301 Articles

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Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood 

The Furtherfield community utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared - across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

This text will provide a brief background as to how Furtherfield, a non-profit organization and community, came about and how it extends the DIY ethos of some early net art and tactical media, said to be motivated by curiosity, activism and precision, [01] towards a more collaborative approach that Furtherfield calls Do It With Others (DIWO).

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We Demand The Impossible: 

An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon

Furtherfield interview with Gavin Grindon and John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination about the User's Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible. Published by Minor Compositions.

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Manifesto of the association Real Democracy Now (English) 

We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.
Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.
This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It's time to change things, time to build a better society together.

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The GHI of Tactical Media 

Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.

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Engaging Ambivalence 

Interventions in Engineering Cultures

The most significant underwriter of engineering research in the United States is the Department of Defense, largely acting through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA exists to channel funds from the military to academic and corporate research labs in exchange for technological innovations that serve the needs of its clients - the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. As DARPA public relations officers are fond of pointing out, innovations funded by DARPA grants may also find expression in civilian applications, particularly in the communications and aerospace industries.

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My Postmodernism - My '80s 

Filmmaker and activist Gregg Bordowitz's passage through the 1980s mirrors the course of AIDS activism in that decade. From the very first ACT up demonstration in New York to the triumphal storming of the FDA headquarters outside Washington, DC, he deployed his art in the battle against AIDS. Bordowitz leads off this two-issue series of personal chronicles of the decade, recounting his experiences as an activist and guerrilla filmmaker at the forefront of the fight.

"Art does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be recognized, fostered, and supported in every way possible."
- Douglas Crimp, introduction to AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (MIT Press, 1988)

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Signs of the Times: the Popular Literature of Tahrir 

Protest Signs, Graffiti, and Street Art - a special issue of Shahadat

This issue takes as its focus the popular literature of the Egyptian Revolution. Drawing on protest signs, graffiti, and street art in Tahrir to read the culture of resistance particular to the Egyptian Revolution, the curators examine how protesters changed the political narrative through the use of images, memorials, and expressions of daily life.  Featuring examples from an extensive gallery of online images culled from the collections of several prominent Egyptian journalists and activists, the online piece is a visual tour of some of the creative production of Egypt's Revolution.  A collaborative curation project split between New York City and Cairo, this is ArteEast's first critical look at the cultural production related to recent political developments in the Middle East.
- Co-curators, Rayya El Zein & Alex Ortiz.

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Talking about a Revolution: An Interview with Camille Otrakji 

"If you've been following events in Syria, you'd know that the English-language press is mostly deeply critical of the Assad regime (while the Arabic press displays a slightly wider range of views). I thought it would be worth trying to present a minority report on the situation from a Syrian friend of mine, although, as you will see, he argues precisely that his position is actually held by a very significant majority (albeit a rather quiet and frustrated majority) of Syrians.

Camille Otrakji is a Syrian political blogger based in Montreal. Although he tends to keep a low profile, Otrakji has been, for the past several years, at the forefront of many of the most interesting and influential online initiatives relating to Syrian politics. He is one of the authors and moderators at Joshua Landis's Syria Comment, and the founder of Creative Syria, a constellation of websites including Mideast Image (a vast collection of original old photographs of Middle Eastern subjects) and Syrian Think Tank (an online debate site hosting many of Syria's top analysts). Last year, Otrakji courted controversy with a new initiative devoted to the subject of Syrian-Israeli peace, entitled OneMideast.org. He agreed to speak with me about the latest events in Syria, and I'm sure that his views will generate plenty of discussion."

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We Make Radical Media You Make Adverts 

A corporate media group has trade-marked the phrase "Radical Media" and is trying to ban Peace news, New Internationalist, Red Pepper and others from using it in the title of a conference?

Following a recent Diary item in the Guardian, indymedia is today reporting on the story that a corporate media group has forced us to change the name of our conference. Readers are invited to attend a demonstration outside @Radical Media's London office, Tuesday, 3rd May 2011, 5pm, London W1T 7AA.

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The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic 

This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects. Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool's functioning, is discussed in a context of Inter-American Transcendentalism.

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the banality of cyberpunk, short notes on wikileaks 

a year ago wikileaks was as known as any other hacker project on the
chaos computer congress in berlin. its organizers which you remember
only by surname were talking about technical and organisational
issues, smoking a joint and gathering collaborators and co-developers.
like often german or swedish hackers were running the backend of this
project. they like the technocratic part where organisation and code
goes together. here is where wikileaks has its center, and the idea of
it was rather a channel, a protocol, or a p2p network to allow more
transparency in information. the opposite movement against closing
down on information which belongs to the public, and a direct result
of a cyberpunk worldview, where an oligarchy of  a few corporations
runs the world.

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