ART & ACTIVISM  
   
  association APSOLUTNO (FR Yugoslavia) www.apsolutno.org
APSOLUTNO is Zoran Pantelic, Dragan Rakic, Bojana Petric and Dragan Miletic. The production of APSOLUTNO includes not only aesthetic, but cultural, social and political aspects. Projects in various media (video, printed materials, installations, site specific projects, audio and web projects) often start as a response to political stimulus from the immediate surroundings.
   
  Natalie Bookchin (US): calarts.edu/~bookchin
Natalie Bookchin works with the net, computer games and other unpopular art forms. Organized "Street Action on the Superhighway," a project about the spaces between art and activism, the streets and the net, so far in LA, Basel and Barcelona. Formely part of RTMark; has collaborated with Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Jin Lee and Lev Manovich.
   
  Heath Bunting (UK): www.irational.org/heath
Net.artist, photographer, draughtsman, and designer. Projects include describing himself only through net links (readme), asking viewers to keep watch of criminal activities in different cities by using their computers for surveillance (CCTV), and an identity swap database.
   
  Critical Art Ensemble (US): www.critical-art.net
Formed in 1987, CAE's focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collective has written several books including The Electronic Disturbance, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas and Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media.
   
  C.U.K.T. (Poland): cukt.art.pl
C.U.K.T. is a "meta-national" institution fighting for the rights of machines and technological culture; it is outside the "oppressive political structure" of actually existing institutions, but not separated from their world--offering practical ideas on education, labor and unemployment, political power and technology. They reject the label of "artists," prefering to work in techno clubs and city streets than in galleries.
   
  Francesca da Rimini (Australia): sysx.org/gashgirl
Francesca da Rimini, aka GashGirl, is an arts manager, curator, corporate geisha girl, cyberfeminist, puppet mistress and ghost. Original member of VNS Matrix; worked on collaborative projects with The Thing Net (los dias y las noches del muertos) and with Ricardo Dominguez hauntings). Squandered hours investigating the artistic and erotic potential of negotiated email relationships, online virtual communities and web-based narrative architectures.
   
  Electronic Disturbance Theatre (US): www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd/html
ETD are Ricardo Dominguez, Stephen Wray, Brett Stalbaum, and Carmen Kirasic. EDT developed flood-net as a technology for virtual sit-ins in support of the Zapatistas. During SWARM, 20,000 people from across the world came together to block the web pages of the Mexican president, the Pentagon and the Frankfurt stock exchange. EDT has since openly distributed the flood-net kit.
   
  Fiambrera (Spain): www.sindominio.net/fiambrera
A Madrid-based community dedicated to public art, using alternative urban performances. happenings, and hoaxes as their main working media. In their own words, "La Fiambrera is a work group which defines itself though its deeds…"
   
  Fran Ilich (Mexico): www.neuroticos.com/borderhack, www.sputnik.com.mx
Fran Ilich is one of the organizers of Borderhack!, the Mexican variation of the Kein Mensch Ist Ilegal movement. He is the editor at large of Sputnik Cultura Digital (an online daily news service and monthly print magazine), the moderator of nettime-latino, and the Mexico City editor of Rhizome.
   
  the INSTITUTE (Romania): go.to/theinstitute
The Institute of Constructions & Deconstructions is Cosmin Gradinaru, Dan Panaitescu, Sergiu Negulici and Ioan Godeanu. The project was created as a virtual institution. The Cultural Reconstruction Program is a process of rebuilding the Romanian value system, through the creation of an "Official Bulletin," a website, CD ROM, various performances and actions, and the production of games without rules and endings.
   
  Miklos Legrady (Canada): www3.sympatico.ca/miklos/artcrimes
ARTCRIMES is a hip-hop landscape, a comic-book depiction art, life and the net. Project 1 is a series of virtual paintings (essays) which analyze the art world, its powers, weaknesses, structure, patronage, networking ... . Eliminating questions of interpretation, they pose theory in its righful place--within the painting medium. Project 2 leads to a series of posters examining the sick body of contemporary art, made at the Collective Unconscious in N.Y. in 1995.
   
  Lyyying Community (Poland): www.cik.lodz.pl/galeria/leezec/index.html
Lyyying Community (WSPOLNOTA LEEEZEC) has its roots in the Orange Alternative movement, a group that staged surrealist happenings in the 1980s in response to a communist power in ruins. Lyyying Community, the subsequent mutation of the 1990s, organized artistic, atmospheric street happenings, and actions that were not "directly" political, trying to provoke the audience into thinking about socio-political events as well as philosophical and existential issues.
   
  Makrolab (SI): makrolab.ljudmila.org
Makrolab is a complex, experimental project, developed at Ljudmila and initiated by Marko Peljhan. The team involved in the project uses different artistic and technical means. With the Internet as one of its major platforms, Makrolab consists of a research and telecommunications station designed as an autonomous communications and living environment.
   
  MEZ, Data Bleeding Texts (Australia): netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm
MEZ [Mary-Anne Breeze] is a professional net.wurked avatar who [since 1995] has exhibited x-tensively in a net.wurked sphere. _The Data][h!][bleeding T.ex][e][ts_ r remnants from email performances d-voted to the dispersal of writing that has been n.spired and mutated according 2 the dynamics of an active network.
   
  Molotov (UK): www.molotov.org.uk
The MOLOTOV ORGANISATION are conscientious objectors in the cultural war . Their actions, carried out in accordance to the principle "whatever it is...we're against it," have included bizarre club nights, guerilla art installations and various underground activities."The banana criticism project uses the banana as a critical tool to bombard art installations.
   
  Old Boys Network (Germany/US/Australia/Switzerland): www.obn.org
"OBN is not explicitly an art project, but a hybrid which evolves at the interfaces of art, science, philosophy and politics ... OBN does not formulate theories, nor theses; it does not give any instructions nor does it offer answers to the pressing questions of our times. OBN tries to escape the imperatives of a traditional understanding of politics ... OBN's understanding of politics ... is about forming alliances, about defining common issues, about creating a discourse... "
   
  NSK (Slovenia): www.ljudmila.org/embassy
Neue Slowenische Kunst was formed in the early 1980s in Slovenia from the discrete groups Laibach,, the visual arts group Irwin, the theater group, Scipion Nasice Sisters, and the design group, New Collectivism. NSK operated as a spectral double of the State, playing with all the parapernelia of power: declarations, uniforms, embassies and consulates, passports.
   
  Sciatto (Italy): www.ecn.org/sciattoproduzie
Sciatto is a group exploring social and urban borderlines as the last significant field for artistic performances. It identifies its research sphere in the outskirts, in fragments refused by the post-industrial city's transformations, in the possibilities for causing mutations, re-interpretations of the space on which one works. Estrangement is the means of a break, lighting up an alternate image, strongly conditioned by the forms and possible interpretations of scraps and ruins.
   
  Alexei Shulgin (Russia): www.easylife.org, sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart
Alexei Shulgin is a net.artist, musician, curator, theorist and teacher based in Moscow. He created the Moscow WWWArt Centre site in 1995, and the Easy Life site in 1997, which includes the Introduction to net.art manifesto co-authored with Natalie Bookchin. His projects include Form Art, FuckU_FuckMe, and the cyberpunk group 386 DX.
   
  Survival Research Laboratories (US): www.srl.org
Established in 1978 by Mark Pauline, SRL began by hijacking billboards and other public spaces, and developed into the organization of spectacles of machinic destruction. Their works are ritualistic and interactive, using machines, robots, animal carcases and all kinds of special effects, creating socio-political satires of old and new technologies alike.
   
 

VNS Matrix (Australia): sysx.org/vns
VNS Matrix (Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce and Francesca da Rimini) is a cyberfeminist group hatched in Australia in 1991 with the aims of decoding the narratives of domination and control that surround the culture of high technology, and intervening in the construction of social space, identity and sexuality in cyperspace. Projects include theme parks, CorpusFantasticaMOO, manifestoes, all.new.gen, spiral.space ...

   
  Faith Wilding (US): www.art.cfa.cmu.edu/wilding
Multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses aspects of the somatic, psychic, and sociopolitical history of the body. Her art practice is recombinant, using whatever media best accommodates the subject matter, content, and purposes of the project, including drawing, painting, printmaking, writing, artist books, performance, and electronic media.
   
  Technologies To The People (Spain): www.irational.org/tttp
TTTP was developed in 1996 by Daniel Garcia Andujar, whose projects included interventions in public spheres on the topics of xenophobia and the misuse of technology in surveillance systems. TTTP is a metaphor about the use of technologies, aimed at people in the so-called Third World, people denied access to the new information society and new technologies, all those living within the confines of new and alien borders.
   
 
  INFO-WAR, PRANKS, HOAXES  
 
  0100101110101101.org (Italy): www.0100101110101101.org
Started their career by manufacturing a non-existent artist, and since the art system is not based on anything real, he was invited to the Venice Bienale before the hoax was discovered. Produced copies of the private hell.com site which could be entered only by membership, and later a hybrid copy of Art.Teleportacia, Olia Lialina's commercial net.art gallery that attempted to sell net.art "originals" of Shulgin, Bunting, JODI, and Lialina herserlf.
   
  Luther Blissett (Italy): www.lutherblissett.net
The Luther Blissett multiple name project began in 1994 in Italy, and has since then been joined by dozens of mail-artists, underground reviews, poets, performers and squatters' collectives in cities throughout Europe. In Italy, Luther Blissett organized dozens of situationist assaults against the establishment, as well as situationist assaults against the establishment of situationism. Since anything that lasts too long has a tendency to become a corpse, LB has already made a ritual suicide.
   
  Ad Busters (Canada): www.adbusters.org
Global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Ad Busters Media Foundation creates rogue ads, publishes a magazine, operates the website and offers its creative services through PowerShift, an advocacy advertising agency.
   
  Cultural Terrorist Agency (UK): www.irational.org/cta
The Cultural Terrorist Agency (CTA) is a funding agency committed to supporting contestation of property and representation. Cultural terrorism can be defined as an offensive against dominant systems of meaning.CTA has been involved in campaigns against capital fundamentalists including: Adidas & Nike. Glaxo. Tesco. Sainsburys. 7-Eleven. American Express. Art Market. Monsanto.
   
  Culture Jammers Encyclopedia (Canada): www.syntac.net/hoax/index.php
The Culture-Jammer's Encyclopedia was created by Ishmael Gradsdovic, when it still bore the single voluminous title of Trolls, Hoaxes, Culture Jamming, Poetic Terrorism, Media Hacks, Frauds, Impostors, Spoofs, Counterfeits, Fakes, Pranks, Scams, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Culture jamming helps to poke holes in the veil we spend so much time helping each other to construct.
   
  etoy (Switzerland): www.etoy.com
A group of net.artists questioning the power of corporations on the net. In 1995, etoy purchased the web domain, etoy.com. Two years later, an online billion dollar toy corporation bought the eToys.com domain and decided to sue etoy.com for using a URL that was too similar to its own. Many artists and activists joined in Toywar at the end of 1999; subsequently eToys stock plummeted, and the toy corporation finally withdraw its lawsuit. etoy just celebrated its one year victory.
   
  JODI (Netherlands/Spain): www.jodi.org
When in 1995 JOan Heemskerk and DIrk Paesmans decided to create their webpages to show their photographic works, they accidentally caused a software disorder that left the screen in a chaos of colors and enigmatic signs. They found this unexpected vision aesthetically very interesting, since then they have produced disorders of flashing and illegible screens as electronic art, laying bare the hidden side of the computer behind the screen.
   
  Peter Luining. FF00FF (Netherlands): www.xs4all.nl/~real/FFOOFF
Re-mixes of the classic net.art works by JODI, antirom, turux, lfoundation, kalx, antiorp, etc. Peter Luining studied contemporary philosophy and was directing video-clips and making ads with 3D animation until 1996, when he began working full-time on net.art "minimalist" projects.
   
  Multi-Cultural Recycler (US): shoko.calarts.edu/~alex/recycler
This project by Amy Alexander recycles webcam shots from different locations world-wide. One of the options takes three random shots while another - "Make your own Cultural Compost"- allows the user to choose three particular shots or to use images recycled by previous visitors to the site. The Recycling Gallery exhibits artistic collage work of all the users.
   
  Plagiarist Org (US): www.plagiarist.org
Amy Alexander's latest project, an artistic space with projects produced from “material plagiarised” from the Internet, and whose items, often satirical, deal with property, appropriation and the infinite resources of the web. Recently plagiarized the 0100101110101101.org site.
   
  Pode Bal (Czech Republic): www.podebal.cz
Pode Bal is a self-described "defense against the orthodox virus in society." The group consists of 5 artists and designers who create posters and stage exhibitions in unlikely places, like the House of Parliament--usually provoking media scandals. They are sculptors of information, working to uncover the ever present totalitarian trends in Czech Society.
   
  POTATOLAND (US): www.potatoland.org
Several projects by Mark Napier: Digital Landfill is an online rubbish dump where the visitors can throw away all the digital garbage they no longer need (e-mails, obsolete data, spam, old webs). RIOT is a browser that makes an automatic collage of the page the user wishes to see, together with the last three that have been visited. The Shredder is a browser that takes the data from the page, destroys its original structure and reconstructs another parallel web page with its fragmented contents.
   
  ®TMark (US): www.rtmark.com
Creative subversion for social ends. A mock corporation that offers possibilities for investment, but only "sabotage" products are available. The group is made up of artists, teachers and other professionals who seek to reveal the way corporations subvert democratic processes. Using media provocations in print, television and radio as a means of product distribution, their projects include the highly publicized rogue sites for G.W.Bush and the World Trade Organization.
   
  Situationist Sites:
NOT BORED: www.notbored.org
Nothingness org: www.nothingness.org/si
   
  VakuumTV (HU): vakuumtv.c3.hu
VakuumTV was founded in 1994 as a live show in which a large frame separating the stage from the audience imitates the experience of watching TV. VakuumTV borrows conventional television broadcast techniques in order to reinvent them in a distorted manual form. The combination of live performance and projected images and the mobilization of the audience for active involvement transcend the limitations of conventional television.
   
  Andrei Velikanov (Russia): velikanov.artinfo.ru
Videos and net.projects like the Virtual Body of God recycle the garbage of consumer culture and the words afloat in the seas of information. Information is the new god which has made subjectivity obsolete and deprived people of the possibility of interventions. You can read all about it in the new English version of "Virtual Body of Juxta" on the website.
   
   
  TACTICAL MEDIA  
   
  Candida TV (Italy): candida.kuyzz.org
Candida TV was born from underground cinema, video production, rave parties, street theaters, independent radios, underground bulletin board systems on the net and counterculture pop-magazines. Candida is a core of 12 people, fusing the experiences of self-managed squatted community centers and technical knowledge in the field of cinema and video production. They are now working in suburban areas to educate people in using video and computer technologies.
   
  Disinformation (US??): www.disinfo.com
Site conceived as a search engine for "hidden information". It focuses on topics related to science, culture, politics, and "alternative" lifestyles: counterculture, counterintelligence and anti-censorship.
   
  Tetsuo Kogawa (Japan): anarchy.k2.tku.ac.jp
Theorist of polymorphous radio and originator of the mini FM movement in Japan. Is now traveling with a workshop/performance which he calls a "radio party": showing how to make a transmitter, making radio-art-type sounds using it and then opening a small radio station for the audience to use immediately.
   
  MediaFilter (US) : MediaFilter.org
The tactic of media is invisible. Invisible in plain sight... the tactic of media is to make the invisible visible... Texts, opinions, magazines, actions and investigative journalism. Recommended by Noam Chomsky; targeted by the CIA. Open line for those who live in a state of war.
   
  Media Research Foundation (HU): www.mrf.hu
Media Research Foundation focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of new technology, and its cultural dimensions. MRF has organized, meetings, symposiums and events in an effort to educate the public about the impact of new technology on culture and society, including the MetaForum series (1994 to 1996) coordinated by Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, and Janos Sugar.
   
  Net Institute (Italy): net-i.zkm.de
The net institute kernel was designed to use the web as a collaborative environment to construct urban and cultural networks and to organise also the internal structures of projects, communities, organisations. On a political and cultural level, the kernel was born to trig new practices based on the strong relation between landscape and mediascape, the city and the net.
   
  Next 5 Minutes (NL): www.n5m.org
A Dutch site which deals with media tactics in all its forms. The 3rd edition of Next 5 Minutes was held in Amsterdam in March 1999, a conference focusing on cultural tactics in communication, dissident art, and electronic activism of an international nature. The page provides access to files giving information on previous editions of the event, its programmes, magazine, and current debates.
   
  Paper Tiger TV (US): www.papertiger.org
Free-access program on Manhattan and San Francisco TV. Their objective is to decentralize the power of the media industry by promoting the active participation of the public. Programs are produced by activist groups, artists, community centers, etc., and show "the other side of the news." Paper Tiger promotes a critical view of the media in order to demystify it.
   
  RADIO B92 (FRY): www.free92.net
In May 2000, the Serbian authorities once again silenced the well-known independent radio station B92 in Belgrade, Serbia. But transmissions via the Internet have continued, whith the support of XS4ALL.
   
  Radio Patapoe (Netherlands): basis.Desk.nl/~ptp
Radio Patapoe has its origins in a 1985 punkrock -radio station named "Dood" (Death). In 1988, it mutated under the name "Revolutionairy Radio group." This station continues to exist now, under the name Patapoe in the same squat where Death began, still using the same mixer and alot of the same people, but with lots of new musical and non-musical programmes.
   
  Tactical Media Crew (Italy): www.tmcrew.org
Tactical Media Crew was born to introduce the Italian radical-Autonomous movement into the internet. TM Crew concentrates on: Social Centers, Pirate-Comunity radios, radical syndicalism, feminist movements and many others who will and are deciding to join this project.
   
  Transmissor (Spain): www.interzona.org/transmissor.htm
The Transmissor is an alternative information directory of activism, media tactics, critical art, anticopyright and hacking, providing hard to attain pieces which do not interest media corporations. This idea is directed to all people who lack confidence in "objective and truthful" information, which really serves only the interests of States and corporations.
   
   
  ART SERVERS & MAILING LISTS  
   
  C3 Center for Culture and Communication (HU): www.c3.hu
C3 is a service provider and media lab in Budapest, focused on innovative experiments in digital art and fostering cooperation among spheres of art, science and technology. Part of the ENCART network, along with V2, ZKM, and Ars Electronica.
   
  Contrast Org: www.contrast.org
Contrast.org is an organisation and workspace for contra-information, and contra-expertise on the Internet--from a radical-critical perspective. They often place material that is censured in other countries on the Dutch server, and have initiated online political campaigns and developed projects of public criticism.
   
  [fnØrd] (Spain): www.flyingmind.com
A libertarian digital community which “appeared on the Internet with the intention of becoming a temporary autonomous zone, an island of freedom which aims to become a peninsula in the web world. After some experience, we have adopted an open door policy to new people, ideas, and proposals with a view to producing a dynamic and ever-changing site.” (in spanish)
   
  Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Alliances (Canada) www.syntac.net
Toronto based server hosting diverse projects, but focusing on cultural pranks and hoaxes. It houses the Culture Jammer's Encylopedia, and the sites for Luther Blissett and 0100101110101101.org. You will also find their "Incidentalist Manifesto" on the first page.
   
  Irational.org ( UK): www.irational.org
An international system for deploying "irational" information, services and products for the displaced and roaming. It supports independent artists and organisations that need to maintain critical information systems (including Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, the Cultural Terrorist Agency, and Technologies to the People). These 'Irationalists' create work that pushes the boundaries between the corporate realms of business, art and engineering.
   
  Ljudmila (Slovenia): www.ljudmila.org
Ljudmila is an open-access media laboratory that supports education, research, and work in Internet, digital video, electronic arts, digital and analogue radio, communications, hardware production and interdisciplinary integration. The projects focused on digital media education are organised in modules and through a mentor system, involving local and international experts. The www.ljudmila.org server hosts more than 120 websites focused on civil initatives, artistic projects and media activism.
   
  nettime (Netherlands): www.desk.nl/~nettime
A mailing list started in 1995 that became a forum for critical reflection on the www, its politics, its aesthetics, and unrealistic expectations. Nettime texts have been published in several editions and Nettime lists have sprang up in different locations, including Latin America, Germany, France, Japan, and Romania.
   
  Rhizome (US): www.rhizome.org
Rhizome.org is a portal for new media art-- an archive, a program event calendar and a mailing list that provides a platform for a global community who share an interest in the intersection of contemporary art and emerging technologies. The Rhizome community is geographically dispersed, and includes artists, curators, writers, designers, programmers, students, educators and new media professionals, spanning 75 countries and five continents.
   
  Public Netbase (Austria): www.t0.or.at
"Public Netbase is a forum for free media communication and an information society withut regrets." Non-profit internet provider that also runs an event and information program, providing users with technical assistance and knowledge needed for active participation in internet culture.Its existence has fostered the growth of a lively internet scene in Vienna and has increased awareness of the implications of new technologies.
   
  Simulacro Net (Spain): www.simulacro.net
Pure Internet sham. Theoretical and artistic space that is not all that it appears to be. It contains several individual spaces 13H, Rafa C, ThankyouSatan, La Base, Delusion, Le Duanier, SILEX-CORP, as well an archive of translations, review texts, photos, interviews and videos.
   
  The Syndicate (Netherlands/Germany): colossus.v2.nl/syndicate
The Syndicate was created as a mailing list in 1996 during the Next 5 Minutes conference in Rotterdam. It was a loose affiliation of artists, curators, networkers, writers and festival organisers, most of them from Eastern Europe, working in the field of new media. The list self-destructed in 2001, as the administrators unsubscribed from their own list ... leaving something else in its wake that still bears the same name.
   
  TAO (US): www.tao.ca
Federation of local autonomous collectives and networks promoting the right to self-determination and the establishment of worker-owned and operated autonomous zones, and the creation of tactical arts for practical and inspirational application.
   
  The Thing (US): www.thing.net
The Thing New York was first created as a Buletin Board System (BBS) in 1992 by Wolfang Staehle, and has since become an alternative site for net.art, hosting an archive of texts, on-line magazines and multiple art projects. Current senior editor of The Thing NY is Ricardo Dominguez. Since it's birth, the Thing has migrated to other spaces: Berlin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Basel, Vienna, and Rome...
   
  re-lab / xchange (Latvia): www.re-lab.net
re-LAB is built on the principles of new media art production, free information, open communication. Activities include operating the mailing list, net.radio meetings, workshops, net broadcasters' events and collaborative broadcasting sessions. Re-Lab maintains the X C H A N G E network experimenting with the acoustic potential of cyberspace and creative Internet broadcasting.
   
  Yourserver (UK): www.yourserver.co.uk
Yourserver hosts Crash Media, the Art Servers Unlimited meeting in 1998, the temporary media lab Revolting, and the VR project. VR explored the metaphor and myth of VIRTUAL REVOLUTIONS in social, political, aesthetic & cultural perspective, focusing on the shift of perceptions in the virtually transformed Europe of the 1990s.
   
   
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