4. Intersections of Protest, Art and Networked Space: Analysis of the Artistic Protest Post Carnival

Since the development of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin in The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Prism Key Press, Lexington, KY, 1936), the ease of producing and circulating art has become a significant marker of what art is and does. It also indicates how art has been removed from its auratic space and time, with special emphasis on aesthetics and cult value, to become more of an artefact that is marked by political, social, cultural and economic overtones. While art inherently is always political, the appropriation of art, exclusively for registering counter-cultures and forms of protest through different art movements, changed its landscape and encounters with it. Subsequently, aesthetics is not the only attribute used to experience art. With the advent of modern technology, the functionality of art has received renewed interest and has been enhanced not only by what art semiotically represents but also by the materiality of digital space and the characteristics of the Internet. This chapter examines the transmutation of a physical protest called Post Carnival, organized by artists to challenge moral discipline by the police, into the digital and networked space, and how the protest is experienced by participants in the digital space. We found that protest in the social media platform produced new spaces using networked new materiality and interactivity. Furthermore, the protest’s digital reproductions became a spectacle, though the protesters’ initiative was to politicize art challenging and questioning the act of the police that territorialized public spaces.