Global Pictures: Formalist Strategies in the Era of New Media Krista Geneviève Lynes (bio) Concordia University krista.lynes@concordia.ca Abstract This essay examines the role played by political and activist media, as well as media infrastructures and platforms, in creating solidarity or continuity between the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, Indignados and the ‘Printemps Erable,’ among others. It critiques the overvaluation of social media in organizing protests and creating solidarity between social movements, demonstrating the renewal of discourses of the “global village” on which such valuations depend. Instead, it examines the role of aesthetics in creating sites of solidarity and affiliation across different local political struggles, taking as its case study a series of performances and a video work by the artist Milica Tomic. The Arab Spring, the Indignados movement, the printemps érable, Occupy Wall Street, and the proliferation of “occupations” in 2011 and 2012 have enlivened critical and aesthetic discourses about social movements. The irruption of protests in disparate parts of the globe has invited questions about the possibilities of solidarity across national and regional divides, and the role that media (new and old) might play in circulating powerful symbols of protest transnationally and in building transnational networks that support local protest struggles. Amateur footage from local protests, the dissemination of poster art or photographs of victims of police violence through social media networks, 1 performances that draw attention to the acute forces of power and exploitation, “hacktivist” actions, and activist art all contribute to mediatizing and mediating protest movements, intervening in public culture, and creating iconic images that migrate from specific protest sites to politically engaged publics around the world. The circulation of images of protest; connections through social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; and the “occupation” of public space have led to the search for what W. J. T. Mitchell, following Heidegger, calls a “world picture,” a dominant global image linking the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and European uprisings, as well as a methodology that accounts for the “infectious mimicry” between, for instance, Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park (Mitchell, “Image” 8). Questions emerge, first, about the contiguity of the movements through media infrastructures and platforms, in the use of imagery, and in the language of protest, and second, about the mediating role of activists and cultural producers, broadly speaking, in framing protest and demanding structural change. While much has been made of the sociality of “social media” (its capacity to connect within and across protest movements), it has also highlighted distinctions between protests in different parts of the globe. Such distinctions are material— the “hard” revolutions of Tahrir Square (demands for the fall of autocratic regimes, democracy, civil liberties, and a “decent Keynesian economy”) versus the “soft” revolutions of Zuccotti Park (a radical critique of American capitalism rather than of the state, per se) —but also aesthetic, contrasting the perceived “excesses” of protest culture in North America with the social realist genre of protest languages in the Arab Spring. While the aestheticization of political action has been suspected when it comes to the representation of material demands, corporate media structures such as Twitter have frequently been celebrated in mass culture as having “world picture”-making potential. The dismissal of “excessive” media tactics in North American cities has taken the form of accusations that the social movements are in fact nothing but representation, in other words that protestors’ demands are simulacral, or that the movements exist more fully as declarations of resistance than as instantiations of it. Protesters have donned top hats and pig snouts, rolling around in piles of fake bills to highlight the obscene actions of corporate executives. 2 Anonymous and LulzSec, among other groups, playfully threatened to erase the New York Stock Exchange from the Internet (Penny). Activist artworks, such as the fictive National Agency for Ethical Drone-Human Interaction’s “Do Not Kill Registry,” mocked the democratic potential of government sites for civic engagement. Drum circles, “chalk walks,” “favela cafés,” and other performative actions used cities as a staging ground for ongoing protests. 3 A banner example of the accusation of frivolity and excess is a New York Times column from 23 September 2011 by Ginia Bellafante, which described Occupy Wall Street as an “opportunity to air social grievances as carnival,” and gave a vivid account of a protestor, “half-naked,” bearing a “marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the Browse > Literature > Postmodern Culture > Volume 25, Number 2, January 2015 Access provided by Concordia University Libraries [Change]