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.
Introductory essay for the second editon of the Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media, 1996.
Instigating final declaration of the FC⚡MC
In the middle of the protest, something new emerged:
Final declaration of the FC⚡MC - International Media Center during G20 in Hamburg
That guerrilla video is now the subject of historical reflection is
probably a sign of its demise. There has been a recent flurry of
archival and publishing activity centering on experiments made in the
'70s. In 1997, the Chicago-based Video Data Bank released Surveying the
First Decade, a compilation of work from the early days of video, and
Oxford University Press published Deirdre Boyle's Subject to Change:
Guerrilla Television Revisited, the definitive study of the video
movements of the late 1960s and '70s. These reflections on the utopian
impulse in early video provide an opportunity to think about the
present state of media in this country, in particular those movements
that have attempted to create electronic space for non-commercial views
that run counter to the mainstream.
tranzit is a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia since 2002.
ReadTactical 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.
ReadFelix 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.
ReadInke Arns, curator and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She lived in Paris (1982-86), finished school in West-Berlin in 1988, studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988-96) and in 2004 obtained her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia.
ReadA biography on Christoph Schlingensief.
By Till Briegleb.
It's time to create the pop stars of activism,
the idoru of communication guerrilla,
it's time to threaten and charm the
masses by the ghosts coming from the
net, to play the myth against the myth,
to be more nihilist than infoteinment!
- etoy -
For many reasons, the 80's, years of the Mitterand socialist government, were years in which grass roots movements got institutionalized and traditional activism was "out". The logic of the Republic (everybody is equal without distinction) allied with traditional individualism and clanic behaviour ("la guerre des chapelles") forbid the emergence of non dominant/non normalized subjectivities. This tradition is still alive today. The 68 generation didn't feel necessary to pass on their knowledge to younger generations. From their point of view, they created new ways to go about the world by themselves, so should the new generations. The notion of alternative and activism became stigmatized. It wasn't a very tactical in those years to position oneself in terms of an alternative. As a result, by the beginning of the 90, the most visible part of the intellectuals and the grass roots movements seams to be lobotomized.
Read1. 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.
