Protest movements and the spectacle of death: From urban places to video spaces. (original) (raw)
Video activism as archive, commemoration and evidence
This article examines video activism in a context where ubiquitous camera technologies and online video sharing platforms are radically changing the media landscape in which demonstrations and political activism operates. The author discusses a number of YouTube videos documenting and narrating the recurring, anti capitalist demonstrations in Europe in the past decade. With the death of Ian Tomlinson in London during the 2009 G20 protests as an empirical starting point, the author raises questions of how video documentation of this event links up with previous protest events by juxtaposing representations of ‘the moment of death’ (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) of protesters in the past. This article suggests that these videos work as (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2) a site of commemoration in a online shrine for grieving, and (3) a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression. The author offers a re-articulation of the longstanding debate on visual evidence, action, and testimony in video activism. The results are suggestive of how vernacular commemorative genres of mourning and paying tribute to victims of police violence are fused with the online practices of bearing witness and producing visual evidence in new creative modes of using video for change.
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Global Protest : Visual Culture and Communication
The Aesthetics of Global Protest, 2019
Protest movements are struggles to be seen and to be heard. In the last 60 years protest movements around the world have mobilized against injustices and inequalities to bring about substantial sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic changes. Whilst familiar repertoires of action persist, such as strikes, demonstrations, and occupations of public space, the landscape is very different from 60 years ago when the so-called 'new social movements' emerged. We need to take stock of the terrain of protest movements, including dramatic developments in digital technologies and communication, the use of visual culture by protestors, and the expression of democracy. This chapter introduces the volume and explains how aesthetics of protest are performative and communicative, constituting a movement through the performance of politics.
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2016
This article argues that YouTube, as a platform for sharing DIY videos, is an useful resource for understanding the role of affective processes before, during and after protest events. As a case study the article investigates the documentation on YouTube of two antagonistic demonstrations in Aarhus, Denmark, on 31 March 2012. We argue that the collected material, consisting of 71 YouTube videos, can be analysed to reveal a wish or will to experience the demonstrations affectively through three forms of DIY video production: 1) a form where the videos affectively charge the demonstrations before their actualisation; 2) a form where the affective potential of witnessing political violence is actively engaged, sought out, and enjoyed by the video producers during the event; and 3) a form where the affective intensity of the demonstrations is confirmed and prolonged after-the-fact, and the excessive nature of future confrontations implicitly ‘pre-charged’. The videos as such are not onl...
Mobile Death Videos in Protest Movements: Cases from Iran and Syria.
Thanatos, 2 (2), 2013
In the Iranian and Syrian protest movements, the emergence of videos of dying protest participants recorded by mobile phones and disseminated via social platforms (esp. YouTube) have played a significant role in mobilizing and solidarizing the broader public for these movements. In this regard, several questions on the broader effects of such media phenomena in protest and conflict contexts arise; e.g., on how mobile videos recording death are perceived and construed in different media and public contexts, and which implications the prevalence of such videos brings about for the public perception and interpretation of the Iranian and Syrian protests and conflicts. The article presents an explorative study on two mobile death videos that appeared in course of the Iranian and Syrian protests and conflicts: the mobile video of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death in Iran and the mobile video of a man filming his own death in Syria. Special emphasis is given to the discursive and media-aesthetical effects of these mobile death videos by focusing on their symbolic and representational impact, the affectivity of these recordings of death, and the discursive and aesthetical practices in bringing forward certain accounts on the protest and conflict reality in Iran and Syria.
Challenging Memory and Reality: Documentary Activism and Video Activism in New Social Movements
Université Perpignan via Domitia, 2016 "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." Jean Baudrillard Introduction: Documentary activism/Video-activism is an intersection point of social sciences. On the one hand, there is the literature of social movements; on the other hand, there are the debates on new media, technology and communication. Thanks to the new technologies, the ways of communication are transforming. The interaction between people and ideas are getting faster and this causes mobilisation through communication skills. One of the most important skills to interact and mo-
Beyond "Riot Porn:" Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects
Ethnos, 2013
From the globalization protests of the previous decade to the more recent Occupy Movement, activists have embraced the use of digital video. Many appropriations of the technology, including those by human rights advocates, rest on the theory that ‘seeing is believing’ and understand video to be uniquely suited to forms of truth telling such as witnessing, documenting and reporting. While I encountered such realist uses of video during fieldwork with direct action movements in the former Yugoslavia, activists are also preoccupied with videos depicting the most physical confrontations with the police, videos they sometimes referred to as ‘riot porn’. They engage these videos for the sensory, affective and bodily experiences they facilitate. Indeed, activist practices around and claims for video indicate that they understand video as a technology of the self, using it to forge emotional relationships with activists elsewhere, steel themselves for physical confrontation and cultivate new political desires.
“A Clear Message?” Aesthetic Practices of Protest, On-Site and Online
Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Studia territorialia, 2022
This paper explores how the performance and aesthetics of contemporary protest are shaped by social media networks and audiences from a theatre and cultural studies perspective. It analyzes the tactics used by protesters during and after on-site protests to disseminate their messages and to actively influence and control the interpretations of their protest that are distributed online by others. Based on observation of three European protest events in January and February of 2019 (in London, Budapest, and Dresden) this paper presents the characteristic tactics of protesters in light of specific dynamics between on-site and online protests. It discusses the aesthetics of protest in the context of the ambiguousness of on-site protests, which is reinforced by social media.