Art Presentations for Tactical Media

I decided it would be best to focus on a few “projects” that Garcia and Lovink specifically point out as demonstrative of a recent tendency toward “scaled-up ambitions” since tactical media practices of the 90’s

Telestreets is a decentralized network of over 200 pirate television stations utilizing both old and new technologies set up in and around Rome in opposition to the media monopoly controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s wealthiest citizen. The transmitters have a signal strength of about 3km. Garcia and Lovink discuss Telestreets in relation to criticism of the project (and Tactical Media in general) as potentially powerful but failing to keep raising the stakes and scope, ultimately becoming over-hyped and irrelevant.

Download the Telestreet doc video here
Nettime Article

Witness is a Brooklyn-based human rights group promoting video advocacy and online technologies to document human rights violations in effort to enact political and legal reform and as tool in justice proceedings. It was started by musician Peter Gabriel who noticed the power of documentary media while traveling to sites of human rights abuses during an Amnesty International tour. They claim to train their partners to turn their video and images into narrative forms and larger scale campaigns in order to increase the efficacy of the footage.

Witness video: Outlawed

Other videos

Relevant article on Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2162780?nav=tap3
Tips and Techniques

Women on Waves is an organization/mobile clinic started by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts that provides abortion information and non-surgical services to women in countries where abortions are illegal via a boat that travels to international waters. Recent campaigns include Portugal in 2004(where their entry was blocked by Portuguese war ships, and the country has since passed a pro-choice referendum on the issue ), Argentina, and Ireland. The group collaborated with Willem Velthoven for the I Had An Abortion campaign to create ACT (Art Communication Tool), which mixes print, “interactive storytelling,” bullet-proof dresses, and T-shirts in order to make the reality of abortion more public in order to catalyze change. Prototypes for the campaign were shown Greece and Amsterdam as part of large art exhibtions. The Campaign has an online portion called Women on Web, where women who have had the procedure can post their picture in a show of support for worldwide legalization.