next 5 minutes :: festival of tactical media

The Tactical and the Technical

Specific forms of technology enable and constrain specific possibilities of use. Technology is never neutral, it is never matter of fact, but is constructed with an in-built agenda that is most often informed by economic and political interests, but is also invested by a host of implicit cultural assumptions.

Main-stream technology developers will, however, more often than not deny such issues, and instead present a naturalised image of technology, technology as a fact and force of nature.

Tactical Media practitioners have therefore always concerned themselves not only with the use of existing media technologies, but also with the construction of technology itself.

Uncovering the implicit politics and cultural biases of media technology is one critical practice we want to highlight here.

The necessary complement to that is people building their own tools and infrastructures, shaping their own technology that fits with their particular singular agenda and politics.

The technical is therefore a vital aspect of the tactical in the contemporary media ecology.

Programme Items

Feminist Approaches to Tactical Media
*Radio Space* "wireless in your psyche"
Paper Tactics and the Revenge of Print
The Tactical Media Tool Builders Fair 1
The Tactical Media Tool Builders Fair 2
TV Hacking
Aids Activism Workshop
Gender IT
No Escape
Open source streaming alliance and dynabolic cdrom workshop
BAkSCII mobile internet cafe
The Slackers Lounge