Brian Holmes: Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009)

“This publication contains a selection of texts and essays by the writer Brian Holmes that engage with the possibilities and problematics of geopolitics and geopoetics. Holmes is a crucial contemporary writer and thinker whose insight into current social and political developments and how they relate to artistic processes opens up a new field of “geocritique”.

The examples he cites extend across Latin America, Europe and Asia, where he looks at networks, artworks, films, institutions and protest movements for signs of how future progressive strategies might be shaped. The texts here are connected in part with the long-term collaborative research project Continental Drift.”

Publisher Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Zagreb: WHW, 2009
Research Series, 2
ISBN: 9789070149987
414 pages

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Megan Boler (ed.): Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (2008)

In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the “social web” (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory Web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers.

The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of Web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262026422, 9780262026420
464 pages

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Brian Holmes: Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art & Politics in a Networked Era (2003)

“Networks redefine urban and social borders and can be interpreted in many ways according to the chosen perspective, a limited territory or the entire globe, revealing at the same time the potential and the limits of their actions. This collection of essays, which features a solid political approach intertwined with art, pushes the limits of the critique of the mobility as defined by human beings and the reconfiguration of urban space, analyzing the powers and desired contained in it. A hyperlinking of transnational forces of opposition are invited to play a strategic game coordinating their efforts for imagining future alternative and sustainable realities, through a media struggle which uses the same propaganda tools of capitalism. The collaboration with the art collective Bureau D’Etudes and the resulting maps of power produced by them are nodal, but the core of these essays are the instruments of analysis offered, which elaborate new expressions to effectively decode our contemporary world.”

Publisher Arkzin Communications / What, How and for Whom, Paris/Zagreb, 2003
Broadcasting series, 3
ISBN 9536542838, 9789536542833
294 pages

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