Means of Promotion / now here

This workshop was examining different strategies to be a parasite on existing media. The students carried out actions to announce an exhibition and documented their efforts. On Friday the 26th of March 2004, the final show presented the outcome of the projects and their documentation. ‘now/here’ became a documentation of the promotion for itself.

We organized an unregistered demonstration with empty banners by the Liberty Clock monument in Tallinn. Estonian law requires a demonstration to be registered by the authoroties. We did not ask for any such permission, posing the question to the system whether or not this was an illegal action. The event was covered by all major TV-stations and newspapers in Estonia.

After the demonstration, we were allowed operate in the background of the talk show Koosolek on Estonian TV3. We created a parallel show mimicking the original, thereby promoting our own project and commenting on what was going on in the foreground. Simultaneously there was another talk show running on the Estonian Channel 2, and at one point we showed a message asking people to switch to this programme. There we performed another, unannounced interference that was documented and shown at the end of Koosolek.

The students also produced a series of independent actions to announce the event, based on their own ideas with the same, parasite means. These were all documented with video and/or photography. In the end, the project was not about how much the message was spread, but how to spread it and how to use the media.