Event

Digital Forays and Global Uprising: Aesthetics of Digital Dissent

This session we consider the digital junctions of aesthetics and protest - mediated by a capture, circulation, and reconfiguration that spans the globe.

Since the Arab Spring, the protests and dissent have only become more audio-visually mediated with an instantaneity and ubiquity that is never merely ‘formal.’ The mediation and the aesthetics are in many ways also the uprisings themselves. What types of imagery are being captured, circulated, and remade in these moments of conflict—and how do they travel from one site of conflict into others around the globe? What devices, channels of communication, and infrastructures allow and/or impede such exchanges? What sort of visual logics of dissent are emerging across the world through digital practices? How is it changing form – lending itself as material for memes, slogans, and graffiti—but all the while changing one’s view of participation, agency, and belonging?

This session we consider the digital junctions of aesthetics and protest – mediated by a capture, circulation, and reconfiguration that spans the globe.

Join the Kevorkian Center with Amal Khalaf (Cubitt, Serpentine Galleries), An Xiao Mina (Researcher/Author Memes to Movements), Rebecca Stein (Duke University) and discussant Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU Steinhardt) on October 29, 2020, at 12:30 pm (EST) to think through these questions and discuss together issues.

Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt, London and Projects Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London where she has worked on the Edgware Road Project since its inception in 2009.

An Xiao Mina was an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where she studied online language barriers and their impact on journalism.

Rebecca Stein is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University researching linkages between culture and politics in Israel in the context of the Israeli military occupation and legacy of the Palestinian dispossession. She is the author of Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (co-authored with Adi Kuntsman; Stanford University Press, 2015), which studies the ways that social media has altered the Israeli relationship to its military occupation, in both state and civilian contexts; Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Duke University Press, 2008) which considers the relationship between tourism, mobility politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (to name a few)

Discussant: Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics and global/digital visual culture.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by October 21, 2020. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. A captioned version of this presentation will also be made available within a month to our Youtube page.

Also be advised that this Zoom event will be recorded and made available after the event on our Youtube page.

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