Media activism. Forms of popular media appropriation

The research project aims at a systematic and historical stock-taking of those forms of media appropriation whose chief characteristics include "incompleteness" and "openness" (Meikle 2002). "Popular media appropriation" is understood as the development, social re-interpretation and use of such incomplete and open media in a way that is not covered by formal social normative systems, leading to a potential of non-censorable publics. The project represents the first comprehensive work on a subject whose ephemeral character and roots in non-institutionalized settings has meant that it has remained on the margins of media studies. In historical terms, the project focuses on the present, but includes a retrospective of the precedents and early forms of media activism, ranging from Graffiti and the man-media of early modernity to early 20th century radio activism and the community TV movement of the 1970s and 80s. The forms of media activism examined in the project include culture jamming, hacktivism, alternative media, tactical media, electronic civil disobedience, electronic street theatre, swarming, and the bricolage movement. Key preliminaries to the project include Meikle`s "Future Active" (2002), on Giannetti`s work the media aesthetics in Bakhtin`s work on popular disobedience in carneval (Giannetti 2000, Bakhtin 1987), Lovink and Garcia`s work on tactical media (Garcia & Lovink 1997), and DeCerteau`s theory of action (DeCerteau 2000). Apart from printed literature, current resources include key online forums such as nettime and rhizome, and interviews with activists and artists. The project on media activism forms part of the inter-faculty research area Innsbruck Media Studies at Innsbruck University. It will be carried out in cooperation with Zurich University of the Arts. The outcome will be a knowledge base on media activism that will lead to an improved conceptualization of and facilitate further research on the subject of media activism.

The research project Activist Media Popular Forms of Media Appropriation started out from the premises that there are forms of using and creating media with the intention of creating a public for dissenting voices, voices of protest, disobedience, and resistance, that do not find themselves adequately reflected in the mainstream media. Its intention was to identify such media and describe them from a historical and a systematic angle. Even though the term media activism and activist media became widespread only in the second half of the 1990s, when computers and internet became accessible for a large number of people, the aim of the project was to go beyond the narrow identification of media activism with tactical media that dominated the early theorizing the phenomenon in the1992. Tactical media theory sought to bring together the tactical behavior of consumers, as described by Michel de Certeau, with new forms of political activism emerging in a historical context of globalization and neo-liberalism, with the security/terror dualism as the paradigmatic political modulation. The ambition of the tactical media movement was in great part to create media interventions that would articulate dissenting political positions in a context when established structures of resistance, and their respective ideological underpinnings, would often be part of the problem itself. Often cited examples of tactical media activism are the actions carried out in connection with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. In order to gain a more historical perspective, we connect media activism as a phenomenon of modernity and post-modernity with early forms of resistant cultural practices, often of a performative kind (speech, songs, masquerade, etc). These forms continue to provide a paradigmatic aesthetics for current forms of media activism. For example, the grotesque body form resurfaces in biopolitical media activism (for example, Google Will Eat Itself by uebermorgen.com) and the ancient techniques of masking and parody in actions that work, for example, with fake web sites (as the Yes Mens gatt.org). The print revolution marked a historical passage towards media technologies in the modern sense. Print media such as posters and pamphlets were outstanding activist media in the 19th century and continue to be significant, along with political graffiti. On a systematic level, a distinction can be drawn between constructive and deconstructive media activism. The former, exemplary for would apply to social movement media, alternative media, citizens media etc. aimed at primarily at social change, the latter to forms that intervene on the semiotic (e.g. culture jamming) and technological levels (e.g. hacking), subverting and transgressing existing cultural and technological codes and boundaries, with the intervention itself being the message. Even though mostly associated with the tradition and agendas of the political left, activist media have also been used and developed for anti-liberal purposes. Finally, over the last few years a new arena for media activism emerged, centering on the political and legal frameworks around media production, rather than on the media or their content. The main focus of this kind of activism has been the area of copyright, the development of alternative licenses, and new cooperative models based on the sharing of media resources.