As power becomes traceable: raising the stakes on critique 

Among the many troubling and bizarre features of contemporary politics, the following apparent paradox can be found: Informationalisation has brought along enormous increases in the traceability of the doings and dealings of the powerful. But the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low. After information technology, the going about of those in power and their abuses, are increasingly documented, and the resulting records are increasingly susceptible to leakage to the public. Email is an obvious example. In the run-up to the last Iraq war, a message by an official of the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested ? aggressive surveillance ? of UN Security Council Members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, made its way to the newspapers.

Next 5 Minutes 4 

Next 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together media, art and politics. Next 5 Minutes revolves around the notion of tactical media, the fusion of art, politics and media. The festival is organised irregularly, when the urgency is felt to bring a new edition of the festival together.

• tactical media,
• cartography,
• activism,
• diy media,
• streaming media,
• media theory,
• media criticism,
• participatory media,
• cyberfeminism

Frequently Asked Questions: Digital Work 

How does digital work differ from its analogue forms?

Although developed for military and corporate purposes, digital technologies also create oportunites for working people. With these amazing tools, we are not only able to invent new aesthetic forms, but also can work in more satisfying ways. Above all, digital technologies can allow us to rediscover the dignity of artisan labour without losing the material benefits delivered by the analogue working methods of Fordism. Over the past two centuries, industrialisation has slowly replaced skilled craft labour with repetitive factory and office work. In the Fordist factory, even the pace of working can be determined by the speed of the assembly lines. For most of this century, people have grudgingly accepted the boring nature of their jobs. In return, they have been given enough wages to buy large amounts of goods and services produced by Fordist industrialisation. However, once their living standards are sufficient, most people also want to enjoy satisfaction in their work. They don't just want money, but also respect.

A new culture of resistance: from WikiLeaks to the squares 

Now that the grassroots movement that started inadvertently with the Arab Spring has gone global, it is necessary to cast a backwards glance to try and figure out, with some perspective, the dynamics of what has happened, physically and conceptually, over the last year. We propose a simple vision of the process of uprising in 2011, which was consolidated on the past 15th of October as a new culture of popular resistance and creativity. We also aim to point out the recent or enhanced concepts born in the collective consciousness of society during this period.

• wikileaks,
• occupy

The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic 

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.

• activism,
• migration,
• borders

"V for Vendetta": The Other Face of Egypt's Youth Movement 

"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea [?] and ideas are bulletproof."
- From the film V for Vendetta

• middle east,
• anonymous

Political Ecology Begins When We Say "Black Lives Matter" 

"They say it's a joke they say it's a game." The slogan was launched on the Chicago streets by the group We Charge Genocide, in the middle of a demo demanding reparations for victims of police torture. The folks on the street chanted those words, we hurled them out of our mouths in staccato bursts, while looking round at the passers-by who pretended not to notice. What the chant means is either enigmatic, or it's painfully obvious. There is a kind of disdain that minimizes a death or a beating or a torture or a life sentence for black people in the name of lawfulness, efficiency, morality and humanist ideals. That kind of disdain has made democracy impossible in the US - and other places too.

• cartography,
• activism,
• social justice,
• democracy,
• BlackLivesMatter

Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus 

Please join Not An Alternative, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and Upgrade NY! this Thursday, June 10 for the opening of Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus, an exhibition which examines models of participation and participation as a model in art and activism.

Re:Group proposes that with participation now a dominant paradigm, structuring social interaction, art, activism, the architecture of the city, the internet, and the economy, we are all integrated into participatory structures whether we want to be or not. The exhibition showcases work that subverts existing systems or envisions new alternatives to the ways in which individuals can take part, or choose not to take part, in social and cultural life.

• art,
• activism,
• participatory media,
• collaboration

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

Insular Technologies - A Civil Tactical Response to SIGNIT Communities 

In the past four years we have been accustomed to receive information on the extent of global signit work that has actually been going on without the knowledge of civil populations, communications infrastructure users and developers and in many cases even governments. A very quiet debate has started around issues arising from the knowledge about the ECHELON system, which has now spread also into mainstream politics, and we should be very careful observers of this processes. One should also be aware of the fact, that possible ?sister" systems exist in the EU countries, Russia, France and China, although not much is known about them, except what can be gathered from each countries encryption regulations, which in this respect can be taken as an information on each of the countries civil rights and signit polices. We can also assume that Israel possesses strong signit mideast oriented capabilities.

• infopolitics,
• Signal Intelligence

INFOBAHN BLUES 

Since American Vice-President Al Gore made his famous speech in California a couple of years ago, it has become impossible to scan any news medium without finding at least one reference to the "Information Superhighway". The Information Superhighway metaphor - specially tailored for Mr. Gore's California audience - is so brilliantly simplistic it seems to have blown the mind of every media editor in the Western Hemisphere. With an Information Superhighway you just plug in your modem and roll your data out onto the ramp and into the dataflow where it zips along the freeway until it hits the appropriate off-ramp. Finding data is the same - it's all nice straight data-lanes with on and off ramps and well-banked curves.

Basic how-to guide for preserving fundamental rights on the Internet | Xnet 

Xnet publishes a Basic How-to guide for preserveing fundamental rights on the Internet
#Democracy – Rights and freedoms protected by the people: recent events in Catalonia as a case study

How-to guide: https://xnet-x.net/en/how-to-for-preserving-fundamental-rights-internet/
Even more basic PDF version.

• infopolitics,
• net.activism,
• info-activism,
• censorship

GlobalNoise 

Activists involved in the Indignato, Occupy, #yosoy132, etc  movements have begun a campaign to create GlobalNoise, a worldwide cacerolazo, or casserole march, on Saturday, October 13th, 2012. The hope is that local Occupations and Collectives will take up the call to march, using the method of a casserole march to highlight whatever issues are the most important to their community.

• street protest,
• occupy