Visual Media and Culture of ‘Occupy’

Visual Media and Culture of ‘Occupy’
Author: Pamela Odih
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1443870064

On 15th October 2011, hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors assembled into a spectacular carnivalesque procession towards Paternoster Square; the heartland of London’s banking district. Beginning with Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’, this book examines Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral in relation to media spectacle. Initially focusing on arrival narratives, it asks the question: were the 15th October 2011 anti-capitalist protestors ‘hailed’ into becoming the subjects of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral? Based on extensive ethnographic interviews and photographic data, this book demonstrates the complex ways in which Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral ‘interpolated’ (Ashcroft 2001) and subverted media spectacle. Kairos exemplifies the longue durée of the art and ethics of Occupy. The bifarious dimensions of kairos emphasise an ethics of care and devotion alongside the indeterminate possibilities of the aleatory encounter. Formulated within Marxist aleatory materialism, this book explores the momentous reality of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral. Instantiated within an extraordinary conjuncture of conflict between capital and labour, Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral manifested formidable expressions of resistance to the disembodied ‘space of flows’; ‘timeless times’; and the ‘real virtualities’ of transnational capitalist accumulation. Empirical case studies are used to engage with the extraordinary strategies that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral politically cultivated to address: (i) the future of print news media, The Occupied Times of London; (ii) disjunctures and disruptions within the locality of the ‘space of place’ amidst the harsh reality of neoliberal austerity measures; (iii) the harnessing of multi-modal information communication technologies as part of an imperative to unite the ‘space of place’ with an international environmental citizenship; (iv) critically mobilising market analogues and promotional media integral to the neoliberal market reform of public sector healthcare provision and, in so doing, occupying a radical riposte to the entrepreneurial self and marketized morals of neoliberalism’s homo economicus consumer citizen. In these and many other examples, this book argues that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral exemplifies the possibilities of kairos as a condition and consequence of the politics, visual media and culture of new social movements.

The Aesthetics of Global Protest

The Aesthetics of Global Protest
Author: Aidan McGarry
Publisher: Protest and Social Movements
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9789463724913

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

The Art of Protest

The Art of Protest
Author: T. V. Reed
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2019-01-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1452958653

A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

Image operations

Image operations
Author: Jens Eder
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2016-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526108658

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

Occupation Culture

Occupation Culture
Author: Alan Moore
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781570273032

Occupation Culture is the story of a journey through the world of recent political squatting in Europe, told by a veteran of the 1970s and '80s New York punk art scene. It is also a kind of scholar adventure story. Alan W. Moore sees with the trained eye of a cultural historian, pointing out pasts, connections and futures in the creative direct action of today's social movements. Occupation Culture is based on five years of travel and engaged research. It explicates the aims, ideals and gritty realities of squatting. Despite its stature as a leading social movement of the late twentieth century, squatting has only recently received scholarly attention. The rich histories of creative work that this movement enabled are almost entirely unknown.

The Occupiers

The Occupiers
Author: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2015
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199313911

In the fall of 2011, motivated by the lack of a meaningful response to the global financial crisis and a paralysis of democratic politics, a small group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City. The Occupy Wall Street movement would go on to inspire camps in nearly 1,500 towns and cities, all of which were ultimately forcibly evicted by police. Without illusion but with solid evidence, The Occupiers answers fundamental questions about the movement and serves as a corrective to some common myths and misconceptions on both ends of the political spectrum.

Occupy

Occupy
Author: W.J.T. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022604288X

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. “You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

Generation Occupy

Generation Occupy
Author: Michael Levitin
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 164009556X

The fight for a $15 minimum wage. Nationwide teacher strikes. Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and the rise of AOC. Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Read how the Occupy movement helped reshape American politics, culture and the groundbreaking movements to follow. "Fluidly written . . . Levitin’s enthusiasm is infectious . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots changed a good deal more of the landscape than Zuccotti Park’s three-quarters of an acre in New York’s financial district." —Tod Gitlin, The New York Times Book Review On the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, Generation Occupy sets the historical record straight about the movement’s lasting impacts. Far from a passing phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street marked a new era of social and political transformation, reigniting the labor movement, remaking the Democratic Party and reviving a culture of protest that has put the fight for social, economic, environmental and racial justice at the forefront of a generation. The movement changed the way Americans see themselves and their role in the economy through the language of the 99 versus the 1 percent. But beyond that, in its demands for fairness and equality, Occupy reinvigorated grassroots activism, inaugurating a decade of youth-led resistance movements that have altered the social fabric, from Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock to March for Our Lives, the Global Climate Strikes and #MeToo. Bookended by the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, Generation Occupy attempts to help us understand how we got to where we are today and how to draw on lessons from Occupy in the future.

Visual Culture

Visual Culture
Author: Margarita Dikovitskaya
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780262042246

Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.

Strike Art

Strike Art
Author: Yates McKee
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1784781894

The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new—if internally fraught—political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other—oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action. Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F, Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labor, debt, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of the overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matter movement. Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that are still only beginning to ripen, at once shaking up and taking flight from the art system as we know it.