Syllabus
Week 1: Art, media, and activism—how we got to today (lecture and seminar)
Sets the scene through a brief history of art- and media-activist practices leading up to today, examining the impact of social and technological change; also looks at the impact of networks on art’s autonomy, and the relation between theory and practice, as well as the specificity of the digital as a medium
Week 2: Capital, labour, and value in a digital age (lecture and seminar)
Looks at the ways contemporary political economy has been theorized, together with the possibilities and difficulties that communicative capital poses for organising, popular resistance, and subversive artistic praxis
Week 3: Tactical media, performance, design (lecture and seminar)
Looks at a variety of critical and aesthetic interventions, including electronic civil disobedience, DOS attacks, cybersquatting, Floodnet applications, tactical cartography and visualization, and so forth; also looks at the media activism as performance and aesthetic practice the role of art and design in critical media interventions, especially the role of speculative design fiction
Week 4: The Twitter Revolution (lecture and seminar)
Looks at the role of social media activism in protests and unrest in Moldova, Iran, and the Arab spring examining the relation between twitter and the streets, and the limits and possibilities of digital participation
Week 5: Media squares (lecture and seminar)
Looks at technologies of communication and participation in the Occupy, 15-M and Nuit Debout movements, examining the relation between digital and real-world organising, as well as connections between smart mobs and DIY artistic production
Week 7: Designing media activism (workshop)
In-class crits with pecha kucha presentations of group design projects
Week 8: Digital populisms and far-right co-options (lecture and seminar)—with visiting speaker Dr Paolo Gerbaudo (KCL)
Looks at the use of digital strategies by populist movements today, such as the gilets jaunes, and at the appropriation of critical and tactical-media approaches by the far right, evaluating the political ramifications of these developments for the theory and practice of media activism
Week 9: Digital parties and democratic reformations (lecture and seminar)
Looks at how digital technologies are transforming democratic forms and institutions, with a focus on the potential for social media to reconfigure representation and the relation between leader and base, and on how big data is changing campaigning
Week 10: Whither media activism? (workshop)
A hands-on exploration of online interventions, micropractices, and design fictions that speculate about or advocate for digital futures.
For further information please contact cim@warwick.ac.uk or visit https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/apply-to-study/cross-disciplinary-postgraduate-modules/im933-media-activism/