Tactical Media - Tactical Media Artists

Tactical Media Artists

• Krzysztof Wodiczko

Best known for his homeless vehicle project. Wodiczko designed a sleeping quarters for the homeless using a device that resembled a shopping cart and inside was a designed sleeping area. He dispersed the vehicles to homeless people around New York City, envisioning a goal that raised homelessness awareness. New York City officials confiscated the vehicles so the message would not further spread.

• Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco

Best known for Couple in a Cage, performances where people pretending to be extinct natives are displayed in a caged area in public. This work of art is intended to challenge the idea of preconceptions that many hold regarding other cultures.

• Nao Bustamante

Bustamante performs art that challenges stereotypes and constructions of identity, bringing attention to issues about personal classification and character. She is a strong proponent of individualism and personal growth: the only entity capable of forging an identity being the person him or herself.

• Allan Kaprow

Kaprow's work attempts to integrate art and life. Through "Happenings", the separation between life, art, artist, and audience becomes vague and open to interpretation. The "Happening" allows the artist to experiment with human senses, deploying the involvement of sight, sound, and smell. Key elements of happenings are planned, but occasionally, artists retain room for improvisation.

• Michael Mandiberg

Mandiberg produces websites and Firefox plug-ins that provide information about environmental aspects of our world, such as the cost of oil. His plug-ins reshape and modify the displayed information on other websites to display an alarming point.

• Michel de Certeau

De Certeau helped invent the idea and methodology that is tactical media and stressed the important roles of consumers vs. producers in society.

• David Garcia
• Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink is a very influential person and has played a large role in the evolution and presence of tactical media. Lovink in a sense believes the idea of tactical media has been greatly miscued and that what this idea and title once stood for has been misinterpreted and drawn off course by falsified groups and causes that claim the title of tactical media.

• Graham Meikle
• Rita Raley

In 2009, Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara authored a book titled "Tactical Media" published by the University of Minnesota Press in its “Electronic Mediations” series. Raley provides a critical exploration of the new media art activism that has emerged out of, and in direct response to, postindustrialism and neoliberal globalization. Throughout the book Raley analyzes projects by tactical media groups such as the DoEAT group, the Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience to name a few. Raley argues that contemporary models of resistance and dissent in fact mimic the decentralized and virtual operations of global capital in our "post-9/11 security state" to exploit and undermine the system from within.

• The Yes Men

The Yes Men are an activist duo who perform "identity correction", in which they pose as representatives of large corporations and fake moral actions (in contrast to the actual ideology of such groups). Using mass media outlets, the duo draw attention to corporate crime and often create situations in which corporations must publicly acknowledge their lack of responsibility towards disastrous events.

• Daniel García Andújar/ Technologies To The People.

Andujar turns free and ope- source software into a progressive tool to reprogram the use and understanding of computers as well as social culture at large.

• X-Devian and the Reprogramming of Free Software Culture
• The Art of Hacking –or: Communication Guerrilla as Artistic Practice with New Media