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Street protests: an urban electronic resistance fest

Street protests, politics, and mobility: A study of activist uses of syndication
By Olivier Blondeau
Hacktivism
Rather than the presidential elections, perceived by many American activists as a defeat forecasted in the absence of any credible challenger to George Bush, it was the protest movement against the Republican National Convention in New York in August 2004 ("A31-RNC") that more likely crystallized the political, technical, and artistic innovation potential that came to the fore during the whole American election campaign.

A31 as an urban electronic resistance fest

A31, to borrow the Critical Arts Ensemble's words, was truly an "electronic resistance" fest at the level of a whole city. For four days, in a place that had practically been put under a state of siege, New York's streets were transformed into a vast testing ground of "tactical media", mobilizing a variegated range of sometimes very unexpected actions. It is beyond the to-be-expected displays of the "street-theatre" of the so-called "reality", perfunctory performances whose subversive potential fatally ends up being absorbed by "cultural consecration", that one probably has to look for political innovation and the true insurrection of meaning, that is: in the new forms of electronic resistance.

A31 is foremost one of the first instances where street protest meets the new media activists, up to that moment cosily sheltered in the "temporary autonomous zones" offered to them by the world of contemporary art, big corporate and public entities, or prestigious American engineering schools. In the same way as in Genua, the "flagship device" was the hand-held video camera, which marked a turning point in media activism; the cellular phone, with its built-in image recorder is what will be remembered as emblematic of those four days. After a period of being ignored, not to say shunned, by media activists, the cellular phone, and beyond it, the whole gamut of issues around mobility, made then and there their entry on the "hacktivist" scene. Yet another illustration, if needed, of standard theories of innovation confounding principle, phrased by William Gibson in the novel Neuromancer: "The street finds it's own use for things."

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continue reading: Eurozine
http://www.eurozine.com/article/2005-07-19-blondeau-en.html
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