311 Articles

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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.

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The ABC of Tactical Media 

Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.

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The DEF of Tactical Media 

Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago(1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences,understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media.

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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.

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    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?

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      Erik Hobijn over techno-parasieten 

      Techno-parasieten zijn volgens de definitie van Hobijn 'apparaatjes die gebruikmaken van gedeeltes van onze verworvenheden, speeltjes behept met opmerkzaamheid die technische storingen tot gevolg hebben.' Technoparasiet 00020004C leeft van de lantaarnpaal. Het is een soort bloemkelk dat het regenwater opvangt en het licht van de lantaarn omzet in energie, met als doel het creëren van een potentiaal verschil. Het regenwater wordt gebru ikt om het proces te versnellen. Hiermee wordt eerst de zinklaag aangetast en op den duur ook de ijzerlaag aangevroten zodat de lantaarnpaal wordt doorgezaagd en omvalt. Een andere parariet klimt in een spiraalachtige beweging langs de lantaarnpaal omhoog. Het motortje loopt op lichtenergie, heel langzaam. Boven aangekomen slaat hij ineens het glas en lamp kapot, vermoord zo zijn voedingsbron en valt dan naar beneden.

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        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.

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          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.

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            Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm! 

            The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently oneof the most pressing problems confronting political and militarystrategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and thegeosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above spaceand surface is a ~fait accompli~ and has inaugural value (ushers a newepoch). Something nicely conjured up in a (French) advertisementpraising cellular phones with the words: "Planet Earth has never beenthis small". This is a very dramatic moment in our relation with theworld and for our vision of the world.

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            Die Informationsbombe 

            Ausgestrahlt im Deutsch-Franzoesischen Kulturkanal ARTE November 1995.


            In den fuenfziger Jahren hat Albert Einstein gesagt, dass wir es mitdrei Bomben zu tun haetten. Die erste, die Atombombe, sei bereitsgezuendet. Die zweite sei die Informatikbombe; die dritte, dieBevoelkerungsbombe, werde im 21. Jahrhundert explodieren. Gegenwaertigexplodiert die Informatikbombe. Neue Technologien, insbesondere dieMoeglichenkeiten zur Schaffung virtueller Welten, veraendern Kultur,Politik und Gesellschaft grundlegend. Zu diesem Thema diskutieren heuteabend im Gespraech der Stadtplaner und Philosoph Paul Virilio undFriedrich Kittler, Medienspezialist an der Humboldt Universitaet inBerlin.

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            Unser Feind, das Internet 

            - Ethische NETZPRINZIPIEN

            Impulsreferate etablieren eine engagierte RL Diskussion, die Im Netz fortgefuehrt und in Newsgroups konkretisiert wird.
            Der Wunsch und die Notwendigkeit zur Entwicklung neuer Terminologien und originaerer Diskurse wurde evident. Nach den Jahren des Zitierens ist es an der Zeit und wird durch neue Lebensrealitaeten im elektronischen Netzwerk und aufgrund internationaler Erfahrungen mit der Praxis regulativer Eingriffe neue Begriffe, Strukturen und Theorien zu entwickeln. Jeder kann sich aktiv an dieser Koevolution technischer und Inhaltlicher Verbindungen beteiligen!

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              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".

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