strikeWare Social Media TakeOver
strikeWare is a Baltimore-based art collective formed to create action-oriented experiences. Our recent work aims to uplift and amplify stories critical to our American history, often using new technologies to emphasize the nowness of that history.
Q&A with strikeWare
When did you realize you were an artist?
When the stars aligned in our combined birth years.
Why does arts education matter to you?
strikeWare: We want to provide spaces where the community can interact with our work and go on an experiential journey with us. Our thoughtful blend of art and technology rediscovers narratives so that we can, together, engineer a more compassionate future.
Mollye: As an educator, I am always seeking the opportunity to grow in my service to any student who wants to learn from me. Through my research practice and studio experience, I bring contemporary knowledge of immersive environments, social practice, and experimental media to my teaching. My belief that all students have the capacity to grow in my class is tenacious, perhaps even stubborn. As a student, my mentors were engaged and kind, but I learned the most from them when they challenged me to push beyond my own boundaries and knowledge of what is possible. Knowing how important those relationships were to me, I likewise set a tone of mutual respect and work to implement a pedagogical practice of listening, assessment, and continual improvement.
Jeff: We are all of us teachers with notable technical skills, and our excitement comes from an interest to create new works. Drawing, Creative Coding, Game-making, VR/AR, Photography and Filmmaking are all subjects we practice and teach. These subjects give new students the opportunity to experiment with the world, understand histories, and share deeply personal stories in creative and novel ways, much as we do in our collective projects. An arts education trains students in creative problem-solving and critical thinking, helping to overcome challenges in any arena.
Christopher: The future of education goes hand in hand with new media art practices. As we continue through the second decade of our digital age, I like that strikeWare’s art can be a springboard to show how artists might identify and uncover visual truths behind culturally accepted norms, especially in this age when technology is demanding a new structure for the higher education model. I would expect educators and students to interrogate our work.
The public and humanities component of our art includes a focus on our shared social histories, and the expressions we need to develop to understand uplifting characteristics and transgressions placed upon everyday individuals. The underlying spark of that prior statement hints at what it means to be cohesive in a divided society, where individualistic power is fragile yet substantial. We’re a collective, so our togetherness is meant to inform others that a special kind of power lies in a team effort - it lends towards a principle of sharing, group participation, group learning, and consistent challenge.
As a leader in the Arts, what are your priorities for the coming year?
We’re always finding new ways to contextualize and add substance to our art. Everything right now is very personal and we hold onto whatever balance we can achieve. We want to be honest and frame ourselves as artists and as proxies who might remind others that accountability is shared. These are difficult times and art can be a mirror to that reality. Our words are here so that others may understand us better; and words, like art, are both methods that give us voice to show up as leaders in this digital age. Clarity emerges from relaying what we’ve learned, through our own self-education, which is not just about repeating what others might say, but picking it apart and showing what is or isn't sacrosanct.
How does creativity show up in your day?
The day-to-day of our art is led by three separate lives who find balance in his/her/their own right. We kind of roll with our decisions about medium, narrative, and the use of material in our personal practice and then make the necessary crossovers when we all get together for any prospect that might fill an empty space in the art world, both in a literal and figurative sense. Together, we justify the use of technology with functionality, conceptual form, and craft. Sometimes the result manifests as a keen dissection of some minor, but outrageous shift in the day-to-day happenings of contemporary society.
In an increasingly digital/automated age, the studio is an exciting site where the builds of machines of increasing complexity rival the ability of those created by corporate assembly. Our art, machines, and new media reflect and expose that DIY is what defines our work. It’s the touch sensory materiality of specialized pieces that draws the audience in.
Share a recommendation of a book, artist, event, or piece of work that inspires you!
https://www.newmediacaucus.org/woke-new-media/ - Link for articles and videos of topics explored by local artists. (Kojzar included)
https://www.aam-us.org/2020/06/15/towards-frictionless-augmented-reality/
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
