Josephine Berry on 13 Sep 2000 17:00:58 -0000 |
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<nettime> Tactical Art in Virtual Space 2 |
X marks the Spot: Portals to Place When Josephine Bosma entitled her 1997 interview with Heath Bunting "Street Artist, Political Net Artist or Playful Trickster?" she linked together some of the key issues at work in Bunting's tactical use of the Net. Were the word 'or' to be replaced with 'and', dispensing with the false problem of choosing between three not incommensurate identity types, we would have a description of the artist which hits upon the crucial attribute of his art: the creation of friction between real and virtual space through the indeterminacy of play. In the same interview Bunting discusses a work that he would later title CCTV - World Wide Watch. His deadpan tone conveys very well the essence of the tactical mode; at once ironic, throw-away and serious: "At the moment I am working on a closed circuit television camera project across the Internet whereby you can watch various city centres in various countries of the world, for instance Tokyo, Dublin, LA and London. Each of these cameras is linked to a webpage and on that webpage you are encouraged to watch these street locations for various crimes. If you see anything, you can type the details into the text box, click a button and this information will be sent directly via fax to the local police station, for instance at Leicester Square. So it's somehow encouraging people to police themselves and save the police some labour, so they don't have to watch other people." In the final version of the project, Bunting confronts the viewer with a sequence of near-aerial CCTV views of 5th Avenue, New York; Broadgate, Coventry; the Marktplatz, Guetersloh, Germany and Oviedo, Spain. But the viewer's giddy sense of voyeuristic power, derived from the ability to view four city scenes simultaneously, laid out in their unconscious legibility for our scopophilic gratification, is undercut by the invitation to intervene. The viewer is confronted with the choice of converting the implicit power of the gaze into its explicit enactment (I am choosing to believe that the fax numbers are what Bunting says they are); a choice which splits the viewer's subject position between an occupation of the legible space of strategy and the tactical and partial space of everyday life. The contradictory nature of the spaces conflated in this work (both God-like and on-the-ground) - a spatial multiplicity which the Internet's networked expanse and digital mutability indifferently accommodates - becomes unbearable when the viewer's potential affectiveness looms into view. In contrast to the Digital Hijack where the hoped for moment of awakening is instantaneously neutralised by virtue of its inability to step outside the dominant simulacral economy, Bunting shocks the viewer awake with the unsettling possibility of cutting through the simulacral field of equivalences and precipitating an intervention into the particularities of place and its inhabitants. The viewer is accustomed to occupying both subject positions independently of each other; it is also usual to forego agency when occupying the God-like vantage point (perhaps a precondition of the fantasy of legibility?) and legibility when occupying the 'writerly' position of Wandersmann. In short, the shock delivered here is the shock of occupying the position of power where legibility and agency are combined. This dual position of legibility and involvement is not dissimilar to that occupied by the flâneur, as explored by Benjamin in his discussion of Baudelaire and the Paris of the Second Empire, who is at once enthralled by the crowd but aloof, whose fascination with this fleeting, polymorphous spectacle is a writerly one, whose style it is "to go botanizing on the asphalt" . But if CCTV - World Wide Watch playfully and critically insinuates the look of power, it also implies the reciprocal gaze of its subject. Next to the form which, in its generic simplicity, invites the viewer to reflexively dash off a note to the ever attentive forces of law and order, are set the words: "Improve self policing with further absented police force." This exhortation to internalise the burden of policing and thus further atomise and virtualise the forces of discipline until no external display of power remains, ironically articulates the ultimate Foucauldian dystopia; a dystopian order against which de Certeau's antidiscipline of tactics is practiced. Here the viewer, who can perhaps be cast as unconsciously assisting the spread and perfection of Foucault's 'political technologies of the body' by incorporating them seamlessly into the fabric of his/her life, is confronted not merely with those technologies but their articulated discourse. As with the conflation of spaces and gazes, CCTV also conflates the normally silent functioning of the technology with its explicit enunciation. Here we have a concise example of the self-conscious adoption of tactics which differs significantly from those tactics described by de Certeau. As already stated, de Certeau's point of departure is Foucault's analysis of the historical development of a diffuse set of disciplinary techniques (an overwhelmingly optical and panoptic mode of observational discipline) whose development he traces back to the advent of the rationalist discourses of the Enlightenment. An origin from which, Foucault argues, the technical modalities increasingly diverge: "Foucault thus distinguishes two heterogeneous systems. He outlines the advantages won by a political technology of the body over the elaboration of a body of doctrine. But he is not content merely to separate two forms of power. By following the establishment and victorious multiplication of this 'minor instrumentality,' he tries to bring to light the springs of this opaque power that has no possessor, no privileged place, no superiors or inferiors, no repressive activity or dogmatism, that is almost autonomously effective through its technological ability to distribute, classify, analyse and spatially individualise the object dealt with. (All the while, ideology babbles on!)ŠThis gallery of diagrams has the twin functions of delimiting a social stratum of practices that have no discourse and of founding a discourse on these practices." So as the techniques of power lock tight, so too does their ubiquitous hold over society grow silent. But, ponders de Certeau, once their silent history has been uncovered and their primary (panoptic) technique articulated, have they then fallen into decline? Was their successful ascendance not a consequence of their silent technical advances and lack of dogma? This questioning causes de Certeau to cast around for other 'technological practices', which lack the coherence of the panopticon, which may be scattered, heterogeneous and 'polytheist' but whose silence or existence outside dicourse endows them with the potential to "produce a fundamental diversion within the institutions of order and knowledge." And herein lies the paradox of de Certeau's undertaking, namely to articulate a practice of resistance whose very status as such, not to mention efficacy, relies on its resistance to articulation. But for de Certeau, it seems, the guarantor of their survival is their imbrication in the very heart of regulatory disciplines such as consumption. They constitute the ineradicable indexes of alternative techniques and practices which return, like the repressed, in the disciplinary regime which attempts to dispel them. A project by Bunting that seems to lie closer to this understanding of tactics, and yet perhaps exemplifies the difference of tactical media all the more, is his X Project begun in 1996. Combining his predilection for wandering about city streets and the semi-legal practice of tagging in chalk with his interest in the emergent social space of the Net , Bunting began a systematic programme of tagging the URL 'www.irational.org/x' in strategic places, primarily in London but also in other sites such as Bath, Amsterdam and Berlin (one presumes he simply tagged in the cities he happened to visit). If a passer by, on observing the URL, felt inclined to look it up on the Net they found a white page with minimal information on it. Underneath a JPEG derived from the chalked tag are the following three questions: "Where did you see this chalked? (Please include city and country)"; "Why do you think it was done?" and "Who do you think did it?" On filling out and submitting the questionnaire, a page which collates all the answers is downloaded. Today there are several hundred entries. The specific sites that the artist chose to tag were by no means random; in London Bunting primarily chose bridges (Hungerford and Waterloo) as well as international sites of significance to new media culture such as Clink St. (the site of an independent media laboratory Backspace where Bunting and Rachel Baker often worked), The Hub in Bath and De Waag in Amsterdam. It is likely that the bridges indicate the notion of crossing between zones - the central activity of X Project - and that the media centres also intimate concerted initiatives to depart local geography and enter into series of remote collaborations. By means of the chalk tag, Bunting has created a semiotic and functional portal between virtual and physical space. In contrast to Digital Hijack, X Project taps into the contingencies of wandering. Rather than manufacturing a shock for the viewer, caught unawares in the midst of their impervious passage through the regularised space of the search engine, Bunting positions his tag to be caught by the corner of the eye in the midst of an awkward climb up the steep steps of a bridge or in the nooks and crannies of back streets - a mode in which awareness of place is heightened. The chalked tag catches the walker in the midst of a tactical traversal and the project's completion relies upon the viewer's alertness and curiosity to pursue this index of virtual space in the midst of an actual place. Rather than reinforcing the sense of the homogeneous order of virtual space, Bunting hybridises physical and virtual space and creates a tear not only in the latter but also in the former . Interestingly, it is by making this incision in the self-containment of each - or rather making explicit the impossibility of such self-containment - that the contingent and self-erasing nature of wandering can be mapped, recorded and co-ordinated. This suggests the potential of a view from above that is created from below and a reversal of the power implied in this same reversal. Rather than the fantasy of legibility implying a disengagement from the everyday, here legibility is created by and for the walker, the subject of the gaze. Perhaps this text is written blind, but it promises the eventual possibility of being read. The series of correspondences which 'emerge' on the website brings into being the consciousness of the cumulative potential of individual wandering. Tactical media art is here shown to be not only the coming to self-consciousness of those silently resistant ways of operating, but also the power resident in this coming to consciousness. A recognition that precipitates an aggregation, and hence the realisation of the power which these myriad movements compose. The first in a long series of answers to the question "Why do you think it was done?" encapsulates this notion very well: "to collide the known with the emergent." Has VR really killed desire? Tactics and 'Post-Oedipal' Space Bunting's interplay of 'real' space and 'virtual space', their ability to interrupt each other, poses an interesting question to a popular formulation of Slavoy Zizek's. In a series of writings on cyberspace and the functioning of desire , Zizek proposes that virtualisation reveals the always-already virtual nature of reality - the role of the symbolic order - at the same time as bringing about a 'psychotic' suspension of the symbolic order that structures this same reality. In the beginning of his essay "Quantum Physics with Lacan" , Zizek illustrates this point by referencing Lacan's discussion of courtly love. For Lacan, courtly love is not a means of intensifying desire by creating more obstacles between its subject and object, but rather of concealing the fact that the possibility of satisfying desire per se does not exist; an impossibility that is concealed by its very prohibition. In Lacan's own formulation courtly love is: "A very refined manner of supplanting the absence of the sexual relationship by feigning that it is us who put the obstacle in its way." Desire, explains Zizek, is a short circuiting between the 'primordially lost Thing' and an empirical object which is elevated to the order of the former: "this object thus fills out the 'transcendental' void of the Thing, it becomes prohibited and thereby starts to function as the cause of desire." In cyberspace, however, (and for Zizek, it is important to remember, his definition of cyberspace hangs somewhere between its actual and projective forms in the absence of specific, concrete examples), when 'every' empirical object can be immediately obtained without the ordinary frustrations such as the need to cross physical space or the unavailability of the desired item, "the absence of the prohibition necessarily gives rise to anxiety." The question that is posed here is how desire can be sustained let alone function when its paradoxical nature - "the fact that desire is sustained by lack and therefore shuns its satisfaction, that is, the very thing for which it officially strives" - is lain bare. Zizek answers this by describing a trend in which the computer generation becomes increasingly unable to tolerate the look of desire in others, and are wont to forget about a possible sexual liason because, for example, they are too engrossed in playing computer games or interacting in chatrooms. As prohibition is lifted and desire declines, last ditch attempts to preserve the dignity of the sexual object are mounted such as PC and religious fundamentalism. But the real effect of these prohibitive discourses is a phobic reaction to 'normal' sexual enjoyment which is everywhere cast as perverted. This, argues Zizek, develops the subject as pathological Narcissus who prefers 'interaction' with the computer over sexual engagement with another. Both VR and 'interactivity' are in Zizek's terms 'Orwellian misnomers', covering up in the former the demise of the already virtual structuration of reality and in the latter the increasing isolation of the individual who no longer interacts properly with others. At the root of the individual's primordial envelopment in virtual space is "the dream of a language which no longer acts upon the subject merely through the intermediate sphere of meaning, but has direct effects in the real." Yoked to this dream of profound involvement, is the radical disengagement of the post-oedipal subject. The psychotic's relation to the symbolic (one which Zizek compares to the subject of cyberspace) is defined by externality and overproximity. On the one hand he/she is not interpellated into the symbolic order (the signifying chain is 'inert') and remains outside it, and on the other the gap between 'things' and 'words' is collapsed and he/she starts to treat words as things or things start to speak themselves. In cyberspace, the space between word and thing which sustains sense is collapsed, as is 'symbolic engagement' which operates in this space, resulting in radical disengagement: "I can pour out all my dirty dreams, precisely because my word no longer obliges me, is not 'subjectivised'." Interestingly, however, Zizek shies away from describing a total collapse of the symbolic economy in cyberspace or virtual reality (interchangeable terms it seems here). Instead, he sees the agreement between users to suspend the usual performativity of the symbolic order as analagous to the agreement between analyst and analysand in which the normal performativity of the speech is also suspended; the analysand can hurl verbal abuse at the analyst and it won't be taken personally. Likewise, in cyberspace, the participant consents to 'play the game' in which, despite words having little or no performative value, they are nonetheless bound by the symbolic pact of the 'act of faith' in which intersubjective relations in cyberspace are contained. One of the main difficulties with Zizek's analysis is his characterisation of cyberspace itself as the context in which this new order of subjecthood finds its perfect conditions. Although Zizek does not imply that the disappearance of prohibition is a consequence of cyberspace itself, he certainly sees cyberspace as producing no internal resistance to its unbridled advance. His homogeneous description of the typical cyber subject and his mode of activity betrays the limitation of Zizek's model; he seems invariably to be talking about a cliché of the anti-social, well-healed, masculine, avidly consuming and games playing computer geek. Cyberspace itself is cast as the ultimate consumption machine whose success lies in its ability to collapse the sign into the thing itself; the immateriality of the commodity. However, as we have seen above in the example of Bunting's work, although the Net entails this radical mutability that undoubtedly vehiculates Zizek's collapse of the word into the thing, or by which the word becomes the thing, and the thing thereby becomes as malleable as words, the collision of virtual and real space can and does occur revealing that the Net's consistency is far from simple. That is to say, the leakage between these two spheres reveals not only a resistance to the pyschotic collapse that Zizek himself ultimately denies through his recourse to the symbolic pact, but also the possibility of using virtual space to enunciate the practices of everyday life - practices which remain outside 'the proper' - into a shared language which might entail performativity. There are numerous mundane examples in which individuals feel obliged to be as good as the word they give via the Internet, but here we are also interested in the opportunity cyberspace gives for co-ordinating the confused multiplicity of inidividual idiolects, of converting tactics into something close to strategies. An exceptional example of this are the protests against the WTO which occurred in Seattle in late November/early December 1999 which serve as an example of this tranformative potential of cyberspace. Here a multiplicity of political ideologies and actors were coordinated via the Net into a formidably performative display of resistance against a powerful agent of globalisation. But without the entry of another spatial, symbolic and atom-based system of 'words and things', is Zizek's notion of our unimpeded access to the (albeit nonexistant) object of desire in cyberspace quite accurate? Does the erasure of distance between our desire for the object and the object itself, the immediacy of delivery which can be figured as the subsumption of space by time in computer networks, really guarantee receipt? Rachel Baker's work Dot2Dot reveals the very skillful capacity of the Net to frustrate desire. In this work, Baker takes her cue from the Net porn industry which typically lures the viewer/consumer deeper and deeper into a site with free 'thumbnail' GIFs promising the full scale image but which ultimately delivers the image either at a price or, if free, only on an illegibly small scale . Far from the theoretical end of scarcity which the Net promises and Zizek assumes has been achieved, digital scarcity is imposed in order to intensify desire and thus increase the monetary value of the digital object. In Dot2Dot Baker picks up on this Net porn technique and exaggerates its manipulations to reveal the powerful hold that (pornographic) commodity fetishism still has in the Net. The art website's homepage is a dot 2 dot drawing of a copulating man and woman against a deep blue background whose subject matter, although largely composed of dots and numbers, is not difficult to make out. As is usual with these childrens' games, certain areas of the final drawing are already filled in. In Dot2Dot, these parts are the woman's eye and hands, and the man's mouth, penis tip, and fingers. Here the peek-a-boo suggestiveness of certain pornographic images is undercut by the delineation rather than concealment of the sexually 'significant' parts. Each dot in the drawing also doubles as a link to another page on the site where a predictably salacious GIF is offered (e.g. "fist inserted fully into pussy") but only on condition that the viewer/consumer enters personal details such as their name and company details. Having submitted these, the viewer is brought straight to the irational.org homepage and the promise is never honoured. Through this frustrated libidinal circuit, Baker not only intimates how the traditional commodity's never-honoured 'promissory note' is still operative, but also how the consumer is willing to submit more and more personal data in its pursuit. The exchange of one real data body for the unkept promise of another. Baker's hoax can in some ways be compared with Etoy's Digital Hijack; as with the hijack, Baker is playing on the notional conformity of the viewer. The level of cooperation that individuals will countenance, their willingness to exchange valuable personal data on the vague promise of some form of libidinal gratification is at issue in this work. But unlike the hijack, the viewer has sought out this confrontation by keying in the work's URL, finding it through a search engine or entering it through the irational.org homepage. In most cases, we can surmise, the viewer's acquiescence is unusually self-conscious because it is given within the differently signifying context of an artwork. This might for instance result in the input of totally false information which, unlike with other commercial websites, would not effect the user's further passage in any adverse way. A more important difference, however, is that where Etoy attempts to alert viewers to the compromised nature of the search engine's 'neutrality' through hacking its system, Dot 2 Dot merely replicates the porn industry's production, manipulation and frustration of desire. Here, no radical alternative is even mooted. In contrast to Etoy who create an interruption and in so doing point to the manipulability of the status quo (an instance of Zizek's symbolic suspension?), Baker foregrounds the extra-technical limitations to digital malleability exerted by the intersection of symbolic and economic forces. If Baker and Bunting's works both point to the outside of an endlessly differential and simulacral field of play which challenge Zizek's reading of cyberspace, his primary discussion of prohibition and desire are confirmed rather than challenged by their work. The need to point to the stoppages, tears, leaks and limits to the virtual sphere is a central part of their work which can be seen as a way of of maintaining the function of desire which in turn produces action. The short circuiting mentioned above between the 'primordial Thing' and the empirical object, the construction of desire's object, can be seen at play within the construction of place where empirical objects are similarly invested and so animated. This is demonstrated by the promise of belonging that place exerts on the subject but can never wholely fulfill. I would like to propose that the pull exerted by place and by the things out of which place is composed, together with the subject's desire to consume these things in their quest for belonging or of jouissance, is essential to the practice of tactics which, as de Certeau points out, can be found at the heart of consumption. But hasn't place also been described here as ceding to space? And is it not more accurate to talk about the total disappearance of limit in the simulacral economy in which, if we follow Baudrillard's argument, the invasion of exchange value into all aspects of life becomes the locus of the radical equivalence of things; the end of the metaphysics to which place and desire belong? Is not the callousing of Erlebnis touched on above not also a sign, both on and offline, that this is becoming the case? Are we not so inured to the shocks of our environment that they too become merely differential? By turning finally to a work by Jodi - certainly not a categorically tactical net artwork in the manner of Heath Bunting - I will attempt to answer this problem through the trope of estrangement. An analysis of this work helps formulate the question: is it necessary to feel the exertion of place, with all the vicissitudes of desire that it might imply, in order to practice a tactics? Does the putative equivalence of things, the conversion of place into space, cancel the possibility of Erfahrung out of which, paradoxically place is created? Jodi's piece whose title, as is usual for them, is also its URL, http://sod.jodi.org is based on the source code of a 'shoot 'em up' style computer game called Wolfenstein. In the spirit of the 'open source' movement - based in part on the belief that 'software should be free', but more consistently on the belief that the best software is the product of a whole community's programming efforts rather than the isolated and secretive programming methods of commercial companies - the games company ID Software published the Wolfenstein source code in 1999(??) . This cult, multi-player game has subsequently become the raw material of several Jodi artworks . In Jodi's Web piece, the look of a programming shell interface has been simulated. That is to say, the viewer is confronted with the garishly coloured field of text boxes in which programmers write code, but which also recall early or lower order computer interfaces. This interface has the nostalgic quality of a once 'transparent' computing age in which the apparent legibility of the computer's operating system and file structures found its analogue in the rudimentary visual range (for example, pixel size and colour distribution). In this piece, Jodi have taken various sequences within the Wolfenstein source code and hyperlinked them together. This means that the utility of the original code has been rendered not only the obsolete object of aesthetic contemplation but has also been repurposed as a set of Internet hyperlinks. This would be analagous to using an old wagon wheel as the support for a coffee table. This repurposing of code is one example of the estrangement at work in http://sod.jodi.org; as with a shard from an absent lifeworld preserved in a museum, Jodi's autopsy of code and its transposition to the different programming environment of the WWW endows it with a ghostly quality. The lifeworld from which it has been severed clings to it as a negativity or absence making its existence in its new environment only a partial one. It is perhaps no coincidence then that, on actually reading the code, one notices that the coincidence of death - a typical subject of computer games - and the instrumental nautre of programming language begin to produce a macabre and amusing quasi poetry. For example, one sequence runs: "// Test if death sequence is done if (death sequence is done) { // change state to death player-state = DEAD } //end if death is done } // end if dying else // player must be death { // the player is dead, so clean up the mess" The lines 'change state to death' and 'player must be death' certainly resonate with the notion of the 'post-oedipal' state gestured to by Zizek which would, in its eternally deferred realisation, be premised on the passing out of the symbolic order into an unimaginable beyond; a place in which the old signifying chain has become 'inert'. Could we see the non-functionality of this code, accordingly, as equivalent to the non-performativity of words in cyberspace? Or does the importation of one programming language into another programming environment and its subsequent obsolescence provides us with another example of a 'limit'? Is this not an instance of how words and things are not commensurate in computer space, even if those things are made up of words or signs and how words or code can guarantee a certain set of operations in one environment which do not translate to another. Through its deconstruction into an object of contemplation, Wolfenstein allows itself to be read again as a commentary on its own casual instrumentalisation of death: "end if death is done". An inversion occurs which allows the normally buried linguistic underpinning of the game's interface to speak over and even against the very spectacle which they engender. This then would appear to be an example of how the mutability of the digital object and limit can be seen operating at the same time but not univocally. As with collage, the repurposed data object will always drag with it its former signifying context thus throwing into doubt the degree to which Baudrillard's radical equivalence of things can really be said to exist. The locus of exchange has not completely subsumed the loci of meaning, exchange value has not completely eclipsed use value (even in cyberspace), nor have words necessarily lost their performativity, especially if we allow that the instrumentality of programming language constitutes a new kind of performative utterance. Conclusion Even though data objects on the Net, or in virtual space, may not reside in their own exclusive locations in the same way that they do in real places, we have seen that they are nonetheless capable of being estranged. This estrangement, conversely, suggests a rightful place which here I have considered through functionality. The location of information objects, as with things in 'real' places to a degree, cannot be read simply from their co-existence with other things as de Certeau has suggested, but also through their functionality which might or might not be transplantable. In this respect, what we might term 'place' on the Internet, is much closer to a practice than an occupation, which is de Certeau's definition of space: "space is a place practiced" . Indeed virtual space, as with physical place, can only ever be experienced through practice; when the possibility of certain practices is rendered obsolete (the transference of a piece of code), the sense of being out of place draws our attention to its very existence in the computer network. The recognition of this heterogenous consistency of the Net provokes, in turn, the consideration that virtual space itself might well be another 'Orwellian misnomer'. Not only does the Net span the real space of its sprawling infrastructure and the representational space of the screen image (spatial categories hardly without precedent before the advent of the Net), but its totality is also filled with the material and symbolic limits common to real space evidenced, for example, in malfunctions. However where this space is radically different from either physical or representational space is the immense capacity of the digital to combine heterogenia and thus to create mutations; a capacity which becomes the leverage point of tactical net art and media. What makes the medium of the Net so interesting to net artists is the ease with which discrete functions (search engines, source codes, networked CCTV cameras etc.) can be repurposed and re-embedded into separate contexts or operations. Far from making these functionalities all equivalent, their availablity for hybridisation contains the possibility of a clash of new and old contexts or utilities. In this sense the tactics dispalyed in net art or tactical media differ from the tactics displayed by the walker in the city in which the environment is relatively fixed, and come closer to the tactics at work within language. As with language there are rules of syntax, but the mobility of its constituent parts is far greater than within the built environment. It is somewhere between the resistance of syntax and the hybridity and mobility of the online world that the tactics of net art are situated. In this respect, their work can be said to occur in an indeterminate stage between the recession of certain limits (here read in both a material and symbolic sense) and the creation of new ones. Without wishing to ignore the very real sense in which the Net courts the deadening quality of equivalence, the flattened experiential order of Erlebnis, it seems that an important realisation of tactical net art is the possibility for interrupting equivalence with hybridity. Not all spaces in the Net refelct the same degree of deterritorialisation, for example or effect the same non-performativity of language. But conversely, the deterritorialisation of the Net and its capacity for the endless reproduction of equivalent data has been seen to provide the basis upon which the scattered multiplicity of 'walkers' and idiolects can be formed into a totality which hints at the paradox of a heterogeneous yet coherent form of power emerging within the (now post?) disciplinary society. Footnotes: De Certeau is interested in the distinction made by Foucault between a 'political technology of the body' and the elaboration of a body of doctrine. In other words, the Enlightenment discourse that gave rise to the techniques employed by the disciplinary society was incommensurate with the unarticulated logic of those technical rationales. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California, 1988, p. xiv Ibid, p.xix Ibid Ibid, p.34 "The terms goes back to the discussions we had, as a group organizing the first next 5 minutes conference in the summer/fall of 1992. At that time we [were using] the term 'tactical television'Š The term 'tactical' also has a pre-history in the media activism context." From private email correspondence with Geert Lovink, 12th July 2000. Geert Lovink is a co-founder of the nettime mailinglist. See 'Empire'ŠNegri and Hardt *** "Nevertheless, the hype of the Internet is essentially based on the promise that the worldwide dissemination of new technologies might remove all barriers between people. Many critics have unmaseked this rhetoric as an escape from real existing capitalism or as promotional campaign for neoliberal barbarism. However, there is a more dangerous mistake made in the popular regard for the net as an 'alternative' territory to the 'real world', or as a place, where free and unfettered communication might become a reality. In this view, borders become something you cannot see or touch, and the net and the various networks become an arena for 'new' border policies." "<Border=0> The Art of Campaigning", Florian Schneider, Next 5 Minutes 3 Workbook, eds, David Garcia and Geert Lovink, Next Five Minutes Publications, Amsterdam, 1999. Here I am referring to the era of the Internet before '94 in which the blanket exclusion of commercial practice together with the high level of programming expertise of most users created the sense of a radically alternative space in which the Net's community was relatively free to determine its technical particularities at the same time as 'growing' a new set of social practices and possibilities. For an idealised description of these early days see Howard Rheingold's, Virtual Communities: Finding Connections in a Computerised World, Minerva edition published by Mandarin Paperbacks, London, 1995. The group RtMark is an important example of Net based cultural activists adopting the presentation forms of large corporations. This involves a large variety of tropes from the language and aesthetics of their promotional videos, to their Net-based methods for raising capital for projects, to their temporary 'mergers' with other groups to their registration of '.com' URLs. See www.rtmark.com Ibid An http Cookie is "A packet of information sent by an HTTP server to a World-Wide Web browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. Cookies can contain any arbitrary information the server chooses and are used to maintain state between otherwise stateless HTTP transactions. Typically this is used to authenticate or identify a registered user of a web site without requiring them to sign in again every time they access that site. Other uses are, e.g. maintaining a "shopping basket" of goods you have selected to purchase during a session at a site, site personalisation (presenting different pages to different users), tracking a particular user's access to a site." From FOLDOC Computing Dictionary, http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html Geert Lovink is the co-founder of the nettime mailinglist - a crucial and agenda setting space for new media culture and politics (www.nettime.org). http://www.nettime.org David Garcia and Geert Lovink, The ABC of Tactical Media, www.nettime.org, 1997 The 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), although later overturned, attempted to criminalise the"knowing" transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18 years of age. Section 223(d) prohibits the, "knowin[g]" sending or displaying to a person under 18 of any message "that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." Sited in "Supreme Court Of The United States Syllabus; Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, et al., Appellants V. American Civil Union et al. on Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; No. 96-511", reproduced on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website: http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/EFF_ACLU_v_DoJ/19970626_cda.decision The 1999 conference 'Next 5 Minutes 3' held 12-14 March in Amsterdam was dedicated to tactical media. The main topics of debate were The Art of Campaigning; Tactical Education; Post Governmental Organisations and The Technical and its organisers included David Garcia and Geert Lovink. N5M3 was an important landmark in the development of the discourse on tactical media, and included the participation of many net artists and net art afficionados including Shu Lea Chung, Rachel Baker (programme notes), Alex Galloway, Steve Kurtz, Kate Rich, David Garcia and Geert Lovink. http://www.n5m.org Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood", first published in Artforum, Summer 1967, in Art in Theory: 1900 - 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Blackwell, 1992, p.826 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London, 1996 Pierre Levy, "The Art of Cyberspace", in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey, Aperture, 1996, p.367 Ibid Rachel Baker's 1999 work Art of Work demonstrates the exact formalisation of this tactic as an artwork. As part of a bigger project in which artwork and office work are brought into relation, she encourages fellow temps to engage in 'work resource mismangement' by using their office time and equipment to creative and political ends. www.irational.org/tm/art_of_work de Certeau, Ibid, p.117 This term is used by Joh Ippolito in "The Museum of the future: A Contradiction in Terms?", July 1998, http://www.three.org/variable_media/vm_concept.html Marc Augé, Non-Places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Verso, 1997, p.49 http://www.hijack.org Hartmut Winkler, "Search Engines: Metamedia on the Internet?", Readme! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, eds. Bosma et al, Autonomedia, 1999, p.30 Ibid Here I am referring to user behaviour or navigation not the registration of URLs and the production of content which could undoubtedly be likened to settlement. Perhaps it is important to note however, in the latter case, that settlement does not relate to time spent in a certain place but rather ownership of the right to be located or to mediate a certain message. Yahoo! named its categorisation system 'the ontology', succinctly betraying the contradiction between its purported utlility and underlying bias. See Ibid,p.31 See Harmut Winkler, Ibid. "Search engines of this type are wholly insensible to questions of semantics or, to make it more clear: their very point is to exclude semantic problems of the type evident with Yahoo. Yet that is not to say that the problems themselves are eradicated. They are imposed on the users through the burden of having to reduce their questions to unambiguous strings of significants, of having to be satisfied with the mechanically selected result. All questions unable to be reduced to keywords fall through the screen of the feasible. Technical and scientific termini are relatively suitable for such a search, humanistic subjects are less suitableŠ" Ibid, p. 32 For Etoy's explanation of the Digital Hijack see www.hijack.org After search engine employees started to spot this trick merely by eye, spamdexers simply made the repeated word the same colour as the background and so rendering it invisible. For a discussion of Etoy and the history of spamdexing see Andrew Leonard's "Search Me", http://hotwired.lycos.com/packet/leonard/96/32/index3a/html, 1996 The Etoy team, in all public appearances, dress with complete uniformity. The entirely male group sport shaved heads and favour utility clothing such as municipal-style boiler suits. The picture of the Etoy member mentioned, through the anonymity of the dark glasses and casual connection to the cable - a cipher for the information technosphere - produces its member as replaceable techno-cultural 'foot soldier' (a term later employed by the group). This mode of subject positioning creates a glamorised, possibly ironic surface to a posthumanist understanding of the erstwhile divide between nature and artifice. Etoy, Ibid. Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire, Verso, 1997, p.116 Charles Baudelaire, quoted by Benjamin, Ibid, p.151 de Certeau, chapter VII, "Walking in the City", Ibid. This concept is also encapsulated by Henri Lefebvre in his term 'abstract space'. Ibid, p.94 Ibid, p.92 Ibid, p.93 It has, for example, become a common feature of both commercial and artistic websites to deploy error messages to startle the viewer into concentration - most typically these do not pressage an imminent computer crash but merely introduce a new part of the site. Josephine Bosma, "Heath Bunting: Street Artist, Political Net Artist or Playful Trickster?" Telepolis, www.heise.de/tp Ibid In "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire", Benjamin, Ibid, p.36 Ibid, p.46 Ibid, p.49 www.irational.org/x "I like playing. Yesterday I was walking around climbing on things, drawing little drawings with chalkŠI spent many years just walking around the streets." In Bosma, Ibid Since the advent of X Project the URL's appearance in public space has become ubiquitous through its use in advertising. However the chalked tag's lack of any other identifying feature makes Bunting's use of the URL more ambiguous than its usual association with a commercial product. It's dubious legal status also alligns it with the tactical appropriation of public space or spectacle for ends which ultimately militate against its regulatory administration. www.irational.org/x See "Quantum Physics with Lacan" in The Individible Remainder, "Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being" in The Plague of Fantasies and " Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?" in The Zizek Reader. In Slavoy Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, Verso, 1996 Sited in Ibid, p.189 Ibid, p.190 Ibid Ibid Ibid, p.196 Ibid, p.196 www.irational.org/tm/dot2dot For a discussion of the relationship between the free or 'gift' and commercial porn economy, see Frédéric Madre's "Porn Free", Mute Magazine, issue 14, 1999 irational.org is the server name and group working title for Rachel Baker, Heath Bunting and others - www.irational.org It is certainly possible to see the tendency for commercial companies to embrace the open source movement as an instance of the commercial cooption of a tactical practice. Here, the collective writing of code, which occurs as a totally voluntary and distributed activity, can be converted back into a commercial product and sold on the open market. They have also created a CDRom based work, SOD, 1999, which converts the interactive 3D game space of Wolfenstein into a series of black and white, patterned and entirely abstract spaces. The geometry of the original game space and the first-person view point is stripped of its illusory effects and revealed as a sequence of basic, albeit animated, Euclidean spaces. The preservation of the game's original sound effects, however, renders its Brechtian act of desublimation even more potent. http://sod.jodi.org de Certeau, ibid, p.117 -^- www.yourserver.co.uk/crashmedia -^- ->- www.metamute.com -<- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net