Notes on the Politics of Software Culture 

Software 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.

At Frontiers 

Frequently at frontiers we are asked, "Anything to declare?"

The wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border official is to say that you have "nothing to declare", and quickly move on. Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or at least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.

• no border,
• borders

TERROR FEEDS: Inside the Fear Machine 

Outer Spaces Conference Series 2017

An analysis of ISIS and its media strategy, the meaning of cyber jihad, and why people enrol as foreign fighters.

The 12th conference of the Disruption Network Lab
Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin.

• media,
• infopolitics,
• post-governmental organisation,
• fear,
• info-activism,
• media criticism,
• middle east

The Role of the Engineer in the Information Age 

When 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.

Frequently Asked Questions About Justice on Trial 

It is neither easy nor popular to go against prevailing assumptions in society, especially when they pertain to how justice is dispensed in this country. But speaking out against injustice is and always has been the moral assignment of those who are inspired by the promise of American Freedom. That's why Johanna Fernandez and Kouross Esmaeli sought to tell this difficult story of a system gone awry in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Dissecting what went wrong - and what continues to go wrong - in the American justice system when it comes to people of color or of lesser economic means (and working toward correcting those injustices) is an essential civic duty, and the basis of Justice on Trial.

• tactical media,
• independent media,
• prison,
• death row

The Invention of the Savage: Colonial Exhibitions and the Staging of the Arab Spring 

Watching a popular uprising in real time was indeed a dramatic experience. As viewers tuned in (or streamed in) to the violence, courage, and uncertainty of events in North Africa this year, many of them had the impression of witnessing the "actual" events, free from the framing tactics and analytical bias often found on the six o'clock news. A host of new media celebrities became household names as they reported live from Tahrir, and news outlets such as Al-Jazeera saw an unprecedented rise in viewership. Spectators were made to believe that a return to the event "itself" was once again possible after decades of being locked into what Jean Baudrillard called the hyper-real. The revolution in-and-of-itself seemed to unfold before our eyes, creating a fetish for real-time revolt.

• middle east,
• street protest,
• postcolonialism

Final Program: As If / Vox Populi / The Syrian Archive / The Society of Post-Control 

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.

• tactical media,
• meme wars,
• tactical research,
• trickster

Digital Partisans 

On Mute and the Cultural Politics of the Net

• politics,
• art,
• tactical media,
• diy media,
• infopolitics,
• independent media,
• media theory,
• media criticism

The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control - Part II 

There is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184).

• tactical media,
• media theory

The Blood of the Victim: Revolution in Syria and the Birth of the Image-Event 

In March 1993, Kevin Carter took a photo of a starving Sudanese child crawling towards a UN relief camp less than a mile away. A few meters from the weary child stood a vulture, waiting for her death to begin his meal. Birds also must eat, and in southern Sudan they were eating because humans were not.

• participatory media,
• middle east,
• street protest

The DEF of Tactical Media 

Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago(1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences,understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media.

• tactical media,
• diy media,
• media theory,
• media criticism

The Information war 

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".

http://new . territories / appropriation . of . medical . discourse / art . com 

Nina Czegledy and Inke Arns presented the material described in the following text during the afternoon programme at V2_Organisation Rotterdam on Sunday, January 21st, 14.00 - 18.00 hrs.

On an imaginary journey in the territories of current medical practice and visual art, we observe the disintegration of former boundaries and discover the emergence of a new discourse involving new metaphors and new mythologies. In the course of this voyage we witness the crystallization of a process which began in the Enlightenment and today is linked together by electronic technologies. Mediated by television, and lately the Internet, the concepts involved here, have contributed to the construction of a simulated reality in both medical science and art which imprisons attention and redirects it from the subject of the activity reproduced.

CHANCE 2000: Vote yourself! Just do it! 

Germany 1998: 2 years before the New Millenium a new form of Political Party came into existence: CHANCE 2000 - The Party of the Last Chance. In the midst of an election that was one of the most important in postfascist Germany an artist jumped into the political arena to "make politics more aesthetic and aesthetics more political". The film- and theatremaker and talk show host Christoph Schlingensief started the Campagne: "VOTE YOURSELF!" In Berlin he started the project with an "Election Circus". Together with a famous circus-family from former East Germany and with his crew of actors and his family of handicapped performers he founded "CHANCE 2000 - Party of the Last Chance" in a circus tent in Berlin/ Prenzlauer Berg. The message for the Republic was: "Vote Yourself, we know how to do it!" Every citizen was asked to become an independent candidate for the new Bundestag. Manuals were sent out how to become a direct candidate. And many different people realized their chance to "prove that they exist" by bringing their name on the ballot sheet: "Chance Meier", "Chance Mueller", "Chance Schmidt". If you managed to collect 200 signatures of support in your political region you were part of the game and you could vote yourself. Why not voting somebody you know by heart, you trust and love?

• campaign,
• social sculpture,
• post-governmental organisation

Ban Facial Recognition Europe 

Text campaign and research Ban Facial Recognition Europe, by Paolo Cirio. 2020

This petition introduces the campaign for the permanent ban of Facial Recognition used for identification and profiling in all of Europe. An initiative by the activist Paolo Cirio and thanks to the research and analysis of European Digital Rights (EDRi).

• art,
• campaign,
• activism,
• biometrics

Civil Networking in a Hostile Environment: Experiences in the Former Yugoslavia 

Methods of media resistance - the example of Radio B2-92

Veran Matic, editor-in-chief of the famous Radio B92, Belgrade, and chairman of the ANEM federation of independent broadcasters in Serbia and Montenegro, discusses some of the methods employed by his organisation in the tumultuous environment of the former Yugolslavia.

Toward Polymorphous Radio 

We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.[1]

• radio