—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: [Reader-list] Next 5 Minutes 4: Preliminar Program
From: "Next 5 Minutes" <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, June 25, 2003 9:55 am
To: [email protected]
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A N N O U N C E M E N T
NEXT 5 MINUTES 4
International Festival of Tactical Media
PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
Amsterdam 11 - 14 September 2003
De Balie / Paradiso / Melkweg / Waag Society
NIM Montevideo / Imagine IC / SALTO
http://www.n5m.org
What is Next 5 Minutes?
Next 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together art, campaigns,
experiments in media technology, and transcultural politics. Next 5
Minutes revolves around the notion of tactical media, the fusion of art,
politics and media. The festival is organised irregularly, when the
urgency is felt to bring a new edition of the festival together.
How did this particular edition of the festival come about?
The fourth edition of the Next 5 Minutes festival is the result of a
collaborative effort of a variety of organisations, initiatives and
individuals dispersed world-wide. The program and content of the
festival is prepared through a series of Tactical Media Labs (TMLs)
organised locally in different cities around the globe. This series of
Tactical Media Labs started on September 11, 2002 in Amsterdam and they
continue internationally right up to the festival in September. TMLs have
been organised in: Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona,
Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago,
Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar.
The results of the various TMLs are published in a web journal, at:
http://www.n5m4.org
What are the main themes of N5M4?
The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core
thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These
four thematic threads are:
"Deep Local", which explores the ambiguities of connecting
essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts.
"The Disappearing of the Public" deals with the elusiveness of the public
that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers
new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'. "The Tactics
of Appropriation" questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state,
or terrorist actors all seem to have become
effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost?
"The Tactical and the Technical" finally questions the deeply
political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the
development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and
constraining its tactical use.
The festival explores a variety of forms and formats, from low-tech to
high-tech, from seminars and debates to performances and urban
interventions, screenings, installations as well as sound projects and
live media, a pitching session, a tool builders fair and open unmoderated
spaces. Defining for tactical media is not the medium itself, but the
attitude towards media.
___________________________________
MORE INFORMATION:
How can I find out more about the festival?
By reading on in this document, but also by consulting the website of the
festival at: http://www.n5m.org
The site also contains a Frequently Asked Questions section that
addresses many practical questions you may have.
Further information can be obtained from the festival office:
[email protected]
___________________________________
TICKETS:
How can I reserve tickets?
You can only reserve day tickets and passe-partouts, which give
access to all programs of the festival.
You can reserve tickets at: [email protected]
Ticket prices:
Day Ticket: 20 Euro
Passe-Partout: 35 Euro
These tickets offer access to all venues and events, including the
evening programs.
Tickets for single programs are not sold, except for the evening
performance programs.
___________________________________
How to get accommodation?
In the beginning of August we will publish details on how to find cheap
and affordable accommodation close to the festival venues.
Follow the link "Accommodation" on the front page of our web site
http://www.n5m.org
ANNOUNCEMENTS LIST:
Receive our announcements via e-mail!!
More information at:
http://www.n5m.org/mailman/listinfo/n5m4-announce
___________________________________
NEXT 5 MINUTES 4 - OVERVIEW OF THREADS & THEMES:
* THE DISAPPEARINGPUBLIC
Full Info:
http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#dis-public
Introduction:
Interfacing with the public ?
There is no public, but where are our publics ?
In more than one sense, the practices and promises of tactical media are
tied up with the idea that in the last decades we have witnessed the
disappearance of The Public. One big reason for this is the
explosion of heterogeneous media and heterogeneous media practices, and
the fact boundaries between media spaces have become increasingly porous
(i.e. between media domains that are nationally and culturally distinct).
Another reason is that the idea of " normal people ", on which the
concept of The Public relied, has been thoroughly
undermined, not in the least part because these people increasingly came
and put themselves in the picture, aided by media. (Thus, the differences
among various not so normal people can these days no
longer be easily airbrushed out.)
Funnily enough, also for those media practitioners, artists and
activists, who feel enthusiastic about the disappearance of The
Public, the question of the public is no less acute ! In situated media
interventions, the particularity of context tend to take the foreground,
and precisely not a disembodied generality such as " The Public ". Here
margins count as a resource rather than as constraint, and they can and
should be celebrated as such. But when it comes to these kind of
projects, the question of who exactly one is
interfacing with often comes up as a pressing concern. A totally
eclipsed public, that is, an empty hall, an empty street, or empty
chairs, many have found out, is not an ideal situation either. And when
the public " just doesn't get it ", we can't just dismiss the possibility
that there may be a problem with the performance itself. And what if one
ends up " not liking " one's public ? More
importantly, a constructive picture of who or what one is trying to
prompt with a given media intervention, remains totally crucial.
While The Public has disappeared, we thus keep and should keep asking
where/who/what is the public?
In working with that question, the issue of the " erosion " of the public
domain, especially with the rise to dominance of commercial mass media,
and, it should be added, after the disappearance of The Public,
inevitably comes up. In this way, it is easy to get caught between
excitement about the disappearance of The Public, puzzlement about
appropriate publics, and resistance to the " erosion of the public domain
". But, that last diagnosis might also prompt us to go and look for the
missing public, and try to conjure one up. The
question thus is, what are the techniques and tactics available, and
which should be developed, to make a public appear ?
Sections:
- Testimony and Witness
- Tactical Cartography: Diagrams of Power
(Visualising for the Public Eye)
- Archives of Resistance
- Critical Games
- Urban Interventions
Urban Interventions
http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#urban-int
Where else to find the public than in the streets? The move of
alternative and resistant media cultures out of the ghetto of the
internet into the streets is a rather obvious one. The tactic is
comparable to that of art moving beyond the museum and gallery space.
Invariably, as soon as such media-interventions leave the relatively
unfettered space of the net, or the sanctioned art spaces, and enter
public urban space, they encounter an entirely new set of conflicts and
constraints. Despite all these restrictions public urban space remains
one of the ultimate social interfaces that we want to
question and investigate at Next 5 Minutes 4.
- "Packing Geldershoofd" by Archeopteryx (Izhevsk)
The art group Archeopteryx from Izhevsk (Russia) proposes to execute
their project PACKING on the blind facade of one of the large
High-rises of the Bijlmer district (Amsterdam South East), called
"Geldershoofd". The high-rise will disappear within a few years as part
of an urban restructuring plan. The original idea of the Package action
was to mark 9-storey housing blocks (the traditional Russian standardised
housing "boxes") in various Russian cities with giant painted protection
labels, normally used on transport boxes. The
traditional meaning of these labels is apparently projected onto the
residents inside these "boxes", urging to protect the people inside: DO
NOT WET, DO NOT BREAK, HANDLE WITH CARE.
http://www.n5m4.org/journal.shtml?118+575+1638
- "Escaping Oblivion" (Bus trip) / Tactical Tourism
A bus trip to sites of contestation in and around Amsterdam
During its entire history the city of Amsterdam has been a place
where lots of social, political, religious and cultural issues have been
contested. Primarily aimed at our international guests, but also with the
intention of informing a wider audience about the historical and cultural
context in which the Next 5 Minutes originated, this bus trip takes you
to a number off unusual or unexpected sites where the sometimes invisible
past of Amsterdam will be resurrected.
- Mobile Transgenic Fast-Food Test Lab
Critical Art Ensemble and Beatirz da Costa
http://www.critical-art.net/biotech/index.html
- Aar Paar Project
Collaborative Public Art Project by Artists in India and Pakistan
http://www.members.tripod.com/aarpaar2/02.htm
___________________________________
* DEEP LOCAL
Full info:
http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#deep-loc
Introduction:
Globalisation is renowned for its de-localising effects, as
trans-national business and policies erode local cultures and harness
them for their own ends. But, far from extinguishing locality,
globalisation as a process also invites the creation of new kinds of
localness. "In this process of producing new localities the global is
constantly being reformulated as a summary of singular new
localities." The spread of telecenters, and urban digital culture
projects are forceful examples of recent experiments in
trans-locality. On the one hand, the adaptation of digital and other
media to local contexts serve urgent needs : here it is decided among
others who will and will not participate in digital cultures and in what
ways. But these projects also provide opportunities to unearth fixed
assumptions, and propose forms of situated activism and
embedded innovation, as opposed to lab-based forms of "research and
development".
Sections:
- New Landscapes for New Media
- Language
- Enduring Post Communism: Networks of Patronage
- Laboratory Italy
- Bodies of Globalisation
(Global AIDS activism and the multitudes)
- Freedom of movement == Freedom of information?
___________________________________
* THE TACTICS OF APPROPRIATION!
Full info:
http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#approp
Introduction:
From its earliest articulations, tactical media practitioners have
always recognised "appropriation" as one of the prime constitutive
elements of the tactical. From the re-purposing of the fruits of the
consumer electronics industry,(exploiting video's forensic immediacy to
institute a subject centred realism) through to later phases of new media
tactics, as evinced by the work of groups like RTMark, and the practices
of logo tinkering, and imposturing, blossoming on the Net. Thus rather
than complaining about the speed with which our
tactics are stolen it is time to recognise that tactical media has been
in the appropriation game all along.
Indeed it is in the precise moment of appropriation that power
becomes momentarily visible. And here lies the opportunity for the
balance of power to be re-defined, for the weak once again to turn the
tables on the strong. Appropriation is the name of the game. The
important question is who appropriates whom?
There are some who would rather seek solace in the belief that a new
social movement is emerging from the formation of alliances between a
multitude of heterogeneous critical groups and micro-movements. But those
who believe that mass movements are immune from appropriation should
observer the ease with which Chirac together with a coalition of EU
member states have appropriated the mass peace demonstrations to
legitimise their geo-political stance visa a vie America. The
scope and logic of appropriation are infinite. Here as elsewhere
power exists both where it is enacted and where it is being challenged
If appropriation is indeed one of the crucial operators of media
politics, the question how that condition can be effectively
addressed (rather than escaped from), is especially important. So we can
ask questions like: in what ways are opposition politics these days
constrained by logics of appropriation? and how can we conceive of
appropriation as something that enables instead of threatens
antagonistic politics?
Sections:
- Tactical Media in Crisis
(Strategies for Tactical Media)
- The Indymedia Debate
- Uses and Abuses of the Language of Human Rights
- Contestational Science
(Reconfiguring Scientific Networks of Power)
- Tactical Media from the "Dark Side"
___________________________________
* THE TACTICAL AND THE TECHNICAL
Full info:
http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7#tactec
Introduction:
Increasingly the new right wing political movements in Europe and
elsewhere have created their own tactical media. Adopting the same
principles of resistant comments to main-stream politics, and as in the
case of altermedia.info even the (web-)styling of indymedia and other
open publication platforms, to involve the audience in their narrative
and promote reactionary politics. In Amsterdam some
conservative Muslim groups have been using the open public channels on
the local cable system to distribute fundamentalist satellite
television programs originating from the Middle East, camouflaged within
the highly multi-cultural programming of the open channels on Amsterdam
cable-TV. Is the "dark side" learning the tricks of the trade from the
benevolent media tacticians? Are these tactics
inherent to a specific form of politics?
Sections:
- Radio Space "wireless in your psyche"
- Paper tactics and the Revenge of Print
- Recuperating Video's Meaning
- The Tactical Media Tool Builders Fair
The Tactical Media Tool Builders Fair
Next 5 Minutes 4 will host a mini-fair of tools developed by artists and
activists, running continuously during the entire festival. At any time
three or four projects will be presented simultaneously in the fair-space
by the makers themselves who will be up for questions and discussion. The
emphasis of the fair space will be focused
primarily on streaming media, wireless media, open source publication
tools and tactical gizmo's. However, also artists' devices that can be
used by others and conceptual tools can be presented in the space.
Presentations rotate every few hours. An exact schedule of projects and
presentation blocks will be published at the festival. Some of the areas
covered by the fair include:
- Updates on Streaming Cultures
A meeting ground for tactical streaming media, artists, activist,
net.audio, hybrid media experiments. The streaming media mini-fair is a
follow-up to and update of the successful net.congestion festival, held
in Amsterdam in October 2000 - What has changed since, where has the
field moved after the commercial streaming industry collapsed and
virtually disappeared?
See also the archive of net.congestion: http://net.congestion.org
- The Desire to be Wireless
A special focus area will be the domain of wireless media and the
cultural forms that spawn from it. The technology of wireless
networks has become democratised in many ways, nit just via cell
phones. There are a number of projects that experiment with the
possibility of using wireless networks to provide free access to the
internet in public space (the so-called wireless commons). We wish to
explore this terrain via a series of performances and experimental
projects. Besides offering interesting avenues for artistic
experimentation the wireless technologies also offer opportunities for
new forms of low-cost mobile reporting, as well as to set up
local networks in places where a 'wired' infrastructure is not
available.
- Open Source Publication Tools:
A host of open source publication tools have hit the gift-market, content
management systems, on-line databases, weblogging software, schedulers,
reporting tools, web zine tools, and even complete
on-line video editing systems. A selection of some of the most
noteworthy publication tools will be presented in this section.
- Tactical Gizmology
Beside software tools some activist have also focused on creating
machines for tactical intervention work. IAA's pamphleteering robot and
graffiti writer are famous examples of such tactical gizmo's, but also
repurposed consumer electronics and robotics appliances allow for all
kinds of unforeseen uses….
___________________________________
WORKSHOPS
Next 5 Minutes 4 will host an extensive series of workshops that will
focus in a more concentrated setting on various aspects of the
overall festival program. The workshops will have a more practical and
'hands-on' character. The workshops will feed on the availability of a
unique group of highly experienced practitioners and specialist brought
together for the festival in Amsterdam from many different countries. The
main workshop locations will be the Waag Society,
Imagine IC (Amsterdam South East), the Artlab of Montevideo and a
dedicated and fully equipped workshop space at the Melkweg. The
workshops will start in the days prior to the festival and will
extend for two days beyond the three main festival days, thus making
available a full week for the workshop program.
The registration for workshops will be open for festival participants and
audience, but is limited to a maximum number of participants. Where
possible audience facilities will be made available for people who want
to follow the workshops as listeners. At the 2000
net.congestion festival we discovered that the interest for this
possibility was surprisingly large.
The exact scheme of workshops including dates, themes and locations will
be published well in advance of the festival.
Themes will include:
- Open Source Streaming Tools
- Multimedia Archiving & Databases
- Open Source Publication Platforms
- Digital Story Telling
- IPL for the Digital Domain and Censorship
- Hybridising Media (tactical combinations of radio, TV, internet &
satellite technology)
- Wireless Media
- Satellite Technology
- Tactical Gizmology
- Contestational Robotics - IAA & Hakctivist
http://www.hactivist.com/cdl_mission.html
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/
- TV Hacking - prepared with Kees Stad
___________________________________
PITCHING SESSION
Find people to work with!!!!
The pitching session is an attempt to create a place were media
tacticians can find collaborators for whatever project they happen to be
working on. A meeting ground where people can pitch conceptual,
practical, technical, artistic or activist projects to find the
expertise they are missing - the expertise that YOU are missing!!
Contact the production office in time for the pitching session. This will
provide a unique opportunity for finding the collaborator you dearly
missed, or the project you would love to work on, but you
didn't know existed. Create your own solutions! Pitch at Next 5
Minutes 4 and find your unknown other…..
___________________________________
THEORY SLAMS
At a few key-points in the program we will invite some of our most
articulate guest to compete in making their urgent message heard in the
frame of a three-minute each theory slam contest. Every
contestant has to convey the urgency of whatever she / he has to say
within the next three minutes after receiving the go: verbal
gymnastics for tactical media theorists!
___________________________________
PERFORMANCE PROGRAMS
Next 5 Minutes 4 wishes to continue the tradition of bringing
together extensive performance programs with radical art and media
experiments that transcend the traditional contours of regular art and
media production. In the spirit of the infamous Low-Tech Show of the
previous edition and the very successful performance programs of the
net.congestion festival, we want to invite performers from around the
world that challenge the traditional frameworks of art and media
production. Besides the four evening programs that are planned in the
main festival locations (Paradiso, Melkweg, Balie), we are also
looking for unconventional interventions into the public city space of
Amsterdam (Urban Interventions).
The TML process has so far delivered a long list of performers from many
different countries and regions even beyond the sites where the various
TMLs were organised.
- A completely safe environment….
A completely safe environment is a co-production of De Balie and
Paradiso, which is produced independently, but will be presented in the
frame of the Next 5 Minutes festival.
The evening program is an ironic challenge to the current security mania
that has seized public discourse not only in the United States but also
increasingly in horrifically safe countries such as The
Netherlands. For the evening a barrage of security equipment and
procedures will be installed at the entrance of the Paradiso venue to
ensure a perfectly tranquil environment inside. This completely safe
environment will, however, be continuously scrutinised by various
advanced surveillance and tracking technologies that are aimed at
ensuring a perfect safety for such an environment. The project is an
attempt to find out what is required to create such a perfectly safe
space and turn this into a visceral experience for the visitor.
- Voicing Resistance: Hip Hop as Political Culture
A performance night devoted to Hip Hop as a site of resistance that has
long left its roots in the North American urbania. The
performance night will bring together musicians and collectives from the
USA (Code Red), the Beta Bodega Coalition y
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