially engaged artwork engaging more than 300 contributors in a few short weeks within the online and physical spaces of RMIT University in the heart of Melbourne, Australia. This artwork was instigated during the initial February 2020 outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China in response to expressions of fear and isolation, travel bans, and growing racism targeting international students. It employed one of the most pervasive barometers of popular and public culture today, the selfie. Through its messages of care alongside signs of solidarity from Chinese students suffering anxiety and isolation, #unmaskedselfiesinsolidarity moved individual selfie expressions of identity into the realm of socially engaged arts and public space.

… of the 5th International Conference on …, 2011

We report our experiences of how public voice, news reporting, and sensor information can be blended and mediated digitally in ways different from the traditional formats of civic debate. We use Klimatrends (Climate Trends), an iPhone app and related infrastructure, as a probe to understand how citizens, journalists, and other stakeholders can engage in conversations and reflections on an important topic or event understood as a space for aestheticized public voice. By attempting to make news "felt" through bridging an "affective gap" between readers/consumers and news/information providers we offer a tentative design strategy for public engagement with civic debate.

Public Art Dialogue Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020

This article seeks to account for the disruptive and often unwelcome interlocutor of public art: the protesting and dissenting public. I will do this through a discussion of two artworks by artist Suzanne Lacy, Code 33: Emergency, Clear the Air (1999) and Between the Door and the Street (2013), both projects that had a deep commitment to public consultation and collaboration during the development process and presentation, yet despite this, attracted protests from the activist communities the works’ sought to serve. I draw on anti-racist, critical whiteness and feminist theory, as well as recent scholarship on the politics of listening, to take seriously the nature of the disagreements raised by the protestors in each case. In doing so, I question the dialogic, collaborative models employed in Lacy’s projects, which found the protestors actions incompatible with the political aims of the works. I argue, however, that a politics of listening compels us to consider which speakers, and which speaking positions, get left out of the terms set by the dialogical, collaborative encounter. I contend that the protesting public could instead be considered generative, critically engaged interlocutors who bring attention to properly political questions that belong in the "good" narratives of public art.

Aestheticized Politics, Visual Culture, and Emergent Forms of Digital Practice, 2013

The aftermath of the 2009 Iranian presidential election will be explored here from a visual perspective, with attention to its aestheticized politics. The revolution occurred online as well as in the streets, but it has been difficult to evaluate the effect of online activity on the offline world. I argue that both the notion of circulation in new media and theories of representation are insufficient to address the impact of digital culture on protest art and its effect on the public sphere. I propose a theory of practice that accounts for new forms of social practice that is based on a convergence mode of production.

The workshop re-examines the nexus between aesthetics and politics by turning away from their conception as institutionally or communicatively differentiated spheres and instead take a "practice turn" to have a look at what is actually done, and how, and to what effect – both in art, design and aesthetics and in politics, policy-making and governance. The workshop will be opened with keynotes by Antoine Hennion and Sophia Prinz. The aim is to further probe and outline a more conceptually refined practice-oriented approach toward the intertwined and reciprocally constitutive relationship between aesthetic and political practices. We hope to learn from concrete empirical examples about a variety of specific ways in which sensorial perceptions and collective subjectivities and agencies are shaped and about how they relate to each other, interact, and co-produce or jointly work to dismantle collectively lived realities. We expect that a focus on sensorial perception, affectivity and aesthetic practice will contribute a novel perspective on the (un)making of collective orders as it traditionally concerns studies of politics, governance and innovation, but where, so far, social order has largely been reduced to institutional, discursive and cognitive dimensions.