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Political life is increasingly characterized by interactions with digital images. Due to transnational networking through communication systems, (moving) images circulate globally and are rapidly disseminated and manipulated. Activism is also no longer bound to place or time, and large crowds can be mobilized in a very short time. People post on social media platforms, to build communities and show solidarity. Sometimes also to make their mark as quickly and easily as possible.
The #Clicktivist project approaches the complex issues technically, aesthetically, and theoretically. Machine Learning, or more precisely a Generative Adversarial Network, is used to generate new images from protests. The training is done with images of political movements in the realm of Black Lives Matter, feminism, and Fridays for Future. Communities of resistance that are most often exploited for commercial purposes and thereby disempowered. And here are parallel emerges: AI also appropriates protests and manipulates them, turns them into novel abstract images of protests.