Search results for 'infrastructure'

article

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.

Read
article

The Revenge of Print 

In the wireless era, is the paper medium simply passé for the work of activists? Are zamizdat, fanzines and political magazines just good for historians? After the mid-nineties zine crisis due to a sudden rise of the cost of paper and the advent of the Internet, the actual role of magazines seems to be re-defined and still strategical for the circulation of ideas.

Read
    campaign

    Holograms for Freedom 

    The Citizens’ Securities Law’s Reform is an attack on the right of freedom of assembly. This measure restricts citizens’ liberties, and criminalizes their right to protest. Turning a right into an offence for which you can be pursued, detained, and judged.
    To respond to this injustice and to show the future will have to face if this bill continues its course, we saw the need to carry out a different kind of protest that would allow our demands to become unstoppable: the first hologram protest in history.
    A massive protest, through which we will demonstrate, that despite the trammels imposed by the government, they will not silence our voices, and even if we have to turn ourselves into holograms, we will keep on protesting.
    www.hologramasporlalibertad.org/en.html#project

    Read
    article

    Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the cloud 

    "We have to be very attentive and united at a state level to fight against what is a threat to democratic authority and sovereignty,"
    - French government spokesman Francois Baroin speaking out against wikileaks releasing US diplomatic cables.

    "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
    - A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow

    Read
    article

    The Watershed in Your Head - Mapping Anthropocene River Basins 

    Translating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.

    Read
    event

    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.

    Read
    article

    The Fascist Simulation 

    In the United States, fascism presently unfolds as a simulation. The fascist simulation constitutes itself as a pixelated sea of livestreams, images, posts, and comments, circulating widely as its own networked, autonomous model of reality. It is enacted as an ensemble of people, social media platforms, presidential tweets, superspreader events, confederate flags, television chyrons, informatic infrastructures, automatic rifles, toxic masculinities, MAGA hats, racist hashtags, and video game servers. It is fascist ideology reified through consumer technology.

    Read
    article

    The Law of Web TV 

    Internet policy is hard to enforce, but there is no harm in thinking it through. On the other hand, whatever order there is in the Net is generally the result of focussed self-organization: namely that the elements that constitute the medium, technology, market, infrastructure, policy and consumers, fall into place rather quickly and often better than expected.

    Read
    article

    Notes on the Politics of Software Culture 

    Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on software for their execution - from systems of e-government and net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation of social groups and movements -, it is necessary to understand the procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the cultural and political 'rules' coded into them.

    Read
      article

      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!'

      Read
      article

      Electronic Markets & Activist Networks 

      The two very different types of digital formations examined here make legible the variable ways in which the socio-technical interaction between digital technology and social logics produce distinctive outcomes. These differences point to the possibility that networked forms of power are not inherently distributive, as is often theorized when the focus is exclusively on technical properties.

      Read