Abstract
This article is a reflective text by an art curator interested in exploring the boundaries between video activism, spectatorship, and pedagogy. It proposes new ways of critically understanding the terms “activist,” “participation,” and “militancy” in the context of an expanded notion of the image and the role of the spectator. Emerging from field notes, the article narrates and shares the experiences of engaging students at workshops for “Between Broadcast – a project around activist videos,” held at at fine art academies and universities in Leipzig, Dusseldorf, and Bergamo. The practical aim of the workshops was to introduce and engage students with the subject of so-called activist video clips on YouTube. The students were asked to find, select, and discuss militant videos and, subsequently, to create a montage from them. The conceptual aim of the workshop was to reflect upon video spectatorship online and what that means, the agency of the spectator, and the possibilities of their active participation in the process of viewing. The outcomes of the workshops were the development of critical thinking of the students concerning the subjects of online video, digital empathy, their engagement with videos as individual viewers and as a collective, and the power of montage as a narrative and activist tool.
Highlights
To achieve a socially valuable result and bring about real, tangible change is at the very center of the aim of art and video activism
Art activism: Acts of seeing and montage Defined as “art that is grounded in the act of ‘doing’ and that addresses political or social issues” on the website of the Tate (Activist Art, 2018), “art activism”1 has been identified in the last decades as a specific artistic category by critics and has since been a highly debated and controversial topic
Unlike the visitors who integrated the playlist screened in the art space, which was based on a more objective arbitrary order for footage, here the students decided together how their multifaceted perspectives on the notion of activism could present a coherent dialogue through the montage of found video material, and how to give meaning to very different materials through the process of montage
Summary
To achieve a socially valuable result and bring about real, tangible change is at the very center of the aim of art and video activism. Today recent news articles reveal evidence about the involvement of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm in manipulating the opinion of users, on the ground, users have employed YouTube as a tool for expressing political and existential urgencies and for spreading this worldwide, as well as for the storage of their visual accounts, with YouTube functioning as a safe place for the short- or long-term public existence of their media Within such an articulated landscape of art, videos, and activism, this paragraph reflects the question of if we still think of an inner characteristic of the image itself as aesthetically constructed. The third was the aim of the preservation of footage, thanks to the embedding in an artwork of what are often volatile or fugitive fragments of digital material online
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