Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund 

The CAE Defense Fund was created in 2005 as a mechanism to raise funds for legal bills incurred by Dr. Steven Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell in what its members argued was a politically motivated attack by the Department of Justice - one which threatened the constitutional and fundamental rights not only of the two defendants, but also of everyone, due to legal precedents that would have been set by an unfavorable outcome.

In response, thousands of people worldwide organized demonstrations and raised money for the two men's legal defense through fundraisers and a variety of other grassroots efforts.

www.caedefensefund.org

• art,
• biotechnology,
• science,
• fear

Beautiful Trouble - A toolbox for revolution 

Introduction

By Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell

"The clowns are organizing. They are organizing. Over and out."
-Overheard on UK police radio during action
by Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, July 2004

• tactical media,
• activism,
• diy media,
• net.activism,
• info-activism,
• participatory media,
• self-mediation

Art and the Paradoxical Citizen 

To the Arts, Citizens: it's a fantastic title. Hearing it, anyone who's been involved in political activism will probably think: "At last we're getting somewhere." The idea that art is part of citizenship, that there is a democratic exercise of the arts within the framework of public life, and that this appeal to the citizen-artist can be supported by a major cultural institution, is about as progressive as you could get today. Especially since this is a direct echo of the French republican tradition, where the phrase, Aux armes citoyens, is nothing less than a call to rise up and institute democracy against tyranny ? in other words, a call to revolution. The Portuguese know the meaning of this revolutionary call to arms from decisive historical events that are still in living memory. So one can imagine that the organizers of this exhibition did not take their title lightly.

• art

N5M3 South Asia Forum Presentation 

Working with new media in the part of South Asia that I come from is something like crossing a tightrope on a bicycle. The bicycle which could have helped me along were I on my way on flat ground makes the crossing that much more precarious. Consider the bicycle to be the single computer and the internet connection which I use along with at least seventeen other people, friends, colleagues, neighbours and complete strangers.

Looking into the practice within the labs 

To talk about the Cybermohalla project is to talk about concrete practices and how they relate to forms of knowledge. This is essential when we reflect on being producers of knowledge. What we are trying to follow and understand is the intricate web of processes involved in the development of a group - not just an aggregate of specialised selves. We also try to follow how this group generates within it a capacity for self recognition, for intersubjective recognition, for understanding the social biography of the neighbourhood and for developing a sense of and addressing diverse publics.

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

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

Occupy Sandy and the Occupy Movement 

Friends,

At Zuccotti Park, there was always a bit of social service involved in the occupation:-- homeless people sheltered, the hungry fed -- but it was ancillary to Occupy's main objectives, which dealt with societal, structural problems. But the reaction to hurricane Sandy, and the formation of Occupy Sandy, brought out a different aspect of the Occupy movement, not directed at Wall Street or big systemic issues, but directly providing help to those in need.What kind of role is that for Occupy? How does it fit in with Occupy Wall Street's basic thrust?

• environment,
• urban intervention,
• occupy

Not Home 

"Happiness is where I am not"

Darko Fritz's Search for Home

• art,
• migration,
• borders

Stop Streaming and Listen: Fight Post-Governmental-Content-Control Streaming Media breaks UK law - find out why nobody wants to care... 

Streaming media deliver video or audio content over the web. But streaming media are very different from the web. In the UK such formats force BT to breach the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Act. To the grass-roots activist web-critics, this might be the right (and most likely only) time to pull the plug and prune the web. Alternatively we could happily stream on and witness how independent media production will be pushed to the periphery of the new order. Here is one of many scenarios...

• radio,
• streaming media,
• independent media

Stop The Jabiluka Uranium Mine in Kakadu 

Does the art of campaigning involve commodifying a struggle and presenting it in a package to the people through the media? What impact does the media really have? How useful is the net as an alternative medium? Does it only reach the alternative people - those who already know about the issues or is it capable of engaging with the mainstream public. Does genuine public opinion have any real impact in the current political and corporate climate?

• environment,
• campaign,
• media

Ontologies of the Wayward Drone - Part II 

A Salvage Operation:

Ontologies of the Drone

Amplifying Expertise

• art,
• war,
• surveillance,
• drone

Crisis / Media 

Sarai-Waag Workshop at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi March 3-5, 2003

"The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
- The Inferno, Dante Alighieri

• crisis

Media, Activism and Society of the Spectacle 

Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

• activism,
• diy media,
• spectacle,
• media criticism

Tactical Media in Brazil - Submidialogia conference report 

The four-day conference on the campus of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) brought together many key persons from the tactical media movement of Brazil and some of their counterparts in the Brasilian government.
The movement is converging from roots in free radio, free software, hardware hacking, art and social movements. It is currently focussed around a large-scale project master-minded by Claudio Prado and supported by the Ministry of Culture: ?Pontos de Cultura? (Culture Spots) which is aiming to empower up to 600 cultural projects with free software-based multimedia production and publication facilities.

• tactical media,
• Brazil

Next 5 Minutes Core Themes 

The third edition of the Next 5 Minutes revolved around four core themes:
- The Art of Campaiging
- The Post-Governmental Organisation (PGO)
- How Low Can You Go? The Technical and the Tactical
- Tactical Education

• campaign,
• tactical media,
• lowtech,
• next 5 minutes

A New Geography of Power? 

The formal political system today faces a new geography of power. Globalization and the new technologies have contributed to the shrinking of state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new actors engaged in governance activities. The current phase of the world economy is characterized by significant discontinuities with the preceding periods and radically new arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the impact of globalization on the geography of economic activity and on the organization of political power. There is an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority over its territory we have long associated with the nation-state.

• urban intervention,
• globalisation,
• post-governmental organisation

CAE: Framing Tactical Media 

Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.

• art,
• tactical media

Access for All FAQ 

Written for Interstanding - Understanding INteractivity conference, Tallinn, Estonia November 23-25, 1995 - RFC Draft 1.1

• tactical media,
• infopolitics

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".