IsayUsaySsay




Name   : David Garcia
Time   : 20:00 (V2)
Subject: Openingspeech to N5M
Date   : thursday 18 january 1996
Openingspeech to N5M 1996

The Next 5 Minutes is a project that brings together in almost equal measure the worlds of the social and political activist, the tradition of the visual arts, radical applications of communications technology and critical theory.

This is not a random cluster of discourses, this nexus has been embodied in a large enough number of individuals, groups and projects for long enough to be able to be seen as a distinctive movement within contemporary culture. A movement some of us have chosen to call 'tactical media'.

  • Tactical media participate or even accelerate the technological and social forces that are enabling more people than ever before to make their own media. To create their own images and tell their own stories.
  • Tactical media are works and projects that act out the dream that we are moving from a culture of alienated acts of consumption into a culture of participation and communication.
  • Tactical media represent a broadly based movement for the democratisation of all media practice.
Although it includes alternative media, it is not restricted to that category. In fact we introduced the term tactical to disrupt and take us beyond the rigid dichotomies that have restricted thinking in this area, for so long, dichotomies such as amateur Vs professional, alternative Vs mainstream.

Even private Vs public. Many of the works we'll see in the coming days bear witness to an individual's participation in and subjective responses to public events. This is only to be expected, as the telecommunications umbrella has made public events into part of the very texture of our lives. Public events are not merely markers in our private lives but they are also what has formed our lives, both private and public.

But it is above all mobility that characterises the tactical practitioner. The mobility that enables them to cross borders and combine a variety of disciplines and perhaps most significantly take advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty.

As far as possible we want the Next 5 Minutes not just to be about access and participation but to embody it. So we have gone to great lengths to provide a wide variety of platforms for our visitors to work with. They include: 24 hour live television and radio, electronic publishing, internet access, an extensive library and media archive, a "temporary autonomous zone" (in which visitors can schedule their own presentations) and finally the most important platform, is the stimulus provided by the content of the conference itself.

We hope we have done enough to entice you into active participation in The Next 5 Minutes and I look forward to a rich and stimulating dialogue in the days ahead.


David Garcia (davidg@xs4all.nl)