See to believe: the Center for Tactical Magic's sleight of hand

Abstract

The Bay Area's Center for Tactical Magic has been performing “magical” art interventions since 2000. The Center's work augments traditional activist techniques by offering new conceptions of what art and activism can entail in a contemporary urban context. This article explores how Jacques Rancière's reconfigured relationship between art and politics can be applied to the Center's work, providing new distributions of the sensible for participants.

Keywords

• The Center for Tactical Magic
• activism
• distribution of the sensible
• art as dissensus
• alterity
• oppositional device