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and regions. The concept of the global street party had been fulWlled, at
previously unknown levels of political analysis and tactical sophistication. A
new cartography of ethical-aesthetic practice had been invented, embodied,
and expressed across the earth. 11
CIRCUITS OF PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION
Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics 279
J18 was clearly not an artwork. It was an event, a collectively constructed
situation. It opened up a territory of experience for its participants—a “temporary
autonomous zone,” in the words of the anarchist writer Hakim Bey. 12
With respect to the virtual worlds of art and literature, but also of political
theory, such events can be conceived as actualizations: what they offer is a
space-time for the effectuation of latent possibilities. This is their message:
“another world is possible,” to quote the slogan of the World Social Forum
movement. But what must also be understood is how these discontinuous
political mobilizations have helped to make another world possible for art,
outside the constituted circuits of production and distribution.
The simplest point of entry is the Internet. E-mail lists and Web
sites have opened up a new kind of transnational public sphere, where artistic
activities can be discussed as part of a larger, freewheeling conversation
on the evolution of society. Some of the early players in this game were the
New-York based Web site and server called The Thing, the Public Netbase
media center in Vienna, and the Ljudmila server in Ljubljana. From the mid-
1990s onward, these platforms were all involved with the development of
“net.art,” which could be produced, distributed, and evaluated outside the
gallery-magazine-museum system. The do-it-yourself utopia of a radically
democratic mail art, which had been evolving in many temporalities and
directions since the 1960s, suddenly multiplied, transformed, proliferated. In
1995 the transnational Listserv Nettime was constituted, in order to produce
an “immanent critique” of networked culture. 13 Such projects could appear
as intangible and ephemeral as the “temporary autonomous zones.” But they
helped give intellectual consistency and a heightened sense of transnational
agency to the renewed encounter of artistic practice and political activism
that was then emerging under the name of “tactical media.”
The concept of tactical media was worked out at the Next 5 Minutes
(n5m) conferences, which have taken place in Amsterdam since 1993,
at three-year intervals. 14 David Garcia and Geert Lovink summed it up in
1997: “Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’
media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded
forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited
by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider