Text source from https://www.neme.org/projects/designing-disobedience
Designing Disobedience
On Friday 31 January 2025 at 7pm, NeMe kindly invites you the opening of the exhibition Designing Disobedience.
“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.” 1
Designing Disobedience discusses how the dominant platforms, systems, and technologies controlled by capital and government interests can be usurped for the interest of the public, and how artists can play a vital role by speaking the truth though their work.
According to Ibrahim Helal, the editor advisor for Al Jazeera Network, televised media in western societies are “coherent, [and] systematic. You expect what is going to happen – that is why people don’t watch it.” 2 This may indeed apply to radio, television, and print news but in the last twenty-five years, the development of social networks has enabled citizen journalists to produce up-to-date information and global scale dissemination more rapidly and abundantly. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, BlueSky, YouTube, etc, are fast replacing the traditional news sources. Social media do not just provide content providers free platforms to publish, but problematically, they also analyse, commodify, and in addition manipulate their users through algorithmically produced individualised ‘suggestions’ and targeted political advertisements. This practice was revealed in mainstream news during the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal of 2018, when data misuse was disclosed to the UK based Guardian newspaper by whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee. It was later found that Cambridge Analytica illegally obtained psychological profiles of 87 million Facebook users which it then used to target them within the platform to promote BREXIT and the election of alt-right highly controversial figures like Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump.
The power of the media to manipulate public opinion has already been discussed in detail by thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Mckenzie Wark, Paul Virilio, Walter Lippmann, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald Shaw amongst many others. Regardless of their new or old descriptions, media are tied to public or private controlled institutional structures and forge relationships within the global and/or local context they operate.
The Designing Disobedience project includes an exhibition for the public but as importantly, it focused on a mentoring process for the participating artists who attended a series of group workshops which promoted challenging theoretical approaches and enabled the development of the concept and the materiality of their work through critical discourse. The mentors were Dr Alessandro Ludovico, Vuk Cosić, RYBN.ORG, Davor Mišković, and Régine Debatty. Through the mentorship programme the artists investigated the possibilities of art to form and shape public opinion, and how it can escape the confines of the cultural bubble and operate in the social sphere where action has greater agency.
“While a direct lie is used to mislead and alter truth, and bullshitting and lies are used to ignore truth, the artistic lie is used to expose truth.” 3
According to Herman and Chomsky’s 1988’s thesis, Manufacturing Consent, the mass communication media of the US “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalised assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion,” 4 by means of the propaganda model of communication. Herman and Chomsky’s title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase “the manufacture of consent” used by Walter Lippmann in his book Public Opinion. 5 Designing Disobedience, takes a similar direct critical approach towards our news media landscapes and utilises it for the fine arts process.
“We live in a strange time” are the first words uttered by the BBC’s documentary maker Adam Curtis in his 2016 film HyperNormalisation. When the documentary was released, Donald Trump, was known as a reality TV star running for president in America, and the UK offered the public a vote to leave the European Union without an idea of what to do if they voted for it. “If people are given a big button with FUCK OFF on it they’ll press it,” said Curtis in the documentary. People were (and still are) dying trying to cross the Mediterranean, fleeing burning cities. Police continue to shoot unarmed black people in the United States. The earth‘s biodiversity is being eradicated at a pace not seen in 65 million years. Major events have happened, and are still happening.
In ubiquitous connected societies, media can shape or manipulate opinion by reporting selected aspects of reality while filtering out others. Families no longer have one screen that they share, but multiple screens that stream personalised content. Centralised companies control our feeds through AI powered algorithms constructed to maximise emotive, measurable, engagements. As in off-line media, new media technologies are also controlled by geopolitical forces and personal interests. Most developments and changes to them are obfuscated from the public but their effects are only too visible in our daily internet routines and our news feeds.
According to McKenzie Wark there is a terrain created by the television, the radio, and the networks crisscrossing the globe which produces “a new kind of experience, the experience of telesthesia—perception at a distance. This is our ‘virtual geography,’ the experience of which doubles, troubles, and generally permeates our experience of the space we experience firsthand.” 6
The news, as service, as propaganda, as history, or as image, are determined by the foundational indeterminacies of media that they can no longer be reliably fixed in space/place and in time as a knowable entity. This project, aims to encourage artists to collaboratively and critically approach our media dystopic landscapes and suggest ways to navigate the dominant platforms and news-sites in order to speculate on the underlying causes of events and create poignant works that respond to the unstable and unsustainable times we live in.
Participating artists investigated the discourse surrounding the scale of media influence, the news-media’s centralisation and concentration, and the control many different kinds of on and off-line news-media exercise in the hegemonic and ongoing globalisation process.
This project focuses on the role of news media in the arts and applies it to the performance of that role in Cyprus. This effort is based on NeMe’s particular interest of media technologies and will serve to mobilise a creative, critical translation of these technologies.
Yiannis Colakides & Helene Black
Participating artists
Jafra Abu Zoulouf with Dorgham Bassam Qreiqa, Constantinos S. Constantinou with Giannis Floulis, Vasilis Vasiliou & Louiza Vradi, George Gavriel, Aggela Ioannidou, Dize Kükrer, Kypros Kyprianou, Danila Parniouk, Efi Savvides, and Nina Sumarac.
Opening times
Opening: 31 January 2025, 19:00-21:30Duration: 3-28 February 2025.Opening days-times: Tuesday-Friday, 17:30-20:30
Funding
This project has been funded by the Department of Contemporary Culture of the Cyprus Deputy-Ministry of Culture.
Notes
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988 ⇧
Claudia Romeo. "Internet vs Television: the future of news." #IJF19 WebMagazine, 9 April 2016. ⇧
Hadas Emma Kedar. "Fake News in Media Art: Fake News as a Media Art Practice Vs. Fake News in Politics." Postdigital Science and Education, 2019. ⇧
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988 ⇧
Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion. Transaction Publishers, 1992. Originally published by The Macmillan Company, 1922. ⇧
McKenzie Wark. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Indiana University Press, 1994. ⇧
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