NEoN Re@ct Symposium SPEAKERS Bios and Abstracts NAME BIO ABSTRACT Janna Ahrndt Janna Ahrndt received her MFA in ‘P@tching In: Stitching Together Electronic and Time-Based Art from Tactical Media and Social Aesthetics Purdue University. She is part of a wave as a Political Art Practice’ of new media artists rejecting the notion that craft and technology are In the early 2000’s, the Maker directly opposed. Her work explores movement hoped to open up how deconstructing everyday technology to everyone in true DIY technologies, or even making them for fashion However, makerspaces yourself can be used to question larger continue to have a gender gap and oppressive systems and create a race issues that relate directly to the space for participatory political action. privilege of making and having the Her activist and social art practice blur resources - time – money - energy etc. the lines between the materiality of to experiment with new technologies. craft and the digital realm of new This leaves many women and media technologies to create socio- marginalised groups feeling that the political interventions. Janna has power structure in these supposedly presented her research on the use of structureless spaces is just a DIY electronics as a medium for continuation of the power structures participatory political art at ISEA 2019 of the tech industry. In this short paper in Gwangju South Korea and will be my focus is on finding ways to engage facilitating workshops for her P@tch communities in civic action while project in collaboration with the honouring the integrity at the heart of Science Gallery in Melbourne Australia DIY. By bringing together Maktivism in July 2019. and Craftivism in my work, I aim to forge an effective feminist political art medium that explores current exploitative economic systems controlling the production of textiles, and information and communication technologies. By allowing artists to subvert physical spaces and expand on them through digital content in order to engage activist communities, I believe new media artists can create something that is more like the hybrid digital-physical lives we lead. In combining Maktivism (Maker +Activism) and Craftivism (Craft + Activism), a more effective political art medium is created. This combination serves to critique not only targeted political issues, and I feel this combination also provides a medium to question current exploitative economic systems that control the production of textiles, as well as information and communication technology (ICT), and our societal values expressed through our technologies. Andy Best Andy Best-Dunkley is a media artist, ‘T/Act - sound controllers for social sculptor and educator, specialising in empowerment’ playful and provocative interactions and installations. Andy’s work tackles This paper presents the T/Act sound social and political themes, and he controllers (Tactile – Action – Act – seeks collaboration in diverse spheres Actor) developed by the author such as data visualisation, live together with young people with performance, and physical interaction physical disabilities. The author seeks design. Between 2002 and 2013 Andy to show that interactive media was principal lecturer of Digital Arts at technologies can significantly Turku University of Applied Sciences. increase the level of social Since 2014 he has been lecturer in empowerment experienced by sculpture at Aalto University. He is a individuals taking part in public doctoral student at Aalto Media Lab, performance by magnifying the effect researching possibilities for social of their own actions and movement in empowerment through collaborative the space. Using custom designed interaction in media environments, wireless electronic controllers, the with emphasis on working with people performers “play” music and sound with disabilities. using the movements of their bodies and wheelchairs. For the disabled person, the ability to harness media technologies for artistic expression challenges their perceived public role as passive object. They become, through their own actions, active subjects causing affect to the whole audience experience. Jon Blackwood Dr. Jon Blackwood is currently a ‘After the Captured State: Reader in Contemporary Art, and Contemporary Artists, Digital leads research, at Gray’s School of Art, Strategies and Political Action in North Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Macedonia, 2015-19’ He was formerly Head of History & Theory of Art at DJCAD, University of This paper will outline the ways in Dundee, from 2004-11. His research which critical artists responded in the focuses on cultural ecologies and political circumstances of managed radical politics in the former democracy and state capture in the Yugoslavia, with a particular focus on context of North Macedonia, for North Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia- nearly a decade. The dominance of Herzegovina. His major publications the Macedonian political landscape include Critical Art in Contemporary by Nikola Gruevski’s right-wing, Macedonia (Skopje: mala galerija populist, ultra-nationalist party VMRO- 2016) and Introduction to DPMNE had many consequences, but Contemporary Art in Bosnia- in the field of aesthetics, the Herzegovina (Sarajevo: duplex 100m2, megalomaniac Skopje 2014 project 2015). Jon has also curated major was the visual outworking of the ruling exhibitions of art from the region party’s ideology. Set against the including Captured State: New Art backdrop of ethno-nationalist kitsch, from Macedonia (Summerhall, what strategies did critical and Edinburgh, 2017) and Utopian Realism: independent artists adopt, and with Mladen Miljanović (Peacock Visual what results? Now that the Gruevski Arts, Aberdeen, 2019). Jon is currently government is a memory and many of working on a major show of its members subject to legal process, contemporary art from Bosnia- how have former activists adapted to Herzegovina entitled Suspended the discourse of mainstream politics Animation as part of the Edinburgh and how has the cultural ecology of Festival, at Summerhall, in the summer Macedonia mutated in response? of 2020. In answering these questions, we will develop two specific strands of inquiry into (digital) art and activism. Firstly, we will consider group work as a response to authoritarian politics; we will consider the use of humour and the crude aesthetics of advertising in the case of the artist duo OPA (Obsessive Possessive Aggression), and their nuanced digital response to the politics of the Macedonian space. Secondly, we will note the use of digital guerrilla tactics by groups such as Sviracinje and anonymous visual protestors who use the power of social media to multiply the impacts of their activism. Finally, in the political sphere, we will consider the relationship between contemporary art and activism in the Macedonian space from 2015-19, and note the tensions and dissonances that resulted. In adopting a case study approach it is hoped to open out the complexities of the Macedonian space but also to draw parallels between individual and group case studies, with cartographies of struggle elsewhere in the globe. Giulia Casalini Giulia Casalini is an independent ‘Queer-feminist Ecologies of curator and producer based in Resistance in Digital (after)Lives’ London. Her PhD (Roehampton University) look ats the methodologies From discrimination and hate crimes, of queer-feminist live art from a to environmental destruction and decolonial perspective. Since 2012 she colonial violence, queer-feminist artists is the co-director of the non-profit arts have found in digital technologies the organization Arts Feminism Queer creative tools to call attention to (CUNTemporary). Her curatorial injustices and inequalities. practice engages with artists and work Simultaneously, they have generated of a complex and challenging nature innovative ways of engaging bodies to create multidisciplinary exhibitions and their avatars in pressing political and events for institutions or alternative issues, whilst blurring the distinctions spaces, with a focus on live art and between the virtual and the real. In audience participation. this presentation we will examine these virtu(re)al creative manifestations specifically for how they negotiate grief, spirituality and death in order to engage with collective traumas. Maria Chatzichristodoulou Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria ‘Performance and Citizen Media: X) is Reader in Performance and New Gesturing Dissent” Media at London South Bank University, UK, where she also acts as Head of Though the concept of citizen media Division Creative Industries, Director of has achieved increasing visibility in its Enterprise for the School of Arts & many different forms throughout this Creative Industries and Director of the decade, its relationship to Centre for Research in Digital performance (studies and art) has Storymaking. Maria is also Editor-in- hardly been considered. The question Chief of the International Journal of of ‘how does performance relate to Performance Art & Digital Media citizen media’, therefore, is both a (Routledge). In the past Maria taught pertinent and a timely one. Some of at the University of Hull and the the most powerful interventions that University of London Colleges take place in the public sphere Goldsmiths, Queen Mary and Birkbeck, aspiring to generate social change, worked as a community participation are activist performance actions that officer (The Albany), performer and aim to raise awareness around issues curator (independently)