On Saturday, the 12th of March 2011, a few minutes before six, the second Video Vortex reader was presented to the audience of the sixth edition of the Video Vortex conference. Editors Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles invited the contributors to the second volume, who were present en masse, to celebrate the launch of the book on stage.
ReadCollective Action After Networks
Part of the PML Books series. A collaboration between Mute and the Post-Media Lab.
"We can't start perfectly and beautifully. Don't be afraid of being a fool; start as a fool." - Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche
Roll
up, roll up - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and foes -
welcome to the unparalleled, the unexpected, the perfectly paradoxical,
the grotesquely beautiful, the new-fangled world of the Clandestine
Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA).
We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every
morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and
friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for
those around us.
Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of
us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies,
others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the
political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us:
corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless,
without a voice.
This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But
if we join forces, we can change it. It's time to change things, time to
build a better society together.
We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing, and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society. The aim of this document is to promote innovative strategies capable of defending and extending the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably.
Read"Since its inception, the internet has provided new ways for people all over the world to exercise the rights of free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. These rights are not simply the benefits of a free society--they are the very means of preserving that society's freedom."
They wanted the Germs; they got 'em. - Darby Crash
The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has
always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse
needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and
the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the
9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange
across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.
Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.
The Furtherfield community utilizes networked media to create, explore,
nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and
knowledge is shared - across the boundaries of established art-world
institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist
projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This
is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small
collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique
and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art
process.
This text will provide a brief background as to how Furtherfield, a
non-profit organization and community, came about and how it extends the
DIY ethos of some early net art and tactical media, said to be
motivated by curiosity, activism and precision, [01] towards a more
collaborative approach that Furtherfield calls Do It With Others (DIWO).
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is
an idea [?] and ideas are bulletproof."
- From the film V for Vendetta
The four-day conference on the campus of the Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (Unicamp) brought together many key persons from the tactical
media movement of Brazil and some of their counterparts in the
Brasilian government.
The movement is converging from roots in
free radio, free software, hardware hacking, art and social movements.
It is currently focussed around a large-scale project master-minded by
Claudio Prado and supported by the Ministry of Culture: ?Pontos de
Cultura? (Culture Spots) which is aiming to empower up to 600 cultural
projects with free software-based multimedia production and publication
facilities.
These 0.
"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!"
(after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on 'Western Civilisation')
The third edition of the Next 5 Minutes revolved around four core themes:
- The Art of Campaiging
- The Post-Governmental Organisation (PGO)
- How Low Can You Go? The Technical and the Tactical
- Tactical Education
Germany 1998: 2 years before the New Millenium a new form of
Political Party came into existence: CHANCE 2000 - The Party of the
Last Chance. In the midst of an election that was one of the most
important in postfascist Germany an artist jumped into the political
arena to "make politics more aesthetic and aesthetics more political".
The film- and theatremaker and talk show host Christoph Schlingensief
started the Campagne: "VOTE YOURSELF!" In Berlin he started the project
with an "Election Circus". Together with a famous circus-family from
former East Germany and with his crew of actors and his family of
handicapped performers he founded "CHANCE 2000 - Party of the Last
Chance" in a circus tent in Berlin/ Prenzlauer Berg. The message for
the Republic was: "Vote Yourself, we know how to do it!" Every citizen
was asked to become an independent candidate for the new Bundestag.
Manuals were sent out how to become a direct candidate. And many
different people realized their chance to "prove that they exist" by
bringing their name on the ballot sheet: "Chance Meier", "Chance
Mueller", "Chance Schmidt". If you managed to collect 200 signatures of
support in your political region you were part of the game and you
could vote yourself. Why not voting somebody you know by heart, you
trust and love?
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?
Read"Culture-jamming," a term I have popularized by articles in The New
York Times and Adbusters, might best be defined as media hacking,
information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one.
Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and
other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders,
investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive
meanings are all culture- jammers." Mark Dery
Damn the Networks! Victory to the Imagination!
Yogi in Craig Baldwin's "Spectres of the Spectrum"
Summary of the extended conversation on the emergence, consequences, and activist responses to the concept of "post-control"
Report of the conference 'The Society of Post-Control', organised by Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia, tying into the opening of the exhibition As If.
Activist Media Tomorrow*
* BH: When I wrote this text five years ago, it really was not clear whether
the swarming tactics of the counter-globalization movement would get a
"second chance." But they have, and now the subtitle could be "activist
media today."
What happened at the turn of the millennium, when a myriad of recording
devices were hooked up to the Internet and the World Wide Web became an
electronic prism refracting all the colors of a single anti-capitalist
struggle? What kind of movement takes to the barricades with samba bands
and videocams, tracing an embodied map through a maze of virtual
hyperlinks and actual city streets? The organizational aesthetics of the
networked movements was called "tactical media," a concept that mixed
the quick-and-dirty appropriation of consumer electronics with the
subtle counter-cultural anthropology of Michel de Certeau. The idea was
to evoke a new kind of popular subjectivity, constitutionally "under the
radar," impossible to identify, constantly shifting with the inventions
of digital storytelling and the ruses of open-source practice. Too bad
so much of this subversive process was frozen into a single seductive
phrase.
Extinction Rebellion is an international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience to achieve radical change in order to minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.
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