One of the great rediscoveries of the past year has been the act of physically gathering on streets and squares – the transformation of the individual into a crowd, and more importantly into a ‘public’, and the collective assertion of protest creating an intense form of public visibility through the re-appropriation of public space. Recent events, ranging from popular uprisings against mostly authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, to anti-austerity protests in Southern Europe and the UK, to the occupy movement in the US and its replication across the Atlantic, mark an intense resurgence of social and political protest. However, most of these events seem to point emphatically beyond the ‘media-question’ deemed to be at the heart of Tactical Media. They certainly point beyond the now-tired discourses of cyber or online activism of the past two decades.

Instead, the central organising logic in these great public gatherings seems to be to ‘take the square’– the shedding of private identities in favour of public roles, and the physical encounter with the unknown other. These remarkable emanations of public protest break all forms of ‘electronic isolation’. Once again the point seems to be re-emphasised that ‘the political‘ can only properly unfold in the theatre of the grand urban public space. Contestation requires physical embodiment to draw it away from insular discourse circulation and the self-contained affective feedback loops that feed on the libidinal energies and desires of entrapped broadcast and online media audiences. It seems that only the transgression into public spaces can break the hold of these insular electronic circulations.