Saturday, November 13, 2021
5:30pm EST
Workshop: 90 min
Open Call Session
Organized by Strategic Transparency Collective
Presenter: Roopa Vasudevan
*Capacity Limited to 25 Participants. The waitlist for this session is closed.*
The Creative Resistance Workshop is part of an ongoing series designed to bring artists working with technology together in small groups to talk through notions of creative resistance and critical art practice. Through a series of guided writing exercises and intimate group discussions, participants will evaluate foundational assumptions around what "resistance" looks like in media art, the ups and downs of strategies and technologies engaged, and where critical practice might contribute to the power hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. Participants will then collaborate to draft a manifesto detailing practical commitments and desired changes in the media art landscape for a more equitable and just technological future.
Artists and cultural workers examining or dealing with technology in their practices—defined extremely broadly—are encouraged to participate.
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Roopa Vasudevan (she/her) is an American media artist, computer programmer and researcher. Her practice focuses on issues of power, identity and agency in the digital era, and on generating more creative and ethical practices for tech-based art and design. Roopa’s artwork has been exhibited and featured by media outlets internationally, and she has participated in residencies, taught workshops and classes, and spoken about her practice around the world. She maintains a steadfast commitment to artist-led organizations, and has worked with spaces including Flux Factory (Queens); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn); SPACES (Cleveland); and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), where she is currently a collective member. In 2020, she was a Rapid Response fellow at Eyebeam (Brooklyn), where she began developing a framework for creative resistance through tech-based art. Roopa is currently a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she researches relationships between tech institutions and new media artists.
The Strategic Transparency Collective is a decentralized network of new media artists rethinking our relationships with technology, surveillance capitalism, and corporate control. Our aim is to develop frameworks for tech-based creative resistance that do not serve to reaffirm the dominance of Big Tech and its profit-driven imperatives. We advocate a robustly self-reflexive approach to working with technology and data, and encourage artists to align their goals with each other and operate as a community—rather than reinforcing the neoliberal tropes of individual artistic excellence and the myth of the singular genius. The collective emerged from a series of workshops run as part of Eyebeam's Rapid Response For a Better Digital Future fellowship in the summer of 2020. Those workshops spurred the development of a series of Manifestos for Creative Resistance, which are continually being added to by new collaborators and participants. Future work will include the development of project ideas and templates, publications, and more infrastructure enabling a self-sustaining community of artists and practitioners.