Smashing the Image Factory. 

A Complete Manual of Billboard Subversion and Destruction

"When our work is done, advertising and billboards will fly beside the soviet flag in the museum of dead totalitarian experiments"

• culture jamming,
• billboard improvement

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

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

Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: Part 3 

This interview was conducted between subRosa and Ryan Griffis via email correspondence during the first half of 2003.

• feminism,
• tactical technology,
• cyberfeminism

Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite? 

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

Reading the Arab Image 

This debate in the frame of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Power Cut Middle East programme, takes a look at the images, both moving and still, that have come from the Middle East like a huge wave in the past few months. Due to the increase of mobile phone films and photos, we have a great deal of material whose origin is uncertain. It seems authentic, but who is coming to blows with whom? And who has made the films and taken the photos? Regimes are also aware of this, and use it to their advantage. Are we seeing actors, paid demonstrators, real people? How do we read and interpret these images?

• grassroot journalism,
• media criticism,
• middle east,
• cinema

Media, Activism and Society of the Spectacle 

Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

• activism,
• diy media,
• spectacle,
• media criticism

CAE: Framing Tactical Media 

Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.

• art,
• tactical media

Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm! 

The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently oneof the most pressing problems confronting political and militarystrategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and thegeosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above spaceand surface is a ~fait accompli~ and has inaugural value (ushers a newepoch). Something nicely conjured up in a (French) advertisementpraising cellular phones with the words: "Planet Earth has never beenthis small". This is a very dramatic moment in our relation with theworld and for our vision of the world.

• speed

A Pirate Utopia for Tactical Television 

In recent years Amsterdam has become known for its free-net the Digital City. Less well known but in some ways equally remarkable has been the emergence of Amsterdam's radical movement for public access television. This text is just a beginning, a highly selective historical snap shot.

• tactical media,
• community media,
• network cultures,
• next 5 minutes,
• amsterdam,
• tactical television

The Language of Tactical Media 

"World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -- motto of Tactical Media Crew, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan

• tactical media,
• theory

Chance 2000 - The Last Chance Party (1998) 

Right in time for the 1998 German elections, Christoph Schlingensief decided to found his own party with the futuristic-sounding name CHANCE2000 - motto: Vote Yourself!

• politics,
• campaign,
• democracy,
• trickster

Strategies for Tactical Media 

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.

• politics,
• tactical media,
• theory,
• virilio

Using the Media: the Clean Clothes Campaign 

The existing use of media so far has been determined by the local, decentralized nature of the campaign. Local groups are adapting, editing and redesigning existing material like research results, lines of argumentation and logos, photos and slogans. The educational material, used by trade unions, schools and churches is very specific and "customized", and therefore cannot be used in campaigns which target the general public.

• politics,
• campaign

Rehearsal of Memory 

About his CD-ROM production called ROM

The production of this interactive programme has been commissioned by Video Postive 1995 and the construction of the artwork is set to take place during January to April 1995.

Unser Feind, das Internet 

- Ethische NETZPRINZIPIEN

Impulsreferate etablieren eine engagierte RL Diskussion, die Im Netz fortgefuehrt und in Newsgroups konkretisiert wird.
Der Wunsch und die Notwendigkeit zur Entwicklung neuer Terminologien und originaerer Diskurse wurde evident. Nach den Jahren des Zitierens ist es an der Zeit und wird durch neue Lebensrealitaeten im elektronischen Netzwerk und aufgrund internationaler Erfahrungen mit der Praxis regulativer Eingriffe neue Begriffe, Strukturen und Theorien zu entwickeln. Jeder kann sich aktiv an dieser Koevolution technischer und Inhaltlicher Verbindungen beteiligen!

Ontologies of the Wayward Drone - Part II 

A Salvage Operation:

Ontologies of the Drone

Amplifying Expertise

• art,
• war,
• surveillance,
• drone

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

Historical Background of the US Biowarfare Program 

In light of the current FBI/Patriot Act investigations against Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), it is worthwhile to point out two moments from the history of the US government?s involvement in biowarfare. The first concerns the specific issue of access to knowledge, education, and resources in the life sciences. The second concerns the general backdrop of US biodefense ideology. All of this information has been confirmed by several sources, and has been in the public domain for some time (see the references below).
Needless to say, this is not meant to be a comprehensive ?history? of biowarfare. Instead, it is a perspective on biowarfare from the vantage point of US involvement. What is evident is that the US government?s involvement in biowarfare raises far more substantial questions than the investigation of dissenting artists.

• biotechnology,
• biowarfare