b 1957 in Philadelphia (USA); 1978?82 study of art at the Cooper Union
of Art, New York (USA), under Hans Haacke, Vito Acconci and Martha
Rosler, degree of Bachelor of Arts; since 1981 in cooperation with Nam
June Paik; 1985 starting his own production of tapes and installations;
1990 Artist in Residence at the Video Fest Berlin (D); lives in New
York (USA).
Increase the level of paranoia.....
bombs in the metro.....bombs in Oklahoma......
bombs in the World Trade Center.....bombs in Mururoa.....
Who are the real terrorists?
The Internet was started in the 1970's by the U.S. Defense Departmentas a communications tool and is now being bought out by I.B.M., M.C.I.and other megaCorporations. April, 1995 marked the closing of theNational Science Foundation's part of the internet, and signaled thebeginning of the end of the publicly funded computer networkinfrastructure.
Saturday night on August 6th 1988 was stiflingly hot and humid. My
apartment had no air conditioning and I was dying from the heat.
Fortunately that night I was booked from midnight to 7 a.m. at Broadway
Video at Broadway and 49th street to do special effects and editing on
my video work entitled "Free Society".
We've had the camcorder revolution. It made making videoprograms
cheaper. Audio-equipment is affordable, so radiomaking is possible for
a large amount of people too. So for a long time already the masses are
potential mediaproducers. There were only minor successes in accessing
the broadcast channels both legally and illegally. But the efficient
one-to-many distribution system (radio and tv) are chocked, regulated,
hard to get access to. The Internet having the capacity for streaming
media seems to promise new possibilities. Boundless access, for anyone
making radio, and maybe in the near future TV. Some are pessimistic,
and see these channels soon closed and regulated as well. What will
this streaming media look like and who will be streaming?
This is a short text [1] which appears in "Public Netbase: Non Stop Future. New Practices in Art and Media" edited by the fine people at the New Media Center_kuda.org, in cooperation with World-Information Institute / t0. This book was presented at Transmediale 2009 in Berlin.
http://nonstop-future.org
Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self- aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass medium (1995-2005).
What follows are personal accounts from various people who were present on that fateful night in Tompkins Square on August 6, 1988. They observed and experienced firsthand the bloodlust of the marauding cops invading our neighborhood from all over the city. Twenty years later, these memories are still fresh in the minds of those who were there, as though it all happened just yesterday....
ReadAt 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!'
ReadIf media theory over the last 40 years largely understood media as hopelessly contaminated by capitalism, the quietism implied by this critique also met its challenge in Guattari's concept of 'becoming-media'. Here Clemens Apprich revisits key media political debates to imagine post-media approaches in the age of social media.
ReadTactical 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.
Read
