Regarding Spectatorship: Revolt and Distant Observer is an ongoing research project curated by Marianna Liosi and Boaz Levin exploring the notion of mediated political spectatorship.

The project focuses upon the prevalent mode of vision and the engagement of the distant onlooker in relation to mediated political events, critically exploring the role played by mass and informal media as well as by technological devices in the politics of representation. Recent social uprisings, protests waves, revolutions and coups were all highly mediated events. New “social” media, as well as more traditional broadcast communication channels, contributed to the events, and became as much a part of the spectacle as it’s medium. The research aims to explore the notions of distance in relation to involvement, spectatorship in relation to agency and vision in relation to action. It gathers together a wide range of questions concerning the ambivalent way in which the role of technological devices and social media within the political sphere is perceived.

The website is the first public outcome of the one year-long multi layered project that will also include itinerant events and will culminate in an exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, opening on November 20th 2015. Conceived as an ongoing platform of discussion, the website aims to facilitate and stimulate a broad and interdisciplinary discourse around the questions of political spectatorship, offering a rich historical and theoretical context to the project. The website gathers together solicited essays and archival material by a wide range of intellectuals, alongside a growing collection of cultural references, videos and archival material. The first round of contributors include Brian Holmes (media theorist, culture critic, activist), Vera Tollman (critic and writer), Quinn Slobodian (historian), Sohrab Mohebbi (curator and writer), Oleksiy Radinsky (writer and filmmaker) and Paolo Caffoni (editor and essayist).

Amongst the artist to participate in the exhibition are Sharon Hayes, Martha Rosler, Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Peter Snowdon, Abbas Akhavan and Daniel Herleth.

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Post-Migrational Rap

Neologisms in times of Alphabet Inc. The following text is entirely based on the non-scientific stratagem of literature, and in particular, the text is structured around the creation of new words – neologisms – whose greatest ambition is to be credible for the glimpse of an instant, and then probably to evaporate. Conversely, the neologism may actually crystallize, could come continue

Bodies, spaces, actions. Notes on the 56th Venice Biennale and Environs

 I The official inauguration ceremony of the Universal Exposition took place on Saturday morning 1st May in Milan. In the afternoon of the same day, again in Milan, the event once known as Labour Day celebrations was held which, over the years, has revolved around job insecurity, with its patron St Precarious, and this year expressed dissent with regard to continue

Images At a Distance

But what do you see when you look at a picture you took? I see the picture, Rora said. 1 Introduction The website text for the Regarding Spectatorship project calls for the critical exploration of ‘the distant onlooker’ of political events. This subject is a pressing concern for researchers interested in relationships between the ‘immediate and media-ted’ aspects of contemporary continue

Monetizing concern

Monetizing concern is a work by Darius Kazemi built for Regarding Spectatorship. Darius Kazemi is an artist and programmer working under the moniker “Tiny Subversions”. Kazemi operates an army of bots – small programs that create automated Twitter feeds, Google accounts or other randomly generated online “users” – inhabiting the virtual sphere with witty nonsensical comments, pranks and poetics. His continue

After the Image

Abounaddara is a collective of self-taught volunteer filmmakers involved in what they termed “emergency cinema”.  “Abounaddara” translates as “The man with glasses”, referring both to a  common colloquial nickname, as well as to Dziga Vertov’s (1896-1954) “Man with a Movie Camera”. In 2014 the collective was awarded the Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize for “Of God and Dogs.”1 This continue

The Worker’s Eye (1930)

This is just another of these “Bolshevist” exaggerations, I can hear a reader exclaim, as if the eye were not in all human beings a basically similar natural organ, which can change its structure only through illness or damage. Certainly there are different kinds of eyes in spiders, bees, snakes, cats, elephants and human beings–but in the human race there continue

Année zero – Mouvement de libération des femmes iraniennes (1979)

On the evening of March 7th, 1979, Khomeini’s decree on the compulsory headscarf was announced. The following morning 5000 women gathered at the Tehran University to protest against the decree, climbing over the gates locked by the Islamists and marching through the city. For the first time the newly established order met resistance. The women of the French ‘Politics and continue

Notes of Projection (2013-2015)

Through their collaborative research Feizabadi, Behkalam and Maier-Rothe explore different notions of the term “projection”. Within this framework, the video aims to connect a variety of historical events and movements, including various cinematic and political activist approaches since 1945. Initiated in January 2013 on the second anniversary of the so called “Arab Spring”,  Notes on Projection unfolds through epic Lumières’ scenes, as well as more recent continue

Wars and Metaphors

This article was originally published in a small “alternative” newspaper, and it functioned as a book review of Susan Meiselas’s book Nicaragua1 . The publication of Meiselas’s book was significant: a high-budget, high-profile photo book, put out by the important publisher Pantheon Books, about a leftist revolution in the Third World— just the area of the world that we in the continue

Can You Be in Solidarity with a Dead Body?: African Activists in West Germany’s 1968

We read everywhere that European Third-Worldism in 1968 was pure escapism, a flight from domestic realities, a naïve projection of the idea that the “revolution was elsewhere,” seasoned with an unsavory exoticism. West German Third Worldism is often held up as one such case of bad internationalism–a neurotic, probably sexual cathexis with the icons of Che, Mao and Ho—held in contrast to the supposedly continue

La Commune (Paris, 1871), Peter Watkins (2000)

La Commune (Paris, 1871), 2000,  is a historical drama film directed by Peter Watkins about the Paris Commune. Gathering together non-professional actors, including many immigrants, the director before the filming asked the cast to do their own research on this event – which has been always marginalised – in French history. Criticizing the manipulative power of media and the hierarchical interpretation and narration of history, spectators continue

Mosireen

Mosireen (Arabic:,مصرين, English: We Are Determined) is a non-profit media activism collective, born out of the explosion of citizen journalism and cultural activism in Egypt during the revolution. Mosireen’s Youtube channel.  

Hologram Protest

In April this year protesters in Madrid held a hologram protest across from the Spanish parliament, the first ever such protest, as media outlets were quick to point out, skilfully choreographed and hastily projected in front of the congress gates. Specters were – for once quite literally – haunting the sterile streets, voicing the grievances of those citizens prevented from continue

Excerpt from La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

Exécution des otages, prison de la Roquette, le 24 mai 1871

During the summer of 1871, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Paris Commune, Eugène Appert(1831-1890), a Parisian portrait photographer and royalist, published Crimes of The Commune.  The series, consisting of nine photographs, purported to show the rebel’s criminal and brutal nature. These were, in fact, the first known political photomontages – fabricated images which combined fact with fiction, continue

October: Ten Days That Shook the World – Sergei M. Eisenstein

bak.ma

bak.ma is the digital media archive of social movements in Turkey. starting from Gezi resistance – Videoccupy archive – it aims to reveal the near history of Turkey with audio-visual recordings, documentations and testimonies. bak.ma means ‘don’t look’ in Turkish. ‘Don’t look’ was also one of the police announcement that protesters heard during the riots in the street.

The Molotov-Eisenstein Cocktail 2.0

I think I remember the moment when I realized that the war in my country has started.1The Maidan uprising was still in full swing,  president Yanukovych was still in power, and the Russian invasion of Crimea has not yet taken place. I was filming the clashes between the rioters and the police in front of National Art Museum of Ukraine continue

Extradition of Victor Hugo

A report from London about the extradition of Victor Hugo from Brussels, following the fall of the Commune in Paris. There could hardly be a better example of the early forms of political spectatorship, its opponents and proponents. Better yet, the subject of the letter, Hugo – a novelist and playwright, for whom the Commune had functioned as a muse continue

Tactical Television. Movement Media in the Nineties

The history of grassroots struggle is constantly threatened by oblivion.1 Here I want to recall just a few key elements in the extended chain of transformations that led to the formulation of a new aesthetic and communicational style by the transnational social movements of the late Nineties. The analysis begins with a conceptual innovation in media theory that took place continue

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