Re: <nettime> Media Squares: On the new forms of protest and their media, int. seminar, Friday September 30, Amsterdam

[Snafu <snafu@thething.it>]

Hi Eric:

the seminar sounds interesting as usual, but I think that the blurb does 
not make justice of the fascinating title, which suggests that "the 
medium IS the square." This proposition is in my opinion much more 
interesting than a more traditional take on social movements media as 
extensions of social movements praxis.

Let us assume for a second that the act of occupying a square is in fact 
an act of disintermediation that follows and complements the great 
disintermediation of the Internet. As Franco Berardi puts it, we are now 
entering a phase in which "the general intellect is looking for the 
erotic and social body that has been lost in the process of 
virtualization and precarization." We have spent way too much time in 
front of computer screens. This has increased our cognitive abilities, 
decreased collective bargaining power, and cut the feedback loops that 
turn for example a rich intellectual exchange IRL into a pleasurable 
bodily experience.

If this is the case, then we should not concern ourselves primarily with 
the media that draw the masses to the squares. Rather, we should begin 
our analysis from the forms of embodied communication and social 
organization that occur within the medium of the square. These may 
include the language of hand signs in mass assemblies; the spatial 
distribution of people, tents, gazebos, banners, and stages; the 
manifold collaborations (and conflicts) among collectives, committees, 
and affinity groups; and the molecular forms of communication that 
escape aerial shots, radio and TV coverages, even activist micro-media. 
There is so much more going on in each of these Media Squares than all 
the media can possibly tell.

To be sure, the Medium Square is still filled with media of all sorts 
and kinds. But the function of disembodied media seems to be in this 
context more prosthetic than creative. Traditional media--including 
digital media--enable these movements both to reach beyond their locale 
and connect components that do not always communicate IRL. However, the 
fulcrum and kairos of these media still lie in the Media Squares. It is 
in the square-as-medium that communication intensifies as the affective 
and bodily dimension of thoughts unfolds to make worlds that cannot be 
perceived on a computer screen, a radio, a TV set. Such communication is 
not truer nor more authentic than mediated communication. It is simply 
richer as it contains a kind of information that has not been reduced to 
a set of probabilities, that mobilizes the five senses, and in which 
signal and noise have not been separated.

All of this is to say that if Media Squares are becoming the event of 
our times, then such an event calls for new modes of reading its 
emerging properties. Perhaps it even calls for a relocation of our 
conferences and programs in the very Media Squares we are beginning to 
approach, as scholars and activists, from many different angles.

Cheers,
Snafu


On 9/14/11 7:08 PM, Eric Kluitenberg wrote:

> A  N  N  O  U  N  C  E  M  E  N  T
>
> Media Squares
>
> On the new forms of protest and their media
<...>


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