My previous blog summarized my final project, but I want to mention here a possible connection to music that wasn't anywhere in my project...

My final project has been about art as civic media.

In my paper, I talked about:
1) Theoretical models for civic art.
2) The practical component of my project.
3) Examples of civic art.
4) How and why civic art might work as a medium for information conveyance.

Last week I worked on the practical aspect of my project. This week I’ve been reading more research materials and figuring out more details of the practical aspect of my final project.

This week I read Fred Fejes’ “Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic: The 1954 Media Campaign against Miami's Homosexuals and the Discourse of Civic Betterment” (http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.mit.edu/openurl?volume=9&date=2000&spage=3... ) and Gyorgy Kepes’ “Toward Civic Art” (http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.mit.edu/stable/1572235?seq=5& ).

Although “Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic” focused mostly on the politics, the Miami Herald and One Magazine, and the historical context (busy nightlife, including gay clubs; recent crimes adding to the atmosphere of fear, etc.) that contributed to the campaign against Miami’s homosexual community, there was some mention of the use of art in the campaign.

This week I read:
1) "Everyday creativity as civic engagement: A cultural citizenship view of new media"
http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:hFxi5C8OoxwJ:schola...
8) "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" by W. Benjamin
http://dxarts.washington.edu/coupe/wk1/benjamin.pdf

I appreciate the comments I've gotten from my classmates - re those comments:

My project will have two parts, both centered around the idea of using art as civic media.

Part 1) I'll do this first, in order to have better ideas for part 2. Part 1 is a literature review on the history of public art interventions (anonymous, subversive, graphic art, etc.), including detournement, ad hacking, critical and satirical graffiti (and reverse/ clean tag graffiti), billboard modifications, adbusters, political remix, etc. The deliverable from part 1 will be a paper, probably about 15 - 20 pages in length. To be finished by mid - late November.

Chakravartty spoke about the desire of China to stay culturally isolated from the American-dominated capitalist global economy while engaging in the global economy itself, evidenced in the term "economic globalization" (rather than naked "globalization"). She mentioned the distrust of global intrusion - specifically the intrusion of China - in Africa shown in local fears that more children "with Chinese features" would be born to African women. She also brought up the Northern, and, in particular, American fears regarding increased global connectivity reflected in immigration debate and policy and in the "war on terror". In the 1950's, and to some extent still today, in the US there was a distinct fear of the ideological spread (of communism) across the entire world.

Raw notes from Wednesday's class on Media Justice located at: http://etherpad.brownbag.me/p/mediajustice .

We took cues and ideas from Wednesday's reading,

1) Dana Cunningham, "Can African-Americans find their Voice in Cyberspace?" [parts 1-4]
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/03/can_african-americans_find_the.html
2) Media Justice: An Affirmative Framework for Media Change:
http://centerformediajustice.org/about/our-framework/
3) MAG-Net annual report 2011:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/64874140/MAG-Net-Annual-Report-2011
4) Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-net) reports:
http://mag-net.org/media-justice-resource-library

Additional texts:

My first concern in writing this entry is whether or not, by so doing, I am devaluing the Internet as a civic medium. Even before I started trying to figure out what I wanted to write about, I was concerned with the causal chain that led to my post: there is no initial idea driving/ inspiring my entry; I have an assignment from a professor as impetus, and from there I've tried to dredge up ideas, which will hopefully be good enough. But I find "good enough" a little worrying, morally. In class I'm learning about how and why the Internet can be a powerful tool for manipulating information... should my first relations with it in wake of this new light be to post anything other than a carefully-crafted piece I've independently decided to write? (When I Google-search "definition civic media", MIT comes up 3rd...