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The current issue of the Portuguese online arts, culture and technology magazine Interact focuses on art, activism and digital networks and includes an article by Helen Varley Jamieson that looks at the impact and effectiveness of online activism through cyberformance.

Networked Conversations as Activism discusses the methods, processes, challenges and results of the cyberformance projects make-shift and We have a situation! Both projects facilitated networked conversations around urgent topics, between local and global, proximal and online, audiences. The article concludes that the proto-political engagement and awareness-raising achieved through these project is more impactful than comparatively passive forms of online activism such as petitions and “clicktivism”.

Read the full article here (in English).

“We have a situation!” is the subject of a chapter on cyberformance and civic engagement in post-democracy, recently published in “Convergence of Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Global Civic Engagement“, ed. Ryan Shin, (IGI Global, 2016; ISBN 9781522516651).

The chapter, written by Helen Varley Jamieson, discusses how “We have a situation!” uses cyberformance  to provoke conversations around urgent contemporary issues. Through heterarchical co-creation processes and real-time online events, temporary networked communities emerge and engage in creative problem-solving. The fifth “situation,” created at Multicidade Festival in Rio de Janeiro in November 2015, addressed the problem of water pollution in the context of the approaching 2016 Olympic Games. This chapter chronicles the process of creating and presenting this event and proposes that cyberformance fosters an intimate proto-political form of online engagement as a positive alternative to increasingly commodified activism in commercialised internet spaces. The chapter concludes that networked arts projects – in social, artistic and educational contexts – have an important role to play in the post-democratic reconfiguration of civic engagement, agency and activism.

During the second half of 2016, I will be working with staff, students and artists in Coventry, UK on the creation and presentation of the sixth “situation”. We’ll be focus on the social and community situation that has developed as the university has rapidly expanded in the town centre, dramatically altering the population demographic and the daily life experience for the people of Coventry. For this project, I’ll be the Disruptive Media Learning Lab‘s first International Artist in Residence, and will collaborate with Rachelle Knowles, associate head of the School of Art and Design, who participated in the Graz situation in 2013.
Continue reading “We have a situation in Coventry!”