Digital Art and the Tunisian Revolution

Abstract

The revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests that began to sweep across numerous Arab countries in December 2010 shocked the world. In this context of radical transformation, of the explosion of enduring political frameworks or of brutal repression and humanitarian disaster, people have struggled to understand the revolutions, and to encourage alternative, nuanced visions of them. The production of art is vital to this process. How does art evoke the idea of revolution? How does this art invent new visual languages? This article addresses these questions in relation to the specific context of the Tunisian Revolution of January 2011. It gives particular attention to innovative uses of video online, focusing on Oussema Troudi's Deux minutes de Tunis (2011).1 The Tunisian Revolutionlike other revolutions in diverse modern historical contextshas often tended to be articulated, internally and externally, in black and white terms of success or failure, liberation or constraint, for or against, friend or enemy. The complex range of perspectives in Tunisia has, at times, been reduced to binary perceptions of secularism and religion or, more extremely, a 'Western' notion of democracy and a radical version of Islamism.2 Troudi's work exceeds simplistic narratives of the Revolution. Instead, it points to the uncertainties that followed and poses questions as to the future of Tunisia. It does so by exploring the space of the Revolution in ways that allow contingent elements to enter the work and partly to determine its shape. Deux minutes de Tunis is reminiscent of enduring means of using video or