#cropt

What happens when feminism runs up against the wild world of social media influencers? When feminism wants to sell us something, are likely are we to disentangle capitalist ideology from pop-feminist rhetoric? 

On team cropt, we’ve been thinking a little about choice feminism, which in the words of writer Haley Nahman, tells us that “any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist, and any criticism of those choices is therefore anti-feminist.” It’s the feminism that’s concerned (as Nahman puts it) with “individual action and individual empowerment” but “isn’t scalable.” 

For more on choice feminism, join us listening (and re-listening) to Nahman’s interview on Adulting with Oenone Forbat available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. 

(L to R Hannah Hopkins, Nadya Naumaan, Jared Bellot, and Will Kiley)

Hello! My name is Hannah Hopkins, and I am the Dramaturg for Daria Miyeko Marinelli’s CROPT.

To me, dramaturgy is a collaborative process in support of the play: we’re figuring out how to ask new and better questions together in real time.

We felt it was important to share this play now because in this moment, we have the opportunity and obligation to confront the violence that has always already been just beyond the surface of what we desire and take for granted. 

My role will help this new play by finding, facilitating, and supporting ways to connect critical voices and ways of knowing to the world(s) of CROPT 

Hello! My name is Nadya Naumaan, and I am the Dramaturg for Being Julia Roberts.

To me, dramaturgy is

  being a play detective - serve the truth of the play..    

We felt it was important to share this play now because

 Islamophobia still exists in the US. Also levity is important and we love Julia Roberts. Can these things exist in a play together? Only Abbas knows.

My role will help this new play by

 providing research, listening, and providing endless enthusiasm.  

Hello! My name is Jared (he/him),  and I am the Dramaturg for Michael Jackson and the Devil's Book by Terry Guest! 

To me, dramaturgy is getting to have lots of really good conversations and getting to ask a lot of really good questions (not expecting an answer in return). 

We felt it was important to share this play now because Black lives and Black stories and Black myths and Black people matter now. And always. 

My role will help this new play by helping to facilitate the journey of the creative team through lots of ambiguity and uncertainty. And serving as the biggest cheerleader/sounding board/hype man to the my INCREDIBLY TALENTED AND INCREDIBLY BRILLIANT collaborators, Terry and Wardell. 

Hello! My name is  Will Kiley,  and I am the Dramaturg for  P_A_N_G_E_A  by Calamity West. 

To me, dramaturgy is bridging the rehearsal room and the outside public, advocating for the playwright and director’s intentions, crafting questions that help either open or close the play. 

We felt it was important to share this play now because the tempo of 2020 is causing us to reevaluate our senses of self while shaking up our histories and dreams. 

A confession: Neopets is the only reason I have a job. I feel like I’m exactly the right age to have grown up spending countless hours blinking at the Neopets interface, willing myself to understand just what was meant by a long block of HTML. If you’re like me, you remember graduating to Xanga, then MySpace layouts, then the big show: building your own website. I wonder often whatever happened to the pages I designed on Microsoft FrontPage fifteen years ago or the Blogger or Tumblr sites I was so excited to “launch.” I have to believe that they’re all still out there somewhere, locked away to me by chains of broken passwords I swore I’d never forget. In so many ways, that’s where CROPT begins, too. 

CROPT asks us to think about what’s inside and behind the infrastructures we take for granted, the systems we use to make ourselves into something else. This post is about part of that infrastructure: the internet. We couldn’t be making CROPT right now, of course, without the internet -- without the thousands of blinking data centers around the world that draw energy and resources and labor to support our Zoom connections, our Tumblr blog, our Google Docs and iMessages and FaceTimes and the countless other tools we use to make creative work.

But what happens when we see the things we’re not supposed to see? What happens when we want to see what data centers and cloud computing demand of land?

In April 2015, Google released a short video introducing a new platform for cloud computing. Set against soaring instrumental pop music, the advertisement showcases several Google employees — nearly all white men — extolling the technical excellence of Google Actual Cloud, “the world’s first cloud offering running on servers in the troposphere, inside actual clouds.” Google Actual Cloud appears as just that: actual white clouds of data floating above crowds of rapturous onlookers. As a throng of awed Googlers assembles under the shadow of Google Actual Cloud, one of the only two speaking women in the video adds that, “I just love that I can see it.”

Of course, Google Actual Cloud is an exceptionally well-branded April Fool’s Day joke, but I’m interested to think about why and how it is so effective. Even as multinational tech corporations like Google engage in concerted public efforts to visibilize the cloud through art projects and splashy employment advertisements, there is still a need for interventions that address the felt effects of  our hyper-reliance on the internet,. I think the woman in the video has a point when she says that she loves that she can see “it.”

Cropt #28: "Overlooked"

Limited Edition (10) Print on Paper, 16x20

Detached analytical rationalization can result in "Can't see the Woods for the Trees".

The "Cropt" Series explores rare animal hair as measured cubic segments, representing our methods for analyzing creatures so we can better understand them, while we loose focus on their existence as a whole.

2012 © Robert Stein III