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from:
Small, Clumsy, and Intimate Devices for Awkward Hybrid Settings
(report)
The workshop offered insight into potential ways of utilizing awkwardness to offer alternative ways of being together online. It opened up a space of sharing uncomfortable moments of a time we were all forced to have a solely online interaction with the world. Sharing awkward online anecdotes spoke to a facet of hybrid existence that is only ever spoken of informally, and never addressed practically. Yet the making of small clumsy intimate devices addressed this topics with a tactical approach. It encouraged participants to challenge the formality of online meetings, and interact with the screen and people behind it, in a more imaginative way. red thread reflection
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from:
Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll
(report)
red threadDuring the opening remarks by Geert Lovink and lecture by Joana Moll for the In-Between Media Conference, crisis was a running yet implicit theme. Geert's opening was an invitation to reflect upon hybrid practices as a way to confront crises. Or, more broadly speaking, how can we come together and act collectively, overcoming distances, absences, and movement restrictions, using the media we have available. On the other hand, Joana's talk pointed out how the very media we seek to ally with is itself a source of crisis, both towards our conception of privacy and the environment. Nevertheless, she still resorts to the web-based formats to make her point in Carbolytics. She uses the site of immaterial-computer-ideology, the interface, as a ground to show its contradictions and seams. Maybe this is what tactical media looks like: using media against itself - a media in crisis. Tactical media, as a proposal of a possible aesthetics and politics of the moving and networked image is, perhaps, a crisis in the very concept of media. Realizing that media (which sees itself as a somewhat immaterial presentation of the absent) has an overwhelmingly material existence and that doing things with it means to deal with this materiality (and in the case of the internet, that implies working materially at an infrastructural level), rather than casting it aside to convey or represent a message. Tactical media is, then, not about using media to do something else (making political claims, communicating or "raising awareness") but the use of existing media as an already material and, therefore, political (agency with real material implications) practice.
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from:
Practices of Streaming Resistance
(report)
Live Streaming can bring people together and offer support in the time of crisis, when other forms of connection may be impossible, be it COVID or war. DIY live streaming can be an effective method of political resistance. Although there are many tensions present: between the political agency of self hosting and the technical restrictions, open source and accessibility, urgency and quality. Experimenting instead of just theorizing, and having fun with streaming, could antagonize the doomy feeling of our day-to-day reality. red thread
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from:
From Tactics to Strategies
(report)
The red thread of this session is one of the responsibilization, from the little practices and misuses of platforms to the bigger strategies to adopt in the face of powerful technological actors. We are too often ready, though we do not admit yet even recognize it, to sacrifice technological independence by using Big Tech, hosting on its “cloud” and naibely archiving on its platforms. If we need to go from tactics to strategies, we need to start putting our own practices as activists into question, learn from past experiences and engage in new ways with our current technological context.
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from:
Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo
(report)
red threadTrends, Tactics and Aesthetics: the TikTok Limbo confronts a reality where scrolling is second nature, a cure for boredom and a window into connecting through niche subcultures. In the panel we learned how a mainstream TikTok trend was able to transform the confines of the home during the pandemic into a space of ambient play and pleasure. We were made to reflect on how scrolling has come to strcuture how we experience the world and the ways it can be complexified to prioritize pleasure production. We looked forward with hope at niche trends and the ways they can serve as a critique against the very platform they exist on. Finally we were made to recognize how scrolling connects us if we look past the individual action and consciously decide to use it differently.