“Media Acts”: The Trickster, the Prankster, the Hoax and the Hack.

Conference: Fiction as Method

Dates: 17 October 2015

Abstract:

One of the defining attributes of Tactical Media, that quasi-movement of the 1990s, is that it continually sought to propel itself beyond the confines of the semiotic landscape, setting out, not so much to describe things, as to do things. Tactical media’s preferred modality is that of “media acts”, which we could see as having a relationship to the concept of “speech acts” in which utterances are performative and active rather than descriptive or propositional.

Given this emphasis on the performative; we might ask whether it is even possible, let alone useful, for the legacies of Tactical Media, to be framed within the context fiction? In this paper I will argue that it can be. But that in order to do so we must recuperate the role of media tactician as trickster. employing the hoax, the prank and the hack. This is not so much, fiction as narrative, as fiction as event, and pseudo-event.

Source: Manual