Garcia & Lovink, ABC of Tactical Media
THE ABC OF TACTICAL MEDIA
David Garcia & Geert Lovink
Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made
possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of
distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by
groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider
culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial
they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them
from mainstream media.
A distinctive tactical ethic and aesthetic that has emerged, which is
culturally influential from MTV through to recent video work made by artists.
It began as a quick and dirty aesthetic although it is just another style it
(at least in its camcorder form) has come to symbolize a verite for the 90's.
Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the
source their power, ("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their
limitation. their typical heroes are; the activist, Nomadic media warriors,
the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, the camcorder kamikaze, they are
the happy negatives, always in search of an enemy. But once the enemy has been
named and vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall
into crisis. Then (despite their achievements) its easy to mock them, with
catch phrases of the right, "politically correct" "Victim culture" etc. More
theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of
representation, that became the foundation of much western tactical media are
themselves in crisis. These ways of thinking are widely seen as, carping and
repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism.
To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that
the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially
affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the
fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source
of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does
not make them redundant.
Tactical media a qualified form of humanism. A useful antidote to both, what
Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as "the unopposed rule of money over human
beings". But also as an antidote to newly emerging forms of technocratic
scientism which under the banner of post-humanism tend to restrict discussions
of human use and social reception.
What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice of Every Day Life' De Certueau
analyzed popular culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts but rather as
a set of practices or operations performed on textual or text like
structures'. He shifted the emphasis from representations in their own right
to the 'uses' of representations. In other words how do we as consumers use
the texts and artifacts that surround us. And the answer, he suggested, was
'tactically'. That is in far more creative and rebellious ways than had
previously been imagined. He described the process of consumption as a set of
tactics by which the weak make use of the strong. He characterized the
rebellious user (a term he preferred to consumer) as tactical and the
presumptuous producer (in which he included authors, educators, curators and
revolutionaries) as strategic. Setting up this dichotomy allowed him to
produce a vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to amount to a
distinctive and recognizable aesthetic. An existential aesthetic. An aesthetic
of Poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring.
Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful
discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.
Awareness of this tactical/strategic dichotomy helped us to name a class of
producers of who seem uniquely aware of the value of these temporary reversals
in the flow of power. And rather than resisting these rebellions do everything
in their power to amplify them. And indeed make the creation of spaces,
channels and platforms for these reversals central to their practice. We
dubbed their (our) work tactical media.
Tactical Media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and
pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning the premises of the
channels they work with. This requires the confidence that the content can
survive intact as it travels from interface to interface. But we must never
forget that hybrid media has its opposite its nemesis, the Medialen
Gesamtkunstwerk. The final program for the electronic Bauhaus.
Of course it is much safer to stick to the classic rituals of the underground
and alternative scene. Bu tactical media are based on a principal of flexible
response, of working with different coalitions, being able to move between the
different entities in the vast media landscape without betraying their
original motivations. Tactical Media may be hedonistic, or zealously euphoric.
Even fashion hypes have their uses. But it is above all mobility that most
characterizes the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine
or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and
hybrids. To cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines
and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are
continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and
regulatory uncertainty.
Although tactical media include alternative media, we are not restricted to
that category. In fact we introduced the term tactical to disrupt and take us
beyond the rigid dichotomies that have restricted thinking in this area, for
so long, dichotomies such as amateur Vs professional, alternative Vs
mainstream. Even private Vs public.
Our hybrid forms are always provisional. What counts are the temporary
connections you are able to make. Here and now, Not some vaporware promised
for the future. But what we can do on the spot with the media we have access
to. Here in Amsterdam we have access to local TV, digital cities and
fortresses of new and old media. In other places they might have theater,
street demonstrations, experimental film, literature, photography.
Tactical media's mobility connects it to a wider movement of migrant culture.
Espousedby the proponents of what Nie Ascherson described as the stimulating
pseudo science of Nomadism. 'The human race say its exponants are entering a
new epoch of movement and migration. The subjects of history once the settled
farmers and citizens, have become the migrants,the refugees the gastarbeiters,
the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.'
An exemplery example of the tactical can be seen in the work of the Polish
artist Krzystof Wodiczko who 'perceives how the hordes of the displaced that
now occupy the public space of cities squares, parks or railway station
concourses which were once designed by a triumphant middle class to celebrate
the conquest of its new political rights and economic liberties. Wodiczko
thinks that these occupied spaces form new agoras. which should be used for
statements. 'The artist', he says, 'needs to learn how to operate as a nomadic
sophist in a migrant polis.'
Like other migrant media tactitions Wodiczko has studied the techniques by
which the weak become stronger than the opressors by scatering , by becoming
centreless, by moving fast across the physical or media and virtual
landscapes. 'The hunted mustdiscover the ways become the hunter.'
But capital is also radically deterritorialized. This is why we like being
based in a building like De Waag, an old fortress in the center of Amsterdam.
We happily accept the paradox of *centers* of tactical media. As well as
castles in the air, we need fortresses of bricks and mortar, to resist a world
of unconstrained nomadic capital. Spaces to plan not just improvise and the
possibility of capitalizing on acquired advantages, has always been the
preserve of 'strategic' media. As flexible media tacticians, who are not
afraid of power, we are happy to adopt this approach ourselves.
Every few years we do a Next 5 Minutes conference on tactical media from
around the world. Finally we have a base (De Waag) from which we hope to
consolidate and build for the longer term. We see this building as a place to
plan regular events and meetings, including coming The Next 5 Minutes. We see
the coming The Next 5 Minutes (in January 1999), and discussions leading up to
it, as part of a movement to create an antidote to what Peter Lamborn Wilson
described, as 'the unopposed rule of money over human beings.'
This manifest was written for the opening of the web site of the Tactical
Media Network, hosted by the Waag, the Society for Old and New Media
(www.waag.org/tmn). First distributed via Nettime in 1997.
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