Art Engagement Project

Below: Photography by Ailie Rutherford

Feminist artist Ailie Rutherford ran four hands-on workshops with the Equally Safe Online (ESO) project and connected participants to curate a creative workshop model for working with gender-based violence (GBV) victims/survivors.

The four exploratory sessions, testing both online/in-person and hybrid methods, held two core objectives: firstly, to experiment with radical participatory methodologies to facilitate future discourse of lived experiences of online gender-based violence (OGBV) among highly marginalised cohorts affected by violence and abuse. Secondly, to encode ESO’s concepts, producing artistic computational code of ESO’s concepts drawn from across all its research sprints. In particular, the latter goal aimed to aid interdisciplinary communication between ESO’s diverse research team, where the artistic key tested transdisciplinary collaboration and bridged the social sciences, humanities, and STEM. 

The unique combination of art and computer science allowed a collaborative visual process to be applied to participant researchers’ interpretations of OGBV terms and ideas, permitting them to discover, discuss, and crystalise concepts for the latter, most complex compuational stages of the project. The approach drew on historical methodologies developed from Ailie’s radical artistic work with Feminist Exchange Network and Glasgow Women’s Library, employing hands-on, printed symbols to visualise economic realities and collectively imagine new social possibilities. This versatile toolkit garners a shared visual language for participants to represent their individual and shared experiences through creative process.

Among many benefits, the workshops also worked to crystalise, and reflect back, concepts to test the team’s understanding of its own findings. This was essential prior to ESO’s robotic outputs began construction, and to ensure researchers were bridged together through shared language. The process of co-creation, furthermore, actively applied feminist praxis by offering vital political-emotional space for researchers to discuss embodiment and ethics in OGBV research.

Resulting in an artistic computational key, the workshops brought about an elicitation-based canvas for democratic research methods and for interpretative discussion around OGBV; designed shared language between a hyper-diverse research team; and considered the potential for an exhibition for disseminating ESO’s concepts to the public. 

Young People Engagement Event