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Diane Davis: Our annual Speaker Series started in the early 2000s,
but just to give you a sense of it—a recent sense of it—
we hosted Cynthia Haynes and Gregory Ulmer in 2008;
Lisa Maruca, Michael Joyce, and Cynthia Selfe in 2009;
Dave Parry in 2010;
Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky in 2011;
and Barbara Biesecker, Joshua Gunn, and Alex Reid last year.
This year we thought it'd be productive to invite people outside of UT
to come join in on the fun remotely,
and the Rhetoric Society of America agreed, and they're sponsoring this event
as their second annual Graduate Student Webinar.
So we'll be joined today by various guests from around the country
logging in through Google Hangouts and Twitter.
Our distinguished speaker will be introduced in just a moment
by Trevor Hoag, an ABD in our rhetoric concentration here
and an assistant director in the lab, but let me thank just a few people first.
This event would not happen every year if it weren't for the really extraordinary
team of humans who literally run the place.
So thank you big time to Will Burdette, the program coordinator;
Hampton Finger, the systems administrator;
Megan Gianfagna,
Cate Blouke,
Marjorie Foley, and Trevor: our assistant directors.
I feel very blessed to get to work with each of you
and I'm very grateful for the way that you make me look so good so consistently.
Thanks also to the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, the Department of English, and the College of Liberal Arts,
each of which supports the lab in most every way imaginable.
And thank you, of course, to our distinguished speaker
and to you for coming out today. This will be fun. Trevor?
Trevor Hoag: All right.
Bonjour, everyone.
Welcome and thank you for coming out to the lab's annual speaker event.
Today it's my honor, as well as my pleasure, to introduce our speaker.
But before I tell you about how awesome she is,
I just want to say a few words about the theme that she'll be presenting on,
which is the question—and I highlight the word "question" here on purpose—
of digital activism.
I also want to take this opportunity to point out
is the theme of the DWRL's in-house electronic journal Currents.
And speaking of Currents and its theme,
I think that the journal's call for papers
this year so nicely encapsulates
an introduction to thinking about this question of digital activism and tactical media
that I thought I would just read from it to kind of get our wheels turning
about some of the questions that we might want to engage today. So here we go:
"Social media technologies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, podcasts,
text messaging, and other mobile blogging programs have recently
been used to share information between activists around the world.
From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, web-roots campaigns
have seen many successes, while information-sharing 'hacktivists'
like WikiLeaks and Anonymous have demonstrated the potential value
of digital media technology in exposing institutional malfeasance.
But while many tout the value of digital activism for promoting
social and political change, others remain skeptical.
Some, for example, argue that digital technology fails to generate
the actions and social conditions necessary to produce stable communities
or meaningful change, and many debate whether online discussions
truly allow for greater understanding of diverse voices
or merely draw us into echo chambers of increasingly like-minded
and even, perhaps, extremist groups.
Some note digital media's employed not only by groups seeking the greater good,
but also by terrorist organizations and hate groups. Meanwhile, the ethics
and legality of hacktivism remain unclear. Along with these new issues
raised by social media, the perennial question or problem of access remains.
If digital media technologies become the favored means of promoting
and participating in causes, then what of those
without the capacity to engage with these technologies?
And finally, what do these debates suggest for the future of pedagogy and scholarship
regarding digital literacies? In what ways might pedagogy and scholarship
reimagined or retooled in response to the questions raised here
in order to share next generation of digital activism?"
Fortunately, we have someone with us today
who's both thought about and written a lot about many of these questions,
and who I'm sure will help us to begin figuring them out: Dr. Rita Raley.
Dr. Raley is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
as well as currently holding a visiting appointment at
the University of New York [ed. note: New York University].
Her interests lie at the intersections of digital media and humanist inquiry,
with particular emphases on cultural critique, artistic practices, and language.
She's the author of the book Tactical Media that explores the relationship
between new-media art and activism in relation to neoliberal globalization,
as well as being a co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2.
She's published multiple articles and book chapters
on mobile and local media, digital poetics,
interventionist media arts practices, and global English.
She directs the Literature and Culture of Information specialization at UCSB,
and has held multiple fellowship, teaching, and writing appointments at highly respected institutions.
So please join me in giving her a very warm welcome.
[ applause ]
Rita Raley: All right. So I'll just make a few prefatory remarks and then check the acoustics and the optics.
So let me first start by thanking you, Trevor, for that really generous introduction.
Thank you to Diane and everyone else in the lab for the invitation.
I'm really pleased to be here. It's been a great day so far
and I'm looking forward to speaking to you more this afternoon.
So one other prefatory remark has to do with my title,
the full title of which was "From Creative Cloning to Where-Next."
And I'm going to retain "Where-Next,"
but only as a reference in the last sentence of my paper,
so I just showcase it here.
It was a sort of thought-experiment-slash-persuasive-game,
really just a performance from Molleindustria.
It was a parody of security exercises,
a parody of the modeling of crisis and catastrophe
of the sort that you see in briefs like "Expecting the Unexpected."
So what one could do with this topic is to think also about ARGs,
which I mention because I know at least one of you is thinking about these things:
ARGs that speculate on potential futures, like World Without Oil,
for instance. We can perhaps take that up later.
The first question one might be inclined to ask of tactical media in early 2013 is this:
How, in the wake of Occupy—
Occupy movements and Occupy the political project—
are we to think about socially engaged practices that are resolutely—
in Critical Art Ensemble's terms—
situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating?
How are we to think about the significance of asymmetric interventions
manifested in hacktivism, in networked art and in performance, in relation to occupation,
the spatio-temporal horizon of which—both in name and in practice—
is markedly different from these more immediate events,
with an operational field circumscribed as the "Next 5 Minutes"?
How, further, are we to think about tactical media
in the wake of Spain's 15M movement, anti-austerity strikes,
the so-termed "Arab Spring," strike debt,
and student protests happily too widespread to enumerate here?
In other words, in the wake of all of the insurrectionary and oppositional struggles
that have erupted in this decade—erupted in the sense
of having seemed to capture the global political imagination.
This is not to suggest commensurability or equivalence
among all of these insurrectionary movements,
from the Arab Spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow,
but it is more than clear that long after CAE declared the streets
as "dead capital," in their terms—even in ruins—
and the traditional organizational models of political activism outdated,
the streets are not so easily dismissed,
even as their latent possibilities are commodified
and insistently reduced to the calculable metrics of programmatic action:
the actions of the protestor, Time's person of the year in 2011.
Such a distinction between physical and information infrastructures is untenable, however.
Tactical media has been particularly adept at taking advantage of the flexibility,
instantaneous communication, and flash mobilization
that networked and programmable media has made possible.
So "by any media necessary," certainly,
but its predominant techniques have been modding, hacking, reverse engineering,
creative cloning, DDoS attacks, digital hijacks, and counter-gaming.
But Anonymous and hacktivists played a significant role in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt,
maintaining Internet connections, streaming live video of brutal attacks on citizens,
and relaying information through Twitter. So too the Occupy movements
have variously availed themselves of the techniques and tools
of social networking, the postal system, and face-to-face communication,
with organizers often moving from camp to camp within a particular geographic region.
If protest has become amorphous
in the analysis of these divergent movements and events,
demands have been equally so,
at least insofar as they have been consistently misrecognized as such.
Demands are blueprints, they rely upon a teleological structure
that either culminates or fails to culminate in a mystified, spectacular event.
They instrumentalize and they aim to manage the future:
"Here are the precise demands we would like met,
after which point we can consider the matter to be settled."
The power of the Occupy movements has arguably been exactly this evasion,
whether by accident or design, of the demand to delineate demands:
an important point of continuity between the present
and tactical media as a particular art activist project.
Critical Art Ensemble, in answer to the question, "What does your art change?", simply replied,
"We have no way to measure outcome." It is entirely apposite, then,
that the Tactical Media Archive be living—as it's titled—
be mutable, open to discursive reframing,
the continuous collection of materials working against a deadening fixity.
Tactical media as an institutional
and a discursive entity has a particular history,
and it's often been conceptualized not as a movement, but as a set of tactics,
of tools and techniques that would inform a movement.
It resists codification both at the level of theory and of practicality.
That is, the temporal scale and diversity
of the sheer number of artists and interventions that might plausibly be tagged
as "tactical"—from the Barbie Liberation Organization
to the development of mobile labs
and alternative networks and infrastructures such as WiFi.Bedouin—
makes for a rather unwieldy taxonomy.
Eric Kluitenberg has suggested that, quote,
"More sophisticated cartographies would be necessary to begin charting
the intensely hybridized landscape of today."
And indeed, no one rubric can precisely account for both
the visualization of petropolitics, as in this example,
and contestational robotics such as LowDrone.
As is clear from recent exhibitions
and catalogs that eschew tactical media in name
but embrace it as a concept and a mode of positioning,
the variety of work that could be so classified
stretches the descriptive category to a kind of limit.
But it is precisely this abstraction—one that maintains a link, albeit flexible and dynamic,
to the concrete specificities of circumstance—that makes it cohere.
Abstraction makes it possible to articulate temporary,
nonessential commonalities among disparate projects.
The very act of categorization might seem, on the face of it,
to stabilize and naturalize tactical media as a monolithic entity,
which would be fundamentally at odds with its ideological investments in ephemerality and plasticity.
And to categorize, of course, is to systematize:
a rendering calculable in the process of rendering visible, anathema for practitioners
who adopt tactics of opacity and invisibility for the very purpose
of rendering themselves non-available to administrative management.
But the category of the tactical,
however indistinct, does serve to make visible
a diverse and dispersed body of artistic practices that might otherwise
not be formalizable as political critique.
Recognition does not entail the establishment of the ontological truth of things,
it is not about what is and what is not properly tactical media,
it does not circumscribe or mandate,
interventions are not built to specifications that foreclose
on the possibility of diversion and improvisation.
Its use is rather, then, paradoxically strategic.
Tactical media can be appreciated within different institutions and discourses.
As a descriptor, it facilitates
the recognition of continuing lines of effort in creative production
in the service of engaging a public with reflective understandings
of systemic politics. It's something around which to mobilize
and around which communities can form around the identification of shared investments.
Let us then take seriously the slogan
"Tactical media is dead, long live tactical media,"
and regard it in terms of potentiality,
what worlds it might make possible— worlds not produced as fixed objects,
but rather experienced as they come into existence.
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