Strategies for Tactical Archives: Public keynote lecture and conference, October 27 - 28, 2023 

The Strategies for Tactical Archives conference investigates how documentation and archiving can feed into living practices of activists, artists and media makers that address the position of communities who feel aggrieved or excluded from the wider public culture.

The program consists of a public keynote lecture on Friday evening October 27 (starting 19.30) by Sarah Schulman, writer, activist and co-initiator of the ACTUP Oral History Project and author of Let the Record Show - A Political History of ACTUP New York, 1987-1993. This is followed by a one day conference on Saturday October 28 (10-17 hrs.) at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

• art,
• tactical media,
• archive,
• activism,
• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• video activism,
• aids activism,
• act up,
• art of campaigning,
• queer rights

A Personal Map of the Resistance Movement in France 

For many reasons, the 80's, years of the Mitterand socialist government, were years in which grass roots movements got institutionalized and traditional activism was "out". The logic of the Republic (everybody is equal without distinction) allied with traditional individualism and clanic behaviour ("la guerre des chapelles") forbid the emergence of non dominant/non normalized subjectivities. This tradition is still alive today. The 68 generation didn't feel necessary to pass on their knowledge to younger generations. From their point of view, they created new ways to go about the world by themselves, so should the new generations. The notion of alternative and activism became stigmatized. It wasn't a very tactical in those years to position oneself in terms of an alternative. As a result, by the beginning of the 90, the most visible part of the intellectuals and the grass roots movements seams to be lobotomized.

• politics,
• campaign,
• tactical media,
• activism,
• public domain,
• civil disobedience

#OccuPride Summer 2012 

Call to Action: Reclaim Pride From the 1%
#OccuPride #OccuQueers #Tranarchism #PinkBloc
Global Facebook event

Pride 2012: The Struggle for Sexual and Gender Justice Continues
This summer, communities across the world will celebrate Pride Festivals commemorating the birth and victories of the Gay and Trans Liberation Movements. Despite the profound social change these movements have accomplished since the first high-heels were thrown over the barricades at Compton's Cafeteria and the Stonewall Inn, it is clear that the struggle for queer, trans, and gender-variant liberation is far from finished.

• aids activism,
• act up,
• occupy,
• queer rights

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

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

John Doe

Source behind the leak of the Panama Papers.

• activism,
• infopolitics,
• globalisation,
• info-activism,
• finance

Dark Markets 

Dark Markets is a two day strategic conference that looked into the state of the art of media politics, information technologies, and theories of democracy. A variety of international speakers inquired into strategies of oppositional movements and discussed the role of new media.

• politics,
• infopolitics,
• democracy

As power becomes traceable: raising the stakes on critique 

Among the many troubling and bizarre features of contemporary politics, the following apparent paradox can be found: Informationalisation has brought along enormous increases in the traceability of the doings and dealings of the powerful. But the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low. After information technology, the going about of those in power and their abuses, are increasingly documented, and the resulting records are increasingly susceptible to leakage to the public. Email is an obvious example. In the run-up to the last Iraq war, a message by an official of the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested ? aggressive surveillance ? of UN Security Council Members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, made its way to the newspapers.

Ricardo Rosas

Ricardo Rosas is a writer, translator and experimental musician. He was one of the organizers of the Brazilian Tactical Media Lab in Sao Paulo. He has studied Social Communication and German Studies at Universidade de Sao Paulo and is currently senior editor of Rizoma (www.rizoma.net), a web site devoted to activism, tactical media underground culture in general, net critic, conspiracy stuff and occulture. He writes about media activism and (anti) pop culture.

(died April, 11, 2007)

• tactical media,
• Brazil

Contestational Robotics 

Keywords: robots / contestation / public space / expression management

• contestational robotics,
• public space,
• expression management

Beka Economopoulos

Member of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history.

www.notanalternative.net

Ryan Griffis

Ryan Griffis makes work in the form of visual art, text, curated exhibits, and performance that usually focuses on relationships between activism, visual culture, and technology.