Rita Raley: Tactical Media (2009)

“Tactical media describes interventionist media art practices that engage and critique the dominant political and economic order. Rather than taking to the streets and staging spectacular protests, the practitioners of tactical media engage in an aesthetic politics of disruption, intervention, and education. From They Rule, an interactive map of the myriad connections between the world’s corporate and political elite created by Josh On and Futurefarmers, to Black Shoals, a financial market visualization that is intended to be both aesthetically and politically disruptive, they embrace a broad range of oppositional practices.

In Tactical Media, Rita Raley provides a critical exploration of the new media art activism that has emerged out of, and in direct response to, postindustrialism and neoliberal globalization. Through close readings of projects by the DoEAT group, the Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience, and other tactical media groups, she articulates their divergent methods and goals and locates a virtuosity that is also boldly political. Contemporary models of resistance and dissent, she finds, mimic the decentralized and virtual operations of global capital and the post-9/11 security state to exploit and undermine the system from within.”

Emphasizing the profound shift from strategy to tactics that informs new media art-activism, Raley assesses the efficacy of its symbolic performances, gamings, visualizations, and hacks. With its cogent analyses of new media art and their social impact, Tactical Media makes a timely and much needed contribution to wider debates about political activism, contemporary art, and digital technology.

Publisher    University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN    0816651515, 9780816651511
208 pages

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Ars Electronica Festival Documentation & Catalog Archive, 1979-2007

The Festival documentation presents selected art projects and relevant texts from 27 years of Ars Electronica. Some of the texts showcased here have been abridged; you’ll find the full text in the Catalog Archive, which contains unabridged versions of all texts that have been published in the Ars Electronica catalogs since 1979.

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Judy Malloy (ed.): Women, Art, and Technology (2003)

“Although women have been at the forefront of art and technology creation, no source has adequately documented their core contributions to the field. Women, Art, and Technology, which originated in a Leonardo journal project of the same name, is a compendium of the work of women artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practice. The book includes overviews of the history and foundations of the field by, among others, artists Sheila Pinkel and Kathy Brew; classic papers by women working in art and technology; papers written expressly for this book by women whose work is currently shaping and reshaping the field; and a series of critical essays that look to the future.

Artist contributors include computer graphics artists Rebecca Allen and Donna Cox; video artists Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Valerie Soe, and Steina Vasulka; composers Cecile Le Prado, Pauline Oliveros, and Pamela Z; interactive artists Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen, Agnes Hegedus, Lynn Hershman, and Sonya Rapoport; virtual reality artists Char Davies and Brenda Laurel; net artists Anna Couey, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Nancy Paterson, and Sandy Stone; and choreographer Dawn Stoppiello. Critics include Margaret Morse, Jaishree Odin, Patric Prince, and Zoe Sofia.”

Foreword by Pat Bentson
Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262134241, 9780262134248
541 pages

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