Search results for 'Revolution'

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A Virtual World is Possible: From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes 

I.

We start with the current strategy debates of the so-called 'anti-globalisation movement', the biggest emerging political force for decades. In Part II we will look into strategies of critical new media culture in the post-speculative phase after dotcommania. Four phases of the global movement are becoming visible, all of which have distinct political, artistic and aesthetic qualities.

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The Concept of Tactical Media 

Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This "new media" activism was based on the insight that the long-held distinction between the 'street' (reality) and the 'media' (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society.

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Stop Streaming and Listen: Fight Post-Governmental-Content-Control Streaming Media breaks UK law - find out why nobody wants to care... 

Streaming media deliver video or audio content over the web. But streaming media are very different from the web. In the UK such formats force BT to breach the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Act. To the grass-roots activist web-critics, this might be the right (and most likely only) time to pull the plug and prune the web. Alternatively we could happily stream on and witness how independent media production will be pushed to the periphery of the new order. Here is one of many scenarios...

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The ABC of Tactical Media 

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.

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Parasitic Media 

By Nathan M Martin for The Carbon Defense League, September 2002
A parasite is defined as ?an organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.? The tactics of appropriation have been co-opted. Illegal action has become advertisement. Protest has become cliché. Revolt has become passé. These disputes have reached the definition of rhetoric. They are the usual suspects. Having accepted these failures to some degree, we can now attempt to define a parasitic tactical response. We need a practice that allows invisible subversion. We need to feed and grow inside existing communication systems while contributing nothing to their survival; we need to become parasites. We need to create an anthem for the bottom feeders and leeches. We need to echo our voice through all the wires we can tap but cloak our identity in the world of non-evidence, and the hidden.

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    Ten Premises For A Pandemic 

    How much has changed in just a few days. Here is another text I've composed in an attempt to continue to think about the pandemic, and our lives within it. I hope it's of use, however minorly, as we all try to come to some kind of terms with the novel transformations, precarities, and struggles emerging in every direction.

    ~i

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    The Brent Spar Syndrome 

    Shell is not going to forget lightly its misadventures with the Brent Spar. The Oil Major was taken by complete surprise when the Greenpeace campaign against sinking that former drill platform achieved its goals. What happened to Shell can in fact happen to any corporation. Loosing control of the situation as result of the activities of a pressure group has become a nightmare scenario for the modern multinational enterprise.

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    INFOBAHN BLUES 

    Since American Vice-President Al Gore made his famous speech in California a couple of years ago, it has become impossible to scan any news medium without finding at least one reference to the "Information Superhighway". The Information Superhighway metaphor - specially tailored for Mr. Gore's California audience - is so brilliantly simplistic it seems to have blown the mind of every media editor in the Western Hemisphere. With an Information Superhighway you just plug in your modem and roll your data out onto the ramp and into the dataflow where it zips along the freeway until it hits the appropriate off-ramp. Finding data is the same - it's all nice straight data-lanes with on and off ramps and well-banked curves.

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      The Power of Social Media - The Helplessness of Traditional Media and #direngeziparki #direnankara, #direnizmir 

      Residents of Istanbul started a peaceful sit-in as a reaction to the city governments plans to demolish Taksim Square's Gezi Park on the May 29th 2013. The demolition was part of the plan to replace the park and construct a shopping mall on one of the only green areas left in the central cross road of Istanbul. The reaction was sparked by a decision making process that lacked any consultation with citizens. Inhabitants of the city initiated this on-site protest to raise their voices against the demolition plans, but also to exercise their right to freedom of speech and to freedom of assembly in a democratic society.

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      Mediate YourSelf! 

      At the end of the third 'Next 5 Minutes' conference on tactical media (March 1999) in Amsterdam, an interesting discussion emerged around the question of how the minor media practices elaborated and highlighted in this vibrant event would ever reach a wider audience for lack of being covered by any mainstream outlet. At one point, some people from the back of the room (unfortunately I don't know anymore who exactly, I believe an Italian group), shouted: 'We don't want to be mediated - we mediate ourselves!'

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      My Postmodernism - My '80s 

      Filmmaker and activist Gregg Bordowitz's passage through the 1980s mirrors the course of AIDS activism in that decade. From the very first ACT up demonstration in New York to the triumphal storming of the FDA headquarters outside Washington, DC, he deployed his art in the battle against AIDS. Bordowitz leads off this two-issue series of personal chronicles of the decade, recounting his experiences as an activist and guerrilla filmmaker at the forefront of the fight.

      "Art does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be recognized, fostered, and supported in every way possible."
      - Douglas Crimp, introduction to AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (MIT Press, 1988)

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      Putting the Demo Back in Democracy: March Against the Moguls. 

      That guerrilla video is now the subject of historical reflection is probably a sign of its demise. There has been a recent flurry of archival and publishing activity centering on experiments made in the '70s. In 1997, the Chicago-based Video Data Bank released Surveying the First Decade, a compilation of work from the early days of video, and Oxford University Press published Deirdre Boyle's Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, the definitive study of the video movements of the late 1960s and '70s. These reflections on the utopian impulse in early video provide an opportunity to think about the present state of media in this country, in particular those movements that have attempted to create electronic space for non-commercial views that run counter to the mainstream.

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      Media Darkness 

      Reflections on Public Space, Light and Conflict

      There is an unshakable belief in the idea that what defines the mass media is that they produce or constitute, in all their different ways, a public. So while there is agreement on the fact that not every public sphere is a communication medium, many people tend to think that every communication medium constitutes a public sphere - the most recent and prominent candidate being, of course, the Internet. But is this claim as to the public quality of all media, hegemonic as it may be today, really tenable?

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      No One is Illegal! Manifesto 

      For a world without borders! No immigration controls!

      DEFEND THE OUTLAW!

      Immigration controls should be abolished. People should not be deemed 'illegal' because they have fallen foul of an increasingly brutal and repressive system of controls. Why is immigration law different from all other law? Under all other laws it is the act that is illegal, but under immigration law it is the person who is illegal. Those subject to immigration control are dehumanized, are reduced to non-persons, are nobodies. They are the modern outlaw. Like their medieval counterpart they exist outside of the law and outside of the law's protection. Opposition to immigration controls requires defending all immigration outlaws.

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