Tactical Media

At the most basic level, tactical media come out of critical cultural practices. It defies authority and bourgeoisie art, as well as other institutional/professional structures. An example of tactical media:
The Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). The CAE has provided us with a concise and complete definition of tactical media:

“Tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that will contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture”.

Next 5 Minutes is a group in Amsterdam that utilized the concept of tactical media. They brought together different works that were based on tactical media and fuses art, politics and media. They have information about the festivals on their website.

The Yes Men Institute for Applied Autonomy is another example of a tactical media group. (Note- the website randomly switches from English to French to Spanish- making it very difficult to understand what they do).

One of Canada's most well known media jammers and magazines, Adbusters, is my favorite type of tactical media. The magazine publication is visually interesting and put together with a witty edge that is often lacking in Canadian texts. They take existing media productions and play with the context/content to make a similar ad with a completely inverted meaning. Their collection of "spoof ads" is quite amusing and inspiring for VCC grads who hope to make a differenc in the world like me.

One thing to note about tactical media groups is that they do not wish to bring about radical change or revolutions because they believe that it is not possible to create such massive systemetic movements. Instead, they opt for "molecular" interventions- small movements and interventions similar the ones we did as part of our class. However, after 9/11, the critique on politics and capitalism has gained new life and now asks for revolutionary practices. Tactical media and interventions provide the public with the revolution they need. Gene Ray comments that tactical media are not prepared to fit into this role because of the lack of an overarching strategy or system to resist. It is also important to note that tactical media have now found success in institutions and art worlds even though they were not originally created for such success. As Gene Ray notes,

"Tactical media now finds itself in a world that it did not forsee and that directly undergoes some of its founding assumptions. Mutations of thought, beyond anything so far produced, are needed to adjust theory and practice to the new realities of global anticapitalism and permanent war- and to avoid the neutralizations of official approval".

Another example: the popular iPod posters that had taken over our metropolitan cities were infiltrated and inverted by Forkscrew to make iRaq posters. the iRaq posters followed a similar visual pattern- as you can see in the image. They discussed the death counts, Abu Ghraib and other Iraq war realities that don't always make it into the media.

This is an excellent example of successful visual parodies, detournement, culture jamming, and tactical media.