<nettime> Tactical Media Workshop NY

["Drazen Pantic" <drazen@opennet.org>]

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.

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