Hi, my name is Claudia Edwards and today I want to speak with you about communicating
political messages across mediums.
Now the reason I'd like to speak about this is because I think it's incredibly important
to consider effectiveness of a different communication strategy when trying to affect change, when
trying to reach people, and when trying to make people care.
So I guess I should give you a little bit of a background about myself, about why this
is interesting to me, and also the work that I've done before in these fields in order
to have some, hopefully, credibility in explaining my perspective on what they are and the spaces
between them today.
So for myself, I studied sculpture first when I did my BFA at Concordia University in Montreal,
so I live in Montreal, and I started out in sculpture and visual forms of art.
I moved towards solo performance, video practice, then it expanded, it just kind of kept expanding
and I was working in consensus-based theater, collective theater and performance projects.
I also ran a city-wide arts festival, which was multidisciplinary, and then more recently
I worked for about a year at CKUT, which is McGill University's radio station, another
university in Montreal.
Now this radio station has a social justice and advocacy-centered mandate, so it's an
independent news agency, and what that means is for all of the people who support it, institutions,
et cetera, but mainly people, a people-powered kind of independent news, none of them have
influence over what the news is produced by the media group.
And so this maintains a certain amount of freedom, which is very necessary in the media,
to cover any story that is important to cover.
So that's how I sort of moved into media, I got very interested in interviewing individuals.
Another important thing to know about independent media and about what advocacy-centered means
or what advocacy journalism would be is rather than reporting on stories from the typical
perspective that is shared in the news, probably some expert, maybe some government member
who runs a particular department, there are so many experts which we hear talking about
issues all the time, and interestingly there are many people whose own experiences are
not centered in those stories, so we do not hear what they have to say about the issues.
Whether it's indigenous issues of land abuse, whether it's veterans talking about their
own experiences of returning after war, there are just so many groups of people who are
heavily marginalized in the media.
So working for this agency, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of very interesting people who
were very close to the issues that they were talking about.
Another thing that I would add is that I'm somebody who learns by doing, so I'm really
a maker-thinker and I really value this process of going out into the world and trying stuff
and seeing what happens and seeing how it fails and understanding the limitations and
the benefits of each thing that you do.
And it took me a long time actually, as sort of an artist in my artistic practice, it took
me a long time to understand the medium that was important to me.
And I think what sort of was a constant thread was actually starting with a message or an
issue that I wanted to talk about and realizing that there might be better forms which could
speak to or embody a particular kind of message.
And so it kind of just kept expanding and always there was a sense of urgency to what
that message was.
An example would be if you were trying to make, if you were trying to speak about the
material world, you might do a short segment on the problems of plastic in the ocean.
You could also meld a whole bunch of plastic together and create a sculpture out of that.
And people would experience it in the gallery or in a photograph and the actual material
would be speaking for itself.
In this sense, the material has agency.
Now what's interesting is thinking about what is the viewer's experience of that work?
What are they going to feel impelled to think about or do when they see this formal aesthetic
thing in a space that was intended for their experience?
So I would say that effective communication strategies actually consider the ideal medium
or media from which to work.
They consider their target audience that they, because we're only talking about political
messages here, there are so many ways that you can make art or media or anything.
But if you have a political message, who is the audience that you're trying to reach?
This is important to know because a message could be both resonant or educational.
And also you need to think about the sense of agency that the audience, participants,
viewers, whatever they're called in this practice, what sense of agency are they going to have?
Okay, so I have on this board five different categories of mediums through which it's
possible to convey political messages to groups of people.
And this is by no means everything.
This is just a list that I put together out of convenience, but also things that I have
some experience in.
So I've actually put it on a spectrum and I'm just going to indicate what the spectrum
is here.
So we're going from the most active response from viewers to the most passive response.
And another thing I'll just point out in these rows, we're going to start off with disadvantages.
So these are the disadvantages of a particular medium.
Okay, so let's begin.
In the category of mass media, this is including advertising, ad campaigns, television, Hollywood
movies, forms of media that reach tons of people.
And they do this by having very large distribution, a lot of support behind them in one form or
another, a lot of funding.
So what are some of the disadvantages of producing mass media in order to convey a message?
What are the disadvantages of making an ad campaign, or a TV show, or a film, which is
intended for large audiences?
A spoonful of sugar, make it palatable.
Now, if you're producing large media forms, you're probably going to have a lot of investors
and stakeholders and funders, whether they're institutional or individual.
But there's going to be a lot of money behind it because the distribution costs a lot,
because the production costs a lot.
So that means that you have to please a lot of people in the production of your message.
And because of that, what happens is it's very likely that your message will be diluted.
If your message is in any way radical, in any way marginal, you're going to have to
reduce some of the impact of what you're trying to say, also making it palatable for
the public, so that more people will be open to minute or gradual change, but not everything
at once.
And for many people, this is an absolute transgression, it's not possible for them to work that much
in the center.
Now, what are the benefits?
The new normal, Emma Watson, is one hot feminist.
If you can find likeable people or well-known or familiar characters, identities to convey
your message and share it and personally rep it, people who like them, who know them, the
public at large, is going to be a little more open-minded about receiving what that message
is.
So, we have the case of Emma Watson, but another example would be of this working, the television
show RuPaul's Drag Race.
This is a television show which has effectively visibleized the large spectrum of gender identity
and sexual identities that are possible, and also a culture, an artistic, creative, underground
cabaret, drag culture that has been around since the 80s, but has been pushed and remains
on the margin, and it was something that evolved as a kind of resistance movement.
But now, putting it into the public eye, it actually has in some ways not only, it's not
only visibleized this whole other world that many people may be never knew about, but it's
actually normalized it because it's familiar, because you see the episodes each week and
you get to know the characters and they don't seem so strange anymore, so that's that.
Now on to journalism.
This includes both mainstream and independent, so this would be large organizations and national
news agencies, you have Fox News in there, you have, I don't know, there's a, in Canada
we'd have the CBC, the NBC, but you also have things like Democracy Now on the independent
side, you have CKUT where I worked.
So what are some of the biggest struggles and setbacks for news producers?
Well, yesterday's headlines.
So news is constantly disappearing.
There's always new news, and it's basically, you know, there's an ongoing struggle to keep
information relevant, to keep facts remembered, while at the same time contributing to this
flow of information, but the information often feels like an overflow.
And also the will to immediacy, simply reporting on and documenting events does not necessarily
explain or provide a basis for understanding how those events, how those social issues
are connected.
And so it's possible either to do a lot of work to relate current events to past events
and maintain a narrative within your news agency, so that things do not seem so overwhelming
and confusing and unusual, but actually a part of patterns of history.
And it's also possible to really create a narrative which confuses people, or which
creates a narrative that actually isn't true.
I mean, on the level of reporting stories, there is a journalistic obligation to not
lie, though it happens, but it should not happen, but you're not lying, but you can
connect ideas and thoughts and emphasize those in ways which can be quite negatively
propagandistic in order to convey a sense of only one side of a struggle or convey a
particular bias.
Now, what are benefits?
Keeps people up to date.
What the hell is going on?
People know what things are happening, what people are working on, both afar and nearby.
And not only does this give them a sense of what's happening in the world, but also how
movements, how events, how behaviors of governments are similar all over and the potential to
learn from those.
Okay, so now we're going to move over to the category of art, and as you can see this kind
of falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of the most passive to the most active.
Now in this category of art, I'm just talking about, I've kind of reduced it, so I'm just
talking about visual art, gallery art, audio, things that you would experience alone, probably
in a solitary way.
And so some of the struggles of the art producer trying to reach many people with their message,
the will to novelty, your art has to be new.
It's incredibly important for artists to be innovating, and this is how they get to the
front of their field.
And many people don't even reach that stage, and it's quite difficult even to get space
in a gallery, so the will to novelty, this production of sort of new knowledge through
a creative research, it's something that is memorable, and it's something that because
of how memorable it is and how the way we experience it, it actually can be embedded
into history then.
People have reason to write about memorable experiences, and this art history happens
that way.
And so some of the benefits, let's focus on that, of this, well, the personal is political.
Through the experience of art, it's possible to see things through somebody else's lens
entirely, and so it is possible to have a kind of indirect, empathic transference, and
what I mean by that is, again, seeing things in the eyes or in the ears of another person,
the way that they have chosen to recreate reality, it conveys not only a message but
like a sentiment and an experience which is foreign, and this increases people's experience
of what empathy is.
Now it also provokes different ways of thinking, and that's why I've called this feelings puzzles.
This is my new word for what art is, but effectively when we think about these huge problems, whether
it's racism or sexism or Donald Trump or the fast food industry, these are problems that
we experience now today, they are urgent, but they're also part of a long history of
struggle and resistance, and these huge problems that have been written about and that people
are working on in all kinds of ways, academics, people in all kinds of fields, they're not
things that we can solve right now.
It's not possible to have an immediate solution to this thing, and it's going to be an ongoing
battle.
So what a feelings puzzle does is it creates a novel kind of way to rethink about a thing,
and instead of feeling completely overwhelmed and unable to fix the problem, there's nothing
about an artwork that says you have to understand what this means.
In fact, there is the expectation that it's going to be mysterious and kind of obscure,
and it's going to take a process of puzzling through, and so the sensorial qualities of
artwork we remember physically, we experience that, and then we walk away from it, and we
keep thinking about that, and we puzzle through ways that this might be trying to change and
flip a narrative on a particular issue, which is important.
Okay, we're going to go over to activism.
So activism, these are grassroots and bottom-up movements, and what that means is non-hierarchical
organizations of people who are getting together outside of large institutions and forming
their own institutions, small organizations, sometimes large ones.
Activism does not necessarily mean protesting in the street or rioting or anything like
that.
It could be writing to prisoners and just letting them know that they haven't been completely
erased from the world or humanity.
It might be working on disability resources and trying to increase accessibility of like
a city, like the curbs in the sidewalk or whatever it might be.
So there are many ways to do activist work.
Some of the disadvantages of this field of reaching people, but then everyone will know
what I think.
There is a very real fear that many people have, and not for wrong reasons, of confrontation.
It can be quite scary to confront both authority members and also members of your own community
on the subject of an issue.
Now the other reality is that, well, yeah, let's leave it at that.
We're going to move on to the benefits of activism.
So no politics of respectability allowed.
The messages, what this means, respectability politics, the messages are not restricted
by their internal members, pushing the radical perspectives into the general discourse.
So respectability politics is this thing that can happen within activist circles or circles
around a particular subject where people feel that their messages or their language needs
to be diluted and more palatable in order to receive a larger group of members and participants.
And that is really something that I think activism and radical organizing seeks to reduce
this as a reality at all so that people within the group are not censored, people are actually
working together on the issue transparently, honestly, boldly.
This also reflects on the need for extremes because radical is this term that when you
really look at issues that are called radical, often I would say that they're actually very
basic human rights issues.
People who want to have safe work environments, whatever their kinds of work are, you know,
people who want basic forms of respect, recognition, health services, people who are otherwise restricted
in levels of basic human rights.
I would say that things have been pushed into being understood as things on the margin,
but really what the reality is is that these marginal groups of people have basic needs
that aren't being recognized.
So instead we have the possibility for minority groups to speak up or even, you know, large
groups of people who hadn't previously been engaged in an issue but become engaged.
Okay, finally we're going to look at socially engaged art activism, so this is relational
performance art, relational art theater, collectives, things that are done in groups around
political messages.
So in this category, the disadvantage is, well, I am a grown-up.
Stop telling me what to think.
Now it's very possible and it can happen that artwork with political messages can feel overly
didactic and this kind of goes against the logic of making work and making feelings puzzles
and it's not necessarily the case but it's possible.
So this is something to be conscious of.
Another limitation is the fact that if you're making a performance with a group of people,
well there are people who are going to want to engage in that and there are people who
aren't.
So not everyone is actually comfortable at being at the center of attention and that's
a reality that's a limitation that you have to work with.
There are certain people who will participate, who will come to your events, who will engage
and there are certainly people who will not.
Now in terms of what is beneficial, we're going to talk about the benefits of socially
engaged art activism.
Do you feel me, it is possible in all arts practices to reach a kind of empathic transference
in the arts field that happens without a body even there, without the artist's body
that is but within socially engaged work the relationship is actually a part of the work.
Building relationships is actually a part of the work and so this sense of relating
to the other is incredibly immediate and this has a certain power to it.
And again as you know clearly we're on this fully, on this end now of the spectrum of
the most active ways to get people involved.
So people are building works themselves or they're participating in ways that directly
implicates them where they are embodying perhaps another person's identity as they're
acting, performing, perhaps they're just speaking thoughts of another person but there are many
ways to make the sense of relating to the other quite urgent in the work.
Some things that are great about this form and about arts in general, abstraction, absurdity,
humor, these forms make it possible to explore difficult and heavy content distancing the
viewer's personal background from the narrative that they just collectively shared.
And so another final thing, it fights this problem of disconnection because it's actually
a community building form fundamentally.
An example of this would be the Bread and Puppet Theatre Company for whom I presented
this actual same presentation just last week for FAST3.
After participating in a Bread and Puppet production, all of the members know each other,
they've actually explored the issue for long enough together that they then become advocates
for the issue and they built communities in ways that are not threatening.
For those who might find an activist project more threatening, perhaps this field would
not feel that way.
Another thing is that it enables people to explore trauma through a shared narrative.
And finally, catharsis, which means having all of the feelings at once.
So the audience becomes participant, people reach a level of such feeling collectively
that a transformation becomes possible.
That is all of my presentation for you.
Thanks for your time for thinking about this with me today.
And I guess the questions that I will just leave you with, what are you trying to cultivate
interest in?
Who is your target audience?
What is your outreach strategy?
And how are you hoping that they will respond?
I think that these questions, the relationship to agency, are perhaps the final thoughts
I want to leave you with when you consider what it is to communicate political messages
across mediums.
