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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathSociety
 
IO_dencies (Knowbotic Research), 1997deportation.class (kein mensch ist illegal), 2000Bitte liebt Österreich! (Schlingensief, Christoph), 2000
 
 
 

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1980s, when Paul Garrin talked about the «camcorder revolution» (thus defining the hope for a mass medium coming from below): the Internet was now seen as a means of democratization. The high-flown hopes and ambitious plans of this period are embodied in a series of virtual ‹city-like› communities and ‹context systems› that developed in 1994 and 1995 in the then new World Wide Web (WWW): the Digitale Stad (DDS) Amsterdam and the International City Federation (ICF) Berlin. But these early utopian approaches were rapidly overtaken by commercial developments and fell apart as a result.[53]

But even if these two pioneering projects disappeared, the theme of extending and changing public space via the new media was by no means off the agenda. This is shown by the project by the «IO_dencies» (1996–1999) project by the Knowbotic Research group, which was located on the interface between the Net and real space. «IO_dencies» (pronounced ‹tendencies›) explores the possibilities of intervening and acting in complex urban processes

 

taking place in network environments. It examines the potential that digital technologies have for creating interlinked, participatory models and investigates how public space could look if it emerged within electronic networks, or through them.

Since 2000, various political and at the same time artistic campaigns have drawn attention to themselves: «Deportation.Class,» «Bitte liebt Österreich!», «[V]ote-auction» and the «The Yes Men» use the tactic of resistance by apparently affirming and conforming to their opponents' image and corporate identity. While Deportation.Class exposes «Star Alliance» set up by Lufthansa and twelve other airlines in the 1990s as a «Deportation Alliance,» thus agitating against Lufthansa's deportation practices, Christoph Schlingensief's «Bitte liebt Österreich!» campaign adapted the mass media Big Brother format to stage a media friendly deportation, voted for by TED viewers of asylum-seekers and carried out during the Wiener Festwochen directly from a container in Herbert-von- Karajan-Platz. As the whole thing was promoted as an

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