Search results for 'culture'

article

30 Years of Tactical Media 

This is a short text [1] which appears in "Public Netbase: Non Stop Future. New  Practices in Art and Media" edited by the fine people at the New Media  Center_kuda.org, in cooperation with World-Information Institute / t0. This book was presented at Transmediale 2009 in Berlin.
http://nonstop-future.org

Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to  predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept  around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self- aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively  short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass  medium (1995-2005).

Read
campaign

#FREEBASSEL 

#FREEBASSEL Campaign launched to bring home loved and celebrated Internet Volunteer detained in Syria.

Damascus - Tuesday, 3 July 2012 - Today marks the launch of the #FREEBASSEL campaign to bring about the release of Bassel Khartabil, known widely on the Internet and in technology communities as Bassel Safadi. Bassel is a resident of Damascus, Syria, a technology pioneer and respected community leader. He is a loving family member and friend to countless people at home and around the world. He has been detained since March 15, 2012, without trial. Today the campaign learned Bassel is being held at security detention branch 291 in Kafer Sousa, a facility that was uncovered in the recent Human Rights Watch report "Syria: Torture Centers Revealed."

Read
event

Art and Political Conflict 

A public debate at Framer Framed, Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam, Sunday July 6, 2014 - 14.00 - 17.00 hrs.

The relationship between art and political conflict has been significantly reshaped by the proliferation of digital media and the internet as a means of instant dissemination of images, texts, and audiovisual expressions. Artistic /activist actions intervene via these digital means into an expanded symbolical space that is no longer the sole sanctuary of artists and art audiences, but instead has become the 'neural fibre' of everyday life.

Read
event

1st Annual #FREEBASSELDAY on March 15 

We, the supporters of the #FREEBASSEL project are inviting every person, everywhere to make an event on March 15, 2013 with other people in your city in global solidarity to call for the immediate release of open web advocate Bassel Khartibil. This day is the one year anniversary of the illegal jailing of Bassel Khartibil, well known free internet pioneer, software engineer, teacher, husband, family-man and friend. Bassel is a normal guy, in a bad situation. He is now stuck in a Syrian jail cell where he is not able to directly contribute to his local and global communities. We demand his captors to #FREEBASSEL!

Read
event

Dictionary of War - Novi Sad Edition 

After a one year break the DICTIONARY OF WAR continues with a fifth edition on January 25th and 26th, 2008 in Novi Sad, Serbia. Again 25 new concepts on the topic of war will be presented in alphabetical order by artists, theorists, filmmakers, scientists, researchers. Loosely based on the slogan: "At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something" DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating concepts.

Read
article

Digital Solidarity by Felix Stalder 

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.

Read
article

Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto 

In memoriam: Aaron Swartz

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

Read
article

Security through InSecurity 

Increase the level of paranoia.....
bombs in the metro.....bombs in Oklahoma......
bombs in the World Trade Center.....bombs in Mururoa.....
Who are the real terrorists?

Read
    article

    Hippy Cull 

    from Underground, PO Box 3285, London, SW2 3NN, UK

    1. Neo-hippyism is upon us: a bumper pack of seriously dumb tendenciesthat cripple processes of change. Some of these tendencies relate toideas, and some of them to action, they range from the 'political' tothe way people dress. They form the aesthetic, theoretical and materialdatabases people use to inform and develop what they are getting up to.This database needs reformatting.

    Read
      article

      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".

      Read
        article

        We Demand The Impossible: 

        An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon

        Furtherfield interview with Gavin Grindon and John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination about the User's Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible. Published by Minor Compositions.

        Read
        article

        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.

        Read
        article

        The GHI of Tactical Media 

        Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.

        Read