13 BIDO LITO!
ALTERNATIVE FACTS As the battleground for truth spills out from the internet message boards into mainstream politics, Craig G Pennington looks at what lessons can be learned from the tactical media movement. “How can we play an active, meaningful part in a response?” On 26th January <strong>2017</strong>, Stephen Bannon – Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist – labelled the mainstream media “the opposition party”, proclaiming it should “keep its mouth shut” and that “they don’t understand this country”. Less than a month later, Trump delivered his Maoian depiction of the media as “the enemy of the people”. It can be baffling to reflect on how such provocative, inflammatory and wildly-unhinged statements have become a daily occurrence since Trump embarked on his campaign trail – and equally terrifying to see ideas considered peripheral and divisive only a matter of months ago weave their way into the mainstream. It is important to consider the fact that this media assault isn’t a phenomenon reserved for the US. Before Bannon took up his position as Trump’s chief lieutenant he headed up Breitbart News Network, a far-right ‘news’ website in the US which has managed to normalise and mobilise much of the ideology and support which propelled Trump to the White House. Taking divine inspiration and a heavy dose of mentoring from all this is chief UKIP funder and pug-faced Brexiteer Arron Banks, who recently launched westmonster.com – a thinly-veiled attempt to dress hate and intolerance with some form of legitimacy, inspired by the ‘successes’ of Breitbart. To Trump/Bannon/Banks et al the media is the “enemy of the people”, unless, it seems, that media is crafted in the image of themselves. But, what does this all-out assault mean for the media as we know it? As an independent media platform ourselves, at Bido Lito! we’ve been forced through a period of self-reflection by events over recent months. What role do we play? How can we play an active, meaningful part in a response? How does the creative community we are a part of come together with an alternative view of the world? How do ideas of tolerance, community, pluralism and respect counter the extremes that seem to become more normalised by the day? How do we counter fake news and post-truth with our own alternative facts? An indication of a potential route forward could well sit within the idea of ‘tactical media’, an influential movement that flourished in the 1990s that fused art, political campaigning and an experimental use of the media itself; manipulating media platforms and turning prevailing messages on their head for artistic and political purposes. The tactical media movement has inherently embraced the idea of ‘fake news’ for decades, but with a very different purpose than Bannon and co. With impeccable timing, How Much Of This Is Fiction? – an exhibition which explores the idea of tactical media and the fake news phenomenon – opens at FACT on 2nd <strong>March</strong>. One of the exhibition’s curators, Professor David Garcia, has been active within the tactical media movement since the 1990s. He co-founded the award-winning Tactical Media Files, an online repository of tactical media materials past and present, and is currently Professor of Digital Arts and Media Activism at Bournemouth University. It seems that the idea of fake news has a much longer history than we may initially think, as Garcia tells us. “Fake news in the form of fake newspapers have a long history. For example, there are newspapers declaring allied victory in the Second World War before it happened by the Flemish resistance. Or Polish Solidarity, who faked a national newspaper announcing the end of Marshal Law.” A quick visit to tacticalmediafiles.net also throws up an interesting local example of such an intervention; in April last year, mocked-up parodies of The S*n’s infamous front page from 1989 declaring ‘The Truth, We Lied’ appeared in newsagents across the city. Away from newspapers, there are other marquee examples of artistic hijack. “The example I would give is the Kissing Doesn’t Kill campaign from ACT UP, who fought against fear and ignorance of Reagan’s inaction and silence,” says Garcia. The campaign, which centred around a nationwide run of billboard adverts, aimed to combat the public indifference towards AIDS and highlight the complex issues associated with it. “ACT UP was a critical reference as it was a campaign that combined fine art, the PR industry and ferocious activism. The PR connection plays out in its clear relationship with United Colors Of Benetton’s use of multiculturalism in their marketing campaign at the time.” Evidently, the idea of manipulation of media is not a new phenomenon. But, what can we learn from the practice to help us navigate the new realities of today? According to David Garcia, there is a much deeper shift at play. “I would argue that what we are witnessing is the demise of [Walter] Lippmann and, later, [Noam] Chomsky’s paradigm that established media combine and contrive to ‘manufacture consent’,” he says. “This is no longer possible, as one of the consequences of the new dominance of social media platforms as primary news sources is that the big broadcast and print media outlets have lost their role as gate keepers, determining what it is possible to think and say. The term ‘post-truth’ can sometimes sound like the howl of pain from the status quo lamenting the loss of its ability to dominate the agenda. Steve Bannon and the insurgent right have captured the social media platforms to do the opposite; they specialise in manufacturing dissent on an industrial scale.” As an artist who has been working within the field of tactical media, Garcia represents a view from the inside of the practice. I’m intrigued to know how much of a threat to public life – and society more broadly – he believes the fake news and the posttruth idea to be. “I would argue that there are two tendencies at least as worrying as the fake news panic,” Garcia laments. “I am more worried about the shameless fake outsiders; Farage, Trump, Johnson and Le Pen, all wealthy insiders masquerading as the authentic voice of the people. I see this as a battle between ‘hyper-rationalism’ and ‘authenticism’. The hyper-rationalists – for example the flawed Remain campaign and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – pretend they are in control. They adopt the faux scientific language of ‘management speak’. They seek to explain and then fail to persuade. They lack impact; theirs is an affectless language. The inverse is the authenticist; typically they pose as outsiders and adopt the guise of truth-tellers who claim to represent the ‘authentic’ voice of the people, ‘telling it like it is’. Even their gaffs and flaws are seen as demonstrations of authenticity. Their blunders and lies are overlooked in the belief that they are right about the ‘deep truth’. As tactical media artists, we begin by un-masking both the authenticist and hyperationalist as the rhetorical poses of two elites fighting for control of the social mind.” FEATURE 14