Minor Media Normality in the East 

1. Autogenerative Europe

In our imagination, eastern Europe was always black and white. Traveling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colorful western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn't remember having seen any color, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker's experiments with color only reinforced our image of the east as gray. Europe clearly had an ideologically motivated neurosis when it came to the perception of color.

• art,
• network cultures,
• deep europe

Remaking Media Practices - From Tactical Media to Post-Media 

If media theory over the last 40 years largely understood media as hopelessly contaminated by capitalism, the quietism implied by this critique also met its challenge in Guattari's concept of 'becoming-media'. Here Clemens Apprich revisits key media political debates to imagine post-media approaches in the age of social media.

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

Manifesto: Greed breaks the sack In favour of a free culture of citizens who share 

10 solutions/facts plus one.

A citizen response to the recent attacks on freedoms in the name of an incoherent concept that carries the name "intellectual property".

• copyleft,
• copyright,
• free culture

Notes on Culture Jamming 

"Culture-jamming," a term I have popularized by articles in The New York Times and Adbusters, might best be defined as media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one. Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings are all culture- jammers." Mark Dery

Damn the Networks! Victory to the Imagination!
Yogi in Craig Baldwin's "Spectres of the Spectrum"

• culture jamming

Report: Public Debate 'Vox Populi and The Syrian Archive'
 

Summary of the presentations and public debate on digital archiving practices, activism, and the role of the artist.
Report of the event Vox Populi and the Syrian Archive on 21 January 2017, organised by Eric Kluitenberg..

• art,
• war,
• archive,
• middle east,
• street protest

Notes on the Future of Activism 

Contemporary activism begins from the realization that for the first time in history, a synergy of catastrophes face us. Our physical environment is dying, our financial markets are collapsing and our culture, fed on a diet of junk thought, is atrophying -- unable to muster the intellectual courage to face our predicament.

• activism,
• info-activism,
• culture jamming,
• occupy

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.

A Concise Lexicon of / for the Digital Commons 

Access / Bandwidth / Code / Data / Ensemble / Fractal / Gift / Heterogeneous / Iteration / Journal / Kernel / Liminal / Meme / Nodes / Orbit / Portability / Quotidian / Rescension / Site / Tools / Ubiquity / Vector / Web / Xenophilly / Yarn / Zone

• public space,
• public domain,
• digital commons

Syrian Hands Raised: User Generated Creativity Between Citizenship and Dissent 

As much as images of violence, civil war, and sectarian strife become prominent in the media narrative of the Syrian uprising, little gems of innovative cultural production, artistic resistance, and creative disobedience continue to sprout across the virtual alleys of the Internet. These creative gems are also the germs of a viral peer-production process at work at a grassroots level in the new Syrian public sphere. Such acts of creativity - mash-ups, cartoons, slogans, jokes, songs, and web series - are probably too small and inconsistent in impact compared to the horrific magnificence that shelling, bombing, sniping, and killing scenes that provide daily fodder to global television viewers. It is also challenging to discover them; in fact, as remarked by Tunisian blogger Sami ben Gharbia at the Arab Bloggers meeting in Tunis (3-6 October 2011), Facebook is not the most suitable platform for activists to store, archive, tag, search for content, and give it a context.

• net.activism,
• info-activism,
• middle east

A Pirate Utopia for Tactical Television 

In recent years Amsterdam has become known for its free-net the Digital City. Less well known but in some ways equally remarkable has been the emergence of Amsterdam's radical movement for public access television. This text is just a beginning, a highly selective historical snap shot.

• tactical media,
• community media,
• network cultures,
• next 5 minutes,
• amsterdam,
• tactical television

SWARMACHINE 

Activist 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.

• tactical media,
• activism,
• swarm

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

Electronic Markets & Activist Networks 

The two very different types of digital formations examined here make legible the variable ways in which the socio-technical interaction between digital technology and social logics produce distinctive outcomes. These differences point to the possibility that networked forms of power are not inherently distributive, as is often theorized when the focus is exclusively on technical properties.

• activism,
• globalisation,
• net.activism,
• economics,
• finance

Contain This! Leaks, Whistle-Blowers and the Networked News Ecology 

WikiLeaks 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.

• wikileaks,
• news

Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite? 

[Originally published in: The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]

The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation 

Republished 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

• activism,
• post-governmental organisation,
• tactical camping,
• occupy

Post-media operators: "sovereign & vague" 

No one recognises these powers as their own

(Why Theory?) We have to dispense with the idea that theorising occurs after the creative event; that a poem or a track or a text is made and then, as part of its process of dissemination, there follows the theorising of the piece. Such a theorising is normally attributed to those known variously as critics, reviewers and essayists.

• media theory,
• media criticism

The Fourth World War 

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.

• zapatista

The Brazilian Context 

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.

• tactical media,
• Brazil