Uncommon Grounds

New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East

Anthony Downey

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781784530358
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857735935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this groundbreaking book, a range of internationally renowned and emerging academics, writers, artists, curators, activists and filmmakers critically reflect on the ways in which visual culture has appropriated and developed new media across North Africa and the Middle East. Examining the opportunities presented by the real-time generation of new, relatively unregulated content online, Uncommon Grounds evaluates the prominent role that new media has come to play in artistic practices - and social movements - in the Arab world today. Analysing alternative forms of creating, broadcasting, publishing, distributing and consuming digital images, this book also enquires into a broader global concern: does new media offer a 'democratisation' of - and a productive engagement with - visual culture, or merely capitalise upon the effect of immediacy at the expense of depth?Featuring full-colour artists' inserts, this is the first book to extensively explore the degree to which the grassroots popularity of Twitter and Facebook has been co-opted into mainstream media, institutional and curatorial characterisations of 'revolution' - and whether artists should be wary of perpetuating the rhetoric and spectacle surrounding political events.
In the process, Uncommon Grounds reveals how contemporary art practices actively negotiate present-day notions of community-based activism, artistic agency and political engagement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Notes on Texts and Artists’ Inserts
• Introduction
• 2011 is not 1968 An Open Letter to an Onlooker
• The Paradox of Media Activism The Net is not a Tool, It’s an Environment
• Revolution Triptych
• For the Common Good? Artistic Practices and Civil Society in Tunisia
• Citizens Reporting and the Fabrication of Collective Memory
• Performing the Undead Life and Death in Social Media and Contemporary Art
• Artists’ Inserts
• Sarah Abu Abdallah, Saudi Automobile
• Fayçal Baghriche, Family Friendly
• Ganzeer, Manazer
• Roy Samaha, Untitled for Several Reasons
• Art’s Networks A New Communal Model
• When the Going Gets Tough …
• Potential Media The Appropriation of Images, Commercial Media and Activist Practices in Egypt Today
• A Critical Reflection on Aesthetics and Politics in the Digital Age
• Digital, Aesthetic, Ephemeral A Brief Look at Image and Narrative
• New Media and the Spectacle of the War on Terror
• The Magnetic Remanences Voice and Sound in Digital Art and Media
• Re-examining the Social Impulse Politics, Media and Art after the Arab Uprisings
• Artists’ Inserts
• Sophia Al-Maria, Chewing the Data Fat
• Hans Haacke for Gulf Labor
• Rabih Mroué, The Pixelated Revolution
• Arab Glitch
• The Many Afterlives of Lulu
• Cardboard Khomeini: An Interrogation
• The Art of the Written Word and New Media Dissemination Across the Borders between Syria and Lebanon
• On Revolution and Rubbish What has Changed in Tunisia since Spring 2011
• Saadiyat and the Gulf Labor Boycott
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Image Credits