‘The Book of Thugs’ is an interactive, transmedia art piece, under the Words Matter project conceptualized, developed, and installed by the Fashioning Circuits Lab of ATEC (The School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas). Fashioning Circuits is a place where ‘critical-makers’ come together and both study and engage in scholarship, creative practice, and computational craft. An essentially feminist maker-space, Fashioning Circuits is interested in decolonizing and recovering alternate histories, and ‘The Book of Thugs’ is inspired by this objective.
The participatory, interactive and transmedia art piece invites viewers and spectators to engage with a book that provides an alternate historical origin story and meaning of the word ‘thug’ – one that is more rooted in South-Asian nationalism and anti-colonial resistance rather than how we normatively understand the word to be.