When one thinks about the power of collective action one usually pictures the sea of humans commonly associated with protest. There are numerous historic events that come to mind, stretching back to the Iranian, October, French, and American Revolutions, through to the Civil Rights Movement, the Struggle, and the Arab Spring. What becomes apparent is that collective action on a mass scale occurs at times of political, social, and economic instability. What defines collective action in the lulls that occur in-between these pinnacle moments, however, is less clear.

Just days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a particular series of memes surfaced − scattered between millions of others − which tried to highlight the supposed lack of support for America’s new president. It began with two juxtaposed aerial photographs, taken eight years apart outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington. The first was from Obama’s inauguration, the other from Trump’s, where large areas of land appeared comparatively empty. The legitimacy of these images is inconsequential; my interest lies in the flurry of memes that followed.

The first appropriation suggested, through the inclusion of a ‘detail’ box, that the visible white patches in the ‘TRUMP’ camp were KKK members, dressed to the nines. Then came memes that side-lined the original pairing to the top-half of the frame, including images of large, sprawling crowds from well-attended gigs. This cut-and-paste process went on for a day or two, with people supplementing their favourite band for another. The final meme to grace my newsfeed depicted six coupled-blocks; OBAMA/TRUMP; PINK FLOYD/QUEEN; CARPET/NO TV SIGNAL.

There’s something particularly compelling about the flattening of the latter evolution that I couldn’t quite get my head around; politics-popular culture-white noise. How, for example, was collective action in political terms different from collective action as a result of music or the visual/performing arts? Is it possible to differentiate the two?

One could argue that the grey areas that exist during times of relative stability play an important role in the processes of imagining a variety of potential futures. ‘Great’ art (and by that I mean the art that gets written into history) has always seemed to straddle climatic periods of intense instability, with one foot riding the wave of optimism and the promise of a better future, while the other turns its back, comes crashing down, or attempts to ride it out. This particular meme, however, seemed to suggest something else, some kind of unresolved disconnect − our feet neither here nor there. It was as if the camera was slowly drifting off into outerspace; a balloon ride fuelled off all the hot-air surrounding Trump’s campaign. At the same time, perhaps it was the exact opposite, a zooming in, rather than out; too much time staring at our feet, the static of our TVs.

Adam Curtis’s attempt to come to terms with this sense of disillusionment is titled HyperNormalisation (2016). It opens with a countdown; followed by the image of a ghostly, torch-lit tree. As the light moves across its branches, the areas previously visible become enshrouded in the black of night, which is then transposed, through both time and place, to the strobe-lit belly of a night club, just moments before a bomb explodes. What we’re left with is the shattering of glass, and the surgically imposed voice of our narrator:

“We live in a strange time, extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world − suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit − yet those in control seem unable to deal with it, and no-one has any vision of a different or better kind of future.”

Situated somewhere between the politicised, surveillance-heavy world conceived in Orwell’s 1984 and W.B. Yeats’ Second Coming, Curtis’s world − and by extension, ours − relays a vision of the present in which, “Over the past forty years, politicians, financiers, and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated.” What we got in return, he suggests, is a simplified, manageable reduction − an intentional display of smoke and mirrors that feed the world a type of reassuring-nothing.

The title for the documentary is drawn from Alexei Yurchak’s book Everything was Forever (2006), which looks at the Soviet Union in the 1980s, just before it collapsed. “Back then, everyone new that the systems at hand were failing them, but because there was no alternative, everyone just played along,” Curtis told Jarvis Cocker, the day after Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s third and final presidential debate at the Nevada University in Vegas. “The fakeness was just excepted, because it was normal.”

By this point, we’d all become accustomed to Trump’s capacity for contradiction, but nobody, at least not in my immediate circles, actually expected that Trump would win the election. Curtis puts this down to the rise of a ‘new’ powerful individualism, raising the argument that “modern consumerism was rescued by the ‘Me’ generation because it suddenly allowed you to sell lots and lots of different things to lots of people who wanted to express themselves in different ways.” In this vain, the quest for self-expression, coupled with an unhealthy faith in technology as a tool for stability (think insurance fraud), became, by-and-large, the very driving force of modern capitalism. He even goes so far as to posit that those bent on attacking the system didn’t stand a chance:

“...The most radical thing you can do” he told Jarvis, referencing something he’d heard from someone else, “is come out of your house one morning, turn right, walk across Europe on a line you’ve drawn across a map to Allepo, get there, and don’t tell anyone, don’t write a book about it. . .”

The point that Curtis was making here was that through their very engagement, artists, musicians, and our entire counterculture, were being subsumed into the larger mechanical world of shut doors and high walls, designed to perpetuate and maintain our current diet of misinformation and mass-hysteria. Anything that one did or said would simply be regurgitated back to them: ‘if you like this, you’ll love this’.

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While Curtis recognised the presence of a third party in perpetuating this loopy system, what he may have failed to get across was the extent to which these external forces could influence and target individuals, before they joined the crowds. In an article titled ‘The Data That Turned the World Upside Down’, two reporters from the Zurich-based Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, provided a chilling explanation for the success of Donald Trump’s campaign.

In 2008, Warsaw-born psychologist Michal Kosinski got accepted to do his PhD at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. There he launched a little known application alongside his fellow student David Stillwell, called MyPersonality. Through mediums like Facebook, their online quiz would revolutionise a method of psychometrics that had been pioneered in the 1980s, but, up until now, was relatively limited in its reach.

According to Grassegger and Krogerus, this mode of analysis, known as the ‘Big Five’ or ‘OCEAN’ (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), was so accurate that it could predict one’s skin colour, sexual orientation, intelligence, religious/political affiliation, or one’s susceptibility to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, based purely on your last 68 ‘likes.’ “Before long,” they continue, “he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves.”

The use of wide-scale profiling in presidential campaigns is, of course, nothing new. However, where Clinton’s confidence was based on demographic projections, Trump’s had, through a company called Cambridge Analytica (the very same company behind the Leave.EU campaign) adopted elements of Kosinski’s psychometric methodology, combining it with readily accessible personal data to generate a Big Five profile for every American citizen (220 million people) that they could then use to target personalised ads, adaptable to an individual’s fears, hopes, and aspirations.

“Not only can psychological profiles be created from your data, but your data can also be used the other way round to search for specific profiles,” explain Grassegger and Krogerus. What this means is that if you plug something into Facebook enough times, you’ve got a personality profile. From there it’s a case of tailoring a specific message to match your profile and feeding this back in. The next time you like something remotely related to what you’d previously liked, you’d inevitably stumble across one of Trump’s Trojan horses. After a while, what’s being regurgitated back to you are no longer your ideas at all. In this way, one can no longer view self-expression as something inand- of itself. Like a photographer in a dark room, the people behind Trump’s campaign were able to create their own test strips, dodge and burn details, and then insert these back into the internet’s feedback mechanisms until they got the result they were looking for.

Rather than Curtis’s mute pilgrimage, what appears as an essential requirement for the integrity of our freedom is the ability to engage with others in an unregulated environment. For me, being radical in contemporary society is more a case of ‘step outside the house, turn right, walk across Europe on a line you’ve drawn across a map to Aleppo, and while you’re walking, start up conversations, out in the open air.’

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Ink has a way of solidifying things, and in that ageing process much is lost. Colonialism, for example, is commonly understood as a one-way thing. This too might be said of the current undercarpet fashion of contemporary colonialism. What we can easily discern in the present, however, is our own sense of entrapment and confusion, which may seem a lot more one directional to others who read about this era further down the line.

In their paper, ‘Dreams and Disguises, As Usual,” RAQS Media Collective raise a very valuable point about the twoway nature of the colony, describing how, in the early days of the English East India Company many of the English, Irish, and Scottish that landed on the shores of India gave up their faith, adopted Islam, and forgot to speak English; and vice versa. “The edifice of Empire, which relied so heavily on the adventures of impostors to lay its foundations, also required their marginalisation,” they explain. In South Africa too, the only way that the apartheid government were able to perpetuate their rule was by ensuring that people were kept separate. In this sense, there is much to be learnt about the processes of collective action within communities.

One example is Deveron Projects, an international residency programme established in 1995 by director Claudia Zeiske, Annette Gisselbaek, and Jean Longley in a small, rural town in the North East of Scotland called Huntly. Like most things organic, it began as a conversation between friends, all of whom had moved to Huntly from major cities − London, Copenhagen, and Berlin. A four hour drive from both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and with a population of approximately 4500 people, Huntly has a very unique position within the economic and cultural climate of Scotland. “The social needs and capacities to host a contemporary arts programme in [this] setting demand a very different approach to the status quo generally oriented for the metropolises in the South of the country,” wrote Zeiske. In its natal years, Deveron Arts ran several summer schools, workshops, and small exhibitions, with the intention of finding a venue to house their projects. After conducting a feasibility study, however, they found the conditions unfavourable. “In comparison to an urban environment, the potential audience was limited by geographical reach and the town lacked an established gallery-going audience likely to attend events,” explained Zeiske,

“The financial costs of acquiring or building a venue were unlikely to ever generate a return, and indeed might actually have alienated local residents from a space by following a model designed for cosmopolitan urban trendy tastes.”

Inspired by the likes of Lucy Lippard and Grant Kester, the aim was to address specific groups within the community and beyond through a range of social, economic, environmental and political perspectives by facilitating socially engaged, topic-driven projects. Determined through intensive, ongoing research into the socio-economic, political, and cultural framework of the community, each topic would then function as a vessel through which international artists and local residents could meet half-way to explore variations of the same idea.

What I find ingenious about this methodology is its ability to disrupt any sense of ownership that one might have, not only to an idea, or to history, but to space itself; to draw people out of their homes and into the lives of others. In the summer of 2013, a team of African and European artists (including Rocca Gutteridge, Jacques Coetzer, and Deveron founder Claudia Zeiske) set off on a six day ‘foot print exploration’ into the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda. Their journey emulated the two year trek that the Scottish explorer, scientist and missionary Alexander MacKay took to get to Uganda, having landed in Tanzania in 1876. Like many of the missionaries and colonial figures who first set foot on the continent, MacKay’s legacy, too, has left its mark on the hearts, minds, road signs, and architectural facades of the country.

When he first arrived, he brought with him the usual spread of commodities for trade, and more importantly, a printing press. His intention was to spread Christianity and the word of God, to which he was successful. No doubt a history fraught with all the problematic trappings of colonialism, MacKay’s legacy is somewhat controversial. As a result, this project sought to “tread lightly but think deeply”. Like MacKay, the participants carried a small printing press with them, leaving temporary traces along the way.

“Was he there to also expand the British Empire, directly or indirectly? Questions that have the rightful potential to send the conversation in a predictable, “colonial finger pointing” direction. But there is also a more pragmatic side to the story: like the adventure tourists today – the explorers and missionaries first and foremost were curious and through their wanderlust, spread the early seeds of globalisation, whether for good or for bad,” reads the project’s intent.

The following year, Ugandan artists Sanaa Gateja and Xenson Znja set out on an artistic pilgrimage back to MacKay’s place of birth, Rhynie, to return his spirit (MacKay passed away from malaria in 1890, having never left Uganda). “It is very important for us in Uganda to know where he came from,” Sanaa told STV News.

Working closely with the Rhynie Woman (an artist collective who question how food can be used to re-engage with landscape and history), the community of Rhynie, and the charity Books Abroad, Sanaa Gateja and Xenson Znja spent two months in Scotland, exploring the various aspects of the man’s life. For Sanaa, it was important to find out more about the histories and traditions of the community in which MacKay grew up, and to transfuse the cultures of Uganda and Scotland through the celebration of MacKay’s life − the man, the explorer, the mechanic, anti-slavery activist, print maker and educator.

Xenson, on the other hand, hoped to be the counterpoint to Sanaa’s more celebratory approach, attempting instead to travel through time and reverse the flow of MacKay’s teachings; transposing some of his legacy back into Aberdeenshire through a series of performances (often impromptu) which incorporated fashion, poetry and spoken word. Interestingly enough, little was known about the life of Alexander MacKay in his hometown prior to Sanaa and Xenson’s arrival. It is through these artistic interventions that the people of Rhynie would learn something of their own heritage, both good and bad.

This learning process extends beyond the self, and is only made possible through the public’s willingness to participate and engage. A year after their journey to Scotland I had the opportunity to watch Xenson’s performance Ensi Yaleta at the FNB JoburgArtFair (2015). At the beginning of this performance the artist is wheeled onto the centre of the stage inside a green rubbish bin, emerging after a moment to take centre stage. Cloaked in empty beer and soda cans, Xenson’s performance question the extend to which we are able to rid ourselves of this extra-skin, which appears to have become synonymous with the self. A metaphor for consumerism, xenophobia, the concept of hierarchies, and social decay, the garbage appears as a central force throughout. At the end of the performance Xenson kneels down, addressing the garbage directly out of desperation, just moments before crawling back into the dustbin: “Me, I am no longer a part of you.”

“I’ve become something stale. I have no feelings whatsoever. I have become this stone. This emotionless being. Whatever is on earth belongs to me! I will consume whatever is on earth, and I will eat it with a few individuals!”

Rather than the endless cycle of refashioned information and retreat, these experiences have the potential to break the loop, to learn from the past, and in so doing, find new avenues through which to envisage a future. As Ulli Beier points out in his conversation with Chinua Achebe, (pp. 28) “There is a well-known Igbo proverb, which says, “The world is a dancing masquerade. If you want to understand it, you can’t remain standing in one place.”