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Rita Raley: Tactical media, then, as speculative practice, following Nigel Thrift,
for whom practices are to be "understood as material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over time,
through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized devices, to reproduce themselves."
Practices unfold within a structure of bodily habit,
a set of physical activities that, while modular,
nonetheless cohere when ordered by a procedural script. The script is necessarily repeatable,
and it's the repetition that allows for practice to emerge as a practice.
Practice is that which is experiential and enacted in the moment, but it follows in the wake of what has been,
retracing activities that have been performed in the past,
and it's necessarily oriented toward the reenactment of these activities in the future.
A tactical media practice is not technologically determined,
though the actors within the different scripts encompass the whole of the object-world
and specifically the material presence of specialized devices that are neither inert nor simply used.
But these practices are neither reducible to these artifacts and apparatuses,
nor are they explicable as aftereffect or consequence,
as in the notion that the activities that unfold are simply the result of a script that's been programmed and put into play.
They are instead generative. Again, they reproduce themselves.
They also have a necessary mutuality and shareable structure.
Witness RTMark's "Protester," a beta platform that allowed activists to incubate projects
and to form new collaborations,
or "DIY for Vagabonds: Tactics on the Move," which is an open-source platform for sharing tactical practices.
The Yes Men,
GWBush.com,
Ubermorgen and RTMark's Voteauction,
and Nike Ground:
all instances of the exploitation of the "actual order of the things," quoting Certeau.
Work by art activists who appropriate to their own ends the techniques and protocols
of a particular sociotechnological milieu as a medium for creative production.
These interventions are first and foremost pedagogic,
predicated on the notion that it's in the public's interest to become alert to its capacity for thought and action.
For this type of artistic praxis, critique is situated in the act of mimesis—
in the act of creative cloning or even counteractualization.
This mimesis is a reflection in a double sense:
mirroring and replication on the one hand and critical contemplation on the other.
As in the staged branding of Vienna's Karlsplatz as Nikeplatz,
with members of the 01.org collective announcing the new monument in the shape of the Nike swoosh,
a near-total inhabitation of the discursive frame jars the audience into a recognition of the actual—
capital accumulation—and of a potential future unsettled from the present: what might be.
Interventions such as these might well beg the question:
To what extent are we being asked to immerse ourselves to the point of identification,
to become complicit with existing systems in order to acheive any sort of agential position?
In other words, following Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's work
on the harnessing of countercultural aesthetic strategies for post-Fordist systems of control,
a skeptical viewer might well ask
whether such embedded works are in fact insufficiently attentive to the very systems within which they're working
such that critique is neutralized and pressed into service for capitalist productivity.
But a fully immersive participatory and identificatory tactical media practice—
here pushing the identity and corporate logic of Nike to its logical conclusion—
can still function as a means of using a system against itself precisely because it's playful and experimental.
It tinkers with and refracts what is in order to imagine something different.
Its reiterative structure has a latent potentiality, then,
and opens rather than forecloses lines of inquiry.
It exists in dynamic interplay with its object,
and it neither claims a stable outside nor fixes upon a synchronic slice of a system.
In its eschewing of a singular and reductive negative judgment—"Nike is bad"—
it maintains a purchase on continuous response.
Interventionist art projects in this mode articulate a counterimage of political and economic regimes
via semiotic shocks that make these regimes perceptible,
and if they are perceptible, then it becomes possible to work concretely toward structual transformation.
They are, then, inherently speculative,
unsettling the present and remaining open to multiple futures
whose actualization can be conjectured but not fully anticipated.
As Julian Bleeker's work on design fiction reminds us, the future is malleable. It can be bent.
Tactical media is then a rigorous free play against binding structures,
acts of sabotage that constitute participatory networks.
In this light, the summative moment during the student protests at UC-Davis in November 2011
was not the pepper spray attack itself,
remarkable as it was to see such a powerful expression of a generation's willingness to put their bodies on the line
and directly confront a militarized police force.
This happening had all the markers of an event:
It occupied the singular space and time of spectacle,
its incalculability in spite of the surplus of recordings lending itself to mystification and spiritualization.
But its summative moment was instead a process and thus not so distinctly situated:
The Davis cop meme that exploded in its wake,
occupying iconic scenes—some just for fun and play,
but some harnessing a longer political history of play that transformed the political landscape.
The cop meme is an illustrative instance of the use of play to create possible futures,
its template the structure that provides the grounds for improvization and invention.
Parodic play is not a matter of choosing between the lulz and sociopolitical engagement, but rather both/and.
It's an extension of the structures of the present
using humor to open up to possibilities of thinking otherwise
without again foreclosing on the expansive range of potential latent within the system.
From The Anarchist Cookbook to The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia to the more recent Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution,
there are a number of guidebooks for direct action:
how to reverse engineer, how to sabotage, how to organize a clown protest—
all recipes for disaster, outlining tactics for synergizing artistic imagination and shrewd political strategy.
Manuals prescribe how-to, but they're also a means by which to document experiences,
share information, and build a knowledge base.
That they should in the contemporary moment be framed in terms of community investment
rather than prescription or a structure of authority speaks to a slight tempering of the mantra
"situational, ephemeral, self-terminating"—
visible too, I think, in the proliferation of maker communities,
community labs and gardens, and alternative systems of exchange.
Tactical media, then, as speculative practice and as mode of living. January 21st, 2008:
Operation Chanology begins with a declaration of war against the Church of Scientology
and the Anonymous movement launches as a movement out of the merry pranking of 4chan.
On February 10th, Anonymous members emerge in public with Guy Fawkes masks for the first time,
and they start to realize the magnitude of the international community that had formed.
I'm just going to play a short video clip,
just over one minute, from one member describing the day.
[clip from We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists]
Talking Head #1: I figured many fifty nerds from every city somewhere might show up and wear their masks at a building for awhile and leave.
Talking Head #2: No one thought they were going to come out. [cut to personal video footage] This is me on the way there. I haven't slept. I'm very *** tired.
[cut back to interview] And I remember going to the park that day, and it's really *** early in the morning,
which I thought was a bad idea. And I'm smoking a cigarette and I'm looking around like,
"Where the *** is everybody?" There's like, there's nobody here. [cut to personal video footage] So here I am,
sitting in Bryant Park waiting for the other Anons to show up. [cut to interview]
I remember thinking, like, "Oh ***." Am I going to be the only one in the park? Am I going to walk to Scientology with *** six or seven people,
which totally defeats the entire purpose of this because now they could single me out, you know?
Then I get up and I start walking around and I see there's a lot of green balloons over there for some reason—
on the other side of the park. There was like, *** two hundred people.
There was Guy Fawkes masks everywhere,
and I'm like, "Holy ***, this is huge!" [cut to personal video footage]
There's a *** lot of us. That's pretty good.
I had no idea how many Anons there were until we started moving. Ha ha!
Raley: The potential of Anonymous as collective is precisely this uncertain aspect:
It can be anything and everything. Thus should its iconic sign mimic the UN logo,
extending a promise of future solidarity premised upon the actions of the faceless protester
whose touch would reorient the state of things.
Its predominant technique is still the distributed denial of service attack,
which it's notably launched against the Australian government, the MPAA,
along with financial companies that have refused payments to WikiLeaks.
But the political project the movement has claimed for itself is the identification of the exploit:
the Achilles' heel of any given network, but with a particular investment in cracking systems which themselves exploit
as well as capitalize upon and control. In their pranks and DDoS attacks alike,
they refuse state and corporate information monopolies,
and they work to sabotage all attempts to foreclose the multiplicities of the singular event.
Such does a mythicized figure of the hacker writ large— from The Pirate Bay founders to Aaron Swartz—
emerge as a heroic protagonist engaged in creative destruction;
in, as McKenzie Wark puts it, "producing the new out of the old."
But hackers are at their most powerful when they're part of a team.
This, after all, is the lesson of Anonymous, of Pirate Bay,
also of Neuromancer and any number of speculative fictions that attempt to think the break
and imagine fundamental social transformation.
Franco Berardi counsels that building and sustaining solidarity necessarily means
"re-activating empathy between living organisms.
This empathy is the foundation of the solidarity we need today."
Parodic memes, anti-censorship campaigns, the building of alternative networks and organizational platforms:
These are all ways of sharing and living in common.
As CAE explains, tactics "are grounded in a sense of 'community' ...
and their ad hoc nature prevents them from transforming and solidifying into a structure of authority."
A RAND paper in 1997 summarily describes electronic activism as
"disrupting or destroying information and communication systems."
The principles of anonymity and asymmetric force described here still pertain,
but the cultural weight now rests with solidarity—
the "we" rather than the "one": "We are legion. Expect us."
This is the terrain of the coming insurrection:
a community as yet unyolked to a particular formal structure and simply "we."
So in this next section I'm going to focus one particular project at length,
and it is this one: Urban Diary.
This is just a documentation, a sort of illustration of the information architecture.
Urban Diary, by the group Rude Architecture, was an interactive SMS work
installed on the platform of the Alexanderplatz underground station in Berlin in 2001 and 2002.
The artists invited passersby to submit 160-character diary entries
that were then anonymously projected onto three advertising billboards on the station walls after a 24-hour interval,
the temporal lag between reception and projection allowing the contributor to become part of the audience
and preventing direct physical address in the form of hailing,
yet still allowing participants to seek ordinary responses or self-affirming feedback
or even simply to make some noise.
The only explanatory information in the station during the hundred days it ran
was a web address and a telephone number on the fade-out of individual messages.
The effect of this withholding, and that there were no wall labels or fliers in circulation,
was to create a sense of secrecy, the knowledge of the project transmitted
through the same popular word-of-mouth channels that circulate rumors and gossip.
It was, at core, a reimagining of public space as a sandbox,
a toolkit with which to play and think,
and as such constitutes a sharp refusal of the impoverished technocratic imagination of the creative industries.
The overarching purpose of the installation, however, was even more provocative.
In the artists' terms, it was "to give place to— to re-place or re-locate—
existing communicative potentialities within urban space."
It was to make visible the voices of the crowd, to give place to vacant and transitory idle talk,
which, as Paolo Virno notes, "resembles background noise:
insignificant in and of itself ... yet it offers a sketch from which significant variances,
unusual modulations, sudden articulations can be derived."
Background noise is, in this analysis, a zone of potentiality,
a site that may give rise to creativity and inventiveness.
Communicative activities in these terms do not reflect but rather produce the state of things.
The utter ordinariness of most of the messages submitted, then—
"It's going to get worse"—is thus entirely the point.
Expertise is shifted from the professional and granted to the ordinary speaker,
whose idle talk might be insignificant because it's not anchored in philosophical,
historical, or emotional substance,
but for this very reason can function as a free-floating site of discursive invention
and remain open to swerves, divergences, and unforeseen interactions.
Instead of a melancholic lament for a public space that's been overwritten by neoliberal economic interests, then,
this piece—Urban Diary—was an affirmative gesture:
an invitation to its audience to exploit the latent potential within the communicative field.
In other words, to produce something new.
What matters is not the substance of any one message,
powerful as it may be to provide the infrastructure for the expression of political and economic frustration:
"I just wanted to say that ever since the Euro, I am paying more for practically everything, but I'm not earning any more!"
What matters, rather, is in fact that infrastructure, which extends well beyond hardware and software
to include the condition of possibility for the actualization of these potentialities.
Urban Diary is in this sense— as the artists asserted—quote,
"a reclamation, a winning back of life itself."
It's social activity that, as Virno says elsewhere,
evades the "gloomy dialectic between acquiesence and transgression."
Participating in such a work is a momentary experience.
It has an immediacy that has both a temporal and a spatial dimension.
It's about what happens in particular place at a particular moment,
not simply because it was situated on a rail platform:
a space one moves through rather than inhabits,
the microcommunities that form from the anonymized mass or crowd or contingent,
the occupation of physical space temporary, the negotiation of relations to that space and to the others in it
fluid, dynamic, emergent.
Relationality, then, is enacted rather than harnessed or captured,
which is all the more meaningful in a sociotechnological milieu
that in no small measure is dependent on the manufacturing and regulation of mutuality.
What such an intervention produces, then, are counterpublics,
which for Michael Warner are "spaces of circulation in which it's hoped that the poeisis of scene making will be transformative,
not replicative merely."
Counterpublics, idle talk, background noise:
these are fields of energy the transformative potential of which remains to be exploited by communication that enacts rather than transmits,
thereby opening up a space for creativity, experimentation, and invention.
After the first Next 5 Minutes festival, Andreas Broeckmann argued that the open-ended,
non-functionalist, non-utilitarian aspects of tactical media were assets—
were to be considered as assets rather than liabilities.
He said, "the relative structural weakness of a tactical approach
and the absence of a unified political goal among media tacticians has its strengths in the flexibility,
in the compatibility with other initiatives,
and in the ability to form alliances notwithstanding political and ideological differences."
The same argument holds today.
The generative potential of tactical media lies in part in its adaptability to new situations and collaborations.
Tactical media is radical creativity that takes its place alongside of piracy and parkour,
embracing risk, transgressing and disrupting a given system.
These are all material practices with experimental and plastic forms,
adaptable and responsive to their environments.
Tactical media is speculative in that it does not predict, prescribe, or program future outcomes.
It rather activates, sets into motion, unsettles the status quo.
It adheres, moreover, to the logic of the prototype, the alpha version,
made to test a concept with the expectation of bugs, kinks, failures,
and the knowledge that the thing itself might not be actualized.
Such a logic is expressive in the work of The Hypothetical Development Organization,
which divines alternative plans for derelict buildings,
offering not the promissory note of the design sketch
but rather stories about implausible futures that will never arrive.
Consider technological prototypes with unrealized applications
that are never actualized in mass manufacture, as in the case of the Transborder Immigrant Tool:
a collaborative hack of used cell phones that converts them into GPS-enabled devices
that migrants can use to locate highways and caches of fresh water while crossing the US-Mexico border.
Planned for distribution to immigrant communities,
built on a Motorola phone available for forty dollars,
requiring no service for GPS functionality, the project met with substantial legal and political resistance in the United States.
Critics alleged that the tool encouraged illegal immigrants to undertake risky crossings,
while admirers celebrated its life-saving potential in that it could direct border crossers to sources of water.
Designed as a poetic rather than a strictly functional entity,
the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a prototype. It's a thought experiment; it's an idea.
Even as an idea it's disturbed, provoked, and inspired,
and the realization of that idea, again, has been vigorously policed.
In the name of the abstract ideals of hospitality and justice, the artists took a speculative leap of faith,
in the process making themselves available to very real risks.
In the right conditions, the tool could re-form the experience of the journey through the desert, even save lives.
As a prototype, its potential has not yet been fulfilled.
Not because of a withholding, but because it's perceived as too radical a technology
so its context of actualization—the patents, manufacturing licenses,
distribution rights—must be blocked.
It's not yet gone into legitimate production, though it might.
It's not yet been conceptually captured by political agendas, though it might.
It certainly emerges from a deeply critical view of the apparatus of state security,
but its point, its goal, its program is not strictly defined.
It dares, finally, to make legal threats into opportunities,
to insist upon poeisis rather than rational explanation,
and to imagine more hospitable and illicit worlds in which we live in common.
Not "where next," then, and not even "what next," but simply "next."
Thank you. [applause]
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