© Steve Cisler 1999. Non-profit servers and archives may distribute this document, as long as it is not on the same page as annoying banner ads or animated gif files. Others may contact the author. [Ed: sadly, networker and friend Steve passed away in 2008, as this text doesn’t seem to be floating around anywhere else, I decided to extract and revive it from my archive!]
“Tactical media” refers to the use of old and new media to achieve non commercial goals and to emphasize “a plethora of potentially subversive political issues.”
In spite of all the electronic connectivity, there is still a hunger to meet in one place. The more we communicate online, the greater the number of real world conferences and meetings. People realize they still need to get together, no matter how smoothly a video conference or email exchange may be. In March 1999, I took part in a multi-ring circus of activities called Next Five Minutes 3 (N5M3) in Amsterdam. It followed several years of my online participation.
Background
In April of 1996, Bruce Sterling started a discussion topic in the Wired magazine conference on The WELL, an online site where I had been hanging out since it started. The topic was entitled “Goofy leftists sniping at Wired [magazine]” and included a lot of posts from the nettime mailing list that Sterling found amusing or outrageous. I joined nettime (www.nettime.org) the source of most of the pieces and found it was quite a bit more varied and interesting than the wired conference had been. It’s hard to typify the kind of messages you see on nettime, but it includes criticism of the current trends in Internet growth, reports from hot spots in Eastern Europe, innovative art exhibits and experiments, meeting reports, and controversies ranging from the provocative use of new media to the role of George Soros and his Open Society Institute. There are also text experiments and word plays plus weekly calendars and announcements for obscure journals, literary web sites, and new media experiments. The strength of it, the lure of it for me is that many worlds intersect, and through the distributed moderation by people in North America and Europe, just about the right mix of messages reaches the readers who number less than 1000. Originally, many were from Holland, Germany, and eastern Europe. Now, people from Asia, North America, Africa, and Australia take part.
Until last Fall I had not met anyone from the nettime list. Patrice Riemens, a media activist and conference organizer from Amsterdam, and I met for lunch at Stanford, and I learned more about the conference being planned for March 1999 in Holland. N5M3 was the third such event. The title originated when people were enamored of futurism, and David Garcia felt we would do better by understanding the present and then have some understanding of the near future, the next five minutes. The first was in 1992 and focused on the use of video in activist causes. The most recent one had so many themes, side shows, and ad hoc meetings, that my report is just one path among many routes.
I had not been in Amsterdam since 1971. With the advent of affordable electronic media, a whole new scene emerged that revolved around access to the new tools (video and then computers and now networks). An excellent history from the inside is here: [https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9807/msg00053.html]. I arrived in Amsterdam in the early morning after a very different kind of experience at an Internet conference in Egypt.
Someone from Silicon Valley is not really used to frequent and convenient public transportation. It took about 40 minutes from the airport by train (about $3.00) to the Central Station and then by tram to an area called Leidesplein and a five minute walk to the hotel Quentin. After a visit to the Amsterdam offices of Tachyon, Inc. (the new satellite company I’m working with) I headed for De Balie, a theater, cafe, event center where everyone registered. I had the feeling that a lot of the people attending did not know each other at first, but for some this was an old and familiar crowd. It was a group that liked to smoke. In California a 6 gb hard drive is about the same cost as a pack of cigarettes, and fewer people smoke, but after several days in Cairo I was used to hazy air and adjusted to the atmosphere in the public areas of Amsterdam.
Most of the events took place at De Balie, conference HQ, or a hundred meters down the street at a theater called Paradiso. Across the street was an artists club where members could share meals, and the crowds of speakers and presenters were fed there. There were about 750 attendees, and the organizers were able to keep the cost to a very reasonable $30 for the three day event, probably because they had more than one hundred volunteers working on every phase of the event. It was probably the most wired event I have attended. Besides video interviews taking place in the cafes and on the street, each event was broadcast on Amsterdam’s public access cable channel and streamed over the Internet. The organizers hope to edit this footage down to a video. Volunteer reporters posted summaries, as did other attendees who used one of the public access machines in De Balie or downstairs in Paradiso. Unlike the Internet Society conference where there is a room with literally hundreds of machines and 1/5 of the attendees usually online, this conference emphasized people meeting people. Very few people used laptops during the sessions, though the one woman sitting near me had a keyboard style that sounded like someone shuffling plastic poker chips. I finally moved in order to hear the speakers. Many people were carrying camcorders, and a Swiss photographer waved a small Sony digital camera over the subject’s head like a hair dryer or a security wand at the airport. Most sessions were panels with short presentations followed by Q&A. Every meeting was held in English, and this might have led to the reticence by some audience members to take part, but the range of questions and comments was great.
There were also smaller, more intimate meetings in the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) which featured topics that some found fresher than the main themes. It was a strong point of the conference organizing that there was room for elaborate events, show and tell sessions, and completely ad hoc meetings that arose out of some previous event or discussion. And of course the cafe was always full with people clustered around the dozens of tables. Patrice Riemens set up the Slacker’s Lounge on the Mezz. at the Paradiso where he served tea, tiramisu and provided a large table for chance meetings and chats. For more non-verbal communications, there were late hour dances and screenings of videos and movies.
The main themes of the conference included the art of campaigning, tactical education, post governmental organizations, a technical track, and additional meetings on cyberfeminism, Inter East (where they looked at the way NGOs navigated the restricted waters of countries in a state of economic and political crises), South Asia forum, and a meeting on the Amsterdam digital scene, and European developments. Each of these was divided into individual talks and presentations.
The events that I experienced seemed to highlight these issues: how to ensure that there is public space, public bandwidth, and access to the tools in an increasing commercial environment or one where the government is not supportive but repressive. Many of those present were anti-establishment; they were not scheming to land big grants from the EU in Brussels. Others had a strong faith in government as a force to rectify some inequalities in the social and digital realms. The tactical education track discussed the transference of media skills for social change in many different countries; in using the media in conflict resolution rather than conflict agitation through sensational reporting; and an evening program mixed street poetry, localized music, and an online net event “Cyberslam for Mumia (Abu Jamal).”
Snack Shots
The organizers gathered to give brief plugs for their tracks. One of the main leaders, David Garcia, led off with snapshots of the days ahead, though I thought he said snack shots — which also fits. Ann Whitehurst, a British artist, said, “Disabled artists are living experimental lives.” Following this intro was the first session, on cyberfeminism. I’m looking at the fine printing of Irena Aristarkhova, a Russian sociologist, writer, and feminist who put her name and email in my journal. My cheap fountain pen smudged her fingers, but it so much more meaningful to see someone’s own writing than their business card. Irena had longer to speak than most other speakers that followed her, and she did not waste our time. She spoke about the challenges of being a Russian feminist today and her involvement in Radek, a Russian journal of cultural theory and politics — in a post-Marxian context. She commented on the concepts of community and hospitality, the latter being dependent on the ownership of the “house” and the Russian view of community was one that was nostalgic for a sort of small village view of the world, but this same peasant world accounted for about 30% of the exiles in Siberia. They were sent there because they did not fit into this narrow world, the very one that many Russians would like to return.
The other women present had just attended a feminist conference in Rotterdam and the American, Faith Wilding of the Old Boys Network, presented a sort of summary report. Marleen Stikker, director of De Waag/Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam reported about the formation of a loose consortia. Earlier this year a group of about twenty new media centers from Latvia to the U.K. met to establish what they are calling the European Cultural Backbone (ECB). One of their goals is more bandwidth to share projects, news, strategies, and art. Besides having a strong interest in satellite connectivity, there was a follow-up conference in Rotterdam on what is called the Insular Technologies Network to link these labs using PGP over a separate HF Radio network. Some test units are being developed in Slovenia at one of the labs, and a more complete report is located here.
Art of Campaigning
Geert Lovink, the multi-tasking omnipresent scribe and observer of events all over Europe, introduced DeeDee Halleck of Deep Dish TV and U. of California San Diego. She spoke about the California prison industry, its rapid growth, and the impact it’s having on society and the education budget in my state.
The Clean Clothes campaign dramatized the pitiful amount of wages earned by Asian clothing makers with visuals projected on the screen and a sort of progressive strip show where buff young men in jeans, ski masks and head lights, strutted on stage that was flooded with fog, while another fellow with a massive Mohawk cut pieces of their pants off and tossed them in the audience, as the music thundered in the background.
There was a humorous tale of the Chance 2000 campaign to unseat Kohl where the political critics said it was too arty, and the artists said it was too political. All of the speakers in this session had a good sense of what would instruct and entertain the audience. It was very different from the mainly verbal presentation of so many speakers (including me).
Outside the meeting hall
Between the two main buildings are silver pillars, one with a phone and the other with an outdoor Internet station. The whole design of the Internet post looked clean but rather unusable: the keyboard angle, the sharpness of the screen, and the lack of privacy in the middle of a sidewalk. I can only imagine what little usage it gets.
Two guys from the Institute for Applied Autonomy came up when I was talking with a silver robot, squat, bright, with a cartoony face and a bunch of pamphlets describing the project. As you reach for a pamphlet a little voice cries, “Pull harder.” “Petit Frere,” as the creature is known, is used as a propaganda robot to distribute subversive literature. It’s design is calculated to engage people who have fond memories of benevolent sci-fi robots of the past. I carried Little Brother’s head to the other venue as they explained about another device, “Graffiti Writer.” Using a bank of computer controlled spray cans operating like a dot matrix printer, the wheeled device can write messages at ten miles an hour (16 km/hr) and then escape back to the home base. As the pamphlet states, “These bots for rent…and are available to artists, activists, and assorted antagonists through the gift economy.” Very cool, even if the N5M3 video interviewers preferred the robot’s story and ended my 15 nanoseconds of fame a little early. Robots usually trump humans in the media. Contact [rp3h@andrew.cmu.edu] in Pittsburgh, PA.
Near the cafe were a few literature racks, and members of Mongrel were loading them with their free, lavishly produced posters showing composites of portraits of black, Asian, white people with parts of their face masked over with parts from other members. Very disconcerting. Their web site has the images, and many of their other projects including “Actual Hull” in reaction to a Virtual Hull (UK) web site, and a very interesting hacked portal where anyone looking up racist terms will encounter Mongrel’s own annotations. They came a week early to Amsterdam and put on a workshop for immigrant kids in a poor part of Amsterdam. Their plan is to take this computer workshop to Jamaica and other countries. I enjoyed the mix of art, politics, and practical education for non-technical people walking in to a store-front operation.
Technical Themes: Lowtech. Notech. Slowtech.
“Explore the aesthetics and charm of lowtech, and the amazing power of forgotten media” was the promise, and artists and nerds from Russia to Colombia via Ljubljana had demos: a 386DX cyberpunk rock band using one old but highly tuned computer (Alexei Shuglin); Tjebbe van Tijen gave a demo of shadow puppets, and old projection systems like Laterna Magica ; and Gustav Metzger, perhaps the oldest participant pleaded with the crowd to embrace nature and notech. van Tijen spent a long time rounding up volunteers to help darken the performance area. He had assembled cardboard on long sticks and needed five people to hold them over the bright EXIT signs. I think the audience had dropped out of activist mode into “entertain me” mode, and it took a lot of pleading (and wasted time) to get the room dark. I finally grabbed one, only to be stuck behind the sound/video console in the back and totally unable to see the stage. Maybe the reticent crowd had made a better choice than I.
James Wallbank of Redundant Technology Initiative said the that Brits toss out over one million PCs each year, and he has embarked on projects to use the old hardware for art exhibitions (the picture of “Amsterdam 1999” is really a preview from their web page), and his team has recycled hundreds of machines much as Bill Callahan in Cleveland, Ohio, has been doing in his neighborhood.
Vuk Cosic of Slovenia’s Ascii Art Ensemble is fascinated with this old art form which used to be sent around between radio telex stations when I was in the military, and anyone on a mailing list has received an ASCII art piece as a signature file or holiday greeting. Cosic showed a whole animated video of this, and they are working on 3D animated Cyrillic! However, the coolest device was his ASCII camera which he set up in the back of the Paradiso, and during the event he printed out 1650 images of attendees. The camera consists of a bisquit PC, webcam, Epson pos printer, and java code. His web site is filled with ascii art and many other projects.
I missed the satellite workshop run by Raul Marroquin, MauzZ, and Zoe D’Amaro. It brought together dozens of experts in all aspects of satellite technology and media activism. The summary of this and all the other workshops can be found on the main site.
Post Governmental Organization (PGO)
The premise for this panel and debate was that some NGOs had attained enough power that they were taking over the roles formerly held by governments. Andreas Broeckmann hosted the event. Tom Keenan of State Univ. of New York talked about the power of NGOs in events such as the famine movement (see “Road to Hell” by Marran for a very critical treatment); Saskia Sassen encouraged those present to tell stories about the local effects of global capitalism, and she outlined the some of the change in national governments. I spoke about the role played in the early 90’s by American and Canadian community networks, providing access before ISPs had started and how the commercial side had boomed while the development of community networks has been flat and is now being challenged in other ways by the federal tax authorities.
The most provocative presentation was by Kevin Dowling, an investigative journalist from the UK who had traced the ties between the senior board of the World Wildlife Fund and major intelligence agencies. He contended that the slaughter of elephants in southern Africa helped finance wars in that part of the continent while it was blamed on locals serving the needs of Asian and Arab traders and consumers. People from Greenpeace who were in the audience objected to his damning the work of a conservation group because of the links and actions from many years ago. Dowling showed slides of the links between the different people in the org. charts of various companies and organizations. Given what we can find out about most people, whether they sit on the board of Shell or work in the streets of Paris trying to smash capitalism, I think it is relatively easy to pull together network diagrams of the interests and links within different strata of society. As Ted Nelson commented, “Everything is deeply intertwingled.” Because we move in so many different networks, they are not necessarily deeply linked. Because many military brass are bird watchers (as Dowling claimed), that does not mean the Audubon Society is a paramilitary group. In fact, other kinds of activists use “bird watching” as a front for observing industrial and military practices. Dowling met in the Salon later to talk more fully about his ideas. He claimed not to be trying to besmirch the reputation of the World Wildlife Fund but a number in the room thought he was just using his open sources to make up a conspiracy.
During the debate and discussion it was clear that the word “government” or “NGO” or “union” evoked very different images in the audience. The term PGO did not cause much reaction. Most seemed to be trying to understand the premise but did not necessarily accept it.
The PGO afternoon continued with some excellent “product demos” including one on Y2K Industries (though they misspelled millennium), a proposal by Richard Barbook for a Digital Workers Union; the Association of Autonomous Astronauts; Daniel Garcia Andujar of Valencia, Spain, whose very slick “Technologies to the People” presentation of fake products was a high point for me. He gave me a pamphlet for the Street Access Machine, a device that allows street people to accept credit card donations from passing donors. No longer will they be able to say, “I don’t have any cash, just a card.” Daniel told me that some banks actually liked the idea and may not have realized it was more of a commentary on the disconnectedness of many poor people than a product proposal.
Final Day, Sunday March 14th
On Sunday there were sessions on corporate counter campaigns by companies such as Monsanto against NGO’s (PGO’s?) such as the Greens. Art after activism discussed the “doubts that hard core artists have about the usefulness of new media in a political context.” Migration activists who are working with migrant groups, people without the right papers to live in a chosen country, and the ways that borders are patrolled in the New Europe (or the United States) announced a plan to have 99 camps on both sides of various borders (Czech Republic and Germany, for example) to bring attention to these issues. It was one action that was planned at the conference, showing that the participants were not just talking about the “art of campaigning.” They were doing it.
Streaming media as used by B92 radio in Belgrade, Radio Qualia in Australia, and stations in Kosovo, New York, London, and Amsterdam was rightfully given a big chunk of time. Little did we realize that a few days later B92 would be shut down by Yugoslavian telecomm regulators. It was a very timely program, and it made me realize how the struggles for open access to all the media will intensify in the coming years.
Concluding thoughts
The discussions that started in Amsterdam are continuing on a variety of mailing lists: nettime, n5m3-debates, rewired, and many that have been spawned since the Balkan war heated up.
N5M3 happened to take place the some days before NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, and many of the people who attended are being adversely affected by the actions of NATO and armed forces behind Milosovic. That ranges from anxiety and sadness on the part of colleagues in Germany, Holland, and the U.S. to physical danger to those in the battle zone. All of us became conscious of the increasing importance of traditional and new media in providing some nuance to the simplistic pronouncements of both sides or to the illusion that there are just two sides. Alternative media sources (radio, print, Internet streaming media and static web pages) in Kosovo and Serbia were present, and some of their stories have found a place in today’s headlines, along with email snippets from those who were in Kosovo and who are still in Serbia. In many post-conference postings, writers have commented on the effect of support alternative media versus the cost of one cruise missile. There have been critiques of the way that government controlled media have PhotoChopped and edited recent (?) footage from the war zone. In some ways, the N5M3 prepared me to be critical about what is being broadcast, disseminated over all the networks. I just did not think I would need it as soon as I did.
Notes: 1. Moscow-based magazine “Radek”, dedicated to theory, art and politics continues the project “mailradek in English”. Everybody who doesn’t receive it can send a “subscribe english mailradek” e-mail to kireev@glasnet.ru, and they will include her/him into the mailing list. The address is: Russia 117333 Moscow, Vavilova 48-237, for O.Kireev. tel./fax: (095) 137 71 31.