Roots
Although tactical media borrows from a number of artistic and political movements, it has been suggested that much of its techniques are rooted in the Situationist idea of detournement, that is, in the critical appropriation and transformation of a preexisting workâbe it an artwork, a commercial billboard, or a political campaign. In the case of tactical media, it is the media themselves to be the subject of a detournement.
The dada movement has also been credited as an influence on tactical media, the two often used within activist campaigns. Much like it, tactical media often aims to do the opposite of the media it penetrates: it shocks and reveals an antithesis.
Tactical media also draws from surrealism, borrowing the idea that a "truer" experience than the present one is present. Much like surrealism, tactical media also criticizes social, political and cultural elements of a given society through its domain's techniques.
As for media-related roots, tactical media partly stem from the alternative media created by the counterculture of the 1960s. However, due do their temporary nature, tactical media do not tend to construct alternative media outlets, but rather appropriate existing media channels and technology to transform their usage and/or the popular understanding of their messages. In this respect, tactical media are more akin to other temporary forms of cultural and political intervention, such as guerrilla communication and culture jamming.
Read more about this topic: Tactical Media
Famous quotes containing the word roots:
“Now fades the lasts long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running underground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)