The Strategic Transparency Network is a group of new media artists rethinking our relationships with technology, surveillance capitalism, and corporate control. Our aim is to develop frameworks for tech-based creative resistance that do not serve to reaffirm the dominance of Big Tech and its profit-driven imperatives. We advocate a robustly self-reflexive approach to working with technology and data, and encourage artists to align their goals with each other and operate as a community—rather than reinforcing the neoliberal tropes of individual artistic excellence and the myth of the singular genius.

The Network emerged from a series of workshops run as part of Eyebeam's Rapid Response For a Better Digital Future fellowship in the summer of 2020. The workshops are online gatherings where digital artists come together to collectively explore what resistance means in their practices, look meaningfully at how these conceptions might cause harm or contribute to surveillance capitalism, and make commitments for their work going forward. Those workshops spurred the development of a series of Manifestos for Creative Resistance, which are continually being added to by new collaborators and participants.

Subsequent projects have included public art projects, exhibitions, and publications dedicated to centering artists and their values in the development of new technology. An independent press connected with the Network was launched in 2024. The workshops also served as a major component of Roopa Vasudevan’s dissertation research at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania).

View more about the Network here. Future work will include additional project ideas and templates, publications, and more infrastructure enabling a self-sustaining community of artists and practitioners.

Contact:
Email // GitHub organization

Collaborators to be added!