Notes on Culture Jamming 

"Culture-jamming," a term I have popularized by articles in The New York Times and Adbusters, might best be defined as media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one. Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings are all culture- jammers." Mark Dery

Damn the Networks! Victory to the Imagination!
Yogi in Craig Baldwin's "Spectres of the Spectrum"

• culture jamming

We Make Radical Media You Make Adverts 

A corporate media group has trade-marked the phrase "Radical Media" and is trying to ban Peace news, New Internationalist, Red Pepper and others from using it in the title of a conference?

Following a recent Diary item in the Guardian, indymedia is today reporting on the story that a corporate media group has forced us to change the name of our conference. Readers are invited to attend a demonstration outside @Radical Media's London office, Tuesday, 3rd May 2011, 5pm, London W1T 7AA.

• activism,
• diy media,
• independent media,
• media criticism

Free Jeremy Hammond 

Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison! Show Him He Still Has Our Support!
Jeremy Hammond is a 28-year-old political activist sentenced to 120  months in prison, with an additional 3 years probation upon his release, after pleading guilty to the Anonymous conspiracy to hack the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). A longtime proponent of "hactivism," his actions are a form of electronic civil disobedience. He believes that "people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors."

• campaign,
• war,
• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• anonymous,
• surveillance

Media Darkness 

Reflections on Public Space, Light and Conflict

There is an unshakable belief in the idea that what defines the mass media is that they produce or constitute, in all their different ways, a public. So while there is agreement on the fact that not every public sphere is a communication medium, many people tend to think that every communication medium constitutes a public sphere - the most recent and prominent candidate being, of course, the Internet. But is this claim as to the public quality of all media, hegemonic as it may be today, really tenable?

• public space,
• political science,
• media criticism

How to Turn Your Liability into an Asset: Media, Art and Politics in Post-communist Bulgaria 

The first interview was conducted during the opening of Hybrid Workspace in June 1997, the temporary media lab in the margins of the big art show Documenta X in Kassel (Germany).

• politics,
• art,
• Revolution

No One is Illegal! Manifesto 

For a world without borders! No immigration controls!

DEFEND THE OUTLAW!

Immigration controls should be abolished. People should not be deemed 'illegal' because they have fallen foul of an increasingly brutal and repressive system of controls. Why is immigration law different from all other law? Under all other laws it is the act that is illegal, but under immigration law it is the person who is illegal. Those subject to immigration control are dehumanized, are reduced to non-persons, are nobodies. They are the modern outlaw. Like their medieval counterpart they exist outside of the law and outside of the law's protection. Opposition to immigration controls requires defending all immigration outlaws.

Human rights, testimony, and transnational publicity 

In the period between the end of the cold war in 1989 and the events of September 11, 2001, human rights became the dominant moral narrative by which world politics was organized. Inspired by the momentous political and cultural transformations taking place at the time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the spread of global communications technologies, promoters of human rights discourse optimistically predicted that a transnational public sphere dedicated to democratic values would emerge (We now know, of course, that such predictions were wrong, as early post cold war hopes gave way to the harsh realities of contemporary globalization).

• feminism,
• theory

Some points of departure 

Introductory essay for the second editon of the Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media, 1996.

• culture

The Accenture Files  

Investigation by the Expose Accenture, the Movement Research Unit, and the Progressive International

Today, the Progressive International, Expose Accenture and the Movement Research Unit release the Accenture Files, revealing the central role of the world’s largest consultancy in the global right-ward turn towards surveillance, exclusion, and strong-men: The Reactionary International.

Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and a comprehensive review of internal documents, our investigation demonstrates how Accenture has quietly embedded itself deep into the apparatus of security states worldwide, deploying its vast network of resources, wealth and technology to surveil entire populations, fuel the military-industrial complex and channel immense public wealth to private hands.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• economics,
• finance,
• tactical research

Ten Theses on WikiLeaks 

These 0.

"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!"
(after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on 'Western Civilisation')

• wikileaks

Ontologies of the Wayward Drone - Part I 

A Salvage Operation

On a clear evening in December, as the sun was setting over the Texas horizon, a Mexican drone entered U.S. airspace and crashed into a backyard in El Paso.

• art,
• war,
• surveillance,
• drone

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

Art in the Age of Terrorism: 

Dr. Steven Kurtz-the artist accused of bioterrorism in federal court-will make his first public appearance following the dismissal of his case

Thursday, May 29, 2008, 7PM
Eyebeam 540 W. 21st St. (btw 10th and 11th Aves.)
Free and open to the public

• art

Indymedia: It's time to move on 

Indymedia is the name given to a particular network with a rather uneven global reach, to which many hundreds of local independent media projects, mostly web-based, have been affiliated at one time or another. It is also the name for a particular approach to news media - one that attempts to avoid hierarchal production and hence promote grassroots reports on events.

• grassroot journalism,
• diy media,
• independent media,
• media criticism,
• participatory media,
• news

Manifesto by N. Tolokonnikova from 05/04/2012 

The Letter written by N. Tolokonniokova in which she outlines the problematics of Gender Equality and other fundamental freedoms in frames of ethical consensus monopolized by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian State, absent the plurality of the people of Russia and incarceration of Pussy Riot, as its main actors.

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison,
• women's rights

A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software 

October 2011.

The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting. The so-called 'financial markets' and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization.

• politics,
• infopolitics,
• precarity,
• street protest,
• tactical camping,
• austerity

Tompkin Square Riot Memories 

What follows are personal accounts from various people who were present on that fateful night in Tompkins Square on August 6, 1988. They observed and experienced firsthand the bloodlust of the marauding cops invading our neighborhood from all over the city. Twenty years later, these memories are still fresh in the minds of those who were there, as though it all happened just yesterday....

• gentrification

At Frontiers 

Frequently at frontiers we are asked, "Anything to declare?"

The wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border official is to say that you have "nothing to declare", and quickly move on. Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or at least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.

• no border,
• borders

Introduction to the N5M Zapbook 

The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and  marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.