so it’s thursday, the day before friday, class day. as of last friday, one of the tasks of my daily routine was to read, digest, interpret, write 8 pages, and prepare to guide a half hour discussion about the first chapter of a book called eletronic civil disobedience, by a group called the critical art ensemble.
so far, i’ve read, i’ve digested, i’ve outlined, written 3-4 pages of material, spoke with the professor, and poked through the many related paths via wikipedia. while i feel 4-5 more pages wouldn’t be disastrously difficult to complete tonight, i also feel overwhelmed now by the vastness of the topic of tactical media (and by the constraints of a day job and the body’s requirement for sleep).
now, instead of plugging away at the pages and discussion questions production, i’ve decided to step back and think freely with my fingertips on the keys. my hope is that this will ultimately enhance the quality of the paper and assist the clarity of my thoughts in general. it’s always fun to read back through rough times as well, and feel good that they’ve passed. ok, so here goes.
cae is a group of 5 folks originally, and possibly still now. one of them was arrested or charged with felonies after reporting his wife’s death, because he had various instruments in his home that were suspicious, which he had used for art installations. i’m pretty sure he’s still not clear, because there’s an ongoing fund to protest the whole deal. the group is politically active using tactical media. they are artists with similar political perspectives who want to use artistic expression and tech skills to create positive change. they seem to understand authority (a tiny word) pretty well and how it has evolved over time. they use writing as a major method of resistance to this authority, as well as installations in the physical public domain and the virtual public domain.. these are all words i’m not used to using, but it’s fun to learn eh.
in the chapter i was to digest, cae comes with a pretty persuasive force. in the context of the basic tactical media research i’ve done, they describe essentially the context in which electronic civil disobedience is born, where it lives, and where it needs to go. they lay out the history of authority.. the castles, capital, institutions… centralized, physical masses really, that were about control, supremacy, power, domination, wealth.. these sorts of things. next i believe, comes their discussion of how all that is today. it has evolved. it’s now decentralized, invisible, nomadic.. and therefore no longer vulnerable to old means of activism. the new civil disobedience has to evolve as well. one of the keys then for modern society to resist authoritarian power then is to evolve as well, to begin or grow the usage of tactics that are strategic and decentralized and powerful. that’s the gist of the beginning. there’s a whole lot of other ideas in there umm… social order, disruption, cyberpolice, division of labor, criminality/curiosity…lalala, all related, but what’s kinda interesting is the switch cae makes from basic what’s going on to this is what needs to happen…very clearly. build cells. make sure they’re self sufficiently strong and attack. sure, there’s some avant-garde theoretical more more stuff in there, but they know stuff is wrong and they take direct action in virtual ways. ok, so there’s too much to get into in my opinion, which is why i needed to step away from the paper itself …
in relation to the readings we’ve done so far by mcluhan and benjamin, this is all related, yes surprise. tactical media…medium is the message…art/reproduction/mechanical… use this new stuff for political good. makes sense….
the indentations are interesting. flesh machine hmm… this stuff is interesting for real. i wanted to jump start my curiosity with the class, and at least we’ve achieve that. hope tomorrow goes ok.
. . . access . cell . community . technocratic avant-garde . counter strategy . flow . disrupt . resist . block . disobedience . trespass . r&d . marketing . value . social organization . division of labor . order . negotiation . hacker-activist schism . pluralism . institution . power . elite . centralized . hidden . capital . authority . domination . cyberspace . virtual information . representation . profit . cyberpolice . hidden . nomadic . curiosity . criminality . intent . property . punishment . . .
[back to work and then the actual paper some more]