Reconfiguring Protests in the Media Milieu: Iconic Productions from Gezi Park Movements

This paper is part of the international project Protests as Active Audience Voices: Global, Glocal or National Phenomena focusing on the wave of social protests raised all over the world since 2011, leading to different political processes and social movements like the Arab spring in Northern Africa, Occupy Wall Street in the United States and other Western democracies, May 15^th Movement in Spain, Gezi Park in Istanbul…

Our general purpose is to achieve a better understanding of the role played by iconic productions in this global attempt of fostering a revolution or, at least, to achieve some degree of social change. Both online and offline media played a certain role in the proliferation of oppositional political aesthethics which still requires a deeper clarification, placing its users and consumers as the main instances for achieving grounded explanations.

For the Turkish Case Study, iconic productions from Gezi Park Movements show that street art artists were actively involved in the protests both onsite and online, so their own negotiation between material and virtual worlds and their self-interpretation about how and why they are using and perceiving media turns into an appealing mileu for oppositional political aesthethics.

After a descriptive introduction presenting the key features, in-depth interviews with some of the artists whom images distributed though social media gained an ‘iconic status’ will be carried out in order to explore, among others, the following questions:

-        How was the image distributed? And how did it evolve at the short, medium and long term into an ‘icon’?

-        Which ICT resources were used during the protests and which functions were they attributed by the artists?

-        What kinds of connections were established in terms of political aesthethics with other social protests co-occurring in different places of the world? How was this dialogue performed?