Next 5 Minutes 1
The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program taking place between 8th and 10th January 1993 in Amsterdam, 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.
Theses explorers can be found on both sides of the mainstream-marginal dichotomy. N5M is about the individual media-activists trying to get their message across via public access channels but also about small production companies testing the limits of mainstream tv from the inside, about tv-art projects using television techniques to develop a new kind of poetics, community tv fighting for the right to access and people within big tv institutions developing radical new program concepts.
What these tv-makers have in common is a social and cultural position. An important aspect of that position is that they have no fixed institutional or discursive relationship with the world of television.What they have are tactics; tv-tactics depending on very specific circumstances in space and time. Because the tv-tacticians haven't got a fixed place inside the world of tv, their politics and/or aesthetics are shaped by different tactics used in different contexts. It is always the context in which tactical tv is made that influences the tactics deployed. Tactical tv is about "... clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, 'the hunters cunning' manoeuvres, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike." (De Certeau).
The N5M aims to give an overview of tactical tv as it exists all over the world. This offers a chance for tv-tacticians to meet one another and exchange experiences. This is very important for the people involved in the event, and hopefully contacts will persist into the future. But we don't think it's enough.
We want to extend the possibilities for tacticians in the tv-world, and by doing so giving more substantial choice to tv audiences.
The N5M feels that each contributor to the conference has important things to say about the growing opportunities tactical tv has to achieve this goal. That's why we dedicate the next five minutes of space to all your experiences and ideas. A more democratic tv finally comes into sight.
(excerpt from the introduction by Bas Raijmakers, 1992, published in the N5M Zapbook)
N5M1 Zapbook - Working Papers (October 1992) - pdf document 16.7 MB:
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/TMF_documents/N5Mzapbook.pdf