Doug Ashford + Naeem Mohaiemen: Collectives in Atomised Time (2008)

The endless debates of art vs. politics; reportage vs. agitprop vs. poetics; what is and isn’t art. My feeling is that the specific reality within which our Visible Collective project formed, operated, and ended, were very specific to the 00’s. Even the way in which we quickly became commodified within an uber-category of “collective art practices” is specific to an over-heated market. The context within which Group Material worked was different, and the results were….?

Published by: IDENSITAT Contemporary Art Association, Spain, 2008
Cover image by Fred Askew

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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)