Drazen Pantic on Mon, 23 Apr 2001 20:17:55 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Tactical Media Workshop NY |
Tactical Media Workshop The Impact of New Media on Political Engagement and Cultural Activism Organized by Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU Saturday, April 21, 2001 @ NYU's Center for Alternative Technology Background The workshop was organized as a session of activists and thinkers who are engaged in refiguring the social spaces emerging at the intersection of technological innovation and cultural/political activism. The broad goal of the meeting was to see what we can systematically learn from these experiences, moving beyond the anecdotal to build a practically-informed model of networked politics, and to consider ways in which we might build upon this knowledge. Series of meetings and discussions preceded the organization of this workshop. The initial idea of organizing relatively small workshop in New York devoted to tactical media emerged in numerous conversations and emails between Barbara Abrash, Joan Shikegawa, Geert Lovink, Marleen Strikker, Ted Byfield, Andrew Blau, myself as well as numerous other people who contributed towards shaping this meeting and its agenda. The archive http://forums.nyu.edu/cgi-bin/nyu.pl?enter=tacticalmedia contains initial announcement, list of participants who were able to attend the meeting, as well as their short introductory statements. The Structure of the Events The moderator of the event was Andrew Blau, who has brilliantly maintained lively and open discussion, while on the other hand carried on with the meeting agenda and subjected participants to prepared questions with great delicacy and tact. The first session was devoted to the following 3 questions: 1. What have been the issues at stake for you, in working with new and old media forms? 2. What limits and possibilities have emerged in your own media practices, and how do they relate to the goals you established at the outset? 3. What new spaces for thinking, creativity, and action have opened up for tactical media, in this new media environment? The second session focused on exploring individual cases and needs in expanding the work to the next level. Highlights (at least for me) were brilliant expositions from Daoud Kuttab and Myoung-joon Kim from Seoul. Daoud explained basic ideas behind the Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN) and their ambitions to go aggressively into the Internet streaming as well as the current action of assembling public access Internet center for journalists. It is clear that AMIN could very well use the experience of Open Source community in building public access centers and collective sharing of bandwidth resources in their Internet radio project. Ravi Sundaram immediately took on that, and offered help from Sarai people, who have great and fresh experience in assembling a public access space using Open Source tools and tactics. So, all chances are that we will soon see another great action of activists solidarity over similar social and political goals complemented by the Open Source tools. Myoung-joon Kim gave us brilliant exposition of the Korean Progressive Network. The striking example of their activity is recent everyday video coverage of Daewoo workers struggle using broadband with the help of JinboNet http://cast.jinbo.net/video/special_daewoo.html. Korean situation is even more specific, given the fact that Korea has more then 5 million broadband subscribers, hence many people use Internet (especially streaming services) as the primary source of information. The final session was devoted to exploring specific collaborative projects and ideas for future shared work, gatherings. The following ideas received full support of all participants: * David Garcia has suggested the continuation and regularity of meetings like this over a three year research project. The research will be spanned over regular meetings; at least twice per year: one devoted to conceptual and the theoretical issues and one based on more practical and activistic "problem solving" approach. Each meeting might follow by a publication * Virtual Source Book Will focus on describing and research of practices as well as open platform for ideas for further projects. It was suggested that we the methodology for describing tactical media practices is very much needed. A suggestion of adapted Request for Comments format was welcomed, and the first step towards adopting RFCs and working with that format might be compiling the proceedings from the workshop. Finally, meeting ended by thanking Barbara Abrash and Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU for organizing the workshop, Natalie Jeremijenko and Center for Alternative Technology for hosting the event and Joan Shikegawa and The Rockefeller Foundation for sponsoring the event. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net