Creative Resistance Talk

Please join us on Friday, April 23rd from 1 - 2 p.m (EST) for a talk by ITP alumna Roopa Vasudevan. Please RSVP for the event here.

Description

Artists and creative practitioners are widely seen as responsible for destabilizing or critiquing cultural norms and social systems. But when we talk about resistance or refusal enacted through creative means, what exactly do we mean? How does artistic work serve to resist dominant structures—and where does it sit in relation to the structures it aims to critique?

In this talk, artist and researcher Roopa Vasudevan will discuss her work examining the relationships between new media artists and the tech industry, and begin to unpack the ways in which the priorities of Big Tech structure the ways we are able to critique or subvert it in creative work using technology. Using literature on resistance, refusal and solidarity drawn from activist movements and scholarly texts on social change, she will outline the problems and possibilities inherent in both the concept of "creative resistance" and the assumption that creative work carries inherent pro-social ethics. She will also discuss the "Strategic Transparency Collective": a social practice project begun in the summer of 2020 which aims to bring media artists and creative technologists together to discuss their relationships with technology, so that we can begin the process of aligning values, determining what resistance to dominant technological systems means, and figuring out ways to implement it in our work going forward.

Bio
Roopa Vasudevan is an American media artist, computer programmer and researcher, currently based in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited internationally and supported by Eyebeam (Brooklyn, NY); the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation (Philadelphia, PA); the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives (Haverford, PA); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard); China Residencies; SPACES (Cleveland, OH); and Flux Factory (Queens, NY). She is currently a member artist at Vox Populi, a 30+ year old collectively run arts space in Philadelphia.

Roopa received an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013; served as an Assistant Arts Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai between 2016 and 2018; and is currently a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is researching the relationships between tech institutions and new media artists.