Tactical Media Research Articles

Tactical Media (review)

Reviewed by: Tactical Media Alex Cummings (bio) Tactical Media. By Rita Raley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. ix+195. $19.50. In this original and wide-ranging book, Rita Raley examines how technologies of data visualization and gaming can serve as tools for new kinds of political resistance. A literary scholar, Raley approaches websites, installations, and other forms of new media art from an aesthetic perspective, studying these objects more as texts than technologies. When Raley looks at a video game, she examines it not primarily as digital entertainment or a political act, but as an artwork whose political message is embedded in its technological form. Tactical Media is, in short, a contribution to the growing literature on new media art, exploring how contemporary artists have used information technology to challenge capitalism in an age of globalization. The book unfolds in three chapters that center on immigration, antiwar [End Page 667] activism, and finance capital. As these subjects suggest, Raley is not telling the story of a unified or coherent political movement. The targets of her activists range from McDonald’s and George W. Bush to intellectual property interests, which the art collective Ubermorgen skewered by hacking Amazon.com and making thousands of books available for free online. A key example is decidedly low-tech: the group DoEAT simply pasted new messages on signs along the U.S.-Mexican border meant to warn of immigrants crossing the highway. Activists replaced the warning beneath the silhouette of a mother, father, and child with “Free Market” and “Now Hiring,” reminding drivers of why families might be dashing in front of their cars (p. 31). This “border hack,” as Raley calls it, is one of many acts that seek to defamiliarize the signs of everyday life, pursuing a series of provocative events or spectacles rather than a program of systematic change. For Raley, groups like Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men substitute a “micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” for an older leftist paradigm of revolution (p. 1). In this sense, Tactical Media is an ambivalent book that attempts to make the case that frequently symbolic, technology-based activism can illuminate the inner workings of finance capitalism and the contemporary security state. Raley positions this activism against the increasingly abstract representational systems of the stock market, economic theory, and the “information society” in general (p. 132). New media art can reveal a “parallax,” she suggests, contrasting digital systems of control with the heavy weight of life as it is experienced by actual human beings (p. 143). In doing so, she juxtaposes projects like John Klima’s ecosystm, which used Reuters stock data to represent stock transactions as bursting knots of light, with Allan Sekula’s photos of harbors and shipping containers. The photos unambiguously convey the material reality of a global market that celebrates instantaneity and the erasure of space, while ecosystm also creates an intelligible experience out of a financial world that seems esoteric and inaccessible to all but its most privileged adepts. At first, projects like ecosystm seem merely to depict the workings of the financial system, reporting the ups and downs of the very mechanism that they purport to critique. However, Raley convincingly argues that these works do more than reflect or represent the markets in a one-to-one relationship. Rather, they interpret the data (and the vast web of social relations that produces them) through models, portraying currencies as flocks of migratory birds or a market as a plant that receives light and water based on the success or failure of stocks. These metaphors differ from the conventional wisdom of neoclassical economics, which conceives of markets as dynamic but hermetic systems that naturally trend toward equilibrium. Like DoEAT’s border signs, such works aim to jostle the viewer into seeing social relations in a new light; a war game in which it is impossible to win, [End Page 668] for instance, subverts the typical experience of game play while also calling into question the possibility of victory in the “war on terror” (p. 86). Tactical Media places these works in a broader historical context by drawing on a dizzying array of thinkers, from philosophers Michel...

Scattered (Western Marxist‐Style) Remarks about Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties

With a point of departure in Western Marxism’s idea of art’s ability to contribute to radical social transformation this article analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, especially relational aesthetics and interventionist art, in the guise of a more solution‐orientated approach and the tactical media approach. Although the artistic practices associated with these designations contain interesting capabilities the article argues that they remain firmly within the already established horizon of small‐scale adjustments instead of radical transformation. In that regard they do not challenge the neoliberal discourse but only confirm the idea of TINA (‘there is no alternative’).

Junk Culture and the Post-Genomic Age

Junk Culture and the Post-Genomic Age Allison Carruth (bio) Review of Thierry Bardini, Junkware. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. In the spring of 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published a series of papers in Nature that led them to claim that DNA is "the molecular basis of the template needed for genetic replication" (qtd. in Watson 246). The papers paved the way for Watson and Crick to receive the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology, in turn validating what Crick had famously termed the "Central Dogma": the view that information, in the form of biochemical blueprints, flows one-way from DNA to RNA to proteins. This causal process continues to inform the paradigm in molecular biology according to which DNA is "the most important component of the cell, its 'master plan'" (Strasser 493). What the Central Dogma has struggled to accommodate, however, is so-called junk DNA: those DNA bases that do not code for protein (some 98.5% in the human genome) and hence appear to be excessive, or to have no genetic function (Bardini 20, 29-30). Thierry Bardini's Junkware, a recent title from Minnesota's Posthumanities series, interrogates this very paradigm by considering the biological fact and cultural significance of junk DNA. For Bardini, junk DNA is both master trope and fringe element of an era in which human beings are becoming "junkware": "a new kind of slave[,] enslaved in our code itself" and subject to a "disposable and recyclable" society of workers, consumers, and spectators (7, 9). Bardini defines junk as "the quintessential rhizomatous genus" of Homo nexus, an emergent subjectivity at once individuated and networked (13). To develop this argument, Part One of Junkware ("Biomolecular Junk") traces the cybernetic view of biological life through its "blind spot" of junk DNA. In Part Two ("Molar Junk: Hyperviral Culture"), Bardini shifts from the social study of modern genetics to offer a cultural theory of junk more widely construed. Throughout, his method is one of accumulation, aggregation, and critique. Junkware sifts through an array of materials that includes science fiction, online wikis, Google search results, epistemology, cybernetics, critical theory, and mass media coverage of everything from the Human Genome Project to gene therapy. A cross-disciplinary scholar, Bardini's voice in Junkware ranges from that of the high theorist to that of the pop culture critic to that of the social scientist. Bardini's project makes two interventions: one in the discourse of biopolitics and one in the history of genetics. As for the former, Bardini sees the ultimate horizons of capitalism as the "invention of genetic capital" and the systematization of "living money" in the form not only of animal and human bodies but also of tissues, organs, and genes (11). Here, we can situate Junkware within recent work on what sociologist Nikolas Rose and others term "life itself." The thesis of Junkware resonates most clearly with Nicole Shukin's contention in Animal Capital that late capitalism has literalized commodity fetishism by turning biological life into currency, while the free market system has simultaneously become vulnerable to "novel diseases erupting out of the closed loop" of biocapital (16-19). In Tactical Media, Rita Raley suggests that late capitalism and critical theory participate in a feedback loop, whereby the material procedures of late capital both determine and are determined by the theoretical terms of biopolitical critique. Raley observes, for example, that capitalist ideologies of mutation and adaptation cross-pollinate with postmodern theory, as in Fredric Jameson's argument that late capitalism operates like a biological virus (129). In Junkware's historiography of genetics, Bardini engages the work of both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to claim that twenty-first century society morphs beyond both the disciplinary societies of the industrial era and the control societies of the post-industrial era. In "Postscript on the Societies of Control," Deleuze argues that the third stage of capitalist society hinges on "floating rates of exchange" and "a continuous network" in which the individual and the collective "orbit" one another. Seeing a fourth stage of capitalism on the horizon, Bardini writes, "the latest episode in the modern civilization . . . is the cybernetic decoding and organizing of the flows of...

Making a Noise – Making a Difference: Techno-Punk and Terra-ism

This article charts the convergence of post-punk/post-settler logics in the techno-punk development in Australia. Exploring how punk would become implicated in the cultural politics of a settler society struggling for legitimacy, it maps the ground out of which Labrats sound system (and their hybrid outfit Combat Wombat) arose. It provides an entry to punk through an analysis of the concept of hardcore in the context of cultural mobilisations which, following more than two centuries of European colonisation, evince desires to make reparations and forge alliances with indigenous people and landscape. To achieve this, the article traces the contours and investigates the implications of Sydney’s techno-punk emergence (as seen in The Jellyheads, Non Bossy Posse, Vibe Tribe and Ohms not Bombs), tracking the mobile and media savvy exploits of 1990s DIY sound systems and techno terra-ists , aesthetes and activists adopting intimate and tactical media technologies, committing to independent and decentralised EDM creativity, and implicated in a movement for legitimate presence.

Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturais

To reflect on waste is to think of it beyond cycles of consumption, as an integral element of cultural processes. The essay broadens the analysis of waste to speak of cultural remainders in a more comprehensive sense, including populations that exist (and have to subsist) at the margins of the official city, often through acts of reappropriation generally considered piracy. Such reappropriation is central to the informal economies whose control evades the cybernetic approaches to governance, and whose cultural logic offers a counterrationality to dominant processes of consumption. Piracy is a strong element of informal economies, and its mode of production and distribution operates through fragmentation, occurring in the interstices of the city or in an ephemeral manner in order to escape surveillance. Strategies of evasion and the fluidity of the market of illegal goods, the ephemeral appropriation of space by street peddlers, by garbage collectors and inhabitants of residual spaces offers a broader view of a dynamic of info-technological recodification that is not restricted to groups of tactical media, political activists, or the terrain of digital media such as Internet and mobile telephony.

Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture Fred Turner (bio) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. By Geert Lovink. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xxviii+312. $95/$27.95. If the internet were a city, Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink would be the Baedeker of its bohemian quarter. Zero Comments represents his fourth book-length tour of the net’s intellectual hubs since 2003. Like its predecessors, it delivers its readers into the digital salons of the blogosphere and the many online networks in which coders come together to make everything from software to music. It also surveys regions of heady offline debate—contemporary German media theory, for instance, and transatlantic colloquies on the role of the aesthetic in organizing networked labor. Though the book never attempts to sustain a single argument across its pages, it makes an excellent introduction to some of the most current debates within and about internet culture. The book’s currency depends on Lovink’s own mobility. Though appointed as a professor at the University of Amsterdam and widely read in academic circles, Lovink has long functioned as a public intellectual. In the 1980s, he participated in Adilkino, also known as the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, an influential group of media theorists; later, he became an editor of the media art magazine Mediamatic and a cofounder of the Dutch community network Digital City. More recently, he has convened a slew of gatherings, online and off, and led discussions on the future of digital art, new media technologies, and collaborative labor. Zero Comments synthesizes Lovink’s roamings into eleven essays. Each addresses a single area of debate, such as the social impact of blogging, tactics for media activism online, or the complex politics of online cooperation. The essays also hum with the voices of Lovink’s many and well-selected conversation partners. In his essay on alternative media tactics, for [End Page 508] instance, he offers a brief but very useful history of online social movements devoted to media activism. He then analyzes contemporary debates about those movements, first in his own voice and then, increasingly, by incorporating long passages of commentary first posted online by a range of other writers. In one sense, the essay devolves: Lovink’s singular voice and whatever linear case the essay hoped to make begin to disappear. In another sense, though, it evolves: the essay itself becomes a cocktail party into which Lovink has invited his reader. Insights ping around the room, so to speak. Lovink’s own range from the banal (“the strength of tactical media is that it can bring people together”) to the provocative (“the concept of a digital multitude . . . is based entirely on openness”) to the acute (in online production “the contradiction between selfishness and altruism has proven to be a false one”). Those of his collaborators range as well. At their best, the essays function as mirrors of the discussions within which Lovink first developed them. In an essay on “distributed aesthetics,” for example, he introduces Anna Munster, with whom he convened a 2006 conference in Berlin. Though he writes solely in his own voice, Lovink introduces a theory of aesthetics that, as he acknowledges, owes much to her thinking. In their joint view, European and American culture are leaving a moment in which digital technologies support a separate online world and entering one in which we inhabit “relays of entwined and fragmented techno-social networks.” These networks in turn require that artists and others develop ways of representing links, patterns, distributed groupings—i.e., a distributed aesthetic. Historians of technology in the arts might point out that over the last forty years, everyone from mail artists to installation builders has been preoccupied with representing social and sociotechnical relationships. They would be right, but they would miss the point: Zero Comments does not aim to be a comprehensive survey of emerging cultural forms so much as a model of intellectual engagement with the people and ideas shaping those forms. It raises more questions than it answers, but at the same time it presents a sharp-eyed look at the collisions of machine and culture, amateurism and professional...

Tactical Media, Sustainability, and the Rise of the ‘New Green Revolution’

In this special issue of Third Text, ‘Whither Tactical Media?’, Gene Ray and Gregory Sholette extend a series of questions concerning the historical obsolescence, future survival or revolutionary s...

Tactical Media at Dusk?

Tactical Media at Dusk?

Tactical Media and Art Institutions

Tactical Media and Art Institutions

Introduction: Whither Tactical Media?

We began collaborating on this Special Issue in June of 2006. Our concern was to understand how tactical media (TM) had evolved in the decade since its emergence and to ask how far and in what ways...

Amazon Noir

Amazon Noir

Failure Notice

Failure Notice

Tactical Media and the End of the End of History

Essay| August 01 2006 Tactical Media and the End of the End of History Gene Ray Gene Ray Gene Ray is a critic and theorist currently living in Berlin, Germany. His new book is Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (2005). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2006) 34 (1-2): 31–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2006.34.1-2.31 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gene Ray; Tactical Media and the End of the End of History. Afterimage 1 August 2006; 34 (1-2): 31–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2006.34.1-2.31 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Transmission of Political Critique after 9/11: “A New Form of Desperation”?

The Transmission of Political Critique after 9/11: “A New Form of Desperation”?

Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press

This paper demonstrates that US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse. This failed discursive translation results from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms. Through content analysis of US prestige press—meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal—this paper focuses on the norm of balanced reporting, and shows that the prestige press's adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.

The artist and the Internet: a breeding ground for deception

This article investigates a range of projects which use the Internet as an enabler in the development of fictitious selves, internet dwelling entities, or avatars. Largely based around text environments, email list and viral distribution of information, the projects discussed in this text are representative of a particular strand of art of the Internet, that which makes use of the properties of networked technologies. Positioned between art and activism the projects discussed here can be loosely defined as net.art and/or tactical media. The Internet becomes an enabler for artist/activist groups to devise tactics and engineer situations which question and potentially upset existing power relations between the individual and the establishment.

Fibre

Fibre

The Yes Men

The Yes Men

A Virtual World is Possible. From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes

ARTNODES is an e-journal promoted by the UOC, the aim of which is to analyse the intersections between art, science and technology. ARTNODES publishes contributions that focus on the reflection and study of the intersections between art, science and technology, from a formal, historical and conceptual point of view.

We are All Boat People: A Case Study in Internet Activism

This paper uses a detailed case study in order to exemplify some key trends and characteristics of activist uses of the internet. It focuses on the We Are All Boat People campaign in support of asylum seekers, discussing this in relation to three main areas. First, it considers the campaign's media strategies in the context of what Scalmer has called ‘the dilemmas of the activist’ (2002: 41). It then discusses the campaign in the context of tactical media and its key methodology of detournement. Finally, the project is discussed as an example of what Tim Berners-Lee has termed ‘intercreativity’ (1999: 182–83).