The GHI of Tactical Media 

Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.

• tactical media,
• next 5 minutes

Help B92 Campaign 

International support campaign for independent media in Yugoslavia, including the famous Radio B92 media center, in operation between March and July 1999.

• radio,
• tactical media,
• independent media,
• yugoslavia

The DEF of Tactical Media 

Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago(1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences,understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media.

• tactical media,
• diy media,
• media theory,
• media criticism

Stream Art Day at Framer Framed 

UKRAiNATV together with THE VOID (INC) came to co-organize a day long event at Framed Framed in Amsterdam. Part of the ongoing exhibition "Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis" this event will focus on streaming practices, hybrid and tactical media, stream art and expanded tv... With an open invitation to both in-person and online audiences, we will explores how media can be used as a tool for collaboration during times of crisis. It includes hands-on activities like PeerTube transmission tests, live stream workshop together with talks and creative performances.

• art,
• tactical media,
• war,
• streaming media,
• tactical television

In memoriam: Oleg Kireev 

On Friday April 3, 2009 we received the terribly sad news that our friend and ever inspiring colleague Oleg Kireev from Moscow had died, apparently as a result of suicide. We are left behind as friends and colleagues, bereaved and puzzled by this dramatic fact. Kireev was a prominent guest in some of the most important projects in the art / media / politics triangle, which we had the honour developing at De Balie. Kireev was a crucial figure in circles of free culture, media activism and the arts in Moscow, one of the most demanding environments for such activity one can think of.

• tactical media,
• Russia

Final Program: As If / Vox Populi / The Syrian Archive / The Society of Post-Control 

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.

• tactical media,
• meme wars,
• tactical research,
• trickster

The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control - Part I 

There is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184).

• tactical media,
• media theory

Tactical Media and the End of the End of History 

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?

• art,
• tactical media,
• activism

The Brazilian Context 

Many are the social, political or economic problems in Brazil. Socially, there's an extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Such a big social unequality is reflected, for example, in the extreme differences between the center and the periphery in the big cities, regional unequalities, criminality, racism. Besides that, we live in an unnoficial police state that acts in defense of the elites, murdering and arresting poorer citzens, because of the color of their skin or social condition.

• tactical media,
• Brazil

Migrants / Media / Metropolis 

Migration and media-activists gather with theorists and labour organizers to discuss and share best practices in the fight against precarity and insecure labour conditions. Sharing inspiring examples of social justice unionism and creative campaigning like Justice for Janitors in the U.S. and Cleaners For a Better Future in the Netherlands.

• campaign

Interfund report 

Subject: [Interfund] - Create Your Own Solutions
Date: 03.12.98, 21:54:24

Interfund meeting  {AT}  Xchange Unlimited, Riga November 29, 1998.

During the Xchange Unlimited Baltic New Media Culture Festival in Riga a meeting was held to discuss the creation of the Interfund. The participants were Diana McCarty, Rasa Smite, Manu Luksch, Pit Schultz, Eric Kluitenberg, and others.

A Pirate Utopia for Tactical Television 

In recent years Amsterdam has become known for its free-net the Digital City. Less well known but in some ways equally remarkable has been the emergence of Amsterdam's radical movement for public access television. This text is just a beginning, a highly selective historical snap shot.

• tactical media,
• community media,
• network cultures,
• next 5 minutes,
• amsterdam,
• tactical television

Ian Alan Paul

Ian Alan Paul is a transdisciplinary artist, theorist, and curator. His practice includes the production of experimental documentary, critical fiction, and media art, aiming to produce novel conditions for the exploration of contemporary politics, ethics, and aesthetics in global contexts. His projects have approached a wide variety of topics including the Guantanamo Bay Prison, Fortress Europe, the Zapatista communities, Drone Warfare, the military regime in post-revolution/post-coup Cairo, and most recently with the history and future of Palestine.

• art,
• tactical media

The Yes Men

The Yes Men are a group who use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business.

• tactical media,
• activism,
• spoof