If media theory over the last 40 years largely understood media as hopelessly contaminated by capitalism, the quietism implied by this critique also met its challenge in Guattari's concept of 'becoming-media'. Here Clemens Apprich revisits key media political debates to imagine post-media approaches in the age of social media.
ReadExploring the radical shift in the boundary between fiction and reality in a world increasingly governed by ‘post-truth’ politics
Exhibition @ FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, 2 March 2017 - 21 May 2017
Public Opening: Thursday 2 March / 6 - 8pm / All galleries
“Antisocial Media” is a remix/cut-up/utopian-plagiarism of Guy Debord’s 1967 “The Society of the Spectacle” that reflects on the role of the network and (anti)social media in political, economic, and everyday life.
ReadThis short essay for Cahiers Costech explores the complicated relationship of activist and experimental / artistic practices around digital and online media to the problem of time.
ReadDuration: 19 Apr 2022 - 30 Dec 2022
The Tactical Media Room (TMR) is an initiative of Waag Futurelab and Institute for Network Cultures (HvA), founded in late February 2022 after the Russian invasion in Ukraine. In collaboration with hackers, artists, designers and researchers in The Netherlands, TMR aims to support independent tactical media, journalists, newsrooms and civic initiatives from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
Welcome to the Tactical Media Files, a "living archive" for Tactical Media's present, past and future.
ReadProjects that bend and stretch the possibilities of media technology. All levels are possible but we will definitely not fetishize high tech solution s. In fact N5M3 will counter the obsession with high technology. Instead of glitching the high-tech fantasies of many of the international art & tech events, N5M3 will make a vigorous effort to go low-tech.
Most media, and certainly common media, heavily depend on technology. "Media", actually is a term which is very hard to define; in many meanings of the word "media", technology is already implied. N5M3 will focus not only on the tactical potential of (new) media, it also wishes to reflect on the developments of media and media technology. The choice of media that we use, and the way we use these media is not completely self-evident or coincidental. Nor is it fully our own conscious decision. The construction of media technology instead is deeply political and political-economical.
Out now and available for download:
INC Network Notebooks 05 - Legacies of Tactical Media
Tactical Media employ the 'tactics of the weak' to operate on the terrain of strategic power by means of 'any media necessary'. Once the rather exclusive practice of politically engaged artists and activists, the tactical appropriations of media tools and distribution infrastructures by the disenfranchised and the disgruntled have moved from the margins to centre stage.
Conscious of the growing involvement of artists in political protest through their art and the utilisation of conventional and digital media technologies, RealTime's editors approached media theorist McKenzie Wark to comment on where he sees Tactical Media fitting in the bigger picture of power and media.
ReadA public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its connections to the present.
Under the working title 'Tactical Media Connections' the editors of the Tactical Media Files, David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg have begun an extensive public research project that seeks to trace and develop the connections between the phenomenon of Tactical Media as it was identified in the early 1990s, not least through the renowned series of Next 5 Minutes festivals and conferences on Tactical Media (www.n5m.org - organised four times between 1993 and 2003), and current critical practices operating at the intersection of art, media, activism, technological experimentation and political contestation.
Essay written in August 2002 for the New York University Tactical Media Lab, organised by the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History.
Andreas Broeckmann is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin and works as the curator of the Leuphana Arts Program in Lüneburg.
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