[Nettime-bold] Critical Art Ensemble: Digital Resistance

["geert" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

http://www.autonomedia.org/digitalresistance/

Digital Resistance
Explorations in Tactical Media
Critical Art Ensemble
Autonomedia
US$14.00

Digital Resistance is the most recent installment in the Critical Art
Ensemble's development of the theory and forms of tactical media practices.

What is tactical media? The term was initially used to refer to "a critical
usage and theorization of media practices that draw on all forms of old and
new media, both lucid and sophisticated, for achieving a variety of specific
noncommercial goals and pushing all kinds of potentially subversive
political issues."

Maintaining that tactical media cannot be a monolithic (and thus easily
co-opted) model but a pliable one that must continually be reshaped, they
nonetheless articulate in this book a few principles which have general
value in the often-contradictory streams of tactical media. Over the course
of eight essays, they illustrate these principles through the broad material
and content base of tactical media, and demonstrate that "no cultural bunker
is ever fully secure. We can trespass in them all, inventing molecular
interventions and unleashing semiotic shocks that collectively could negate
the rising intensity of authoritarian culture."

"Required reading for anyone concerned with disrupting authoritarian power
in all its hideous forms. Once again CAE has produced an essential tool kit
for the intelligent cultural hacker, artist, and hacktivist. Read this book
for smart tactics to fight the encroaching giant of corporate culture and
other antihuman forces vying for control in the 21st century." -- Natalie
Bookchin

"An important example of ad-hoc and self-terminating "bad copy," CAE here
pushes further into questions of effective tacticalities for radical action
in the Net Age. Intermedia becomes nomadmedia and 60's radical politics of
monumental presence is subjected to recombination, shifted to covert actions
articulated in and through the "trace." Here we get some trenchant how-tos:
How to build a graffitti robot. How to think recombinant theater. How to
make collective actions. How to pervert GameBoy. How to ask why we resort to
labels like "terrorist" for actions performed on data-bodies against the
privileges of commodity signature. How? To." -- Rebecca Schneider

"As new forms and cultures of resistance reach a critical mass with a
suddenness and force that can no longer be ignored, pundits in all forms of
popular media have been reduced to helpless sources of panic and
misinformation. In this context, Critical Art Ensemble's Digital Resistance
succeeds not only in being a guide for the perplexed, but also serves as a
user's manual for contemporary activism. In this latest volume CAE brings to
a climax a series of brilliantly illuminating texts, in which, over the last
decade, they have succeeded in forging one of the few lexicons powerful
enough to theorize the issues and technologies at the heart of today's
activist cultures." -- David Garcia, Next 5 Minutes

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1    Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere
2    The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net
3    The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology in the Public Sphere
4    Observations on Collective Cultual Action
5    Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance
6    Contestational Robotics
7    Children as Tactical Media Participants
8    The Financial Advantages of Anti-Copyright

CAE on the web: www.critical-art.net



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