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The Manifestos for Creative Resistance

The Manifestos for Creative Resistance are a series of collectively written documents authored by members of the Strategic Transparency Collective. Developed from a continuing series of workshops first held in the summer of 2020, the Manifestos represent a growing awareness among new media artists of how our work serves to uphold and reinforce the dominance of surveillance capitalism and Big Tech - along with a pervasive desire to be reflexive about our work's impacts, and to engage as a community while working towards critical practices that break free of those restrictions. These documents point to both potential shifts in how we might conceptualize our work's purpose, and actionable commitments we can make in service of those shifts.

Seven guiding prompts that led to the development of the Manifestos can be found wheatpasted onto walls around New York City beginning on Friday, November 20, 2020. Each prompt connects to a website on which selections from the Manifestos are viewable, offering a window into how Collective members have approached answering these questions in relation to our work. The placement of the prompts out in the world and away from technology invites viewers to consider these questions in the context of their own lives, and offers a connection to core questions surrounding technology, art, and resistance that, while central to the work of new media artists, extend well beyond this community into myriad and diverse creative practices.

The Strategic Transparency Collective is a decentralized network of new media artists rethinking our relationships with technology, surveillance capitalism, and corporate control. Our aim is to develop frameworks for tech-based creative resistance that do not serve to reaffirm the dominance of Big Tech and its profit-driven imperatives. We advocate a robustly self-reflexive approach to working with technology and data, and encourage artists to align their goals with each other and operate as a communit - rather than reinforcing the neoliberal tropes of individual artistic excellence and the myth of the singular genius. The guiding prompts and manifestos presented as part of this exhibition were collected, edited, and placed online and IRL by media artist, researcher, and Collective member Roopa Vasudevan, (Instagram: @rouxpz).