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.
Door Geert Lovink
Amsterdam, december 1995
(voor Next 5 Minutes 2 - internationaal festival voor tactische media, 1996)
Notes for Brain Holmes' text: The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.
ReadThey wanted the Germs; they got 'em. - Darby Crash
The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has
always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse
needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and
the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the
9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange
across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.
Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.
1. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."
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.
ReadModernity's great promise - the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins.
One can argue that this vision was always compromised - modernity
(especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism)
always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears - the fear of
epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal
activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic
from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human
from the non human, life from the machine.
The antiwar demonstrations of February 15, 2003 proved it: theself-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetaryscale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In amanifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used thelanguage of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create arift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the greattransnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financialdisasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command ofthe earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted toencourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of theAmerican, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment thathad multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing thetraditional mechanisms of representation.
"Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will"
- Naum Gabo [1]
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.
ReadWikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners
On Sunday April 24, 2011 WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files
from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The details for every
detainee will be released daily over the coming month.
01. These are precarious times. These are eventful times. Let us note some of the symptoms of this instability. There is September 11,and the prospect of a new form of American empire that uses September11 as its pretext. There is the global stock market slide, triggered by the collapse of American tech stocks, which altered the lives of chip-makers in Korea and Coltan miners in the Congo. These are instances of what I call weird global media events. They are events because they are singular. They are media events because they happen in a vectoral space of communication. They are global media events because they call a world into being. They are weird global media events because they defy explanation. They subsume every explanation as mere ripples and eddies in their wake.
ReadGlobal Uprisings is an independent news site and video series dedicated to showing responses to the economic crisis and authoritarianism. Since 2011, Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh have been travelling, researching, and making documentary films.
Their short films detail social movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US. Their films cover strikes and demonstrations in the UK, the large-scale housing occupations and street mobilizations in Spain, the various general strikes, protests, and factory occupations in Greece, the revolution in Egypt, the Gezi Park uprising in Turkey, the 2014 social explosion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the revolt against austerity in Portugal, and the occupy movement in the United States.
Facial Weaponization Suite protests against biometric facial recognition–and the inequalities these technologies propagate–by making "collective masks" in community-based workshops that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies.
ReadThe latest issue of The Occupied Times of London is devoted to the question of technology in contemporary forms of political contestation. The main question thrown up by the editors is to ask: "What is technology for?" (TMF editors)
ReadCultural Center REX, Jevrejska 16, Belgrade, Serbia
Friday, 31st of August, 7pm, 2012
Participants: Corina L. Apostol, Maja Ciric, Pavle Cosic / KORNET,
Nikola Radic Lucati, Vladan Jeremic, Selman Trtovac, Vesna Milosavljevic
/ SEEcult.org, Stefan Tiron, Noa Treister, The Bureau of Melodramatic
Research, Marica Radojcic, Rena Rädle.
The 3rd ArtLeaks Working Assembly will be facilitated by Corina Apostol, The
Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Stefan Tiron and Vladan Jeremic.
