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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