Tactics

Abstract

According to Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter in their article ‘Dawn of Organized Networks’, “it is retrograde that tactical media in a post-Fordist era continue to operate in terms of ephemerality and the logic of ‘tactics’” (Lovink and Rossiter, 2005: 2-3). This essay focuses on the above quote in various ways: It approaches the concept of tactical media and provides a brief description of the entity, as well as explains the rooted aspect of short-terminism and concentrates on its logics. All this is related to the thoughts of most influencing theoreticians and my own experience within this specific field.

Tactical Media characteristics

There have been numoerous studies of ‚wired‘ political engagement in all its diverse forms, network-based activism and political organization (e.g., clicktivism, smart mobs) and hacktivism chief among them. While I do cross paths with some of these studies in my treatment of electronic civil disobedience and other hacktivist tactics, my interests lie in articulating the aesthetic strategies of artist-activists producing persuasive games, information visualizations, and hybrid (we might even say ‚new‘) forms of academic criticism. (Raley, 2009: 5)

According to the above author, as well as other influencing theoreticians, a new form of art expression emerges from the digital culture. Named tactical media, the entity got refined during the last few years of academic study and cyber-artistic activism; finally morphing into an extraordinarily extremist movement underlined with strong ideological background and guerilla tactics.

There is no simple way to describe this radical interest group. According to Raley:

Tactical media are what happens when cheap do it yourself media made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics are exploited by those who are outside of the normal hierarchies of power and knowledge. (…) It is not simply about reappropriating the instrument but also about reengineering semiotic systems and reflecting critically on institutions of power and control. (Lovink in Raley, 2009: 16)

As presented by the author, the concept of tactical media puts the pressure on the creative process via two important aspects: the idea of reapplying a new media item and the deeply rooted thought of opposing the current power structure. The author describes the second aspect more precisely:

In its most expensive articulation, tactical media signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible. Tactical media operates in the field of the symbolic, the site of power in the postindustrial society. (...) [Tactical Media’s] critical object is the substitution of one message for another, the imposition of an alternative set of signs in the place of the dominant. (Raley, 2009: 6-7)

Following the explanation of the term one may think of this artivist media practice as balancing on the edge of extreme power; planting the idea in the minds of people, disappearing from the scene and waiting for it to grow. This fast pace of action working in ‘new’ fields of communication, omitting strategy and approaching the system with a viral attack, as well as the loose structure and ephemerality of bodies and actions create a situation where tactical media may be seen as problematic. As addressed by Lovink and Rossiter:

Tactical media too often assume to reproduce the curious spatio-temporal dynamic and structural logic of the modern state and industrial capital: difference and renewal from the peripheries. But there’s a paradox at work here. Disruptive as their actions may often be, tactical media corroborate the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short-termism. It is retrograde that tactical media in a post-Fordist era continue to operate in terms of ephemerality and the logic of “tactics”. Since the punctuated attack model is the dominant condition, tactical media has an affinity with that which it seeks to oppose. This is why tactical media are treated with a kind of benign tolerance. There is a neurotic tendency to disappear. Anything that solidifies is lost in the system. (Lovink and Rossiter, 2005: 2-3)

Ephemerality and Tactics

While analyzing tactical media in general as a search for ephemerality and the logics of tactics, one should first direct his attention to the words of most influencing theoreticians covering the field. Looking back at the examples and characteristics of this specific media field, one may notice that the concepts of short-terminism/ephemerality and the preference of tactics over strategy are strongly linked to each other. As presented by Raley:

Choosing tactics over strategy might seem to suggest a certain temporal structure: the temporary rather than the protracted, the unguarded and unexpected moment rather than the long-range plan. (Raley, 2009: 9)

The author while quoting Martin further explores this idea of invisible, infected substitutes carrying out the unexpected and unrevealed plan:

Incident based parasitic media response takes place in a very specific time and space. There is no need for the parasite to live longer than a few days or even a few seconds. The more complex system is generative parasitic media response. Generative parasites must adapt and grow with their host system. This growth creates an allowance for greater sustainability of backdoors or hijacks. A parasite need not take advantage of its host’s vulnerability to hijack. It is in the best interest of the parasite to live and feed alongside its host. (Martin in Raley, 2009: 9)

Similarly as the described parasite attacks a body, tactical media feed on the minds of its viewers by planting memories and ideas, spreading the ideology hidden within the transmitting medium. Following, the nature of tactical media (in its viral tactics) promotes information exchange between the viewer and performer. According to Holmes “there are two factors that help explain the consistency of self-organized actions” (Holmes, 2008: 527). The first one is called ‘capacity for temporal coordination at a distance’ and is strongly linked with a constant evolution of a shared environment. The second one is called by him the ‘existence of a common horizon’ and is based on a link between the scattered performers. The concept of audience is therefore a constantly changing one:

To concieve of tactical media in terms of performence is to point to a fluidity of its actants, to emphasize its ephemerality, and to shift the weight of emphasis slightly to the audience, which does not simply complete the signifying field of work but records of a memory of the performance. And here we must once again place tactical media in context of Bourriaud’s commentary on contemporary relational art, to stress that the audience is an analytic category, an experimental rather than ontological entity. (…) The audience concept is thus as flexible and ephemeral as the artistic activity itself. (Raley, 2009: 12-13)

While focusing on the question why is tactical media still keeping this specific structure, I find important to recall the Critical Art Ensemble’s comparison to Scythians (CAE, 1994: 14-15). As the authors keep investigating traces of power-flow in transition between nomadic dynamics and sedentary structures, they pinpoint the very true nature of the analyzed entity. They bring a story of an ethnic group of nomadic warriors whose land was too hostile to inhabit. Due to the conditions they kept pillaging the neighboring territories. Due to the lack of value for the land itself the warriors were in constant move – being unable to localize as well as with unstable and shifting leadership. This created “an invisible empire that dominated ‘Asia’ for twenty-seven years, and extended as far south as Egypt” (CAE, 1994: 14).

Driven by the same mechanism as the Scythian empire, tactical media does not want to be centralized. Similarly as the ancient warriors, tactical media projects prefer the ‘hit and run’ tactic as well as the phantom nature, as this may seem to be the only way of avoiding getting eaten by itself or the power they are meant to oppose.

Experience

During the last few months I had a chance to get closer to tactical media than I ever imagined. Recently I saw a movie on YouTube presenting the freshly growing technique of dead-dropping – a hybrid form of art combining digital data exchange and graffiti. Due to the fact I always was interested in street-art, wallpainting, urban activism and I always could declare myself as a fully armed urban-pirate, I watched the movie and got infected with the ideology of free culture, file exchange without Internet connection, and the viral unconventional approach to embedding data within a material urban landscape. The thought of installing USB flash drives within the city walls in places that are not covered by cameras grew in my head rapidly. I prepared my driller, stencil, glue and a stripped pendrive. I infected another person with my plan and went out to the city during night (as I used to with spray-paint). After the flash drive was glued into a building wall we vanished from the scene leaving no trace behind. In this particular example, the ephemerality of dead-drops is not found in the idea that sooner or later the drive will stop working due to the usage of material. As for my experience with this technique, ephemerality could be found the other day when we went to check if there was any additional data on the spot – the hole in the wall was even bigger than we drilled - both the stencil and the pendrive were gone.

Now as I think about this specific experience with a freshly emerged art practice, I am glad the USB vanished from the wall. Even though it is not there, someone who took it off got infected by the described ideas, and hopefully, one more ghost in Warsaw will try to spread the message under the banner of Jolly Roger.

Summary

While answering the problem stated by Lovink and Rossiter, one should bare in mind that the concepts of tactics over strategy and the preference of ephemerality over still structure are closely bound together. This is even more visible while looking at the participation of audience, transmission of ideology, viral structure of planting memories and ideas, artistic expression, and liquid structure. I believe tactical media, even though the common guerilla connotations and ‘borrowings’ of other artistic techniques, is best described by Raley in terms of its never-ending pressure on ephemerality of body and idea – its temporal nature:

Tactical media is performance for which a consumable product is not a primary endgame; it foregrounds the experiential over the physical. It leaves few material traces. As the action comes to an end, what is left is primarily living memory. (Raley, 2009: 13)

Bibliography and Readings:

Rita Raley, ‘Introduction: Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance’c e , in Tactical Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 1-30.

Critical Art Ensemble, ‘Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance’, in The Electronic Disturbance, New York: Autonomedia, 1994, pp. 10-43.

Geert Lovink, ‘An Insider’s Guide to Tactical Media’, in Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, pp. 267-287.

Michel de Certeau, ‘On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life', trans. By Fredric Jameson and Carl Lovitt, Social Text 3 (1980): 3-43.

Brian Holmes, ‘Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow’, Third Text 22.5 (2008): 525-534.

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, 'The Dawn of Organized Networks', Fibreculture 5 (2005), http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-029-dawn-of-the-organised-networks/

Lev Manovich, ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Production to Mass Cultural Production?’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 319-331.

Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2010, pp. 134-151.