Description

Tactical Media : Steps Towards Interruption, Community, Autonomy

Description:

This workgroup invites artists, scholars, and activists whose work investigates tactics of engagement and opposition through performance and media. We understand tactical media to include the body, imagery, sound, new media, cutting edge technology development, objects, and text. The workgroup will discuss the relationship between means and ends, how media shapes that which we strive for, tactics of making legible and disrupting technologies of power, the role of the audience as participants in open-ended tactical media performances, and the potential of tactics of engagement to generate new forms of association and autonomy beyond dynamics of antagonism.

Related themes and issues:
– Tactical media in transnational social movements, its effectiveness, ways in which performance and/ as media redefined notions of political efficacy.
– Media choreographies: what notions of embodiment and social mobilization do tactical media advance? What forms of dis/engagement are called forth through media tactics?
– Trans-media. How have practices of resistance evolved to include new tactics that address changing power configurations? How does this transfer take place and what does it convey about understanding and intervening on current scenarios of oppression?
– New media limitations such as the digital divide, individual vs. collective agency, the conflicting participatory imperative, different contexts and their agendas (digital literacy, State-regulated programs, politics and lives not accounted for in current community media projects).
– The relationship between social movements and the rapidly changing media ecology.
– Temporality of media tactics. Long-term change (such as media pedagogy and access to media production) vs. tactical media actions as event (media used to disrupt, reveal, mobilize).
– Shortcomings of framing activism through “tactics.” What other conceptualizations of means and ends through performance may we advance? What are the local terms describing a plan of action and the media utilized to mobilize it?
– Choreography as analytic lens. What does this framing contribute in regards to thinking about bodies, media, tactics.
– Troubling the politics of media tactics: Right-wing and conservative mobilizations. Struggles over symbols, slogans, hashtags.
– Indigenous media. How are cosmologies and ways of being in the world conveyed and manifested through tactical media in First Nations’ struggles?
– Feminist and queer media. What notions of embodiment, bodies and identity or disidentification are mobilized through mediated performance?
– Tactical media as interfacing race. Race as social configuration and the usefulness of new media practices in engaging the politics of racialization.
– Performance art as tactical media. The symbolic, the aesthetic and the poetics of relation to manifest politics.
Interdisciplinary tactics: Conceptual art as tactical media.
– Technologies of capture. Surveillance. Subjects, corporations, and the State. Privacy.
– “Obsolete” media.
– Online/Offline tensions and relations.
– Locative media and geolocation as tactical media.
– Hemispheric media: moving together, moving beyond. Cannibalism, hybridity, transcoding.

Format:

Our sessions will be structured around three components: discussions of critical essays that participants will have read in advance; presentations of participants’ work (scholarly essays, performances, or media practices); and practice as research, in which through hands-on exercises we will devise performances tackling different tactical media approaches to engage issues relevant to the city of Montreal.

Before the Encuentro, participants will be asked to send final project descriptions and papers. Conveners will assign a respondent to each paper or creative/ activist project. Respondents will provide feedback and lead discussion. Participants will also be responsible for reading the provided material and browsing digital case studies. Additionally, we will ask the group to bring ideas about media and performance in response to the issue of Manifest! as it applies to Montreal.