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The N5M4 Ed list is the discussion list for the international editorial board of the Next 5 Minutes 4 event cycle. The purpose of this group is, on the most basic level, :

On a more specific level,

BOARD

        Sarai  is a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, one of India^Òs best-known research centres, with old traditions of dissent and a commitment to public intellectual discourse

A few useful url's: The Sarai bi-lingual website (www.sarai.net) is one of India^Òs most popular non-commercial sites. It houses information on Sarai projects, interactive spaces and public resources on urban culture. The Sarai reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. List archive:
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list The Sarai Reader 02, The Cities of Everyday Life: www.sarai.net/journal/reader2.html
Our Monthly Calendar and Newsletter online: http://www.sarai.net/calendar/newsletter.htm

My work is not seldom at the interface of Well, I've always advocated that instead of waiting before our poor can afford a PC and phone, and learn enough English to be able to use the Net, it might be better if we looked to see what telecommunications facilities the poor could already afford, and see how they might be used for them to participate in the information age. The cheapest such device is clearly the ordinary FM radio, but the problem here is that private stations have to page horrendous license fees, and are not allowed to carry news and current affairs, while the government-controlled stations are simply boring and bureaucratic.

We've just set up, in a village in the south of India, an FM station that only sends out about 50mW of power, yet covers the village in a radius of around 400m. We will argue, should the government object, that the FM mikes people use on stages, and the remote door openers on modern cars, all use larger quantities of broadcast power. With such limited reach, there is practically no limit on the number of such stations that can co-exist. Except for a minidisc player used for high quality recording and editing, the entire equipment can be assembled for just a couple of dollars (circuit details are all open source). At that price level, enough such stations should be able to come up, so that people aren't just passive consumers of information, but feel they have a voice as well. We now hope to train the villagers in how to make and maintain the station themselves, as well as look to see how, with the use of walkie-talkies and similar stations in other villages, the range of the station could be increased to a point where it becomes interesting to advertisers. technology and policy.

Would it be appropriate to look possibly at how to bring low-power radio broadcasting into the mainstream? What worries me, is that just as people lost the reading habit, they seem to be losing the radio habit as well: even poor people in the village ask us: why not TV? Because the high cost of that technology condemns them to be couch potatoes for a long time, that's why!

Another area of interest is the use of 802.11b (WiFi, the consume.net kind of stuff) to interconnect villages, and large users of bandwidth in urban areas. Such a model makes redundant the vertically-integrated telecom multinational (which in any case are broke these days): I would love, for instance, to have enough people in Delhi interconnect in this way, so that I could access Sarai's content without having to rely on an ISP (which might even be routing the content to me via the US). Would broadband community networks, and how to propagate them, fit in, with what we have in mind? Here too, in India, we have a fight with the government on our hands, because the 2.4 GHz frequency that 802.11b uses is already in use by some stupid government department or the other. However, with so many people now installing such equipment without asking them, they'll probably have to throw in the towel and vacate

In any case, I am very glad to see that there are many radio experts on this list, and look forward to being part of this very exciting project!

Arun Mehta, moderator india-gii. To join this list which discusses India's bumpy progress on the global infohighway, go to https://ssl.cpsr.org/mailman/listinfo/india-gii members.tripod.com/india_gii is our neglected website.

- one of now co-moderators of nettime-l; i've been doing that for about four years, and co-edited its two most recent publications, _readme!_ and _nkpvi_, which is the last half of the book published for the slovenian pavilion at the venice bienale, vuk cosic's _net.art per me_.

- one of five co-editors of ICANN Watch; before that i spent ~two years writing a column about ICANN for my column roving_reporter (tbtf.com) as well as for _telepolis_ (heise.de/tp/) and _mute_ magazine in london (metamute.com)

- one of five or so board of The Thing/thing.net. late last year, TT received a generous grant from the rockefeller foundation (in no small part due to some of the support of a few people in this group) - occasionally help organize conferences: tulipomania dot com in amsterdam in the late spring of 2000 (my contribution was small and irregular) and, currently, blur_02, co-organized by Creative Time and the NSU, which starts tonight :)

at the moment, my Big Project is _reconstruction report_, a print/web/email/fax publication, funded by the Design Trust for Public Space_, to facilitate public input into the re- development of the WTC site. it's also received support from the NSU and the UN University. this should 'go live' next week and is expected to run for eighteen months at least.

i'm slowly starting up a new non-degree-granting program at the NSU, the social technologies program; but academic in- stitutions move at a pace that makes glaciers look like guinness book of world record-type events on the bonneville salt flats.

in the course of this all, i've done lots of other stuff; much of it consists of small contributions to different aspect of other people's work.

I hope to be able to finish some writing on tactical media quite soon, and will be committed to this project till the festival next year. I am really curious to see if ur idea of an internationally distributed approach to defining the conent and substance of N5M4 and the area of tactical media at large will produice siginficantly new insights and perspectives - that is our hope and expectation here in Amsterdam...

For the more specific info I have included the usual bio-blurp I sent out when asked to provide a biography for talks and festivals abroad. It contains some updated links to texts in mailing list archives such as the nettime-l.

Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, and organiser on culture and technology. He is currently based at De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam, and teaches a course on "Culture and New Media" at the University of Amsterdam.

He taught media theory for the post-graduate education programs in art & design and new media at Media-GN and Academy Minerva in Groningen, The Netherlands, and worked on the scientific staff of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He has lectured and published extensively on culture, new media, and cultural politics throughout Europe.

Since 1988 he has been involved as an organiser in important media culture events such as the Second International Symposium on Electronic Art (SISEA), Interstanding I, II, & III (Tallinn, Estonia), The P2P - New Media Culture in Europe conference (Amsterdam / Rotterdam), the third Next 5 Minutes conference on tactical media, and recently "Tulipomania DotCom - A Critique of the New Economy", and "net.congestion - International Festival of Streaming Media".

URLs:

Texts:

Projects:

- Some Remarks on the Question of Bandwidth: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9707/msg00028.html

- Bandwidth and Content: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9707/msg00044.html

cheers, gerbrand

http://www.tacticalmedia.org

I was founding member of the collectives "Frauen-und-Technik" (women and technology) and "-Innen," and initiated the Cyberfemininist alliance known as "Old Boys Network" (http://www.obn.org). My project "Female Extension" (1997) (http://www.obn.org/femext) was a hack of the first net.art competition initiated by a museum, in which I flooded the museum's network with submissions by 300 virtual female net artists. My net.art generator (http://www.obn.org/generator) automatically produces art on demand. I published the readers "First Cyberfeminist International" (1988) and "Next Cyberfeminist International" (1999). Currently I am producing work on the subject of female hackers. (http:/www.obn.org/hackers)

I guess I have been invited to contribute to female/feminist/cyberfeminist issues within n5m, which will, in fact, be one aspect of my participation. Another will focus on the difficult relationship between art and politics in general.
As soon as I have more details about themes and partners, I'll let you know. Both my fields are not locally limited, so I welcome anyone who feels like contributing, and wants to make suggestions.

Joanne Richardson.

Born in Bucharest, Romania. Grew up and lived in NYC for a long time. Lived for shorter time in North Carolina, former student at Duke University^Òs PhD program in Obsolete American Marxism, which I quit two years ago. For past two years, have been living between Romania, Hungary and Croatia, traveling and working (on programs and organizing events) with media centers in the region. Co-organized ASU2, a one-week festival and workshop last September in Labin, Croatia which brought together some 65 people (art servers, streaming media, and media centers from this and other regions). Actually a lot of people and different institutions should take credit for the organization of the event (labinary, mi2, ljudmila, pro.ba ...), and Zeljko Blace and I should perhaps accept only the responsibility for its minute, daily failures ;). Am now working with mi2 (better known as net.culture center mama) on organizing a conference called Reality Check for Cyber Utopias, which will take place May 3-5 in Zagreb, as part of a longer one-week event. In May I^Òm moving to Cluj, Romania, where I will be for about a year, writing a book (on urbanism and post-socialist transition), and working with the media center that is opening in Cluj (first one in Romania). Before Zagreb, I was often in Budapest, had a residency at the C3 Center for Culture and Communication, where I worked with some friends on putting together a webzine, subsol (http://subsol.c3.hu). Issue 0 includes a few interviews with media centers that might be of interest to some of the people on this list. As a project, subsol is now finished for several reasons, none of them really interesting. As a sign of the end of its activity, it is coming out in book form; I just finished editing the Subsol Reader, forthcoming shortly by Autonomedia Press. In the past, I^Òve written some things on net.art and activism, media - tactical and sovereign, experimental film and video in Eastern Europe, and am now finishing a book, under a different name, called Twilight of the Idols. This is also indirectly or directly about tactical media. A very short version/excerpt is online at

http://www.dplanet.org/02_asci/index.php?id=000011&content=Articles

As far as how I can help, well I also make good coffee ... The people I am working with in Cluj would like to be involved on some level in n5m, and we are organizing a series of events and a larger conference, so maybe we can arrange to meet with some of you and exchange ideas. And I have some suggestions about content, and about some interesting groups to invite, like CUKT from Poland, who had their own presidential candidate in last election, and Candida TV from Italy ... but I imagine this kind of stuff would all come later. Lastly, thanks to the Amsterdam team for asking me to be involved in this, especially because, or in spite of, my critical take on tactical media.

My name is Barbara Abrash. I am very honored to be part of this group and offer apologies for introducing myself so late. I am an independent filmmaker, programmer, and media activist, currently at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, where I also teach in the public history program. In early October, the Center will host one of the N5M4 TMLs.

The Center is primarily concerned with issues of representation, social change, and identity construction embedded in the development of media worldwide. We are relatively new to tactical media, coming at it from our interest in the links between media and cultural/social activism. In conjunction with the Anthropology department, we are experimenting with a new form of web publication -- a ^Óvirtual case book^Ô (VCB) that will bring together the converging interests of faculty, students, and activists in simultaneously studying and using new media technologies. This is designed as a model for organizing, analyzing, and circulating knowledge on the ways in which new media is transforming social action in such areas as human rights, HIV/AIDS activism, and prison reform. At the TML meeting in October, we will discuss the first VCB: ^ÓTactical Media: 9/11 and its aftermath,^Ô which we are developing in conjunction with Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson of Picture Projects, thanks to a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation.

The question that came up at our first work session (and which continues to be at the forefront) is one that I would like to throw open to this group: ^ÓWhat is tactical media?^Ô Alternative media, independent media, Al-Jazeera, the photo shrines that dotted Lower Manhattan after September 11, personal street encounters, voice-mail messages all these have been submitted to us among the examples of post-September 11 tactical media. Our concern is obviously not to create a list of inclusions/exclusions, but rather to frame the question in a useful, probably provocative way.

I recently asked David Garcia about this. Here^Òs his response:

"If tactical media were to ever attain its legitimate objectives it would immediately become redundant as a separate category. In that moment we would all become media, equally unwilling to allow experts and media professionals to control (or monopolize) public discourse. September 11th had this precise effect, rendering (albeit momentarily) the term tactical media, redundant. In the minutes and hours that followed the attack the aspiration of generations of media activists were (aterrible cost) made flesh. Everyone of us, from those at the fiery heart of events grabbing mobile phones, to we the "universal eyewitnesses" scrambling to make contact with others, attempting to make sense of a world turned upside down, became transmitter as well as a receiver. Everyone I have spoken to reached for a phone. In an almost universal reaction to the mainstream media¹s floundering commentaries and manifest inadequacies we all became nodes in the global media network. And America together with the rest of us who, until that moment, believed we the lucky ones who inhabited the 'zones of safety', were brought face to face with new realities both outside and within our imagined and geographic borders.^Ô

AIDS activists all over the world are questioning regimes of intellectual property rights concerning drug patents. Activists in resource-poor countries are fighting to establish generic drug production and to promote generic pharmaceutical drug trade among poor countries. These efforts should be of intense interest to anyone following the recent battles over the forms of globalization now taking shape. I think global AIDS activism, and in particular global HIV treatment activism, provide an important model for activism on a new scale. The enormous scale of the epidemic (40 million people with HIV worldwide) produces an unprecedented situation in which very large numbers of people find themselves sharing a set of demands. Multitudes of people with AIDS around the world are currently making the same demand: Drugs Into Peoples Bodies.

Here are some of the questions that currently inform my work. How can I, as a relatively privileged person with AIDS (my life is sustained by the drugs that the South African activists are fighting courageously to obtain), articulate a position of subjectivity that shares a common sense of purpose and destiny with people with AIDS in the resource poor world?

How can one do something "here" that will bring about change "there"? "Here" and "there" are terms that have been profoundly altered in two ways. First, distances have been bridged and collapsed through new communications technologies. (I receive news about South African AIDS politics daily through e-mail.) Second, modes of production have become increasingly decentered as the controlling concerns of production have become more consolidated; the affects of power are more diffuse, while those who have power are more remote.

De Geuzen is an all female collaborative art and design team that's been working together since around 1995. Our practice practice includes curating, participating in exhibitions and programming educational seminars and symposia. We often deploy our bric-a-brac tactics of multi-visual research to explore female representation, the claiming of space and place, life in the city and the negotiation between the public and private domain.

In general you can find information about our work (projects, CV etc.) on our site: www.geuzen.org

Also at the beginning of the year we were interviewed in Mute magazine: http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/current/geuzen.htm

If you would like to read about our collaboration with the Rode Draad (the Amsterdam based prostitutes rights organization) and a project one of our temporary archives, see: http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~variant/8texts/Jason_E_Bowman.html

our respective emails are: Riek Sijbring: riek@xs4all.nl Femke Snelting: snelting@geuzen.org Renee Turner: geuzen@xs4all.nl

Feel free to drop us a line ....

with kindest regards, Renee, Riek and Femke

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