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)

Matt Mason: The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (2008)

It started with punk. Hip-hop, rave, graffiti, and gaming took it to another level, and now modern technology has made the ideas and innovations of youth culture increasingly intimate and increasingly global at the same time.

In The Pirate’s Dilemma, VICE magazine’s Matt Mason — poised to become the Malcolm Gladwell of the iPod Generation — brings the exuberance of a passionate music fan and the technological savvy of an IT wizard to the task of sorting through the changes brought about by the interface of pop culture and innovation. He charts the rise of various youth movements — from pirate radio to remix culture — and tracks their ripple effect throughout larger society. Mason brings a passion and a breadth of intelligence to questions such as the following: How did a male model who messed with disco records in the 1970s influence the way Boeing designs airplanes? Who was the nun who invented dance music, and how is her influence undermining capitalism as we know it? Did three high school kids who remixed Nazis into Smurfs in the 1980s change the future of the video game industry? Can hip-hop really bring about world peace? Each chapter crystallizes the idea behind one of these fringe movements and shows how it combined with technology to subvert old hierarchies and empower the individual.

With great wit and insight — and a cast of characters that includes such icons as the Ramones, Andy Warhol, Madonna, Russell Simmons, and 50 Cent — Mason uncovers the trends that have transformed countercultural scenes into burgeoning global industries and movements, ultimately changing our way of life.

Publisher Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, New York, 2008.
ISBN 1416554017, 9781416554011
290 pages

author
publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-7)

Matthew Fuller: Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (2005)

In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems—understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as “things”—have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality—how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, “to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials.”

Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of “media ecology.” Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies—”taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously,” as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the “medial will to power” illustrated by “the camera that ate itself”; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in “abnormal” relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, Cctv—world wide watch, that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.

Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture “an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo.”

Published by MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 026206247X, 9780262062473
265 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)