Tactiacal Media Festival

Next 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together art, campaigns, experiments in media technology, and transcultural politics. Next 5 Minutes revolves around the notion of tactical media, the fusion of art, politics and media. The festival is organised irregularly, when the urgency is felt to bring a new edition of the festival together.

How did this particular edition of the festival come about?

The fourth edition of the Next 5 Minutes festival is the result of a collaborative effort of a variety of organisations, initiatives and individuals dispersed world-wide. The program and content of the festival is prepared through a series of Tactical Media Labs (TMLs) organised locally in different cities around the globe. This series of Tactical Media Labs started on September 11, 2002 in Amsterdam and they continue internationally right up to the festival in September.

TMLs have been organised in: Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona, Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago, Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar.

The results of the various TMLs are published in a web journal, at:

What are the main themes of N5M4?

The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These four thematic threads are:

* 'Deep Local', which explores the ambiguities of connecting essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts.
* The Disappearing of the Public deals with the elusiveness of the public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'.
* The Tactics of Appropriation questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost?
* The Tactical and the Technical finally questions the deeply political nature of (media-) technology, and the role that the development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and constraining its tactical use.

The festival explores a variety of forms and formats, from low-tech to high-tech, from seminars and debates to performances and urban interventions, screenings, installations as well as sound projects and live media, a pitching session, a tool builders fair and open unmoderated spaces. Defining for tactical media is not the medium itself, but the attitude towards media.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)