Censorship and artivism on the web: artists against giants

Abstract

Many contemporary artists are currently using the internet and social networks as a channel of expression and a means of creation in itself. Our aim is to reflect on the way in which the latest art adapts to the digital medium, showing, from a plastic approach, how this channel of communication provides possibilities for sharing and interaction that are essential for the proposals that are gestated in the online context. We will base our analysis on the study of a selection of contemporary artists whose discourse has a marked activist bias and whose artistic projects revolve around the phenomenon of censorship on the net, speaking about the problems of the medium from the medium itself. To do so, we will start temporally from the moment in which Web 2.0 emerges, focusing on significant cases in which artistic practice and creative hacktivism act as a springboard against censorship. Thus, we will observe how artists confront large corporations -such as Facebook, Google, Amazon or eBay- and totalitarian governments -such as the Chinese or Cuban-. In short, we aim to reflect on the condition of the globalised gaze linked to digital devices and the limits of freedom of expression in the virtual world from the perspective of artivist thought.