11/22 Chapter 5 & 6 Quotes

3 quotes for each chapter and a short response for each quote

CH. 5

“If people don’t know how to process facts and make meaning out of them, then the facts will stay right where they are: on the literature table or in a museum” (Duncombe, Lambert 174).

• Dissecting information is an important skill in the age of misinformation. This quote is basically saying don’t let your message go in one ear and out the next. Create meaning for your audience and frame it in a comprehensible way, so that they may act on this information.

“The story we create in our heads is based on connections we’ve made between the images. The meaning of the frames and the causal relation we imagine taking place between them are things we, as humans, impose. This is called the Kuleshov Effect” (Duncombe, Lambert 179).

• Without context, the information we receive and the images associated with them cause to have

“She didn’t so much “change her mind” about Muslims, but just slotted Muslims like Linda into an existing part of her mind. Now, Muslims made for good neighbors, exactly the people you would want building a local community institution” (Duncombe, Lambert 193).

• Many people like the ones in this story are opposed to change as they are under the impression it will threaten their way of life. In this case, after meeting Linda the woman was able to empathize and humanize Muslims. She realized that coexisting with people different from herself could also 

CH. 6

“We can learn the most from a type of marketing called social marketing. Its function is not to sell products, but to change social behaviors in often positive ways, promoting initiatives like public health” (Duncombe, Lambert 212).

• This is why I am enamored with marketing. It is psychological. It’s funny reading this section because business is always shunned in these spaces as it should be, but I am glad this book acknowledges the prowess of marketing and how it can be used for good as well as how it intertwines with activism.

“But if it stops there, and stays at the level of changed consciousness, then nothing is ever going to change. We need to manifest general ideas into specific actions that can be visualized and thus enacted” (Duncombe, Lambert 212).

      - It is important to offer realistic change that people can turn into action, help them feel they've made progress, and that the change we wish to impact as activists is tangible. That I why I believe the Phone bank hour and automatic emails to Congress have been such important resources outside of protesting and boycotts. First, you can educate people but creating a movement requires 

• Phone bank
• Email
• Getting people involve
• creating realistic change

“We therefore need to go a step further and compare the benefits and costs of the old way of doing things, the status quo, to those of the new behavior we are proposing” (Duncombe, Lambert 222).

• When trying to convince someone to make change we need to consider why making this change outweighs their feelings on the matter is more important than how it might affect them.

Choose one project from the textbook or otherwise shared this semester that you have responded to and write a brief description (including artist, title, date) and why this project has affected you as an art intervention.

• Shiraga Kazuo's Challenging Mud 1995 piece which we read about in the Khan Academy articles impacted me as an art activist. Throughout the semester with all of the examples we've been given, I guess I still needed to break out from the box of what I view as activism. "Challenging Mud" involves Shiraga vigorously engaging with mud as a medium for artistic expression. The artist physically immersed himself in mud, creating dynamic and spontaneous compositions by manipulating the material with his body. This process exemplifies Gutai's emphasis on direct physical engagement between the artist and the materials, rejecting traditional modes of artistic creation. This art movement in post-war Japan and its artists sought to break away from conventional artistic practices while emphasizing the importance of individual creativity. I find it inspiring to use this as a way to fight systems as large as totalitarianism.