The fourth edition of the Next 5 Minutes festival (September 11-14, 2003) was the result of a collaborative effort of a variety of organisations, initiatives and individuals dispersed world-wide. The program and content of the festival is prepared through a series of Tactical Media Labs (TMLs) organised locally in different cities around the globe. This series of Tactical Media Labs started on September 11, 2002 in Amsterdam and they continued internationally right up to the festival in September. TMLs have been organised in: Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona, Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago, Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar.

The results of the various TMLs were published in a web journal, archived at:
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/n5m4_journal/

The archived festival website:
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/n5m4

The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 was structured along four core thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These four thematic threads are:

"The Reappearing of the Public" deals with the elusiveness of the public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'.

"Deep Local (Growing Roots for the Global Village)", which explores the ambiguities of connecting essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts.

"The Tactics of Appropriation" questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost?

"The Tactical and the Technical" finally questions the deeply political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and constraining its tactical use.

You can downlaod the complete N5M4 Reader as a printable pdf here:
Next 5 Minutes 4 Reader (pdf - 1.4 MB)