Critical / tactical / militant / imminent
What makes critical media practice?
- indispensable, crucial, decisive, life-affirming
- of, relating to, or being a threshold, a turning point, an important juncture, having an agenda
- what’s needed, what’s at stake.
In this conversation, we aim to rehearse this definition, recapping earlier approaches to critical media & technological practice such as Phil Agre’s concept of critical-technical practice (CTP), tactical media, or militant media. Rather than a historiography, we will take a walk across these and other approaches to critical media, to look at instances of intervention, disruption, resistance and refusal that expose and subvert the uncritical informatics approach to socio-political thickness of life and nonlife.
This is a collective gathering and everyone is invited to come and discuss with us. We will start with short inputs by Cristina Cochior, Mona Hedayati, Femke Snelting, and Johannes Bruder, and then open the discussion. Please feel free to bring and share your own critical media practices.
The conversation is organized by Mona Hedayati and Johannes Bruder.
References
Agre, Philip E. 2009. “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI.” In Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner, and Leslie George Gasser, Reprinted 2009 by Psychology Press. New York London: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group. https://www.pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html.
Ali, Syed. 2016. “A brief introduction to decolonial computing.” XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students. 22. 16-21. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2930886.
Badano, Riccardo, Tomas Percival, and Susan Schuppli. 2024. Militant Media CRA#2. Leipzig: Spector Books.
Barnett, Fiona, Zach Blas, Micha Cardenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margarett Rhee. “QueerOS: A User’s Manual.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 50–59. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.8.
Constant. 2023. Techno-Disobedience. https://calibre.constantvzw.org/book/207
Da Costa, Beatriz, and Kavita Philip, eds. 2008. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Leonardo. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip, eds. 2021. Your Computer Is on Fire. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London England: The MIT Press.
Philip, Kavita, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish. 2012. “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 37 (1): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910389594.
Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Electronic Mediations 28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rocha, Jara, Helen Pritchard, and Femke Snelting. “We Have Always Been Geohackers.” In Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence, edited by Possible Bodies, Vol. 09. Data Browser. London: Open Humanities Press, 2022. https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=We_Have_Always_Been_Geohackers
Sauter, Molly. 2014. The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. New York, [New York] London New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsburg Publishing Inc.
Soon, Winnie, and Pablo R Velasco. 2024. “(De)Constructing Machines as Critical Technical Practice.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 30 (1): 116–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221148098.
The Electronic Disturbance: Critical Art Ensemble. 1994. Autonomedia New Autonomy Series. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
Yuill, Simon. “All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses.” Mute. Mute Publishing Limited, June 2, 2008. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses-0.