artistically (Paul Garrin, Brian Springer), and try to develop their own production contexts and distribution media (Rabotnik TV, Kanal X). Like every new medium, video also fosters hope about artistic scope and revolutionizing the means of production. Many 1970s media art projects therefore aim consistently at transforming the broadcaster-receiver structure—a demand that Bertolt Brecht had already made in his «Radio Theory» in the 1930s. Hans Magnus Enzensberger brought this up to date in 1970 in his essay «Constituents of a Theory of the Media». In the early 1970s, a number of feminist artists started to work with the medium of video (Ulrike Rosenbach, Valie Export and others). In this context video, as a new medium unburdened with rigid rules and traditions, is seen as an ideal medium for emancipation. But in the 1980s it became clear that video had only been able to fulfill the hopes placed in it for alternative media channels to a limited extent. In the early 1990s, new media emerged in the form of the Internet and the digital media. These, because of their technical structure and relatively good access availability, once again bring Brecht's utopia of a genuine

‹communication apparatus› within striking distance. While the (artistic) Net activism of the 1990s links up in many ways with the social or socially critical processes of the 1970s and 1980s, it is distinct because of the global reach that only became possible via Internet communication.

Forerunners: Situationist Internationale, Burroughs and Gysin, Fluxus

The Situationist Internationale's theories and practices, Brion Gysin and William Burrough's cut-up techniques and the strategies employed by some exponents of Fluxus are very important in terms of politicized forms of media art since the 1970s. Here the Situationist Internationale and Burroughs and Gysin in particular were clearly adopting the historical avant-garde movements' techniques and aims (Dadaism—here John Heartfield in particular—and Surrealism). The Situationist Internationale was founded in 1957 by Lettrists, the Cobra group of artists and the Imaginist Bauhaus movement.[5] In the person of Guy Debord among others it formulated a radical social critique and also a radical critique of the media society. It rejected