Some activists involved in the Italian Autonomia movement in Bologna start a free radio station. They call it Alice, after Alice in Wonderland. A few years later, this station plays a key role in the explosion of the Autonomia movement and its repression in Bologna. Another group of activists in the US form an urban guerrilla group: they base its name, Weatherman, on a line from the Bob Dylan song, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (Dylan, 1965). After an initial disastrous bomb explosion that kills three of its members, the Weatherman group adopts an underground mode of life, producing communiques, setting bombs, and working with other underground and aboveground social movements. A future German filmmaker decides ‒ not without hesitation ‒ not to join some attendees of his Anti-Theater in their first act of political violence, the explosion of a bomb in a major supermarket. He goes on to set up an alternative ‘German Hollywood’ in his native Munich, while some of these bombers became the key members of the Red Army Faction, joined by a leading radical journalist and another nascent filmmaker.

These fables all concern the constitution of what this book will treat as guerrilla media ecologies in the 1970s. While some of the forms of media creativity and invention that will be mapped here, such as militant and experimental film and video, pirate radio, and radical modes of television fit with conventional common-sense definitions of media, others, such as urban guerrilla groups, do not. Nevertheless, what was at stake in all these ventures was the use of available technical means of expression in order to produce transformative effects, whether these were located on the levels of affect and perception, or on the social or political plane, or, as was frequently the case, on both these levels at once. Why these exploits took place exactly when they did and, conversely, why their radical aims only met with short-term rather than long-term successes, even if they continue to produce tremors and effects on media and political practices and ecologies up to the present, will be some of the key questions guiding this book.

A key supposition in this, following the insights of media archaeology, is that both media inventions and creative social practices are nonlinear and that key developments often take place at the edges, far from the dominant paradigms of the mass media in any given era.