Rebels without regret: Documentary artivism in the digital age

This article takes up the implications of the blurring of art and politics in two documentary contexts: Ai Weiwei’s art activism in China, as documented in Alison Klayman’s award-winning film Never Sorry, and the Gezi protests in Turkey, documented and disseminated virally through the Internet. Drawing parallels between the self-proclaimed hooliganism of Ai Weiwei and the Turkish protesters, who co-opted the hooligan label that the government used to incriminate them and turned it into a tool for resistance, the article argues that hooliganism is just another incarnation of unruly documentary artivism, which has become prevalent in an era of digitally mediated, global social justice movements. As an interpretive framework for understanding how documentary hooliganism operates, the article proposes Tony D. Sampson’s theory of virality and its application of Dawkins’s neo-Darwinian memetic thought contagion model to the way ideas and political gestures spread in the twenty-first century. Hooliganism, like viruses or memetic thoughts, has a self-spreading tendency; its anarchic affect is contagious and creates volatile yet powerful social encounters. Therefore, the article claims that the foregrounding of hooliganism, which is itself a phenomenon that describes ‘affective contagious encounters’ among anonymous crowds, in the artivist practices of Ai Weiwei and Turkish protesters point to the potential of unruly forms of documentation to influence and inspire selforganized mobilization

Simplicity in Visual Representation: A Semiotic Approach

Simplicity, as an ideal in the design of visual representations, has not received systematic attention. High-level guidelines are too general, and low-level guidelines too ad hoc, too numerous, and too often incompatible, to serve in a particular design situation. This paper reviews notions of visual simplicity in the literature within the analytical framework provided by Charles Morris' communication model, specifically, his trichotomy of communication levels—the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic. Simplicity is ultimate ly shown to entail the adjudication of incompatibilities both within, and between, levels.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68281/2/10.1177_105065198700100103.pd

Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence

Selected writings on nature and liberty

xx, 163 p. ; 21 cm

The variorum Walden/ Thoreau

320 hal.: bibl.; 21 cm