On Wednesday July 10, 2024, the Centre for Digital Inquiry (Warwick Uni, UK) will present a livestream, hybrid conversation with Alexandra Barancova, David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg on the legacies of tactical media since the 1990s, alongside reflections on emergent trajectories today for media aesthetics and activism in pursuit of the common good.
Today, we grapple with escalating and overlapping crises: increasing inequalities, rising far-right movements, dystopian threats of automated AI, forever forever wars, and looming realities of climate collapse. Knowledge and nonknowledge are up for grabs at the intersection of media, art and politics, while apocalyptic visions circulate far and wide. In these times, where do we find the radical new imaginaries and sense of autonomy once associated with the tactical?
We’re well beyond now the relatively optimistic 1990s, if we think of tactical media as an era of radical experimentation following the rise of globalization and the so-called end of history. The current splintered media environment is still dominated by the platform capture of participation and engagement, while the subversive spirit of extra-disciplinary experiments at the edges of aesthetics and activism rumbles on. We witness the memeification of everything, sprawling reactionary media ecologies and a rising flood of synthetic bullshit. Tactical media may have sketched a shape of things to come, but the diagram can’t be assumed as exclusive to any kind progressive agenda (if it ever could). These are new conditions of struggle and conflict, spinning out in multiple directions, demanding the reinvention of critical and autonomous schemas under pressure, encounter by encounter, event by event.
What are some key trajectories for the outer bounds of activism and media art these past decades? Does an old school dichotomy between strategy and tactics still make any sense as an analytic? What have we collectively learnt from the hybrid media activism and platform social movements of the 2010s and beyond? What’s the current status of our entrenched dependencies on corporate infrastructures, even when experimenting with alternatives like the Fediverse? What role might living archives play in reigniting new pathways and escape routes? What are the emerging practices and concepts to discuss in support of an expanded commons?
We set up this session as an opportunity to take such recurring online conversations into a different setting, inspired in part by The Nettime Listening Post at transmediale this year, and the stream art network of UKRA))i((NATV STREAM-ART, The Void at INC Amsterdam and the Intermedia dept. in Budapest. All welcome! Join us this Wednesday afternoon for these topics and more. Share your thoughts, questions, responses and comments.
Echoes of Tactical Media
CDI-TV July 10th
16:00-18:00 GMT, 17:00-19:00 CET
Check in on the day, link shared from the CDI site: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cdi/
