User:Tash/grad reading

On media + democracy

Staal, J. and Sison, J. (2013). New World Academy Reader #1: Towards a people's culture. Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.
Towards a People’s Culture is a reader of critical essays and poems chosen by artists and political figures from the Netherlands and the Philippines. It discusses the vital function of art and artists in the Maoist-oriented National Democratic Movement of the Philippines, and concerns itself in particular with the figure of the cultural worker, and its imaginative and practical role in a progressive democracy. Co-edited by a former director of the Philippines Communist Party, the reader as a whole calls for the use of art as a means of mass education, agitation and organisation – in other words, of cultural revolution – against a heritage of colonial mentality and national amnesia. One particularly interesting essay also looks into the protest art of effigy making, and how these “constructed spectacles of pomp and parody” are used to take back / subvert state-controlled images of political figures.

Annotation
I picked up this reader because the Philippines and Indonesia share a similar social and post-colonial context. Both archipelagos emerge from a history marred by cold-war era anti-communist propaganda, military governance, and cultural regulation. Where in Indonesia, Islam has been the most striking cultural force, in the Philippines it was Catholicism first, then Americanism second, which became the greatest influence.

As such, the media landscape in the Philippines seems to be much more susceptible to and dominated by American film, music, fashion – and their accompanying values. This comes from their semicolonial history with them, and the continued meddlings of American economic and political institutions (including those carried out by the CIA) into Filipino life.

Though globalization is also a significant force shaping modern Indonesian culture, for us the influence comes from many sources – South Korean music, Bollywood films, Taiwanese soap operas. What strikes me as the same in both countries though, is the need for the local culture to be released from colonial mentality, that is, the need for Filipino and Indonesian history and heritage to be affirmed into a kind of national consciousness. In simpler terms, I think both countries need to turn their eyes inward and make visible (and audible) the past which have been swept under the rug. After all, what is a political revolution without a cultural revolution?

At this point it’s also interesting to note one of the questions brought up in this reader – that of how art in service of politics is often branded as ‘propaganda’. This concern has ended up discouraging and depoliticizing artists for a long time. But I like the idea that in the right hands, propaganda can also be a ‘progressive and emancipatory tool’.

One last note I want to make is about the interesting essay by Lisa Ito on the popular use of effigies in Filipino political protests. On the visual impact that the burning of these puppets has on the masses, she writes: “Dozens, if not hundreds, of cameras and devices document these performative deaths that bring the spectacle to the same public that consumes state-controlled images of the president.” I find this bears similarities to the role that political memes play online. The main difference though, is that memes are fast and cheap media: easily made by anyone, anywhere.

Staal, J. and Poot, D. (2013). New World Academy Reader #3: Leaderless Politics. Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.

Heryanto, A. (2018). Identitas dan Kenikmatan: Politik Budaya Layar Indonesia. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia.

Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

On media vs copyright

Liang, Lawrence (2011). Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate in Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property.

In this essay, Liang unpacks the representation of the pirate throughout history, making connections between the philosophical, the legal and the everyday realities of how we access knowledge around the world. In tracing the cultural politics of both extralegal distribution and outlaw production, he pays special attention to the caricatures of the 'Asian pirate' and his counterpart, the 'creative innovator'. He advocates for a more situated, non-binary approach to understanding the phenomenon of media piracy and all the underlying social structures that produce it.


Joe Karaganis (ed.) (2011). Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.

This book attempts to map the social and economical structures which sustain media piracy in the developing economies of the world. Situating film, book and music piracy within the context of globalization and the digital revolution of the last two decades, and the low-income, low-enforcement media landscapes of countries such as India, contributors like Liang and Balasz explain that Asia’s copy culture has less to do with crime and illegality and more to do with the region’s stop and start processes of urbanization, modernization and access to information. The conclusion is that piracy, whether in the form of street vendors selling DVDs or P2P protocols serving files between local machines, is less of a threat to development than the continued dominance of high-priced media-markets served by IP-lobbyists and multinationals.

Cramer, Florian and Balaguer, Clara. The Moral of the Xerox.

This publication consists of notes from a conversation between Florian Cramer and Clara Balaguer, on the ethics of piracy and cultural appropriation, paying special attention to the power relations between the East and the West, the inside and the outside, the visible and the invisible. Cramer also traces the evolution of art practices such as culture jamming and plagiarism, looking at how it is used in surrealism, situationism, punk, and internet memes – all as a way to undermine Western notions of property, individuality and capitalism.

Steyerl, Hito (2012). In Defense of the Poor Image in The Wretched of the Screen.

In this essay Hito Steyerl comes to the defense of the ‘poor image’ – exploring its role in contemporary art, culture and capitalism. Through challenging the hierarchies of the image, questioning our fetish for resolution and unpacking our faith in the cult of the original version, she addresses the politics of the digital image and the social and technological forces that govern its circulation.

Steyerl, Hito (2006). Notes about Spamsoc.

In this article Hito Steyerl turns her analytical eye on to pirated DVD’s – those produced and sold in countries like China and India, boasting a collage of appropriated images, mis-translated captions and garbled blurbs in ‘look-a-like English’. Calling this language ‘spamsoc’, she examines its role in reflecting and stretching the politics of the image, asking: ‘Who owns pictures, words and their meaning?” One especially interesting example in this article is a jumbled copyright license Steyerl found on a DVD cover.

Luksch, Manu (2017). From the Cellar to the Cloud: The Network-Archive as Locus of Power In: Dekker, A. ed. Lost and Living (in) Archives. Amsterdam: Valiz.

On media vs censorship

Miao Ying (2018). Online within limits.

This interview with Miao Ying focuses on her latest art object, Blind Spot, which is inspired by the state of censorship on the Chinese web. By searching for and cataloguing every censored word on Google.cn, Ying tries to perform and make clear the oppressive and yet almost invisible impact of government censorship in the country. In her own words, "the Chinese Internet operates in a gray area." So what is the role of the public library – and indeed the pirate – under such a restrictive political and social system?

On media vs erasure (loss / memory)

Sluis, Katrina (2017). Accumulate, Aggregate, Destroy: Database Fever and the Archival Web In: Dekker, A. ed. Lost and Living (in) Archives. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde (2017). What the Archive Can't Contain In: Dekker, A. ed. Lost and Living (in) Archives. Amsterdam: Valiz.

On trends in digital culture

Shifman, Limor (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Cramer, Florian (2014). Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers.

Rheingold, Howard (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge: Basic Books.

Goriunova, O. (2016). The Force of Digital Aesthetics. On Memes, Hacking, and Individuation. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 24(47).