The
cold rain lightens passing the small twice-weekly farmers’ market, down
the corridor past the Italian class for migrants, the bookshop, a
meeting, the circus class. Entering into one room a web of cables
crawls overhead, converging in a loft. Upstairs a small group chatters
in front of computers, editing, uploading, downloading, emailing;
organising a 24-hour pirate TV station. This is the Xmercato24 social
centre in Bologna, Italy, home of “Teleimmagini?”, part of the Italian
Telestreet movement of around 80 pirate micro-TV stations, most of
which have grown in less than 2 years.
In an era of
ever-increasing media concentration Italy is perhaps the most extreme
example. Prime Minister Berlusconi owns three of the four main private
TV channels, Mondadori - Italy’s biggest publishing group -, the AC
Milan football club and much, much more. As Prime Minister, Berlusconi
also has great power over RAI, Italy’s state-owned media network,
giving him control of the six biggest television channels in the
country and access to 90% of the national daily audience.
But
his and other corporate influences are far from hegemonic. There exists
simultaneously an innovative network of grassroots media that is
bringing conflict to this state of affairs, and not merely reacting to
Berlusconi, but providing other forms of information dissemination, new
social relations that break the patronage of the entrenched media, both
state-owned and corporate-controlled, as well as the traditional
consumer/producer divide.
Italy has a long history of resistant
media. In the 70s a host of free radios sprang up across the country as
part of the Movement of Autonomy. Many, such as Padua’s Radio Sherwood
and Rome’s Radio Onda Rosa, continue. As does the daily communist
newspaper Il Manifesto, which prints close to 90 000 copies, 6 days a
week, and has been going for 33 years. In more recent times Italy has
seen an explosion in the use by activists of so-called “new media”. But
these forms are by no means restricted to the net. In fact the most
innovative use both traditional broadcast media forms and the new
horizontal communications
networks in which much of the Italian movement is well versed.
The
birth of computer networks run by Italian activists goes back to
1988-89 with the use of the bulletin board system (BBS) to transmit
news and as a space for debates. These networks in turn gave rise to
the European Counter Network (ECN), a network of computer
infrastructures across Europe. With the coming of the internet ECN
Italy became host to a variety of projects from mailing lists and web
hosting to inspiring, in 1998, the now yearly Italian hackmeetings, a
large gathering of hackers and activists from across Europe. ECN also
formed much of the basis for the beginning of Indymedia Italy, made up
of 12 local collectives, and the most popular Indymedia after the main
indymedia.org page.
This deep base in the use of information
technologies in Italy is also evident in the swathe of “hacklabs”
(think computers/net connection/geeks) that deconstruct the technology,
provide space for various projects and push the now well-disseminated
ideas of free software and hacker ethic through the activist community.
There are dozens of hacklabs amongst the hundreds of social centres
across Italy. Social centres are usually squatted spaces that operate
to serve political, social and cultural needs such as space for
meetings, a bar/café, venue for concerts and events, workshops,
bookshops etc. They range from occupied warehouses and apartment
buildings to old military forts and greyhound racing tracks.
Walking
along Via de Lollis, San Lorenzo, nothing seems particularly unusual.
Enter into the crowded lobby of one of the many apartment blocks and
you’ll find something very different. Around the fortified steel gates
sits a group of Africans and Indians, drinking coffee and watching TV
whilst kids scream and run in and out of the building. It’s their turn
to be on watch in case of any eviction attempt. The whole 9 floors of
this building have been occupied by migrant families and activists. On
the top floor sits TeleAut, so named after the 70s free radio station
RadioAut in Sicily whose founder was killed in 1978 by the mafia. In a
small basic studio daily six-hour TV broadcasts are compiled from local
activist productions, downloading various media from the net, and
fairly impromptu live-to-camera segments. When I visited they were
screening Kill Bill and South Park. On the roof of the studio sits the
antenna, managing to cover a good portion of the suburb, perhaps up to
3km away.
Perhaps the most interesting tactical media initiative
of recent times, the Telestreet network combines both old and new
media, lo-tech and hi-tech. Telestreet is a coordination of TV
micro-broadcasters that first went to air in Italy in the summer of
2002 in the form of Orfeo TV, a neighbourhood station based in Bologna.
A “flashpoint for the development of critical approaches to information
production and distribution” in the words of Rome’s Candida TV, who
assert that what is important about Telestreet “is to meet one another,
share knowledge, re-activate brains, build collective narratives.”
The
small pirate stations can be constructed fairly easily. For around 500
euros you can get set up with the basic infrastructure to broadcast: an
aerial, cables, transmitter and amplifier. It’s possible to transmit
from an ordinary roof-top TV aerial, though many of the Telestreets use
more expensive transmitters that allow them to broadcast further. On
average they broadcast to around 1km, depending on the terrain. The
better ones up to 3km. Only a couple, such as Teleimmagini?, broadcast
24 hours a day. Some a few hours a day, others once a week, others
sporadically. The Telestreets broadcast mostly in the shadow of
commercial stations, in areas where those stations’ signal is not
received clearly or at all.
It would be wrong, however, to
suggest that Telestreet is limited to the radical extra-parliamentary
movement: even some Christian groups run pirate stations, as did a
disabled group, DiscoVolante TV. The latter was supported by the local
council and was then shut down by the national government. A legal
argument, however, that the stations operate outside the law, doesn’t
carry much weight. Berlusconi is currently running his Retequattro
channel illegally, broadcasting on a frequency that was sold 4 years
ago to Europa7, who are unable to broadcast because Berlusconi has
refused to vacate the channel.
In fact Berlusconi is an expert
at operating outside the boundaries of the law. Murdoch too, who has
recently moved into the Italian market with Sky, has a common strategy
of breaking media rules and then forcing the law to conform to him,
rather than having him conform to the law. In opposition to this
continuing media concentration and control the Telestreet network has
grown, not pleading to the government that they enforce the law, but
seeking to intervene into the tele-visual fabric by creating their own
communications needs.
Perhaps
the most spectacular détournement of this media has been the
re-appropriation of privatised football broadcasts. Murdoch’s SKY TV
has recently moved into the Italian market. One of its first moves was
to buy the rights to the biggest soccer games of the season, thus
requiring millions of football fans to buy a subscription to SKY. A
coalition of Guerrilla Marketing and Telestreets in Rome combined to
take the encrypted, privatised SKY signal of the Roma-Juventus match
and rebroadcast it to the suburb of San Lorenzo for free from an
apartment rooftop, immediately making the links between the
capitalists’ agenda of privatisation and profit and the conflicting
desire that football, and much more, be a common good for everyone.
In
the ad breaks the protagonists ran their own anti-ads, pieces from
various Telestreets and information on Murdoch’s nefarious background,
as well as adding their own commentary during the game. If you want to
make a political point in Italy, football is a very good way to make
sure your message hits a huge chunk of the population. The coup was
repeated a month later.
Perhaps what the action politicised more
than anything else was the realm of information, making media activism
not merely a process of producing alternative information, but of
actually making the issue of communications and their control a node of
conflict in itself. As the media and communications sectors of the
global economy continue to grow, as work becomes ever more a process of
communication and the concentration of media ownership continues to
intensify, the politics of information become ever more crucial. In
this case the weaving of autonomous communications infrastructures,
distributing alternative information and confronting the media powers
happen simultaneously.
This hybridisation is also evident within
the Telestreets and their connection to the net. Given the time and
expense required for producing television the net is used as a means to
share high-quality content between stations. New Global Vision is a
series of servers where local content producers upload high-resolution
video good enough for broadcast. This means of sharing content gives
the Telestreets sufficient material to make stations viable and
regular. Much use is also made of other online tools such as BitTorrent
to download the movies and TV shows and redistribute them for free in
the area, thus enabling people without fast net connections or
expensive computer equipment to also enjoy the materials the giant
media corporations would rather have everyone pay for.
In many
ways the Telestreets currently function more as actions than actual
means. They serve more to bring conflict to a mind-numbing mediascape
than to disseminate information across masses of people. Given their
limited broadcast coverage and often “flexible” transmission hours they
are still at an infant stage, lacking money and competing with a
television audience very much entrenched in, but not necessarily happy
with, what they are getting. Competing for attention is still a major
obstacle, making guerrilla tactics all the more necessary. Intervening
politely (or legally) into the Italian media sphere provides little
chance of building much of an audience, as Berlusconi knows too well.
For those with a message to get out more creative means are required, a
field in which Telestreet is becoming a rich laboratory.
Check out the Telestreets documentary on Undergrowth's Motion Pixels by Tim Parish and A-Lo.
