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.
ReadAmong 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.
Programming produced by any big transnational TV network (CNN, BBC, etc.) is, from the standpoint of an Internet user, similar to an Aggregator site distributing video material. It may also function as a portal providing a variety of material of interest to the viewer. Similarities abound - sections of a transnational TV network correspond to parts of an aggregate site: a program schedule is analogous to a web site index, news programs function as general information about the portal's community, shows represent particular web pages or sections on the portal. Most importantly, both TV network and a Web portal try to fulfill the basic media mission: to define its own reality and broadcast it that reality to potential followers - TV viewers or Internet users.
ReadUtopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions.
by ZKP
TRANSLATED MESSAGE:
The global data-network is on everyone's lips. Initiatives that plan
and promote the further extension of the nets in the big style
originate in politics and economy. Goal of this engangement is an
efficiency-oriented and economy- centered utilization of the new
structures of communication. The capacity of these projects is already
proven within a wide range of areas and especially curious people are
working with it yet. However, one can also judge this development
skeptically.
Disruption Network Institute:
Investigating the Kill Cloud
A new hub for investigations and empirical research on how artificial intelligence impacts new technologies of war, automated weapons, and networked warfare.
Instigating final declaration of the FC⚡MC
In the middle of the protest, something new emerged:
Final declaration of the FC⚡MC - International Media Center during G20 in Hamburg
'We Are Left to Make This Moment Into a Movement'
As the news cameras leave, Russell says the real fight begins.
No One Is Illegal is an international network of local groups of immigrants, refugees and
allies who fight for the rights of all migrants to live with dignity
and respect.
On 14 October, the net culture institution Public Netbase was served a writ intended to prohibit a work of art. The writ was the result of a lawsuit filed by Nike corporation, with a disputed amount of 78,000 Euros. The space installation "nikeground ? rethinking space" is a joint project of Public Netbase and the renowned art group 0100101110101101.ORG. The renaming of the historic Karlsplatz square in the center of Vienna into Nikeplatz, as suggested by the project, is meant to encourage reflection and public debates. In their work, the authors combine the artistic tradition of mythopoesis with the new culture of communication technologies.
Reada 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.
Geert Lovink wrote:
A gap is now in danger of getting bigger: old school video journalism, done by political activists, versus a thriving technology based network of media artists. Complaints about an 'eighties' style of amateurism of video works are on the rise. On the other hand, a depolitization of electronic arts is apparent as well. Or do we speak here about a mutual non-understanding? A return of the outworn difference between activist and artist? Can the concept of 'tactical media' present itself as a easy synthesis?
What counts in the long run is the "use" one makes of a theory....We
must start from existing practices in order to retrace the fundamental
flaws.
--Felix Guattari, "Why Marx and Freud No Longer Disturb Anyone"
In 1994, when Critical Art Ensemble first introduced the idea and a
possible model of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as another option
for digital resistance, the collective had no way of knowing what
elements would be the most practical, nor did it know what elements
would require additional explanation. After nearly five years of field
testing of ECD by various groups and individuals, its information gaps
have become a little more obvious and can finally be addressed.
The Disorganisation
Reclaim the Streets (RtS) cannot be understood as a campaign, although
some of its methods are very similar. There are now RtS groups in
thirty cities organising illegal street parties. Most of these groups
only exist for the event, and many of the activists are involved in
local campaigns during the rest of the year. There is no membership or
official line although many would like to see a wider global strategy.
As a movement, RtS is only four years old, and it could grow in
unpredictable ways.
The attack on the World Trade Center was--among other things--a stunning media event, and there was no shortage of analysis on mass media coverage. We saw no reason to replicate what others were doing. What no one seemed to be looking at closely was the significance of this ephemeral material that filled the streets and parks in New York below 14th Street or its relationship with the new media that was also flooding our lives.
This short essay was written in the run up to the fourth Next 5 Minutes festival of Tactical Media, which took place in Amsterdam September 11 - 14, 2003.
[Originally published in: The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]
