Eric Kluitenberg: Legacies of Tactical Media: The Tactics of Occupation: From Tompkins Square to Tahrir (2011)

Tactical Media employ the ‘tactics of the weak’ to operate on the terrain of strategic power by means of ‘any media necessary’. Once the rather exclusive practice of politically engaged artists and activists, the tactical appropriations of media tools and distribution infrastructures by the disenfranchised and the disgruntled have moved from the margins to centre stage. The explosive growth of mass participation in self-mediation incountless blogs, video sharing platforms, micro-blog ging, social networking has created an unprecedented complexity in the info-sphere.

While this frenzy of media activity has been heralded as the catalyst of the new democratisation movements in North-Africa and the Middle-East, the anti-austerity/precarity movements in Southern Europe and the UK, and the recent #occupy movements in the US and Northern Europe, its increasingly intransparent complexity combined with the post 9/11 ‘crash of symbols’ has thrown its political efficacy into question. The demise of WikiLeaks as the crown jewel of on-line whistle-blowing has added to a thoroughly opaque picture.

More than ever tactical media operators require effective instruments to the create tactical cartographies they need to navigate the hybrid realities they are immersed in. This notebook traces the legacies of tactical media to begin creating these hybrid cartographies.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2011
Network Notebooks 05
ISBN/EAN 978-90-816021-8-1
57 pages

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Fibreculture journal, 18: trans (2011)

“It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are extremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse “social” and “natural” differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established media disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment—to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago.

While occasionally sympathetic, issue 18 of the Fibreculture Journal questions this approach. If we pause for breath, it is to take in the new air. This issue draws on the accelerated evolutions of media forms and processes, the microrevolutions in the social (and even the natural sciences) that dynamic media foster, even the way in which “new” media lead us to reconsider the diversity of “old” media species. Summed up simply here under the sign/event of the “trans,” this issue catalyzes new concepts, accounts of and suggestions for new practices for working with all these processes.”

Articles:
Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders: Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete
John Tinnell: Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
Vince Dziekan: Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists
Kristoffer Gansing: The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch: Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction
Troy Rhoades: From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’
Michael Dieter: The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control
Simon Mills: Concrete Software: Simondon’s mechanology and the techno-social
Fenwick McKelvey: A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web

Edited by Andrew Murphie, Adrian Mackenzie and Mitchell Whitelaw
Publisher Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, October 2011
ISSN 1449-1443

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Begüm Özden Firat, Aylin Kuryel (eds.): Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities (2011)

This volume addresses contemporary activist practices that aim to interrupt and reorient politics as well as culture. The specific tactics analyzed here are diverse, ranging from culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, street art, to hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. Though indebted to the artistic and political movements of the past, this form of activism brings a novel dimension to public protest with its insistence on humor, playfulness, and confusion. This book attempts to grasp both the old and new aspects of contemporary activist practices, as well as their common characteristics and internal varieties. It attempts to open up space for the acknowledgement of the ways in which contemporary capitalism affects all our lives, and for the reflection on possible modes of struggling with it. It focuses on the possibilities that different activist tactics enable, the ways in which those may be innovative or destructive, as well as on their complications and dilemmas.

The encounter between the insights of political, social and critical theory on the one hand and activist visions and struggles on the other is urgent and appealing. The essays collected here all explore such a confrontational collaboration, testing its limits and productiveness, in theory as well as in practice. In a mutually beneficial relationship, theoretical concepts are rethought through activist practices, while those activist practices are developed with the help of the insights of critical theory. This volume brings scholars and activists together in the hope of establishing a productive dialogue between the theorizations of the intricacies of our times and the subversive practices that deal with them.

Publisher Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2011
Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race series, No 21
ISBN 9042029811, 9789042029811
261 pages

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