The nonprofessional, ‘amateur’ participant takes centre stage in this participatory logic: Amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations. Most important, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestige-capital.61 Still, there are demands for specialised skill sets. A complex societal context demands a multiplicity of disciplinary viewpoints to solve complex problems and provide grounded analysis. In bringing forward the critical interdisciplinary practice that Critical Art Ensemble envisions there are complex economic realities to navigate ‘amateur’ and ‘expert’ practices, especially in an institutional and market context not geared towards this kind of transdisciplinary practice. CAE therefore advocates ‘collective cultural action’ as a practice of building deliberately hybrid coalitions. As alternative forms of social organisation, these coalitions are juxtaposed with ‘communities’, which in CAE’s view contradict the politics of difference, creating closed social systems. CAE references ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power)62 as an example of such a hybrid coalition, which is composed of artists, activists, scientists and non-specialists addressing an unfolding health crisis through large scale collaborative and participatory actions. Beyond finding fresh approaches to urgent and intensely complex social and medical problems such as the unfolding AIDS/HIV crisis, collective cultural action offers important possibilities to address alternative forms of organising and shaping social reality itself. CAE writes: [...]collective action also helps alleviate the intensity of alienation born of an overly rationalized and instrumentalized culture by re-creating some of the positive points of friendship networks within a productive environment. For this reason, CAE believes that artists’ research into alternative forms of social organization is just as important as the traditional research into materials, processes, and products.63
INTIMATE MEDIA: SCALE AND FEEDBACK Feedback is of prime importance to the participatory logic of Tactical Media. The possibility for reciprocal exchange is a vital part of active engagement. It is clear that mass media, by their very nature, cannot fulfil this demand. The demand for feedback relates both to the structure of the process as well as its scale. Beyond a certain scale a process cannot be properly participatory, as the participant’s action gets lost in a sea of interactions, and the process itself becomes at best reactive. However, because distribution volumes can be enormous in distributed media forms such as e-mail or social networking platforms, while still allowing for personal feedback and reciprocal exchange between 61 | Ibid. p. 8-9. 62 | For further reference see: www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=52740 63 | Critical Art Ensemble, 2001, p. 72-73
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