Stephen Duncombe is co-founder and Research Director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training institute that helps activists to create more like artists and artists to strategize more like activists. He is also the co-creator of Actipedia.org, a digital archive of creative activism case studies. He teaches and writes on the history of mass and alternative media and the arts, and the intersection of culture and politics. “The organization that I co-founded is the Center for Artistic Activism. It's been around for about 12 years, and how I got to it has a lot to do with what it is. I've been an activist since I was in college, maybe a little bit earlier. I co-founded a community activist group in the 90s called the Lower East Side Collective. I'd organize and go to big demonstrations. I'd go to protests and rallies, and I found them very boring. Dispiriting. In the name of sort of people's power, I often felt very disempowered by going to these rallies and these protests. And I was really looking for some other model of thinking about and doing activism. When I was doing this community organizing in the Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a very artistic neighborhood. Now, most artists have been driven out by rents, but when you would do community organizing, who would show up at your meetings would be the artists. DJs, painters, performers, drag queens. And so when you started talking about "Let’s do a demonstration," or "Let’s do a rally, " they brought their art brains to it. So our demonstrations started to look a lot more like raves. Our rallies looked a lot more like performance pieces. And I started to get this idea that if you kind of merge this sort of artistic sensibility, with the aims of activism, it actually makes 1) activism a lot more fun, but 2), it makes it a lot more effective because attracts media attention, and it also attracts people who want to get involved because it looks more fun. And it attracts passersby because it doesn't look like politics as usual. And so they question, "What’s going on?" “