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Category Archives: How To Win
How To Win is a CAA Research Project. We know using art and culture to transform the world is a good idea. But we are haunted by this question: How do we gauge the success of our projects? These posts explore this and related questions. Read more on How To Win.
Joseph DeLappe
Joseph DeLappe, Dead in Iraq, 2007
“It may not effect change in the kind of physical sense that maybe we’ve been talking about, but I think if you can get inside someone’s head, and make the synapses shift for a second, then there’s something really valuable to that.”
Working with electronic and new media since 1983, Joseph DeLappe’s work in online gaming performance, electromechanical installation and real-time web-based video transmission have been shown throughout the United States and abroad. In 2006 he created a project called dead-in-iraq, entering America’s Army First Person Shooter online recruiting game and typing in the names of all of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq. He is an Associate Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he runs the Digital Media area.
10 New Year’s resolutions for designers
There’s some great chunks of wisdom in this .net magazine post from Mike that we can creatively adapt to our own practices.
Like this: from number one: “Choose better problems to solve”
We have more processing power, affordable tools, and combined intelligence right this very minute than at any point in the history of design. We are using it to build shit.
And this, from number four “Stop being your own obstacle”
I spent the first 10 years of my career saying things like, “If I could just do this work the way I know it should be done…” and convincing myself that someone else was keeping me from making better choices. [...] What is this strange gene that makes designers handicap themselves?
Stop designing the compromises you expect to have to make. Your fear of being wrong wins out over your fear of having to convince someone you’re right.
You can’t design in fear. Don’t throw the fight before a punch gets thrown.
And there’s more like “stay curious” and “learn to make mistakes faster.” Really great stuff.
via 10 New Year’s resolutions for designers | Feature | .net magazine.
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Sarah Silverman, Comedy, and the idea of the meta-bigot
This piece from Slate in 2005 introduces the interesting idea of a meta-bigots:
Silverman has become an important member of a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the “meta-bigots”…. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It’s a dangerous game: If you’re humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.
[...]
All of Silverman’s controversies are essentially large-scale pieces of PC performance art—but instead of settling anything about race and humor in America, they just expose the incoherence of the debate. If her humor does have a larger purpose, it is that it maps the outer limits of our tolerance; it exposes ambiguities in the discussion that we don’t like to acknowledge; it taps into our giant unspoken mass of assumptions, tensions, fears, and hatreds—not to resolve them, but to remind us that they’re there. (She told the Believerrecently that she likes the idea of “saying things that force people to have opinions.”) By reducing all of this toxic material into a logical game, she creates a kind of public catharsis. The point of Silverman’s humor—the final translation of all that irony—might simply be that, no matter how much we pretend, we’re notready for her humor. These are life-and-death problems, and our laughter has terror in it.
Party as a Political Act
“We pulled off an event that invoked the shock of something completely different, but was also universally familiar, and we did it in the middle of downtown. I feel good about that at the basest level.”
We met Donovan McKnight last Spring when he participated in our School for Creative Activism in North Carolina. McKnight is the co-director of Face to Face Greensboro, a community advocacy organization that promotes grassroots change through old-fashioned, face-to-face dialogue. We caught up with him recently, after he and his colleagues staged a huge event called Show of Hands 2011, a city-wide party to foster community and increase voter participation.
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Tagged Donovan McKnight, Face to Face Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, profiles
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Frank Luntz on Occupy Wall Street
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about “income inequality” and “paying your fair share.”
1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’”I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”
via How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street | The Ticket – Yahoo! News.
Kids on Wall Street
7 year old Interviews Occupy DC protesters
Wonder Showzen: Where will you hide when the revolution comes?
This is from a couple years ago, but I have never forgotten it.
An Occupied Halloween
Big thanks to CAA’s friends Gan Golan and Mark Read for sending us these links to coverage of Occupied performances and protests that took place on Halloween. Continue reading
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Clowns Arrested in Near-Successful Attack on Wall Street Bull
From the Yes Lab
Earlier today, a small group of Occupy Wall Street activists engaged in a near-successful corrida against the Wall Street Bull.
The incident began when two clowns, Hannah Morgan and Louis Jargow, scaled the steel barricades protecting the landmark. The clowns began spanking and climbing the beast, traditional ways of coaxing a bull into anger in preparation for a Castilian corrida, or bullfight.
Within seconds, police officers grabbed both clowns by their colorful shirts and wrestled one of them (Jargow) to the ground. The other (Morgan) continued to play the harmonica until an officer removed it from her mouth. Continue reading
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