Artifax
Want To Protest Trump's Proposal To Cut Arts Funding? Fax A Work Of Art To D.C.
The National Endowment for the Arts is under attack, and the team at Use All Five wants to help do something about it. They've created Artifax, an online platform to easily craft and send messages to elected officials about why the arts matter. Select the artwork that resonates the most with you, add your message and your zip code, and they'll fax it to your congressperson.
Following every fresh policy announcement cooked up by the Trump administration, social feeds have filled up with variations on the theme of “call your local elected official and tell them not to stand for it.” For everything from the appointments of Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos to the looming defunding of Planned Parenthood, huge swaths of constituents have mobilized (with varying degrees of effectiveness) to call and email their representatives and make their opinions heard. But senators’ answering machines fill up, and emails can easily be sent to the trash.
The way it works is easy: You visit the website and choose an image from the selection of 19 (and growing) work donated by artists and designers that Use All Five has brought on board the initiative. Some of the images are abstract: The artist Isa Beniston, for instance, donated a two-panel sketch of elephants. Others get straight to the point. An image from Studio Rodrigo features a block of text cataloging all the things that art is–education, culture, therapy, humanity–and ends with a simple statement: “Art is worth it.”What is less easy to ignore: a fax message. Despite the fact that may people have probably not operated a fax machine in a decade, “literally every elected official has a fax number with a D.C. area code; the faxes are collected and put right on their desks,” says Levi Brooks, co-founder and CEO of the design and technology studio Use All Five. With the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)’s $148 million budget on the chopping block in Trump’s budget proposal, Use All Five has launched an effort to get people to protest the funding cuts not by calling or emailing their representatives, but by faxing them an image of a work of art.
You can add a personalized message to the image, and when you enter your ZIP code, the open-source API put in place by Use All Five will pull up a list of your elected officials, and send the fax to whomever you select. Artifax launched just days ago, but Brooks says over 250 works of art have been sent out to elected officials so far.
Brooks co-founded Use All Five 11 years ago; since then, the studio has worked with clients as diverse as Google and Guggenheim on projects ranging from brand strategy to web design. The Use All Five team is made up of developers and designers; Brooks, whose background is in design and media arts, says working at the intersection of technology and art drives home “the importance of both philosophies and ways of seeing the world.”
“It scares me, both as an employee and a citizen, to see these cuts to the arts,” Brooks says. It’s a dynamic that has been playing out for years in public schools, where, amid funding cuts, programs like arts and music education are often the first to go. “There’s just not enough recognition of the value of art,” he adds. — Eillie Anzilotti, Apr. 5, 2017
Read the full article at the Fast Company website.