16 June 2025
In Defense of Artistic Freedom: Support Legal Action Against Political Abuse
We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar, who is pursuing legal action against the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) for unauthorized use of her artwork, defamation, and incitement of public hostility.
While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East
off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this
spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s
and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the
political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter,
and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media,
activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across
the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt's
political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most
prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.
The World Social Forum, organized twice in Porto Alegre 2001 and 2002, not only prompted a flurry of autonomous self-organization, crossborder organization, and creative media interventions. It also initiated an intense process of analysis and reflection on the tricky question of a 'global' dynamic of self-organization.
ReadWIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
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 reader of The Seropositive Ball has been added to the Tactical Media Files as a freely downloadable pdf. The Seropostive Ball was a 69-hour 'networked event' staged at Amsterdam's Paradiso June 21-24, 1990, and a shadow conference to the World AIDS Conference in San Francisco. The event was an important precursor for the first Next 5 Minutes festival on Tactical Television (1993). This exceptional document deserves special attention, hence this non-standard announcement. (TMF editors)
ReadSoftware 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.
As a playful, do-it-yourself approach to media activism and new technologies, tactical media (TM) seemed to have some critical bite when it emerged in the mid-1990s. But is it still radical today?
ReadThis polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects. Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool's functioning, is discussed in a context of Inter-American Transcendentalism.
ReadIntroduction to the cultural intelligence manual "Tactical Reality Dictionary"
From: Bruce Sterling <bruces {AT} well.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:59:27 -0600 (CST)
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} basis.Desk.nl
Key concepts: art movements, Internet, reputation economics, arts grants, Europe, Interfund
Privacy, copyright, classified documents and state secrets, but also spontaneous network phenomena like flash mobs and hashtag revolutions, reveal one thing – we lost control over the digital world. We experience a digital tailspin, or as Michael Seemann calls it in this essay: a loss of control or Kontrollverlust. Data we never knew existed is finding paths that were not intended and reveals information that we would never have thought of on our own.
ReadConference on Information Politics, Digital Culture & Global Protest Movements April 4th 2014 - King's College London
ReadWebcasting often is seen as an alternative for experiments which would not be able to get a licence for ethertransmissions. The difficulty projects and broadcasting initiatives encounter when trying to get legal airspace has caused a limited view of the possibilities of working within the ether as such. It is already clear that connections between networks like the internet and the ether can be most interesting, but this is of course not the only reason to have a look at the possibilities of broadcasting more closely. The ether is still the easiest way to reach large numbers of people fast. We should always be aware it is there when we need it.
ReadWikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means
by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least
four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are
fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear.
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).
Maja Smrekar Legal Defense Fund
Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar is taking legal action against a politically motivated smear campaign orchestrated by the far-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS)
In the lead-up to Slovenia’s 10th May referendum on pension reforms for awarded artists, SDS escalated its long-standing culture war—branding contemporary art as “degenerate” and weaponizing Smrekar’s internationally acclaimed K-9 Topology project to provoke moral panic.
In thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to early 2009 and never seen before by members of the public or the media, the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantanamo - 758 out of 779 in total - are described in detail in memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, to US Southern Coand in Miami, Florida.
April 25, 2011
'We Are Left to Make This Moment Into a Movement'
As the news cameras leave, Russell says the real fight begins.
Initiated in March 2011, Tahrir Documents is an ongoing effort to archive and translate activist papers from the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its aftermath. Materials are collected from demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square and published in complete English translation alongside scans of the original documents. The project is not affiliated with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise.
Read