Projects tagged "Activates (people)"

Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Cheat Neutral
Practitioner:
Christian Hunt, Alex Randall
Date:
Nov 19 2009
Cheat Neutral satirizes the carbon offset model by offering people the opportunity to pay someone else not to cheat on their partner in order to neutralize their own infidelity. Cheatneutral allows you to pay £2.50 to carry on cheating while funding “monogamy-boosting offset projects”.
Free the vaccine for COVID-19
Practitioner:
Universities Allied for Essential Medicines and the Center for Artistic Activism
Date:
Feb 1 2020
Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 is a campaign aimed at securing everyone access to Covid-19 vaccine.
Tamms Year Ten
Practitioner:
Indecline Artist Collective
Date:
Jan 4 2013
Tamms Year Ten is an all-volunteer grassroots coalition of artists, prisoners, men formerly incarcerated in Tamms, family members and other people of conscience. In 2008, at the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Tamms supermax prison, the group launched a legislative campaign to call for its reform or closure. Men were originally supposed to be there for one year—but at that point 1/3 of them had been in solitary confinement the entire decade.
Shh
Practitioner:
33Wang
Date:
Aug 30 2019
A street photography exhibition located in Beijing’s most crowded tourist attractions, Dongsi Hutong, to get a voice the Chinese government’s censorship of art works in public space. To hedge the city’s regulation , the human body photography were displayed in the street stores of Dongsi Hutong.
Creative Time NYC’s unique flag project
Practitioner:
Marilyn Minter
Date:
Jun 14 2017
The 14th day of June each year is celebrated as Flag Day, and in 2017 it was no different save for the fact that the project took center stage. The celebrations kicked off with hoisting the resist flag, a creation by Marilyn Minter on the rooftop of the 4th street headquarters of Creative Time.
Las Carpetas
Practitioner:
CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA
Date:
Jan 14 2021
"Las Carpetas looks at the bureaucratic residue of a 40-year-long secret surveillance program that aimed to destroy the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Through still-lives, archival appropriation, and investigation, Christopher Gregory-Rivera provides a counter-history to the way many understand this period of time and its aftermath.
Benjamin Lay spills blood at 1738 Quaker Meeting
Practitioner:
Benjamin Lay
Date:
Sep 1 1738
It was September 1738, and Benjamin Lay had walked 20 miles, subsisting on “acorns and peaches,” to reach the Quakers’ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Beneath his overcoat he wore a military uniform and a sword — both anathema to Quaker teachings. He also carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice.
Performative Radicalism: the Kumbi PSYOP
Practitioner:
BG Kumbi
Date:
Jul 16 2017
The internet has reshaped the ways we learn and communicate. Information becomes heuristic, concomitantly - knowledge becomes protean. If you dedicate enough time to any particular platform, you are likely to acquire a community with congenial individuals. Social media’s proliferation has obfuscated the lines between reality and fiction. Embraced as a tool for many, these digital spaces typically have no monitoring process.
Tupac's “Changes”
Practitioner:
Tupac
Date:
Oct 13 1998
Late last year, the New York Times published an op-ed short film written and narrated by Jay Z. The clip was called “The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail,” and that kind of title was explicit enough for everyone to grasp the entertainment mogul’s general argument, whether they knew anything about drug war or not.
LGBT activists ask strangers for hugs in China protest at Weibo censorship
Practitioner:
Chinese LGBT activists
Date:
Apr 19 2018
A social experiment testing the public’s reaction to gay people in China has gone viral. The blindfolded activists stood in public wearing T-shirts that said “I’m gay would you hug me?” and video of the protest then spread rapidly on Weibo, a hugely popular social media platform in China. The social experiment follows a recent announcement by Weibo to ban gay content on its platform of 400 million active users.
Climate Name Change
Practitioner:
Barton Graf Agency
Date:
Sep 1 2014
To bring attention to the widespread apathy toward climate change, nonprofit group 350action and agency Barton F. Graf 9000 got a little personal. Tapping into the meteorological legacy of naming hurricanes after people–thereby marring the good names of unsuspecting Sandys, Irenes and Katrinas everywhere–“Climate Name Change” told the same storm story, but subbed in the name of prominent politicians who refuse to acknowledge climate change.
Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia’s The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey
Practitioner:
Coco Fusco and MoMA
Date:
Jan 1 1993
The Couple in the Cage documents the travelling performance of Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco, in which they exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real “savages”.
Korean women are fighting back against deepfakes
Practitioner:
Korean Gender Activist
Date:
Aug 22 2024
A few dozen women, wearing white masks, held up signs protesting against pornographic deepfakes. On the afternoon of Friday, August 30, several South Korean feminist collectives demonstrated in Seoul to fight these sex crimes that are flooding the country.
Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule
Practitioner:
Agnes Denes
Date:
Jun 5 1996
Denes's project "Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule" in Finland is a monumental earthwork involving the planting of 11,000 trees by 11,000 people on a reclaimed gravel pit. It's designed to grow over the next 400 years, serving as a testament to environmental stewardship and the potential for regeneration.
Groups Build Parks From Parking Spaces
Practitioner:
Rebar
Date:
Sep 20 2024
Originally a project of San Francisco-based art and design studio Rebar, Park(ing) Day participants from Tucson to Tehran set up temporary installations ranging from simple unrolled sod to art galleries and even free health clinics.
Barack Obama “Hope” Poster
Practitioner:
Shepard Fairey
Date:
Jan 1 2008
Street artist, graphic designer, and activist Shepard Fairey created this visionary portrait of then Senator Barack Obama in 2008 as a form of grassroots activism to support Obama’s first presidential campaign. Fairey based the work on an Associated Press photograph by Mannie Garcia, which he transformed with his signature high-contrast stencil technique, inspired by the political message and bold graphics of Soviet Socialist Realism.
Deportation Class
Practitioner:
no one is illegal
Date:
Sep 1 2016
Deportation Class is a satirical project by European anti-deportation activists protesting European airlines who agreed to cooperate with deportation agendas. Together, these airlines are referred to as the Deportation Alliance. The activists designed a faux luxury offering on behalf of each airline, showcasing the attractive perks of flying "deportation class."
Howardena Pindell; "Rope/Fire/Water"
Practitioner:
The Shed, Howardena Pindell
Date:
Oct 16 2020
Howardena Pindell presented her solo exhibition, “Rope/Fire/Water”, her first video in 25 years and a project utilized by the artist since the 1970s that The Shed commissioned and displayed in late 2020 and into early 2021. “Rope/Fire/Water” mines the history of violence against African-Americans and features Pindell’s personal anecdotes and anthropological and historical data related to lynchings and racist attacks in the United States.
Artists4Ceasefire
Practitioner:
Joe Biden
Date:
Oct 20 2023
Artists4Ceasefire is a collective of actors, filmmakers, and other artists calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire during the Gaza war in Gaza, the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians, and the release of all hostages.The collective was started on October 20, 2023, two weeks after the October 7 attacks.
Living and Killing in Modern China: "A Touch of Sin"
Practitioner:
Zhangke Jia (贾樟柯)
Date:
May 17 2013
"May you live in interesting times" is the familiar Chinese saying, usually spat out as a curse. You can see why in "A Touch of Sin," a film by renowned director Jia Zhang-ke. That kind of time is now, in the history of his country. With four vignettes inspired by real-life "ripped from the headline" events, he shows what the great economic expansion of China is doing to the majority of its people.
Demonstealer Fights For a Better India Through Death Metal
Practitioner:
Demonstealer
Date:
Mar 23 2023
The Propaganda Machine is a battle cry delivered in the language of extreme metal. On Sahil Makhija’s fourth solo album as Demonstealer, he takes aim at the right-wing politicians, racist nationalists, disinformation artists, and religious extremists who manipulate and exploit the masses, in his native India and all over the world. He doesn’t mince his words; just about every lyric on the album could easily be printed on a protest sign.
Iran’s Shaming of Young Dancer Draws Backlash
Practitioner:
Maedeh Hojabri
Date:
Jul 9 2018
"But Ms. Hojabri lives in Iran, where women are not allowed to dance, at least not in public. The 19-year-old was quietly arrested in May and her page was taken down, leaving her 600,000 followers wondering where she had gone.
Book Burning Party - Troy Library
Practitioner:
Leo Burnett
Date:
May 8 2012
Troy, Michigan couldn't afford to keep its library open, so it scheduled a vote for a tax increase. A strong anti-tax group waged a dominating campaign against it. Posing as a political group, an outside advertising agency posted signs around town that said, "Vote to close Troy library Aug 2, book burning party Aug 5." We invited everyone to our Facebook page, adding Twitter, Foursquare, want ads, flyers and more to drive engagement.
Coal for the rich
Practitioner:
The Yes Men, Greenpeace, Colombia College
Date:
Apr 4 2011
Students from Colombia College teamed up with Greenpeace and The Yes Men to take on the Chicago coal industry in an elaborate, multi-layered hoax. The group created a scheme to announce that a new coal plant was planned—but instead of going in a poor neighborhood (like the two coal plants that already exist), this one would be built in a rich one.
Art, Advocacy, and Action: Luke Ching's Crusade for Labor Rights in Hong Kong
Practitioner:
Luke Ching Chin Wai
Date:
Jan 1 2024
Luke Ching Chin Wai is a conceptual artist and labour-artivist in Hong Kong. Since 2013, he has worked undercover in different low-paid jobs in the city, including as a security guard, supermarket cashier worker, and metro cleaner to learn about poor people's working conditions. He then uses these experiences to create art and push for improved labour rights.

Pages