research and exhibition at MIT 2011
November 6th, 2011

About the archive

DISOBEDIENCE An on going video archive.

 

Disobedience is an on-going archive and a video station about the relationship between artistic practice and civil and social disobedience. Founded in 2005, the project is a guide to the geography of recent protest, from the social struggles in Italy in 1977 to the anti-globalisation actions before and after the Seattle protests in 1999. In particular Disobedience is an investigation into practices of art activism emerging after the fall of the Soviet bloc that are today developing on a global scale.

 

Contemporary dissent manifests itself less as theoretical criticism or protest than as defection, exodus and exit. Abandonment rather than confrontation: the search for the new participatory spaces, constituent practices, micro-actions on a global scale, and forms of self-organisation and empowerment are the main strategies of the new movements.  Disobedience is an atlas of the plurality of resistance tactics such as direct action, counter-information, reclamation projects, parallel planning processes, urban tactics, communication tools for creative resistance, self-managed architecture, biological resistance and media activism that have been developed by artists and filmmakers.

 

Many of these phenomena are associated with ‘tactical media’, which was born out of the DIY philosophy that spread with the ‘electronic revolution’. From low cost video recording tools to free web access, technological devices became accessible to groups or individuals (hackers, interventionists, culture jammers, etc.) that felt they’d been damaged by the mainstream culture. Using a diverse range of methodologies these groups and projects address some of the most fundamental and urgent challenges of contemporary urban life.

 

The goal of the archive is to create a common space for artistic output and for political action, understanding that society itself is changing and with it the language it produces as a political subject and as a media object. Disobedience is designed as a long-term work-in-progress and is presented as non-comprehensive and provisional, intended to expand over time.

by obeyanimals | Posted in About the archive, THE ARCHIVE | No Comments » |













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