[iDC] A Reflection on the Activist Strategies in the Web 2.0 Era

[Curt Cloninger]

Thanks Ryan,

I don't mean that de Certeau's own applications are metaphorical or 
analogical. Of course he means them to be exactly the opposite. I'm 
saying that a lot of "tactical media" theory and work has applied his 
ideas by way of analogy rather than directly (although I admit that's 
a pretty broad generalization).

Let's say there is a gradual continuum between strategic production 
and tactical use (de Certeau prefers "use" but I'm not afraid to say 
"consumption"). A tactical media artist who uses tactics to make 
something that she calls "art" is by definition no longer de 
Certeau's tactical user/consumer. She is a producer (she has moved 
further down the continuum toward strategic production). I'm not 
saying there's anything ethically wrong with this. I'm just saying, 
it's less like an artistic approach to the practice of life and more 
like analogically adapting de Certeau's tactical approaches to life 
as a means of making art. In pointing out this distinction, I'm 
uninterested in the old ontological differences between art and life. 
I'm really interested in the efficacy of a practice.

I will check out Hall and Williams.

This resonates with me:
"Artists who call their own bluffs - and dissolve, at the crisis 
point, into the vortex of a social movement."

It makes me think of negative theology (Eckhart, Marion, even Beckett).

But it's tricky to perform.

Here is the full Thompson essay (2006):
http://journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/3/thompson.htm

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Latour changed my mind about "political" art (particularly "We Have 
Never Been Modern" and "Making Things Public"). To understand 
politics in terms of shared matters of concern, gathered in and 
inextricable from things (not just Heideggerean bridges and jugs; but 
light, sound, language, even "networks") -- "politics" thus 
understood finally begins to matter to me as an artist.

Best,
Curt