Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

110 Jesse Drew
community radio stations, now in the process of becoming established. The
possibility for communication and for an end run around mass media and the
culture industries was heartening. Many saw the uprising of the Zapatista
rebellion of indigenous peasants in Chiapas, Mexico, and its poet-leader
Subcommandante Marcos as especially inspiring, with its fusion of art and
politics. In a videotaped statement to a cultural gathering in Mexico, organized
by Rage Against the Machine and others, Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante
Marcos, holding a guitar, says:
If you would like me to sum it up, I would tell you that we made ourselves soldiers like
that so that one day soldiers would no longer be necessary, as we also remain poor, so that
one day there will no longer be poverty. This is what we use the weapon of resistance for.
Obviously, it is not the only weapon we have, as is clear from the metal that clothes us.
We have other arms. For example, we have the arm of the word. We also have the weapon
of our culture, of our being what we are. We have the weapon of music, the weapon of
dance. We have the weapon of the mountain, that old friend and compañera who Wghts
along with us, with her roads, hiding places and hillsides, with her trees, with her rains,
with her suns, with her dawns, with her moons. 13
It was many of these ideas of cultural activism, media criticism,
and culture-jamming that inspired video activists and media activists to come
together around the planned World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in
1999. Armed with a myriad of new media tools and the network capability
of instantaneous Internet access, an organism coalesced around the creation
of an Independent Media Center (IMC), now a model for the surging tide of
worldwide independent media production. That such an effort reached fruition
largely from electronic exchanges between mediamakers is testimony
to the promise of networks. Independent Media was born amid the chaos of
tear gas and truncheons, in a chorus of digital images, sounds, and text. The
IMC model has brought forward a new generation of collectives, now no
longer limited by physical proximity, but united around the idea of cultural
expression of truth and justice, built around temporary autonomous zones
and Xash mobs. There are now many IMCs around the world.
Comparing the Independent Media Center’s coverage of the “Battle
of Seattle” with TVTV’s ground-breaking coverage of the Nixon Republican
Convention in Miami Beach in 1972, Four More Years, one sees both
the similarities and the differences between contemporary collective media
production and those of the 1970s. Much of the motivation remains the
same, and as Sturken says about the early 1970s collectives,
While the members of these collectives were artists (and many still are practicing artists),
their concerns with amassing alternative information, addressing issues of media and
technology, and their pluralist approach to documenting history were antithetical to the
way in which discussions of video evolved in the art world. The belief structure of art in