FCC Studying Government Wireless Service Interruptions (via redOrbit)

In response to an August 2011 shutdown of wireless service by public transportation officials in San Francisco, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced plans to review whether or not they need to establish rules to govern when law enforcement and other public service agencies can…

]]> http://sfsthetik.com/2012/03/07/fcc-announces-probe-into-bart-wireless-service-interruptions/feed/ 0 http://sfsthetik.com/2012/02/17/digital-activism-101-the-5-activist-functions-of-technology/ http://sfsthetik.com/2012/02/17/digital-activism-101-the-5-activist-functions-of-technology/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:33:37 +0000 SFsthetik http://sfsthetik.com/?p=812 by Mary C.  Joyce , The Meta-Activism Project

(Editor’s note:  It wasn’t until after the second term of the Bush Administration, dissastisfaction with two prolonged wars and the 2008 US Presidential election many activists and non-profit advocacy groups stopped being skeptical of digital, or “online activism,” social media evolved and they used the Internet for dramatic political change. At first, organizations like MoveOn.org and many others proved that digital activism had finally come of age. Last year’s Arab Spring and Occupy movement took the power of online political and social discourse to a whole new level. As the name implies, the Meta-Activism Project isn’t the place to go for specific tips or suggestions. The think tank’s research takes a step back and looks at theories, patterns and strategies that activists may want to explore when forming their own digital tactics. In this excellent article, Meta-Activism founder Mary C. Joyce presents a premise for those interested in using technology for activist and organizing purposes. It’s worth visiting the Meta-Activism Project’s website to find out much more.)

From the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements to non-profits and bloggers advocating online to political candidates on Twitter, many people hoping to change the world (or slightly improve it) are using technology to do so.  It seems that every day we learn about a new tactic, a new social media tool, a new argument about how technology has been over-hyped or undersold.  The variety and complexity seems infinite.

I’ve been studying digital activism for the past six years, and during that time I’ve had the nagging sense that this variety is not infinite, that if we look at digital activism for long enough, we will start seeing patterns.  What previously seemed like infinite applications will turn out to be a limited number of technological functions appearing in diverse contexts.  Digital activism’s variety comes from context, not technical capacity.  Today’s digital technologies are capable of a broad, but finite, number of uses.

So I’m going to make a bold claim, digital technology can only do five things for activists.  These five uses can be carried out through a variety of tools (blogs, micro-blogs, SMS, websites, social networks, video, the list goes on) and in a variety of contexts (revolutionary struggle under a repressive regime, international social justice campaign, local advocacy, democratic political elections…), but there are still only five of them.

Activists can use digital technology to:

1) Shape Public Opinion

Collective resistance, protest, activism, advocacy: where do they come from?  They come from a collective perception of injustice coupled with a belief that an alternative is possible.  As social movement scholar Doug McAdam observes, in order for collective action to occur, “at a minimum people need to believe need to feel aggrieved about some aspect of their lives and optimistic that, acting collectively, they can redress the problem.”

What would make you feel aggrieved about your life?  You’d need some information about your situation and maybe an explanation of why that situation was unjust.   Social media is a great way to both generate and share this kind of information, especially when official news-generation companies (the mainstream media) are beholden to elites whose interests are different from yours or by a government that does not want to be criticized.

In China, many educated people get their news from Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.  Though censors are quick to delete information that reflect poorly on the government, people use clever misspellings and codewords to talk about information that matters to them.  Despite the government’s desire to downplay a high-speed train crash last summer, the news got through.  All this information about government corruption and incompetence makes people feel more aggrieved, less contented with the status quo, more desirous of an alternative.

The people of China have not yet risen up to demand an alternative, but the citizens of Tunisia did.  The causes of the 2011 revolution are of course complex, but the Internet played an important role in challenging the legitimacy of President Ben Ali by shining a light on his corruption and abuses.  Starting in 2004, the website Nawaat.org, operated by a group of Tunisian expatriates, provided a constant stream of information about political injustices in Tunisia.  They occasionally created funny or entertaining digital videos framing Ben Ali as a tyrant or highlighting a particularly egregious instance of abuse of power.In 2010, shortly before the revolution, Sami Ben Gharbia, one of the founders of Nawaat, also started TuniLeaks, a site to bring attention to State Department cables detailing Ben Ali’s abused of power.

In Egypt, before anyone went out to protest in Tahrir, the Internet played an important role in fomenting opposition to Mubarak and challenging his legitimacy.  According to Ahmed Saleh, one of the administrators of the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said:

The Internet offered an open environment that politicized the youths, allowed them to raise awareness on possibilities of shaping their future, diversified their perspectives, anonymized their identities, gave them the taste of free speech, and pushed them to see through the regime propaganda and despise it.

In a recent article in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the Internet was a space for formative public discourse even before the social media wave hit.  In 1991, Tunisia became the first Middle Eastern country connected to Internet.  In that decade, before the rise of blogs, web forums served an important political function:

Such forums became sources of un-reported news, discussion, social commentary, and political debate, paving the way for the region’s bloggers. In countries where political discussion was taboo… web forums created new spaces, outside of society, where political discussion was relatively safe.

Digital technology helps the public shape public opinion.  Anyone with an Internet connection can start a blog.  Anyone with a smartphone can record and upload a video of police abuse.  Not only can people act as citizen journalists, creating their own news stories, they can also educate and raise awareness of injustice by curating and re-broadcasting news stories to their friends using whatever social media platform they prefer, or even an old-fashioned technology like email.

The Internet can also be used to access foreign media and information.  In China virtual private networks (VPNs) are a popular way for middle class Chinese to access news about their own country that is censored in China.  However, it is important not to overstate the role that foreign information plays.  The most powerful way to spread information is when the oppressed inform one another.  The became agents of their own consciousness-raising.

User-generated content, the fact that people are sharing information with their friends and family, is different from past modes of mass information dissemination.  In the past there have been brave journalists and television anchormen who have shared information with the public and fomented opposition to an unjust policy (for example Walter Cronkite’s broadcasts against the Vietnam War and Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts against McCarthyism).  However, while these broadcasts did make people feel more aggrieved, it didn’t necessarily make them feel optimistic about change.  They felt aggrieved, but alone, in front of the TV set. What could they do by themselves?

Social media is different because the means of information transmission also creates collective identity and collective grievance creates optimism: it’s not just me that’s mad, my friends are mad too.  Maybe together we can do something. If my friend shares a news item with me about a corrupt official I know that 1) he knows, 2) he is mad enough to share it, 3) he knows that now I know too.  To badly paraphrase Clay Shirky, social media creates a situation where I know that you know and I know that you know that I know: we have mutual awareness of our mutual awareness.  It is not just me and my friends sitting alone stewing about an injustice in front of our TV set, it is my friends and I talking about this injustice in a forum, or a chat, or on my Facebook wall.  And that conversation just might turn into action.

2) Plan an Action

Changing public opinion is a slow, low-burning, and often decentralized process.  It is uneventful, it occurs under the radar.  This is how it is able to occur at all.  Yet, sooner or later, if there are enough people (of even just the right people) talking about their dissatisfaction, they will decide to take action.

Of course, action doesn’t just happen, it requires some planning, even if only to decide what the action is and when it will happen.  Digital technology is useful for this too.  Digital technology allows for the decentralized many-to-many communication of changing public opinion and the centralized few-to-few communication of planning an action.

Yet social media, and the mass participation it facilitates, are also changing how the prominent members of a moment perceive their role.  They see themselves less as leaders and more as specially-skilled peers accountable to the rank-and-file.  Activists in Russia are using a private Facebook group not so much to plan the pro-democracy protests there, but to act as a braintrust.  According to the The Economist:

The main role in organising the protests belongs not to political parties or even to an official steering committee, but to Facebook…. Ilya Faybisovich, a Facebook activist… helped a dozen journalists, activists and opinion-makers to form a private chat group that has over time evolved into the brain centre of the protest movement.  One of them is Yuri Saprykin, editorial director at Afisha-Rambler… says the group’s role is not to lead the protesters but to “sense their demands and formulate them”.

Social media is making decentralized and leaderless movements logistically easier, since participants can be in constant contact.  Research has shown that large groups can use social media to reach decisions in the absence of leaders (see Alix Dunn’s work on the April 6th Facebook group in Egypt – PDF).  However, even when planning occurs as it always did, in a small group of committed activists, video chat, text chat, free international online calling, and email make coordination cheaper, safer, and easier.

3) Protect Activists

The Internet and mobile technology provide benefits to the age-old planning process: they provide anonymity.  Pseudonyms, encryption, throw-away cell phones, onion-routing: digital technology provides real protection for tech-savvy people who want to operate anonymously.  Hacker groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, as well as whistle-blowers connected to Wikileaks have by and large remained at large (with Bradley Manning the major exception).

No shield of anonymity is absolute.  In the absence of anonymity protections, planning online in a repressive regime – or even self-identifying as a dissident – is arguably even more dangerous than doing so offline, since digital footprints are easy to collect and track remotely.  However, for those who do know how to protect themselves, the online world provides a safe space for plotting.

4) Share a Call to Action

The 11 senators are pigs! S&@t, Estrada is acquitted! Let’s do People Power! Pls. pass

WEAR BLACK TO MOURN THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY.

Military needs to see 1 million at rally tomorrow, Jan. 19, to make a decision to go against Erap! Please pass this on

These are some of the text messages Filipino youth sent to one another in 2001 before the overwhelming mobilizations that forced President Joseph “Erap” Estrada to resign.  This was one of the first instances of digital activism playing a central role in forcing a head of government to resign, and it is still one of the most dramatic.  People forwarded these messages to their own social networks and the call to action spread throughout Manila.  Approximately one million Filipinos took part in the demonstrations, which at times filled the cities largest highway with people as far as the eye could see. An estimated one million citizens participated.  It was because of digital technology that this vanishingly low-cost mass broadcast was possible.

Of course, digital calls to action can be infinitely more mundane as well.  You know those mass emails from non-profits asking you to sign an e-petition or donate on their website?  Those automatically-generated status message that let all your Facebook friends know you just donated and gives them a link to donate as well?  Those are calls to action too.

In fact, while people in repressive regimes run the risk that their calls to action will be censored (China blocks messages calling for mass “strolling”), people in freer societies face the opposite challenge: there are so many advocacy messages that it is difficult to be heard.  Free speech is not just free as in “freedom” but also “free beer”: it is really cheap and easy to broadcast a call to action online, so many people do.

While it is now easier to broadcast a call to action, it is also harder to be heard.  It’s a catch-22 that activists and organizations try to make up with through attention-grabbing text and images that inspire strong emotional reactions, ranging from amusement to outrage.  But it’s far better than the alternative, where the only people with freedom of the press were those who owned one.

5) Take Action Digitally

Signing an e-petition, donating online, changing your Facebook status message or avatar image to promote a cause, emailing your Congressman, carrying out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack: these are just some examples of digital-only activism tactics.

These kinds of actions that can be carried out entirely from behind a screen in your bedroom are the most controversial form of digital activism because they seem passive compared to more aggressive offline tactics (an argument famously made by Malcolm Gladwell).   The tactics are known by various derogatory names: slacktivism, clicktivism, armchair activism. Some people even think that digital activism means exclusively digital-only tactics, even though it is only one of the five mechanisms.

People like Gladwell are skeptical that these tactics can make a big difference, and there is a basis for that skepticism.  Gene Sharp, the most prominent scholar of non-violent activism, divides the tactics of non-violent struggle into three categories:

1. Protest and Persuasion: Symbolic acts of peaceful opposition and acts to persuade the opponent to adopt one’s position
2. Noncooperation: Withdrawal of some form or degree of existing cooperation
3. Nonviolent Intervention: Methods that intervene directly in a given situation by disrupting or destroying established behaviors, relationships, or institutions (and creating new ones)

Most forms of digital-only activism tactics fall into the first category – protest and persuasion – which are least threatening to the opponent.  Signing an e-petition, turning your Twitter icon green, even emailing your Congressman – these are all symbolic or persuasive in nature.  They do not force a change in the situation.

However, there are three arguments in favor of digital-only tactics.  The first is that they are a good first rung on the ladder of engagement.  They do not demand much of the opponent, but they also demand little of the activist in terms of time and personal risk.  You can sign an e-petition or join a Facebook group in a few seconds.  If your only activism options were offline – attending a rally or meeting – maybe you wouldn’t get involved in the cause at all.  However, because it is so easy to take that first step digitally, you will get involved.  Then it is up to the organizer to convince you to keep moving up, becoming more involved in the campaign and having greater and greater impact.

The second argument of digital-only actions is that they are not all passive.  When the company GoDaddy.com vocally supported SOPA, many customers dropped their accounts.  Though this boycott (a form of noncooperation) could all be accomplished online, it hit GoDaddy.com where they could feel it: their bottom line.  GoDaddy.com quickly dropped their support of SOPA.

Many instances of hacking, such as the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that shut down a website by overloading it with requests could be seen as nonviolent interventions that prevent the opponent from carrying out their online activities.  The Cablegate scandal, in which Wikileaks and its collaborators stole and disseminated US State Department diplomatic cables online, was an act of nonviolent intervention in the foreign policy of the United States because it damaged the relationships of confidence that the embassies had with the State Department and that embassy staff had with representatives of other nations.  Though conducted from behind a screen, Cablegate was hardly passive.

The final and most effective argument in favor of digital-only tactics is that they work.  Even the lowly e-petition has seen some dramatic successes recently.  Mighty Bank of America, which had $134 billion in revenue in 2010, removed a $5 monthly debit card fee because of a consumer petition.  The multi-platform decentralized social media campaign to convince Komen for the Cure to re-fund a grant to Planned Parenthood to pay for mammograms for needy woman was also successful.

Digital-only tactics can succeed, but it depends on the opponent.  Bank of America was facing major public outrage and it was relatively easy for their clients to go elsewhere.  Komen for the Cure relies on public goodwill to raise money.  Bad publicity means that donors will take their money elsewhere too.  In both cases the context fit the tactic, though this is not always the case.  Changing your Twitter icon green did not much help pro-democracy activists in Iran in 2009.  Just as it would be foolish to only consider digital tactics, it would be foolish to reject these tactics out of hand.  They key is to be aware of all your tactical options and make a decision based on the relative strengths and weaknesses of you and your opponent.

1) Shape Public Opinion (Again)

Digital technology can be used to mobilize people to take action online or offline.  But what happens next?  What happens during the action and after?  The value of digital technology does not end once the action occurs, it cycles back to the beginning: shaping public opinion of the action itself.

Activists choose an action because they think it will help them achieve redress of their grievance, either by convincing the opponent to change their policy or by removing the opponent’s power to enforce the policy, thereby opening a space for more sweeping changes.

However, very few campaigns are won through a single action, so while the long-term goal of the action is to seek a redress of grievances, the short-term goal is to help the activists mobilize for the next action by increasing their own power and legitimacy and decreasing the power and legitimacy of their opponent.

Surprisingly, power is heavily reliant on perception.  The government of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was not fundamentally different the day before and the day after Muhamed Bouazizi killed himself, but people perceived in his story, and in the video of his family members protesting at the local government seat, evidence that Ben Ali had stepped beyond a threshold of permissible action.  His government had not killed a citizen, his government had created such despair that the citizen killed himself.  Ben Ali’s legitimacy (right to rule) had taken a fatal blow.

When Bouazizi’s family protested his death in front of town hall, they recorded a video of it an uploaded it.  A few Tunisians watched the video, were outraged, and shared it using social media.  Well-connected activists sent the video to journalists at Al Jazeera.  Forbidden from reporting from within Tunisia, Al Jazeera was eager to report on the regime.  Reporting by Al Jazeera brought the story to a national and regional audience, where it resonated.  People in other towns began to protest, and finally the protests reached the capital.  Local media, which at first was beholden to the regime, broke ranks and began favorably reporting on the opposition.

After Ben Ali resigned, news of the successful uprising spread rapidly, on regional satellite TV and US-based social media, two media outlets least susceptible to the control of Middle Eastern governments.   People in other countries in the Middle East, were previously aggrieved by their lack of political rights.  That was old news.  Now, however, because of the example of Tunisia, they felt optimistic that change was possible.

Just as social media was important in created a collective sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo, it was now building on that initial dissatisfaction, using a recent event to convince even more people that change was possible.  It was the beginning of an information cascade, which occurs when people observe the actions of others and then make the same choice that the others have made.  The Arab Spring can be viewed as one of the most dramatic information cascades in recent memory and social media was important both in disseminating information and in collecting information and images to be re-broadcast by other media outlets.

And If We Win?

Shaping public opinion, planning an action, protecting activists, sharing a call to action, take action digitally, shape public opinion again: digital technology helps activists throughout the change process from the first spark of consciousness that the status quo is unacceptable to the international ripple effects of a dramatic action.  The next post in this series will dig more deeply this cycle of digital empowerment.

A question that this post does not answer is now digital technology can help activists hold power and govern.  All these functions assume that activists are on the outside, pressuring and challenging institutions of power like governments, corporations, and influential non-profits.  But what happens when the activists when, when they take power?  Will digital technology change the way governments were or will the centralized and hierarchical nature of government swallow digital technology and minimize its importance?  This is the question that is playing our in the countries that underwent the Arab Spring last year.  The answer is not yet known.

This 9-minute film documents one of the fastest-growing and most effective forces combating climate change: organized grassroots movements in the Bay Area, and around the world. Centering around efforts to overturn California’s historic global warming legislation, the film highlights how community organizations and networks throughout the state played a crucial role in mobilizing the vote in immigrant and low income communities to defeat Proposition 23, making the case that equity-based and community-driven solutions are essential in bringing about the deeper restructuring of societies to confront the climate crisis.

For more information about the film and grassroots organizing to combat climate change, visit the film’s website, http://wherewelivefilm.org/

Tonight beginning at 7pm at Intersection for the Arts, in an event free and open to the public,  Kamler will moderate the Art Activism discussion with four other Bay Area artists, who will talk about their work and strategies for engaging the  community. The conversation will include the audience.

Richard Kamler: A Retrospective” (www.richardkamler.org) includes early sketchbooks, installation works, drawings and photographic documentation that trace his career using art as a catalyst for social change.

See the USF Thacher Gallery web page  for full information.

• Four Decades of Art Activism
  A fishbowl conversation moderated by Richard Kamler with Tom Ferentz, Judith Selby Lang, Peter Selz and Scott Tsuchitani (see full description below).
  Fri, Jan 27, 7-9 pm
  Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission (at 5th Street)
• Richard Kamler and Robert Atkins in Conversation
  Thurs, Feb 2 and Wed, Feb 8, 2:30-3:30 pm
  McLaren 250, USF (at Clayton)
• Opening Reception and Birthday Celebration
  Thurs, Feb 2, 4-6 pm
  Thacher Gallery
• Meet the Artist
  Saturdays, Feb 4, 11, 18 and 25, 11 am to 1 pm
  Thacher Gallery

Links:

Conversations with Richard Kamler and Richard Whitaker for “Works and Conversations”

KQED’s Spark on Richard Kamler

• First phase of African opera village completed
  from: Art News Headlines
  BURKINA FASO. The first phase of late artist Christoph Schlingensief's African opera village was completed on 8 October with the opening of a school in Burkina Faso. The remaining two phases are the b...
• Don't Quit Your Day Job?
  from: AltWeeklies.com Culture
  New and unique artist residency in Summer Lake, Oregon, offers safe haven for aspiring artists.... From Eugene Weekly.
• comScore: LinkedIn & Twitter Mobile Access Growing Faster Than Facebook Mobile Access
  from: Mobile - SocialTimes.com
  comScore, an Internet market research firm, released information from data about mobile social media usage changes during the period of August 2010 to August 2011. comScore’s data, if accurate prov...
• Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
  from: ProPublica: Articles and Investigations
  by Jennifer LaFleur A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requestin...
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: blog.sfmoma.org
  Open Space is the blog of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: OPEN SPACE
  Over the past month I have witnessed and participated in the local contingent of the now-global movement known as Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together. The goal of this nonviolent movement, fueled by...
• Duke Foundation creates nation's biggest artist-grant program
  from: Culture Monster
  Jazz, contemporary dance and theater artists who now dream of getting a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling them they’ve won a $500,000 “genius grant” can add another plausible fant...
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Designer Richard Seymour works on products with soul — from a curvy, swoopy iron to a swift and sleek city motorcycle. Seymourpowell is regarded as one of the world’s leading product and innovation design consultancies, with clients who include Ford, Virgin Galactic, Tefal, Casio, Nokia, Guinness, Samsung and Unilever. Seymour is also consultant global creative director of design to Unilever’s Dove, Axe/Lynx and Vaseline brands.

So, it can be said that Seymour’s approach to the concept of beauty, or an analysis of current day thinking on one aspect of the subject of aesthetics, comes from the perspective of product design; at the same time various people would say, a gifted field of endeavor, one of the driving forces behind capitalism and therefore a veiled and corrupt form of seduction, and something that we either intentionally or subconsciously persuades us many times a day. I watch a lot of the TED talks as so many people do because of the inspired and revealing comments from the chosen speakers. Seymour knows his field, and he does a good job putting into perspective how the context of an image, a motorcycle, or any object or person affects our emotional reaction to “beauty.” Many other perspectives in the field of aesthetics to explore; but this is a good entry point, and while the academic perspective can be quite dense, Seymour explores it an a humorous and interesting way. (Re-published under a Creative Commons license.)

• First phase of African opera village completed
  from: Art News Headlines
  BURKINA FASO. The first phase of late artist Christoph Schlingensief's African opera village was completed on 8 October with the opening of a school in Burkina Faso. The remaining two phases are the b...
• Don't Quit Your Day Job?
  from: AltWeeklies.com Culture
  New and unique artist residency in Summer Lake, Oregon, offers safe haven for aspiring artists.... From Eugene Weekly.
• comScore: LinkedIn & Twitter Mobile Access Growing Faster Than Facebook Mobile Access
  from: Mobile - SocialTimes.com
  comScore, an Internet market research firm, released information from data about mobile social media usage changes during the period of August 2010 to August 2011. comScore’s data, if accurate prov...
• Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
  from: ProPublica: Articles and Investigations
  by Jennifer LaFleur A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requestin...
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: blog.sfmoma.org
  Open Space is the blog of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: OPEN SPACE
  Over the past month I have witnessed and participated in the local contingent of the now-global movement known as Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together. The goal of this nonviolent movement, fueled by...
• Duke Foundation creates nation's biggest artist-grant program
  from: Culture Monster
  Jazz, contemporary dance and theater artists who now dream of getting a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling them they’ve won a $500,000 “genius grant” can add another plausible fant...
• more->

One might ask how could one realistically do research into the arts without such an epistemological construct. Of course science can and has a place in research of the arts, but the two are not mutually exclusive. According to the CIIS Creative Inquiry MFA Program website, creative inquiry explores how artists can collaborate with and feed each other across disciplines, experiment with cross-disciplinary approaches to art-making, and explore how artists can collaborate with and feed each other across disciplines, and learn to contextualize their art and investigate how it can reflect or aid social change by transgressing or breaking through personal and cultural barriers.

Such inquiries can be approached for unimaginable numbers of perspectives, including art history and theory, aesthetics, philosophy, social research, communications and media theory to name just a few. One example is the long posed artistic question, “Is a work of art changed in some way by virtue of the fact that it is observed.” Many artists base their work on a question like this, and was studied at length by the late, German philosopher, writer and social activist Walter Benjamin, among others, whose work I will write about soon.

Well I wanted you to hear more about it from one of the faculty in CIIS’ Creative Inquiry MFA Program, Kris Brandenburger, whom I know, and has been in the vanguard of cutting-edge art education for many years. Thank you, Kris.

What is Creative Inquiry? 
By Kris Brandenburger, writer, mechanic, and faculty member in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA Program and the Bachelor of Arts Completion Program 

“To be an artist is to ask questions, to probe material in search of its weakness, strength, durability, vulnerability, in search of some unknown thing that is and is not the material, to make associations with or to find the correspondences between the limited matter at hand and the larger world, to articulate—visually, aurally, structurally, metaphorically—something intuitively if not intellectually known, to configure/constrain matter within a conflicting and/or contrapuntal form in order to persuade the invisible (the unknown) to emanate”.

-Laura Farabough, Playwright

Farabough’s description of the nature of an artist is very germane to how I think of Creative Inquiry—artist and inquiry-centered in the ways that I believe we would like our students to be. The notion of probing or evoking or enticing material to find correspondences or associations with what is not yet known is an exquisitely alive way of being with the material(s) in a given piece. Much of course depends on the understanding of material. And among other possibilities, I understand material spiritually, so that at the heart of the inquiry it is the spirit being probed–the spirit of the artist and her world(s) of embeddedness. It is the search for the rhizomic infrastructure of the material.

Too often, inquiry is understood as most effectively based in the scientific method, which prizes objectivity and seeks to avoid subjective expression. There are the known methods:  observation, evaluation, modeling, etc., all based in a particular logic congruent to the inquiry at hand. In distinction, art making is understood as illogically, personally, “expressive” and subjective (which of course it is), disqualifying it as a method of inquiry in and of itself. But as Farabough reminds us, and as we seek to remind our MFA students, to be an artist is to ask questions, to engage a deep curiosity. So here is a question: “How can a rock, the quintessential physical object, be metaphysical?  How can a stone sing?”  I wish I had asked these questions (Nancy Rosenblum  did in ‘Chinese Scholars’ Rocks’) because they stem from such a profound curiosity about material as to be crackling with vitality and joy. And I believe we have to be committed to joy as a fundamental part of inquiry, as the underlying heart that moves the blood through the body of inquiry. We need the power of love and joy to radiate through the arts practices we engage, and until and unless that is the case, we are lost.

The Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts program creates a space for students to use their art as a tool of inquiry—personal, political, spiritual, etc.  Inquiry takes us to the heart of our own wildness and wilderness. It demands the “yes” that Gertrude Stein put forth, when she said: “The only word an artist needs to hear is ‘Yes’.”

I say yes to what is real, and not yet known.  I say yes to Art.

Recommended Reading:

• First phase of African opera village completed
  from: Art News Headlines
  BURKINA FASO. The first phase of late artist Christoph Schlingensief's African opera village was completed on 8 October with the opening of a school in Burkina Faso. The remaining two phases are the b...
• Don't Quit Your Day Job?
  from: AltWeeklies.com Culture
  New and unique artist residency in Summer Lake, Oregon, offers safe haven for aspiring artists.... From Eugene Weekly.
• comScore: LinkedIn & Twitter Mobile Access Growing Faster Than Facebook Mobile Access
  from: Mobile - SocialTimes.com
  comScore, an Internet market research firm, released information from data about mobile social media usage changes during the period of August 2010 to August 2011. comScore’s data, if accurate prov...
• Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
  from: ProPublica: Articles and Investigations
  by Jennifer LaFleur A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requestin...
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: blog.sfmoma.org
  Open Space is the blog of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Artists of the 99%: A Call to Action
  from: OPEN SPACE
  Over the past month I have witnessed and participated in the local contingent of the now-global movement known as Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together. The goal of this nonviolent movement, fueled by...
• Duke Foundation creates nation's biggest artist-grant program
  from: Culture Monster
  Jazz, contemporary dance and theater artists who now dream of getting a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling them they’ve won a $500,000 “genius grant” can add another plausible fant...
• more->

1. McNiff, Shaun. (1998). Art-Based Research. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Multi-disciplinary illumination specialists

Aliases: Pierre Rodière, Julien Sappa, Joel Rodière
Location: Lyon, France
Profession: Art directors, graphic designers
Website: Lavitrinedetrafik.fr
Notable works: 72 (2011); Gold (2010); Muséogames (2010); Saturday Light (2009)
Connect: Facebook

I have spent the last 20 years making this a personal field of study, in part because the apparent duality of the paradigm matches both my persona and my professional work.

Science. All those tubes and wires.Double-blind, peer-reviewed, journal certified scientific research. Documented, proven test results. I’m all for that really, and do not write here to propose that scientific research is “bad,” or should be changed. Just that there are important alternatives. And it seems I have a lot of company.

Having stated the above it might be natural to assume that what I’m doing is some sort of narcissistic folly.. wanting to believe there is more meaning in my own artwork and other creative endeavors, and that of so many others that I regards as heroes, geniuses, everyday people who changed the world by their thoughts and their creations. Believing that there is something new, quantifiable, tangible and very worth researching. Again, I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that.

I was fortunate enough to be at New College in San Francisco as a graduate student  in the 00′s when Humanities faculty, including Dr. Judy Grahn Anne Bluthenthal and Neeli Cherkovski, among others, founded the Creative Inquiry program there. I remember seeing a media snippet or social media comment from people laughing or thumbing their noses at such a far flung attempt at epistemological classification. An attempt to reify something so non-verbal, so ethereal, so emotional. Well, having studied in that program I can tell you it was one of the best academic programs I’ve had the pleasure of studying in.

(Note: updated 1/14/12:) I neglected to mention that the Creative Inquiry MFA Program is now thriving at CIIS in San Francisco, the California Institute For Integral Studies. A one of a kind program worthy of a closer look.)

Part of this and other related blog posts is an attempt to aggregate material for a book, since this is a subject that really must be approached in real form. But if you come across this, or  social media links, I’d be interested in hearing from you if you are involved in creative inquiry or a related field, and hear about how you approach these subjects.

One would think that the deconstructions that are part of postmodernism would have resulted in much larger efforts to to make the arts a primary form of inquiry. It is partially from that perspective that I regard Grahn, Cherkovski and others who have made progress in these fields of study as part of that group of heroes, in the vanguard of research of human thought and expression. I can’t speak for them, but as an observer I can say that one trait common to these folks was the strength of their convictions; the belief, the knowledge that these are very legitimate forms of academic pursuit and do not need to be “further legitimized by another group’s values and criteria.” ¹

I think since the study of postmodernism began we have seen a convergence of disciplinary thinking from what might previously have been considered widely different and not necessarily considered to be an appropriate merging of thought. Again, this is not completely new. An example might be Kant, or how Arthur C. Danto restructured the concept of aesthetics to  more fully include the concepts used in art today. Consider how Buddhism or other Eastern spiritualities, or how physics suggests that how a phenomenon is observed affects how the phenomenon behaves.²

Continued discussion will include the work of Walter Benjamin and others, whose philosophies laid the groundwork for changing the discourse about the means of production of art, mechanical reproduction, and later computers, and all that implies for how work of many artists has changed and the art world along with it.

1. McNiff, Shaun. (1998). Art-Based Research. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

2. McNiff, Shaun. (1998). Art-Based Research. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

BART states that it’s motivation is “providing safe, efficient and reliable public transit services. BART adds in the draft policy that it is fully committed to its long standing to allowing the exercise of First Amendment rights of  expression “in the areas where it can be done safely and without interference of the District’s primary mission.” In accordance with these principles, BART’s document says, “it shall be the policy of the (BART) district that the district may implement a temporary interruption of  operation of the System’s Cellular equipment only when it determines that there is strong evidence of imminent unlawful activity that threatens the safety of District passengers, employees and other members of the public, the destruction of District property or the substantial disruption of  public transit services.”

I’m not a lawyer and will not attempt to suggest all of  the legal areas potentially raised by such a policy if it were adopted. A couple of interesting things include how the language excludes a definition of who will have the authority to make these decisions, that the phrasing concerning what would amount to a disruption may be intentionally vague, and it is curious why BART did not include data networks also accessible from it’s transit system, such as the   internet, email, audio and video as well as voice over IP.

Several non-profit media, technology, telecommunications advocacy and public interest groups have joined in filing an Emergency Petition before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to issue a Declaratory Ruling in this case.

Public Knowledge, Broadband Institute of California, Center for Democracy and Technology, Center for Media Justice, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Media Access Project, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, National Hispanic Media Coalition, and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative are all joining together suggesting that no local government including San Francisco  has the authority to suspend cell phone service and that BART may have violated the Communications Act of 1934 in its actions of August 11th.

Those interested in protecting freedom of speech everywhere will be watching to see how BART acts, and what, if anything the FCC will do in this matter. There may be legislative and court relief sought. This is not happening in Egypt, Iran or Libya. This is San Francisco, California, America.

BART Board Room
Kaiser Center 20th Street Mall
3rd Floor
344 20th Street
Oakland, CA

The meeting is open to the public.

Help Us Shape Section 429 of the Planning Code to Bring More Art to the C-3 Downtown District    

 

Tuesday, October 18 at 5:30 p.m.

African American Arts & Culture Complex, 3rd Floor

762 Fulton Street, San Francisco

*Parking available/MUNI Fulton 5

"Crouching Spider" by Louise Bourgeois

The San Francisco Arts Commission has worked with the San Francisco Planning Department to revise legislation that will modify
Section 429 of the Planning Code, which requires that private developers within the C-3 downtown district expend 1% of their project construction costs to acquire and place permanent public art at their development site. The new legislation will offer expanded options for developers, including the choice to deposit the “1% for Art” fee into a Public Art Trust that allows for the funds to be spent at places other than the development site.

The Trust will provide for a wide variety of arts programming in the downtown district, including temporary and permanent public art installations as well as performance, restoration of publically-owned artworks in the downtown district, and a funding reserve for local artists and arts organizations that will allow them to present their work to a broader audience in the downtown area. The Trust will also provide funding for capital improvements to cultural facilities in the downtown area. This is the first legislation of its kind in San Francisco.

 

Co-sponsored by Mayor Ed Lee and President of the Board of Supervisors David Chiu, the legislation was introduced to the Board of Supervisors on July 19 and has been referred to the Planning Department as well as to the Department of Building Inspection. Later this fall, the legislation will be returned with recommendations from both departments to the Board of Supervisors for final approval. In composing this legislation, Arts Commission staff has met with artists, city planners, developers, land-use attorneys, urban designers, architects, arts commissioners, government staff, elected officials and numerous non-profits with a vested interest in the beautification of the city and the development of policies pertaining to art, urban design and economic development. Add your voice to the process by joining us on October 18!

 

Please help us spread the word by forwarding this message to your friends and colleagues.

The cover of the October 17, 2011, issue of The New Yorker:

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/10/steve-jobs-new-yorker-cover.html#ixzz1aEpszDJH