"99% OFF" (WK 3)

Income inequality and the need for campaign finance reform are directly linked, of course. Despite the clear robbery of neoliberal policies that cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations – with US productivity increasing 73.4% as opposed to wages increasing only 11.1% since 1973 – “tax reform” (read: “tax cuts for the wealthy”) is expected to be the only legislation that Trump’s administration and Republicans in Congress will be able to agree on. Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money is a great intro. into the relation of these two things, but one need only look to the sad hypocrisy apparent in Ted Cruz’s backing Donald Trump after meeting with their mutual donor, Robert Mercer. Shortly after Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump at the RNC, video of Cruz phone-banking for Trump surfaced. Mercer ultimately provided Trump’s campaign with Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, assets almost as valuable as the millions in campaign donations and outside expenditure. The military-industrial complex is of course another enormous branch of corruption in our political system, benefiting from a ballooning defense budget for at least 25 years.

I decided to create my image based around appropriation of an iconic image that most would recognize and that, in its way, has some interesting function of its own. I am drawing most from Crimp’s ideas of appropriation and how stamps function in our national discourse, especially hoping for it to resonate with the idea of food stamps. But primarily, I was looking for the dissonance of seeing a familiar image changed enough to catch the viewer’s eye. I doctored the original “Forever” stamp that read “Equality - FOREVER” to be more realistic given the disproportionate influence that corporations and the wealthy can have in elections – especially at the state level. In 2012, for example, candidates for House representatives who outspent their opponents won 95% of the time. So I changed the stamp’s year from “2012” to “2010,” the year of the Citizens United supreme court decision, which allowed undisclosed and unlimited outside expenditure in political races. The flag features corporate logos hearkens to the Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to be seen as legal Persons and sanctifies campaign spending as exercising their right to free “speech.” Also, as they are in place of the stars, I hope the broader feeling of the rich representing the people comes across. Now, for example, the public relies on swaying big business and the rich to advocate on our behalves, such as opposition to the Paris Climate accords and the work of billionaire Tom Steyer in bringing spending on lobbying climate change to a level comparable to wealthy interests such as the casino lobby. My only regret, looking back, is finding a way to fit “99% OFF” on the price tag in MS Paint!

Resources for fighting for campaign finance reform and info:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/books/review/dark-money-by-jane-mayer.html?_r=0

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/citizens_united.php

http://www.wolf-pac.com/

http://letsfreecongress.org/

- Teddy Lance

Shoot (Week 3)

Right before I decided to finally get down to business working on this assignment, I had been steadily sinking into a Twitter black hole of Tomi Lahren and Piers Morgan followers. There are no other living celebrity/social media personalities who make me want to wring my body into an all-but-obliterated pile of dust more than Tomi Lahren and Piers Morgan. This I know about myself, so allowing my addicted fingers to type their names into the search bar and scroll through their latest strings of idiocy is generally what some would consider an act of pure masochism; not only does it lead to such willfully ignorant imbecility as Ms. Lahren equating the email scandals of a former presidential candidate with the rising evidence of real-time foreign interference in our democratic elections, it leads to hundreds of thousands of equally willfully ignorant imbecilic followers with equally strong opinions, and with followers of their own. 

I should probably just block these accounts, as I have with the president's, to spare myself the agony of falling into these nonsensical, public political rabbit holes with the original poster and their leagues of admirers, but I haven't yet, for the same reason I haven't stopped reading the top comments on Facebook articles--as painful as they may be, there's something to be said for observing how people outside my mental intellectual sphere see the same things I'm seeing. 

Because I was entirely absorbed in my visceral hatred for these accounts and others like them, I decided to make that feeling the point of this assignment. I'm both eager and anxious to see how the history books will write about this era, twenty or thirty or fifty years from now, and to see how either totally shocked or utterly unsurprised future students will be to learn of the absurdly overinflated role of Twitter in these times. Twitter has become the social and political crux of the virtual world, much more so than other digital media and networking platforms, I believe, in no small part because it is the platform the president has chosen as his primary megaphone. 

Even before it became such a massive element of politics, Twitter was known as the platform most used as a no-pressure space for virtually any thought, possibly a draft of something later to be posted on Facebook or Instagram (the "old saying" goes, "No one is as happy as they seem on Instagram, or as sad as they seem on Twitter..."). Twitter is the go-to platform for our most careless, least thought-out thoughts--and it can also be an incredible way of reaching out and connecting to people. I've followed threads just in the last week of people in Texas whose phones were about to die, who still needed help, who sent one tweeted plea that got retweeted thousands and thousands of times, and ended up getting them saved. Twitter, more so than Instagram or Facebook, is frequently used to share iPhone footage direct from user to follower documenting personal experiences or observations of police brutality or other public demonstrations of injustice. Social media is amazing for its democratic qualities, but it's also a significant player in the ongoing debates around freedom of speech (whether hate speech is included in those constitutional protections, what constitutes hate speech in the first place) and public trust in mainstream and alternative news sources. 

Essentially: I go through brief phases when I would like to personally murder Twitter and all the inexcusably stupid things it has spawned, until I remember how much good is possible using the same tools (which, like video technology and others before it, has unsettling militant connotations). Worse yet, Twitter is the platform which reminds me, more than any others, just how many people there are who believe what they believe just as strongly and surely as I believe what I believe, and empathy and perspective are all mixed up with what is true. (I think of Facebook as "the original" platform used this way--which, by the truly young and hip, it no longer is--this is why the Facebook logo visually entraps the others.) The tagline is ripped from a Woodrow Wilson misquote when, in 1937,  unfounded suspicions arose that Wilson supported the KKK based on a claim that, after seeing Birth of a Nation, he stated, “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The fact that this statement is "almost certainly apocryphal" (according to The New York Times) just lends itself all the more easily to the tragic, difficult reality of parsing through social media accounts in order to determine some piece of truth. 

Sasha Kohan

Superman is an Illegal Immigrant

In 2013, Define America launched the 'Superman is an Illegal Immigrant' campaign, which was meant to advocate for the rights of Dreamers, or undocumented immigrant children who were protected from deportation by Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The campaign used narratives drawn from popular culture to reconfigure one of the most iconic figures in the American cultural landscape as an undocumented immigrant who uses his considerable powers to assert his nationalistic identity. The underlying implication of the campaign is that as n alien from another planet, Superman is a literal representation of the most extreme state of undocumented immigration, and yet he is an American cultural icon who stands for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" -- a statement which subsumes his legal immigrant status within his cultural assimilation in the country in which he grew up. The DACA program is currently under imminent threat from Trump, who has proposed dismantling it within a period of 6 months from September 2017. In response, immigration activists have launched the #HereToStay social media movement, which is meant to unite a network of people who are ready to support, and fight for immigrants at risk for deportation.

As a researcher interested in digital activism and participatory culture, I have always found memes to have significant political power, particularly because of the ease with which they propagate through social networks. The power of a meme lies not in its virality, but the degree to which it can inspire participation and remixing. As a meme, #HereToStay can be used in a variety of ways that signify the resistance of politically precarious populations to governmental attempts to index, and regulate their numbers, or even pose threats to their rights to exist and assemble in public. The biopolitics of precarity is opposed through the use of memes, which are essentially anonymous, and travel through vast networks through deregulated, connective channels of communication.

In the meme above, for instance, I used an image of Superman breaking through concrete walls (symbolic of Trump's most iconic campaign promise), and announcing his support of the endangered DACA program. Neither the image, nor the message are original creations. However, memes are not about originality; they are about the potential for creative remixing. By combining the graphic of Superman with a core sentiment of immigrant activism, the meme recalls the Define America campaign, and links it with themes of truth, justice, and social reform, while collectively enforcing the idea that immigrant rights are intrinsically American, as represented by the vociferous support of an intrinsically American (albeit alien) superhero figure.

se·man·tics

I recently watched a video on Facebook posted by a peer. The video was by janaya khan, an activist and the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada. She proposed the use of the term “white supremacy” rather than “white privilege,” because it refers to the system rather than the individual. At first, I agreed with her argument, and possibly still do, but I wonder how much it matters. I often feel like people (particularly academics) who sympathize with the movement or have radically progressive politics tend to be overly concerned with verbiage and semantics. In the case of privilege versus supremacy, I wonder if those already turned off by the idea that they are endowed with special advantages would be any more willing to accept the idea that they are the benefactors of a systemic supremacy? Further, I’m not fully convinced that these terms don’t essentially mean the same thing.

Despite the above intro, I bring all of this up because of the feelings Alexandra Juhasz discusses at the end of her introduction and her “worries about [doing] the right work” (27) and not to criticize janaya khan, who certainly does more than most to fight for black lives. In my own attempts to do ‘the right work’ I often wonder if the ‘verbiage and semantics’ I obsess over are worth the effort. At one point Juhasz, an academic herself, asks “[w]hat is a video, an article, a book in the face of millions infected and hundreds of thousands dead” (27)? She eventually answers this question, stating “what else is there to do” (28), and further that she uses her book to “mobilize as many ways of knowing and acting as [she] can in the face of horror” (29). However, my poster stays in the land of “thousands dead” and questions the legitimacy of these pursuits, or shall I say my pursuits. What do they matter when black lives are disregarded daily as fodder for a cruel and careless system? Is it possible that there’s power in avenues that are less concerned with naming and category? What might those avenues be?

To end on a more positive note, taking into account my aforementioned feelings of helplessness and possibly looking towards next week’s manifesto: while I believe they should be thoroughly interrogated and kept in check, I think academia, writing, and the pursuit of knowledge embody their own form of power and pursuit. They are worth more than the expectation of immediate action. The cultivation of knowledge is what keeps the history of my people alive. In addition, for me at least, these pursuits are a form of self-care. They are how I’ve chosen to maintain and enjoy my life in the face of what can and will and has gone wrong—they are my armor and the armor of many like myself.

An Activist Tarot? (Week 3 Assignment)

So I really struggled with this assignment, because I ended up with too many ideas. I created some more conventional pieces with specific issues for each but then decided to think about the effort involved in activism, the sustainability and the drain as it were, of resisting oppression on a number of fronts. It all seems intertwined in a way that made it difficult for me to untangle one narrative difficult from the others. I found isolating one set of symbols very difficult.

Anyway, this is all a bunch of hedging. What I actually did for this project is to create a set of images (and they really only function as a set) based on the Major Arcana of the tarot deck. The tarot, while enjoying its moment as a part of white, Silver Lake hipsterdom, has traditionally been associated with  women (especially women of color), witchcraft, excess, rebellion, and the ability to see and/or change the future. The Major Arcana cards are supposed to represent a path from dangerous innocence to worldly experience and understanding. I wanted to see what would happen if I imagined this journey as an explicitly political one, the journey into activism on a number of fronts, to finding one's voice and persisting in sharing that voice through the trials that the cards represent.

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between art and activism this week, about how to create an image that mobilizes bodies, thoughts, action. I don't know that these achieve the movement that I would have liked. But I do think that they are a call to introspection or self-reflection -- I hope they ask us to think about where we are on a personal activist path and how contemporary activism can function as a spiritual journey. If that sounds cheesy, or broad, perhaps that's because it is. But I have always seen activism as a combination between spiritual/human calling and tactical/political planning. This project was my attempt to try and convey that combination in a bold, eye-catching way.

More specifically, I think that the words of the Major Arcana are provocative. They ask us to think about what constitutes "strength" or "love" or "evil". This is why I wanted to highlight those words, working primarily with bold typography and letting the images fill the words up. I'm happy to talk through these image choices in class, but each was chosen as a symbol of where or how these values have functioned in collective activism since the time of the last election. For me, these pieces are as much about that which is covered up as that which is revealed. I wanted these images to ask questions in the context of our attempt to change the face of our world, and to embolden us to think of this attempt as a belief system.

--Eli Dunn

"Class Dismissed" - Week 3 Assignment

With Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign highlighting issues of income inequality and popularizing the idea of the 99%, class and class consciousness have come back to mainstream political discussions. Amidst the widespread attacks on organized labor in so-called "right to work" laws, and lack of coverage of pro-labor issues/demonstrations in the mainstream media, these political movements were very important. I feel that continued focus on issues of class are extremely important right now, and so these images are my attempt to highlight a few cultural examples where issues of class have been reframed by society to obfuscate the issue. The popular cliche of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," is part of the fundamental mythology of the American Dream, and yet ignores the harsh economic realities that most workers face. That contradiction is immediately flanked by another economic reality: that while wealth creation for the working class is flat, wealth creation for the top 1% (a nod to the rhetoric of Occupy and Bernie) has increased dramatically. The last image was intended to reflect the way in which late-capitalist America has subtly shifted discussion of labor and class from that of collective workers rights and struggles to that of collective consumption. Wages may not have increased (relative to inflation) since the mid-seventies, but working class consumption has grown immensely, fueled by predatory lenders offering usurious "pay-day loans" and sub-prime mortgages. The media frames discourse of the economy in terms of "growth," but the growth they refer to is growth of consumption, growth of profits, not the growth of wages.

--Bill Russell

Breath - Assignment 02

Deforestation represents the second largest contributor to climate change on the planet. ‘Breath’ is again about deforestation and is another attempt to create a more visceral response by revealing the symbiotic relationship humans share with nature, trees in particular. The background image slivers show close up shots of trees in multiple perspectives and textures in a natural forested landscape. This is the world as it should be, lush and living, diverse, breathable, natural.  The center image, which imposes itself over the vertical slivers, shows a singular image of foggy desolation.  The smoldering tree stumps create an atmosphere that looks toxic and choking.  The text over the image alludes to the process of carbon dioxides conversion into oxygen by plants through photosynthesis. Trees absorb CO2, much of which is created by humans or human activity, and then release oxygen into the air, which then humans breathe in. It is my hope that by equating breath to this relationship and showing a contrast of breathable and non-breathable spaces, the image will create a jarring effect in the viewer, a cognitive dissonance that makes them think about the cost of convenience.  Not only is deforestation choking our planet, it’s choking us as well. Ultimately this image reminds us that as natural beings, we are actually a part of nature and that our ‘dominance’ of the landscape and exorbitant commodification of natural resources is ultimately detrimental to our own well-being.

-Evan Tedlock