Twelve Theses on WikiLeaks
Thesis 0
"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!"
(after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on "Western Civilization")
Thesis 0
"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!"
(after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on "Western Civilization")
SAN Archipelago is a dispersed studio-chain at transmediale 2026: chroma-green islands in Krakow, Kyiv, Budapest, Warwick, Leeds, Munich and Vilnius, linked by converging streams and shared currents. Emerging from anti-war webcasts and solidarity media actions, StreamArtNetwork (SAN) operates as a low-budget, high-intensity carrier-net for collective presence across borders, territories and time-zones. Thinking with archipelago-drift, SAN leans into highly distributed, translocal communication: many shores, no centre; relation without consolidation.
ReadBolzano Edition: September 20th and 21st 2008
First organized in 2006, Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for creating concepts on the topic of "war", to be invented, arranged and presented at a public, two-day event. The aim is to introduce a series of concepts that either play an important role in the contemporary discourse of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.
The Dictionary of War proceeds with a 6th edition at the opening of the Gwangju Biennale, in Gwangju, Korea. For the first time outside of Europe this edition takes place in the city of the Gwangju civil uprising of May 18, 1980, and in a country that is still in state of war.
ReadFrequently at frontiers we are asked, "Anything to declare?"
The wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border
official is to say that you have "nothing to declare", and quickly move
on. Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or
at least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is
the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.
Public Agency in Hybrid Space
Lead-essay for the theme issue "Hybrid Space" of OPEN, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, #11, (Amsterdam / Rotterdam, 2006).
It's almost spring in Tokyo-
to pick up the dialogue between David and DeeDee as moderated by Geert on activist vs artist, corporation vs independent--
This essay provides a short and insightful overview of alternative television projects in the Italy of Berlusconi.
Zeynep Tufekci is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University (and a "visiting assistant professor" at the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton University.) She is also an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel. For the 2012-2013 academic year, she is residing in Princeton, NJ.
Read16 June 2025
In Defense of Artistic Freedom: Support Legal Action Against Political Abuse
We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar, who is pursuing legal action against the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) for unauthorized use of her artwork, defamation, and incitement of public hostility.
While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East
off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this
spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s
and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the
political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter,
and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media,
activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across
the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt's
political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most
prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.
The World Social Forum, organized twice in Porto Alegre 2001 and 2002, not only prompted a flurry of autonomous self-organization, crossborder organization, and creative media interventions. It also initiated an intense process of analysis and reflection on the tricky question of a 'global' dynamic of self-organization.
ReadWIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
ReadModernity's great promise - the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins.
One can argue that this vision was always compromised - modernity
(especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism)
always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears - the fear of
epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal
activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic
from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human
from the non human, life from the machine.
The reader of The Seropositive Ball has been added to the Tactical Media Files as a freely downloadable pdf. The Seropostive Ball was a 69-hour 'networked event' staged at Amsterdam's Paradiso June 21-24, 1990, and a shadow conference to the World AIDS Conference in San Francisco. The event was an important precursor for the first Next 5 Minutes festival on Tactical Television (1993). This exceptional document deserves special attention, hence this non-standard announcement. (TMF editors)
ReadSoftware has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on software for their execution - from systems of e-government and net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation of social groups and movements -, it is necessary to understand the procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the cultural and political 'rules' coded into them.
As a playful, do-it-yourself approach to media activism and new technologies, tactical media (TM) seemed to have some critical bite when it emerged in the mid-1990s. But is it still radical today?
ReadThis polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects. Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool's functioning, is discussed in a context of Inter-American Transcendentalism.
Read