Art and Power in Participatory Culture

At the Art Department of the University of California Santa Cruz.
visit: [The Course Website].

For most of its history, art and artists have been complicit with the power structures they have operated within. Increasingly in the 20th-century however, there have been movements to trick, haunt, resist, or reroute dominant regimes of power. In this class, we articulate different kinds of power, we come to see how “power-over” is known to function in disciplinary and control societies, and we gain a critical grasp of an increasingly participatory culture. From these articulations, we evaluate the goals and the successes of an array of art projects that, in some manner, address flows of power.

By the end of the course, students can expect to have developed their writing through becoming familiar with a range of participatory and new media artworks as well as some of the critical discourses these artworks are situated within.