Panel Statement

Keywords: Media Activism, Guerrilla Television, IndyMedia Center, Culture Jamming, Digital Storytelling, Cancer Treatment, LGBT Health, Experiential Knowledge, Coded Infrastructures, Aesthetics

Our 21st century media environment has grown more immersive and predominant with the invention of communication technologies such as telephones, satellites, video cameras, and computers. We are all now electronically connected, able to communicate, observe, and react to what is happening anywhere in the world in an instant. How do we make sense of these myriad electronic messages and messengers? Can we trust or understand the monetization processes behind the code that creates and designs our mediated contemporary reality? More importantly, how can we disrupt and transform the mainstream media’s dominant control over most of these messages? During this panel, we shared our knowledge of disruptive media activism, presented in three parts: a) Examining its historical origins; b) Merging cultural and technological processes to undermine a code-controlled Internet; and c) Populating our shared public social networks with culturallycompetent media artifacts, transcoding experiential knowledge into short digital stories.

Presentation abstracts:

1. Robin Oppenheimer – Be the Media: Media Activism Tactics                                                     Like today’s Millenials who grew up on the Internet, early media activists were the first generation to grow up watching the “new” technology of Television. They were mostly college students radicalized by the counterculture politics of the late 60s who also read McLuhan and understood the power of mass media to inform and shape their lives
2. Victoria Moulder & Michael Heidt – Coded Infrastructures                                                      Victoria Moulder & Michael Heidt discuss their aesthetic strategies for relating the formal traits of code with the situational requirements of concrete activist practice.
3. Lorna Boschman – Experiential Knowledge in Cancer Narratives                                               For the past three years, I have been the Project Coordinator and a Post-Doctoral Researcher with Cancer’s Margins, a cross-Canadian research study. We use a community-and arts-based approach to exploring sexual and gender diversity, and experiences of cancer health, support and care. We look at how LGBT people locate and share knowledge after they’ve been diagnosed and treated for breast or gynecologic cancer. Our research-based approach to digital storytelling combines professional mentorship with peer knowledge exchange to create powerful and personal digital stories.

• Lorna Boschman, is a Faculty Associate at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Project Coordinator for the Cancer’s Margins study, led by Dr. Mary Bryson. This artsand community-based LGBQ and T research project explores sexual and gender diversity, experiences of breast and gynecologic cancer health, support/care, and the ways we locate and share cancer health knowledge.
• Michael Heidt, t is a computer scientist, emerging artist and PhD student studying at the Chemnitz University of Technology, in Germany. In his most recent media art installation, PRMD (2014) he explored practices of identity construction with respect to historical narrative and code; and the juxtaposition of digital form and interactional situations.
• Vicki Moulder is the author of interactionart.org, an artist and PhD candidate studying at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She holds a Master of Arts from SIAT and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in visual communications. Molder is a pioneer in the field of social art practice co-producing artworks with not-for-profit organizations since 1988.
• Robin Oppenheimer, USA, is a media arts historian, curator and scholar who has worked in the field since 1980. She was Executive Director of two media arts centers in Atlanta and Seattle and, until June 2015, was a Lecturer at the University of Washington Bothell, with a PhD in Interactive Arts and Technology. Her areas of research include media arts histories,  participatory media, and media activism.

Full text (PDF) p. 968-975