Creative Resistance

Catalog description

Artists and creative practitioners are widely seen as responsible for destabilizing or critiquing dominant cultural norms and social systems; for example, in her book "Race After Technology", Ruha Benjamin argues that artists "...can better understand and expose the many forms of discrimination embedded in and enabled by technology". But when we talk about resistance or refusal enacted through creative means, what exactly do we mean? How does artistic work serve to resist, protest and subvert—and where does it sit in relation to the ideas it aims to critique? This class engages with the notion of "creative resistance", unpacks the meanings and ethical stances associated with the term, and evaluates how it has been applied in both artistic and academic contexts. Students will explore theories of resistance, refusal and solidarity, and experiment with applying them to (or discussing them through) creative work. In the first half of the class, through reading, class discussion and student presentations, we will engage with scholarly and activist literature on resistance, protest and subversion, and look at examples of creative technological works that purport to achieve these goals. We will discuss commonly used strategies such as dark sousveillance (or "looking back" at the machine), speculative design, and distributed or guerrilla artmaking; examine their mechanisms of action; and debate their effectiveness in achieving their professed goals. In the second half, students will apply this thinking to their own project ideas. Students can choose to produce either a final project responding to the themes of the course, accompanied by a short written artist statement, or a more academic written piece that engages relevant literature from the class readings and beyond in service of an argument about the role of resistance in creative practice.