Interfiction 

by ZKP

TRANSLATED MESSAGE:

The global data-network is on everyone's lips. Initiatives that plan and promote the further extension of the nets in the big style originate in politics and economy. Goal of this engangement is an efficiency-oriented and economy- centered utilization of the new structures of communication. The capacity of these projects is already proven within a wide range of areas and especially curious people are working with it yet. However, one can also judge this development skeptically.

The End of a Paradise 

In tactical media circles the Amsterdam media landscape has long been treated as a Utopian model because of her free radios, open tv-channels and digital public spaces. The last few years this media paradise is under threat. How did this come about? And is it still possible to reverse this development? This is the theme of the Amsterdam Media Debate. Nina Meilof (The Digital City - DDS), Andreas Baader and Josephine (Radio Patapoe), Frank (Radio de Vrije Keyser) and media-activists Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink and Menno Grootveld prepared the grounds for the discussion.
The aim of the Amsterdam Media Debate during The Next 5 Minutes is to explain to the international participants that big changes are underway here. They may perhaps learn something from our experiences, but we would also like to try and find out what the differences are with other big cities and with other countries. What are these big changes and how is the situation at the present moment?

• community media,
• diy media

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

Introduction to the N5M Zapbook 

The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and  marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.

Viridian Note 00029: The Interfund 

From: Bruce Sterling <bruces {AT} well.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:59:27 -0600 (CST)
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} basis.Desk.nl

Key concepts:  art movements, Internet, reputation economics, arts grants, Europe, Interfund

• politics,
• culture,
• art

As power becomes traceable: raising the stakes on critique 

Among the many troubling and bizarre features of contemporary politics, the following apparent paradox can be found: Informationalisation has brought along enormous increases in the traceability of the doings and dealings of the powerful. But the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low. After information technology, the going about of those in power and their abuses, are increasingly documented, and the resulting records are increasingly susceptible to leakage to the public. Email is an obvious example. In the run-up to the last Iraq war, a message by an official of the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested ? aggressive surveillance ? of UN Security Council Members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, made its way to the newspapers.

Rehearsal of Memory 

About his CD-ROM production called ROM

The production of this interactive programme has been commissioned by Video Postive 1995 and the construction of the artwork is set to take place during January to April 1995.

Sex in the Age of Media 

The most important issue concerning the representation of sexuality in the media is, whether human dignity is being honored or not. Respect has many forms and those forms have many layers, and really there is no one else but ourselves to be the judge of the way we are being treated. Yet when and where basic human rights are not granted, the feeling of being deeply rooted in one's dignity (if not entirely unimaginable) is but a dream. This world is certainly not the best of all worlds and there is always a battle to be fought and battles will have to be fought again and again. Some so mean and savage that they can only be fought by those prepared to go till the end.

Vakuum TV 

VakuumTV was founded in February 1994 on the initiative of László Kistamás. Its members presented weekly broadcasts on Monday nights at the most popular cultural club in Budapest, Tilos az Á. Needless to say, the designation 'VakuumTV' was not meant to refer to any kind of conventional television channel which could be received on TV sets in commercial circulation. Rather, its founders envisioned a live show in which a large frame separating the stage from the audience imitates the experience of watching TV for the audience. Thus VakuumTV can be received only where this frame is set up.

• next 5 minutes,
• tactical television

The Network of Waves 

Public Agency in Hybrid Space

Lead-essay for the theme issue "Hybrid Space" of OPEN, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, #11, (Amsterdam / Rotterdam, 2006).

• public space,
• infopolitics,
• media theory,
• hybrid space,
• street protest

Transfiguration of the Avant-Garde 

The Negative Dialectics of the Net

In his essay, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", Jean-François Lyotard observes that capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avant-garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.

• avantgarde,
• infinity,
• real virtuality,
• The Yesmen,
• Dow Bhopal Legacy

Islam and Tactical Media in Amsterdam 

Essay written in August 2002 for the New York University Tactical Media Lab, organised by the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History.

• tactical media,
• community media,
• islam

Practices of resistance and enthusiasm in Brazil 

Motivated by the theories of Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Geert Lovink and David Garcia, Brazilian Internet users, activists and artists are, more and more, developing attractive activism and tactical media projects.

• tactical media,
• Brazil

Transcending Post-Communism? 

?In Central and (South-) Eastern Europe the cultural landscape has entered the Post-Soros Era, while still awaiting the arrival of the widely expected EU patronage for the arts and the civil sector ?? (from the original description of the ?Enduring Post Communism? panel)

A Rift in Empire? 

The antiwar demonstrations of February 15, 2003 proved it: theself-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetaryscale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In amanifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used thelanguage of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create arift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the greattransnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financialdisasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command ofthe earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted toencourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of theAmerican, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment thathad multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing thetraditional mechanisms of representation.

"The Desire to be Wired" 

1. Desire.

I come from a social and cultural context which has its languagetaboos, and among them a strong one refers to the libido. Desire is,therefore, something rather personal, and connecting it to the publicsphere might personalize the approach in a naive sense I learned toavoid. But since the same topic has been voiced last year in thecalling papers of the Enschede Photo Biennial, we might be dealing herewith a common place, therefore with a language defensive reflex, andthis is something useful to talk about.

Rise and Decline of the Syndicate: the End of an Imagined Community 

To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100

The Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001, destroying the life-line of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky situation for a while, due - we believe - to the destabilisation of the problematic balance between personal contacts of list members, lurking and filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers, and a growing number of self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and disregarded the social rules of the online community.

• art,
• network cultures,
• net criticism,
• participatory media,
• deep europe

Art and the Battle for Truth 

In their curatorial statement for the exhibition, Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis (2024), Mi You and David Garcia explore how artists address the erosion of trust in knowledge and the rise of disinformation through investigative and critical practices.

• tactical research,
• disinformation,
• evidence

The Avant-Garde Never Gives Up 

The avant-garde never gives up. And tactical media has produced (at least) three different theaters of operation to wage its struggle: media activism, pure tactical aesthetics, and net conceptualism. The first allows for "formal" net.art tactics (materialist, structural), the latter two allow for "real" net.art tactics (native presence, site-specificity).

• art,
• tactical media,
• next 5 minutes,
• art of campaigning

Escaping Assad and Revolution in Rojava 

An interview with a Syrian activist in exile, code-named Sami, published by Occupy.com draws attenton once more to the radical experiment in real-life bottom-up matriarchal democratic design unfolding  against all odds in the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northern Syria. We are republishing two short texts here on this subject matter to speculate about the question if 'Rojava' could offer a repeatable model for post-governmental political design?

• politics,
• war,
• Revolution,
• feminism,
• design,
• post-governmental organisation