Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It's a match struck
in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path
through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies
of those who took Bertolt Brecht's words to heart: "Art is not a mirror
held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."
April 19, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dow Throws a Dismal Party, Few Attend
Underattended "Run for Water" plagued by death, zombies, and dozens of "Dow spokesmen"; truth seems to run free
Following the September 2009 roundtable conference organised by the World Information Institute in New York, the follow-up publication will be presented on Thursday April 15 at the New School University. The book launch hosted by Ted Byfield,
with remarks by Marco Deseriis (NYU), Steve Kurtz (Critical Art
Ensemble), Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men), Ken Wark (NSU), and Trebor
Scholz (NSU)
Wollman Hall, New School University, 65
West 11th St, 5th Floor, New York, NY.
6:30 - 8:15 pm
Felix Stalder's extended essay, Digital Solidarity, responds to the wave of new forms of networked organisation emerging from and colliding with the global economic crisis of 2008. Across the globe, voluntary association, participatory decision-making and the sharing of resources, all widely adopted online, are being translated into new forms of social space.
ReadThe indictment says that I committed disorderly conduct motivated by religious hatred and enmity and by the hatred of Orthodox Christians. I fundamentally don't understand this statement. Our performance aimed to attract the attention of the Russian clergy and the rector of Cathedral of the Christ the Savior, patriarch Kirill. We are representatives of our generation, and we are at a loss after his actions and appeals.
ReadTen years ago, there were few online activists and they believed that "cyberspace" was all theirs, a territory from which to emerge anywhere, outflanking the lumbering second-wave dinosaurs responsible for the Cold War and its successor, the McWorld. In the future that actually unfolded, the dinosaurs learned to boot up computers, connect to the Internet and post Web pages, or pay someone to do all this for them. What was a poor online activist to do? Even the son of Slobodan Milosevic has a Web site, to promote his Belgrade dance club.
In tactical media circles the Amsterdam media landscape has long been treated as a Utopian model because of her free radios, open tv-channels and digital public spaces. The last few years this media paradise is under threat. How did this come about? And is it still possible to reverse this development? This is the theme of the Amsterdam Media Debate. Nina Meilof (The Digital City - DDS), Andreas Baader and Josephine (Radio Patapoe), Frank (Radio de Vrije Keyser) and media-activists Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink and Menno Grootveld prepared the grounds for the discussion.
The aim of the Amsterdam Media Debate during The Next 5 Minutes is to explain to the international participants that big changes are underway here. They may perhaps learn something from our experiences, but we would also like to try and find out what the differences are with other big cities and with other countries. What are these big changes and how is the situation at the present moment?
Shell is not going to forget lightly its misadventures with the Brent Spar. The Oil Major was taken by complete surprise when the Greenpeace campaign against sinking that former drill platform achieved its goals. What happened to Shell can in fact happen to any corporation. Loosing control of the situation as result of the activities of a pressure group has become a nightmare scenario for the modern multinational enterprise.
ReadLike most of this collective effort, even the name is not a single person's brainchild- all we know is that somewhere along the way, people started referring to our work as such. And since it was an unpretentious, practical term, which did represent what we were doing in a direct manner, we just stuck by it.
Read(C) Mark Dery 1996; all rights reserved; reproduction in any medium without author's written permission forbidden.
Abstract of the lecture by Peter Lamborn Wilson
For the 'Next Five Minutes" Conference, Amsterdam, january 1996
Call to join the cybernetic edition of CompArte "Against Capital and its Walls, All the Arts"
July, 2017
International support campaign for independent media in Yugoslavia, including the famous Radio B92 media center, in operation between March and July 1999.
ReadInternational public seminar and evening screening program on the recent outbursts of social protest and their media strategies, hosted by De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam, Friday September 30, 2011.
A public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its connections to the present.
Under the working title 'Tactical Media Connections' the editors of the Tactical Media Files, David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg have begun an extensive public research project that seeks to trace and develop the connections between the phenomenon of Tactical Media as it was identified in the early 1990s, not least through the renowned series of Next 5 Minutes festivals and conferences on Tactical Media (www.n5m.org - organised four times between 1993 and 2003), and current critical practices operating at the intersection of art, media, activism, technological experimentation and political contestation.
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.
ReadTwo years after 911 the global cup looks both half full and half empty. It's hard to be optimistic, yet there are plenty of reasons for it. With the Bush-Blair war machine running out of steam, the movement of movements shifts its attention to alternatives for the WTO, Security Council and similar post-democratic bodies. In the moral desert of the Iraq War the structuration of imaginary consent through the repetitive bombardment of the image began to show severe cracks in credibility. These discrepancies within the represented result in a heightened need for action. The Iraq war didn't fool any one and both sides are still reeling a little from the shock. While maintaining their anger, people moved on from protest to a collective search for that other, possible world. What might a global democracy look like? Would it be a system with representatives and 'rights,' or rather a dynamic set of events, without higher aims?
ReadWIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
Readnet.radio days 98 was this year's manifestation of the annual Radio Days forum, exploring the innovation and experimentation of radio art. This year's conference was hosted in Berlin in June of this year. It was a symposium focused on a new generation of streaming media practitioners, utilising software such as Real Audio to broadcast audio content live on the internet. This phenomena is being dubbed, net.radio.
ReadEssay written in August 2002 for the New York University Tactical Media Lab, organised by the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History.