Tactical Media Files Blog

This short text was co-written by David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg  at the occasion of the start of the Tactical Media Files Blog, which was launched a short while ago. The text repositions some ideas about the Tactical Media phenomenon and the relevance of the term today, as well as its inherent contradictions. We focus in particular on the aims of the Tactical Media Files as a documentation resource for the practices of tactical media, and the problems this inevitably invites.

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Tracing the Ephemeral: Tactical Media and the Lure of the Archive

by David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg

“Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This “new media” activism was based on the insight that the long-held distinction between the ‘street’ (reality) and the ‘media’ (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society.

To challenge dominant (strategic) structures in society, it was necessary to
develop new (tactical) means of producing and distributing media. Not a
specialised task separate from the social movements, but a key activity
around which social movements could coalesce.” [1]

(From “About the Tactical Media Files“, October, 2008)

In 2003 media theorist McKenzie Wark wrote “Tactical media  has been a productive rhetoric, stimulating a lot of interesting new work.  But like all rhetorics, eventually its coherence will blur, its energy will dissipate. There’s a job to do to make sure that it leaves something behind, in the archive, embedded in institutions, for those who come after.” [2]

The Tactical Media Files, operating as a repository of “traces” of experience,  knowledge and tactics goes some way to answering this call for “something to  be left behind in the archive”.

But the archival must feed a living stream of practice. And so McKenzie  Wark’s text requires some qualification, nearly two decades after its initial  articulation the rhetorical energy of the tactical has not entirely  “dissipated or blurred”. Though full of contradictions Tactical Media has remained strangely persistent. In part because it is more than a rhetoric it is above all a practice. In the era of WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring it is clear that rumours of its passing have been greatly exaggerated. The fusion of smart encryption, smart phone movies and social networks transmitting and receiving in real-time has redefined tactical media from “contingent and local” to being no less contingent but now, certainly global.

The opening sentence of The ABC of Tactical Media (1997)  remains accurate “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 is literally “what happens”, it is factual, indexical, pragmatic, something that can be observed, an outcome of the way certain processes in society and culture connect to evolving technological infrastructures.

Tactical Media activities have the greatest impact when two apparently contradictory imperatives are, not so much resolved, as held in dynamic equilibrium. On the one hand there is the imperative to “engage the unbreakable link between representation and politics” (CAE) and on the other hand the recognition that the politics of representation “are badly adapted to an understanding of the increasingly infrastructural nature of communications in a world of digital media” (Matthew Fuller. Towards an Evil Media Studies). [3]

As for this Tactical Media Files  – it is a documentation tool for these ephemeral and fleeting processes – it is not an anthropological undertaking, because it participates actively in what it documents. It is not a science, not an institution, but much more of a tool, an intervention, but one with more long-term aims. More practically we want to create something of a memory, however incomplete, of the practices of  tactical media, knowing that these practices are always in a hurry to ‘move on’. .

Tactical Media has always existed in an uncomfortable space between a fluidity of practice that by its nature resisted or outright refused to be named, and the recognition of constantly being ‘saddled with designations’ by those who are uncomfortable with the unnamed (CAE). More than a desire this fluidity of practice has been recognised as a necessity to continue to be able to deploy a nomadic practice that can engage seemingly unalterable social and political practices, and avoid being captured or co-opted by the very forces that Tactical Media practitioners set out to critique and overcome.

CAE observe that “traces and residues are far less problematic than strategic products, which come to dominate the space in which they are placed“. ‘Monumental’ works are for them the ‘great territorialisers’, that refuse to even surrender space. For CAE they are the ‘great negaters of generative difference’, the ‘engines of alienated separation’ [4]. The operation of freezing living practice and everyday life in an authoritative archive embraces the monumental to impose its reading on history. It is the embodiment of strategic power and in every aspect the very anti-thesis of the ‘tactical operation’ and hence of Tactical Media. And yet we know from historical experiences that the monument can be appropriated to become a key-site for social struggle and transformative change.

Our ideal has been to be able to construct a ‘living archive for tactical media’, a task we have as yet not achieved and one we may never be able to fully live up to. With the notion of a ‘Living Archive’ we aim to create a model in which documentation of living cultural processes, archived materials, ephemera, and discursive practices are interwoven, drawing on the possibilities opened up by open source on-line database and content management systems, and digital audio and video technologies. Documenting the ephemera of Tactical Media thus becomes a dynamic open ended process that acts upon present and future events and is simultaneously acted upon and rewritten by these events and their outcomes. The Living Archive can never become an immutable repository creating a stable foundation for the ‘production of meaning, but instead acts as an active discursive principle emphasising the contingency of historical development.

Based on this ambitious and probably unattainable but nonetheless necessary theoretical starting point we accept that we can only move forward with small steps. We look upon the Tactical Media Files website as a inevitably incomplete documentation resource for tactical media world-wide, not a definite repository that crystallises or defines a field of practice. It was born out of the need to trace a rich interdisciplinary field of cultural and political practice that was fading fast amidst the violence of the ubiquitous real-time presence of the present and its destruction of (the possibility of) memory.

Creative imagination requires a degree of forgetting, but critical awareness equally requires a degree remembering. The Tactical Media Files has to navigate this precarious balance.

Modest steps towards an active engagement

We write this short text to mark the start of a new and rather unassuming extension to the Tactical Media Files, by starting up a Tactical Media Blog. This blog will allow us to trace  and indicate more flexibly relevant activity that connects to the sensibilities of tactical media’s evolving practices. The blog is also an appropriate space for commentary and personal observation, and perhaps for discussion.

The distinctive triangulation of hacker culture, experimental art and radical politics, and its manifestation in the streets, remains the essential circuitry from which tactical media draws its energy. The fact that “new media” are not new any more is precisely the point. Clay Shirkey was correct in pointing out that  ‘Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get  technologically boring.’ The real political opportunities inherent in DIY media politics arise precisely at the moment that they appear most banal to those always anxious to move on to the next big thing.

The question remains how and where to construct a space for dialogue and social interaction, a dimension that a living archive would certainly require. As much as we believe that the distinction between the street and representation can no longer be upheld, we also do not believe that the ‘social’ can emerge through the purely disembodied and mediated encounter in electronic circuitry – we need physical interaction.

Scale and infrastructures

We have to tread carefully in order to be able to move in the direction of the living archive – we can organise smaller scale meetings and appropriate temporarily, in a continuous nomadic movement, existing infrastructures, but the real challenge is to build a sustainable infrastructure for the ephemeral.

One thing that has been learned is the importance of scale, of reaching  beyond the safety of true believers. WikiLeaks has demonstrated the power of operating globally, and engaging uncompromisingly with mainstream media,  reshaping their practices by beating them at their own game. But these gestures remain tactical in that they are temporary, nomadic and ultimately fleeting.

Felix Stalder has accurately described some of the inherent contradictions of the Tactical Media concept, pointing out that “providing  infrastructure for projects is a long-term rather than a tactical task that  quickly overburdens loose networks.” [5]  We must be aware that in tracing the ephemera of tactical media practices we can never beat the ‘monumental’ archive at its own game, nor should we want to do so. It is necessary to develop a sustainable space rather than a monumental one.  And this we would argue is our task, to build a strategically sustainable infrastructure in order to remain tactical….

References:

1 – About the Tactical Media Files:
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=38519&pagetype=about

2 –  McKenzie Wark, Strategies for Tactical Media (2003)
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=46245

3 – Towards an Evil Media Studies
(for The Spam Book, Jussi Parikka and Tony Sampson eds.,
forthcoming, Hampton Press, New Jersey)
Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey
www.spc.org/fuller/texts/towardsevil/

4 – Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance (2001)
www.critical-art.net/books/digital/

5 – Felix Stalder, 30 Years of Tactical Media (2009)
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=42801

This text is a response to the posting The Tactics of Camping by Eric Kluitenberg. It builds on ongoing research of the authors into the history of protest camps as an organisational form. Some further responses can be found in the web archive of the nettime mailing list for net criticism.

TMF editors

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Protest Camps – some reflections on a framework of analysis
By Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, Patrick McCurdy

From Tahrir Square to Trafalgar Square, from the Puerto del Sol to the streets of Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements’ activism across the world. Protest camps are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Protest camps are global phenomena, occurring across a wide range of social movements and encompassing a diversity of demands for social change. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state.
Based on empirical research into a variety of protest camps, we have developed a framework of analysis for protest camps. Importantly we understand them as a unique organisational form that transcends particular social movements’ contexts.

In what remains an ongoing project, we would suggest that there are are four key attributes that appear generalisable to all protest camps. It is not our objective to develop a structuralist account of protest cams reminiscent of resource mobilization approaches but, instead, use these thematic areas as threads to tie together diverse sets of protest camps. This allows us to tell stories (across time and space) about how protest camps are created and set up, how they converge and diverge, and how they share similarities and differences. These four identified areas are: (1) domestic infrastructures (food supply, shelter, sanitation, maintenance of communal and ‘private’ space); (2) action infrastructures (direct action tactics, police negotiations, legal aid, medical support, transportation networks); (3) communication infrastructures (media strategies, distribution networks, production techniques); and (4) governance infrastructures (formal and informal decision-making processes). As these organisational dimensions dynamically interact, they enable and hinder each other, creating specifically configured protest camps.

This approach is allowing up to compare and contrast divergent camps and to argue for a new reading of protest camps as emergent, often radically democratic political spaces. Because of their specific character, we argue that protest camps have the potential to enable an experience of new and alternative forms of democracy for participants, although not all camps aim to produce this effect or necessarily have it. Showing how protest camps configure their infrastructures to enable the experiences of participation, collaboration, collectivity and mutuality, we hope to contribute to the understanding of alternative forms of governance and political participation.

Domestic infrastructures

Something which differentiates the protest camp from other place-based or space-based social movement gatherings and actions is activists’ willingness to forgo the comforts of a ‘normal home'; to brave the elements, living in muddy fields, up trees or on cemented city streets. From this perspective, the protest camp disrupts the very notion of what constitutes a home, and with it, our understanding of public and private, of domestic and undomestic space, as well as our attachments to property and permanence.

2pm, and vans full of people converged from secret venus all over London. By 3pn the site was secure with tripods and a circular fence.

Of interest is how protesters engage in acts of home-building by examining the emotional, affective and interpersonal communicative dynamics that exist between people and objects in the everyday material-symbolic lives of protest. From cooking to cleaning, and shelter to sanitation, protesters and supporters work together to build temporary homes at these sites of protest. The scale of this domestic infrastructures ranges from semi-permanent wooden dwellings and cultural centres to the minimal necessities needed to sustain direct actions. How do activist generate–and fail to generate–domestic infrastructures for and through their everyday operations in relation to their differing objectives. We would argue that people’s perspectives toward each other, as well as towards objects and ideas, are largely shaped through collective acts of home-building that demand a great deal of both physical and emotional labour.

Action infrastructures

Protest Camps are often made to enable political action, and in particular direct action. To target political institutions, power plants or roads, camps form bases for attacks, enabling training and collective strategic planning of direct action. Our work examines how camps function as sites of preparation for action, both in a theoretical and in a more practical sense. Many protest camps are developed to enable action in remote locations, for example rural sites of road construction, mining or international summit meetings, where housing and feeding of non local activists needs to be provided to enable large protest mobilisations. This instrumental origin of some camps as enablers of protest continues in the set up of training sessions inside the camp. Here activists learn from each other how to do direct action, whether facing police lines or blocking access to contested sites. The logistics of actions are also prepared at camp, for example by distributing maps of key targets, or enabling the formation and co-ordination of affinity groups. Furthermore, the collective housing set up at camp also provides spaces for action debriefs, informally and formally, in which activists reflect on their experiences. As actions can be very intense both emotionally and physically–and often carry legal consequences–medical, psychological and legal support is sometimes provided within action infrastructures, taking on forms such as ‘well-being spaces’ and medical caravans. Beyond these forms of preparation, training and debrief, action infrastructures of protest camps often include a number of formalised and informal discursive spaces, whether planned workshops or everyday conversations around a camp fire. Here camp participants develop and exchange arguments that reflect on and justify their actions, sustaining the energy and focus needed for future confrontations with political adversaries.

Camp Communications Infrastructures

While thirty years ago peace camp newsletters were often hand-written, mimeographed and distributed by post, today mobile phones come pocket-size with cameras and short-run video capabilities. Laptop computers and wireless internet access has enabled temporary autonomous media stations to be set up at protest sites, such as those run by Indymedia at Noborders camps, Climate Camps, and Global Summits. These offer live updates of text, photo and video, keeping both protest campers and the broader public informed. Likewise, some protesters seize and appropriate corporate and state-run media tools, such as Oaxaca women’s take-over of channel 9 during the teacher’s rebellion. At their best, these media stations create spaces for democratic, participatory news-making and skill-sharing, from which people offer a diversity of perspectives and outlooks.

Much has been written about alternative media and the role it plays in relation to social movements. However, little of this writing discusses how activists’ engage communication technologies and produce media at the physical sites of protest. We propose to discuss protest camp-based communication practices and media, including media stations and the making of promotional materials, press releases, newsletters and documentary video. We view each camps’ media as part of a broader historical trajectory of activists’ new media practices, expanding our focus to pre-internet and pre-digital cultures to argue that today’s communication practices and infrastructures are heavily shaped by past movement cultures as they came into contact with new devices and platforms.

Governance Infrastructures

How are camps run, how are decisions made? Often protest camps act politically as democratically run spaces. At times camps create clear infrastructures in the form of neighborhoods and spokes councils based on principals of horizontal decision making, while others are run less formally and spontaneously. Some of the larger camps develop further differentiation, creating roles in specific specialists groups like media teams, conflict resolutions committees and mediators. Generally, there is a wide variety of governance infrastructures observable in a variety of camps. These infrastructures are developed according to needs, largely based on national, geographic, economic and cultural contexts. They are frequently based on participants’ prior experiences with self-governance, and indeed camping.
While many differences exits between camps, it is possible to observe learning processes trans-nationally and over time as they occur both between camps and across different social movements. This makes it possible to identify successful approaches on how to run a camp. We argue that the formalisation of internal governance infrastructures is a key signifier of the ‘maturing’ of the organisational form of protest camps. Likewise, the importance of internal governance and its related infrastructures seems to increase when protest camps act less instrumentally as a tool to support action, and more towards larger goals of alternative world-building. In these latter camps, internal governance is explicitly organised as a form of radical democratic action, becoming a distinctly advertised quality and justification of the protest camp.

Alternative world building / Emergent political spaces

Protest camps are political spaces of high intensity, where democracy can be experienced and experimented in a live form. Often camps are only set up instrumentally to support action in remote locations, sometimes they occur spontaneously without a plan. But even in such cases, we can identify the emergence of four infrastructures, domestic, action, communications and governance. Highlighting these, we show the development of material cultures of protest, combined with new ways of living as they are formed in and by the camps experience. Concurrently we often found evidence of the development of strong collective identities within the camp, which triggered the creation of internal democratic processes. These processes are challenging and surely not always pleasant. They tend to create insider and outsider dichotomies between different camp participants, depending on their level of involvement. Indeed, internal divisions and conflicts are the key to understanding protest camps as alternative worlds and places of radical democratic experiences.

These experiences of alternative cultures and governance cannot be made in the regular political process. In the regular democratic process the pains and potentials of participation are limited by institutions that formalise the decision making process. Moreover politics is institutionally separated from life. Protest camps enable the development of alternative ways of housing, feeding, entertaining and living together, alongside innovations in political actions and democratic processes. This is why protest camps are more than just ephemeral places or instrumental strategies of particular social movements. They are laboratories of radical, tangible democracy that more often than not help to imagine and build blueprints for alternative worlds.