Reflections
2023 Reflections from Planet and Maqui, founding members of Indymedia UK and Indymedia London. A half hour audio recording of a conversation made specially for this exhibition.
I’ve heard it described as feeling like you’re walking in to a big collective brain. Everything pulsing this way and that, information rushing around, spreading out and taking in information. It’s a high tech temporary autonomous zone.
from Alternative Media Handbook - IMC chapter: REPORTING THE G8 IN SCOTLAND (2007)
In 1996 the Zapatistas already called for “the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information. A network to resist the power of the lie that sells us this war that we call the Fourth World War. We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements, but for our lives: this is a project of life, of humanity, humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information”.
from "Indymedia Dispatch. Hello?" or How I got stuck in the IMC and enjoyed it. (2006)
Importantly Indymedia has remained one of the few online places that allows users to publish anonymously and without a logon. We always cared about privacy, which means protecting users’ identities from the authorities or corporations, and we prioritised this over the ability to share content with commercial platforms. It is this more than anything which has kept Indymedia isolated from other social media and similar feature developments so thoroughly.
from Time to move on: IMC London signing off (2012)
Indymedia aspire to become the dialectical supersession of mass media, and dream of a future when media itself will be transcended, insofar as media implies a separation between sender and receiver. With the democratization of information, as the receivers can become, potentially, the senders, such a separation is abolished, and information becomes a free-floating field, a pure transparency. The truth of Indymedia is the post-medial universe of unmediated relationships.
from Notes on Sovereign Media (2001)