Dark Markets is a two day strategic conference that looked into the state of the art of media politics, information technologies, and theories of democracy. A variety of international speakers inquired into strategies of oppositional movements and discussed the role of new media.
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.
Outer Spaces Conference Series 2017
An analysis of ISIS and its media strategy, the meaning of cyber jihad, and why people enrol as foreign fighters.
The 12th conference of the Disruption Network Lab
Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin.
Introduction
By Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell
"The clowns are organizing. They are organizing. Over and out."
-Overheard on UK police radio during action
by Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, July 2004
The occupation of key public spaces by Occupy Wall Street, as a means of
calling attention to more basic problems, raises questions of the role
of public spaces that need to be urgently dealt with. The basic
questions about the organization of society, democracy, inequality,
social justice, public priorities are deep-going and require long-term
answers. They should not be pre-empted by the immediate needs for space,
not should any space be fetishized. But spatial issues need to be dealt
with immediately and urgently.
Camping can be so nice. Crawling out of dewy plastic in the early morning, with a pinch of sleep still in your eyes, braving the unbearably hot sun, yet invigorated and ready to take on the day with as much indifference as possible to the ongoing struggle with nature. Surely everybody knows that the secret of success is to fight the laws of petty bourgeois civilisation with minimal equipment and therefore gain a flexibility that is capable of suspending the otherwise ruling power relations for a clearly defined amount of time.
ReadIntroductory essay for the second editon of the Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media, 1996.
"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"
The Negative Dialectics of the Net
In his essay, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", Jean-François Lyotard observes that capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avant-garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.
"Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will"
- Naum Gabo [1]
Modernity'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.
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.
"In August 1996, we called for the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information. We mean a network to resist the power of the lie that sells us this war that we call the Fourth World War. We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements, but for our lives: this is a project of life, of humanity, humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information."
These were the words of Subcomandante Marcos, speaking in 1997 from Chiapas in the midst of the Zapatistas' guerrilla information war against the Mexican state and the neocolonialism reflected in NAFTA. Marcos's powerful statement and Zapatista stories of struggle were circulated from the jungle of Chiapas on mailing lists, listservs, and websites, capturing the imagination of activists around the world and galvanizing a wave of new grassroots media projects. Perhaps no project more purely embodied this response than the Indymedia network, which was launched in November 1999 at the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and quickly grew into a global network of news websites.
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).
The Situationist Movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation. From now on, any fundamental cultural creation, as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.
Read
Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.
Written for Interstanding - Understanding INteractivity conference, Tallinn, Estonia November 23-25, 1995 - RFC Draft 1.1
Nina Czegledy and Inke Arns presented the material described in the
following text during the afternoon programme at V2_Organisation
Rotterdam on Sunday, January 21st, 14.00 - 18.00 hrs.
On an imaginary journey in the territories of current medical practice
and visual art, we observe the disintegration of former boundaries and
discover the emergence of a new discourse involving new metaphors and
new mythologies. In the course of this voyage we witness the
crystallization of a process which began in the Enlightenment and today
is linked together by electronic technologies. Mediated by television,
and lately the Internet, the concepts involved here, have contributed
to the construction of a simulated reality in both medical science and
art which imprisons attention and redirects it from the subject of the
activity reproduced.
On Mute and the Cultural Politics of the Net
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).