[-empyre-] Click for activism

["Melinda Rackham" <melindar@acmi.net.au>]

Hey all
Welcome to the first week of 2004 online forums.This week's discussion
focuses on the issues surrounding the art, ethics and artefacts of tactical
medias.

The age of distributed media has facilitated political awareness and
activism to a mass audience. From clicking to feed the hungry at
www.thehungersite.com, to experiencing in real time first hand accounts of
the bombing of Belgrade on the (original) Syndicate mailing list, to more
recently the Salam Pax blogs from Bagdad, world issues seem very close to
home. We've clicked to email politicians and institutions about local arts
funding issues and global art sackings, and there were many eager
mouse-clicking soldiers in ®TMark's Toy Wars campaign, who jointly plummeted
the stock price a corporation who tried to destroy an online art group.

Today we a take it for granted that mainstream media has a vested interest,
and artists and writers use their skills to create another point of view.
These artworks come under the banner of tactical media  - 'do it yourself'
media, where mass distribution networks are used to critique and respond to
social issues. They never present a monolithic perspective, but rather are
individuals or loose collations defined by their activity which intervenes
into, often subverting or reformatting, the images, texts and icons of
mainstream culture.

2004 presents artists who use their medium in a variety of tactical ways.
This can take the form of boat-people.orgs website, a media distribution
centre, campaign engine and shop where everything is free; or media producer
Sam de Silva's  glossy  print magazine and online digital media channel
SPINACH7, which  covers art issues, culture and technology for diverse
audiences in the Australian Pacific region. Another approach is through the
role paying game genre, where the Escape from Woomera Project Team recreates
the refugee experience within a detention camp, distributing their prototype
game mod online.

In the gallery context artists like Sue Dodds uses live performances and
video installations to challenge and celebrate the ethics of our society's
obsessions with fame, entertainment and spectacle, while Scott Redford seeks
to avoid the usual deployment of the high/low culture divide of popular
culture,  instead adopting a strategy of immersion rather than critique in
his installation and his video work which will be screened on SBS television
as part of 2004's ArtTV program.

As gallery, television and internet audiences we are equally participants as
we look, listen, and click to get involved.
------------------------

boat-people.orghttp://www.boat-people.org was born between the first
sighting of the Tampa and the 2001 federal election. Comprising artists,
webheads, an architect, video guerillas, IT geeks and a couple of
disembodied electronic voices, this group's projects range from online works
and digital distribution of instructions for subversive origami to realtime,
embodied events: all attempts to untangle the paranoid pathologies of nation
and border.


Sue Dodd is a Melbourne based artist working with live performance and video
installation. She is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary Art
Spaces and sessional lecturer in Computer Mediated Art at Victoria
University of Technology.

The Escape from Woomera Project Team http://www.escapefromwommera.org
comprises Ian Malcolm, Kate Wild, Julian Oliver, Kipper, Andrea Blundell,
Justin Halliday, David Jewsbury, Stephen Honegger, Programmer X, Programmer
Y, Monique J and friends. The team has been drawn from the diverse fields of
commercial game development, new media art and investigative journalism.

Melinda Rackham http://www.subtle.net is an artist, writer and producer; and
curator of Networked for 2004. Her internationally shown and awarded online
practice has investigated aspects of online identity, locality, sexuality,
viral symbiosis, avatar and trans species relations. She recently completed
her PhD on Virtual Reality Networked Environments.

Scott Redford is a Brisbane based artist and sometime curator, born on the
Gold Coast in 1962. He has exhibited nationally since 1983 and
internationally since 1997. In 2001/2003 Redford was the recipient of the
Australia Council Residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Redford's
latest exhibition work in Australia includes Fieldwork: Australian
Contemporary Art 1968-2002 Ian Potter Centre: NGV and his last curatorial
foray was This Is Not America at the Queensland College of Art Gallery,
Brisbane in April 2004.

Sam de Silva http://www.spinach7.com is a media producer and facilitator who
is interested in exploring and implementing ways of connecting audiences
with the complex stories about the messy world around us. He is the
co-ordinator of the independent content host 'myspinach.org', producer of
SPINACH7 magazine and lecturer of the Net Communications subject at
Melbourne University. In his spare time, he puts together short video
stories.




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