Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat (eds.): Idea of Radical Media (2013) [English/Croatian]

This is the “reader from the Idea of Radical Media conference, held June 7-8, 2013 in Zagreb, Croatia, and organized by the Multimedia Institute. The conference took place in the context of the exhibition Prospects of Arkzin and the media action Installing the Public, both revisiting the Arkzin phenomenon two decades later. Arkzin was a collective and a publication that emerged out of the Anti-War Campaign in the early 1990s and gave a theoretical and polemical voice to anti-nationalist positions. The publishing and activist practices of Arkzin anticipated and reflected the practices of tactical media that were crystallizing from a particular confluence of a political moment marked by the post-socialist transition, post-Yugoslav conflicts and alter-globalist contestations, and a technological moment of the rise of early Net.

However, the conference and the reader have a broader aim. On the one hand, we wanted to look back at the practical articulations and discursive re-articulations of radical media practices in arts, mass communication and political work and over the last two decades. On the other, to reasses the notion of radical media from a broader historical perspective and the critical perspective of the current political moment.” (from the Introduction)

With essays by Clemens Apprich, Eric Kluitenberg, Jodi Dean, Matteo Pasquinelli, Branka Ćurčić, Alessandro Ludovico, Anthony Iles, Joanne Richardson, Vera Tollmann, Katarina Peović Vuković and Ana Peraica.

Idea of Radical Media / Ideja radikalnih medija
Publisher Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, 2013
ISBN 9789537372101
256 pages

PDF
See also Prospects of Arkzin catalogue (48 pp, 2013)

Metahaven: Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics (2013)

“These are serious times, or so our governments keep telling us. Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of war. Pranks have become a resistance strategy. As the rise of Beppe Grillo in Italy testifies, this may be the hour to fight nonsense with nonsense. Jokes are an open-source weapon of politics, and it is time to tap their power.”

Publisher Strelka Press, 2013
ISBN 9785906264077

Review (Shumi Bose, Blueprint)

Publisher
Authors (in an interview with Aaron Peters)

EPUB

Hans Günther, Sabine Hänsgen (eds.): Soviet Power and the Media (2006) [Russian]

Proceedings from the conference “The Political as Communicative Space in History” (Bielefeld, October 2003) devoted to the comparative analysis of the media in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s provide a pioneering media-theoretical exploration of the role of radio, film, photography and print in the engineering of the communist Soviet power.

Sovetskaya vlast’ i media [Советская власть и медиа]
Publisher Akademicheskiy proekt, St. Petersburg, 2006
Open Access
ISBN 5733103353, 9785733103358
621 pages

Reviews: Wolfgang Schlott (Die Welt der Slaven, 2007, DE, PDF), Alexander Prokhorov (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2007), Alexander Ulanov (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007, RU), Jana Klenhova (ArtMargins, 2008), Yuliya Liderman (Usloviya teatra, RU, 2010).

PDF (broken link fixed on 2014-1-28)
PDFs