for artists and educators to demonstrate how they engage and disrupt traditional understandings of space and place through digital practices as forms of intervention.
To intervene is defined as coming in or between by way of hindrance or modification (Intervene, n.d.). Intervention as critical digital making manifests in blending physical and virtual spaces as a distinctive characteristic of our contemporary moment of ubiquitous connectivity coupled with social media. As recent hashtags #metoo and #timesup have ignited sharing stories of gender bias and sexual harassment to build avenues for coalition, social media platforms have become important spaces for these forms of activism (Langone, 2018). As sites for activism, digital responses by artists and communities allow for individuals to proclaim, share, and disrupt narratives in publicly visible ways to reshape discourse. Reshaping how digital practices intervene on everyday life can happen on many levels from the personal to the institutional. Artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s participatory project Learning to Love You More (2002–2009) was a crowdsourced artwork based on a series of assignment prompts posted on their project website. The 70 assignments focus mostly on simple opportunities for making, including photographing strangers holding hands, interviewing someone who experienced war, and crafting an encouraging banner. The banality of the prompts asks participants to question what they view as art, creating opportunities to make art more accessible, and exposing the personal. The project is an intervention on the artworld undermining high art paradigms through simple gestures of creation shared with the world online and bypassing the gatekeepers of high art. During ←11 | 12→the seven years of the project, over 8,000 people posted their assignments, taking advantage of the ease of sharing and social nature of digital media to spread and promote the work.
The simple gestures found on Learning to Love You More are amplified by the project website engaging critical digital making as a participatory and distributed action. Jennifer Motter’s chapter “Social Media as Sites for Feminist Activism: Facilitating Critical Digital Meaning-Making” discusses social media’s potential to serve as sites for critical digital meaning-making and feminist praxis, by challenging misogyny and patriarchal power structures through the use of simple artmaking techniques broadcasted through larger online communities. Taking inspiration from participatory art projects such as Frank Warren’s PostSecret (2005-present) and feminist techno-communities such as subRosa and GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, Motter presents a critical emancipatory case study to explore when lived experiences are meaningfully shared and recognized as political through individual and collaborative feminist activist efforts.
Collaboration derived within a distributed and participatory framework can lead to reflective assessment, and critical studio practices using these methods often involve a critique of institutions. Rebecka Black and Chelsea Shannon’s chapter “Critical Digital Making and Public Pedagogy: Student-Institution Collaboration through Exhibition Making on Google Arts and Culture” shows how a collaborative process between a large arts institution and a local university can create a critical dialogue about normative pedagogical practices within museums and higher education classrooms. Using commonly available online tools, the collaboration redefines the role of curation in an arts learning space such as a museum while extending where the role of the visitor ends. Intervention at this level takes the personal into institutional space and creates community-engaged practices that begin to redefine those locales intended for the public but are often encoded through layers of social and cultural codes of exclusion.
Using online spaces to intervene happens at many scales, but so do interventions taking place in physical locations where digital and networked experiences augment our realities. A 21st-century sense of place and space is redefined through boundaries of our physical and psychological experiences shifting and changing to support these new forms of intervention. Susan Maly and Hana Marvanová, in their chapter “Digital Media in Art Workshops for Refugees,” share experiences facilitating digital art workshops with refugee children from war-torn countries. Using digital projection, storytelling, and animation, Maly and Marvanová use art workshops to mitigate the stress of severe trauma in the migration and integration process. Their art workshops intervene in a humanitarian effort to be helpful for refugees in residential facilities where the migratory movement has broken people’s lives.
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According to Michel de Certeau’s influential text The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), tactics are methods used by individuals to work with, or against, environments defined by institutional strategies. Culture jamming and hacktivist artworks are examples of interventions through critical digital making using location-based tactics. For example, the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’s Transborder Immigration Tool (2007-present) is a mobile phone application intended to guide individuals to water safety sites through the deserts of the United States and Mexico border. The app provides geotagged poetry to aid those undertaking the strenuous journey. The intervention utilizes a powerful form of geographical data whereby the physical and the virtual become intertwined through geolocative mapping technologies. Danny Jauregui’s chapter “Counter-Mapping as Artistic Strategy” explores how counter-mapping may intervene at intersections of digital mapping, social criticism, and art. The chapter focuses on “Disguised Ruins,” an animated digital map showing the rise and eventual fall of queer spaces in Los Angeles. This work attempts to show how to critically use mapping as a tool in the fight against gentrification, displacement, and historical erasure.
While place-based technologies provide logical extensions of our perception of location and potential erasure, the role of digital images in historical accuracy creates further ethical quandaries as the ease of intervening through graphics software becomes increasingly ubiquitous. Brandon Bauer’s chapter “Arts-based Research Project: Landscapes of Absence” focuses on the ethical issues around the viral circulation of ISIS propaganda images through social media and within the news media. This chapter examines Bauers project Landscapes of Absence to examine image ethics and the use of ISIS propaganda, as well as how the concepts of absence, erasure, and iconoclasm have been used in modern and contemporary art. Ultimately, Bauer questions how might erasure, so often a form of oppression, be inverted to reassert dignity within the horror of war as media spectacle.
The digital age has redefined the possibilities for art in public spaces. Due to the opportunities for interaction through remote connectivity, digital public art can reside on a server and yet be accessed anywhere. Projects such as these mix virtual and real spaces to interrupt public space and ways of thinking about the communities where we live and act. They engage audiences in virtual and physical spaces to support the public’s participation through their physical action, labor, and the gaze.
CONCLUSION
Under the concept of critical digital making, we have collected examples of social art practice, educational case study research, and analytical works using critical theories to recast how we may use digital making for creative and pedagogical ←13 | 14→practice. At the heart of the collection is negotiating what it means to critically reflect on the uses of digital technology, but it is an extended meditation on how this impacts our conceptions of our own identities, our collective work, and the forms our communities may take. The collective author’s voices are concerned with the complexities of pedagogy, but this concern is forged within a range of actors sculpting our learning. Images, web portals, maps, and people teach us, and the framework of critical digital making is intended to invigorate our engagement with these digital innovations as we co-construct agency and our participation with digital media.
Reflecting on the spectrum of collected international authors, it is apparent that technology and learning are intertwined and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Taking inspiration from art practices perceiving pedagogy as a complex interaction of sociocultural factors may support the value of creative thinking in educational settings
