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from: Small, Clumsy, and Intimate Devices for Awkward Hybrid Settings (report)

Wait. questionHow are hybrid settings actually affecting the way we sense others’ presence in public events? questionHow can we bring intimacy when hybrid media interrupt instead of facilitating modes of togetherness? In this three-hour workshop, participants built their own small, clumsy, and intimate devices to hijack the idea of hybridity.
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

questionGeert commented on the reasons this event came to being as well as its objectives: After the isolating Covid pandemic, how can we think and act in hybrid terms? How can we bring together people that are not in the same place? These questions have to be tackled through new hybrid practices and tactics for organizing, streaming, and reporting events. The In-Between Media Conference attempts to be an experiment in these practices while creating a forum for sharing expertise on how to use (digital) media tactically. Lovink also commented on how after the Covid pandemic we quickly moved on to another crisis: the war in Ukraine. Finally, he stressed that the different research lines pursued by INC - hybrid events, meme research, tactical media in the war, and experimental (video) publishing - come together under the question concerning the aesthetics and politics of moving images. Or, in other words, questionthe tactical media question: how can we make local and temporal connections using media? How can we make a hybrid combination of connections?
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

What do we make of activism today? Is there still a space of possibility for tactical media when it is controlled by tech giants? What has citizen journalism become in the era of TikTok? Visual culture now, according to Donatella, is a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. “At a time in which computation has become hegemonic, how do we build counter-hegemony, when images become hardly visible to the human eye?” question
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

As image and information flows are by design hidden in computation, what is most powerful: images or codes? Are coders or photographers more needed, in our context? According to Donatella, the Syrian rebels have showed us the importance of codes, beyond images. What we need now is a generation that thinks beyond the ideality of the image, as well as beyond “just an image”. We need to think about the image first and foremost by thinking about non-images, and their increasing roles in conditioning the former.question
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Do you find yourself in TikTok limbo? Ever since the video-sharing app popped up in 2016, TikTok has become an omnipresent media whose discursive content is having impacts well beyond the containment of the platform. Following its predecessors Vine and Musical.ly, TikTok prioritises short-format videos, self-referential humour, and user duetting. In the absurdity and vastness of our digital existence, TikTok is the place where niche internet cultures blend with the mainstream through an uninterrupted outpour of microtrends. As addictive as it is endless, the draw of the TikTok algorithm got us scrolling away the days. questionBut how is TikTok becoming more than a pastime distraction? What is the amplifying power of this platform within wider public discourse? That is the question that is explored in the panel ‘Trends, Tactics and Aesthetics: the TikTok Limbo’.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

She asks, questionis corecore going through the motions of aesthetical resistance without actually embodying it and making it its core? She explains that online subcultures are like zombie beings, they have skeletons that are recognizable to us, that share ideas between users and aesthetic interests. However, the meat of this body is from what she’s seen is kind of rotting and mutating to a point where it is hard to trance. Trends that are usually static and easy to trace have become more fluid and tricky with social media. This aesthetic ambiguity of online subculture, if we take time to think about it and its implication it could push is a direction of actual resistance and tacticality. quote“Corecore has the potential to be very activating for users.”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka concludes her presentation with the question: “Is corecore something that can break out of this zombification or will it just continue existing and just be animated by the sheer speed of social media? Will the platform absorb this public critique or will there be away for users to break out of this very unusual cycle?” quote question
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

So, why scrolling? Jordi’s interest in it starts with the fact that scrolling is a practice that can be datafied. It is also a place of amazement. We spend a lot of our time during the day just sitting and scrolling. This is a motion that technological devices have created. He wants to see scrolling in a theoretical way, this perspective as a symbolic form. The visual perspective of scrolling has a deeper philosophical meaning. This is because perspectives structure the way we experience the world. So the question becomes: question“how does scrolling come to structure the way we experience the world?”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi asks, question“why does scrolling have this power over us, why are we succumbing constantly into it?” Scrolling as a place for pleasure production. The information is not just for consumption but for pleasure production. He wanted to abandon theory, see scrolling as engaging in practices of pleasure. He admits that he did both TikTok and theory wrong in his approach to this project, he did not have a proper theoretical framework and the TikToks he made were very weird, there was no coherent line through it. The audience laughs as he follows this thought with a playful request to like and subscribe to his TikTok channel @infinitescroller. Now that he knows about corecore he says, his videos aren’t as weird as he previously thought. He explains that he had attempted to hijack or infiltrate trends to see if he could gain viewers for his videos but he failed and did not become a popular TikTok creator during the pandemic. His most popular video was located at a skate park so there is a good chance the viewers were skaters and that is why it gained views.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

The round table starts off with some technical problems with the mics, which again elicits knowing chuckles from the audience. mood Dunja, Tina, Jordi and Agnieszka sit around a table facing the audience. Dunja wants to explore the potential for tacticality with TikTok and the notion of dual tacticality. She notes how boredom is appropriated and exploited by TikTok and there is a need from the users to employ media tactics. Platform intervention that are steering ideologies and dual tactics that generate in the platform environment. She asks question“how are users are being invited to employ platforms to convey certain political or social action while also having to fight this platform giant that has its own interests in the matter?”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

questionDunja asks what are the different sites of subversion, reconceptualization of the platform, things that might not change the platform so much but resignifying, recontextualizing what you’re already doing? What are the possibilities for the users to change their attitude towards those types of appropriations instituted by the platform? Users perceive platform powers as marginal, tolerated rather than defeatist, a kind of acceptance that “we’re trapped now in this environment.” We are fighting against platform power, tension between the two ideological struggles between corecore being left-wing, these ideologies mutating into right-wing ideologies facilitated by the platform, fighting the algorithm as an ideological battle. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka responds that users are attempting to navigate this struggle. The trick is to stay vigilant and think of the wider implications of the decontextualized snippets. The platform intends for us to view them as they all fit together but it is important to think of them individually. The ambiguity makes it interesting but also dangerous. Tina adds that the platform doesn’t recognize the ideological stance. question“Is it the videos or the algorithm that dictate the ideological trend?” opinionAgnieszka answers that it is unclear what role the algorithm plays in the creation of subcultures. She says corecore originally, this being only a few months ago (the audience laughs at the newness of the trend) was anti-capitalist. It then exploded into other hashtag subcultures. The fact that there is no cohesiveness makes it interesting and the platform does not want transparency of their algorithm.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Dunja then raises the question of affordances. question“Are there certain ideas on what types of affordances on TikTok are relevant for being used in different types of tactical ways as well?”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Dunja asks for a reflection on the tension between the visual field on TikTok and invisible, what structures our experience on the platform. The visual field is the main arena of possibility, TikTok is a visual platform or medium. She asks question“What is the relationship between visual medium and user tactics?”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

questionDunja then asks “what is the relationship between what the platform requires users to visualise and how users are using these visual affordances on the platform to ponder on all of these invisible structures that flow through the platform?”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi responds with questions of his own: question“How do we act tactically with the visual?” He is more interested in all of the practices around the visual, both production and consumption. question“What are we doing with these practices, how can we make these practices tactical or political rather than something of the world? Is art production a way of political engagement in the world or is it something outside the world?” It is more about the practices around it, changing how we see it. Reconceptualizing the practices.