As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?
ReadThe CAE Defense Fund was created in 2005 as a mechanism to raise funds
for legal bills incurred by Dr. Steven Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell in
what its members argued was a politically motivated attack by the
Department of Justice - one which threatened the constitutional and
fundamental rights not only of the two defendants, but also of
everyone, due to legal precedents that would have been set by an
unfavorable outcome.
In response, thousands of people worldwide organized demonstrations and
raised money for the two men's legal defense through fundraisers and a
variety of other grassroots efforts.
www.caedefensefund.org
Tactical Media Connections public program, Amsterdam January 20 - 22, 2017.
As part of the Tactical Media Connections public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its connections to the present, a series of public events take place in Amsterdam between January 20 and 22, 2017. The public program includes an exhibition at Framer Framed in the Tolhuistuin cultural centre, opening on Friday January 20; a Meme Wars Lab workshop on Friday January 20; a public debate at Eye Filmmuseum on Saturday January 21, and a one day conference (‘The Society of Post-Control’) again at the Tolhuistuin on Sunday January 22.
Please find below a brief program overview, followed by a detailed description of the different parts of the public program.
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"Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will"
- Naum Gabo [1]
Access / Bandwidth / Code / Data / Ensemble / Fractal / Gift / Heterogeneous / Iteration / Journal / Kernel / Liminal / Meme / Nodes / Orbit / Portability / Quotidian / Rescension / Site / Tools / Ubiquity / Vector / Web / Xenophilly / Yarn / Zone
"Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the "indignados" protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a "cyberspace" detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around "occupied" places such as Cairo's Tahrir Square or New York's Zuccotti Park."
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).
Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It's a match struck
in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path
through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies
of those who took Bertolt Brecht's words to heart: "Art is not a mirror
held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."
The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program taking place between 8th and 10th January 1993 in Amsterdam, that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.
ReadSarai-Waag Workshop at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi March 3-5, 2003
"The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
- The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Occupy Sandy gained the attention denied to Occupy Our Homes because it replaced militant Occupy! with "do-it-yourself" Occupy. Feel-good mutual aid displaced attention from the underlying contradiction between public housing and private utilities onto the quick fix of digital media. Occupy Our Homes, on the other hand, confronts the system with its failures ? predatory lending, homelessness, and empty bank-owned houses. The problems it addresses can't be solved by rolling up our sleeves and getting involved; they require political solutions.
ReadWith kind permission of the author and publisher we have included the introduction of Rita Raley's book Tactical Media - 'Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance' in the TMF resource as a pdf document. Raley's book appeared as part of the series Electronic Mediations with the University of Minnesota Press in 2009.
"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 Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.
1. Toward a European Standard Code for Critical Interchange (ESCCI)
Bezeichnen wir das Internet einfach einmal als 'Kind der Moderne', soist das klassische Genre der Kritik sicherlich ein Teil davon. Im nochandauernden Zeitalter des multikulturellen Massenkonformismus, vollerMikropraxis und Ich-Management, ist die Kunst der Kritik jedoch inVergessenheit geraten. Die hiesigen Kommentare zielen nur noch aufKorrektur von Verhaltensweisen ab. Die Meinungsmacher/innen haben allesAngebotene laengst hinter sich, sie sehen das Ganze wirklichdifferenziert, aus sicherem Abstand. Die glueckliche Tatsache, man seieben nicht engagiert, wird als persoenliche Errungenschaft gefeiert.Solche talking heads ohne Eigenschaften sind aber nutzlos in Zeitenrascher Entwicklungen, sowie das beim Wachstum der Computernetze imMoment der Fall ist.
