Tactical Media Research Articles

From Spatial Domination to Virtual Space Solidarity Tactics: Perjuangan Bersama Untuk Mengatasi Ketidakadilan Terhadap Penghayat Agama Lokal Minahasa

Many studies have explored indigenous religious believers struggle against world religions domination. However, studies on the employment of virtual space to heighten indigenous believers' tactical solidarity from the Global South remain understudy. This paper explores indigenous religious followers' struggles through access to virtual space as a tactic of everyday solidarity against world religions spatial domination and the state politics of religion in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. It focuses on the efforts of Minahasa indigenous religious believers to advocate for their existence through virtual media collectively. Indigenous religious believers have experienced various forms of spatial domination, such as destroying ancestral sites and ritual places that they consider sacred to realize their beliefs. The single truth perspective has produced the domination of the world religions monotheistic paradigm and the state politics of religion. The single truth has resulted in hate speech, stigmatization, and physical destruction of indigenous religious sacred sites. Through click activism, indigenous religious believers employ virtual media to advocate Minahasa indigenous religions/beliefs. The concept of tactical media is used in this study to analyze how the tactics of indigenous religious believers collectively produce a discourse of resistance critique and discourse on the importance of their places of belief to the public. This study uses qualitative research: observation, in-depth interviews, and literature review to argue that indigenous religious believers have tactically used virtual media as a critical discourse of resistance to the spatial domination constructed by world religious relations and state religious policies.

Hacking Surveillance Cameras, Tricking AI and Disputing Biases: Artistic Critiques of Machine Vision

In the field of AI, troublesome machine behaviour is a recurring problem, and is particularly worrying when the governance of populations is externalised to machines. This article will focus on machine vision and explore whether hacking as a concept, a method and an ethic, as it has been appropriated by artists, makers and designers, offers ways for citizens to resist surveillant vision. By combining distant and close readings of art hacks in the ‘Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives’ this article demonstrates a shift in resisting machine vision from hacking sensorial devices to tricking intellectual seeing. I call it the ‘intuition machine shift’ and argue that emergent with this shift is an art hacking strategy which specifically challenges biased machine vision. Drawing from critical making, tactical media and feminist theorisation of hacking, and adopting Mareille Kaufmann’s understanding of hacking as a form of disputing surveillance, this article outlines three artistic approaches to hacking machine vision: hacking surveillance cameras, tricking AI and disputing biases. The conceptual contribution of disputing biases is developed further to offer new nuanced understandings of risks and potentials of art hacks to resist biased machine vision.

‘Keeping news alive in Venezuela’: Using social media as tactical media

Venezuela leads Latin America with the largest number of imprisoned journalists and extreme government-led media censorship. Our in-depth interviews with 25 Venezuelan journalists reveal that assisting journalists to combat government control are social media and technology platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter, which, in Venezuela, have moved beyond their ability to share and mobilise, and have become tactical media, the media of crisis criticism and opposition.

Organizational Aesthetics: On Certain Practices and Genealogies

Abstract “Organizational Aesthetics” traces the genealogies of artistic practices engaging socially, politically, and aesthetically with form to enter into fundamental debates about hierarchy, horizontality, and centralization. Against the background of historical conflicts over relational aesthetics and tactical media, the essay problematizes the exclusive focus on physical gatherings as the exclusive site of relationality. Instead, it offers an analysis that revolves around the dialectic of such gatherings and the organizational and technological structures that subtend and transcend them. Spanning the mid-1990s to the present, this account of organizational aesthetics includes critical discussions of artists, activists, theorists, and collectives including BüroBert, Alice Creischer, Andrea Fraser, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Geert Lovink, ruangrupa, and Jonas Staal.

Transformations of more-than-human networks and the impact of material objects on tactical media artworks

More-than-human networks and the impact of material non-human entities have come into focus, in both social and computer sciences, since the late twentieth century. In social sciences, a plethora of conceptualizations emerged to describe complex, dynamic, heterogeneous and non-hierarchical structures of material and non-material, human and non-human, congruent and conflicting entities. In computer science, the birth of the Internet and the subsequent emergence of the World Wide Web drew scientists’ attention to networks, as well. Later, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) contributed to a shift in the prevailing perception of the Internet, from an immaterial entity to a network of interconnected material objects. Critical media artists explore the agency of non-human entities and the hybrid networks they articulate with heterogeneous agents. Some of them employ interconnected material objects to initiate tactical interventions at the intersection of art and activism. In this paper, we study tactical media artworks that incorporate material and technologically augmented everyday objects. We treat material objects as threefold entities – social, artistic and technological – and focus on the heterogeneous dynamic networks articulated around them. We investigate the actions and interactions of the entities involved, which result in a transformation of the emerging network. We show that these actions and interactions establish small-scale spatiotemporal spheres in which power relations are redistributed. The paper begins with a review of selected social and philosophical theories that introduced new terms, topologies and concepts for describing more-than-human networks. It then moves on to the advancement of networked technologies, focusing on the Internet’s materiality and the Internet of Things. Finally, it examines more-than-human networks, their transformations and the role of material objects in tactical media artworks through the analysis of two selected case studies.

Deus ex Poiesis: A Manifesto for the End of the World and the Future of Art and Technology

In 2020, the Doomsday Clock advanced to just one hundred seconds before nuclear midnight, the hour at which atomic armageddon would end the world as we know it. Using the Greek theatrical device of deus ex machina and Heidegger's reliance on poiesis as a liberating force from technological enframing, I propose the concept of deus ex poiesis as a potential model for addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges of the anthropocene, an era in which industrial technologies have instigated global climatic changes on the scale of Earth's five mass extinctions. Drawing on additional theoretical insights from Gregory Bateson, Jack Burnham, Donna Haraway, Alva Noë, Rita Raley and others, my essay discusses two aesthetic approaches: 1) digital artworks that explicitly engage in forms of (h)activism through tactical media; 2 artworks that develop and apply ways of knowing that lie outside of rational scientific models and that explore hybrid forms of perception and expanded states of consciousness. Artists considered include Electronic Disturbance Theater, rTMark, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, Roy Ascott, Pauline Oliveros, and Kim Jeong-Han.

The Use of New Media for Terrorism Purposes, It’s Strategy and Tactics: Alternative, Radical and Tactical Media Practices

İletişim çalışmalarında medya kullanımı konusu pozitivist yaklaşımlarca kişilerin, eleştirel yaklaşımlarca egemen grupların medya kullanımı açısından incelenmektedir. 1990’larda devletin, sıradan insanların, terör örgütlerinin ve medya pratiklerinin yer edindiği internette kültürel öğeler üzerinden ilerleyen enformasyon savaşının stratejisi ve taktikleri, eleştirel medya modellerine de eleştirel bir bakış açısı getirilmesi gerektiğine işaret etmektedir. 1970’lerde yükselişe geçen kültürel çalışmalar paradigmasının bir sonucu olan; alternatif, radikal ve taktiksel medya pratiklerinin yeni iletişim ortamlarını kullanımına eleştirel şekilde yaklaşan çalışma sayısı yok denecek kadar azdır. 1990’larda birçok sosyal yapı gibi dijitalleşen, kültürü radikal siyasal değişim için araçsallaştıran bu medya pratikleri, 1970’lerin yeni sol hareketlerinin bir uzantısıdır. Yeni sol teorisyenlerinin ve terör gruplarının politik bağlamda mevcut hiyerarşik düzeni yıkmak fikrinde uzlaşıda olması, medya pratikleri açısından da benzer bir stratejiyi paylaşabileceklerine işaret etmektedir. Strateji taktiklerin ustalıkla kullanılması sanatıdır. Yeni solun medya pratiklerinin medyayı taktiksel kullanımını ve terör propagandasının iletişim taktiklerini karşılaştırmalı inceleyen çalışmada, terör amaçlı medya kullanım stratejisi tanımlanacaktır.

ПЕРФОМАНС-МАРКЕТИНГ: СТРАТЕГИЯ, ЭТАПЫ, РЕАЛИЗАЦИЯ

In the article, we have revealed the concept of performance marketing (RM) as a type of Internet marketing integrated into the overall business management system, tied to real performance evaluation indicators. The complex of methodological tools of RM with the use of metrics having business sense is generalized and meaningfully refined. We considered the stages, the sequence of step-by-step implementation of the perfor-mance marketing strategy. Based on the results of the comprehensive strategy of RM, a forecast of the effectiveness of the promo-tion of the S7 company with the use of stra-tegic and tactical media planning has been compiled.

Lures of Engagement: An Outlook on Tactical AI Art

This paper aims to diversify the existing critical discourse by introducing new perspectives on the poetic, expressive, and ethical features of tactical media art that involves artificial intelligence (AI). It explores diverse artistic approaches and their effectiveness in critiquing the epistemic, phenomenological, and polit- ical aspects of AI science and technology. Focusing on the three representative thematic areas—sociocultural, existential, and political—it discusses works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary art, culture, economy, and society. With a closing sum- mary of the major issues and possible directions to address them, the paper shows that tactical AI art provides important insights into the AI-influenced world and has the potential to advance computational arts toward a socially re- sponsible and epistemologically relevant expressive stratum.

Review: Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, by Claudia Costa Pederson

Review: <i>Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media</i>, by Claudia Costa Pederson

Tactical Archives Cartography

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This article narrates our work through archive and cartography to discuss a body of research that runs throughout our lives - as producers, developers, non-artists, artists, archivists, researchers. We have been engaging in networks that develop the internet, tactical media, and free knowledge since the beginning of 2000 in Brazil, in a series of festivals, projects, platforms and other forms of gatherings. A lot of this history is lost in databases and we have been putting our efforts together to bring this digital and material archive together, republishing, editing and re activating it. At the same time, it is inevitable that we bring our own perspective to building the archive, what we identify as a feminist perspective, a weaving of histories (reinventeceduras) and modes of production that are also a “maintenance” of technical infrastructure as a practice of care, connected to the reproduction of our own lives. Cartography is a concept and tool that allows for the gathering of the polyphony of the voices engaged, a cartography that is not total, opening up for collective analysis and for the intervention in the present and future.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Promotion of Ideology of Protest in the Tactical Media

This article focuses on identifying the specifics of the new segment of online media—tactical media. We study the information and organizational resources of the media in promoting the ideology of political protest and implementation of political projects in the media activist practices. Our article focuses on the identification of formational features of tactical media, on the clarification of the category of tactical media, which began to play an important role in mobilizing the political processes and on the definition of their functions in the global information space. The availability of the newest information technologies for a wide range of users made relatively easy the creation of an electronic newspaper or any other mass media product. Tactical media have proven to be cost-effective and technologically advanced communication tools, which include a free radio and mini-FM, cable TV, etc. The definition of “tactical” emphasizes the mobility of these media, which gives the advantage over such “strategic” players, as the big business and the state. Their activity demonstrates the dialectic of global and local, by other words, the tendency of glocalization.

Local Broadcasting as Tactical Media

Abstract Against the backdrop of struggles that local broadcasters in Turkey who advocate for Kurdish minority rights have endured, I discuss local broadcast journalists’ tactics for creating and maintaining programming that caters to the ongoing Kurdish conflict. Local ethnic broadcasting in Kurdish provinces has long strived to offer an alternative discourse than that of the state propaganda and to mobilize political support within and outside Turkey. In order to illustrate the role of Kurdish activist journalism in political mobilization, I analyze examples of local radio programming from 2010 to 2013, a period during which broadcasters in Kurdish provinces enjoyed relative freedom. I aim to illustrate the instrumentality of activist journalism in an authoritarian regime, and the ways in which local broadcasting is utilized as tactical media by both activist journalists and the community they serve.

Fake News in Media Art: Fake News as a Media Art Practice Vs. Fake News in Politics

Fake news has become popular in the last few years and appears mainly in the form of alleged news articles that spread via social media or as satire. However, fake news can appear in two additional manifestations: in politics—when falsehoods are generated by politicians; and as a practice of media art—by the activist-art branch ‘tactical media’. From the perspective of media art history, this article presents a comparative analysis of two case studies of each of these domains: the political case was a false statement about the 2017 tax bill by US president Donald Trump, and the media art case was a false statement on BBC television in 2004 regarding corporate responsibility for the Bhopal industrial disaster, acted by the art duo The Yes Men. The cases were compared for their tactics, motivations, purposes and rhetoric. The most salient difference reveals the producers’ relation to truth: while in a ‘post-truth’ manner Trump ‘bullshitted’, distorted facts and disregarded truth, the Yes Men emphasized facts and exposed truth. This article concludes that fake news in politics is dangerous and that fake news in media art has an educational potential to fight fake news and promote critical deliberation.

Experiments in Posthumanism: On Tactical Rhetorical Encounters between Drones and Human Body Heat

Abstract This essay examines a particular, and particularly fraught enactment of digital and material rhetoric: a tactical media intervention into the militarized drone program, to map a posthumanist reading of “tactics,” updating Michel de Certeau’s famous concept for the current global situation. To introduce what will be posthuman about the model of tactics presented, this essay reviews the current state of work in rhetoric and composition on posthumanism and rhetorical materiality, arguing that it points us to a materiality that is not reducibly, simply present. This situation, on the one hand, produces a political need for experimentation, and yet if we encourage an experimental, tactical response to complex posthuman encounters such as that with the drone’s thermal vision, then we are also encouraging an affirmation of that encounter, which entails its own risks. This essay then argues that while Certeau gives us the tools to imagine how we can tactically use the things of the world, we need to reimagine tactics in a posthumanist key. This essay calls for a retooled model of tactics that would draw out the experimental possibilities of media tactics through understanding their imbrication in systems that are material, distributed, and yet not simply self-present things.

Occupy Climate: Social Movement-Building in Literature, Politics, and the Arts

Abstract New books by Shelley Streeby, Robert Marzec, and Ashley Dawson point the way toward a cultural criticism for the climate change era. In its own way, each seeks to change the methods of literary and cultural studies, to change the form of the academic monograph, and to encourage a just transition from the radically unequal and ecologically injured world of the now. All three can be seen as contributing to the social and academic movement known as Environmental Justice or Critical Environmental Justice. All three evoke, to some extent, earlier, experimental scholarly works influenced by or generative for the Occupy movement, writings by theorists and practitioners of tactical media like McKenzie Wark and Ricardo Dominguez, and such popular radical thinkers as Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, and Winona LaDuke. Finally, all three books emerge, somewhat unexpectedly, from literature departments, raising the question of what we mean by literary and cultural studies at this moment in the eclipse of humanism by planetary geology and posthumanist philosophical thought.

Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia

Going on a Field Trip: Critical Geographical Walking Tours and Tactical Media as Urban Praxis in Sydney, Australia

Let Me Walk

Let Me Walk

Public Dissentiment: Hacktivism in the Age of High-Frequency Traders

Public Dissentiment (2016), an artwork by this author, is an artistic research project and an online tool that helps protestors negatively impact the price of a publicly traded stock by applying the same sentiment analysis tools used by stock trading algorithms. In contemporary stock markets, high frequency trading bots that continuously buy and sell stocks, increasingly perform the role of market makers. These bots provide the market with liquidity by usually being ready to take the buy or sell end of a stock trade. However, these algorithms are also reading news stories and social media posts at lightning speed, and when they detect uncertainty they will pull out of the market causing a stock, or group of stocks, to drop rapidly in value. This text examines the technical and legal aspects of the contemporary networked stock exchange system that make Public Dissentiment’s intervention possible and provides a context for these factors through an analysis of how they produced a space for artistic intervention. Locating this work in the frames of hacktivism, tactical media, and other historical precedents for both network and financial interventions further contextualizes this project. Public Dissentiment falls into the category of mass action hacktivism, which is closely associated with tactical media and culture jamming, and typically includes a performative element. The application is a prototype for how protestors can leverage technology in the age of networks.

You Never Step in the Same River Twice. Quixotic futures of tactical media. Interview with Brian Holmes by Arkadiusz Półtorak

PrzeglÄ d Kulturoznawczy » 2018 » Numer 2 (36) » You Never Step in the Same River Twice. Quixotic futures of tactical media. Interview with Brian Holmes by Arkadiusz Półtorak A A A