Tactical Media

From the lecture on tactical media, some references for those interested students:

Critical Art Ensemble - An influential art/activist collective founded by Steve Kurtz and Steve Barnes in 1986. Webpage features downloadable books on hacktivism, including Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1996) and Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2000).

Floodnet - a piece of software that uses a technique called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to stage political protests on the Internet.

Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) staged a number of these so-called virtual sit-ins in solidarity with the Mexican Zapatista movement. In the same way that real protests are designed to bring a social or political issue to light in the public sphere, Floodnet is an attention grabbing form of tactical media – in this case, for the Internet rather than real demonstrations such as blocking city street traffic.

One idea behind this notion of the virtual sit-in is a belief that power operates differently in the network society and that traditional methods of protest are no longer suitable for the contemporary landscape of informational capitalism.

I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker - an alternate web browser (i.e. Explorer, Firefox, etc.) that offers a completely different interface for looking at HTML pages.


According to Matthew Fuller:

"The Web Stalker performs an inextricably technical, aesthetic, and ethical operation on the HTML stream that at once refines it, produces new methods of use, ignores much of the data linked to or embedded within it, and provides a mechanism through which the deeper structure of the web can be explored and used."

CarnivorePE - created by the Radical Software Group, this downloadable program is inspired by surveillance software used by the FBI. Carnivore listens to all net traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network and serves this data stream over the net to creative interfaces, called 'clients.' The clients are each designed to interpret the traffic in various ways, to visualise the information with unexpected and aesthetic properties.

In this manner, Carnivore operates as a platform through which artists can produce applications that re-present the data stream in unique and innovative ways (see Amalgamatmosphere, Carnivore Webcam Sniffing and Network Is Speaking).