How can you as an artist – or as a citizen – act when confronted with an obviously rigged election, where the possibility to question or critique is minimal and risk for repercussions is high? Activist art group Party of the Dead explores absurdism, satire and black humour in order to protest against Putinism and the war it has unleashed. In this paper we will focus on the Party’s performances in spring 2024, with the shared theme of deconstructing electoral propaganda connected to Russia’s presidential elections – from the start of the electoral campaign in January until the inauguration of the president in May. With this example of action in the situation when any protest activity seems ineffective (there’s no choice in the “election”, the result is known to everyone in advance etc.) we’ll try to analyse the specific dialectics of black humour and political despair: despair as the starting and final point, humour as the cure from despair and its reverse.

As many other visual artists, I have started to use AI as a companion for making satirical cartoons. Chat GPT provides supportive arguments both for what to draw and for the potential of cartooning as a way of subverting political discourses: 

Through their visual impact and accessible nature, satirical drawings can play a vital role in shaping public discourse and influencing political change (ChatGPT 20240424)

My presentation will deal with political and satirical cartoons as a collaborative endeavour, and a way to shape alternative stories around social institutions and political events. The starting point is a workshop held at Malmö University, fall 2023, where the participants collaboratively drew their “writing monsters”, the critical inner voices disturbing writers at work.

At present I am initiating a collaboration with a Russian (exiled) art project, the Party of the Dead. Using the structure of electoral propaganda, this party aims to give the dead their voices back, and avoid that these voices be recruited for patriotic, pro-war messages. The framework of a mock political party is interesting in its openness, allowing for many different expressions to be added within its framework: films, interventions, concerts – and social media updates.

My presentation will deal with the collaborative aspects of cartooning, and more in detail how satirical cartoons use discourses and stereotypes as a departure for rebuilding well known stories into new ones – and how the repertoire of stereotypes that ChatGPT draws from while answering queries can be a very useful guide for creating drawings.

Poe’s law states that irony and sincerity are indistinguishable in digital media, unless marked with a smiley or symbol indicating the intent of the sender. Far right movements, first in the US and later in Europe, have taken advantage of the difficulty to identify satirical intent from political communication, using satirical markers for disseminating extremist political views “under the radar”. The ironic framing allows internet audiences to avoid accountability for the messages communicated, and for political actors to target political opponent. The ambiguous, post-irony framing also allows satirists to venture into non-satirical politics – with the Ukrainian party Sluga Narodu, and the german Die Partei as notable examples of satire-becoming-politics.

The discussions around both satirical political parties and right-wing aggressive memes have often taken their departure in worries that the “satirical turn” of politics as a symptom of a political system that fails to connect with large groups of the electorate, but also that the satirical modality in itself aggravates the situation, as it allows extremists to push the boundaries for open hostility and extreme views in their communication. Taking a practitioner’s perspective, my presentation will look into social media (primarily Instagram) and how satirical pictures and drawings openly or covertly signal their satirical intent, and to what extent the sender’s identity and agenda are visible.  

Museums have always used different media to communicate, widen perspectives and bring new knowledge, but in the era of digital media, their various offerings are increasingly part of the media ecosystem. Our research interventions explored the possibility of reusing existing digitised material in a participatory setting. The aim was to explore the object-centred audience participatory method in digital settings. We held a series of digital and in-person workshops that invited the participants to “imagine” narratives about the provenance of the museum’s objects and journeys to Sweden in a playful and creative exploration. We could observe how the virtual workshop setting supported focused discussions, and allowed zooming, drawing and remixing of digital photographs to facilitate conversation. The workshop participants on-site worked with the museum objects on display to remediate them through photos, drawings, clay modelling, and writing down thoughts and questions about the objects on discussion postcards. The participants’ contributions were included in the virtual collection database (Carlotta), under the same collection as the other museum objects, making the remediation process circular. We argue that object-centred methods enable audience participation in digital media ecosystems both in museums and with other media makers. The audience’s expectations and experiences from using other media bring them to the digital museum platforms with a willingness to explore, remix and integrate.

The data analyzed in this paper is classroom interaction in a class of 3rd graders working in pairs to solve a mathematical puzzle game. The research approach is practice-based design research, informed by ethnographic methods and multimodal interaction analysis. The aim of the interaction analysis is to inform further design through the creation of a collection of learning designs embodying principles of observational learning and social motivation, along with observations from their deployment in the classroom. Data is collected by using a wide-angle video-camera in the ceiling, which is recording nonstop, in combination with handheld video cameras recording over the shoulder of pairs engaged in the activity. Two pairs of learners are followed as they solve a complex logical puzzle. I will look at how the pair members construct each other as more or less “knowledgeable”, in relation to the process of the game and in relation to the task they have to solve. A second issue is to what extent the notion that the activity is a game contributes to structuring interaction between pair members in the two pairs followed. Since my approach concerns design of learning activities, both issues will be related to how opportunities for gameplay, collaboration and rivalry relate to the design of the learning activity.

This paper looks at how players of a card game create spatial arrangements of playing cards, and the cognitive and communicative effects of such arrangements. The data is an episode of two 8-year old children and a teacher playing the combinatorial card game Set, in the setting of the leisure-time center. The paper explores and explains how the visual resources of the game are used for externalizing information in terms of distributed cognition and epistemic actions. The paper also examines how other participants attend to the visual arrangements and self-directed talk of the active player. The argument is that externalizing information may be a strategy for reducing cognitive load for the individual problem-solver, but it is also a communicative behaviour affecting other participants and causing them to engage with the problem and the problem-solver. Seeing and hearing players who have succeeded in finding a set provide observers with rich learning opportunities, and increases their motivation to play the game. From the point of view of learning design, the consequence of this is that bystanders merit to be considered as the potential learners of a pedagogical game as much as the players themselves

In small-scale design research projects, researchers often take on many different roles: designers of artifacts or activities, co-present participants, and analysts of video documentation. There are some obvious risks with one person fulfilling many different roles in a project: A designer may be biased towards her own design proposals, and have difficulties distinguishing between the actual form of the prototype and the intentions behind it. In addition, adopting dual roles as both protagonist and video analyst creates risks for biased interpretations. Referring to examples of fieldwork in educational settings, a conceptual division between design and enactment is proposed as a tool for mapping out and disentangling the different roles of a design researcher in a small-scale project.