Digital Dissidents: Keywords for a Revolution

While much attention has already been given to the political significance of these videos as tools of political resistance, comparatively little has been said about their artistic value as amateur films. Building on our joint expertise as scholars of contemporary art, film theory and political science – including Chad Elias’ research on previously-funded British Council research into the artistic production of the Arab Spring and Zaher Omareen’s work as co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Syria Speaks – Art and Culture from the Frontline – we aim to construct a digital platform for the discussion and analysis of amateur videos made by Syrians in the first year of the uprising. This platform will take the form of a website, Digital Dissidents, that links videos to a set of themes or key terms. Drawing on an extensive network of contacts we have formed through our ongoing research on the Syrian uprisings, we will be asking an international network of artists, filmmakers, scholars and activists to analyse a video in relation to one or more of these themes. Some of the likely participants will include: Osama Mohammed, Rasha Salti (Toronto and Beirut), Orwa Nyrabia & Diana El Jeiroudi (Cairo), Sharif Kiwan (Syria), Lisa Wedeen (Chicago) and Cécile Boex (Paris).

With the addition of an Arabic translation, we expect that this website will circulate widely not only in the UK, US and Europe but also in the Arab World. The launch of Digital Dissidents will also be promoted through our universities—the History of Art department at York and the Screen and Films Studies programme at Goldsmiths—and through a press release distributed on e-flux announcements. Reaching an international network of more than 90,000 visual art professionals e-flux announcements – distributes information on some of the world's most important contemporary art exhibitions, publications and symposia. The widespread dissemination of the proposed website answers to a growing need for an online space in which global communities from different sectors of society can engage with the cultural complexities of the Syrian uprising. It is also very much in line with the British Council’s objective to ‘develop networks or platforms that support and connect Syrian artists’ and ‘advance contemporary forms of expression’.

We believe that this site will lead to a more nuanced and artistically informed analysis of the revolts. In more practical terms, it will provide a space in which the most innovative and politically urgent expressions of Syrian identity can be made available to UK, US and European audiences. Based on preliminary discussions about web design, we envision a flexible platform that will allow users either to search for specific artists and keywords or to browse a visual map of the contributions (based both on their artistic similarities and potentially on their geographic links). This format will encourage a variety of uses: directed research and teaching (including in Chad’s courses on art and activism at York) as well as more innovative online collaborations and discussions between contributors and users.

We aim to initiate and model this collaboration through a launch event in London in Spring 2015. This launch event will screen videos and host a panel discussion that invites some of the contributing artists and scholars to talk about their research on the cultural dimensions of the Syrian uprisings with particular reference to online video and film production. Although planning for this event is of course in the early stages, we envision an interactive discussion modeled on the links facilitated by the website. To further ‘launch’ the online platform during this event, we plan to screen and archive the discussion live through the website.