Looking Forward to It

The Typepad thing seemed like too much trouble, and this is easy, so I'm going to post here about my hopes for this course. (Cf. bibliographic uploads at Typepad... URL TK.)
The idea of this course -- Art Life at SPACE (syllabus URL -- http://new-space.mahost.org/alan.html) -- is basically to introduce modes of artistic practice as a kind of template for activist political work. The idea is, that the model for political work, for affecting consciousness among so many in the U.S. who either don't want to know or are discouraged, is to work in the cultural sphere. Call it propaganda, or call it social work -- the intention is opinion infection, er, affect. And organizing.
There seems to be a widespread recognition of this among advanced artists today, people working primarily with media art, in networked communities. And there has recently been a turn towards a kind of social art work, called "relational aesthetics" (Nicolas Bourriaud), or "dialogic aesthetics" (Grant Kester). You could call this the old-fashioned construction of situations...
Can this kind of work -- like other kinds of politicized and potentially political post-modern post-object work in the last several decades (mainly since 1968) -- be put regularly to work in service of political ends? I think it can. I think a rulebook can be cobbled up, and the disjunct between activists and artists can be closed.
The product of such a program would be what the Spanish call "creactivists" or "artivists." New hybrid cultural workers.