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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathSociety
 
ATV-Aktion (ATV), 1975Radio Freies Utopia (Pezold, Frederike), 1977
 
 
 

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Klaus vom Bruch, Marcel Odenbach and Ulrike Rosenbach, also in 1977, staged an act of anti-authoritarian television piracy that came more from an artistic context, «Alternativ Television ATV.» From their workshop in Cologne, which was converted into a studio and (illegal) broadcasting station, they put out an alternative television program they had produced themselves, which could be received over a radius of a few hundred meters. In the same year, Friederike Pezold realized her «Radio Freies Utopia» action.

In the 1980s, ‹genuine› pirate radio and television stations become a real sub-culture. In Amsterdam, the group Rabotnik TV, which emerged from the squatters' movement, fed its signal into the official TV channels, illegally at first, through a small pirate station at night after programs had finished, then acquired a legal slot on cable. The success of their spontaneous image aesthetics, related to rap, scratch and sampling music, attracted about 50,000 viewers per week.[30] Also in the mid–1980s, the illegal Radio Dreyeckland regularly broadcast ten minutes of information on political protest movements from the point of view of

 

participants and affected parties in the Freiburg area.[31] In Leipzig, Ingo Günther and others[32] were involved in founding the pirate TV station Kanal X in spring 1990, which in the quasi law-free GDR area produced genuine citizens' television before reunification. These continuations of the subversive strategies created by Burroughs and the student movement of 1968 meant that the broad impact requirement was met to an extent, but the power of the mass media remained undisputed.

Media activism

One model for a tactical switch in terms of this power comes from the case of Paul Garrin: by chance, he became involved in a street battle in Tompkins Square in New York in 1989, where the police were taking brutal action against homeless people to drive them out of a park. He made himself scarce to the top of a car and filmed the events with his video camera. He was noticed by the police and beaten as well, but managed to rescue the videotape and pass it on to several TV stations. The topic was then discussed all

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