Anita Sarkeesian

A documentary series on the people and culture of videogames from AREA 5.

Tropes vs. Women in Video Games aims to examine limiting, sexist patterns associated with female representations in games, and to illuminate how these patterns reinforce and perpetuate harmful attitudes about women in our culture.

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explores the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. This series is made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project.

Cynthia Lowen’s powerful documentary Netizens highlights three women as each wages war against one of the internet’s most malevolent forces: prevalent and un-policed misogyny, harassment, and stalking. Directed at thousands of women daily by way of social media, it lies in plain sight, and its ramifications never remain only online. The film deftly depicts not only the forms digital abuse can take, from non-consensual pornography to invasion of privacy, but also the consequences for its victims.

The Sarkeesian Effect focuses on the controversy surrounding feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, Social Justice advocates, and the GamerGate movement; the title is a play on "The Streisand Effect."

What do representations of gender, race and sexuality in pop culture have to do with current social and political climate? The FREQ Show looks at today’s most pressing social issues to consider how the things that what we watch, listen to and play actively influence our daily interactions.

In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.