Global Pictures: Formalist Strategies in the Era of New Media

This essay examines the role played by political and activist media, as well as media infrastructures and platforms, in creating solidarity or continuity between the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, Indignados and the ‘Printemps Erable,’ among others. It critiques the overvaluation of social media in organizing protests and creating solidarity between social movements, demonstrating the renewal of discourses of the “global village” on which such valuations depend. Instead, it examines the role of aesthetics in creating sites of solidarity and affiliation across different local political struggles, taking as its case study a series of performances and a video work by the artist Milica Tomic.