Since the late 1980s, ACT UP has been mobilizing people to fight AIDS. From the beginning, its members argued that it wasn't only the HIV virus that was killing people. Meanings and images in mainstream media were also killing people. Activists argued that the stories that media and governments were telling about people living with AIDS stigmatized them. Those stories lead to discrimination, inadequate health care, and flawed medical research and treatments. Concluding that "silence = death," ACT UP innovated extreme transmedia storytelling practices. They used a variety of new media in experimental, interconnected ways in order to make AIDS mean differently.
Watch as ACT UP finds ways to tell its story across media platforms and devices--finding what each is best at doing, exploiting each for its unique abilities, building synergy across media, engaging audiences in new ways.
credit: Keith Haring
