Michele White: The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (2006)

Internet and computer users are often represented onscreen as active and empowered—as in AOL’s striding yellow figure and the interface hand that appears to manipulate software and hypertext links. In The Body and the Screen Michele White suggests that users can more properly be understood as spectators rendered and regulated by technologies and representations, for whom looking and the mediation of the screen are significant aspects of engagement. Drawing on apparatus and feminist psychoanalytic film theories, art history, gender studies, queer theory, critical race and postcolonial studies, and other theories of cultural production, White conceptualizes Internet and computer spectatorship and provides theoretical models that can be employed in other analyses. She offers case studies and close visual and textual analysis of the construction of spectatorship in different settings.

White shows that despite the onscreen promise of empowerment and coherence (through depictions of materiality that structure the experience), fragmentation and confusion are constant aspects of Internet spectatorship. She analyzes spectatorship in multi-user object-oriented settings (MOOs) by examining the textual process of looking and gazing, contrasts the experiences of the women’s webcam spectator and operator, describes intentional technological failures in net art, and considers ways in which traditional conceptions of artistry, authorship, and production techniques persist in Internet and computer settings (as seen in the creation of virtual environment avatars and in digital imaging art). Finally, she analyzes the physical and psychic pain described by male programmers in Internet forums as another counternarrative to the common tale of the empowered user. Spectatorship, White argues, not only affects the way specific interfaces are understood but also helps shape larger conceptions of self and society.

Published by MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262232499, 9780262232494
307 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-9-3)

Next 5 Minutes 4 Reader (2003)

“Next 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together media, art and politics.

Next 5 Minutes revolves around the notion of tactical media, the fusion of art, politics and media. The festival is organised irregularly, when the urgency is felt to bring a new edition of the festival together.

The fourth edition of the Next 5 Minutes festival (September 11-14, 2003) was the result of a collaborative effort of a variety of organisations, initiatives and individuals dispersed world-wide. The program and content of the festival is prepared through a series of Tactical Media Labs (TMLs) organised locally in different cities around the globe. This series of Tactical Media Labs started on September 11, 2002 in Amsterdam and they continued internationally right up to the festival in September. TMLs have been organised in: Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona, Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago, Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar.

The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 was structured along four core thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These four thematic threads were:

‘The Reappearing of the Public’ deals with the elusiveness of the public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining ‘the public’.

‘Deep Local (Growing Roots for the Global Village)’, which explores the ambiguities of connecting essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts.

‘The Tactics of Appropriation’ questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost?

‘The Tactical and the Technical’ finally questions the deeply political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and constraining its tactical use.”

Edited by Thomas Comiotto, Eric Kluitenberg, David Garcia, and Menno Grootveld
Published in Amsterdam, 2003
140 pages

Event documentation (TacticalMediaFiles.net)

PDF (updated on 2019-5-30)

Oleg Kireev: Media-Activist Cookbook (2006) [Russian]

The publication introduces to the Russian audience topics of tactical media and communicates experience of groups and movements, such as telestreet, Paper Tiger TV, Digital City, The Yes Men, Kein Mensch ist illegal, Critical Art Ensemble; experiences of flashmob, culture jamming, campaigning. It also digs into the history of pirate radios, videoactivism and free software movement. Specifically to Russia, it investigates topics of political technologies (as used in political campaigns and media), and traces the domestic history of free communication in samizdat.

Five translated articles appear in the appendix: David Garcia’s and Geert Lovink’s “ABC of tactical media”, Matteo Pasquinelli’s “Urban Television Manifesto”, “On the use of tactical media in the orange revolution” (by the Ukrainian portal Zaraz. org), Geert Lovink’s “Theory of mixing” and Konrad Becker’s “Freedom of expression and new technologies”.

Publisher Ultra.Culture, Moscow-Yekaterinburg, 2006
Anti-copyright

author (Russian)

PDF (updated on 2013-5-29)