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Featuring guest Dalida Maria Benfield, media artist, activist, and scholar whose work addresses interrelated questions of media representations of gender, race, and nation; media justice; and artists’ and activists’ uses of ICTs globally. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, she is pursuing a research project on the rhetorical uses of race and gender in the online presence of ICT4D programs.

Her talk will consider the paradoxical poetics of contemporary media art and activism. While much of this work enables new forms of collectivity, it also engages tactics of shifting visibilities and disappearances. These challenge us to consider the ephemerality and mobility of political and aesthetic sodalities, as well as the power of absences and anonymity. Exceeding previous political and media formations and the social categories upon which they may initially rely, including class, race, gender, and nation, another poetics is emerging. The examples to be discussed range from the video installation work of Cao Fei, the Internet interventions of Minerva Cuevas, and the transmedia Occupy Wall Street action.

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The Civic Media Thursday lunch series welcomes those working in the civic media field, who share food and company with staff, researchers, and visitors at the Center's headquarters in the MIT Media Lab.