We Are All In This Together is a survey of 10 years of Justseeds member production in solidarity ... more We Are All In This Together is a survey of 10 years of Justseeds member production in solidarity with social movements. This catalog was produced from an exhibition curated by Interference Archive volunteers, and contains 48 pages of color photographs of the installation and graphics. Narrowed down to 7 themes, raging from Anti-war to Gender Justice to Migration, it illustrates the role artists play in grassroots organizing. The original exhibition was held at the Purchase College-SUNY, in the Fall of 2017.
Design of the catalog was created by Community Design, a hands-on design studio class at Purchase College-SUNY, with Madeline Freidman as lead designer.
Accompanying texts written by the Interference Archive curators; Nora Almeida, Kevin Caplicki, Bonnie Gordon, Amber Hickey, Amy Roberts, Melissa Sions and Michelle Wilson.
A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is a collaboratively created book.
34 visionary creative thinkers... more A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is a collaboratively created book. 34 visionary creative thinkers and makers contributed to this book which illuminates ways of devising more socially, economically, and ecologically just versions of now.
CONTRIBUTORS: Alex Kemman (The Valreep Collective) Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens Artist Bailout Collective Billy Mark Cheyenna Weber (SolidarityNYC) Antonio Scarponi (Conceptual Devices) Critical Art Ensemble Ethan Miller Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young) Georg Hobmeier and Tommy Noonan Howling Mob Society Jeanne van Heeswijk Jenny Cameron Johannes Grenzfurthner (Monochrom) Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Editorial Collective) Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative Ken Ehrlich and Kate Johnston Llano Del Rio Collective New Social Art School Platform Rori Knudtson (School of Critical Engagement) Santiago Cirugeda (Recetas Urbanas) Sasha Costanza-Chock SPURSE swearonourfriendship T.J. Demos Temporary Services The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination Precarious Workers Brigade The Vacuum Cleaner The Yes Men TradeSchool.coop UrbanFarmers Watts House Project
OCEAN / UNI, Culturing the Deep Sea: Pacific Resistance, 2024
This short piece of creative non-fiction focuses on my hometown, Oceanside, California – the site... more This short piece of creative non-fiction focuses on my hometown, Oceanside, California – the site of military base and test site, Camp Pendleton, from a first-person perspective. In the essay, I discuss the aural world created by the regular bomb tests that would shake my childhood home, and the interplay between that world and the one present within the ostensibly peaceful submerged coastal seascape adjacent to Camp Pendleton. Weaving personal narratives with military history, as well as evidence of the intergenerational and cross-species transit of toxic waste, I share visions of the Pacific Ocean as a location of solace, solidarity, and solastalgia.
Despite a long history of colonial, military, and extractive industry imposition on the land, wat... more Despite a long history of colonial, military, and extractive industry imposition on the land, waters, and people of Inuit Nunangat, resistance to such efforts is thriving. Through highlighting the work of The Place Names Program and Arnait Video Productions, I show how Nunavummiut (the people living in Nunavut) employ visual media to publicly wage their place-based knowledge as a mode of creative intervention against military and extractive forces, and the ways in which such forces have permeated Inuit bodies, lands, and waters. So successful are these visual acts of resistance that they compel southerners to reevaluate their approaches to northern development so drastically that projects are abandoned or no longer seen as viable. In putting these strategies into practice, Inuit engage with state-sanctioned systems of law and governance, but ultimately reshape these structures to better suit their own needs and the needs of the Arctic land and sea. The maps produced by the Place Names Program and films produced by Arnait Video Productions resist visions of the Arctic as a wasteland and of Inuit bodies as pollutable, instead putting forward visions of consent and reciprocity. Ultimately, I argue that seeing the Arctic in ways that challenge military and extractive representations and center Inuit epistemologies and voices, plays a significant role in halting the continued molecular and chemical colonization of Inuit lands and bodies. In other words, visual media is a tool for resisting unwanted extractive and military bodily intimacies, and insisting on consent before entry of these toxic presences.
“What is the impact,” the photographer Mikael Owunna asks, “when you see somebody who looks like ... more “What is the impact,” the photographer Mikael Owunna asks, “when you see somebody who looks like you being killed all of the time?” Owunna, an American photographer of Nigerian Swedish descent who originally studied engineering, makes work about queerness and the Black body, and describes his practice as a direct response to a dominant visual culture pervaded by images of the Black body as a site of death. His series Infinite Essence (2016–ongoing) simultaneously constructs an alternative visual narrative in our present, while gesturing toward the possibility of another world.
This interview is part of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest's 11th issue, on the aesthetics a... more This interview is part of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest's 11th issue, on the aesthetics and practices of anti-fascism.
This article focuses on the implications of the work of two artists on discourses of temporality ... more This article focuses on the implications of the work of two artists on discourses of temporality and Indigenous futurity. I analyze the work of Skawennati and Bonnie Devine, with particular consideration of their resistance to the hegemonic temporality of extractive and capitalist lifeways and what Mark Rifkin calls ‘settler time’ [Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham: Duke University Press]. Skawennati provides a spiraling narrative of Indigenous pasts and futures in her machinima series, TimeTraveller™. In her sculptural installation, Letters from Home, Bonnie Devine calls upon the viewer to consider the stones from the Serpent River First Nation as elders. The casts of these stones are framed as texts, and viewers are encouraged to learn how to read these lessons, collapsing the divide between deep time and the present. Ultimately, I argue that these artists use emerging, experimental, and established media as a method of creating ruptures in Euro-Western notions of time, providing an embodied experience of a temporal otherwise and glimpses into decolonized futures.
Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas Special Issue: Ecologies of Nature and Culture: The Dialectics of Environmental Entropy and Decolonization in Art of the Americas (October 2018): 90-101., 2018
The issue's curatorial work begins by encountering the
necessary reorganization of life’s rela... more The issue's curatorial work begins by encountering the
necessary reorganization of life’s relationality suggested
by what will be undone and remade in the time of
changing climate. For full articles, see http://joaap.org/issue10/Essays_forward.htm
I co-edited and organized this work.
contributions by Amber Hickey, Brett Bloom, Mauvais Troupe, Rachel O'reilly and Danny Butt, Paula Cobo-Guevara.
We Are All In This Together is a survey of 10 years of Justseeds member production in solidarity ... more We Are All In This Together is a survey of 10 years of Justseeds member production in solidarity with social movements. This catalog was produced from an exhibition curated by Interference Archive volunteers, and contains 48 pages of color photographs of the installation and graphics. Narrowed down to 7 themes, raging from Anti-war to Gender Justice to Migration, it illustrates the role artists play in grassroots organizing. The original exhibition was held at the Purchase College-SUNY, in the Fall of 2017.
Design of the catalog was created by Community Design, a hands-on design studio class at Purchase College-SUNY, with Madeline Freidman as lead designer.
Accompanying texts written by the Interference Archive curators; Nora Almeida, Kevin Caplicki, Bonnie Gordon, Amber Hickey, Amy Roberts, Melissa Sions and Michelle Wilson.
A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is a collaboratively created book.
34 visionary creative thinkers... more A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is a collaboratively created book. 34 visionary creative thinkers and makers contributed to this book which illuminates ways of devising more socially, economically, and ecologically just versions of now.
CONTRIBUTORS: Alex Kemman (The Valreep Collective) Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens Artist Bailout Collective Billy Mark Cheyenna Weber (SolidarityNYC) Antonio Scarponi (Conceptual Devices) Critical Art Ensemble Ethan Miller Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young) Georg Hobmeier and Tommy Noonan Howling Mob Society Jeanne van Heeswijk Jenny Cameron Johannes Grenzfurthner (Monochrom) Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Editorial Collective) Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative Ken Ehrlich and Kate Johnston Llano Del Rio Collective New Social Art School Platform Rori Knudtson (School of Critical Engagement) Santiago Cirugeda (Recetas Urbanas) Sasha Costanza-Chock SPURSE swearonourfriendship T.J. Demos Temporary Services The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination Precarious Workers Brigade The Vacuum Cleaner The Yes Men TradeSchool.coop UrbanFarmers Watts House Project
OCEAN / UNI, Culturing the Deep Sea: Pacific Resistance, 2024
This short piece of creative non-fiction focuses on my hometown, Oceanside, California – the site... more This short piece of creative non-fiction focuses on my hometown, Oceanside, California – the site of military base and test site, Camp Pendleton, from a first-person perspective. In the essay, I discuss the aural world created by the regular bomb tests that would shake my childhood home, and the interplay between that world and the one present within the ostensibly peaceful submerged coastal seascape adjacent to Camp Pendleton. Weaving personal narratives with military history, as well as evidence of the intergenerational and cross-species transit of toxic waste, I share visions of the Pacific Ocean as a location of solace, solidarity, and solastalgia.
Despite a long history of colonial, military, and extractive industry imposition on the land, wat... more Despite a long history of colonial, military, and extractive industry imposition on the land, waters, and people of Inuit Nunangat, resistance to such efforts is thriving. Through highlighting the work of The Place Names Program and Arnait Video Productions, I show how Nunavummiut (the people living in Nunavut) employ visual media to publicly wage their place-based knowledge as a mode of creative intervention against military and extractive forces, and the ways in which such forces have permeated Inuit bodies, lands, and waters. So successful are these visual acts of resistance that they compel southerners to reevaluate their approaches to northern development so drastically that projects are abandoned or no longer seen as viable. In putting these strategies into practice, Inuit engage with state-sanctioned systems of law and governance, but ultimately reshape these structures to better suit their own needs and the needs of the Arctic land and sea. The maps produced by the Place Names Program and films produced by Arnait Video Productions resist visions of the Arctic as a wasteland and of Inuit bodies as pollutable, instead putting forward visions of consent and reciprocity. Ultimately, I argue that seeing the Arctic in ways that challenge military and extractive representations and center Inuit epistemologies and voices, plays a significant role in halting the continued molecular and chemical colonization of Inuit lands and bodies. In other words, visual media is a tool for resisting unwanted extractive and military bodily intimacies, and insisting on consent before entry of these toxic presences.
“What is the impact,” the photographer Mikael Owunna asks, “when you see somebody who looks like ... more “What is the impact,” the photographer Mikael Owunna asks, “when you see somebody who looks like you being killed all of the time?” Owunna, an American photographer of Nigerian Swedish descent who originally studied engineering, makes work about queerness and the Black body, and describes his practice as a direct response to a dominant visual culture pervaded by images of the Black body as a site of death. His series Infinite Essence (2016–ongoing) simultaneously constructs an alternative visual narrative in our present, while gesturing toward the possibility of another world.
This interview is part of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest's 11th issue, on the aesthetics a... more This interview is part of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest's 11th issue, on the aesthetics and practices of anti-fascism.
This article focuses on the implications of the work of two artists on discourses of temporality ... more This article focuses on the implications of the work of two artists on discourses of temporality and Indigenous futurity. I analyze the work of Skawennati and Bonnie Devine, with particular consideration of their resistance to the hegemonic temporality of extractive and capitalist lifeways and what Mark Rifkin calls ‘settler time’ [Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham: Duke University Press]. Skawennati provides a spiraling narrative of Indigenous pasts and futures in her machinima series, TimeTraveller™. In her sculptural installation, Letters from Home, Bonnie Devine calls upon the viewer to consider the stones from the Serpent River First Nation as elders. The casts of these stones are framed as texts, and viewers are encouraged to learn how to read these lessons, collapsing the divide between deep time and the present. Ultimately, I argue that these artists use emerging, experimental, and established media as a method of creating ruptures in Euro-Western notions of time, providing an embodied experience of a temporal otherwise and glimpses into decolonized futures.
Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas Special Issue: Ecologies of Nature and Culture: The Dialectics of Environmental Entropy and Decolonization in Art of the Americas (October 2018): 90-101., 2018
The issue's curatorial work begins by encountering the
necessary reorganization of life’s rela... more The issue's curatorial work begins by encountering the
necessary reorganization of life’s relationality suggested
by what will be undone and remade in the time of
changing climate. For full articles, see http://joaap.org/issue10/Essays_forward.htm
I co-edited and organized this work.
contributions by Amber Hickey, Brett Bloom, Mauvais Troupe, Rachel O'reilly and Danny Butt, Paula Cobo-Guevara.
This zine was created as a supplement to a Teaching with Primary Sources Workshop (co-facilitated... more This zine was created as a supplement to a Teaching with Primary Sources Workshop (co-facilitated with Kate A. McLaughlin) for junior faculty members. The workshop was organized by the Lunder Institute for American Art, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Zine design by Olivia Balcos.
Examines how Indigenous artists and activists respond visually to issues related to land, power, ... more Examines how Indigenous artists and activists respond visually to issues related to land, power, and social justice. We look at a broad range of media used by Indigenous peoples, including documentary filmmaking, printmaking, photography, and performance. While we focus on case studies in North America, the issues explored are relevant across the globe. We discuss Indigenous epistemologies related to land and mapping, and the ways in which these knowledge systems are mobilized in resistance to settler colonialism. Students leave with an understanding of decolonial social movement culture, equipped with theories and methods used to challenge the legacies of colonial research and representation. They complete several creative assignments and write a final essay.
Introduction to the history and contemporary manifestations of surveillance culture in the United... more Introduction to the history and contemporary manifestations of surveillance culture in the United States and its global implications. We ask, what is the role of surveillance in American culture, and how does it shape our bodies, behaviors, relationships, communities, and political possibilities? We look at how surveillance unevenly affects marginalized communities, and consider how artists and activists have responded to surveillance culture through re-purposing these technologies into tools of resistance. Students will familiarize themselves with surveillance technologies, such as iris scanning and drone imaging.
Focuses on notable developments in activist art from the 18th century to the present, highlightin... more Focuses on notable developments in activist art from the 18th century to the present, highlighting the relationships between geographically diverse movements-from The Black Panther newspaper's powerful political graphics to rabble-rousing anti-nuclear activism in Japan. We look at the role of art in social movements, while considering the contexts from which these movements emerged in relation to transnational social, environmental, and economic concerns. The class looks at a variety of activist tactics and forms each week, such as protest walks, grassroots counter-surveillance, and political printmaking, providing students with the tools to analyze how the visuality of activism has developed over time.
In their recent volume, Japan’s Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema, coautho... more In their recent volume, Japan’s Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema, coauthors Sean Rhoads (film historian and Japanologist) and Brooke McCorkle (music historian and Japanologi...
Uploads
Books by Amber Hickey
Design of the catalog was created by Community Design, a hands-on design studio class at Purchase College-SUNY, with Madeline Freidman as lead designer.
Accompanying texts written by the Interference Archive curators; Nora Almeida, Kevin Caplicki, Bonnie Gordon, Amber Hickey, Amy Roberts, Melissa Sions and Michelle Wilson.
34 visionary creative thinkers and makers contributed to this book which illuminates ways of devising more socially, economically, and ecologically just versions of now.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Alex Kemman (The Valreep Collective)
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
Artist Bailout Collective
Billy Mark
Cheyenna Weber (SolidarityNYC)
Antonio Scarponi (Conceptual Devices)
Critical Art Ensemble
Ethan Miller
Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young)
Georg Hobmeier and Tommy Noonan
Howling Mob Society
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Jenny Cameron
Johannes Grenzfurthner (Monochrom)
Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke (Journal of Aesthetics &
Protest Editorial Collective)
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
Ken Ehrlich and Kate Johnston
Llano Del Rio Collective
New Social Art School
Platform
Rori Knudtson (School of Critical Engagement)
Santiago Cirugeda (Recetas Urbanas)
Sasha Costanza-Chock
SPURSE
swearonourfriendship
T.J. Demos
Temporary Services
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
Precarious Workers Brigade
The Vacuum Cleaner
The Yes Men
TradeSchool.coop
UrbanFarmers
Watts House Project
Book Chapters and Articles by Amber Hickey
https://ocean-archive.org/story/waves-will-always-be-louder-than-bombs
necessary reorganization of life’s relationality suggested
by what will be undone and remade in the time of
changing climate. For full articles, see http://joaap.org/issue10/Essays_forward.htm
I co-edited and organized this work.
contributions by Amber Hickey, Brett Bloom, Mauvais Troupe, Rachel O'reilly and Danny Butt, Paula Cobo-Guevara.
Design of the catalog was created by Community Design, a hands-on design studio class at Purchase College-SUNY, with Madeline Freidman as lead designer.
Accompanying texts written by the Interference Archive curators; Nora Almeida, Kevin Caplicki, Bonnie Gordon, Amber Hickey, Amy Roberts, Melissa Sions and Michelle Wilson.
34 visionary creative thinkers and makers contributed to this book which illuminates ways of devising more socially, economically, and ecologically just versions of now.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Alex Kemman (The Valreep Collective)
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
Artist Bailout Collective
Billy Mark
Cheyenna Weber (SolidarityNYC)
Antonio Scarponi (Conceptual Devices)
Critical Art Ensemble
Ethan Miller
Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young)
Georg Hobmeier and Tommy Noonan
Howling Mob Society
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Jenny Cameron
Johannes Grenzfurthner (Monochrom)
Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke (Journal of Aesthetics &
Protest Editorial Collective)
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
Ken Ehrlich and Kate Johnston
Llano Del Rio Collective
New Social Art School
Platform
Rori Knudtson (School of Critical Engagement)
Santiago Cirugeda (Recetas Urbanas)
Sasha Costanza-Chock
SPURSE
swearonourfriendship
T.J. Demos
Temporary Services
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
Precarious Workers Brigade
The Vacuum Cleaner
The Yes Men
TradeSchool.coop
UrbanFarmers
Watts House Project
https://ocean-archive.org/story/waves-will-always-be-louder-than-bombs
necessary reorganization of life’s relationality suggested
by what will be undone and remade in the time of
changing climate. For full articles, see http://joaap.org/issue10/Essays_forward.htm
I co-edited and organized this work.
contributions by Amber Hickey, Brett Bloom, Mauvais Troupe, Rachel O'reilly and Danny Butt, Paula Cobo-Guevara.