Minor Media Normality in the East 

1. Autogenerative Europe

In our imagination, eastern Europe was always black and white. Traveling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colorful western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn't remember having seen any color, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker's experiments with color only reinforced our image of the east as gray. Europe clearly had an ideologically motivated neurosis when it came to the perception of color.

• art,
• network cultures,
• deep europe

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).

• art,
• community media,
• participatory media

Signs of the Times 

Friday, October 05, 2001 12:20 PM
subject: Activism After September 11

Dear Friends,
This essay was published today in The Nation. It's an attempt to discuss what the atrocities of September 11 might mean to those of us who are publicly critical of corporate power and the current global economic model. There are no easy answers to this question so the essay is more of a meditation on symbolism and tone than a political roadmap.

Take care,
Naomi

• 9/11,
• culture jamming

Small, Furry Mammals 

The McLibel media strategy arose from a simple premise: this story has to be told. Most people have been affected by McDonald's in one way or another - working in a store, being nagged by children, stumbling through litter, suffering ill-health or enjoying their burgers - and the corporation's influence continues to increase as they relentlessly pursue their "global domination strategy" (to use their own words). Two people investing their lives to stand up to such a force has got to be a great story in anybody's book.

• campaign,
• food safety

Ontologies of the Wayward Drone - Part II 

A Salvage Operation:

Ontologies of the Drone

Amplifying Expertise

• art,
• war,
• surveillance,
• drone

TERROR FEEDS: Inside the Fear Machine 

Outer Spaces Conference Series 2017

An analysis of ISIS and its media strategy, the meaning of cyber jihad, and why people enrol as foreign fighters.

The 12th conference of the Disruption Network Lab
Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin.

• media,
• infopolitics,
• post-governmental organisation,
• fear,
• info-activism,
• media criticism,
• middle east

Notes on the Future of Activism 

Contemporary activism begins from the realization that for the first time in history, a synergy of catastrophes face us. Our physical environment is dying, our financial markets are collapsing and our culture, fed on a diet of junk thought, is atrophying -- unable to muster the intellectual courage to face our predicament.

• activism,
• info-activism,
• culture jamming,
• occupy

Mediate YourSelf! 

At the end of the third 'Next 5 Minutes' conference on tactical media (March 1999) in Amsterdam, an interesting discussion emerged around the question of how the minor media practices elaborated and highlighted in this vibrant event would ever reach a wider audience for lack of being covered by any mainstream outlet. At one point, some people from the back of the room (unfortunately I don't know anymore who exactly, I believe an Italian group), shouted: 'We don't want to be mediated - we mediate ourselves!'

• community media,
• diy media,
• streaming media,
• media theory,
• media criticism,
• participatory media,
• self-mediation

Media Without an Audience 

Presence in the mediated environment of digital networks is probably one of the most complex phenomena of the new types of social interaction that have emerged in these environments. In the current phase of radical deployment (or penetration) of the Internet, various attempts are being made to come to terms with the social dynamics of networked communication spaces. It seems that traditional media theory is not able to contextualise these social dynamics, as it remains stuck on a meta-level discourse of media and power structures (Virilio), hyperreality (Baudrillard), or on a retrograde analysis of media structures deeply rooted in the functionality and structural characteristics of broadcast media (McLuhan).

• diy media,
• streaming media,
• media theory,
• media criticism,
• participatory media,
• self-mediation

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.

• activism,
• migration,
• borders

Contain This! Leaks, Whistle-Blowers and the Networked News Ecology 

WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear.

• wikileaks,
• news

Putting the Demo Back in Democracy: March Against the Moguls. 

That guerrilla video is now the subject of historical reflection is probably a sign of its demise. There has been a recent flurry of archival and publishing activity centering on experiments made in the '70s. In 1997, the Chicago-based Video Data Bank released Surveying the First Decade, a compilation of work from the early days of video, and Oxford University Press published Deirdre Boyle's Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, the definitive study of the video movements of the late 1960s and '70s. These reflections on the utopian impulse in early video provide an opportunity to think about the present state of media in this country, in particular those movements that have attempted to create electronic space for non-commercial views that run counter to the mainstream.

• community media,
• democracy,
• tactical television

A Virtual World is Possible: From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes 

I.

We start with the current strategy debates of the so-called 'anti-globalisation movement', the biggest emerging political force for decades. In Part II we will look into strategies of critical new media culture in the post-speculative phase after dotcommania. Four phases of the global movement are becoming visible, all of which have distinct political, artistic and aesthetic qualities.

• politics,
• tactical media,
• infopolitics,
• net.activism,
• net criticism

Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite? 

[Originally published in: The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]

Rise and Decline of the Syndicate: the End of an Imagined Community 

To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100

The Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001, destroying the life-line of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky situation for a while, due - we believe - to the destabilisation of the problematic balance between personal contacts of list members, lurking and filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers, and a growing number of self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and disregarded the social rules of the online community.

• art,
• network cultures,
• net criticism,
• participatory media,
• deep europe

A new culture of resistance: from WikiLeaks to the squares 

Now that the grassroots movement that started inadvertently with the Arab Spring has gone global, it is necessary to cast a backwards glance to try and figure out, with some perspective, the dynamics of what has happened, physically and conceptually, over the last year. We propose a simple vision of the process of uprising in 2011, which was consolidated on the past 15th of October as a new culture of popular resistance and creativity. We also aim to point out the recent or enhanced concepts born in the collective consciousness of society during this period.

• wikileaks,
• occupy

Final Program: As If / Vox Populi / The Syrian Archive / The Society of Post-Control 

Tactical Media Connections public program, Amsterdam January 20 - 22, 2017.

As part of the Tactical Media Connections public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its connections to the present, a series of public events take place in Amsterdam between January 20 and 22, 2017. The public program includes an exhibition at Framer Framed in the Tolhuistuin cultural centre, opening on Friday January 20; a Meme Wars Lab workshop on Friday January 20; a public debate at Eye Filmmuseum on Saturday January 21, and a one day conference (‘The Society of Post-Control’) again at the Tolhuistuin on Sunday January 22.

Please find below a brief program overview, followed by a detailed description of the different parts of the public program.

• tactical media,
• meme wars,
• tactical research,
• trickster

Tactical Media and the End of the End of History 

As a playful, do-it-yourself approach to media activism and new technologies, tactical media (TM) seemed to have some critical bite when it emerged in the mid-1990s. But is it still radical today?

• art,
• tactical media,
• activism

Remaking Media Practices - From Tactical Media to Post-Media 

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.

• tactical media,
• diy media,
• infopolitics,
• media theory,
• media criticism

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.

• tactical media,
• next 5 minutes