There seems to be a lot of confusion or misinformation in the Occupy movement about the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly and how that interacts with the right of local governments to place Time, Place, and Manner restrictions on those assemblies.
ReadIn 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.
Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".
ReadAs 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?
ReadRepublished with permission from metamute / Mute Magazine in London:
Moving beyond the conceptual polarisation of tight-knit vanguardist
parties and loose-tie virtual networks, Rodrigo Nunes sifts the residue
of last year's wave of revolts to produce a more nuanced picture of
organisational dynamics in the age of Web 2.0
Many are the social, political or economic problems in Brazil.
Socially, there's an extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Such a
big social unequality is reflected, for example, in the extreme
differences between the center and the periphery in the big cities,
regional unequalities, criminality, racism. Besides that, we live in an
unnoficial police state that acts in defense of the elites, murdering
and arresting poorer citzens, because of the color of their skin or
social condition.
To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100
The Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001, destroying the life-line of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky situation for a while, due - we believe - to the destabilisation of the problematic balance between personal contacts of list members, lurking and filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers, and a growing number of self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and disregarded the social rules of the online community.
Residents of Istanbul started a peaceful sit-in as a reaction to the city governments plans to demolish Taksim Square's Gezi Park on the May 29th 2013. The demolition was part of the plan to replace the park and construct a shopping mall on one of the only green areas left in the central cross road of Istanbul. The reaction was sparked by a decision making process that lacked any consultation with citizens. Inhabitants of the city initiated this on-site protest to raise their voices against the demolition plans, but also to exercise their right to freedom of speech and to freedom of assembly in a democratic society.
ReadActivist Media Tomorrow*
* BH: When I wrote this text five years ago, it really was not clear whether
the swarming tactics of the counter-globalization movement would get a
"second chance." But they have, and now the subtitle could be "activist
media today."
What happened at the turn of the millennium, when a myriad of recording
devices were hooked up to the Internet and the World Wide Web became an
electronic prism refracting all the colors of a single anti-capitalist
struggle? What kind of movement takes to the barricades with samba bands
and videocams, tracing an embodied map through a maze of virtual
hyperlinks and actual city streets? The organizational aesthetics of the
networked movements was called "tactical media," a concept that mixed
the quick-and-dirty appropriation of consumer electronics with the
subtle counter-cultural anthropology of Michel de Certeau. The idea was
to evoke a new kind of popular subjectivity, constitutionally "under the
radar," impossible to identify, constantly shifting with the inventions
of digital storytelling and the ruses of open-source practice. Too bad
so much of this subversive process was frozen into a single seductive
phrase.
Filmmaker and activist Gregg Bordowitz's passage through the
1980s mirrors the course of AIDS activism in that decade. From the very
first ACT up demonstration in New York to the triumphal storming of the
FDA headquarters outside Washington, DC, he deployed his art in the
battle against AIDS. Bordowitz leads off this two-issue series of
personal chronicles of the decade, recounting his experiences as an
activist and guerrilla filmmaker at the forefront of the fight.
"Art
does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must
be recognized, fostered, and supported in every way possible."
- Douglas Crimp, introduction to AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (MIT Press, 1988)
This 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.
ReadWhen looking at technology, we barely see machinery, let alone the people who made it. We seem to take technology and its development for a given, neglecting the process of its creation. We live off the fruits of the tree, without examining its roots.
Read[Originally published in: The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]
gruesse von ELEKTRO
From: Pit Schultz
Status: RO
Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult
Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This "new media" activism was based on the insight that the long-held distinction between the 'street' (reality) and the 'media' (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society.
ReadWhat we've learnt from the Net and how we can extrapolate it to all spaces of struggle.
(Some thoughts geared towards action, compiled for the Radical Community Manager courses that we organise at X.net)
Tactical Media Connections public program, Amsterdam January 20 - 22, 2017.
As part of the Tactical Media Connections public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its connections to the present, a series of public events take place in Amsterdam between January 20 and 22, 2017. The public program includes an exhibition at Framer Framed in the Tolhuistuin cultural centre, opening on Friday January 20; a Meme Wars Lab workshop on Friday January 20; a public debate at Eye Filmmuseum on Saturday January 21, and a one day conference (‘The Society of Post-Control’) again at the Tolhuistuin on Sunday January 22.
Please find below a brief program overview, followed by a detailed description of the different parts of the public program.
The following text is an excerpt from a talk given by Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos to the International Civil Commission of Human Rights
Observation in La Realidad, Chiapas on November 20, 1999. The outline
for the talk was published in Letters 5.1 and 5.2 in November of the
same year, with the titles "Chiapas: the War: 1, Between the Satellite
and the Microscope, the Other's Gaze," and 2, "The Machinery of
Ethnocide." Any similarity to the conditions of the current war is
purely coincidental. Published in Spanish in La Jornada, Tuesday,
October 23, 2001.
Public Agency in Hybrid Space
Lead-essay for the theme issue "Hybrid Space" of OPEN, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, #11, (Amsterdam / Rotterdam, 2006).
This article focuses on grassroots digital activism in the Arab world and the risks of what seems to be an inevitable collusion with U.S foreign policy and interests. It sums up the most important elements of the conversation I have been having for the last two years with many actors involved in defending online free speech and the use of technology for social and political change. While the main focus is Arab digital activism, I have made sure to include similar concerns raised by activists and online free speech advocates from other parts of the world, such as China, Thailand, and Iran.
Read