... 0.0 <nettime> Pit Schultz Interview with Paul Garrin MediaFilter nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 13 Jun 1997 03:54:51 -0400 The following is an interview between Pit Schultz (pit {AT} icf.de) and Paul Garrin about name.space, art and tactical media. [unedited version] Originally published in German on the TelePolis website (www.heise.de/tp). >Pit Schultz: > >lets start: >1. You are an artist. you went deep into technology with >name.space, but this is not the first time you did it. >What, in general, does art have to do with media + technology, >and do how you define your place in it. > Paul Garrin: Control media and you control the public. Free media is a threat to control. As an artist, one strives to discover an effective means of working in any medium--and when that medium is a mass medium, the key is to establish and sustain visibility. If there is no support system to guarantee reliable distribution, the work disappears. One of the main concerns in my work has been the notion of the public vs. the private. Territory. Security. Privacy. And the way that "the media" manages the perception of the public. These things have always been of interest to me. >2. The net, nobody can overlook it, as it becomes something >mystical at the end of the millennium. One of the productive >questions which were brought into circulation through >name.space was: who governs the net? It was always >a tool of power to control the process of naming and even >more, names are the resistent part of language where >another semiotic regime takes place. Take religions, the >space of names is a spiritual one, the space of the dead, >ancestors, gods and ghosts. Today it is filled with brand >names. In which way were you reflecting the name.spaces >outside the net when you began with pannet and what was the >impetus for your decision to start 'playing' with the DNS system. A name is an essential and universal element. On the net, the uniqueness of the name is imperitive. In capitalism, the idea of uniqueness means "value"...commodity. One of the key elements of opression and control is to control the notion of identity. In the meme of the "DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM" (caps intentional) the message is control, "DOMINATION", "TERRITORY". The idea of the "Permanent Autonomous Net" dubbed the "panet" initiative, was founded on the idea that in order to sustain and develop a presence for Free Media, it is imperitive establish and propogate an identity. In order to assure the autonomy of the content, totally self regulating, without the control of commercial interests, it is imperitive to buy the bandwidth--the only option to eventual disappearance of Free Media when the "Disneyfication" of media and the net is completed. [see my article "the Disappearance of Public Space on the Net"] Two recent concrete examples illustrate this point. An excellent website, disinfo.com was started as a commercial project at TCI (Telecommunications, Inc., the largest cable tv provider in the USA with heavy bets on the internet). TCI had the perception that disInformation was an entertainment site, like the "X Files". What they did was create a "Radikal Search Engine" and indexed much of the content of MediaFilter and other sites of alternative media. As soon as John Malone saw what disinformation was really about, he ordered the plug pulled immediately. I then offered the site's founder, Richard Metzger, a home on my network. He had already hooked up with Razorfish.com, luckily. Another is the CypherPunks. The Millionaire's club, eff.org, the proverbial bastion of free speech on the net recently kicked the Cypherpunks mailing list off of their server. So much for their guardianship of free speech on the net. (Autono.net offers Cypherpunks a new home if they see this...). The Sponsors have their agendas and their limits to "tolerance". The idea of what is "authorotative" and what is "acceptable" should not be controlled by commercial interests. The idea of decentralizing DOMAIN NAME SERVICE came when Network Solutions, Inc. announced that it would start charging $100US for name registrations. When I studied the logistics of running dns, I realized that the limits on it were artificially imposed in order to limit supply and facilitate control. The central database and "whois" records are all controlled by Network Solutions, Inc., who is a subsidiary of SAIC (Science Applications International Corp.), the largest private contractor for the US National Security Agency and the Pentagon. Most of the top corporate officers are former US military personnel who have retired from service and are engaged in "private practice", including former NSA Chief, Bobby Inman, current Director on the Board, putting their militarily-acquired skills to work for profit. In effect, when one registers and pays Network Solutions for a domain name, they are also paying to maintain surveillance on themselves. Ask yourself. Is this what you want? Does it make you feel comfortable? [see http://mediafilter.org/caq/CAQ59NetSpooks.html] > >3. After the insight you got into the technology of DNS, >what would it need to rebuild a DNS structure if Network- >solutions would shut down the '10 root-level-servers'. >(Any news about the connections to CIA?) Is it useful >to demand a backup which is not under the main >access of network solutions, and how should one do this? > First of all, Network Solutions has a contract with the National Science Foundation which expires in 1998. By that time, many changes will have taken place that will make their disappearance a non-issue. For now, Network Solutions controls an essential facility which keeps the entire internet in sync. It is not immediately feasable or constructive to disrupt this function since it would be (at least temporarily) disruptive of the net. It is not currently feasable to change the entire internet's configuration of reference to the current rootservers without major disruption of service for several days to weeks--by the time that everyone is informed and updated (and accepts the transition). Running new toplevel names is not a difficult thing. Its simplicity is almost obscene. The issue of global recognition is the key. Right now, name.space lives as an intranet within the internet. Like a matter of perception, the recognition of name.space nameservers or not determines wheather name.space exists or not. Like changing channels--Removing the censorship filter. This is a "grassroots" thing, and my favorite aspect of the potential of name.space--the individual's ability to choose their view of the net...Unregulated by commerce or government. >4. Name.space showed with the efforts and hard work of >a few people how effective a process of decision making >can bring about panic-results. (7 new tlds, 4. Feb.) >How can it remain possible that the internet is an open >standard, and in which way does IAHC already indicate the >dangers of the end of such a policy. How would you proceed? >Is it possible to open name.space from a few-man-project >to an object of collective mind work? Or do you see a way >to learn from it, despite the protocols of bind and DNS ? > The proposal put forth by the International Ad-Hoc Committee is a mediocre attepmt to impose a set of controls and regulations on the internet without any mandate to do so. Their indecisive arrogance is as outrageous as if GATT or NAFTA would have blatantly announced their implemention straight out of the boardroom of some GloboCorp, Inc. without the painstaking international debate they so required. It will never happen. It's legally impossible by current international law. The internet is international and ideally, self-regulating and the reality is that market forces will determine the dyanmics of the net. The convention of DNS is not the issue presently--it's the scope of its possible implementation. Name.space works with the existing DNS software and protocols, exactly. There is no difference. Name.space IS DNS...and about exploring the potentials of a free namespace. Name.space, from its beginnings has always been a collaborative and cooperative project. Most of the toplevel names were suggested by users via a suggestion form on the name.space website. The new "Integral Database Synchronizer Daemon" or "idsd" that name.space is developing will enable the total decentralization of name registries. Registering a named.address will like reserving a seat on an airline with a travel agent. No seat can be booked twice, and all agents share the same database. >5. Many poeple complain that name.space did not work, >for me it is maybe the best net.art project I know of. >It shows to me how far art can go, and only as art does it evolve >as a full success. But even if you don't name it art, >it is obviously political. it works on the symbolic level >where naming as a technolgy of power takes place. The deeply poetic >and subversive investigation of renaming the net-world, comes close >to playing with a technological state of madeness, where things and >names are spiraling in their own universe. How do you think it mimicks >what is already happening(in the net)? How much were you aware of these >levels? > Name.space certainly works. Anyone who says that it doesn't work hasn't tried it. There is no excuse for such false criticism. Name.space is not globally recognized currently, but that will most likely change very soon. Stay tuned....Meahwhile, anyone can try it by changing their tcp/ip dns settings to the name.space nameservers in their area. It currently functions as an intranet that recognizes the whole net. A different route for content. It's about "content routing" rather than territory or control. Addresses created in name.space don't have to pertain to purpose or geographic location...the names combined with virtual domains can be descriptive of content, and address web pages directly. The "black.hole" project is an exmple of content routing with name.space addresses. (http://blackhole.autono.net or http://black.hole). >6. The economic question. How do anarchy, freedom and a radical >left worldview fit together with entrepreneurship within the >new 'cyber' markets? People from the left complain that >you have become a neoliberal, marketeers say that you are a >dangerous anarchist. It looks like a trap, but instead of >defending it here, what do you think is the problem on both >sides? > Anything which defies definition is a threat to order. I have been called many things. The speculative labels that make me laugh the loudest are "neoliberal" and "closet-extropian"... HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHBEHE. :) They don't have a clue. :) that's the funniest part. >7. The fight is not over, you may go to court. Wouldn't >it be better to reach a kind of counter-consensus on the net >and see what comes out of it instead of following the policy >of MCI vs. AT+T as a one man show of pgMedia against the >net oligarchists? Wouldn't it be more clever to find a bottom >line of criticism surviving the Blitz-reform introduced >by IAHC to neutralize counter-movements? Along which lines >you would start if you would open the discussion, taking the >practise of Alternic and DNS as the backdrop. > Your suggestions will not work. In the "practical" world, things do not work out as nicely as one would write them up in a proposal. There are ways to use the controls of the system to cause it to regulate itself by ways that it never intended, given that they always assumed a hierarchy of government-and- military-style order. The people are always supposed to follow that without question. In this case, the fact that there is no regulation or clearly defined authority over the determination of the toplevel namespace, makes it possible, through corporate law, to establish a competitive structure to the current monopoly and therefore invert the hierarchy, and better yet, eventually totally decentralize it without degrading the integrity of the synchronicity of the dns or internet directory service. There is an essential difference between Alternic and the so-called "newdom" movement. The newdom movement wants to break up the internic monopoly held by Network Solutions, Inc., by creating many micro-monopolies. In the Alternic/newdom model, each private registry company would own the exclusive rights to generic dictionary words like "web" or "art" or "earth" among others. Any other registries would have to first buy the name from the "owner" and then resell it as a product or property. This is absurd. It's about the privatization and commodification of language. The name.space model creates an expansive toplevel namespace that is in the public domain. The toplevel namespace is not owned by anyone and is to be shared even by competing registries. The registries provide a service in the public interest and trust and do not "sell property". Toplevel names can come and go according to use, like a natural process. If there is demand for even one toplevel which can be shared by the public, then it will be created as long as the current version of the software can handle it. If there is no longer demand, it can be "retired" in order to free up space for other new toplevel namespaces which may come into being. >8. The net is based on the ethics of 'running code'. No admin >would chance it as long as it works 'somehow'. NS is based on >a revolutionary instead of an evolutionary, or a parasitical >instead of a symbiotic, concept. It is somehow breathing >the air of war, and risking a net-split. How far you were >thinking this? And do you think that there could be a smoother >version of it? > The concept of a net-split is being propogated by a few individuals who lack understanding of name.space. The current mode of name.space, as an intranet, is a demo, to prove that such naming conventions and content routing is possible. It's already been proven beyond a doubt. The next step is to have all the name.space toplevel names included in the root.zone file of the rootservers currently under the administration of Network Solutions, Inc. This will be resolved in the US Courts as an anti-trust action based on existing precedent and case law. The letter requesting inclusion of the name.space roots in the Network Solutions rootserver databases has already been delivered to NSI and I have already spoken to their General Counsel on the telephone, in conference with the Internet Business Manager of Network Solutions and my legal counsel, Michael J. Donovan. Our request was a friendly one from a competing comapny, asking for inclusion in the root.zone file. NSI denies their role and responsibility and said "We do what they tell us to do" (IANA)....but also admitted that they have no written contract which names IANA as the party responsible for determining the contents of the root.zone file. Stay tuned...... [the case has since been filed in US Federal District Court in NYC... see http://name.space.xs2.net/ns./legal.html] >9. There where several counter concepts. One was starting >on one new tld (like BIZ) another was squatting unused tlds >(NT) another was a Rename-the-net project (more artistic). >Technicians are saying it will only change together with >new ways of routing (ipv6) and prepare us for Lap500 directory >services. I thought about NS more like an Intranet with its own >Ip space and therfore also DNS. Do you think that once it >becomes necessary to start an independent technical counternetwork, >and do you have statistics about how many sites would partipate? >And again, how you would build up a net where these people are >bringing their forces together instead of falling into >another hierarchy? > The expansion of the ip address space and the potentials of DNS are two totally separate issues. In fact, with the use of virtual domains, it is possible to free up many ip addresses that are used unnecessarily as hard virtual domains for websites and email. One Sun Sparc can such up an entire class "c" net with 255 ip addresses! I have a mac running WebStar and a Linux Box running Apache which have scores of virtual domains while using only one ip address each. Much more efficient use of ip numbers, one could say. Name.space is part of the internet. It is also the future of the named.address structure of the internet. As an independent tactical network, it is a system which will create an economic basis for free media to remain on line without corporate or institutional regulation or censorship. The goal of name.space is to buy as much bandwidth and processor power as possible to insure that there is always a home for free media and alternative voices and visions on the ever changing internet. >10. Maybe this is a question you want to pose to us. "Why didn't >we participate?" For any of us, NS was a conceptual piece, >we spent hours over the last weeks discussing it, and with it, >the use of radical political/technical concepts, let's >say revolutionary ones within the context of networked >capitalism. We found that, especially with those technicians >who are net-conservativists, it was difficult to accept a completly >new system while theorists liked the idea, but didn't know how and if >it works at all. What do you think attracted so many people to think >and so few to act (in a technical way)? It is a cliche' that people are in fear of change. DNS is a holy cow to network operators. If it works, don't touch it...and forget about it if you can...one less thing to deal with. It's the one centralized aspect of the internet. Big Brother will watch over us and protect us. That is the easy way out. The so-called "hacker" crowd mainly shuns name.space because it was implemented by an "outsider", an artist, not a "hacker". None of them have any concept of law or have the insight to engage on the level that I have, nor do they have the strategic legal, econonmic and public relations concepts that I have engaged successfully so far in the name.space initiative. They suffer from simple adolescent jealousy. Too bad. They are a wasted resource when it comes to autonomy and political action. I am very disappointed with them in general for their lack of maturity and foresight. The theorists have good reason to be interested since name.space has so many symbolic implications. The problem is that name.space is about _real_action_ which requires the responsibility to act on ones propositions and suffer the consequences or reap the benefits, whichever prevails. Certainly not as safe as plain old ASCII. It becomes another dilemma for them wheather to think or to act, or how to reconcile thoughts into action. In all, the idea of Tactical Media in practice becomes the issue. This is a subject that we have all been engaged in discussion over for many years, but very few have put into practice. My problem is that I am a simple practitioner. I can write about things, but only seldom, when I can find the time in between all the actions necessary to actually realize the ideas in my head through real implementation... and the struggle to pay for it all. for more info, please read my essay, "Say you want a revolution...." [http://mediafilter.org/ZK/Conf/Conf_Email/February.16.1997.04.55.27] among others. I'm tired....have to sleep. Please let me know if you need more comments. regards, Paul --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 1.0 <nettime> double interview: Marc Chemillier (Sans Papiers) and Geert Lovink (Workspace) Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 23 Jul 1997 12:05:27 +0200 (MET DST) Internet and Xenophobia An Interview with Marc Chemillier Webmaster of the Sans Papiers Movement By Geert Lovink At Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel July 3, 1997 Geert Lovink: When did you start the website of the Sans Papiers movement? Marc Chemillier: The movement started on march 18th 1996 and the website was up in july, so a few months later. I had this idea because I felt we were lacking information about their actions, meetings and demonstrations. In the summer of 96 the media began talking about Sans Papiers. I wanted to give the full information. Before, faxes were used intensively, mainly for the national coordination, to communicate with other Sans Papiers groups in other parts of France. But only after the eviction of the Saint Bernard church they themselves began producing some newspapers. GL: One would not associate a movement of 'illegal' immigrants with the use of computers. How do you see the relation between the Sans Papiers and the Internet? MC: Computers seem very far away from the situation and the cultures of immigrants. But they understand very well how the computer can help them and they agreed completely with what I proposed at the time. One of their representatives, Babacar Diob, is himself a computer developer. When I began, I hoped that we would receive some messages from Africa but it did not work out. Those African people who are connected to the Internet do not feel any solidarity with the Sans Papiers, who were seeking refuge in a church in Paris. One of the answers we got was: "I don't care about French people. They don't want us to go to their country, and I am working in Canada or America, so I don't care." The people who have Net-access in Africa have money and visa. The problems of the Sans Papiers do not concern them. The website now has two parts: the webpages and a mailinglist. The list is managed by a person from the newspaper 'Le Monde Diplomatique'. The website is private and runs from a server in San Francisco. The mailinglist has 300 subscribers and the site has about 1000 pages. In the beginning it was mainly information from the Sans Papiers, press releases and also material from the "College des Mediateur", a group of well known people who wanted to help the Sans Papiers. Then people on the Internet contacted me and offered to help me. The website is built in circles: in the middle are the 300 people in the church, then the College des Mediateurs and the next one are all the persons involved in this issue, like the government. The fourth circles contains articles about the politics of immigration (in France). The fifth one deals with immigration in other countries. GL: Why aren't the people themselves making use of computers? MC: It's not so easy. It is a technological instrument and the Sans Papiers from Saint Bernard church have got nothing, very little money. Babacar Diob wrote a book about Sans Papiers and from the revenues he bought a computer and now got onto the Internet. He is the only person doing the communication between the virtual world and the world of the Sans Papiers. The other members got printed parts from the Web. We put a print-out of all the messages that were sent to the website on a wall of the place where the immigrants are living. The web is important to provide people with basic information, like about the laws. If you ask people a question about immigration, they will say: "There are too many immigrants." But they cannot tell you any figures. The fact is that only a few people in France are (yet) using the Internet. But together with video, papers and pampflets, it might work. The movement itself is multi-lingual. France do not want immigrants, but they are using the French language as an intermediate. There are many African languages spoken by the Sans Papiers. On the website we try to make a maximum number of translations available. Some of the pages are translated in more than ten languages. People are contacting us through the Internet and offer us to translate documents into Italian, Polish or Svahili. GL: Many people in Europe, especially older intellectuals, seem to be sceptical about the use of the Internet. Do you encounter this also in your work? MC: Recently, I read some of the texts you are refering to, and I became confused about the Internet. I am wondering to what extend the Internet is contributing to the current xenophobia. When I am working on the website, I am alone with my computer. It is certainly something we have to have a closer look at. I am not sure what we can take from the Net, from a general tactical position. It's really open for me. Jacques Derrida recently wrote about the tension in the contemporary world. On the one hand, people can communicate so fast and so easily. The xenophobia in France or in Germany, on the other hand, seems to be a reaction against the speed of the television, the airplane and the Internet. But he is not very pessimistic about it. This reaction to this open world is temporary and local and not so important. e-mail: marc {AT} info.unicaen.fr The Sans Papiers movement: http://www.bok.net/pajol (edited by Patrice Riemens) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Interview with Geert Lovink By Marc Chemillier Recorded in Kassel on the 4th of July, 1997 * Could you explain in a few words what does it mean, "Hybrid WorkSpace"? Geert Lovink: We are here at Documenta, which is a very large art exhibition, and it was the choice of Documenta, Catherine David, and the new Berlin Biennale to make a space together where not art is exhibited, but which is a "workspace". I mean : the name says it all. I chose eleven groups to work here in a three month period, and they all work here on different themes like migration, racism, cyber-feminism, independant media. A group will come here to make radio. A group will come here to discuss the relation between art and science, looking at biotechnology and genetechnology. So a lot of things will happen here, and some of them will be more like research, other will be more like campaign, political campaign, other will do more like discussions, debates, but it's not an art exhibit way you just show works of art. It's different. It's producing content. And it's much related to the Internet, because the half of the project is about the debate between what is going on here and the Net. * Ok, but why do you call this "hybrid"? Because we have the situation between social space here, real space, and Internet, which is cyber-space. In our definition of media, we have a lot of different media we are using. Every week we make a radio program, we are using a lot of video, we are producing text pamphlets papers, and all of them in a hybrid way, linked together. So it's like hybrid media. That's where it actually comes from, the idea "hybrid media". * In what sense do you think hybrid media can help social struggles? I think it's very important to work with a hybrid definition of media, not to believe in the one media which will determine all others, like in the past intellectuals believed in the word. They believed in the written word, and the spoken word. They believed that a discourse was everything. And nowadays, people believe that image is everything. So if we, let say, conquer TV, then we will conquer the consciousness of the masses. We don't believe this. We don't believe in images. We don't believe in texts. We believe in our own very specific hybrid use of the media situation, and not giving one medium so much power. Maybe also we want to criticize media power as such. * Has it some relation with what you call "tactical media", and could you explain in what sense? "Tactical media" is a word which came up in early nineties. Maybe as a critic on alternative media idea, "aletrnative media" meaning "we have good content, we have good propaganda, we are right". Because we have the good arguments, we have the good informations. So what's wrong? What goes wrong? Everything went wrong with that concept, because it created ghetto. It created an isolated information ghetto. The information did not actually spread. So there was a crisis in the concept of alternative media. You can see that in many different movements. With the idea of tactical media, we mean that you can switch platform. Sometimes you work with national TV, sometimes you make a pamphlet with only a hundred copies. We treate those things the same. It's not that national TV is much more important that our own pamphlet. No, we switch for each situation, we try to see what is the best media mix. Maybe it's only a conversation between you and me. Or maybe for a radio station, somewhere. That defines your tactic, where you are, against dogmatic use of media. * If I remember well, in your text about tactical media, you spoke about a "world of migrants". You said the world is becoming a world of migrants. Could you explain this, and explain the relation between this and tactical media? It has to do a lot with that the information is becomming very fluid, and that we are also like in the Net. The information is travelling. It's not so much anymore located to one specific place. So the information about sans-papiers is travelling all over the world. Like the people also. It's a rumeur that is spreading. And I can tell you here that I saw the first video of sans-papiers in Tokyo. When I was in Tokyo, of course I knew about the movement, but I saw the video for the first time in an activist conference there, where people discussed the media tactics of sans-papiers movement, and your works also was discussed there in Tokyo, and the relation between the sans-papiers movement and the homeless people in the Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which is also a movement that is more and more using hybrid media, a lot of different media, which is suiting their specific situations. So in this way, the information is travelling, migrating, with the people. * And are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of such media, and the way they can change our lives? I hope the media will become less and less important. Because I am very much concerned about media power and the monopoly. So if we can try to disseminate media, and lead to democratisation of media, media themselve will become less important. They will become more part of daily life. And we can maybe hack or maybe we can squat the importance of this. This is sounding maybe a little bit utopian, but this is, I think, our ultimate goal. Not maybe the abolition of media as such. I think we always want to communicate in one way. But the symbolic power now is growing so much, and this power is in so few hands, like Time Warner, CNN, et caetera, that we should break that power. Not only by critizing it, it's economy. Not only by making an alternative to it. But I also think by just spreading, opening all kind of channels, for everybody, and try not to speak any longer for the people, but let the people themselve speak. I think that's a very important switch that we make, that we try to give power to people by learning them how to use media and technology. I think that's the ultimate aim. * And what do you think about the thesis we discussed yesterday, which says that the new technologies are related to xenophobia, and that they are not developing communication between people, but they develop isolation of people, alone with their computer? The isolation is definitely taking place in the WorkSpace. So if we see the computer as part of a restructuring of the labor force, then it's definitely sure that people not only loose their jobs, but loose income. So they will earn less money, they will work for more hours, and they will have more flexible hours, meaning working basicaly always, always being available. The technology is actualy facilitating us with that: the instant availability of the labour force. So you can never say "oh I'm not at home", because you are controled by small camera, maybe the spead of your typing is controled. In that way there is a huge controle and yes, isolation. But I think social movements can definitely use the same technology to break it. But then it should go with real life meetings. We don't believe in just virtual cities, huge web sites. We believe that it should be hybrid, with the real life meetings like between us now, here, in Kassel, the link between Kassel and Paris we are making now, and Amsterdam, and many more places. And we use that communication to establish those links between people. * And what about the relation to xenophobia, Internet and xenophobia? I don't see that. Internet is much more fluid. Xenophobia is just one phenomena, or one response to that technological shift, technological revolution as some may call it. It can also be anti-european, it can be anti-american. It's not necessary against foreigners or Africans. It can look for any kind of victims. Maybe it's now focused on Africans, but it can very easily move against the poor, or next time against unemployed people. And that's just very much the political climat. I think this depends very much on how politicians are dealing with this. And I must say now that in this political climat it's very easy to make a relation between computer and xenophobia, because the politicians are encouraging this. Related sites: http://www.documenta.de/workspace http://www.waag.org/tmn http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet http://www.desk.nl/~nettime http://www.contrast.org/ --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 2.0 <nettime> scanner project interview heath bunting j bosma nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 20 Mar 1997 21:24:15 +0100 This interview was made in march 96 and concerns a project heath bunting proposed to make for the conference Next5Minutes, which dealt with art, politics and tactical media. N5M, as it is called in short, was held in januari of that year. You can still find information about this conference at www.dds.nl/n5m heath bunting: www.irational.org JB: Can you tell us what you wanted to do for Next5Minutes? hb: The big idea was to create the first section of the underground secret service and this would be a radio listening post in a proposed series, covering the world, linked together via the internet, enabling people to listen to and monitor radiotransmissions remotely. This could be pirate transmissions, policetransmissions or any kind of radiotransmissions. It seems a shame that large governements and legitimate state secret service have their own networks and the underground always seems to be the victim of these. It would be quite poetic to reverse this, I imagine. Things that would be required would be a computercontrollable scanner, a small pc, a bit of glue software, total cost about a thousand pounds. This would have to be installed somewhere on a vast network somewhere within the city. Central is better. JB: What kind of network do you mean? I don't understand. hb: Well, the main problem people have with getting connected to the internet is that they want it to their premises, at home or their business, whereas this would only have to reside somewhere in the city, because the radio would do the local carrying. So for instance you could put the internetscanner in a advertising company or so, if they allready have a fast link, so you wouldn't have to lay a leased line to a specific receiver. You could just tack it on to an existing network. JB: What is this glue software? hb: Its just a piece of software that would take audio from the scanner, pass it through the computer, digitise it and place it onto the internet to people that want to receive it. Very simple software, it can be written in 5 minutes by experienced hackers. JB: But was it written? hb: It was half written. A collegue of mine who was enthusiastic about the project set to work straight away, in visual basic, on his pc. JB: And why wasn't it finished? hb: We ran out of time, because it was christmas, and nobody works at christmas. Also money. It was suggested to me we could run an entire local radiostation for a year on such a budget. But I think we could probably obtain the equipment. JB: But wouldn't it be so that only one listener at the time could control the tuner? hb: Only one could control, but many could listen. As I said it would be a kind of elite underground listening post, and hopefully many would grow around the world, so people would have their choice. If one was occupied they could listen somewhere else. Its not really for entertainment, its more strategic. JB: You could tune into any bandwidth you would want to as well? hb: Yes, it would be good to have a scanner that would cover all the spectrum. We don't really want to dictate whether people should listen to piratemusic or whether they should listen to military broadcasts or cellular phones, whatever. JB: This can not be a serious threat to the governement can it? Is it a joke? hb: It is a serious threat to be able to operate in the same media as repressive organisations. JB: It is just a serious threat because you are present, which you weren't before? hb: It is a serious threat because you can demonstrate that you understand how they operate and that either by action or just by word you can reverse or reflect their own ideology. For instance, slightly different to radio, most of my international mail is opened. Specifically when it comes from Japan it is very carefully opened and the aperture is made very delicately and reinforced with cellotape for the insertion of a videocamera. So I was thinking it might be nice to make a whole series of envelopes with prelubricated apertures, clearly marked for the assistance of the secret service. It would just say: "Please inspect contents here", for instance. I like to imagine peoples experience of these projects. So, if you can imagine somebody who's job it is every day to cut open an envelope, reinforce it with cellotape and then pass it on to their superior who will inspect it, can you imagine the first person going to the superior saying: "Oh, this one's allready been done! And its got instructions on it." I think that would be quite funny. JB: So you're just teasing them actually. hb: Seducing. Those two people will know that somebody is playing a game with them. And hopefully it will awaken them a little more to what they are doing. Make them think. JB: Are you an idealist? hb: No, I am not an idealist. Maybe a poly-idealist (laughing). No, ideals always end in violence and I don't like violence very much. It makes me scared. ********************************************************************* JB: The remote scanner might still be developed. Time and money required. * --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 3.0 <nettime> HIP: interview with marta (european counter network-rome) Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 11 Aug 1997 17:36:34 +0200 (MET DST) note: this article is one of the results of the on-line journal which was produced during the Hacking In Progress event, last weekend. The live net reporting marked the start of the magazine of the digital city Amsterdam. You can find the text, audio and video reports at: http://magazine.dds.nl/ For the first time, a number of political providers from europe held an informal meeting to get to know each other. After the presentation of contrast.org (nl) groups from Paris, Italy (ecn), Hamburg (nadir.org) etc. discussed about forms of collaborations like the newly created international federation of independant media and the tactical media network, which is currently based at Hybrid Workspace in Kassel. (geert) -------- Interview with Marta from Rome about ecn (european counter network) and islands in the net. by bas r. Can you explain what ecn is and does? Ecn is something like a political provider: we offer space, e-mail, knowledge, network services (of course without asking money) to groups and individuals of the underground scene in Italy and outside. Groups and individuals must have a few characteristics: they must be self organizing, anti-fascist, anti-sexist and anti-racist. How did this initiative start? Ecn is now an open political provider, but its roots are from autonomia operaia, a political movement that started in the 70s in Italy. We started very early with communication technology for the Italian underground and computer scene. In 1989 we created a network of BBS to exchange information between movement radios, social centers and squats in Italy. After three years we joined another new-made network, called Cybernet, and passed into Fido technology. These two networks, ECN and Cybernet found somehow the space to share two souls: a political one from ecn and a cyberpunk, techno-political one from Cybernet. We shared (and still share!) different discussion areas: the main one is the cyberpunk area, where we speak about every argument concerning the use of new technology, politics, transgender, drugs, counter-information and much more. Other areas are about social centers, cyber rights and more. The network of Fido BBS's still survives, and just last year we decided to add an internet service to our efforts, called Isole Nella Rete (islands in the net, go http:// www.ecn.org). This is a new project, that involves new people and new experiences from both original networks, ecn and cybernet. Did this 'opening up' towards the internet have consequences for the contents of the network? The explosion of the internet arrived in Italy in 1994. Before this, the internet was accessible only for universities and for research purposes. So, when it went public and became commercialized, the interest of the general public in life on the net grew. More people became aware of the possibility to get or to share information on the net - and more people learned about ecn and got progressively involved in it. Isole nella Rete chose to open its services to every group in need of a place to organise themselves on the net. The conditions of access are the ones mentioned above. Opening up to the internet also brought discussions on cyberrights and related issues to a larger public. New interests have risen amongst the larger public because of the internet explosion and our islands on the net initiative, like the importance of anonymity in the digital age. Anonymity was considered a bourgeois desire at first, but after people learned more about the importance of this issue in the digital world, where you must defend yourself in a different way compared to the analogical world, they got involved in this discussion. Anarchists used the islands for informing people on the legal actions of the state against them. This made the anarchist movement more sensitive for communication technology; before that they only saw the negative sides of it. What about the sense of community? Is it different on the islands as compared to the BBS? With the Fido BBS technology there was (and still is) a clear sense of community, as compared to the islands in the net website. On the islands are now 4 mailing lists: about social centers, cyberrights, zapatistas and 'movement', a more general area. But these mailing lists are not so 'immediate' as the Fido bulletin boards are. People feel somehow less involved. They see the website (the islands in the net) as an instrument to publish stuff (you read it and maybe answer sometimes) and not as a place to socialise. On the Fido boards people really feel present in a place they share with other people. This sense of community is much lower on the islands. For the cyberrights discussion, there is a gateway between Fido and the web, the messages are the same (if it works). Now the other areas of Fido are being gatewayed to newsgroups (instead of the web) because we think these give a better sense of community. What happens on the islands today? First, there is a project on the islands on political prisoners who have published their diary (in print). We have put that diary on the net with the possibility for everyone to add their own appointments and ideas. It has become a kind of guestbook connecting political stories to all kinds of personal and public events in daily life. Another project of the islands: we offer a real audio service to movement radios by publishing audio info points - this could turn into daily radio news bulletins over the net. We also mirror other sites like the German magazine Radikal. And we offer space to political groups from outside Italy, like ecn France and a Spanish political action group. Apart from discussing issues like anonymity we also build the tools necessary for getting it! Like an anonymous remailer, the 4th in Europe. And we offer a collection of software like PGP for encrypting your messages. This includes software from the US for instance, that should not have been exported ;-). These are all the things that the islands in the net are doing themselves. Beside these projects a lot of other initiatives are guests on the islands. Sometimes we have to teach them how to work with the net. We believe in having as many participants fitting the profile as possible, even if they are sometimes 'politically incompatible', like Italia Cuba and the anarchists pages. Everyone should be able to join, this makes the islands richer we think. Now there is a structure (websites, newsgroups, e-mail, anonymous remailers, etc.) and a place where all info is gathered. For the future we are looking at ways to re-create the web more as a tool to share information, we want to bring more interactivity into it, and show how everyone can organise their initiatives on the net. This we show to both the general public and the underground. Finally we want to extend our international contacts. If you are interested, go http://www.ecn.org and write to info {AT} ecn.org! --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 4.0 <nettime> Interview with Janos Sugar Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 26 Feb 1998 08:15:50 +0100 (MET) Intermedia: The Dirty Digital Bauhaus An e-mail interview with Janos Sugar (Budapest) By Geert Lovink GL: Can you describe for us the way you encountered the media in Hungary from, let us say, the late eighties? In my view, you started working with film and video at a time when the dark period of the early eighties was over and new era was about to begin. JS: I started to work with film in the beginning of the eighties. Parallel with my sculptural studies at the Art Academy, I worked with the Indigo (interdisciplinary thinking) group and we did shows, happenings, films together. Since the leader of the group was Miklos Erdely who himself was partly a filmmaker (conceptual artist, writer, painter--the most influential artist of his time and since) he pushed us, the group a bit in the direction of filmmaking. He did his films in the Bela Balazs Studio (BBS), and so in the early eighties I started to visit the regular Tuesday BBS meetings. Filmmaking at that time was still having some revolutionary romantic appeal and the most exciting and authentic place among the Hungarian filmstudios was the Bela Balazs Studio. BBS was a strange phenomenon: in the ocean of counter selection a little island for (state-sponsored) experiments in the sense of expression and political tolerance. The studio produced strong documentaries; strange shortfilms resulted but were rarely shown. Concerning the dark period, I have to say, it wasn't so dark. Only access by the general public and mainstream media was censored, not production. Public culture was strongly controlled: censorship, bans, but a vital underground art scene (the second publicity) existed, and maybe that is most important. Having no space for the ambitions, no practical perspectives, we had lots of time. For me as a young artist, it was an idyllic training--everyone was approachable, ready for dialogue. A couple of years before I joined BBS, I started to view films consciously and I had seen the basic works. My father took me to see Antonioni's "La Notte" (The Night) when I was sixteen. And after this, the biggest impact was Godard's "Masculin Feminin," which I saw in the late seventies and changed my view about film and filmmaking. Later, I made a few super-8 pieces, worked in films (as an actor in several of Ildiko Enyedys films and even in her diploma work). Finally in 85, I made my first film, a 50 minute long 16mm piece , "Persian Walk," which caused such an unprecedented scandal in the BBS that I had no chance to make anything there for years (and only 4 years later could I obtain a final print of this film). I had some experiences with video, but except for a few narrative pieces, didn't do much. I couldn't have a daily experience with video because access was very limited. GL: What about computers-- do you recall your first encounter, was it in an artistic or academic context? JS: In the mid-eighties, computers appeared in my horizon. In 86, I was given (along with other young artists) some computer time to produce works for the first Hungiarian computer graphic show. The officials wanted a computer graphic show, at least some smart people sold them the idea. The only problem was there were no computer artists, because there were no computers available--for long years--because of the rigid regulations. You saw just hardware parts and even they were sold mostly second hand. Anyway, they managed limited access to some IBM PCs in a room in some state computer research institute and the invited artists were working by a timetable. The only software was "pc paint" and I never heard this name again. >From the mid-eighties, besides my solo shows of installations, I participated in several such national computer art shows ("Artists Hongrois et l'Ordinateur" for example, classical cold war) but not having steady access, I wasn't so excited about it. Once I even had a little job (with the help of Tamas Waliczky) to draw new backgrounds for an existing karate game. I did it, but it took so much time) Then, I nearly bought an Amiga, but for a long time, the only computer around me was a C-64 I used with a tv and an external drive as a typewriter. Actually, this was my real experience with a computer. I realized that using a word processor changes my attitude toward writing totally. Maybe toward everything. GL: Still, you had little access to machines and perhaps also to the current media theory of the late eighties. JS: No real access to video, that's what I really missed. That's why I didn't do any real video art work, which requires in my view a sort of daily practice, a kind of coexistence with the medium. I didn't really miss the computer. Regarding media theory, the situation wasn't so bad, at least we knew that something called media theory existed. Miklos Peternak published some good essays and he had a rather different voice from the others. There were some rare publications, monthlies, small circulation textbooks, and Benjamin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Virillio, Feuerabend were somehow present. In the second half of the eighties Miklos and I started lecturing on film together, and we did it for a few years. There was a so-called Free University, offering a broad choice of evening courses, anyone could enroll in, lots of language courses, and the rest was popular science, art, travelling (the expert lecturer showed slides of his/her journeys). In 96, I did a work using this organization's slide archives--an enormous, unorganized 35mm slide archive of everything, from the AK 47 to sex-education. So, one day walking from somewhere to somewhere in the downtown, I bumped into Miklos, who told me he is just going to give a lecture there on film. We started to talk and I went with him and when the time came he asked me to take part in the discussion. The next year we announced the "Alternative Filmschool" which went on for 3 years. We were payed and we could order films which even we ourselves even hadn't seem. The audience was very mixed--a bunch of young people, elderly people mainly napping and some knitting ladies. We always showed two films and finished with a conversation between us. Sometimes we changed the order of the reels. Later we did a series in the Kunsthalle, under the title: "Film Utopias". Originally, my opera on video technique was planned as the closing event. After all of those experinces I wrote an essay: "The Fate of Intention in the Genre of Two-Dimensional Moving Image". GL: How would you now describe your media awareness during the period of transition, let's say the during the period 1989-92? SJ: This was the time, when I had real life experiences in media theory: the early years of typical East European spindoctorship, watching the soap opera of changing political rhetoric. First political then financial fight for the mass media (The word "media" first appeared in Hungary as "media war", the general usage of the term was/is: "press"); the more and more conscious usage of tv medium by the politicians; the Rumanian tv revolution; the increasing financial difficulties of the BBS. Altogether, this produced a mixture of anecdotes, shocking experiences, and lots of incredible examples. Before 89, things like political commercials or massive ad campaigns were totally unknown in Hungary. And in 1991, in the summer, I was commissioned to do in a few months a five part series for the (state) TV. A very courageous pruducer, who (for a short time) had relatively large broadcast time, started to work with outsiders, visual artists. She asked me to do some four-part series, and with Gabor Bora I made a proposal for "Misunderstandings" which she accepted. I could work with professional TV technique and (because everyone was busy with politics) not even my own producer saw it before it aired. We felt a growing competence and there were lots of opportunities to explain our approach, like inviting people and organizing events such as "The Role of TV in the Rumanian Revolution," (conference, 1990). This led to lots of contacts and information from abroad. And somehow this activity led us to establish the Intermedia Department in 1990 at the Academy of Fine Arts (from where, btw I was kicked out in 84), which was the first program of its type in the post-Communist region. GL: Do you think that there was a dialogue with the early avant garde, or with film of the sixties? Or is this just a reconstruction afterwards, to build the story of the so successful Hungarian Video school around Gabor Body? SJ: There is always a dialogue in art. The hard core avant-garde was somehow still present. Lajos Kassak died in the seventies. Moholy-Nagy became a national pride. But the films of the sixties were more or less under the strong influence of the zeitgeist and for young people poetry was out and filmmaking was in. The film medium represented something very important for this generation, who met the reality of WW2 mainly through films. (nowadays we meet irreality through special effects in the movies.) Film was the top medium: expensive but efficient and glamorous, the dream of every modern artist. Gabor Body was very literate even in an academic sense and represented a very strong intellectual but revolutionary attitude in the filmmaking. His innovation was linking techne with philosophy which appears in a very consciously controlled visuality. And maybe because of this, he understood best what video is. Unfortunately, we cannot speak about his video school. If he could have worked further, I think the significance of video art would be a bit different. GL: You are not making a clear difference between the second part of the eighties and the early nineties. Is this really the case, no 89 fall of the wall what-so-ever? SJ: I think for Hungary, the watershed was 56. This was a long standing trauma even for the politicians too. After 56, they had to give some perspective, optimism, to the people - and for themselves as well. It's interesting, how a so-called unsuccessful revolution like this, killed by the Yalta Treaty, can be successful in a sort of long term. That's why Hungary could became a bit more liberal as the other East Block systems became more rigid. Later, I guess, this somehow became the role of Hungary in the Warsaw Pact. Censorship was based on three principles: support, tolerance, ban. Practically, the Communists used the system intelligently--banning a few, tolerating a lot and continuously playing with dissolving previous bans. The heavily-banned intellectuals were less harassed than in the other countries and were mainly forced to emigrate. People were allowed travel every 2-3 years; information traffic was relatively strong and the cultural life in general was not bad in Budapest--rather ok book publishing, exhibitions, classical music, good choice of movies, etc. There was also the so-called underground or second publicity (art shows, pop and contemporary music, performance, samizdat etc.) with real personalities and with a strong moral position. Looking back, for me it was like an incubator or a natural park: it wasn't difficult to survive, lots of time for talks, meetings, discussions, intensive contacts, partying and of course in most of the cases not the slightest hope for a practical result. No contacts with the so-called first publicity, which was the realm of general or mass society or however you want to express it. The single and most cruel restriction for culture was blocking avenues to reach the broader public. No competition between the old and new, no aggressive cultural memes, no random spread of cultural inspiration. Only insiders knew about the best things going on in art. It's somehow like a philosophical problem: can anything be valid if no one knows about it's existence? Schrodinger's cat in the artworld. This situation caused serious damage, not just in the art (which became hermetic and context bound), but also in the general public. People couldn't know anything about this booming period, about this creative capital. If you go to a library and look through the papers, magazines, of that period you won't find any reference, any news or mention about what was really happening, what was important for us. It's tragic, because the majority of actual decision makers, politicians of today are the so-called average people of yesterday--former normal people who had no extra information source beside the state media. Nowadays, people tend to think it's just well-known general nostalgia for the good old past, but it's not: that cultural second publicity produced the most important solid values. Since Hungary was the most liberal country (the weakest link), there was rather big attention from abroad, lots of visitors, curators, artists. With the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, it has changed: a sort of cultural protectionism emerged between the former Socialist countries and Western Europe. We are not anymore picante Easterners but weak competitors with a bad infrastructure. I don't agree with such an argument, I think the fall of Communism changed the total situation, not just in the former East. In other words, the Cold War deformed the Western cultural infrastructure as well. GL: Could you tell us about your specific way of making films. It is not exactly experimental (in the technical sense), nor does it follow the classical way of narration, it is also not video art. Perhaps you are making a kind of fictional art documentary, trying to undermine all the existing genres... SJ: Fictional art documentary, thank you, I accept that one. The category I like the most is introduced by Miklos Erdely: "cognitive film". The notion originates from the total competence consciousness of avant-garde, which I experienced within the Indigo group. This total competence is more linked to the opportunities (site specific - in a complete sense) than to one or another particular medium. It felt natural to use film, but of course I had no idea for what. So all my films are different, like a different construction, I would say, singular solutions. For me the thought, a sort of hermetic dramaturgy, is essential, if it's somehow complete, then comes the execution, which is sometimes resulting in the humiliation of tradition. I am proud that my film "Persian Walk", in 85, caused such an outcry in the BBS. Even two years ago, I was asked by a renowned colleague to remove the BBS logo from the credit of my latest film, "Ambiguous Window." I cannot accept the notion of experimentalism, because such a thing outside the film doesn't exist in other genres. I believe that even within the film medium an intensive dialog should go on between tradition and progression like in literature, painting etc, where maybe innovation is having less attention but it's not barred from the mainstream. This separation in film makes any innovation more or less a political question. Nowadays the once 'most important genre' (Lenin) has become a very well-integrated part of global entertainment. The big budget cinema is the best vehicle for the subliminal education (of the proletariat). It is very exciting to analyze the hidden messages of the Hollywood movies, like cooperation, partnership, respect, love. I think it is already beyond film, because with its complex ties to merchandising it became the social medium, with basic but irresistible messages. Making film is expensive, and that's why a film should be immediately understandable in the present, otherwise the high production costs will not come back. In other mediums, working artists shouldn't necessarily put importance on instant success in the present, the artwork has time, can wait, until the proper perception. Art history is full of (time is on my side) examples. That is my basic position. Miklos Erdely told the audience in the Millennium (NYC), before the screening of his film, that usually a few people walk out during his films, but those who remain don't complain after at all. After making several shorter films, I became more and more interested in a kind of a synthesis of the avant-garde attitude and experience in filmmaking and the so-called movie (traditional, feature length, narrative) experience. I wanted to demonstrate that beside the big budget (Hollywood) and low budget (artist film) genres, there is a third production possibility: no budget (independent) filmmaking. In 92, I did a film,"Camera in Trouble," which contained a long narrative block. Together with this, I cut a short film, "Ambiguous Window," of footage's I made with my own 16mm camera between 89 and 91. As a result of this double experience, I realized that filmmaking is not necessarily expensive and I decided in 93 to make a feature length film, "Faust Again", (under production) immediately. To realize an idea immediately is an everyday experience of a visual artist, but totally unknown for a filmmaker who is bound to the production costs. With video, the situation is different: not having real access to it, I use it only rarely. In a strange way by teaching video, my interest in making videos is growing. Somehow it's the first forgotten new medium. I think video is still or again very relevant. Maybe the presentation of it should be different, like giving the viewers more time or some unusual environment. It is remarkable, that not the improved recording technology but the improved display technology, like making better and smaller projectors, has made a new impact on video art. GL: You spent a lot of time building up the Intermedia Department of the Art Academy in Budapest. There, you having been teaching a lot, for years and years, perhaps even more then anything else. But what you have been doing with the students exactly somehow remained a mystery for me. Tell us something about your methodology and your conclusions. SJ: The starting idea was to create a media faculty which we did with Miklos using our strong Indigo (interdisciplinary) experience, connecting art and thinking, in the sense of total competence. Art, technology, science with an undefined outcome. We used the word Intermedia as in "interdisciplinary plus media." Just after it became evident that Dick Higgins coined it, in opposition to what multimedia meant at that time. For Higgins, intermedia was the positive pole. I am really pleased we are linked somehow to the fluxus which is still flux. Practically, I have a double job there. I am doing one two-year course where I teach art and an another two-year series of media theory lectures to the same bunch of 15 students, for their whole first and second year. Besides this, I have steady consultations with 5 advanced students who have chosen me as their advisor. Of course, there are other obligatory courses for our students in photo, multimedia and web design, art history etc. My goal is to enhance the consciousness of the students, to be able to go radically beyond their own unconscious sympathies and choose unpopular, less easy solutions. I think the presence of the unprecedented, referenceless media, and the emergence of the work-entertainment-education conglomerate manifests itself more in a general media consciousness than in the use one or another so-called new medium. Its social impact is bigger than the cultural. With this new experience we can see and treat the other genres (if you like the old media), as a medium. The first thing students have to do is to write a fictional biography; then I ask them to collect analogies. Then, there are various exercises in video: like analyzing a real life action by montage; making short video pieces using text, short cuts, raging on the mixer; a series of irresponsible plays with the equpment. It is like teaching a language. In the meantime, we watch and analyze classical video art and anything else they bring--works, objects, collages--to discuss. To exercise control over the image, they have to create a narrative b/w photo. I require them to make three-dimensional (plastic) scripts or models in addition to the classical storyboard for their videos. Last year, in the spirit of tactical media, which I was lecturing about, we did a media event. Since the most popular evening news uses a live background image of the city, we defined a point within the range of this backdrop camera and we gave flashlight signals and this was broadcast throughout the TV news. Parallel with these studio exercises, is a weekly lecture on media theory, where I begin with Adam and Eve (share of work, specialization, secularization etc.), later touching photography, film, video, computer, hypermedia. GL: What should a new media education in an art context look like? and did you have any inspiring models? How should a digital media bauhaus look these days? JS: I think still deep in the core of any art education is the good old "nosce te ipsum". For the Bauhaus technology that was a metaphor, the zeitgeist. But for today, we are learning how arbitrary a so-called functional design can be. Nowadays, technology is fast moving, constantly upgrading and development is a continuous act, like an open language whose grammar always changes with usage and whose new idioms evoke new syntax and new grammatical rules. Result--an endless spiral--a language that wants to tell everything, but is actually falsely transparent. Technology needs instant and powerful demonstration and promotion to evoke demand among buyers. Using artists is the cheapest and most efficient crash test for the sw/hw manufacturers. But art cannot really function in a mediated form. We can alienate form and content but not in art. That's not very good for a visual artist. The so-called new media should be treated equally in every sense: so digital kitsch is kitsch too, but let's not forget how the medial aspect changes our attitude toward the other ways of expression. In a certain sense I think our Intermedia is an ideal model for an actual higher art-education program. We are in the middle of a traditionalist Art Academy, we were accused often of letting dilettants, people who cannot really draw, into the church of art. Our very poor conditions (we never got our full budget) force us not to fear or worship the technology and to create makeshift configurations in our run-down hardware. We teach the practice and the theory of the so-called new media, but we encourage the use of old or traditional techniques too. In the case of new media, it's very difficult to forget the tools--they are sexy, pushing and more and more capable--but the message is more an attitude than an immediately profitable limited expertise. We have a lots of visitors lecturing and our department is popular, probably because the students feel the freedom to work with the most adequate medium. Today's digital Bauhaus should be dirty. I don't really like the hospital/airport atmosphere of media labs, which suggest a sort of neutrality, distance--the ideology of design. GL: We have all seen you running around in Budapest, switching from one medium to the next all the time, several times a day even, between installation art, writing, teaching, theater, film and video, and increasingly working with the computers. And organizing events like the conference series MetaForum we organized together with Diana McCarty. In a way you yourself are embodying the whole idea of Intermedia. But your surroundings are perhaps not so fast, not so flexible...You must have seen a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding. Is 'intermedia' a utopia for you? SJ: It's not a utopia but it's not something I am concentrating on either. I would rather say I am working along the maximum action freedom radius. It forces you to connect things, because of lack of time, to solve one problem with an other, there is no time to worship the medium, just using it. In such a multitude, only the simple models can survive. (like: treat the present as if it were already past) It's like laying a very complex pattern whose regularities or laws are discoverable only much later. Living without feedback. That's the game. In making art, you can experience doing or executing something which isn't based on any practical demand. No one knows about it, only you. It is your sole personal responsibility to realize/not realize if you have an idea. No one knocks on your door, comrade artist, hey, where is the painting? we need the novel! or we cannot reproduce our working power without your film! Such a thing doesn't exist in art. It could be a definition as well. Anyway, that's my experience in visual art and I just transferred it to other areas. If I have an idea, it's a big thing, let's say the most difficult part of the case, and the realization is much easier because it's just practical. I learned immediately how to forget the practical difficulties simply because they are not communicable, they are not convertible. It is a very good strategy in Budapest, because even now there is little public attention on art, but the creative possibilities are big. I like to be in people's blind spot. This situation keeps me incognito. I could and still can work with a rather large freedom. For me it is the highest level of luxury. The rigid surroundings are sometimes very useful to enhance and refine your radicality. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 5.0 <nettime> net, 'radio' and physical space: XLR Josephine Bosma nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 11 Feb 1998 14:24:59 +0100 (CET) XLR stands for eXtended Live Radio. The group was initiated in the summer of '97. In the group are Ulf Freyhoff, Monika Glahn from Berlin and Marko Kosnik (Egon March Institute) and Borut Savski (Ministry of Experiment) from Ljubljana. They were working on trying to establish networks and platforms of any kind, be it physical or on the web. Most interesting of course is the mix or hybrid forms coming from this. They invited many groups and individuals to join in their experiments and their first project took place during two weeks in the summer of 1997. There is about 70 hours of sound material from the event, which is now available partly on the net. At this moment the former xrl crew in both Ljubljana and Berlin are working on new projects, connecting with others via the Xchange mailinglist. What follows is an email interview with Ulf Freyhoff and Monika Glahn. I added one quote from Borut Savski from one of his mails to the exchange mailinglist for alternative web.casters ('broad'casters on the web). Q: What exactly happened during this whole period of the project, and did it work well? There were two main concerns, live-web-radio and live-fm-radio. We did two weeks of fm-live-radio in ljubljana from midnight to 6am (last days live only till around 3 or 4..;)) The first week we did broadcast from a studio at Radio Student, the second week from a public space, Kapelica Gallery, both in ljubljana. We invited people from all over the world to participate and contribute, it took some days till contacts to other places started to work, so the first days we were doing the whole program ourselves. So we focused and improvised on themes which were about what we were doing there, for example one day it was about feedback (this was the day when finally the line to berlin worked and we could work and play with a lot of internet-audio-feedbacks that night...) Other subjects were real-time; machine and human languages; nothing, something, anything; sun ra .. and (of course) cyberpunk, cyberspace and cybereverything; technical languages and nothing, something, anything; sun ra ... Form of the program was a kind of monologues, lectures or readings, discussions, music and experimental live-mix, interviews. The structure was a main program between midnight and 2 am, which we called 'main content area', then from 2 till 4 am mix/improvisation and from 4 am til 5.30 music (recreation). We then faded out with Dagmars Wusch, an ongoing story about the 'cyborgs' that she wrote during the time of the project and reflected the things that were happening during the broadcasts. After some days, when web-contacts started to work, it changed depending on who was when online and what happened at other spaces. Now the focus was more on the external connections, we tried to always have opportunities open for broadcasts from other places. Concerning web-activities: we had a lot of contributions from Berlin, for example musicians were giving concerts or were playing via internet together with people in Kapelica Gallery, there were interviews with artists from Hybrid Workspace in kassel, there were interviews with musicians who work with electronics and web, or for example the last night we transmitted a concert of a percussionist in Aachen. Later this percussionist was supposed to improvise together with a trumpet-player in Berlin (unfortunately the line to berlin broke down completely, so we had to improvise again. Borut Savski and Marko Kosnik then played in the gallery in ljubljana together with the guy in Aachen. In parallel chat was running all the time, and people, who were not able to send sound, gave comments or participated that way and we read parts of this communication during the program too. There were even people from Australia, Tokio and New York participating. At the same time there were people in the gallery doing performance, for example a visitor from NewZealand decided to prepare a performance spontaneously for the next day together with one of the djs, who played the first night together with Berlin musicians... These are some examples to give an impression what happened - but two weeks is so long, that its not possible to mention it all here and now - and of course there were a lot of "black holes" which we tried to fill as good as possible ;) (nobody of us ever did radio before) (the Berlin group JB) There were a lot of technical problems, so we spent the first days between trying to find solutions for them and trying to prepare the broadcast for the night, and contacting and inviting people to participate, explaining via email and chat how to install the needed software...and so on. This is a major thing one has to think about: is it possible to do the content and the technical side at the same time - we were stressed most of the time exactly in between these two concerns. So should one establish the 'technician position' for events like that - what we didn't like as an idea - or is it just about time management ? There are several more 'jobs' that need to be looked after: someone has to be 'secretary' just to keep track of all the 'communications on the side', someone has to be the 'social worker', just to keep track on what's going on between the people at all the connected spaces.. Its all about monitoring what's going on, which is especially difficult if you are not physically at the same places. Q: How did you get the contacts with Ljubljana, why this Berlin/Ljubljana connection? We knew some folks, by chance they were living in Ljubljana, and we always ever wanted to see Laibach... ;-) Marko Kosnik told us about the Egon March institute and his work at Ministry for Experiment, which is an organization within Radio Student in ljubljana. At the Ministry they are working since years on developing different kind of broadcasts. They are inviting people from other countries and are organizing experimental projects and platforms. We saw that there are some similar interests and asked Marko if its possible to do a project there. They said yes and then we developed the concept, also in sending amounts of emails back and forth daily for three weeks of preparation. At the same time we completed the site-setup at Interflugs, which was the studio in Berlin during this time. Q: Were there any transmissions of web.sounds in the ether? Yes, we transmitted EVERYTHING on the ether, no censorship. At the same time we always tried to make the process transparent, to tell something about the measures that had to be taken to make the transmissions possible, and about the possibilities in general. Borut Savski (on Xchange about webcasting): To define the do-s and don't-s of web casting, let's compare it to what the conventional radio technologies don't (!!!) offer... and use web casting in every way possible, especially in the ways that surpass the ways of conventional radio! Even implement conventional (local?) media with web (international) principles (those of us who have the possibility). Q: How important is the physical space for you, why does it need to be connected to the net? The physical space is the most important for us, and it doesn't NEED to be connected on the net. The connection via internet of two or more physical spaces gives the possibility to synchronize those spaces at least partly and for a certain time. It's an image, located in real time and real space, for and about information, experience, network, communication. Translation. Inside and outside. Crossing and melting borders. For any activity in public space its very important to create a certain atmosphere, an 'interface', which reflects what it is about. Its about this translation of (in this case) sound, which comes out of a machine without any-body or human traces, into something you can experience and which creates an atmosphere. >From a call for participation for a special night's program: We are offering the platform we built on this evening to special projects and persons whose work in different ways does connect positions and ideas and puts strong efforts in opening and establishing spaces for creativity, exchange and discussion. Q: What happened after you call for participation, was it effective? We got some reactions of people who wanted to contribute, but they didnt appear at the announced time in the chat, so we had to do other program. Maybe it was unclear to them, and for sure the announcement was too late. Later some of the invited people showed up but merely for personal talk. Chat was integrated into the broadcast anyways. Our experience the days before the event was that a lot of people who wanted to participate could only reach us via chat. So the idea was to let something happen in this medium, where many can follow it and also participate without mediation of us. In chat its always this quite chaotic jumping around between different lines of talks, so it would have been interesting to see how it develops, if there is a certain focus, if its possible to focus... If you want to communicate something via chat, monologues are not possible, or only, if all others wait, what is not very probable, so discussion-strategy is very different from spoken language. Q: what were you basic reasons to start this project? Assuming your question is about the whole xlr project: We all like babel ;) -plus this was about investigating the possibilities of 'contemporary' media for artists. Some questions we had were: - what have we got with the internet that we did not have before / without the internet? - how to 'misuse' the platform / the internet? - how to create an own structure within the superstructure? - how to really focus on contents not getting lost on technical issues? - can the net be an artistic medium, or is it just good for documentation of artistic work ? - what benefits do I get out of using the net as an artist ? (not that we got real answers to these questions, but we have more ideas about these topics now) Q: Are you working more from an art or a tactical media background? (you could write a whole book on that, basically this is about a definition of art) We wont necessarily divide it. both. neither. whats the difference ? (quoted from Neil Stephenson: 'Snow Crash') ---------- ministry of experiment at Radio Student in Ljubljana: http://www.radiostudent.si/mzx/index.htm Monika Glahn and Ulf Freyhoff are also working on web-broadcasts and creating platforms at interflugs, which is an independent organization at the academy of fine arts in berlin. The student's union of the academy of fine arts was very supportive and their room and computer was occupied a lot for radioactivities...: http://www.iflugs.hdk-berlin.de http://www.iflugs.hdk-berlin.de/~xlr --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 6.0 <nettime> Interview with Shu Lea Cheang geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 29 Dec 2000 08:41:56 +1100 E-mail Exchange with Shu Lea Cheang And Geert Lovink Shu Lea Cheang is one of the few artists I know able to operate in both the new media arts and the contemporary arts world of museums and galleries. Born in Taiwan, Shu Lea left Taipeh after the democratic changes and worked in New York as a member of the Paper Tiger Television collective to become a truly global artist in the nineties. It is hard to keep track of Shu Lea and her projects. I got to know her when we both worked in the media lab of the Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam. At the time, around 1998, she was producing the Brandon project, with programmers and designers of the Society, a website and installation which deals with gender and identity on the Net. She then moved to Tokyo to produce her first feature film in the sci-fi porn genre. The following e-mail exchange took place over a few months in the second half of 2000. GL: Where are you? It is hard to keep track of you, digital drifter. Which trouble in, at this moment? You are such an expert in freaking out stessed, burocratic art institutions. Excellent. I know you are not looking for trouble perse. Still, your work provokes people, at some stage, though not in a direct, obvious manner. You are well known for strategy that in Japan. SC: Where I am, in terms of my X-Y positioning or Location URLs? My dissimulating body parts as compressed bytes, transmissible and available. Well, this year, I barely scratched the skin in Germany, a bit of exchange with the German Federal Ministry of Internal Affaires over interfacing airport Hi-Scan machine and internet. I was warned that sending scanned images from suitcases onto the net, 'could possibly give information about how to circumvent measures taken for the protection of attacks on the security of air traffic.' I do play by rules. My intention written in proposals are stated out front when dealings with Institutions. I stepped right into the political conflicts, those of Tokyo Central Government and Okinawa over US military ba se issues, during my residency in Okinawa with the project, 'Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker' (1996). The exhibition at Tokyo's Atopic Site led Japan's censorship debate after the recordings of my meetings with Tokyo Government representatives were published. Back in 1995, I got into trouble with Bowling Alley at Walker Art Center. The museum commanded the site to bear a warning, 'This Site contains mature subject matter. Discretion is advised'. That was on the eve of US Congress' delivery of Communication Decency Act, the museum had yet to configure the cross-section of public and private space. When Brandon was presented at the Guggenheim Museum, all cautious procedures were taken to ensure that subversiveness could work within the system. GL: You have specialized yourself in on a highly specialized meta level of (new) media work. It is the realm of the pure conceptual. In doing so, you depend almost entirely on other people's design, programming work, editing, pre- and post-production. Almost every aspect of your huge productions such as the interactive online installation Brandon and the sci-fi porn film IkU, are realized by third parties. How would you describe your work? Art director, media manager, concept artist? SC: Why do you insist on the division of expertise as 'realized by third parties'? Every aspect of production works toward realization of concepts. I communicate with my parties on a conceptual level. I take the credit as concept/direction in executing large scale productions. I decide with which of the writers, designers, programmers, cinematographers who I would collaborate with. They are each self-claimed art practitioner in their own right. I seek collaboration as I conceptualize the projects. I have carried out my art installation as a filmmaking practice or directing a film as a large scale installation. I think there remains this romantic notion of the artist as loner and a sole operator. I do not practice art as self expression. The urgent command from the 'meta' level has designated me to be Institutionalized. GL: How do you feel about the division of labour you are in? SC: Concept_proposal_design sketches_routing public interface. This year, the project CARRY ON for IFU (International Women University), had me working with IMK:MARS/GMD as part of their CAT (Communication, Art & Technology network) initiative. (http://imk.gmd.de/mars). In this institution, a computer scientist made system analysis of the concept and three system programmers collaborated on database network platform and Java applet application. It was a group effort to configure languages and engineer the systems hard and soft. GL: Let's speak about discontent in media activism - and what to do about its visual poverty. You have been a member of Paper Tiger Television, back in the late eighties. Like me, you have ambivalent feelings, about the immanent danger of activism, using whatever medium or platform, falling back into the one-dimensional styles of the video diary, documentary journalism and plain propaganda. Which strategies would you suggest to escape these obvious traps? The concept of 'tactical media' has been developed, intending to bring together media activists and new media artists. Are cross fertilizations sufficient? Is it an option to abandon the 'activism' label altogether? Good news is the renaissance. The WTO protest in Seattle (December 1999) has brought up a whole new (rave) generation. Then there is the concept of hacktivism. The dark period of neo-Luddism and pessimism seems to be over. What esthetics, in your view, could further energize, broaden, and critique the current global movements? SC: Back in the 80's, we were out on the streets. There was this sense of global connectedness, camcoder media and satellite feed. The sense of urgency for information flow-- shoot, deliver and act. It took a while for video collectives to make transition onto the Net. but then, the nature of hyperlinks on the Net may also contribute to infodata overload and scattered social bodies. Shared information does not amount to counter-activity. I did buy in the idea of electronic disturbance. The Net sit in as media event, but is it helping the movement? Or is it intellectual exercise for computer crash course? The global net-connectedness can be an illusion. Locality reclaims matterness when political agenda is specified. Esthetics functions on conceptual level. I am encouraged by corporate level Netivity. No One is Illegal's campaign on http://www.deportation-alliance.com is good example. Counter information is a slap in the Corporate face one click away. Harwood's Uncomfortable Proximity for Tate Modern goes further to demand side(site) by side(site) fusion. And that is quite a few steps forward from demanding a media slot. GL: You moved away from regular media activism for a certain reason. What is so hot, so interesting and so strategically important about the conceptual and formalistic level? Is it a meta level? Should we consider this more powerful compared to the ordinary levels of content production, design or programming? Can we perhaps compare it with the role of the film director or conductor? SC: You seem to be caught in a twisted complex here. Are we back at the 'level' of white/blue collar class struggle here? I use the word 'level' for my replicants. Level 7 is my recent updated version of humanoid IKU Coders or HiC agents. Level 4 is the retired outdated copies. The machine drives me. A deliberate take over of control key in my functionality. The machine operates. The corporate schemes. The sole/soul artist is out on the bound. Acting as 'floating agent digitale' on my own terms, all directorial and conducting power is given. GL: I am saying this because there is a general discontent, for decades, about the work done by activists, like going to demonstrations, making pamphlets, targeting governments and corporations for their policies in the form of direct action. I see a certain fascination with the more symbolic meta levels where power is located these days. Do you think activists protest at the wrong spot when they go on the streets, blocking roads and offices? SC: I was just off track into daytime porn.... stepped into a major web attack-- 'Webmasters, join us and increase your traffic drastically!' The net windows are launched one after another faster than I can close them. eXXXtreme! are screaming at me !! The Net era traffic jam with roadside vendors hawking. Now, I have not seen activist organizations united this way. Have you? Hyperlinks decentralize. Virtual sit in holds still the information flow. The power to be is clearly s(c)ited. One chooses to confront or comply. The road block is metaphysical. The streets are up for grab. You can claim the streets for spirit refill or make the move to say 'chess' in the final play. GL: Does it make sense for you to distinguish between a polymorphous 'art porn' practice and the mainstream porn industry? Which distinction would make sense for you? Is it a matter of high and low culture? I suppose you would agree that the mainstream porn industry is reproducing the worldwide male dominance and patriarchy. Obviously certain parts of the emancipated middle classes, the upwardly mobile gays, cosmopolitan lesbians, bi-sexual office workers etc. do need their own porn. In that sense 'art porn' is a niche market. Still, I suppose you are not just working for a market. You want more. What drives you to make these films, apart from the fact that it is fun. SC: I have wanted to get away from institutions and funding cycles for a bit. I stepped into porn production as a director for hire with an indie Japanese producer. With my producer, we have all intentions to make money with this film. But it has proved to be quite difficult as the film doesn't fit into any specified market. The self claimed Japanese scifi porn I.K.U. (2000, Uplink Co.) operates on high concept, the meta level in your term. In every sense, it meant to subvert 'the worldwide male dominance and patriarchy', the hard on dick that upholds. Here I want to distinguish my practice from that of art porn which I consider to be a soft industry domain. I.K.U. <http://www.I-K-U.com> confirms cyberporn as Corporate operation of level 7 hard and soft fusion. Ultimately, I.K.U. severs cumbersome tentacles of the wired 90s' cyborg entity and initiates the body as a gigabyte hard drive, self-driven by a programmed corporate scheme. It updates VNS Matrix's ' The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.' by claiming 'The Pussy is the matrix'. GL: Do you mean that in the biotech cyberpunkish sense, as Kronenberg's biopods? Is it the aim, still, to merge bodily functions with technology? Isn't that fantasy already implemented and played out? To what extend do you see the sexualized techno-body as a role model, or let's say, reference of an unlikely future? SC: I am looking at a wireless digital mobile present with no portal to channel us; built in memory flash and gigabyte hard drive as delivered at birth; genetic mutation for ALL NEW GEN. The merge is complete. We ride on the fantasy. Living comfortably with the monster within, I assign my body as a self-programmed, self generative sexual unit. This body functions with an operating system that requires version update and memory upgrade. The unlikely future has come and gone. The retro future could be the next comeback. GL: Over the last years you have been one of few artists who has managed to operate in both the 'contemporary arts' field and in the much smaller scene of new media arts. You have seen both worlds. How do these two rather different fields, which both use the 'arts' label, relate? Will they merge at some stage? Contemporary arts has finally discovered video. How long will it take once they will inhabit the computer networks? And will electronic arts ever leave its own self-referential ghetto? SC: Hey, I am still working...and (projects) under development. I did cross over a few fields. I am not really in that particular 'contemporary arts' scene. But yes, I managed to work the medium. The new media arts field is in step with software development. Technically there are needs for collaboration between artists and programmers, which can be best facilitated by the Institutions. Like any large scale public installations, the new media art can be nurtured as commissioned art work. The Corporate funding is at the core of this underwriting. Here I am not neglecting the web as self-expression, self-distribution medium for a genre of web artists. However, to consider the Net as happening public space, not simply a broadcast medium, how do we keep up with web appointments? I want to feel collective breathing (can be extended to collective orgasm) on my computer screen. As for the self-referential ghetto, we have to grant the privileged club members the fun of mutual masturbation. They don't have to leave. They own the Net. Meanwhile, the rest of the world strides to catch up. Every art agency must comply to digital update. Only yesterday we were handing in our web work for 'permanent collection' at the museums as long as they can provide the archiving servers. Today, we float. (in market and travel sense). The dealers will eventually come around and work the scene. postscript An update on the trouble i am in since your first question- currently I am working on a 35mm movie trailer for my not yet produced scifi porn 'FLUID'. The trailer is commissioned by Palais de Tokyo/Site of Contemporary Creation in Paris, a new museum that is scheduled to launch in the Fall of 2001. This is my first encounter with French Cultural Agency's public funding. I would need to manipulate the ejaculation a bit to survive this one. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 6.1 Re: <nettime> Interview with Shu Lea Cheang geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 31 Dec 2000 15:42:51 +1100 Shu Lea asked me to send a correction to the intro of the interview we did. IKU is her second, not her first feature film she directed. She did not produce the film. Here two related URLs: http://brandon.guggenheim.org/shuleaWORKS http://www.I-K-U.com Happy New Year, Geert # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 7.0 <nettime> interview with Critical Art Ensembl Ryan Griffis nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 18 Dec 2000 11:21:11 -0800 (PST) Tandom Surfing the Third Wave, Part One: Critical Art Ensemble and Tactical Media Production This interview, with Critical Art Ensemble, is the first part of a series of investigations into collaborative/group artistic practice taking place in, and critical of, the e-conomy. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of 5 artists working since 1987, produces cultural products ranging from books to Web projects to performances that investigate moments in art, technology, activism, and critical theory. Ryan Griffis: How did CAE come to be a working group? Critical Art Ensemble: It's too bad CAE has no heroic formation story about a grand international like the one the Situationists are often mythologized as having. CAE's story is much more mundane. We were students looking to develop a network that would have a cultural impact--some way of organizing that would give us enough financial, hardware, and labor resources that we could begin to construct a platform for a public voice. Collective activity seemed (and still seems) to be the best option. RG: Many people, including artists, don't understand how most individual artists finance their work, much less large-scale public work projects and ephemeral/"conceptual" works. With the work that your group (and others) is involved in, being "politically" involved and controversial (in a way that doesn't always lead to "ticket sales") as well as potentially expensive (time & resource wise), could you talk some about the economic strategies of CAE as a collaborative venture? CAE: We don't understand how to finance work either. No granting agency has ever given CAE money. We raise funds in three ways. First, we all have straight jobs. Second, we do a lot of visiting artist and speaking gigs in conjunction with writing, so we get royalties, writer's fees, and speaking fees. This money goes exclusively toward projects. Finally, we try to throw as many expenses as possible at any institution that wants to sponsor a project. We just hobble along from project to project, usually working with an extremely limited budget. A lot of our imaginative power goes into figuring out how to make things for minimal cost. However, it's better than it was when we first started. At least we don't have to liberate materials anymore. RG: CAE has written quite a bit of theory for the practice of collaborative art activity, and from a perspective of involvement. At the current time, where does the group see itself, and other art/activist groups, in relation to other practices, for example the (very youth oriented) electronically aided organizing efforts of recent demonstrations in Philly, LA, and DC? CAE: It all depends on what the group is geared toward doing. Over the past five years, CAE has primarily focused on biotechnology and the colonization bonanza that it is launching. We are working in a very straightforward manner, and trying to do events that demonstrate through participatory theater just what is at stake. Other groups like the Institute for Applied Autonomy (www.appliedautonomy.com) are focused on ground developments, with projects like Graffiti Writer (a remote-controlled, programmable graffiti-writing robot) or their GPS project, designed to offer protesters escape routes so that they pass by the minimum amount of surveillance hardware when on the run. There is so much to be done. Happily there is no single metanarrative that describes intercollective associations, or that maps the intersection between groups working on direct material levels and those working in cultural representation. RG: I've read statements from a member of RTMark expressing uncertainty about the labeling of their activity as art, or rather how the label can be a double-edged sword. I have also heard Guillermo Gomez-Pena say (of his and Sifuentes' work) that they can get away with much more than straight activists because they're artists. How does CAE deal with the reception issue, and are there times when the "Art" label is useful, and others when it's not? CAE: If CAE has to pick a label, we prefer "tactical media practitioners." However, in keeping with this tendency, we use labels in a tactical manner. If the situation is easier to negotiate using the label "artist," then we will use it; if it's better to use "activist" or "theorist" or "cultural worker," then we will use those labels. Regardless of the label, our activities stay the same. Labels are useful only in so far as they set expectations among those with whom we wish to have a dialogue. The label that best taps the knowledge resources of the audience is the one we try to choose. A lot of this problem has to do with the social constructions of the roles of artist and activist. For the most part, these roles are placed within a specialized division of labor, where one role, segment, or territory is clearly separated from the other. We view ourselves as hybrids in terms of role. To CAE, the categories of artist and activist are not fixed, but liquid, and can be mixed into a variety of becomings. To construct these categories as static is a great drawback because it prevents those who use them from being able to transform themselves to meet particularized needs. RG: In looking at many art strategies that have taken an "oppositional" stance towards the various forms of hegemonic oppression, be it blatantly political or theoretical, it usually seems to become assimilated into the larger art world. Overtly political artists become just that (Haacke) and more theoretical work becomes academic style (Kosuth, Art-Language). But such criticism seems to suggest that to become mainstream is death, so opposition is doomed to always stay marginal. But it would also seem that our society (and probably most) are resistant to drastic change, without catastrophe, and such assimilation is a necessity, one that must be carefully watched, but a necessity nonetheless. What are/have been CAE's thoughts on such issues? And how does this play out specifically through CAE's interventions into a discourse like biotech.? CAE: Whether to take a position at the center or the margins really depends on the goals that have been set by the individual or group. The reasons for doing projects on the margins are obvious. Work in such areas is great for education and organizing. From a collective history viewpoint--many individuals and groups working on a specific issue can bring about some positive changes. Working in the center is trickier, because as you stated it can always be used by the center for its own ends. The same can be said when the margins are organized well enough to have a public voice. Take the example of ACT-UP. This group collectively changed the protocols at the NIH in regard to HIV. At the same time, it was used as an example of democratic action that can impact bureaucracy, an example of people having free speech, etc. In many ways the movement was used to reinforce the public perception that democracy exists in capitalist economy. Someone like Hans Haacke is used in this same manner on a cultural level. However, the ability of the sight machine to reconfigure resistant actions (particularly once they address the center) is not a reason to criticize. If a group is creating resistant initiatives as a public practice (as opposed to an underground or otherwise hidden practice) then the cycle of resistance and assimilation is just a given. The important thing to watch is how well a group negotiates this give and take, and not whether or not it does it perfectly. In the realm of biotech, CAE is just trying to make a specialized discourse a public (nonspecialist) one. CAE is worried that nonspecialists in general may not understand the significance of the biological revolution. So many elements are hidden, and there is so much misinformation (generally from market directives and science fiction) that it is difficult just to create a reasonable discussion. Specialization is a scary thing under these conditions. Unlike with the communications revolution, few people (directly) use the applications and information from the biorevolution, although almost all are indirectly touched by it. Since the public has almost no direct experience with biotech, it seems abstract and too difficult for a nonspecialist to understand. CAE's intervention in this situation is to give people direct experience and reliable information so that individuals can come to understand that biotech is within their power to think about and actively affect. RG: Speaking of the G.E. and biotech developments that CAE has investigated, there seems to be a lot of overlap with concerns coming out of communication technologies, that other groups, like RTMark and The Redundant Tech. Initiative, are taking on. Many aspects of CAE's activities appear to address this as well in different ways. Could you address some of these overlapping issues occurring between biological and communications technologies? CAE: There are two primary narratives in regard to this issue. The first is the digital and the second is control. Recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) and in biotechnology are on a parallel course. Contemporary ICT is slightly ahead of biotech, but they are both products of the digital era. When speaking of the "digital," CAE means this in a grander sense than just as a category of technology. We are speaking of a worldview, of a new cosmology. When we use the term "digital," we are referring to the idea of replication. Western cosmology has traditionally been analogic. That is, a process moves from chaos to order and back to chaos, and products exist in a binary pattern--the original and the counterfeit. For centuries the principle that order came from chaos and chaos from order was unchallenged. This situation really started to change in the early 20th century with Fordist mass-manufacturing. Ford intuitively understood the digital in terms of manufacture, in that he knew the distinction between the original and the counterfeit was actually an impediment to profit, and that profitability was increased by employing principles of replication and equivalence. This new model was directly understood and addressed in the development of digital technology--the technology of replication and equivalence. The model is based on the principle that order comes from order. Such an idea had tremendous impact on biology, because without it, the reproductive process could not be understood, because biological reproductive process is about replication. Once this idea was accepted, it was possible to understand DNA in a whole new way. Manufacturing, ICT, and biotechnology (the primary markers of the 20th century) are linked in that they share this new principle of order from order. The second narrative, control, also links ICT and biotech. Both of these revolutions are about greater determinacy in complex systems. ICT primarily functions as a means to improve the gathering, storing, exchange, and distribution of information in the virtual world. Biotech is about the same processes in the realm of the organic. Through improved control of complex systems, capital can achieve its own ends in terms of constructing bigger and more efficient profit machines and maintaining the social hierarchies that best lubricate this machine. Take the example of work. ICT has contributed to its intensification to such an extent that the worker's body (particularly the technocrat's) is failing to function in the high velocity marketplaces of capital ( since the body is a low-velocity constellation). Biotech is partially an initiative to prop the body up, to redesign it, so it can keep up with the demands of a society of speed. RG: With respect to GE/GM technology and human medicine, what are the group's interests in visualizing aspects of this technology that have a significant impact on access to health care and other privileges relating to the understanding of "healthy" vs. "unhealthy"? For example, denied access to managed health care, or jobs, based on "genetic predispositions". CAE: The group hasn't really addressed this issue specifically, although it does come up in relation to our investigations into the reconfiguration of eugenics in pancapitalist economy. The question for CAE is perhaps broader, and concerns categories such as fit/unfit or normal/abnormal. These categories clearly stretch beyond the specialization of healthcare and into generalized social and political organization. As tactical media artists, the group has completed four major projects examining various aspects of biotech revolution in a theatrical form that invites public participation (participatory theater). These works raise questions concerning (1) eugenic traces in assisted reproductive technology ("Flesh Machine" - both the book ( published by Autonomedia) and the performance project); (2) extreme medical intervention in reproduction and the attack on sexuality ("Society for Reproductive Anachronisms"); (3) the acquisition of "fit" flesh materials ("Intelligent Sperm On-line"); and (4) the utopian promissory rhetoric spinning off of the Human Genome Project ("Cult of the New Eve"). The most recent project is one that CAE began to investigate in the "Cult of the New Eve," and that is the politics of transgenics. What the collective is exploring in particular is the relationship between transgenic production and biological environmental resource management. RG: Could you talk a little about this project and specifically explain the significance of the concepts of transgenic production and biological environmental resource management? CAE: Transgenic engineering is the formation of new combinations of genes by isolating one or more genes from one or more organisms and introducing them into another organism. It was once believed that species boundaries were for the most part impenetrable. Now, all bets are off. Any species or combination of species can be combined with any other (although the limits of these recombinations are still unknown). Once the genomes of all the species are mapped and sequenced, and this information becomes readable, highly functional organisms can be created to suit the needs of the institutions or states that create them (hence the huge investments from both public and private sectors in various genome projects). Biological environmental resource management is mainly concerned with introducing species particular to one ecosystem into another ecosystem, in an intentional attempt to preserve or to reclaim a desired version of ecological equilibrium. The problems with this method are clear from the beginning. How is equilibrium defined? What is a desirable ecosystem? The ideological repercussions are overwhelming. Be that as it may, the method has been used for over one hundred years. There have been successes and disasters, although the disasters tend to get more press--kudzu, cane toads, etc. With transgenics, the possibilities for new species introduction grow exponentially. Resource managers are no longer limited to the catalogue of life as it existed in the past, but can create a nearly infinite amount of recombinations (eventually with very specialized characteristics) from this catalogue. New organisms are already being made on a daily basis using transgenic processes. The question of what can be made and what happens when these creatures are released is of central importance to all specializations concerned with the environment. Indeed, the commodities market is already testing the possibilities by releasing transgenic bacteria, farm animals, and plants into the ecosystem. This form of testing and of biological environmental resource management is a relatively gray area. The possibilities are both utopic and dystopic, but public mistrust of transgenics makes public discourse on the subject all the more difficult. To complicate this situation further, capital is in the midst of an ideologically schizophrenic moment. On the one hand, the ideology of transgenics (the mixing of categories) has traditionally been used as a means to mark the other and justify colonization. Colonial subjects have been considered dangerous because of the high value placed on transformation and mixing of natural constellations, which to the western colonial mind shows them to be out of harmony with the law of nature (according to which species can only combine with like species). To be sure, such activity in western mythology results in making of monsters in the most extreme sense--vampires, werewolves, and witches. Not to mention that the territory of the other, like hell itself, has historically been sprinkled with projected fantasies of horrific recombinant creatures (harpies, sea monsters, cyclops, etc.) that are abhorrent to nature. Yet now that this law of nature (like with like; species with species) has been reduced to a simple boundary to be crossed for profit, capital has to produce a kind of double think that maintains colonial signifiers but allows the recombinant to be accepted in everyday life. Now that this new organic realm is open for invasion, centuries of ideological signage have to be re-engineered. The sharply divided opinions about transgenic food are indicative of the problem. On one hand, the traditional transgenics fears sweep through the general public, and on the other hand, those concerned with maximizing profit in food resources are building data that show that transgenic food is neither a health hazard nor an ecological threat. This battle between the dystopian/utopian form of representing these new initiatives is the perfect dramatic friction for a theater of transgenics, and biological environmental resource management is one key discipline where material conditions will play themselves out in the extreme. RG: One thing that I've noticed frequently in CAE's writings is the examination of our (US mainstream) culture's focus on the spectacular and unusual when it comes to death and memorialization. The group seems to like using Greg Ulmer's concept of a memorial for automobile deaths as an opposing point of focus. This seems to me to suggest an attempt to do something not often done in "activist" art practices (Adbusters, etc.), which is mainly addressing latent desire(s) behind the mundane acts of living, along with being critical of the actions themselves. CAE: Nonrational economy, or the under economy, has always been of primary concern for CAE, considering that capitalism has an immense stake in limiting the scope of desire to work and commodity relations. The task of trying to productively agitate the nonrational is by far the most difficult because it is where organizational and analytic abilities are of modest use in insuring successful actions. The standard tendency of cultural and political activist practices to react and counter a given activity that reinforces or expands dominant social hierarchies with a strategic or a tactical initiative (logos opposed by antilogos) will not work in the realm of the nonrational. All we can ask in such a case is what can we do to create conduits into territories of visibility where repressed/invisible desires can find public expression. When done successfully, such expressions can introduce a productive level of chaos into society (usually at a micro level), which in turn offers organized (rational) movements or activities a more liquid space to act effectively. In other words, the political chess match between oppositional forces does not have to follow standard patterns of interaction. While this narrative sounds good in theory, the problem is that there is no way to know who will benefit or what the final result of agitating the nonrational may be. It's a real roll of the dice that can have as disastrous (authoritarian) consequences as it can have good (liberationist). However, given the current situation, resistant forces have little to lose by working in this arena. RG: Does CAE see the "Us/them" dichotomy common to many oppostional camps problematic? If so, what theories/practices do you use to not fall into that trap, while remaining actively critical? CAE: That really depends on the situation. For example, CAE is in favor of what we term tactical essentialism. When this is employed, people can successfully use universal binaries to establish the social solidarity that can in turn produce a resistant movement. It has been used well in the past by the Women's Liberation Movement or the Black Power Movement. However, this choice is tactical, meaning that it must be surrendered once the movement has been established. If resistant vectors are to continue to increase in mass and velocity, they must then establish more complex critiques and actions that recognize the inconsistencies, aporia, and gray areas involved in separation. CAE's main principle for not falling into the binary trap is our use of tacticality. Obviously, this a very long discussion that goes beyond the limits of this interview, but here is the short version. The five principles of tactical media are: specificity (deriving content and choosing media based on the specific needs of a given audience within their everyday life context); nomadicality (a willingness to address any situation and to move to any site); amateurism (a willingness to try anything, or negatively put, to resist specialization); deterritorialization (an occupation of space that is predicated upon its surrender, or anti-monumentalism); and counterinduction (a recognition that all knowledge systems have limits and internal contradictions, and that all knowledge systems can have explanatory power in the right context, and that contradiction in general is productive). Our practice is about process only--the process of resistance. We have no final cause in mind, no utopias, and no solid social categories. CAE interacts with the becomings of lived time in an effort to expand difference. RG: I don't want to naturalize technology here, but what does CAE make of certain trends in technology that seem to favor more democratic (less specialized) forms of communication and commerce (shareware, Linux)as opposed to the more dominant forms of private property and intellectual property rights? How is biotech connected to these changes? CAE: We have to be careful with this issue. The primary conflict, if not crisis, that is happening within capitalist economy concerns how digital economic power should be configured and consolidated. Currently, capital is split. On one hand, there are those who believe that profits can be maximized by doing away with older notions of property. From this perspective, in an economy based on replication, the only thing that matters in terms of profit generation is the speed of replication. The faster information is replicated and thereby consumed, the higher the profits in analogue economy. For example, if a company gives away free music on Napster, that company will in turn sell more CDs, more concert tickets, more band merchandise, etc. From CAE's perspective this is the position that will eventually become dominant because it is a digital strategy. On the other hand, many still believe that digital products should be governed under the same property principles as analogue products (traditional privatization). The struggle within capital is intense on this issue. Whichever way it goes, the public is not going to win. Capital will only tighten its hold on digital economy. The good side is that during these conflicts it's possible for actual anti-capital initiatives to accomplish more by camouflaging themselves with this discourse and reaping benefit from the confusion emerging from the crisis. It's so nice when the capitalists turn on one another over a principle that was beyond question prior to digital economy. Biotechnology is a part of digital economy in that it is primarily about speed and replication, so we are witnessing the same struggle. From the research point of view, scientists are generally good about sharing information, but there are limits. Patenting is still alive and well. From the corporate perspective, it's the same split as with digital information. Some want to treat genetic and molecular breakthroughs as analogic, others don't. Take GM food for example. Some argue that it is best to give away genetically modified seeds (a common occurrence in postcolonial food initiatives in the third world). The belief is that once food production is cornered from the molecular level up, that profits from other related goods and services will increase. Others want payment from the beginning. Since much of this happens on a case-by-case basis (for example, Monsanto uses both strategies), it's difficult to tell what the future will bring. Critical Art Ensemble can be found on the web at www.critical-art.net. Ryan Griffis is a member of artofficial construction media (www.artofficial-online.com) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 8.0 <nettime> Interview with Toshiya Ueno geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 26 Sep 2001 16:01:16 +1000 Urban Techno Tribes and the Japanese Recession Interview with Toshiya Ueno By Geert Lovink Toshiya Ueno is a Japanese sociologist, media theorist and critic. In May 1990, when I was introduced to Toshiya in Tokyo during my first visit to Japan, I could not quite make out who he was. His English was poor and so was my Japanese. I had heard about his institutional involvement and his career as a popular columnist for fashion, design and computer magazines. In 1992, when he came to Amsterdam for the first time we slowly got to know each other and by the mid-nineties our friendship was established. He kept coming back to Europe and became a regular visitor of the Ars Electronica festival, reporting for Japanese magazines. At that point Toshiya's English skills increased dramatically and a fierce dialogue about media theory issues and the state of new media culture worldwide started between us. A few times a years Toshiya would stay in the tiny guest room of my former Amsterdam house. He gradually left the official Japanese new media business and started to investigate Amsterdam's free media scene, drugs culture and the (Goa) techno trance scene in particular. Through the lively refugee tribes from former Yugoslavia based in Amsterdam Toshiya came in contact with techno-trance rave scenes in Croatia where he made his debut as a DJ and TJ (text jockey), a passion he would continue in Japan. Our collaboration would take us from Internet conferences in Europe, a annual five years long teaching project at Osaka's Inter Media Institute (IMI), a common trip to Taipei to co-producing a television show about Amsterdam's subculture. In this e-mail exchange we have focussed only on a few aspects of Toshiya's work: the notions of urban tribes and digital diaspora, the use of technology in subcultures and the need in Japan to cross boundaries and start a dialogue and exchange between various scenes. GL: In retrospect, how would you describe the nineties in Japan? It seems such a strange period, where not that much seems to have happened. It more looked like a never-ending mild recession. A sweet stagnation without brutal Thatcherism. No crucial decisions were made. No drastic cuts. No equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall. No uprisings. There weren't even dramatic political and economic changes following the 1997 Asian financial crisis and countless bank scandals. The cultural climate seemed dominated by a ongoing consumerism, yet in a less ecstatic way compared to the bubble years of the mid-late eighties. A sophisticated numbness and joyful innocence could be found amongst youngsters. How could this odd mix of technological speed and pop fashion admits an ongoing recession result in such an amazing soft stagnation? Please tell me if I am wrong. If this model is running out now do you see any signs of discontent or even protest? TU: Your description may be right until mid 90s, the days just after the collapse of the speculative and 'bubble' economy. But around 1999 a drastic storm of 'neo-liberalism' set in. Ordinary people were seemingly not aware of this crisis in their everyday life. However, if you turned your eyes to the micro level you could find lots of symptoms of a collapsing corporate welfare state. There have been many lay-offs, 'restructuring' of businesses and various cases of 'privatization' of the public sector such as museums, institutions and state universities. Until 1995 people did not feel these measures and were by and large unaware of the coming crisis. Since 3 or 4 years however we are facing a 'second hand' version of 'populism' in the UK-style. Politicians have been quite influential in this process. It did not matter whether his/her political stand point were left or right, liberal or conservative, global thinking or nationalistic. These days novelists and TV stars are capable of winning an election and become president of a local prefecture or win a seat in the national parliament. Some of them are significant figures in Japanese subculture. During the recession the cultural or expressive sector of society was deeply damaged. It has become difficult to find a publishing house for books that have a theoretical or political content. I was saddened with the absence of uprisings or riots, yes. But I also have to say there have been numerous revolutions, even though most of them came from conservative and reactionary side. 'Revolution' is the very nature of neo-liberalism. Japanese society is following the same process which the UK and US experienced earlier. On the other hand one has to see the singularity of the Japanese 90's. We could for instance point at the transversality (a notion of Deleuze/Guattari) and singularity of the economical, cultural and even political crisis. GL: Is it useful to integrate the notions of subculture and media as developed by UK cultural studies into your research about Japan? TU: Cultural studies UK-style and its versions in other Asian regions are of importance to me. I do not want to reduce cultural studies to political and theoretical reflections on Japan's imperial and colonial past, neither to a sociology of popular culture. In the UK, cultural studies has also been tactical criticism and a theoretical weapon against populist neo-liberal politics within the everyday life. Cultural studies were not just an analytical tool, it was also related to real micro and cultural politics against the populism sprouting of neo-liberalism. I am referring here to do-it-yourself, Rock Against Racism, the movement against Criminal Justice Act and so on. Until recently I have also been thinking why we did not have protest movements in Japan. But now I am more interested in doing something real and respond to the seemingly invisible and intangible crisis. We can make something happen in this situation. Although neo-liberalism is really shit, it is also true that it can also generate forms of resistance against itself. A few years ago, in Germany and Amsterdam, I came across the rave party phenomena. I discovered music-based subcultures even though rock had long been a part of my life. Rave culture has got something for me. Rave is based on hedonistic desire and fun, but at the same time it can also be connected with environmental awareness. It is a movement in itself with its own anarchist politics. For instance pirate radio is often used these days to broadcast from rave parties. In the early 90's I used to be a critic of contemporary art, music, film and all kinds of expressive cultures. Those were the so-called postmodern days. At that time the Japanese economy was still a powerful force. The speculative 'bubble' economy needed, even preferred, 'speculative' essays and articles. Under those circumstances I wrote a lot of papers and essays for a myriad of magazines. However, when I came across rave I realized that music was the most important thing for me and my critical interpretive ability was most suitable for the music and its cultural and political implications. That's when I stopped writing about other fields such as new media theory and the arts. Within the rave movement I found a lot of elements I was interested in and involved with before, for instance, free radio, techno music, ecology movement, quasi-squat activities, anarchism, dissident politics, and also visual designs of party gear--decorations which are related to contemporary and electronic arts. All the elements I had been interested in so far were coming together in rave. I started to elaborate my own theory based on everyday experiences. GL: Do you think that techno culture is part of the leisure industry to forget daily boredom? TU: A party is not a festival or carnival to forget the routine of the everyday life. A party is a critical part within the everyday. Sometimes people think of a rave as a unusual event which is opposite to the everyday life as a 'temporary autonomous zone' (Hakim Bey). For some scholars raves are conceived and interpreted as disorder, chaos, a marginal experience, frequently depending on communitas and liminality arguments as developed by Victor Turner. Theoretically speaking these arguments are rather banal. Raves or parties are not liminal or marginal. One can bring in elements such as the gift economy, open minded communication, abandoning the sexual 'picking up,' environmental consciousness and so on. Even though it seems that rave and party can occur beyond the everyday life, beyond the border between order and disorder, the usual and unusual. Because of my involvement in rave culture people in liberal and leftist academic circles in Japan have started to criticize me. They say: 'Toshiya changed a lot. He abandoned social movements, cyber cultures and media politics.' But that's not true. These days I am much more involved in cultural politics, the politics of the everyday life than ever before. Through rave culture I am encountering a variety of urban tribes. GL: Aren't you overestimating the political dimension of the rave phenomena? TU: Most of the ravers are apolitical and lack consciousness about political issues. For instance, they don't care about Japan's colonial and imperial past. On the other hand it is very interesting that some of young trance tribes are negotiating with capital or globalization in their own way when they have to manufacture fashion gear. They don't have a political agenda but they somehow have tactics to survive or to make money in their relationship with Japan's former colonies such as Korea and Taiwan. They don't deny their eventual political agency concerning topics such as ecology and the pirate (gift) economy. As a dissident sociologist I would like to construct a political practice with these urban rave tribes in order to develop tribal solidarity in Inter-East connections through various subcultures and build bridges between Japan, Korea, Taiwan and even China. In other words, rather than being crazy about a reflection and redemptive consciousness on the Japanese colonial and imperial past, I would like to create something positive together with ravers, urban tribes and also youths and people in ex-(or post) colonial Asia. I have to say that the leftist 'authentic' and 'liberal' position in Japanese academia is failing to grasp such alternative possibilities. They tend to be too 'moralistic' by seeing history and past only in a regrettable way. I am sure that there is a similar pattern in former Yugoslavia. If the Croats for instance insist on their 'most-victim status' then you can not invent something positive or productive in tribal solidarity with others, for example with Bosnians or Serbs. GL: What do you think of the current I-mode fashion in Japan? Is there any reason for Westerners to be excited or even jealous about the Japanese wireless craze and DoCoMo in particular? TU: Certainly all of my students and the party tribes are all using mobile phones to communicate, make appointments and sometimes to get a bit of info. But I can't find any reason why westerners should be jealous about their Japanese counterparts. Concerning tactical use of mobile gear I can point to more interesting and crazy usage in Europe. Nowadays even for most dissident punks and squatters handies are really helpful technological tools. Some DJs and organizers in Japan started to distribute tracks via wireless networks. At the same time they are also are thinking about how to hook up mobile phones with MIDI instruments. Even though all this supports capitalist telecom corporations, these experiments could be really revolutionary. GL: How would you describe Internet use amongst young people in Japan? It is being said that they're not so interested. They are much more crazy about wireless applications and more protected, intimate BBS systems. Is the English language an obstacle to communicate? Cybercafes and public terminals aren't that popular compared to for instance Australia, Asia or Latin America. TU: Japanese youth are not so crazy about Internet, as far as I see, certainly not my students and the tribes around me. The aim and the way of using the Internet are quite different. They are all the time net-surfing but mainly visit Japanese sites. They are also quite skillful using computers to edit sounds and moving pictures. The web design scene is also powerful but always lacks content, especially political and theoretical one. So relatively it is true that they prefer 'stand alone using computers' over the Internet. There are only very few students who visit English based sites. Language is still an obstacle, also for me. There are not so much cybercafes in Japan because most of the people already have their own computers in the office or at home. Of course tribes in the party scene are more active on the Net in order to organize parties, wary of local authorities and police to find out. GL: Where does the 'urban tribe' concept come from? Don't you see it as a set back to go back to such an anthropological term, so close to ethnicity where there no longer is any ethnicity? Why would rave cultures be best described as 'urban tribes'? TU: The term 'tribe' was not invented by myself. For this I have to go back to Japan of 1955. One author published a novel titled Season of the Sun. It was a bestseller. It told the story of hedonistic subculture youth and caused a sensation in those days. A film was based on the novel. Increasingly that type of youth style out of the novel could be found everywhere because youth were trying to imitate the style and fashion described in Season of the Sun. Of course, this novel was inspired by the real youth of these days. And then a term was invented: 'sun tribe'. People used to call the dissident, hedonistic youth during the fifties the sun tribe (taiyo-zoku). After that in each period, 60s, 70s, 80s, mainstream press and parent cultures always used the term zoku to describe unknown youth subcultures. For example otaku-zoku, crystal-tribes (Japanese yuppies in 80s) or the speed bike tribes. Japanese are crazy about the generation gap phenomena, perhaps because we don't have visible markers amongst people. 5 or 6 years difference is already important for people. Japanese youth are very sensitive about age. Since the 90s this symptom is slowly changing. Maybe the otaki-zoku was the last tribe in Japan. Because people tried to use another term, kei, it is very difficult to translate - system or series. So, for instance, Shibuya-kei, Shibuya-series in English. Shibuya is the name of the district of Tokyo, one of youth centers in the city. So people would like to call the music genre and some fashion based on the youth in Shibuya, Shibuya-kei. Nobody these days is using the term 'tribe' anymore. But at the same time there are a lot using the term tribe or tribal in flyers for club and rave party to connote new types of music genres and specific atmosphere. Another interesting point is that the author of the Season of the Sun later became a politician in the parliament in the LDP - the dominant liberal-democratic party. He is now governor of the Tokyo metropolis and perhaps the only mayor who rejected to give the human rights to gay people or to give rights to foreigners to be able to vote. He's a real fascist or at least can be called a fanatic nationalist and historical revisionist. He is constantly denying Japan's colonial violent past. He once called Asians 'third people'. Japanese would be first, Americans and the westerners second. According to him people from other Asian countries such as migrant workers or students should be discriminated. This is a really crazy situation. Why did this man become so powerful? Because people supported him. In that way zoku and the story of tribes is not only based on sub-cultural studies, it is deeply related to Japanese politics. Recently the son of Prime Minister Koizumi, who is also populist, neo-liberal, started appearing as an actor. Despite of the poor result, he gave an audition with the title '21st century Yujiro' (Ishihara's dead brother). Such phenomena are interesting, ironical and crucial for Japanese populism and conservative cultural politics. In Japan the term 'tribe' has had a specific meaning. In the late 40's in Osaka, the second biggest city in Japan, there were squat villages, squat towns of Korean residents. They were very much discriminated. In those villages there was a lot of scrap of steel underground. They tried to dig up this scrap and get money by selling it. But this scrap was the national property of Japanese national government. And then the conflict between the police and the Korean residents started. It made a sensation in those days. These Korean residents called themselves the 'Apache tribe.' They compared their position with native-American. Numerous authors and novelists wrote the novel featuring this 'Apache tribe.' One of them was an SF called Japanese Apache Tribe, written by Sakyo Komatsu, in which Apache tribe appeared as a mutant having iron body something like cyborg or T-1000 in Terminator 2. It is a well-known fact that this novel influenced the underground cult movie Testuo. I am sure that some SF freaks or club techno tribes regard this film as a legendary piece. GL: You have been working with the 'digital diaspora' concept. Could you explain this? To what extend would you support a withdrawal into the Net? Could we speak of productive monads and where does this inward looking become eccentric and obsessive otaku-ism? You have been critical of the figure of the otaku and the Western fascination for this so-called typical Japanese obsessive behavior of the 'otaku' data collector. Where does a sub-culture in Japan have possibilities for resistance, and at what point do 'temporary autonomous zones' transform into consumer-driven lifestyles? TU: By using the term digital diaspora I don't mean the disappearance of human lives and bodies into the Net. Rather, I use it to talk about a diaspora within the Net (or generated through the Net). Historically diaspora cultures can be found around the world. Some theoreticians working on the diaspora topic have used the term of web or network. The term 'diaspora web' was introduced by Paul Gilroy. These days this terminology is no longer a mere metaphor but rather a sort of allegory for the reality itself to which we are faced up. We are now faced with broader cyberspaces through network technology. Not only due to computers but also via radio or telephones the information 'seas' have been expanding. Not only through the power of Internet, actually some refugees and people in diaspora began to keep their lives in diaspora through video distributions or computer networks and other electronic technologies. One could mention refugee communities in Perth (Australia) coming from Croatia or Macedonia. They are using VCR technology to maintain the relationship to their original place. And also one can put as example, some independent media in Amsterdam to support people coming from ex-Yugoslavia, (as described in Dona Kolar-Panov, Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination, Routledge,1997). Information technology and telecommunications are developing the diaspora notion into new directions. Diaspora in general is connected to moving and migration forced by some power relations including economic, political, religious and so on. To describe the things and the cultural elements moved, like dreadlocks, T-shirts, and music etc, one can appropriate the term cultural diaspora to interpret such a circulation. Certainly diaspora is a sort of cultural traveling and causes traveling theory, but it should not be confused with globalization in general or postmodern pastiche eclecticism which is based on the 'anything goes' parameter. But on the other hand it is becoming difficult to maintain the dichotomy between real refugees, illegal migrants, asylum people, 'suffered diaspora,' ravers, hooligans, travelers, tourists and the 'cultural diaspora.' It is becoming difficult to distinguish forced settlement and voluntary migration, dwelling and traveling in a rigid way. We, I mean critic or intellectuals in the 'first world', are in between the 'suffered' and the 'observer'. Diaspora is crucial tactical tool and even medium or space to analyze this situation. GL: What does the diaspora condition got to do with the specific Japanese 'otaku' phenomena, the manic collectors of instance records, magazines and games? TU: In the past I have criticized the term otaku but not the otaku people themselves. I am criticizing the cultural condition of otaku and its political context. I myself am an otaku of sorts, being crazy about Japanese animations and psychedelic trance techno. I am skeptical about Japanese art based on otaku-ism. Western people are fascinated by otaku culture and that's why it can be marketable. Some even try to emphasize the cultural traditions and history of otaku. They say Japanese culture has always been dominated by collectors infomania. For them Japanese history has been postmodern and eclectic right from the start. GL: Where does the difficulty to communicate between scenes, movements and disciplines within Japan come from? It is striking to see how many useless frictions and anxieties there are, between artists, scholars, institutions, activists. This makes it rather difficult, I suppose, to set up networks in Japan. The only communication which seem to work are the very private, intimate channels on certain bulletin board systems (BBS). There seems to be a form of competition, not related to work, money or income. This fact has made it difficult to set up a half-way independent and interesting new media arts scene in Japan. Japanese we get to meet in the West do not collaborate in Japan. It seems much easier for them to meet in New York, Amsterdam or Paris then in their own country. Do you believe that this is simply cultural (as a 'second nature') and therefore next to impossible to change? Isn't it interesting that this overdose of communication devices hasn't had a significant impact on this specific aspect of Japanese society? Or should we view this observation as yet another culturalism? TU: Well, I don't want to say that there is particular inability to communicate in Japan. I am actually highly skeptical about any form of culturalism or cultural essentialism. But to be honest, I have also have felt the useless frictions amongst the different urban tribes in Japan on numerous occasions. I am fed up with that situation. That is the reason why I am frequently staying in Europe. Maybe others also feel like that. For instance, in Japan, media artists are generally not interested in politics and especially not in Japanese politics. On the other hand, most of the leftist intellectuals have never heard of media art or media activism. Tetsuo Kogawa and Toshimaru Ogura are great exceptions of course. The former was founder of free radio movement in Japan and still very active for experiments of streaming and developing critical media theory. The latter is radical media activist and theorist organizing anti-wiretap and anti-echelon movement. In fact, I myself have not met them since long time. Tokyo is too huge to see each other. Toshimaru is living far away from Tokyo. There is a deep gap. Of course this gap is both cultural and political. Cultural studies is recently becoming popular in leftist and liberal academic circles. But most scholars reduce cultural studies to a method for criticizing the notion of the nation state. Their arguments have never reached younger generations or urban subcultural tribes on the streets or scenes such as hip hop or rave, even though they could easily be against the nation state and its cultural hegemony. Take the example of LETS (local trading system) in Japan. That's a popular concept at the moment amongst critical intellectuals. Koujin Karatani and partly Akira Asada, who always prefers the 'safety zone' rather than the real 'critical space,' are at the moment involved in organizing NAM, the New Associatist Movement, which is a network of LETS in Japan. I support LETS, its theory and especially its practices. Being one of the ravers and organizers of small illegal parties I respect every form of gift-economy style and reciprocal symbolic economy. So why don't I join NAM? Despite of Akira and Koujin's nasty and cynical gestures towards social movements during 80's, it is good to see what they are doing. But there is an old type of politics at work within NAM. Karatani and others are putting out the theory, and then people can do LETS activities according to the theorists' system. Volunteers work within the structure elaborated by intellectuals and theoreticians. This in my opinion points at an outdated and unnecessary contrast between theory and practice. Their classifications on some parts in the movement are very ironic. They call their small groups 'kei' meaning series or system, in contrast to tribe. So you have bunka-kei (culture series), lilon-kei (theory series), undou-kei (movement series) and so on. It sounds like a bad joke to the subcultural urban tribes. Karatani and Asada's take on social movements is to ignore and neglect the organic and transversal relationships amongst different scenes. What I am trying to do is setting up small pirate radio stations and flea market activities during open air raves. Indeed, there is a difference in understanding between tribes such as rave and punk and hip-hop. But that's a much better situation than the classic binary opposition between theory and practice. Karatani labeled NAM as a new type of communism. Probably that's right. But he does not think about the people's reaction. By using the term communism NAM is losing interesting people and tribes. Their way of communication is using classic leftist language in an almost tragic-comic way. I am familiar with it but most people are not. I wished NAM and various urban tribes and subcultural scenes would shake hands and build an affective and effective alliance. For that vision a cultural politics would be crucial, a politics which communicates within the scenes rather than mere political rhetoric. It can be called cultural politics. Technology can change the way of communication in each cultural and political context. That is why I restarted the pirate mini FM free radio idea during open air parties. I would like create hybrids amongst different urban tribes such as techno, punk, eco, anarcho, rave, new age, otaku, the left and other dissidents. GL: What is the current level of media theory in Japan? We don't hear much about it. I can't think of any Japanese contemporary theory being translated. We actually only hear about theory import into Japan, not the other way round. Is this because there's nothing going on? This can hardy be the case. Is the produced theory only of local interest? What's reason for this theory deficit? TU: There are a few tendencies within Japanese media theory. The first is mainly developed in academic field and is called media studies. There are some layers and spectrum goes from audience research to more positivist methodologies. Basically researchers don't want to go outside of universities and academic circles. Most of them are not enthusiastic to use media technology themselves. There are a few translations or papers available in English. The second tendency would be a form of criticism to be found within new media art, connected to the Internet hype and early-mid 90s media technologies. That is why it used to have financial support from big corporations but that's fading away. Unfortunately new media arts lacks the vision on the broader political economy of its own field. That is why corporations can safely speculate their money into 'speculative' media theory . The third tendency would be the activist 'tactical' media. But that stream is very micro and weak in Japan. As I mentioned, Tetsuo and Toshimaru are active in both theory and action. They are paying attention to the economy and politics of the media and Internet. I am not that satisfied with the theoretical level of the three currents. For most of the time I have been moving between the three and taken difficult in-between positions. What is crucial in this context is how we can build bridges between the different media tribes. GL: Over the last few years you have been going to a wide range of raves, from illegal parties in German forests, squatters parties in Amsterdam, raves in Zagreb to solar eclipse parties in Hungary and Zambia. You also attend a variety of raves in Japan, from expensive Tokyo club events to informal events in parks and in the mountains. Do you see yourself as a modern anthropologist studying rave culture? Have you encountered any problems with this form of 'participatory research'? TU: There is a 'belonging without identity' as described by Gorgio Agamben and Lawrence Grossberg which goes beyond the usual definition of community as a social entity with shared values. Without identification on fixed and stable positions it is possible to belong to a tribe. Tribal formation are not one. Within one tribe we can find diverse styles, differences in taste and even conflicts over how to live ones life. When subculturalists say ' (s)he is tribal' it means that there is an open group-minded feeling, a solidarity and tolerance for other tribes and different styles. It point at a consciousness against the mainstream of this civilization and its globalization. For example, tribal cultures within the rave scene show respect for so-called traditional tribal or quasi-premodern cultures and their 'indigenous' way of living. This respect is so distant from the way in which journalism and political science talk about 'tribal wars.' The position of the DJ in all this is highly significant. The DJ functions as a mediator and catalyst to both inform and transform people how to enter other dimensions of the world. They could be considered the shamans of the cyber age. But this shaman is at the same time an 'organic intellectual' in a Gramscian sense, organizing people to get to other horizons of society through 'partying.' Becoming a DJ has influenced my way of writing in many ways. Both positions, the sociologist and the DJ consist of a cut'n'mix of materials produced by others. Usually a DJ does not compose or create the music tracks him or herself. The DJ cut'n'mix is '(re)inventing' and (re)elaborating already existing sounds. The same can be said about the work of the sociologist or theoretician as a TJ (text jockey). We can no longer pretend to create 'theory' out of the blue. We always first collect material, texts and resources and then start quoting, editing and appropriating passages from past works. That is do-it-yourself within theoretical practice. Kodwo Eshun's notion of 'remixology' is quite suggestive. Sometimes I am asking myself: am I a sociologist or just a tribal raver? It is a really difficult question to answer. I don't want to merely celebrate rave culture. There are a lot of problems such as hedonism, consumerism, drug issues, frictions amongst tribes and organizers, negotiations with local authority and police have to made, etc. I never face any problem during my 'participatory observation' or fieldwork research. Maybe this is because of my enthusiasm to join the party. The difficulty is lying somewhere else. I do not have the proper language yet to talk to both academic circles and party tribes. It might even be impossible. I would like to invent a different way to theorize everyday life. [Toshiya Ueno is an associate professor at the Expressive Cultures Department at Wako University, Tokyo. Several of his papers in English are available in the Nettime archive. He is preparing a book titled "Urban Tribal Studies" with the Amsterdam-based Croatian sociologist Benjamin Perasovic. His published books, in Japanese, amongst others, are "Situation, Cultural Politics of Rock and Pop (Sakuhinsha, 1996), "Artificial Nature, On Cyborg Politics" (Keisoshobo, 1996), "Thinking Diaspora" (Chikuma Shobo, 1999) and "Cultural Studies, an Introduction" (With Joshi Mori, Chikuma Shobo, 2000, vol.2 coming up).] # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 9.0 <nettime> An interview with Geert Lovink snafu nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 05 Oct 2001 17:09:51 +0200 dear nettimers, the follwing is the integral version of an interview/dialogue between Geert Lovink, Snafu and Subjesus. It was made in July for the portal of the Italian pubblic Television Rai.it. (Italian abridged version at http://www.rai.it/RAInet/smartweb/cda/articolo/sw_articolo/1,2791,137,00.htm l) In this text Geert touches a variety of arguments, from the first development of the digital public domain, to the recent evolution of Tactical Media passing for an analysis of the dotcom burst and of the possible development of independent platforms and infrastructures. ------- Interview with Geert Lovink By Snafu and Subjesus Q: You took a part in several media-related experiences, mostly in the Netherlands: the Adilkno group of media intellectuals, the pirate radio movement, tactical media conferences, the Amsterdam-based community network The Digital City and so on. Could you give a short yet detailed outline of your past activities, and a glimpse at your present days, as a member of a global/local networking culture? A: Is this a job interview, or what? I am not sure if my personal biography is all that significant for the theory and practice of "becoming media". Certainly I cannot see an accumulation of knowledge or even experiments in our "alternative" network sector. Growth in the digital arena is more spasmodic than linear or dialectic. Yet, there are waves of change, intense periods in which History and the personal biography seem to fire each other up. In the meantime there is just boredom--the usual, eternal, repetition of the same old topics and patterns in which thoughts and movement come and go. We are now in a golden age of net activism, and we should all enjoy this rare and special period. In my biography the year 1980 was of significance, the squatters movement in Amsterdam and Berlin, urban autonomy in a post-ideological and post-68 condition. Leftist models occurred at moments of regression. They were responsive and regressive, not strategic, imposing dogmatism is in a precious situation where something new was about to emerge. At that time the left had split into a pragmatic faction and an intellectual ghetto within academia which was only able to analyze its own defeats and failures (which is, I agree, a study in itself). Just imagine how different Baudrillard would have been if he would not have had the boxing ball of 1968. The same can be said of Deleuze and Guattari. One cannot understand their intellectual position without basic knowlegde of the French political landscape in the sixties and seventies (which was dominated by the PCF). In the age of ecstatic normalcy, lacking opposition the theory without enemy, without reference, has become a self-mirroring text regime. Activists in this context are, almost by default, forced to respond anti-intellectually. This tendency started in the late seventies with punk. If you have the impulse to do something you have to stop deconstructing yourself. Just do it, as the Nike phrase correctly states. Hit and run. See how authorities and their sign system respond. Trail and error. Ignore those who tell you that all activism ends up in building concentration camps. This is moral blackmail from those who are not involved anyway. Take the moral highground in such situations and respond with a sovereign silence. It is not worth the anger. This also counts for the hacktivism and net.activism debate. Let's not be afraid, neither for radical action, nor for radical theory--and leave the pc knights outside . Theory is not an ersatz religion. It won't tell you what to do--nor what to think. It has truely become a Foucaultian toolkit, that is, one which stays in the wardrobe for most of the time. Forgotten pearls. Beautiful but unworn. In this situation the Event becomes an almost holy entity. For many, Events are just falling from the sky because they are no longer created by some Party or Vanguard. Cracking the events therefore becomes precious knowledge. Most people just live their lifes. They wait and see, until something happens: 1989, raves, Seattle, a squat, a riot on the first of May (or not). This eventism can also be found at the media level, with the Internet, or local radio, suddenly creating zones of possibilities, which then fade away, after a wild night, some exciting months in a media project, or however long it might take. That's my biography. The development from print to radio to Internet, in my case, is not an interesting one. What is interesting is the ability to metamorphorize, as a person, using (new) media, in the way Klaus Theweleit described this process of personal "growth", using "techniques". Sometimes one succeeds, in some cases in all seems to fail, ending up in (in)significant misery. The hardest part for me is to judge my conceptual work. The realm of ideas has lost so much of its significance, despite all the warm hearted compliments of theory sympathisizers and reassurements from the side of industry that "one day your good content will rewarded." Q: You have written a lot about the digital public domain, often with a realistic and disenchanted view. Yet, if we look at experiences such as DDS and xs4all, we have the impression of an early European net.culture able to highly influence the digital innovation, by acting as a subject of the early networks. Nowadays the mediascape has clearly mutated its outlook. Despite the apparent crisis, dotcoms and telecom are monopolizing and re-shaping the net. Yet, we feel that many issues raised by the digital avant-guards (if we can use this term.) have been absorbed by mainstream new media: access for all, low costs of connection, availability of webspace and various facilities are on the agenda of any big corporation. In the context of the Next5minutes 3 you launched the "free for what?" campaign (www.waag.org/free), which was exactly focusing on these issues. At which level the ideology of a generalised free access have been absorbed and emptied of its idealistic drive and at which level it has positively influenced the economical development? Did that ideology help to reduce the digital divide, or the market continued to be driven by its own logic, without being affected at all by social dynamics? A: Let's not be overly afraid of co-optation. I don't think it is all that interesting to design memes which cannot be used by the evil forces of the state and the market even though it is quite a challenge. We did serious work into that direction with Adilkno and our "strategies of failures" were certainly not the most popular. Amongst your peers it is not widely appreciated to be on the "heights of despair" (Cioran). Utopian ideas speak to the people. This is simply the case, despite half of century of organized disgust of utopianism. Even amongst distinguished scholars negativism has never been popular. I have always been willing to take the risk of promoting digital ideas, knowing that, at the end of the day, they would be perverted, not just be third parties, but also by classic infightings within the alternative ghettos. Increasing the media-cultural complex needs new ideas, just to feed itself, with regardless what. One day you are their "content", and next day you don't exist anymore. It is our normal state to be ignored. Only the scandal will bring you in the spotlight of the Spectacle. There is really nothing special about this media law. Nothing to be upset about. In the case of the demand for public access to information and the communication networks it is a broad and diverse new media culture which counts, in the end. The projects themselves are interesting enough. Some of them are even really exciting! What then counts is to leave that particular stage or project early enough not to get bitter or cynical. When we are speaking about the birth of (public access) media it is all about the Art of Appearance and Disappearance. I know, these are ugly terms from the postmodern eighties. Too bad. But they really make sense (combined with a healthy dose of economic theory from both liberal and critical perspectives). You want your ideas to spead and you don't want to become complicant. Fine. Your choice. Then don't blame others for making money with them. If the gift economy gets corrupted, move on. If everyone has Internet and the revolution still hasn't arrived, too bad. Change stage. The idea of a Digital Commons is still there, despite IBM and HP buying themselves into the open source movement. Q: Your last book is a collection of interviews entitled "Uncanny Networks". You highly contributed to the development of networks in Europe. The original idea, if I'm not wrong, was to create a field of convergence where artists, activists, programmers, designers, critics and academics could meet. Over the years "the tactical media" space has been filled with a variety of events and solutions, from the Next5minutes to the Browserday, from a diffused net plagiarism to the Toywar. On the other hand, in the introduction to your book you say "multi-disciplinarity remains an idle goal, not a daily reality. The division of labour is still there, due to the highly specialized knowledge of each field." What are the results of the efforts of weaving these networks over the years? The process of crossing the fields is still too young or is already gone? A: You are right. Where does our fascination to work with other disciplines originate? Why this is a passion so many people share, comparable to the common hateress against the Microsoft monopoly? Are we really locked up in the cages of specialized fields of knowlegde? Discontent about the division of labour is certainly there. Does it come out of a false hunger for totality, a holistic drive towards a unified existence in which everyone can do anything at the same time? I can only ask questions here. Perhaps working with Others is what people really want compared to the demand for social change in the first half of the 20th century. Specialists constantly need new imput in order to remain creative and competitive. The underlying idea of working with the professional Other is that he or she has hidden ideas and energies which will collide and fuse with ones own. In the office world and the work floor having to others is not all that special. Multi-disciplinary task forces are pretty common. The strategy of mixing, creating temporary, hybrid solutions and (art) works is only shocking for those who have something to lose, aka those who are running institutions. Internet does not belong in visual arts, theory is not activism, real technology does not need art, etc. But people do not fit in categories and some resist the constant need for qualification and the specific education and reward systems. Undermining self-referentiality within disciplines is a somewhat bizarre, not very rewarding hobby. It is of course better carreerwise to stick to the rules of the administrators rand just do your own art, cultural studies, television or radio and not behave like a mad scientist in search of the recipe for making gold. Because what should the outcome, for example in the case of multi-media, look like? Q. I'm not very interested in "professional" cooperation. Ultra-specialisation of labor makes multi-disciplinarity necessary, if not vital to exist on the market. My question was more referred to people (like you) that decide to cooperate following a desire, a tactical line of flight, a trajectory which is meant to lead somewhere or nowhere else. Tactical media was naming many different spaces of invention. This definition wasn't only indicating what to do in "the next five minutes ". It was the expression of a new infrastructure and a new way to communicate amongst real people, through space and time. Not for the sake of "cultural innovation", but with the intention of building a shared code, a procedure of attack. This chain of reactions worked perfectly with the Toywar, for instance. But, is it always necessary to wait for an emergency to verify our power? What is the network doing for the rest of the year? According to your experience, is it stronger than 5 years ago? I know it's very hard to make a complexive balance, but you are one of the few people who really travelled through many central experiences. [Sorry, to be so specific but this is the real core of the book. I was talking to Ricardo Dominguez recently: he said that one of the netstrike tools is to upload questions on the target server, like "Is democracy.html on this server?" And the answer would answer "democracy.html is not found on this server". 404, a tipical net.art gesture becomes in this way part of a tactical action. What is usually considered a physical attack, shift into a syntactical one. This is the space where single gestures become rings of a chained discourse. It's the space where net.art meets hacktivism or where hacking meets net.art, e.g. life sharing by 01.org. I'm very interested in this space, it's my favourite one, because it keeps the heritage of the XX century avant-gardes, but being much less elitist to me. I want to understand if these different communities meet just occasionally or are building the conditions for a paradygm shift. On one hand, net.art seems to dig more and more into conceptualism, interface design; hacking is all focused, at least in Italy, on writing softwares under GPL; hacktivism seems an endless count of online actions more or less related to the current "anti-glob" agenda. Here the function of the networks become crucial. If you read the subjects of Nettime you have the feeling of a very balanced, integrated world; on the other hand, anyone keep following h/er own thread; i know that the network doesn't have a personality, it's not a subject or a party. I don't want to reduce it to a definition, but in the last 5-6 years many things changed inside and outside of it=85 i'd like you to paint a fresco of this shift, frome the point-of-view of an insider=85] A: The Web is not the Party. It is not even a movement. What we face here is an increasing uncertainty over the political. There has been a shift over the last twenty years, away from clearcut political structures and activities towards a much more blurry field of "cultural exchange". Others have written at length about the shift from politics towards arts and culture, specially in Germany. The somewhat closed circles around magazines such as Spex, Texte zur Kunst and Starship have reached a sophisticated discourse around that topic (however, not (yet) accessible for non-German audiences). The uncertainty on the Net is a big issue, as far as I can see. Will the Other answer? The essence of networks, one could arguably state, is collaboration. Not just communication or exchange of information. However, the cases of a successful collaboration remain rare. This is partly because so many are new users are not yet accustomed to the Net. They merely use it as a tool (making money, for example). This is why I am hestitant about using the Net for attacks. It is not very creative and sophisticated, at least not at this moment. In my opinion the density of self-organization has got to rise first. The lose cultural networks we see at the moment are going nowhere. They may create a bit of discourse, but that's all. That even counts for the activist sites such as indymedia.org. They still have to reach the level of workgroups. It will start to get interesting if netizens, the global online citizens will have their own intranets. Substantial islands within the net, also software-wise. That will not so be ignored or knocked-down. I am not if the invisible, tactical strategies of the Deleuzian age will last forever. They were written in response to the declined, at that time still powerful structures of the communist parties in France and Italy. Such entities do not exist anymore. We are living in the post-89 world in which micro-politics and rhizomatic strategies have become almost hegemonic concepts. It that sense it is right to say that this a Deleuzian Age. But I am not the kind of person to obey the Deleuzian State Region. Neither would Deleuze, I suppose. It's hard to deal with fashions if you like them. As many have noticed before, viral marketing has become a mainstream corporate strategy. I am very concerned with the lack of infrastructure in the net culture. Virtuality alone will not do it. We have to physically own and develop (or hack, steal, etc.) cables, satellite, offices to work from and not buy into the advertisement of the happy mobile nomad. This is also means that we have to go beyond the somewhat primitve and moral critique of institutional politics. I am keen to see how complex and diverse superstructures, virtual institutions can be developed. Not just a website plus mailinglist. We should not get stuck at that level. Q: That's it. Maybe it's time to go beyond a mere "we want bandwidth" or "access for all". Server machines could be a good start: if you want to build a really autonomous network you have to build up your own computer host, like in the BBS-age when anyone could be a sysop and run his own net. The recent wave of interest towards P2P systems such as Gnutella or the much-rumored Freenet seems to signal a sort of growing awareness about that. Recently, www.wired.com reported a not-so-weird proposal coming from the Cato Institute, a kind of US libertarian anarcho-capitalist think-tank, to build up parallel private networks beyond the mounting state-regulation of the web (muck like offshore states, e.g. Seeland). This funny convergence between issues and attitudes so different - typical of this post-all age - may be a symptom. Isn't it time to claim "server machines for all?" A: For sure. In a few years we might get there. Now are still in the period of economic downturn and rollout of bandwidth capacity (both for Internet and wireless). However, we are no longer living in the na=EFve (Clinton) years of the cyber plenty. In a time when everything was growing it was easy to be libertarian.We are now moving towards a period of confrontation, away from the third-way agenda of consensus in which, for example, such of Sealand, Wired and Ayn Rand followers such as the Cato Institute perfectly fit. I am not sure if we should continue the strategy of building temporary autonomous zones. It is time to be in the world. That's the strategy of the so-called Seattle movement against corporate capitalism. Confrontation with the corporate world and its institution, based on decentralized and networked affinity groups and individuals, coordinated by a power portal (www.indymedia.org). We have had enough laissez faire laissez passe politics. Deleuzian rhizomatics was part of that. But the age of "imperial sovereignity" of the Internet is coming to a close. The Net is becoming a battleground, not just a market place for ideas and their data. That image is too simple, too harmonious. Now that the introductory phase of new media is coming to close (despite further tech revolutions) we return to a real politik of the networks in which economic interests of telecom giants, microsoft, governments and regional blocs are becoming real. The recording industry has to go to court against Napster. It cannot just tolerate it. Nor will Hollywood tolerate Gnutella. People who are developing and using such systems have to understand the clandistine nature of what they are doing and take responsibility, take sides. The time of playing and surfing is over. If you run a server, fine, do it, but then you are also the sys-op, and with that comes certain legal and ethic responsabilities. If one is prepared to accept this, then go ahead! But don't say afterwards, I didn't know I was only exchanging films and software without knowing that it's illegal. People have to be prepared to say: "Legal, illegal, Schei=DFegal." Q: What are the economic sources on which to build a really independent new media culture? According to Negri and Lazzarato, the economics of information has most to do with the "production of subjectivities". And this production often needs to assume the form of enterprise acting within (and in a sense against) the marketplace. Negri and Lazzarato define "political enterprise" this new agent, and we are seeing some examples of that rising. xs4All, even after the take-over by the Dutch telecom KPN, could be one of those. What are your feelings about that? A: New media culture is producing concepts, not value in the speculative dotcom sense. Let alone money. And not content either. They are concepts-in-the-making which need to be tested out first before they can be used on a large scale to produce subjectivity, as Negri and Lazzarato describe it. The fun about this test phase is not the some heroic avant-garde position of showing people the way. I think it is a much more playful, experimental stage, less pedagogical, in which ideas are getting hardwired into a small scale technological culture which builds up its own userbase and rituals and then gets exposed to society and the marketplace in a later stage. The real test then is to see how robust the "meme" is which has been collaboratively developed. There can be sell outs, betrayals and other setbacks. Boredom of the everyday is even more destructive to good concepts. I am not sure if profit or non-profit really makes such a big difference, probably in the speed in which ideas can spread. I am interested in sustainable memes that can constantly change, grow and contract, without losing its core identity and basic ethics. xs4all seems to be a good example. What I do not like are people who build up something precious, together with many others, and then, for some reason, pull the plug and disappear. To me, all CEOs of dotcoms startups which went bust are cowards to me. Many of the dotgone companies were "build to flip", ran by people who only do business in times of hyper growth. Come on. Who's afraid of a crisis, or two? Those who grew in the seventies and eighties, without all that easy VC money are ready to take risks, to make something out of nothing. The dotcom business model is for the unpatient so-called enterpreneurs who, in the end, only learned how to burn money. They did not even develop concept, let alone software. What the cultural sector of the New Economy (RIP) has done in the wild years of 1999-2000 is not entirely clear. They mainly fought over the definition of net.art so that art critics could start writing and art collectors could start collecting. Culture was in a volatile, defensive mode and did not profit whatoever from the money fountain. It was a time of survival. Online text archive: http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet, coming soon: www.laudanum.net/geert # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 10.0 <nettime> QuickView on Software Ar Olga Goriunova nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 21 Feb 2003 13:48:22 +0200 QuickView on Software Art Amy Alexander, Florian Cramer, Matthew Fuller, Thomax Kaulmann, Alex McLean, Pit Schultz, and The Yes Men, interviewed by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin. http://runme.org Q: Why are you personally attracted to 'software art'? The Yes Men: We are very interested in software art because of its potential for automation! We can use these technologies to replace the artists. A wholesale replacement. Followed by leisure! Alex McLean: Because making code is empowering, but generally taught very badly. The act of programming is portrayed as systematic and uncreative. This may be appropriate for working on quality assured credit card transaction systems, but why apply it to programming as a whole? Software art might give us a place to look at the creation and use of software outside of formal business constraints, and the stereotypes thereby fostered. I'm also repelled by software art, because I see artists trying to employ software thoughtlessly. Hopefully software art will draw on its hackerly heritage enough to sidestep readymade wizardware. Thomax Kaulmann: Software art can be a manifold thing. It can look nice in source code or at runtime. It can influence culture or can give an impression of the present culture. Software art is just another art discipline and it is not defined. Art is always a matter of intention, there can be different media to transport one's vision: stones & hammer, canvas & color, camera & video or computers & software. An artist is intrinsically motivated to translate his/her ideas to a broader culture, through software as well. Amy Alexander: Hmm, it's a little like asking "why are you attracted to art?" isn't it :-)? I'm not sure verbal answers to such questions can be entirely satisfactory or productive. But to give a partial one: I think because software art is a mode of non-verbal expression relevant to contemporary culture - just as photography, video art, etc., were to the times in which they first appeared (and still are.) Matthew Fuller: Perhaps the conjunction of two highly productive and inventive forces, neither of which really wants the other is always going to make for something interesting? What is named as contemporary art has responded to networks and computation by taking on certain of the characteristics of networks - the formulation of 'the relational aesthetic' for instance - without actually dealing with the specific technologies. On the other hand, software cultures have only very rarely considered themselves to or have acted in a manner which is reflexive, in the way which is most usefully and richly developed over the last century and a half or so of art. Various conjunctions of these two patterns of activity, their mutual interference, seem to be generating some exciting or annoying or disruptive or inventive effects. One cannot claim this for all of the work that operates here of course, but it is an opening to new conjunctures. Pit Schultz: Software art is attracting me because it is carrying a seductive promise that possibly software production could be seen as cultural production; that writing code has more meaning as making a program run or crash or sell. It might place media art into the history of contemporary art with the passage of conceptual art for example. It poses questions of artisanship, and pragmatic aesthetics of code, a kind of surplus that is not technological in terms of efficiency. Florian Cramer: If one defines (as the Read_me 1.2 jury did) software art as art that is either based on formal instruction code or which is a cultural reflection of software, then there has been a lot of interesting artwork lately in this field that has a attracted me and which justifies to engage with this concept. Jodi's work of the past few years, which has radically shifted from browser art to manipulations of computer software, is one striking example. But aside from that practical observation, I am also attracted by theoretical issues, since, being an academic in comparative literature, I research the borders and grey areas of writing, executable code and art, from the permutational poems of the late antiquity to lullist and kabbalistic language speculation to up to the very new situation that instruction code has become a mass commodity and a material appropriated by artists in all kinds of ways. I thus would never limit software art to craftsmanship of programming (i.e. software art as a Donald Knuth-style "art of programming"), but consciously take speculative, unclean, or even non-computer-related approaches into account, from certain forms of poetic play and conceptual art to the use of machine code fragments as private languages in artistic "codeworks" like those I collate, together with Alan Sondheim and Beatrice Beaubien, into the "nettime unstable digest". I should also add that I am a Free Software activist who perceives operating systems (particularly those which don't create artificial frontiers between "users" and "programmers" - i.e. Unix, Plan9, LISP machines) and software as ways of thought and cultures that are in no way aesthetically, culturally or politically "neutral". It thus follows that software and art, as modes of both cultural reflection and construction, are closely related to each other. Q: Which viewpoints on the issue you find most interesting? Alex McLean: That of the programmer, because I am one myself, and that of people using the software, because there is often great disconnection between software creators and their audience. Amy Alexander: I have a few interests: critical, political and algorithmic. Critical: Software art helps us examine the biases and the influences on culture of software at large. Most non-art software pretends to be neutral and objective technology - devoid of human influence. Software art opens itself up to examination of its human-created biases and its human-experienced influences - so it helps us understand how these factors operate in "normal" (non-art) software as well. Political: Governments and corporations use software and information capital to exert influence. But artists and others can use software to strategically redistribute information capital in a more equitable, useful and entertaining manner. (Mi datamine es tu datamine.) In other words, I think it's important to realize that data and algorithms are separate things. Even proprietary data can often be publicly accessed (search engine databases, etc.) But how it's used is in the algorithm - strategically written algorithms can provide a lot of leverage and be very handy as tactical media tools. And algorithmic for its own sake: the visceral, improvisational nature of art and communication through algorithms and coding. Matthew Fuller: Yes, it is the way in which various software art projects reveal the way software is embedded within wider currents of social and aesthetic composition. How does software manifest, reproduce or invent new relations, say of class, or of processes of work and activity? How is it racialised? Is it so precisely in its 'universality'? Does it have a way of doing things built into it that enhances certain kinds of sociability, or act against them? We can ask these questions in a number of careful ways, but also in a manner that acknowledges our embeddedness within software as culture. Part of these discussions are already part of office culture, think of the drippy compensatory humour of 'Dilbert' cartoons; consumer culture, where it exceeds itself as simple passivity, the inventive intermediate role of 'power users'; and, perhaps most usefully in this case in the way that particular scenes invent new forms of software and new ways of dealing with established forms - think of the now long term tradition of the demo-scene for instance. At the same time, it's useful to work from the 'opposite' direction. There are some interesting currents that take advantage of the specific material qualities of particular kinds of coding culture. Think of some of the games mods or some of the generative code work that really take advantage of the idiosyncratic, perverse and particular nature of code practices. Exploiters of bugs. Make the machines stammer, speak in tongues. Amy Alexander: The algorithm is also very important here. The algorithm that generates the output is an important and subjective thing, and in commercial software, it often hides behind the veil of innocent, technological neutrality. An obvious example is Google's PageRank algorithm, which determines which sites appear towards the top of Google's results, and which don't appear at all. The algorithm is very biased toward big sites, especially if they own lots of other big sites. But in their description at http://google.com/technology, Google explains that they rely on "the uniquely democratic nature of the web" and that "Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult." Didn't humans write the algorithm? That is a very direct example. Software artists approach the subjectivity of algorithms in different ways; some are more formal; many are more subtle. But because software art opens itself up to examination of its subjectivity, and the fact that interface is driven by human-generated algorithms, it can help us think about the broader software context. Pit Schultz: Which viewpoints? The view from the 'folkloristic' aspect of programmers' cultures, writing gimmicks. The aspect of generating a tree of knowledge out of existing material, by changing the viewpoint to it. The question if there's something else than an unlimited numbers of readymades to be found. The archive aspect of an area of production, which is not yet bounded, territorialized. Something ambivalent that was already attracting me to the possibility of net.art. A strange attractor for the possibility of existence of such a genre? Florian Cramer: Georg Philipp Harsdoerffer's "Mathematische und philosophische Erquickstunden" ("Mathematical and philosophical recreations") from 1636 -- perhaps the first attempt to systematically combine poetics, mathematics and algorithmics into a playful whole, Abraham M. Moles "First manifesto of permutational art" from 1963, Jack Burnham's exhibition "Software" from 1970, Geoff Cox', Adrian Ward's and Alex McLean's 2000 paper "The aesthetics of generative code", Matthew Fuller's 2000 paper "It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word", the (to date: four) jury statements of the Transmediale and Read_me juries, to some extent also Larry Wall's papers on Perl and postmodernism. We could use more cultural criticism of software in general, and especially a criticism that sees more than surface screen visual and which doesn't fall into the trap of simplistic analogies between structures in software and structures in society. Q: Programmers don't seem to be interested in submitting their works to art festivals and competitions. There is a huge body of their work that might be interesting culturally and artistically. What are the possible strategies and interfaces that can help to make those works visible in the extended software / art context? Alex McLean: Yes, programmers don't need institutionalised art festivals or competitions. They have the Internet, and the grass-roots fact-to-face meetings that result from their online projects and discussions. Amy Alexander: Programmers don't need art festivals - hooray! Rewind back to "net artists don't need museums", and multiply by a factor of two (because programmers typically don't consider themselves in the "art" field at all.) So a programmer's work might be culturally and artistically interesting, but you have to go where it lives instead of making it come to you. First we should ask ourselves, "is this a problem?" Personally, I don't think so. Centralization causes marginalization of whomever is not in the "center." Not to mention structural weakness (single point of failure - when the "center" disappoints, the whole can fall apart.) Do programmers feel the urge to be pulled into the "art context?" If not, then to do so might be to open a software art zoo and hunt down projects to bring them into captivity - so we can gawk at them without getting our fingers dirty. Many authors won't want to be involved in "art" contextualizations at all. Others will if the context and culture seems inclusive and relevant to them. Programmers (among others) are turned off by artspeak, or if every discussion refers back to postmodern philosophy. These conversations exclude people, and it is in fact possible to have an intelligent, culturally relevant discussion without these as the focus. Also, it is helpful for non-programmers to read about, learn about, and experience geek culture. It is a culture, and it's about people, not technology. So anyway, hopefully runme.org takes a couple of positive steps: it's, we hope, easy to submit work to - you don't have to spend a lot of time putting together a big press kit with lots of artspeak to impress some jury and mailing it in ... and you can invite someone else's work in, if they're too busy or too shy to submit it themselves... it also tries to respect that software art comes from both "software" and "art" genealogies but is its own thing. I think it's a problem when people try to interpret software art as strictly "software" or strictly "art." Time will tell if our diabolical plans have been successful. :-) The Yes Men: There are many examples of amazing "outsider art" that isn't recognized as such by the producer.. So I would think merely pointing them out, or finding them and making contact with the producers is what would be most important first. Alex McLean: Yes, runme.org may be a start, allowing existing communities of people interested in creative aspects of computing to share their view. Florian Cramer: I personally think runme.org is an excellent step in this direction. With its function as a download repository and weblog-style interface (as it was pioneered by Free Software websites like Slashdot.org and Freshmeat.net), it clearly overcomes some (so-to-speak) interface design issues of the festival/competition/exhibition-oriented art system, although I still think that both channels could and should co-exist. I find the exhibitions "I love you" (at MAK Frankfurt 2002 and at transmediale.03 Berlin) and jodi's "install.exe" (at plug.in Basel 2002 and Buro Friedrich Berlin 2003) very successful presentations of software art in the language of the traditional art system, and the presentations are necessary to address a larger non-geek audience. Since runme.org got headline coverage on Slashdot.org, I am quite optimistic that this is the way to go. In general, Free Software self-organization provides good blueprints to software art self-organization. Pit Schultz: The question is what constitutes the 'software art context'? The software repository is known from shareware and other kinds of downloadable software tools. Is it applicable to the area of 'art' too? If we talk about context, the question is what kind of 'institutions' make software art exists, where are its boundaries? Who constitutes these boundaries and how? And of course, is there a history of software art, assuming that it exists. Matthew Fuller: Roland Barthes suggested that a truly interdisciplinary object is one which is nameable by none of the disciplines that in part contribute to making it, or that congregate around it. Such an object is owned by no one set of ideas and approaches. It demands that traditions become strange to themselves. So what is set in motion when art approaches the irritating subject of programming, what happens when the 'art' insistences on being incidental, on being amateur, on being able to go wide-eyed or cunning into any context, comes into some relationship with technical skill? Equally, what happens when computing enters a context wherein every stage in a process has aesthetic effects? What happens when computing's in-built judgments about what is 'optimal' or what is 'trivial' are subject to question and reinvention, or may even usurp its capacity to rule, to make rules? The revaluation of the trivial, of waste, of the past, of what has been shat out, and conversely, what it founds - the new - is one of the powers of art. I don't think that this work then that you ask about, that of programmers, needs 'help'. It doesn't need to be 'made visible'. We don't need gestures of sympathy such as those repetitiously awarding Linux the name, 'Art' in order to make things possible. What is needed are more specific alliances with particular currents of programming and other strands of making culture; deranging gestures that bring new worlds to light; prison break-outs; sustained and thoughtful work that makes itself available for use. Q: Software art seems to be quite an open field yet, possibly due to the reason it is very diverse and in many respects is based on the programmers' culture that is hard to grasp. While contextualizing grassroot movements like this one and thus, providing an access to interesting practices to larger audience, we are at the same time inevitably packaging them for easy appropriation by art institutions. How do you think we can deal with this problem? Alex McLean: Having people with broad knowledge and experience of programming languages forming part of art institutions. Critics should become literate in some of the many languages of software art before trying to understand its context. Right now I think many art institutions are too software illiterate to be of any interest to software artists. The Yes Men: Yes! Just like the outsider artists... Well, it seems the important thing is to respect the desires and intentions of the creator... See if they want to be appropriated first. If appropriation involves a compromise of integrity, then figure out in each instance how to make the work useless to the dominant narrative...? Pit Schultz: How did other types of 'immaterial art' deal with this problem? How did early computer graphics deal with it, or certain kinds of Fluxus? The question is for me first of all is there a 'style' a kind of common 'ductus' which one can see after the years surrounding different forms of 'conceptualism'. The suggestion is that there is a difference to be made in relation to other forms of art, which are based on the postulation that a new 'form' is found, only through the use of a specific 'new' medium. The autonomy of media art in relation of contemporary art has to be questioned, on the other hand the way the art operating system processes incoming 'new forms' has to be questioned too. Software and the net allows to run a 'museum' with much less funds than elsewhere, this poses questions of what defines the needed power relations of representation which are constituting an art form. "Software art" insofar is not new, but it reflects, enhances, explores the role of software in a post-industrial society and afterwards. What is the role of the original, the author, the object, can one apply other basic questions of the predecessors of this potential art genre in a new way? How do seemingly successful works function gaining a market? (rhizome list etc.) What kind of criteria they seem to fulfill? Is there any place of constituting itself outside of an institutional interest? As with any art I'm also interested in the art which hasn't to be called art. Matthew Fuller: This question might also be posed from a different perspective. If art institutions are treated simply as a particular and distinct part of a number of interlocking, but also partially differentiable processes and institutions it is useful to use them and take part in them for those things that they do well. … I also think that in general it is wise to avoid becoming involved solely in one kind of institutional structure. The advantage of the internet and other distribution mechanisms is that you can be active in art contexts, but also develop relations to other circuits of distribution: shareware, module libraries, free software, gratis CD ROMs and so on. Work to multiply these. Mongrel for instance always triangulates what it does, using the net, streets / communities, and art systems to reinforce each other, but also to make sure that no one mode dominates the others. Amy Alexander: I don't worry about this. Art institutions (including runme.org!) can and will appropriate anything they want - the thing about digital projects of course is that in general, they're infinitely reproducible - so an institution jumping onto the net doesn't interfere with other nodes and modes of distribution. It just jumps on the bandwagon. People can decide for themselves which packagings they find most interesting. Florian Cramer: This is a question that applies to any labeling and contextualization of art. Recuperation is inevitable as soon as you call something "art", and of course we ourselves do contribute to that recuperation. I don't care, and even think it's good to recuperate certain things -- like, for example: hacker code -- to save it from being overlooked or forgotten. It's rather problematic if the recuperation happens the other way round, as problematic exploitation of programmer's cultures through artists (like in the RSG Carnivore project and - despite its good intentions - the "CODeDOC" exhibition at the Whitney museum). ______________________________________________ No commercial use without the permission of the authors. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 11.0 <nettime> Interview artist and educator Ralf Homann Trebor Scholz nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 08 Nov 2004 01:06:12 -0500 Ralf Homann is an artist and director of the Experimental Radio Program at Bauhaus University, Weimar =20 Interview with Ralf Homann by Trebor Scholz. =20 TS: Please introduce the "Experimental Radio Program" at Bauhaus University and its history. RH: The Experimental Radio was founded in 1999 at Bauhaus University. The new Department of Media was set up two years ago based on the realization that the common understanding of media as =8Cvideo=B9, or =8Ccomputer=B9 or =8CTV=B9 wa= s not complete. =8CVideo didn=B9t kill the radio star.=B9 If what used to be called =8Cnew media=B9 were to be transformed to regular media, then the terms =8Cold=B9 and =8Cnew=B9 would have lost all meaning. This is especially true in the context of the arts. For example: Are etching, sculpture, painting and radi= o really old media? Or do new media start with =8Celectronic,=B9 =8Cmechanical=B9 or =8Cdigital=B9 processing? All these definitions fail because they are based on tools. In contemporary art after The Bauhaus the =8Ctool follows the function.=B9 I understand radio as a global, worldwide phenomenon, a tool which is =8Cpublic domain=B9 just like screws, wood, or stones but more global like TV, phone or the internet. Radio is 'pilot media' following the theory of time-based electronic communication because it was always first. It was set up before TV and before video streaming became popular. The Experimenta= l Radio at Bauhaus University uses radio as a tool for the fine arts just as it uses it as a tool for sound sculpture, journalism and sound design. This relates back to the Bauhaus idea that the fine arts, applied sciences and design should come together to create an artwork. We have our own radio studio and local FM frequency, and a streaming media server for net radio. We also have a studio for projects that are based on sculpture, installation, performances, actions or interventions in public space. Perhaps it is necessary to explain some German traditions to understand the special significance of the Experimental Radio. After World War II the West German media were organized by the Allies to guarantee a democratic development of society. Print media were organized as private property, but the electronic media networks are based on =8Cmother=B9 BBC as a public, non-state, and non-private system. This goes against the grain against of the German understanding of public space and public sphere, which is either state or private. The idea of common property declined about one hundred years ago and Radio and TV in Germany were highly regulated in Nazi Germany and then again during the Cold War. For example, producing or merely possessing a radio transmitter in Western Germany without license could be punished by five years in jail. In East Germany high school students who use an illegal transmitter were killed by the state in the 1950s. The Experimental Radio was set up in the 1950s when Thuringia (the state within the Eastern part of Germany where the Bauhaus-University is located) allowed private and also free and community radio. My first project at the Bauhaus-University was the =8CMicro-Radio-Party.=B9 I realized it together with the Tokyo-based artist Tetsuo Kogawa. I invited him to present the Micro FM Movement in Germany. He also gave a workshop about the making and use of small FM transmitters. His performance dealt with the body: In our bodies the building and use of radio transmitters is inscribed as fear, as a heavy offense and complicated technical challenge, = a secret, and esoteric practice. Working with him we dealt with ideas of micr= o politics. A party or picnic, for example can have a political dimension and power. During the performance students were standing on the dance floor, surrounded by DJs working on turntables. People gathered there and around a sofa with a small FM transmitter-- we called it =8Cradio sofa.=B9 From the sofa a report about the event was broadcasted to the neighborhood. A goal of thi= s micro-radio-party in the stairways of the department's main building was to give the building we were in with its ugly nazi-architecture a new connotation. This first project gave an introduction to the idea that radio is not necessarily better if it has a larger audience. The position that radio is only a mass medium refers to the history of radio in the era of Fordism-- the idea of large target groups. The term target group alone show= s its context situated in the decades between WWI and WWII when radio became so popular. The next project in 2000, was the internet radio festival called =8Ctype=3Dradio~border=3D0.=B9 We set up simulcasting, ether and internet, and collaborated with artists like radioqualia and other radio stations around the globe including a local self-organized initiative of migrants and refugees called =8CThe Voice.=B9 We had several points to get across. On the on= e hand we wanted to say that radio is not a local but a global medium. On the other hand, we discussed the fact that digital data and digital currency ca= n be moved around the world (type=3Dradio is the button you use to charge a credit card). But when migrants encounter heavy restrictions when they want to physically follow these data. TS: The Bauhaus in Weimar is the first university in Germany, which founded a Faculty of Media. At The Bauhaus the first MFA program in Germany is in the process of being consolidated. The program in Experimental Radio is the only one of its kind in Germany, which teaches radio in the context of the arts. It seems unavoidable to ask about the linkage between the educationalist tradition of the Bauhaus and your current educational practice. Do you draw connections between industry and the university in th= e way Walter Gropius propagated it? RH: Walter Gropius demanded an educational practice in the arts, which educated the artist also in economics very early on as freshmen. The Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus included several chairs for media management and the department has its own MBA line of study, which focuses on the economics of creative works, and the culture industry. At the moment we try to set up a chair for the creative commons. Lectures by these professors are open to BFA and MFA students in Media Art and Design. We collaborate on exhibitions, offer internships and support residencies for our students. Gropius' idea was ground breaking back then. Today it is simply reflected in our regular program. Gropius=B9 demanded an education in economics that was motivated by the urge to close the gap between art and life. We know these ideas also from other artists and movements. Gropius said that the concept of the traditional German Art Academy separated the artist from daily life. He claimed that it creates a gap between art for art's sake on the one hand and the people on the other. For him, 'the industry' was part of daily life of the people. Gropius also emphasized tha= t German art academies produced artists who were not able to make a living. Gropius thought of the artist as a polished, perfected craftsman. But in Modernism the industry has taken over the role of the crafts. We must analyze this situation and draw our own conclusions. The Bauhaus University is of course the place where the Bauhaus was founded= . But it is also the location from which the Bauhaus people were exiled. Last year we organized a demonstration of students against some restrictions by the City of Weimar. The students showed up in front of town hall with a banner saying: =8CTomorrow Dessau, the next day Chicago.=B9 They pointed to the corporatization of education American-style in Germany and the fact that many teachers at the Bauhaus had to flee Germany and founded a Bauhaus in Chicago. There is always a deep awareness of tradition which is important. Bauhaus University is not a museum or a kind of fancy seal of the old Bauhaus. We understand Bauhaus University as the place where new ideas and concepts emerge. Perhaps we can create a new, electronic Bauhaus. Gropius' demands on economics mean something different today. The educational principles of Bauhaus University are centered around practice. Our so calle= d =8Cprojects=B9 are more important than classical lectures or a thoughtless curriculum that teaches tools. Students find solutions for real problems. Our classes in media art and design do not stop with the demo design. We always realize the projects. We cannot hide from the fact that students can=B9t be fired. We live in an era of globalization, which means that form follows economics. But if form follows function, then we must think about the function of the arts. When Gropius demanded to close the gap between ar= t and industry, between daily life and art, then we must ask if this gap is real or if it has disappeared long ago. What we need now is perhaps a new distance between art and industry. But which industry are we talking about anyway? I do not agree with Gropius=B9 slogan that the artist is the polished craftsmen as this could be misunderstood simply as mastership of tools. I=B9m not interested in prolonging the classification between practice and theory= . We are accustomed to think in both these categories. Contemporary art is theory and the theory is its own practice. We need the arts to reflect the practice of theorists and the theorists to reflect the production of artists. TS: What is the professional future of students graduating from your Experimental Radio program? RH: The Experimental Radio program offers a wide range of skills and qualifications depending on how long the student is in the program and whic= h individual career she has in mind. Each student individually plans for her study guided by a mentor. The minimum is that students take courses in Experimental Radio only for one segment of their study in order to get an overview. They then use these skills for other concentrations such as TV, public relations, interface or sound design, composition, journalism, sculpture, management, cultural studies, or media sciences. At Bauhaus University it is possible to study architecture and take courses in Experimental Radio to get qualified to produce urban radio documentaries. What's wrong with that? The maximum length of the program is five years. A student could finish her BFA in three years and then get an MFA in another two years. The Experimental Radio program is based on three segments for students who want to finish with a BFA or MFA in Experimental Radio. These three parts of study give undergraduate students the possibility to get involved in projects of other concentrations. They can decide on their own strategy to get ahead. They can, for example, combine different skills from web design, TV, photography, interactive media or sculpture. At the moment, Bauhaus University is the only place in Europe=B9s German speaking area where you can study radio from scratch at university-level. Other universities offer radio only on a postgraduate level or as small part of journalism or literature programs or as an additional offer of a conservatory or a drama school. Radio education in Germany is mostly based on training at public radio networks or small private stations. There is no established academic education in this field. The Experimental Radio at Bauhaus University qualifies the student for a professional future in the public or private radio networks: as an author, journalist, producer, director, music editor, anchorman, or link man. There is only one job we cannot prepare for, which is that of the sound engineer as this profession is regulated differently b= y German law. But we do have two apprenticeships for sound engineers at the department. Our focus is always on the individual plan of the student. Some examples: There are students in the program who see their future as DJ, owner of a record label and composer in the field of electronic dance floor. Other students want to work as freelancers in radio journalism, as director in radio drama, or as artists who are interested in audio works. Again, other artists use the projects to question strategies of intervention in public space. And there are students who are more interested in creating new software using the courses of Experimental Radio to be challenged and find real problems that they will need to solve. Sometimes filmmakers or club VJ= s visit our lectures because Experimental Radio is more linked to pop culture or tactical media than other departments. This heterogeneous crowd gives ou= r classes a special spirit because this kind of mixed scene is what you will find also outside the university in the professional field. We teach radio in the context of the fine arts. This concedes newer developments in contemporary art and goes beyond the traditional =8CGerman Hoerspiel=8C (radio play) which is rooted in theater or literature before the 1960s. This tradition was transformed by the likes of Klaus Schoening who curated the Ars Acustica at documenta 8 (an international art exhibition) o= r Heidi Grundmann at Austrian radio ORF. Another example is the department of Radio Drama and Media Art at the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation. This focus on fine arts educates students to use radio as a tool for their art, as a strategy in public space, for actions or interventions but also to create objects, environments or performances in the white cube, sound installations, acoustic images, documentaries or radio dramas. The Experimental Radio, in particular, offers contexts to develop such artworks= . Students get a chance to develop individual strategies, transfer their skills across media or expose their work to a new kind of public audience. This is part of the education in media art and the professional field of th= e students here. TS: Between the techno-optimism of the 1990s and the techno-skepticism put forward by more traditional cultural theorists, which approach to technolog= y do you propagate? RH: Nice question. For me technology is part of the so-called 'natural world.' We must live with this fact. It is possible to make radio without technology, because radio is the idea to make radio and imagine technology. Walter Klingenbeck=B9s group is a very good example because their radio never started, but the group was working in the German resistance. You could find more examples of pirate radio stations or radio fans who never broadcast bu= t who create small groups of people who meet in the street. That=B9s a phenomenon of radio. The aim of our radio program is always to bring people together face-to-face. We cannot broadcast faces so we are careful not to loose this aspect of the medium. There are some programs which are rooted i= n the authoritarianisms ruling the world, at times when radio was set up similar to the news, or the time signal, which organizes a virtual mass in front of the unique sender or leader. But the basic message of modern programs including the commercial one is that you are not alone, you are part of a group and please go out, and meet this group or at least face our product in the supermarket. The argument that radio diverts or lulls the listeners is wrong. I do not approach technology in categories of optimism or skepticism. I am interested in an analysis of uses of technology for freedom. I was not a fan of the 1990s idea that the internet will make the world automatically better or that it will create some kind of truly digita= l democratic society. We could only observe that the internet was going opposite ways than Radio or TV. Radio and TV were highly regulated by the state through technical standards. Now we have the experience of tactical media. We now see a lot of initiatives to get regulations in place and to limit the old systems of distribution. Have a look at what has happened wit= h Indymedia over the last few days in the UK. It's back to radio. I prefer this technology because radio is a dancing media. Moving around the body is always better off than sitting in front of a screen or being pinned down in a cinema seat. I prefer the digital wired, the analogue wireless solution, because nobody can control who listens. TS: Three years ago you helped put together the "bauhaus radio reader." The widely acknowledged current crisis in new media arts education is in part grounded in the need to find texts with tolerable expiration dates. Which texts do you read with your students? RH: The project of =8Cbauhaus radio reader=B9 deals with this problem, because at the moment we cannot find a good compilation of texts. This project is not finished, it is more a crawl over the screen and a never ending story. In my opinion radio is a medium for illiterates. We can make it without texts. Especially in Germany we find a lot of texts about radio dealing wit= h problems we never faced. It=B9s a pity because in former times German Radio theory was very interesting. But perhaps after Adorno=B9s denunciation of the medium nobody was really interested to work hard on contemporary radio theory. Now you mostly get fights between high culture and pop or the peopl= e who try to protect children by demanding regulations for censorship. For the foundations year in Media Art and Design we use a fine compilation, edited by my colleagues at the Department of Media Culture Klaus Pias, Joseph Vogel, Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle, Britta Neitzel, which is called "Kursbuch Medienkultur." This compilation gives a good overview about media theory from Brecht to Baudrillard. French philosophy is very important. In the basic program of Experimental Radio we use LaRoche=B9s and Buchholz=B9 "Radio Journalismus," and Michael Dickreiter=B9s "Handbuch der Tonstudiotechnik." Those are the German standards for working in professional Radio. We also use Douglas Kahn=B9s and Gregory Whiteread=B9s compilation "Wireless Imagination" and Neil Strauss=B9 and Dave Mandl=B9s "Radiotext(e)." Apart from that we read Tetsuo Kogawa and of course Geert Lovink=B9s books dealing with radio and tactical media. To discuss ideas of free radio we us= e a compilation from the Swiss "Klipp and Klang Group" called "Kurze Welle, Lange Leitung," which was published by the Zurich art space Shedhalle. We also read Hakim Bey=B9s "Radio Sermonettes" in the foundations program and Gerald Raunig=B9s compilation "Transversal, Art and the Critic of Globalization," and Marius Babias=B9 compilation "Im Zentrum der Peripherie, Kunstvermittlung und Vermittlungskunst in den 90er Jahren," which deals wit= h art movements in the 1990s. In addition, we use professional magazines from media politics and media research to pop music and contemporary art. For Students who are in the program for a longer time I offer a seminar in whic= h we read texts or discuss articles from recently published catalogues, but also some texts from the US free radio movement. TS: Which proposals do you have for alternative structures in new media art= s education? RH: Dealing with media always means that we can loose sight of our goals. The worst case is when you end up working mainly to find sponsors for your next project. We need a space where it is possible to reflect and test driv= e differences in order to find the next utopian position. Technology and economics are the basics but do not get us a better world. I remember that picnic was the tool to get a brick into the Iron Curtain. We need such picnics for new media education and perhaps we need more parties. TS: How do you foster cooperation in the classroom and beyond? RH: We have no classroom, only a studio for the art works and a radio studi= o for the live broadcast. In the first place we are always focused on production. In our studio you can make programs as a lonesome cowboy but that=B9s boring. Mostly there are teams creating programs: authors, anchormen= , music editors or DJs, directors and producers. It's always more than one person working in the studio. Commonly this is necessary simply to use the complex tools. You need support from other students who read more tutorials= . There is one central meeting for each project. Here we discuss all question= s and set up working groups and teams for an exhibition, an excursion, the production of a radio drama or a magazine of the weekly program. Especially the final presentation at the end of a period must be organized within teams. At Experimental Radio teamwork is common and every second summer I offer a special project dealing with collaborative work between artists or groups to discuss structure, problems of communication or secret hierarchies. One project included an excursion to the opening of the Venice Biennial. Such excursion must be prepared by students and forces cooperatio= n and group-building. Bauhaus University is located in the small downtown of Weimar. Most students live in flat-shares and there are some clubs in town, mostly visited by students. As part of our final presentation we organize special programs at these places where we stream media. Weimar is situated in the middle of Germany, Berlin is near, big cities like Frankfurt, Munich= , Hamburg or Prague are not far away either. Students come from all over Germany not only the surrounding cities. It is very common for students to travel around, to make excursions to important festivals, concerts or exhibitions to create their own network to realize their projects. They support each other with their experiences and varying skill sets. Graduate students have the right to make so called "free projects." This means that students can set up their own group or collaboration with students at other universities, or work together with professionals and get my advice. My program runs several mailing lists and a server to support communication when students are not in town. Usually we involve students who are abroad a= s part of a student exchange in our weekly program with reports via streaming media or help them by organizing small-budget collaborative exhibitions. TS: How do you make use of social software in your radio programs? Please give examples of the way you used streaming audio and video in educational contexts. RH: We use software to organize group work, to set up collaborations. We prefer mailing lists for all lectures and we use web logs for technical support, uploads and downloads to exchange files. We try to use open source software for all applications but it is not always possible. We can't ignor= e the fact that we educate students for their professional future, and if outside the university there is no professional application of open source, then we can=B9t teach it inside the university either. To encode our streams we created our own open source software, called o-stream, which uses the og= g vorbis file format. Last year as part of our collaboration with the French art school Villa Arson we had a workshop in Nice, which we streamed as well= . I prefer open source because it allows us to twist the software according t= o our needs. The issue of software licenses, or creative commons is part of education. We made documentaries for example and organized an exhibition that dealt with so called open culture. The course was taught by the artists Cornelia Sollfrank and Laurence Russel. It included an excursion an= d a workshop about the "Wizard of Oz" conference in Berlin where Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University presented his notion of the creative common license. We use streaming media; of course for internet radio. In our weekly radio program we use simulcasting, ether and internet. Beside this line of production we foster audio streaming for special events. We focus on the esthetic possibilities of the tool such as delay or noise. We use it to realize our collaborations in the city and with other places, like the collaboration with Tetsuo Kogawa in Tokyo. We also did a stream with your students at The Department of Media Study. From 2000 until June 2004 we had a collaborative program, called pingfm. The students of this group broadcasted every Sunday together with Amsterdam-based artists like Toek from Radio100. Until June we had our own studio for pingfm with its streaming sessions but now the students stopped because they are about to graduate. I started audio streaming in 1999 when I came to Weimar. I starte= d by involving a student team in the Net Aid Campaign to support Radio B92 in Belgrade during the Balkan war. Streaming video is not my favorite. As an artist I create a lot of visual works but as part of my teaching at Experimental Radio I demand that the time-based and broadcasted programs are without pictures. Students sometime= s use web cams or create great visuals in the context of VJ-ing parallel to the audio stream but I do not encourage that. If we use visuals than they should be received like radio or act like paintings in a gallery: You can pass by, the body should have all options in the space where you show it. TS: Thank you for the interview. This interview was conducted in the context of a series of events on new media arts education by the Institute for Distributed Creativity http://distributedcreativity.org References Studio B11- Experimental Radio http://radiostudio.org http://bauhaus.fm pingfm - a netbased platform for audio/video experiments http://pingfm.org Transit~wellen is a project by schleuser.net, which is situated in the area of contradictory communication about public space. http://transitwellen.net Experimental Radio, Ralf Homann http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/lehrgebiete/radio.htm Wizards of OS conference, Berlin The Future of the Digital Commons http://www.wizards-of-os.org/ =20 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 12.0 <nettime> "A Global Sense of Place" David Garcia nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:32:05 +0200 "A Global Sense of Place" Report from Eterea 2 Meeting of Italian Tactical Television Makers March 25-28th, 2004 the second major gathering of the Telestreets took place in Sennegallia. Here are some notes from a short visit to the world of Telestreets. Background Telestreet, the latest wave in the rich history of Italian media activism, has been fairly widely reported on this list and elswhere but some of the basics are worth revisiting briefly. Telestreets are semie-legal micro-broadcasters, literally street TV makers using small transmitters to send programes that mostly reach no more than a few blocks. Telestreets range from making their own local items to capturing the programming (such as big football matches) from the commercial satellite operators and re-broadcasting them for free on Telestreet networks. Telestreets operate between the legal and technological cracks of the Italian mediascape, squatting the shadows or blank spots which terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach leaving a shadow on the broadcast spectrum which the Telestreet groups occupy. Telestreet reclaims the Œsocializingš power of television. As a medium video retains an immediate accessibility which does not even need to presume conventional literacy. The immediacy and expressive rewards of making TV has enabled Telestreet to appeal to a much wider constituency than just "the movement" or hacktivists. But despite the apparent return to the earlier tactics of the broadcast media pirates, Telestreet is a more complex and interesting hybrid. As their manifesto declared "Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an extension of the net: but to avoid another media alternative "ghetto", the horizontally of the net must meet the "socializing" power of television." Orfeo TV in Bologna is believed to have started the ball rolling when it began transmitting in 2002, just a few blocks away from the site of the legendary Radio Alice, and has since been described as her "bastard offspring". What began in Bologna with a few transmitters was soon "joined in a circulation of struggle through a network of websites; they are now connected through 'tactical television' to other Italian microbroadcasters like 'no-war TV', 'urban TV', and 'global TV'." In what Mark Coté describes "as an emerging network of infrapower". The Telestreet phenomenon is another splinter from the legacy of the Italian autonomy movement of the 1960s and 70s, a politics which brought down on itself the wrath of both right and Italian communist party by privileging desire and expression over either market forces or party discipline. It re-booted anarchist ideas for a post-industrial age, introducing notions of "immaterial labor", "post fordism" and "refusal to work". The influence of these ideas has fluctuated but grown steadily with fall of the eastern bloc and the rise of the virtual class. But perhaps only "refusal to work"and "class composition" have survived the co-option by "communicative capitalism" and "third way" social democrats. The first meeting of the Telestreets (Eterea 1) was held in Bologna in 2002 at a point when there were only two or three nodes in existence. But it was at this meeting when Telestreet was conceived and launched not just as a platform but as a political campaign. Two years later what began as a small network of interventions has become a catalyst for wider resistance. Today the network includes more than a hundred nodes (the number fluctuates daily) and stretches the length and breadth of Italy. The Gasparri law and the Counter Reformation The recent meeting of the Telestreets (Eterea2) was needed to address questions that had grown more urgent as Telestreet has expanded. With rapid growth has come diversity and questions about whether it is still possible to achieve a common strategy. This was given heightened significance by the passage of the Gasparri law (Gaspari is the minister of communication), allowing Berlusconi to consolidate his dominance of the Italian mediascape. The passing of this law leaves many in the Italy believing that they are facing an unparalleled political emergency. When I asked the well known autonomist and writer Franco Berardi (Bifo) how the Berlusconi administration sought to justify there actions, "what do you mean justify" he responded in mock amazement "We are a country of the Counter Reformation, there is no need for argumentation. If you win, you win." Given the fact that this is a defining moment both for Telestreet and Italian politics the choice to hold the meeting in Sennegallia, a small coastal resort was surprising. Indeed this choice along with the agenda of much of the meeting was resisted by a number of militants in Telestreet. The dissenting voices argued that the meeting be both attempting a higher profile and be focused exclusively on mobilizing resistance against the Berlosconi regime. There was however one good reason for holding the meeting in Sennegallia and that reason was the Sennegalliašs own Telestreet: Disco Volante. Disco Volante Nothing about the Disco-Volante studio suggests radical media culture. It is located in the sleepy back streets of Sennegallia and is part of "Zelig" a local project in which the disabled and able bodied share a studio and make art together. The project is the long term initiative of artist/activist Enea, the buoyant host of the meeting. The front of the narrow studio space gives no clue that any electronic media are present or indeed welcome. The studio is an overflowing torrent of collages, maquetts, sculptures, paintings, decorated found objects and countless toy theaters. The atmosphere is a mixture of the controlled naiveté and chaos of an artist from the Cobra era and Geppettošs workshop in Pinocchio. A wall near the entrance is covered with numerous awards and photographs of ceremonies at which Zelig participants are being honored as well as images from trips and adventures. This is art and media activism with deep local roots. The technology of the TV studio in the back of the space sits easily alongside the paints and carpentry tools that could have been found in any artistšs studio of the last 500 years. Enea, the director (this is not a collective) informs me that this is not art as therapy, neither is it some "art in the community" project it is simply a space which is open to those with disabilities to join him in concocting some version of the good life out of the process of making art together in pleasant surroundings. The fact that this also happens to be combined with a semi legal TV station that mixes a relaxed expressionism with militant campaigning for disability rights is both a fact and appropriately incidental. Its quite hard to find words to do justice to the atmosphere of energized generosity that pervades the Zelig studio. Astonishingly Disco Volante was the first Telestreet to have been forcibly shut down by the ministry of communication. The actual transmitter was not confiscated instead it was sealed by ministry officials, a seal it would be a criminal offence to break. Enea takes the sealed transmitter around with him displaying it as an emblem of repression. Of all the Telestreets to choose as a test case for a ministerial clamp down, why pick on a channel for disabled people? The explanation lies in the fact that it was not merely tolerated by Sennigalliašs local government it was actively encouraged. This was not only a battle between Telestreets and the ministry but also between local and national government. These are the regional complexities of Italian politics, complexities go back a long way, think for example of the leading role played by the communist party in the crack down and destruction of Radio Alice in Bologna. Disco Volantešs position as test case combined with a supportive local government willing to sponsor the event made Sennegallia the obvious choice. But more importantly it also provided the opportunity to mount a direct challenge to the law by resuming transmisions of the proceedings of the Telestreet gathering, on channel 52, the frequency from which Disco Volante had been expelled. Eterea TV: Channel 52 Transmissions from the meeting began almost immediately but by the end of the first afternoon there were rumours of the police trying to locate the source of the transmissions. By evening the rumours had been confirmed and an impromptu meeting was called to descide how to respond to the police pressure. We crowded into a small room at the "colony", where most people were staying and our host Enea, who was clearly enjoying himself, introduced a local radical lawyer who was present to advise on the risks and help us weigh up the options. Enea himself, informed us that he had actually visted the police himself that afternoon to ask what they intended to do. The officer in charge of policing the airwaves had declared himself no friend to this law but also said he was a familly man and not about to lose his job defending us. So what to do? Carry on transmitting and risk the event being shut down and equipment being confiscated or back down? Some militants from Naples even proposed going on the offensive by transmitting on a frequency that would push the populist commercial Rete 4 off the air. Although the meeting did not opt to go down this rout, they still decided to go ahead with the transmissions on channel 52 and indeed to increase their visibility by making their programs as publicly as possible, out in the market and surrounding streets and transmitting them the same day. Moreover a reporter from national broadcaster Rai 3 would be covering the actions to be transmitted on national television. The transmissions proceeded without interruption. Later that weekend, on Sunday night I was amazed to see that indeed this small action in Sennegallia as well as the Telestreet meeting itself did indeed warrant a five minute slot on the national news. Italian media militants may be correct in declaring that they live in a media dictatorship but their work has more effect and visibility than in most of the rest of Europe By contrast we in northern Europe inhabit the dictatorships of indifference. Militants: Activists: Expressevists The arguments and struggles which dominate Telestreet, can be seen as a dynamic triangulation between three categories or modalities of the tactical: militancy, activism and expressevism. Here are some rough working definitions. * Militancy: On the second day of the meeting Franco Berardi (Bifo) spoke up for militancy when he rounded off his "hair raising" speech by declaring that in the current political emergency the last thing we should be doing is "embracing our miserable marginality". In his talk he spoke for those who favor direct action, for the politics of maximum visibility and playing for high stakes. For the militants the emphasis on micro-media should not be translated into the irrelevance of micro-politics. * Activism: for activists micro-transmissions and micro-politics far from being ineffective have a viral power and ultimately can be more significant than engaging directly with the spectacle of national politics and big media. Micro media actions can multiply below the radar of the powerful and only be noticed when they have become to strong to crush. This notion of activism includes long term and highly situated commitments, like Disco-Volante (or for that matter Autolabs in Sao Paolo, or Sarai in New Delhi) whose reverberations go deep and produce new kinds of connective locality. This practice is less obviously heroic than militancy, it engages in fresh ways with every day struggles and affirms ordinary life. * Expressionism: the final essential modality of the tactical, expressivism, is sometimes referred to rather anemically as "cultural politics" and sometimes as art. In fact it can be art, but it is also *more* than art and its specific claim on loyalty is in urgent need of recuperation. Expressevism is a politics not just of power (i.e. sovereignty) but of language. The power of language to make and rehearse worlds, worlds whose forms resist pre-determination. This usage refers to language in the broadest sense of the word. It includes all experimental arts and invention, including the technological. Expressevist politics are based on our awareness that in a world of contingent horizons, our sense of meaning depends, critically, on our powers of expression. "And that discovering a framework of meaning is interwoven with invention" [1]. Whether or not this generation of utopian political movements can avoid new forms of authoritarianism will depend on the vigilant defense of the expressevist dimension and its subversive freedoms. History shows artists are like the canaries that used to be carried by miners, they give early warning of toxins in the ether. The greatest danger for Telestreet is to split along the faultlines of any of the modalities. If Telestreets (indeed all tactical media) are to retain their characteristic bite; militancy, activism and expressevism must all be present or all will be lost. In each of the particular cases of a Telestreet, one or two of these modalities will always predominate, but it is only by retaining all three, in variable orchestrations, that we will see the formation of real difference, effectiveness and freedom. Global Telestreet Whatever the differences within the Telestreet movement there is consensus on the need to scale up. Some voices would like to see it gain its own national frequency others would prefer local autonomy to prevail with each Telestreet extending and intensifying the process of expansion through networking and the sharing of content. Making the dream of effectively hybridizing Telestreet through networking and content sharing was explored in different ways throughout the days of the meeting. From Alan Toneršs (Autonomedia) [1] detailed and knowledgeable exposition of the ways in which the approaches of "the creative commons" movement were being and could be further applied to Telestreets through to the technical solutions being offered by New Global Vision [3]. The remarkable NGVision project was founded in the wake of the Genoa G8 protests. It set out to make the hundreds of hours of activist material freely accessible in a single location as common resouce. They currently have the space of 5 servers, stocked with around 300 videos, with a new tape being added at least once a week. NGVision uses bit-torrent to make the download times relatively fast, an hour of video can be downloaded in approximately fifteen minutes. NGVision is already in extensive use with approximately 10.000 videos being downloaded per month. NGVision has offered its system for use by all Telestreets in Italy and beyond. Although the local roots and Italian political theater help to make Telestreet strong the atmosphere can also be rather self referential and inward looking. But there is a growing realization that to survive Telestreet needs to reach beyond the conceptual boundaries of national politics. Slowly a translocal awareness is occurring in part through the work of writers like Agnese Trocchi and Mateo, Pasquinelli and Mark Coté whose work is helping to spread the Telestreet virus. Versions of Telestreet are already beginning to spring up in Holland, Switzerland (Proxyvision) and most recently as Telesione Piquetera the first Telestreet in Argentina [4]. Cecelia Landsman and myself were attending the meeting on behalf of Amsterdamšs version of Telestreet: Proxyvision. In our presentation we emphasized the translocal dimension of Telestreet [5]. Italian Telestreet works in part because it is embedded in local histories but is also through inspiring similar initiatives elsewhere. Our point is that once these initiatives take hold active connections and support from the more developed Italian Telestreets will take the project down pathways unconstrained by the puppet show of national party politics. The ways in which this process is already occurring are helping to a relatively new kind of *situated metropolitan tactics*. From this perspective, rather than imagining that the networks have made boarders disappear, we see the emergence of new ways of organizing locally that (by the very act of connecting across and through our differences) lead us towards something like a "global sense of place". David Garcia http://www.telestreet.it/ [1] Sources of the Self. Charles Taylor 1993 [2] <http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302/msg00116.html> I later found a quote of Alan Toner from an essay he wrote about the anti-Iraq war demo in Rome which could equally be applied in the Telestreet context. "Challenges on this scale put into perspective the sniping between different radical factions and pose once again the problems of representation. How can practices of self-organisation, democracy and direct action proliferate?" [3] http://www.ngvision.org/index.en.html [4] http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssu e=24&NrSection=5&NrArticle=1368&ST_max=0 [5] Proxyvision Presentation http://www.radioalice.org/nuovatelestreet/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&f ile=article&sid=59&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 13.0 <nettime> Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross [REVISED] Geert Lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:55:11 +0200 http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/interview-with-andrew-ross/ Organic Intellectual Work Interview with Andrew Ross By Geert Lovink Does cultural studies scholar and labour activist Andrew Ross need to be introduced? I became familiar with the work of U.S. American researcher of Scottish decent in the early nineties when his co-edited anthology Techno-Cultureand books No Respectand Strange Weatherreached wide audiences. His highly readable books deal with a range of topics from sweatshop labour, the creative office culture of the dotcoms, middle class utopias of the Disney town Celebration to China's economic culture as a global player. For outsiders, Andrew Ross might embody the 'celebrity' persona of academia, but he is someone I experienced as modest and open, a prolific writer who is very much on top of the issues. To me Andrew Ross has been a role model of how to reconcile the world of High Theory with the down-to-earth work within social movements, a tension that I have been struggling with since the late seventies. Reading Andrew Ross makes you wonder why it is so hard to be an organic intellectual after all, as Antonio Gramsci once described it, a figure which is light-years away from the abstract universes of the Italian autonomous theorists such as Negri, Virno and Lazzarato. No esoteric knowledge of Spinoza, Tarde or Deleuze is necessary to enjoy Ross. We do not read about exploitation in a moralistic manner but instead obtain a deeper understanding of the complex contradictions that the global work force has to deal with. Australian post-doc researcher Melissa Gregg, whose book Affective Voicesdeals with the history of (Anglo-Saxon) cultural studies, includes a chapter about Andrew Ross. Gregg describes Ross as an "intellectual arbiter between the academic politics of cultural studies and the activist imperatives of the progressive Left." His "academic activism" describes the "human cost of economic growth," thereby counterbalancing the "neglect of material labour conditions." Instead of fiddling around with concepts and terminologies, Ross describes the "human face of economics" much like Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative journalism, reaching into the category of airport non-fiction. The suspicious attitude towards appropriate payment is the key obstacle to an effective labourist politics among Leftist intellectuals. In the case of the no collar culture "not only did the culture of willing overwork severely haemorrhage any chance of a sustainable industry, but investment in the cult of creativity disassociated no collar work from the manual labour involved in producing the tools of their craft." In the following email exchange with Andrew we focused on the topics of research methodology and style of writing, the role of ethnography, the question of creative labour and strategies of activism. GL: Suppose you were to write one of those booklets and we would entitle it Letter to a Young Researcher. How would you approach this? Could you tell us something about your method? Is it fair enough to say that you moved on from General Theory to case studies? Clearly, students need to know about both, but I have the feeling that theory is a dead end street these days and that your research methodology offers an alternative. AR: Since I came of age, intellectually and politically, in the 1970s, I was a paid-up member of the Theory Generation, dutifully participating in Lacan and Althusser reading groups, and the like. But even then, I was rarely comfortable with the hothouse climate around what you call General Theory. Even then, I was learning that theory should be approached as simply a way of getting from A to B. It wasn't the only way to get from A to B, nor was it always the best way, and it was easy to get stuck en route with all your mental wheels spinning in the air. Indeed, I saw some of the best minds of my generation--to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg--vanish down that path. I'm glad I survived, I've been in recovery for two decades now. When it comes to method--and this is what I tell my graduate students--it's more important to know what A and B are. Once you have a good sense of your object and the questions you want to answer, then you are in a position to choose your methods--i.e. how to get from A to B. In most disciplines, the method comes first, and is then applied to an object. For us, it's the other way around. The questions and the goals determine the methods. So, how will I answer those questions? Do I need to do interviews, or conduct surveys? Do I need to visit sites, or consult archives? What kind of reading do I need to do, and what is the likely audience? In the program where I teach, our students are trained in more than one method--ethnography, historical inquiry, textual analysis, data analysis--and are encouraged to be flexible in their application. They are much more likely to think of themselves as investigators, undertaking case-studies, rather than being motivated by general theoretical problems. Approaching research in this manner, it's more likely that they will find their own voice, or at least a voice that is uniquely theirs, rather than aping the consensus voice of their discipline, or whatever influential master thinker they have been weaned on. It took me several years to shake off my own academic training and find a voice that I felt was my own and I had to go well outside my comfort zone to achieve anything. So my advice to young researchers is tailored to the goal of getting them to that point much earlier than I did. GL: Does your move from Cultural Studies to a new form of labour sociology also imply a critique of the way in which cultural studies has been bogged down in studying popular culture and mainstream products and services? In my experience 'cultural studies' has not globalized but can increasingly be identified as an Ango-Saxon project that has not broadened its reference system outside of the UK, USA and Australia. It may have adopted 'French theory' but in France itself cultural studies is nowhere to be seen. Now, there is nothing wrong with cultural specificity and the political heritage of research schools ... knowledge is always embedded in particular generations and experiences of a small group of players. I know there are zillion debates about the 'future of cultural studies' but could you nonetheless say something about this? AR: To answer that question, I'd have to touch on a debate about why labour was not more central to cultural studies during its heyday. Indeed, some would say that a conscious effort was made to sideline attention to labour. This is quite understandable if you consider how the British Left, for example, was dominated by a labourist mentality in the 1960s and 1970s. It was necessary to get out from under the heavy weight of that mindset to appreciate that other things mattered politically. I myself grew up in the industrial belt of Scotland, where labourism was the air that you breathed, and so the discovery of cultural politics--the fact that you could even think about culture politically--came as a revelation. Naturally, there was a certain degree of overcompensation involved in the cultural turn. Folks just kept going further and further from the labour fold, arguing that this or that sector of daily life "mattered" in ever more ingenious permutations of the feminist axiom that "the personal is the political." The result was that the field of political economy was abandoned, to some extent, to the hardliners, who no longer had to listen to the feminists, queers, cultural radicals, and ethnic identity advocates, and polarization set in between the cultural justice and the economic justice camps. The legacy of that split is still with us--indeed it has been played out in every US election since the early 1990s. There's no doubt it has hampered the Left, but the division has been exploited much more adroitly by the Right. While you may be right about the limited geographical footprint of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline, I don't think these larger political conflicts are confined to the Anglophone countries. They are expressed in different ways in other societies--usually through the repressive filter of religion or statism or ethnic sectarianism--and are sometimes harder to discern, but they are no less relevant. In all of the hand wringing about polarization, what's neglected is the work that was done--it was never really abandoned--and is still being done to reconnect these two wings of social justice. I suppose that's where I would place my own energies from the late 80s onwards, in areas of research--science and technology, and environmentalism in books like Strange Weather, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, and Real Love--that were not at all central at the time to the main currents of cultural studies. By the mid-1990s, I was being drawn into labour and urban research, both of which have dictated the bulk of my research and activism for the last decade or so. However, I'm not sure I would have gone in that direction if it hadn't been for cultural studies. For example, it was my interest in fashion consumption that took me into the anti-sweatshop movement and led to the publication of No Sweatand Low Pay, High Profile, and it was an interest in ecological politics that motivated my field work on the New Urbanist movement in The Celebration Chronicles. One area where all these currents re-converge is in the emergent policy about the "creative economy." Here is a sector that has received a massive amount of attention from government agencies and national economic managers desperate for a development paradigm that will allow them to compete or play catch-up in the high-skill, knowledge economy. And it's all about cultural workers, once seen as completely marginal to the forces of production and now increasingly central as a source of potential economic value. Now there does exist an extensive body of cultural studies scholarship, initiated by Tony Bennett in the mid-1990s, that engaged directly with cultural policy-making, but it's only recently that this tendency has moved centre-stage, and will, I predict, occupy more and more of the field. In many ways, it's an angle that was missing from Raymond Williams' distinction between two conceptions of culture: one based on the high/low value hierarchy, and the other, more anthropological understanding of culture as "way of life." Neither made much room for culture as a livelihood, or cultural work as labour. In Williams's day, it would have taken a remarkable act of social foresight to imagine that artists, writers, and designers would come to be seen, in the governmental imagination, as model entrepreneurs for the new economy, and yet here we are. Let me give you an instructive example. Back in the mid-1990s, after the leadership of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations)changed hands, I became involved in a organization called Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ). It was founded, mostly by labour historians, in recognition of the hope that the US labour's movement's era of complicity in the Cold War was over, and that a rapprochement with intellectuals was now possible. Most of the activities of SAWSJ were dedicated to supporting the industrial and service unions. This was entirely laudable, but it often meant ignoring the labour issues in our own backyard of the knowledge economies. Even at that time, it was difficult to get an audience for the view that we were not only in denial about this, and that we should be alerting the labour movement to the opportunities and dangers posed by the burgeoning culture/creative/knowledge industries (I wrote an essay "The Mental Labour Problem," which was intended to address this denial). Not long after, managers and ideologues of the New Economy dramatically reshaped perceptions about how value could be generated, and the labour movement was left sucking dust. New media employees helped to glamorize the 24/7 workweek, design, art, architecture, and custom craft were embraced as engines for boosting property values in the real estate boom, the amateur (MyCreativity) ethic became the basis for a whole new discount mode of production that exploited the cult of attention as a cheap labour supply, and much, much, more along these lines. The only development along these lines that has really attracted trade unions is in academic organizing, and largely because it offers a fairly traditional opportunity to recruit new members. For sure, there are individual unionists, mostly in sectors like telecommunications, who are keeping up with changes in the mode of production, but the labour movement, as a whole, and not just in the US, may have relinquished the short-term opportunity to fight over the terms of the knowledge economy. Knowledge and cultural workers are accustomed to think of themselves as in the vanguard, and it will probably take a generation of "proletarianization" and another big recession to persuade them that collective organizing is in their long-term interest. But that's no reason not to build a movement of ideas and actions that will be serviceable, when that moment comes. GL: I read your Low Pay, High Profileas a search for new strategies in activism. In your 'academic activism' you leave behind the disempowering reform-or-revolution choice and try to imagine, being part of a movement, where the 'global push for fair labour' can be taken. Here in Amsterdam I have seen how the Clean Clothes Campaign is doing this. Is it fair to say that you practice a form of 'radical pragmatism'? Is there a politics of immersion? Many of us fear deep engagement and try to keep the appropriation machines at a safe distance. How do you gain the confidence to survive Disney's Celebration, the dotcom madness, and Chinese IT culture? AR: "Intellectual activism" is a term we use among our students. We vastly prefer it to "public intellectual" because there are very few slots available on the public media spectrum at any one time, and they are usually reserved for gatekeepers or single-issue political advocates. For sure, activists and intellectuals function in a different kind of temporality. The activist needs something to happen tomorrow, the intellectual needs a slower germination of ideas. But you can't have movement of action without a movement of ideas, and the challenge really is to try to synchronize your thought with what's happening on the ground. If you work closely, as a scholar, with a justice movement, then requests will invariably be made to provide tailor-made research to further the activist cause. In some instances, that will be straightforward, in others it won't be so easy to provide because activists generally don't want complexity, they need black and white, and critical scholars are not trained to think in black and white. I have certainly encountered this dilemma in my own labour-oriented work, in the anti-sweatshop movement, for example, where, at times it seems that the only desirable research is that which corroborates the existence of corporate atrocities. But I didn't experience it as a fear of "deep engagement" as you suggest, nor as a fear of indulging in intellectual dishonesty. Take the work I did in the China field as an example. I had been a China-watcher for a long time, but was clearly not a sinologist. Nonetheless, I figured that I may be able to produce some useful research (that a sinologist, bound by disciplinary convention, perhaps could not) by going there. So, too, since the AFL-CIO refuses to have any official relationship with the China labour federation, there was a real research gap for labour scholars and educators to fill. I was familiar with all the literature on the labour-intensive export factories of South China, but I could find very little about the Yangtze Delta workplaces, where the lion's share of high-tech FDI was beginning to flow, and most of it higher up the technology curve than in South China. At that time, there was a wave of anxiety about the outsourcing of high-wage, high-skill jobs to China and India, but very little was known about the conditions, aspirations, and opinions of the new offshore workforce employees. So I enrolled in Mandarin classes for a year to give me some language mobility and took my family off to Shanghai to see what I could find. A trained sinologist would probably not have started out interviewing where I did--at the American Chamber of Commerce, in the belly of the beast, as it were--but in fact the contacts I made there helped open doors to many of the factory and office workplaces where I did my research. Nor do I think that a sinologist would have followed some of the leads I did since they were often about explicitly transnational flows of capital, knowledge, technology, personnel, and customs. In fact, in the year's worth of field work I did in the Yangtze Delta industrial parks, I didn't come across a single researcher doing anything in any of the areas I myself was pursuing--documenting the regional labour market, workplace conditions, the nature and character of the investments, the rate of technology transfer and knowledge transfer into the industrial parks, the cultural conflicts between young Chinese engineers and their foreign managers, etc. Now this is the single biggest regional economy in China, and the most high-tech, so it was astonishing to find no one else in the field. Even the foreign journalists I got to know there rarely left their offices in Shanghai--a convention, no doubt, that goes back to pre-Liberation days. So, to get back to the gist of your question, I think the "confidence" you refer to has more to do with not being bound by the conventions of a discipline or a profession that tends to dictate the conduct of scholars, activist, and journalists much more than we imagine. I became an agnostic in that regard a long time ago. The downside of this is that you have no idea who your audience will be, or that you will indeed have an audience. For example, the most detailed early review of my China book was by George Gilder, in his newsletter for high-tech investors. He mined it for information about the performance of Chinese tech companies that would be especially useful to his readers. Not exactly the kind of audience I had anticipated! GL: How important is storytelling in your work and is it something that we, cultural theorists, can learn? I find this skill more difficult to practice, and teach, compared to the relatively easy act of summarizing the theory of canon of the day, now Agamben and Badiou, in the past Derrida and Foucault, and Althusser and Gramsci in the early 1980s. I see your recent work in the critical anthropology tradition. Action research also had a particular mix of observation and active participation. Is ethnography something we should look into or do we then again run the risk of turning it into a theory religion? AR: You are right, it is not easy to teach, and largely because it is so experiential. I was trained first as a textual analyst, and then as a theorist, so I developed skills as a close reader and a conceptual thinker. What this meant was that I was a pretty bad listener. I grew up in a storytelling, working class culture in Scotland, but my academic training had taught me to distrust all of that, in fact, to distrust language tout court. Over time, and as I developed my own ethnographic techniques, I had to re-learn how to listen to other people's stories, and to be accountable to these people when I used their stories for my own purposes. So listening was important. As for telling the stories, the genre of investigative journalism has probably been as useful to me as critical anthropology. When anthropologists are in the field, they are often competing with journalists (though not on deadlines) but they rarely acknowledge journalistic narrative. In the full-length ethnographies I have done--in new media companies, in Celebration, and in China--I was competing directly with other journalists for stories insofar as my informants were often used to talking to journalists. Being a scholar was an advantage in those situations because people trust you more with their stories and confidence. As for ethnography becoming a religion, I don't see that happening. To go back to what I said at the outset, it's a method for getting from A to B, but it's not the only way, nor is it always the best way. You have to choose your methods based on your goals. These days, ethnography feels more honest to me than the kind of armchair criticism that I started out doing in the 1980s, but I still do certain kinds of writing that don't entail getting out of my seat. GL: Activist campaigning is becoming more and more associated with 'tactical media', social networking and so on. Is this justified? Do you think that a better understanding of Web 2.0 and new media would alter activism as is often claimed? As you know my work is associated with the 'tactical media' term but I have often made clear that (new) media cannot create social movements out of nothing. A more effective way of using cell phones and the Net is not in itself a guarantee that the real existing discontent in global capitalism will flip into organized resistance or even protest. AR: I agree, these days it is necessary but not sufficient for social movements to be tech savvy. The tactics for outwitting the oppressor have to be continually updated, and that is the job of movement tacticians, but the "sufficient conditions" for change haven't altered appreciably. You need a critical mass of popular sentiment, you need a significant fraction of elites to break with their class station and cross over, and you need an effective formula for capturing media attention. These days, most social justice movements have about six or seven years to make their mark before a) activists burn out or branch off, b) the formula exhausts its efficacy, c) the enemy coopts public attention. The anti-sweatshop movement was a good example; the formula of shaming the brand was like a narcotic for the media, "Nike sweatshops" became a household phrase, and elite guilt was appropriately mobilized. It took the lavishly funded efforts of "corporate social responsibility" several years to convince the public that the big garment companies had somehow "fixed" the problem and that it was OK to go out and buy Gap clothing again. In the interim, I think we achieved quite a lot. At the very least, the trading rules of the global economy are now contested in the public eye, rather than written in secret by unelected WTO officials, and consciousness-raising about sweatshops contributed, in no small part, to that shift in the rules of play. That said, there is one key area of activism in which tactical media has become particularly important, and that is in the copyfight over intellectual property. The corporate rush to proprietize knowledge is surely one of the biggest acts of theft in centuries, and new media activists have a frontline role to play, because the tactical tools they use are, more often than not, the technologies at play in the property grab. Disciplining rogue users (for the downloading of unauthorized content) is just the most highly publicized face of the massive effort of capital-owners to administer an effective division of labour within the knowledge industries. That effort increasingly depends upon control over not only the authorized use of technologies, but also the IP inside employee's heads. But it's not just the high-tech employees that are suspect. The new property grabbers are in a running battle with the ever-proficient hackers of the technocratic fraternity, and now they have to contend with a small army of legally-minded and tech-savvy advocates of the information commons. As I see it, this contest is very much an elite "copyfight" between capital-owner monopolists and the labour aristocracy of the digitariat (a dominated fraction of the dominant class, as Pierre Bourdieu once described intellectuals) struggling to preserve and extend their high-skill interests. The history of shareware and its maturation into free software/open source can be seen as the narrative of a distinctive class fraction--a thwarted technocratic elite whose libertarian world view butts up against the established proprietary interests of capital-owners. While they see their knowledge and expertise generating wealth, they chafe at their lack of control over the property assets. Their willingness to work against the proprietary IP regime is directly linked to their entrepreneurial-artisanal instincts, but, more importantly, it is a power-test of their capacity to act upon the world. The class traitors in their midst are engineer innovators who go over to the dark Gatesian side of IP monopoly enforcement. So, too, the mutualist ethos of the FLOSS communities is very much underpinned by the confidence of members that their expertise will keep them on the upside of the technology curve that protects the best and brightest from proletarianization. What I don't see is all that much attention to those less-skilled who are further down the entitlement hierarchy, who are not direct participants in this power struggle, and whose prospects in the chain of production do not extend to the profile of the master-craftsman straining at the corporate leash. They are much more distant from the rewards of authorship, and are less likely to feel personally disrespected when IP rights are expropriated from above. So how do the interests of these below-the-line workers get represented in the copyfight? I'd like to see new media tacticians think more about sustainable income models for everyone rather than focus primarily on the livelihoods of creatives or high-skill knowledge workers. GL: Surprisingly, in the new media sector, young professionals are earning less and less while their working conditions aren't that great either. This is one of the outcomes of Rosalind Gill and Daniella van Daemon's case study on the Amsterdam web designers. It's important here to add another level that sufficiently describes freedom and subjectivity of the actors involved. People are passionate about the challenges that new media create. In what ways could we describe such a paradoxical circumstance? AR: The Amsterdam study is interesting, though these results don't surprise me. The labour market for new media employees was at its rosiest at the height of the New Economy years---there was a limited labour supply, the new entrants had a monopoly on skills and applied knowledge, and demand for them was fierce. Under normal circumstances, conditions and pay scales could be expected to deteriorate from that high. But the impact of outsourcing, since 2001, has accelerated that decline, if not in terms of actual jobs transferred overseas, then as a result of the general climate of insecurity that has been ushered into white collar and no collar workplaces by the imminent threat of "knowledge transfer." The house motto of Razorfish in the boom years used to be "Whatever can be digital, will be." It was by no means easy to predict what came to pass all too quickly as "whatever can be outsourced, will be." For sure, the offshore transfers started out in coding and in the more routine sectors, but they moved up into design and web development fairly rapidly. As far as jobs in the global North goes, there's no reason not to expect that the situation will soon resemble the garment industry, with the most specialized, custom work remaining onshore, perhaps along with a less formal sector of sweated or intern work needed for fast turnaround. Everything else will be done overseas. As for on-the-job passion and enthusiasm, it's an integral part of the job profile, attested to through thick and thin. It was this devotion that got me interested in studying new media workplaces in the first place, since it's quite uncommon, in the history of modern work, to hear employees express this kind of zeal around their jobs. My study, in No-Collar, turned into an effort to describe and diagnose the conditions of "self-exploitation" that resulted. One of my informants put it most succinctly when she said she was given "work that you just couldn't help doing," and in a workplace from which the very last drops of alienation had been squeezed. Nowadays, every knowledge industry employer recognizes the benefits of this kind of ideal employee, who is turned on by the challenge of risk, accustomed to sacrifice (long hours) in pursuit of gratification, and willing to trade his or her most free time and free thoughts in return for the gifts of mobility and autonomy. Folks in the arts have long lived with this sacrificial mentality, and know a thing or two about the insecurity associated with it. So, too, gearheads, from the days of ham radio onwards, are familiar with the devotional cults that a machine can inspire. But neither cohort has been prepared for the consequences wrought by the rapid industrialization of their respective crafts and hobbies. The effort to industrialize custom creativity is a primary goal of capitalist production today, right now. I suppose I would say the same of the academic sector, with the proviso that academics are so fond of their siege mentality that they can only see their workplaces being invaded by corporate logic or industrial process. They don't see that the traffic goes in both directions, they know so little about the corporate world that they can't see how the mentality and customs of academic life are being transplanted into knowledge firms, whose research is increasingly conducted along similar lines. The truth of the matter is we are living through the formative stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation. Neither is what it used to be; both are mutating into new species that share and trade many characteristics, and these changes are part and parcel of the economic environment in which they function. GL: You touched on the "creative economy." As you know, we've been dealing with this in the MyCreativity project that my institute in Amsterdam co-initiated. What should the critical research in this field look into? There is a call to go beyond the hype bashing and look into the labour precarity issue. Still, the consensus-driven hegemony of business consultants seems strong and uncontested. What work could be done to open the field and make space for other voices and practices? Are there ways to obtain cultural hegemony these days? AR: That's a good question, and should be at the heart of anyone interested in a sustainable job economy. It's not all that productive to scoff at policy initiatives that might just be capable of generating a better deal for creative labour. As I see it, critical research ought to be doing what governments are not, and that is coming up with qualitative profiles of what a "good" creative job should look like, based on ethnographic methods. Currently, all we have are productivity and GDP statistics, on the government side, and, on the other side, a cumulative pile of scepticism based on the well-known perils of precarity that afflict creative work, dating back to the rise of culture markets in the late eighteenth century. I have yet to see a "mapping" of the creative sector that includes factors relating to the quality of work life. It wasn't that long ago, in the 1970s, in response to the so-called "revolt against work," that governments actively championed "quality of work life." Of course, corporations came up with their own versions of "innovative" alternatives to the humdrum routines of standard industrial employment, but the hunger for mentally challenging work in a secure workplace has undergirded and outlived all the management fads that followed. For those with an appetite for a dialogue with the policy-makers, I'd say that the qualitative research about good jobs is a plausible way to go (and I'm talking about fully-loaded jobs, not simply work opportunities). It wouldn't take all that much to come up with some proposals for guidelines, if not outright guarantees, about income and security, based on that kind of research. The goal would be to offer a sustainable alternative to the IP jackpot economy that currently drives the consultants' world-view. I'm not sure if the result would be what you would call cultural hegemony, but if the challenge to existing hegemony is going to draw on labour power in any way then it's in our interest to ensure that there will be a robust employment sector there to provide heft and volume to these challenges. Clearly, the strategies for organizing have to be re-thought in ever more ingenious ways, but there are no good substitutes for organizing, as far as I can see. Tactics like culture jamming or brand busting have their uses, and they have served as appropriate tools, but you can't give up on the power of numbers. (edited by Ned Rossiter) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 14.0 <nettime> Interview with Caroline Nevejan Geert Lovink nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:00:02 +0100 The Politics of Presence Research Interview with Caroline Nevejan By Geert Lovink The Dutch cultural producer Caroline Nevejan is known for her work at the Amsterdam pop temple Paradiso, as a co-founder of the Waag centre for new media culture and in her manager role at HvA, the university for professional education. Currently she is a member of the Dutch Council for Culture and the Arts, which advises the Minister of Culture. She was about to leave the Hogeschool van Amsterdam in 2004, intended to write her PhD, when I arrived there. The dissertation is ready now. In April 2007 Caroline Nevejan got her degree at the University of Amsterdam. The title is Presence and the Design of Trust and can be freely downloaded at http://www.being-here.net. The interview below was done to reflect on her PhD research. I must have ran into Caroline around 1980, during the turbulent riot days of the Amsterdam squatters movement. Late 1981 we were both part of the group that kicked off the bluf! weekly, bringing together undogmatic factions within the new social movements of the time. For a few months we were both in the editorial team. A few years later Caroline reappeared as the events producer of Paradiso. It was there, in August 1989, that we worked together during The Galactic Hacker Party, Amsterdam?s first computer hacker?s convention. I was there in my capacity of ?illegal scientist?, as a member of the Adilkno group and Mediamatic editor, writing reports and manifestos. A year later I participated again in an event of a similar visionary magnitude, the Seropositive Ball, which connected HIV-AIDS activists on a global level. Out of these grew the first Next Five Minutes ?tactical media? festival in January 1993. Key element of these events was the spatial arrangement of the interaction between the Paradiso audience and people elsewhere. In conjunction with De Balie, the cultural centre next door, an Amsterdam style was developed in which a lot of emphasis was put to create an ?aesthetics of public debating?. Discussion was more than a disagreement between key actors. It had theatrical elements in which the producer took up the role of director. It was in this context that new communication technology such as telephone, fax, video conferencing, bulletin board systems and the Internet started to play a role. Why limit a dialogue to those who were able to gather in a particular time and space when you can also involve others remotely? ?Presence and the Design of Trust? is certainly an innovative and non-conventional piece of research. Let?s call it singular. Caroline decided to take both The Galactic Hacker Party and Seropositive Ball as her case studies and came up with valuable insights that contribute to the yet unwritten history of Amsterdam?s new media culture. The central dynamic she studied is the one between natural and mediated presence. Technology has altered our sense of presence. The question that Caroline Nevejan poses is how networked events can produce ?thinking actors? that play a role in building up ?crucial networks?. Overcoming the usual binaries between real and virtual is one, but how can we build ?communities of practice? that really make a difference, beyond techno-fetishism and political dogmatism? How can we overcome the tendency to produce noise and tension on the line and develop a sense what ?vital information? is? GL: You have a broad, conceptual understanding of ?design?. Where does this idea come from? People know Dutch design and architecture, but that?s perhaps not what you refer to. Design, in your understanding, seems to be a procedure, a set of rules, not unlike project management, which is a practice, one that is not by definition related to aesthetics. CN: Coming from Holland, the ?man-made? land where everything is designed and which has a remarkable design tradition of which the modern aesthetics have influenced worldwide perception of design, has definitely influenced my perception. I know the environment is ?made?, I know aesthetics matter, I know different designs operate at different scales and need different approaches to resources, project management, distribution and protection. My personal understanding of design is also deeply influenced by social movements, by critical science and by the specific Amsterdam evolving digital culture at the end of the 1980?s and early nineties, which was a remarkable inspirational environment to be part of. It was not till I entered into the Doors of Perception community that I started to refer to my own practices in terms of design. In the Doors of Perception large global network people have been discussing and presenting best and worst practices in the developing networked society since 1993: scientists, engineers, artists, graphical designers, interaction designers, philosophers, businessman, inventors, computer wizards and others coming from art, grass root organizations as well as from small companies and large multinational corporations. All were concerned to find good and profitable ways to proceed in this unknown and fast changing landscape. Already in the mid nineties the discourse in this conference changed and started to imply that designing ?stuff? implied designing behavior and experiences of others. It became apparent from practices in business as well as social organizations that design is a way of looking at problems and solving them. In the fast changing landscape design methodologies appeared to be capable of dealing with a large variety of input in a fast output process. People realized that such an approach could be very useful, also outside of the classical design realms. The evolving networked and information society and the elaborate digitalization of many processes had a huge impact on basic structures of many organizations and businesses. They needed the skills from the design world to be able to deal with the complexities they were facing. In my view, today, design has become a paradigm in itself. Because it emphasizes the ?making of things? people from different disciplines can contribute and collaborate. The ?thing? to be designed brings perspective to the collaboration. In design a variety of languages and media is used (writing, drawing, sketching, photo?s and film etc.) to make mock ups, demo?s, storyboards, scheme?s etc, and the use of such ?boundary objects? facilitates the conversation between people who usually have a hard time understanding each other. Nevertheless I argue that I think that ?design as research? or ?deep design? as Peter Lunenfeld formulated it, has not yet developed the rigor and knowledge base it needs to be able to deal with the complex issues it faces. I propose to distinguish between 2D design for space (space) and 3D design for function (space and action), 4D design for dramaturgy (space, time and action) and 5D design for orchestration (space, time, action, relations between people). When focusing on dimensions, each of these kinds of design has its own traditions that it can build on. In the different arts and sciences basic issues around the structure of time and space, actions and relations between people have been studied and experiences have been gathered that can be used. Originally ?design? referred to 2D design for space as in layout and to 3D design for function (space and action) for creating objects and architectures of all kinds. This design is inspired by the classical ?design is art? tradition. 4D design for dramaturgy (space, time and action) designs sequences of action. It is used to create events, educational modules, computer applications or the creation of games. This 4D design can build upon the rich traditions of theatre, dance, music, film, architecture and certain sports. Over the last 10 years we have seen the rise of 5D design for the orchestration of processes (space, time, action and the relation between people). One is today much more aware how infrastructures, frameworks and platforms influence how people interact. Designing user platforms, intranets and communities online have led to using design methodologies for designing new business processes, learning ecologies and human communities. Sometimes one can wonder whether to call this design. I do when design methodologies are used to tackle complexities. Traditions to look into are the arts in which improvisation and synchronization between the artists plays a role of significance as well as into the social and organizational sciences. So, yes, I guess I do have a conceptual understanding of design. I do argue, though, that aesthetics matter. GL: How did you encounter the concept of ?trust?? Isn?t it a concept of business consultants who saw that their clients had a security problem with their computer networks? How did this concept get introduced in cultural theory and design? CN: The moment I was introduced to the existence of Internet immediately raised the issue of trust. In the 1980?s networks like Peacenet and Greennet provided us with news, which could travel beyond the censorship rules from countries like South Africa. So the Internet provided ways to get around not to be trusted formal news reports and it generated ?trust? because the witnesses themselves could speak up and testify unedited. When I started to make shows in Paradiso I collaborated with hackers and through them I found out how the technology itself is easily manipulated, how any code can be broken and how the business propaganda of delivering ?safe? environments was (and is) a fairy tale. At the time I could not have formulated it in these terms, but in hindsight I can see that we were dealing with multidimensional designs and were struggling how all these related and contextualized each other and in this process trust appeared to be fundamental to be able to understand what was happening. Trust is a fuzzy concept and at the same time it is crucial in any interaction. Everyone who makes things that other people use faces issues of trust. In collaborations, agreements and contracts, in delivering and using services, as well as in every street, issues like safety, liability, believability and trustworthiness profoundly influence the dynamics of interaction. Even though little has been written about ?trust? as such in the design world, since people realize that they are modeling behavior of others, trust surfaces as an issue. The possibility of using multiple identities on the Internet has made more and more people aware about for example the basic trust people exchange when they meet. I find the design of trust most complex in 5D designs. These often deal with power relationships in which the establishment of trust can easily be misused. I do not think such misuse only happens in business, I have seen it in many places. Especially when larger groups of people start to express themselves and start to take responsibility, as is facilitated by developments like the Internet, the old fashioned forms of control is not good enough anymore. With new ways of generating knowledge and new ways of interacting, new management styles are necessary. Such styles focus on orchestration, on delegating responsibility (instead of tasks) and facilitate people to contribute and meet other people with other skills and knowledge as well. The way ?trust? and its dynamics are shaped, shapes how people will relate and this defines possible success. GL: I read your study as a reflection on the culture of organizing public debates that existed in Amsterdam. From early on you have been looking for alternative formats and ways to ?stage? controversies in a different manner, for instance through a banal detail like the rearrangement of seats. Do you think that we reflect enough on this new culture that has been created in Amsterdam? It is great to read about the Galactic Hacker Party and the Zero Positive Ball. However, you also get the feeling that we do not take ourselves serious enough. Could we talk about a ?school? in Amsterdam that deals with alternative designs of public debates? There is a lot of knowledge floating around amongst event an organizer that is not written down. You?re not a historian, and neither am I. How do you see that we could better ?capture? the overflow of innovative, unique practices that happen in this city? How can this fertile place of experimentation gain more influence, worldwide? CN: When traveling I realize again and again that the Amsterdam cultural context in which I grew up and to which I could contribute to, was very special. It would be interesting to analyze this from a design perspective: to distinct the historical, the structural and the self-organizational elements for example. What created this amazing challenging and yet safe playground at the time? Such an analysis also needs to take into account how it changed early this century. How community centers were shut and kids were back in the streets, how people retreated in their own realm, how bureaucracy and administration dehumanized, how the homo scene is suddenly in defense again, how the local media scene more or less disappeared. Most of all I wonder whether the current generation of young people in Amsterdam experiences this freedom and richness we participated in at the time. I do agree with you that in the seventies, eighties up to the mid nineties there was a very special culture here, which was internationally recognized and which maybe you could even label as what I would propose to formulate as The Amsterdam School for Public Research. One of the characteristics of this Amsterdam culture was and maybe still is that things are made and tried out in public spaces and had a research character. People from different disciplines participated as well as artists, whose involvement has been crucial for success. By making things in public place, ?the public? influences what happens. And as a result things that are made and happenings inform the larger political and social debates. Public Research, a notion we introduced when we founded the Waag Society in 1994, has not been much elaborated very much upon since. There is a lot of not-formulated experience and insights in how to make Public Research happen, here in Amsterdam as well as in other places (like the Sarai initiative in India for example). I wonder, though, whether this is a question of ?capturing?. I guess cultures fertilize new cultures when there is a chance to experience. Such an analysis should inform new designs that can operate in the new current contexts. Your question also seems to suggest that the ?Amsterdam approach? should gain more influence worldwide. Even though I tend to be skeptical about such ?cultural transmissions?, I realized through the many responses on the Al Jazeerah broadcasting of ?Couscous and Cola?, a television series produced by my (own) sister, in which a group of migrant teenagers from the Amsterdam-West suburbs freely discusses their lives, that the ?openness? that till today characterizes Dutch society, resonates with young people around the globe. To be able and to be allowed to ask questions and listen to each other is fundamental to Public Research. The challenge as well as the safety needs to be provided though. Personally I have taken the challenge to take the things I learned into a different professional arena in 1999, namely to higher professional education: to design a sense of performance in education, to switch the attention from designing ?education? to designing ?learning environments?, to orchestrate public research in such large organizations. The methodologies we developed in the emerging Amsterdam digital culture were rather useful in that context. I also witnessed that the battle for power is much stronger which pointed out how fragile such processes can be. Because of the Web 2.0 developments, and the knowledge management problems that organizations have, more study into Public Research makes a lot of sense. James Surowicky points out that diversity and independence are prerequisites for any ?wisdom of crowds?. Scale makes all the difference and as my research strongly suggests, a balance between mediated, witnessed and natural presence has to be found. Such research will address a larger movement in society: how do we create and communicate experience and collaborate at a time of post-industrialization, hypermodernity and mass-individualization? I like your suggestion to start this analysis with a focus on the re-arranging of seats. How the seats are positioned, I can testify and you as well, makes a huge difference in what will happen next. GL: Over the years certain concepts become alive. As ?memes? they start to travel and become meaningful for a group of people and then are taken outside of that context, appealing to people you had no idea about. This happened to ?tactical television? that we both worked on with a group of artists and activists in 1992. This turned out to be the first Next Five Minutes festival. Three others followed in 1996, 1999 and 2003. These days there are academic anthologies and lectures series about ?tactical media?. In the book you haven?t emphasized this event. Can you nonetheless say something about your role? CN: It started in my perception with a conversation between David Garcia and me at my kitchen table. We were discussing how the current language to talk about media did not pay tribute to the things we liked and thought were good. It was not anymore about ?left or right?, or about ?independent versus dominant?. We decided to explore this more and we invited a few people, like you and Bas Raaijmakers, Geke van Dijk, Raul Marroquin and Menno Grootveld who were all concerned with media, to share this thinking. In my memory we met three or four nights and had long conversations and came up with the notion of tactical television, which emphasized the cracks in the media-landscape as well as the position of the media-maker. I was the producer and ?concept-protector/communicator? of the first N5M. Each of you had a program-line and I was safeguarding that it became one program as well as that the developed thinking would communicate. You did Eastern Europe I remember distinctly. Bas en Geke did the southern hemisphere with Patrice Riemens as well. David invited artists from all over. Tjebbe van Tijen made the archive. It was a very rich program and in the end the atmosphere from the event was nearly utopian. For many participants it was very reassuring to see how people using media in smart ways could make interventions. Remember that the strategic freeze of the cold was over and so much potential seemed to blossom. At the end of the first N5M I had a clash with David Garcia, which in hindsight was a very interesting one. He wanted authorship over the concept of N5M, being an artist this was very important for him because the building of reputation is crucial for new funding. I, being the producer and responsible for something that was a collective endeavour, said that this was out of question. It is a whole group who made it happen and in case of a community activity one does not claim authorship, one is happy enough to participate. The issue of reputation building through ownership of authorship versus the building of reputation through participation is till today an issue of tremendous importance. When we started to produce the second N5M I ran into a serious disagreement with the editorial group. In 1996 the Internet was conquering the world and all you guys wanted to pursue net-critique. You and Pit Schulz had just started the nettime list and this was an opportunity to meet and explore more. The result was a program full of white young ambitious boys, yet it has been my pride to always make programs in which diversity is the fundament and also I thought that the scope and original agenda of the N5M was not pursued enough. Together with Patrice Riemens I wrote the article ?Vital information for social survival? to make my point (which was published in the Economic Times of India). In the end I withdrew from the editorial group. I supported the second N5M from out Paradiso, but it was not ?my program? anymore. It is great to see though how the notion of tactical television has traveled. It makes sense because the notion of tactical media is way to understand certain positions in today?s complex media-landscapes. Also, many of the nettime-posters have become Professors of New Media and Digital Culture, who teach between them thousands of students all over. GL: A concept that you emphasized, time and again, is ?vital information?. It appealed to me, and stayed with me, ever since it was used in the Zero Positive Ball event in 1990. Can you say something more about it? Has it been used in other contexts? CN: Vital information has been an important notion for me since the Zero Positive Ball indeed. That is where it surfaced for me. The strive for survival and well-being, the conatus as Spinoza called it, makes people take hurdles they thought they never would. When this strive is triggered, original energy of people becomes available and what happens next will make sense. The dialogues and the connections that are made, will truly influence people?s lives. When mediated presence offers ?vital information? the bridge between natural and mediated presence becomes very smooth. I have found that in any situation one can find the vital information. It always taps into this deeper layer of survival and therefore it also taps into the sense of ethics people feel. One communicates around the current status quo, so to say, to be able to create, if at all needed, changes in this status quo. It takes an effort to find ?vital information?, one has to ask questions and challenge the current status quo. I only know a few people who work with the concept of vital information. As you know I am not a regular writer, and after the first article with Patrice Riemens, I only discussed the concept again in my dissertation. Nevertheless I have worked with many people over the years and in those collaborations ?vital information? always has played a role of significance. GL: You have somehow copy-pasted the NGO rhetoric around ?human rights? in your work. I wonder why. As you know there is a whole debate about how useful the ?rights? discourse is in the new media and activist context, and how, potentially, disempowering it can be to claim ?rights?. It?s such a passive and institutionalized activity. Nonetheless, you have chosen the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a central document in your study. One would expect boring government or U.N. documents to do. Is there maybe a personal reason why this document plays such an important role? CN: It is interesting that you ask about a personal reason for this choice. It was not a personal reason at first. Since the moment I realized that ?the sense of presence? can be described as ?the sense for survival and well-being? to formulate it shortly, I was looking for a way to make trust operational in which this sense for survival would resonate. I was aware of the many critique?s that are formulated about the UDHR, but realized that in the light of destruction during World War II the UDHR is formulated (which is mentioned in the preamble). In the light of the unimaginable destruction that happened all ideological or religious reasoning became obsolete. Also the fact that it is a secular document and that it has played this vital role in international diplomacy for over 50 years, defines its significance. And I felt with the current developments in which there seems to be no limit as to how far we are digitizing people en mediating our presence around the globe, such a strong reference point is necessary. Up to this day, when being involved in working with refugees, ?illegal? people and other political situations, the UDHR has been a declaration that one can refer to and on which basis one can go to local, national and international courts, to point out that in certain situations human dignity was denied and that therefore such situations have to be challenged and changed. If I would look for an even more personal reason than I guess the UDHR resonates in its fundament most with motherhood for me. Children have rights that are not to be neglected nor denied by any religion or political system. This is something I feel very strong about. GL: I noticed that in your references and experiences that you describe, you easily switch between the world of global corporations, human rights activists and social movements. Is the context that you work in really without frictions? You do not often mention that there are conflicts of interests. I suppose you are not suggesting that we all work on the same project. In the past people would have asked: which side are you on? CN: Already in the past the question: ?which side are you on?? has produced more than enough atrocities, exclusions and humiliations that were not beneficial nor necessary as well as that they were counterproductive to ?the cause?. I strongly believe that people can be ?good? human beings in all realms of society, even if they have different interests, as long as they are willing to enter into dialogues and conversations with others when appropriate. You notice indeed that I try to get around the ?being good? and the ?being bad?. I think that does not actually exist, as a scientist definitely not, but also in my personal life and in my professional life I find this distinction not useful at all. However, in my dissertation and up to this day, I have not entered into any thought or dialogue about the character and value of intentions, which is part of this debate and which I also expect to have consequences for this debate. I focused on how things and processes can be good and bad in certain contexts from the perspective of supporting survival and well-being. The feeling of something being good or pleasant is an important indicator of where well being is to be found (I here take the perspective of Professor Antonio Damasio). To transpose such senses and feelings into judgments about other human beings in general I find medieval reasoning. That is why our judicial systems as well as our scientific structures are important. Logic and reasoning sanction the action and ideas of people in certain contexts, which is how we can protect ourselves from each other?s misconceptions and destructive actions. Nevertheless I do agree that when certain interests color certain actions and perceptions this should be mentioned. In my perception I show awareness of this. Are there any specific paragraphs where you miss the mentioning of certain interests? The introduction of the ?crucial network? specifically deals with these conflicts of interest. As you can read, I argue that the presence of the ?crucial network? the gathered conflict of interests, generates an environment in which trust can be found. Power becomes transparent in such a case and therefore the power status quo can be challenged as well. GL: There is an example we can discuss here. Lee Felsenstein, who is featured in your book as one of the early hackers, has recently made some critical remarks about Negroponte?s One Laptop per Child project (http://fonly.typepad.com/fonlyblog/2007/06/one_computer_pe.html). How would you, using your vocabulary of Presence and the Design of Trust, look into this controversy? Your PhD supervisor, Cees Hamelink, also has strong views on this ?ICT for Development? field. CN: For a start I like to argue that we are not dealing with a controversy here. If anything we are observing a debate between two groups of Americans who both claim to know how to change the world. I guess it is great if they make cheaper computers, do more research into learning and I am always in favor of people who put children on the agenda. However, both do not seem to be inspired nor hindered by knowledge of things that are happening already, nor do they seem to be aware of the social and economic circumstances of the ?developing world?. Even IT multinationals like Intel, Motorola, Philips, HP, Nokia and others have realized at the beginning of this century that while the northern markets are being saturated with their products, people in the southern hemisphere of whom most earn less than 1 dollar a day, can not afford their products. This realization is one of the reasons that they are shifting from product to service design. To push for a hundred dollar computer per child excludes most of the children in our world, also many children in the United States are too poor to be able to afford such a machine. It is clear to me that this initiative generates lots of research funding for the Americans involved and has a potential business perspective worth billions of dollars. Where this initiative may become dangerous, in the sense that it will prevent other people to make their own things, is where they start developing infrastructure with American for profit companies for all regions of the world. The material infrastructures of the Internet in the end define who has access to what. Especially the market of building infrastructures is, as Cees Hamelink has been pointing out for over 20 years, a new form of colonialism, cultural imperialism or whatever you want to call it. The ownership and responsibilities that come with this ownership (and its potential misuse and if not being affordable), should be of great concern worldwide. Even in Amsterdam we do not own our own information infrastructure anymore. Concerning Lee?s proposal for a computer per village, I can only point to things that are already happening. In 1990?s Sam Pitroda, and Indian entrepreneur collaborating with the Indian government, gathered over 300 engineering students one summer to design India?s telephone system. The idea was that one phone per village makes all the difference. And so it appears to be. By 2002 every village, so is claimed, now has an STD phone in its local shop. The shop owner provides the service of making phone calls to the villagers who pay a few cents per call and the shopkeeper has a raise in income because of exploiting the phone. Jiva, one of the many social entrepreneurs in India, has started to put a computer with every phone to develop telemedicine as well as distant learning. Infrastructure matters, but even more so do new models for learning. Since 1999 Professor Sugata Mitra, at the time connected to NIIT and now connected to Newcastle University, has been exploring the idea of children who learn through self organization. His by now famous Hole in the Wall project has advanced a lot since. In his last experiment he asked the question whether Tamil speaking children could learn bio-technology in English on their own and he found that they had acquired 30% of the material he had left them alone with for three months (speaking English with a Texan accent they had acquired from one of the sites!). He comes to the conclusion that groups of children, when left alone with a computer hooked up to the Internet, actually learn a lot. For this to happen the computer should be located in a public space so that children can discuss what they see and can enter into competition with each other as well as learn by copying each other. You ask me to connect this to my research into Presence and the Design of Trust. I guess the market of infrastructures should become transparent for it to generate trust. However, we people will use anything that works and a worldwide judicial system that will respect privacy and promote freedom of expression is not in place. Much government policymaking is way behind technological developments. Sugata Mitra?s work on the self organization for learning I find extremely interesting, also from the viewpoint of my research. He emphasizes that children who gather in natural witnessed presence, because they enter into conversation with each other, have unexpected high learning curves. They make ?sense? of the mediated chaos they encounter in the first place and within days are capable of operating this chaos and learn from it. From his research one could conclude that mediated presence generates the highest learning curves when it is perceived in natural witnessed presence. A similar experience we had with projects like Demi Dubbel from the Waag, and also my experiences at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam point into this direction. GL: If we become culturally specific, much of the Amsterdam ?making things happen? that you and I are part of can be reduced to the exchange between the Netherlands and the United States. In both case studies, the hackers event and the AIDS conference, US-American activists, and their concepts and reference systems, are playing a key role. Obviously, continental Europe had a lot to catch up with in 1989-1990, particularly if we look at cyber culture. If we switch to the current Web 2.0 craze not much has changed. Americans are flown in to do their spiel, both in the academic, commercial and cultural contexts. Just look at the large creative industries event, held here in Amsterdam so far in 2006 and 2007 called Picnic. The cultural flow seems one-sided. Have you seen much change over the past twenty years in the way that the USA and Europe are interacting? CN: In my perception, being a witness of USA policy since the seventies, the USA has rudely intervened all over the world and does not hesitate to offend the international community nor does it hesitate to promote their culture with all means available. This has not much has changed. In the telecommunications sector the battle about infrastructure is not over. But also, because the US government has shown such disrespect for others, the USA underground is also profound, which again is an inspiration for many of us. The USA is and has been over the last 50 years ?the? major player in information and communication technology as well as in the cultures (music, film, internet, TV) it produced. In 1989 when we organized the Galactic Hacker Party (before the Berlin wall broke down) the UNESCO declaration in which a ?more-balanced flow of information? was on the agenda. However, since the cold war was over, ?wild capitalism? has conquered the planet as you know, but such dynamics also produce its counter forces and for example the fact that whole regions of the Internet are not English anymore will have impact. In the shows we organized in Amsterdam Americans were never our only guests. And of course this takes a lot of effort, with many European countries it is not easy to interact and with other parts of the world it is even harder. Even with the Internet being so omni-present today, it is often complex to identify the right people. Networks of trust are crucial. I remember distinctly that because you had spent time early nineties in Eastern Europe we had regularly had East-European guests. Because you were the ?social interface? as you are till today for many of us to many others we do not know in other areas of the world. I do argue that current event-organizers do not take enough trouble to make sure they present a diverse program and reach out to diverse publics as well. In my dissertation I describe how in Paradiso a constant effort is taken to prevent the rise of mono-cultures and include new or not known or not-staged people again and again. I think the taking of such effort is a prerequisite for any good program that wants to make a difference. GL: At the end of your dissertation you have proposed your own methodology, and coined it YUPTA. It describes a design method in which the relation between presence and trust takes centre stage. Could you explain it to us? YUTPA is the acronym for ?being with You in Unity of Time, Place and Action?. I argue that if we want to understand the relation between presence and trust there are four dimensions that deeply influence this relationship: here/not-here, now/not-now, do/not do and you/not-you. The dimensions place and time define what synchronicity is possible and what feedback possibilities there are. I also realized that the perspective of possible action, to be able to intervene in what happens next, influences the responsibility we can take (and not retreat in a moral distance) and therefore influences what trust we can establish in a certain situation. And this is influenced also deeply by the relation we have to other human beings. When we are in relation with someone (family, friends, colleagues, neighbors) we understand what happens in the context of this relation. people we do not know and with whom we have no connection we merely treat as information to which different laws of causality apply. In the model I developed the four dimensions create 16 possible spaces for social interaction. I argue that each of these spaces for social interaction have specific possibilities for certain kinds of trust/distrust and delegations of trust. When designing communication processes a much more deliberate design of such processes is possible. By identifying what kind of trust is necessary, you can also decide what medium and format to use to be able to establish such a kind of trust. I find through giving lectures and working with people that especially in 5D design trajectories YUTPA seems to be a valuable contribution. GL: In terms of education, so much seems focused on short-term skills, in particular when we look at new media. There is a great fear amongst higher education officials to miss the connection with the labour market. However, there are places, such as the Design Academy in Eindhoven and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, where they do focus on concept development. Is it possible to teach conceptual design on a broad graduate level, to the thousands of students who are now into new media design? Or do we really have to limit this to a small group of more experienced students that work in post-graduate labs? CN: I definitely think you can teach conceptual design to children, grown ups of all ages and also to the thousands of students who are now studying new media design. The issue though is ?attention?. To be involved in conceptual design requires reflection. To be introduced to the skill of being able to use different ways of reflection requires personal attention. I think more emphasis is needed on the development of solid analytical skills and ways of doing research. Also I found that a lot of the students I worked with were not used to openly reflect and needed to find the confidence to do this. One can learn analytical skills by seeing it done, especially when the subject is intriguing. In my twenties for example I did this fantastic minor in film in which we saw many unusual films as well as great analytical talks about them. We were with a few hundred students attending this course. But we also had breakout groups that were guided by students who had already done this course before and that made a huge difference. I realize that education had to deal with huge budget cuts in the last decades, which triggered the need for more a self-organizational design of education. Nevertheless I have been amazed in my years of higher professional education at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, how the concept of students teaching other students is used so little in the orchestration of learning environments. Today students are mostly left alone in project based groups, but do not have the advantage of being guided by students who are ahead of them. So I would argue that it is a question of orchestration in the learning environments to make sure that the skill to reflect can be developed and conceptual design can become a ground from where you actually design ?stuff?. I also think it is very necessary to do this because otherwise, as you point out, the fear to miss out the connection with the workforces of the future will appear to be correct. GL: You have not chosen for a classic academic career. Instead, you have been active as a cultural producer, consultant and manager. Over the past years you sat down and reflected upon your practice. This is in accordance with the general trend in the Anglo-Saxon countries to have more ?practice-based? PhDs. Now that you?re done, how do you look at the academic rituals? Universities seem to stick to their own people who have followed the ordinary career path as required by the sitting professors. New media, design and activism, it all doesn?t seem to fit very well within the university system. If students do not chose for a life-long career in their late twenties, they usually can?t enter academia at a later stage, so it seems. What are the implications of this for society at large? CN: I perceive the same trend as you do although it is not everywhere as rigid as the Dutch situation seems to be. In the United Kingdom and the USA for example I see that professional PhD?s are valued very much and academic careers can consist of diverse practices. But overall, yes, I see that the social sciences strongly defend their position. It is as if academia has become a class that one has ?to be born into?. I find this very alienating since social sciences can really make a difference, which they are more and more loosing out to do. Today, interestingly enough, mostly in business schools I find the original thinking and the development of new social practices to be valued and supported. To answer your question more in depth I turn to the concept of the ?double hermeneutic? as it is formulated by Anthony Giddens. Social sciences retrieve their concepts from society, add and produce new concepts that in turn produce new practices which are then analyzed which produce new concepts which produce new realities and so on. This makes the social sciences very complex, as Cees Hamelink points out again and again. Only when I found out how much my practice has been influenced by the concepts I gathered, of which quite essential ones come from social sciences, I realized the implications of this double hermeneutic in the social sciences. When the exchange between academia and society is diminished to academic publishing and the influx of other kinds of knowledge and output is discarded of, it will be lesser and lesser equipped to be able to deal with today?s complexities and for that reason slowly fade out in the end. In professional social science?s realms (in business, in large organizations as well as in individual practices) you can clearly see that many more methodologies for creating engaging reflexivity have emerged. Interestingly it are the business schools and some anthropology departments that have devoted attention to such new models. It seems that academia is still trying to show the natural sciences that it matters by focusing on questions that can be measured in the manner of natural sciences. Such positivist research can be very useful provided it is contextualized in larger frameworks of thinking. Especially in the thinking I perceive a reluctance to connect to innovative and original theoretical and professional practices. Instead of claiming specific methodologies for its own domain, it adapts to a system which in the end, I suspect, will appear to be very counterproductive to its own goals. Another way of analyzing the current situation is by focusing on the current social science?s research paradigm. As Thomas Kuhn elaborated so eloquently, science develops steps and gaps between paradigms, which make previous paradigms obsolete. Possibly the social sciences are stuck in a paradigm that deals with social realities as we could perceive them in the 1980?s. The current huge changes because of technological development as well as the scale of globalization that we have to deal with everyday, are mind blowing. Instead of taking the lead in these developments it seems that the social sciences have retreated in a world as we knew it, adding ?some new wine in old bags? and, what I object most to, demanding obedience from its students in the first place. The result is a mediocre thinking, which does not inspire social practices at all, since it does not take into account the need for innovation as it happens in education, in health, in business, in government etc. I also object to the fact that the few people, who dare to develop concepts that deal with these issues, are marginalized up to the point of exclusion. So you can ask me why interact with this community? I guess that social sciences are dear to me, that I value the scientific methodologies very much and that they can help to understand and to invent the new ways of social interacting that we witness and practice everyday. I wish that the research establishment of today would open up and start to play its role of significance again because there is a body of knowledge to be developed that is badly needed by many. The current fragmented and distributed development of social practices would greatly benefit from social sciences taking up their historical role again. (Thanks to Patrice Riemens for editorial assistance) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org 15.0 <nettime> Interview with Wolfgang Sützl: Sharing – Cornelia Sollfrank nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 23 Nov 2016 09:29:53 +0100 Sharing – the rise of a concept Cornelia Sollfrank in conversation with Wolfgang Sützl Liverpool, 5 November 2015 Cornelia: Your recent research has revolved around the notion of “sharing,” and I would like to get a better understanding where this interest comes from and how it is embedded in the larger context of your work. Wolfgang: This interest in sharing has resulted from my research on media activism. In the course of a research project at University of Innsbruck, we realised that “sharing” plays an important role in many activist communities – while its actual meaning seems to be rather vague. It obviously relates to the then very topical phenomenon of file sharing, but there seemed to be other implications as well. Media activism was not just brushing media against the grain, but also intervening in the socio-economic structure of the media and tech industries. This involved questioning the notion of scarcity. If you can make digital content available to many people for free, why not do it? In an interview I did with Eben Moglen, a co-founder of the Free Software Foundation, he asked: if you could provide everyone with enough food to eat by pressing a button, what would be the moral argument for denying people that food? Activists realized that digital media had this potential of functioning outside an economy of scarcity. To examine such questions, we organized a conference, Cultures and Ethics of Sharing, in Innsbruck, and later I co-organized an ICA preconference on digital sharing with Nicholas John (Hebrew University). Since then my research has been mainly concerned with the conceptual dimension of sharing. Cornelia: Before we talk about the phenomenon of sharing in the context of digital networks – which obviously is the field in which it has been rediscovered and has proliferated most in the twenty years – I would be interested in learning more about the intellectual roots of this concept. You have looked at a number of philosophers who might be useful in order to conceptualise the notion of sharing – one of them being Georges Bataille and his idea of the excess… Wolfgang: Bataille is of particular interest in this regard, because he developed outlines of an anti-economy that starts from surplus rather than scarcity. He focused on what we do to expend resources, rather than make them. He felt that Marxism was not radical enough, buying into the notion of scarcity which is at the heart of the capitalist economic model. He defined a boundary to economic exchange, with expenditure being that which can no longer be exchanged, that which no longer yields anything and cannot be recycled into additional growth. He calls this “The Accursed Share,” which is also the title of the book he wrote in 1949. And just like Bataille’s expenditure, sharing is not something that can be used towards growth. The concept of a “sharing economy” does not make any sense. Cornelia: What also comes to mind when thinking about sharing is its embeddedness in Christian culture. How much is the positive connotation of sharing due to this religious origin? Wolfgang: The New Testament contains many references to sharing, the most widely known is perhaps the Feeding of the 5000, where Jesus and his followers share what seems to be a ridiculously small amount of food. This happens after Jesus tells his disciples not to send people to the surrounding villages to buy food, that is, he stops them from engaging in economic exchange. What seems key to me here is not so much that by sharing a large crowd is fed from a few loafs of bread and some fish, with everyone getting enough. The point is that there are several baskets full of food that remain uneaten. There is a surplus that comes from sharing, and it is, just like Bataille’s “accursed share,” a surplus that cannot be recycled into further growth. This is a model of an anti-economy that also underlies the demand to offer the second cheek. The positive connotation of sharing, its “niceness,” comes perhaps from the idea of equality and togetherness in sharing. This is very different from the formal equality enjoyed by participants in a market, and the hierarchies that are created or strengthened through almsgiving… Cornelia: Together with Bataille and his notion of expenditure, the multiplication of loaves and fishes suggests a parallel to what we have been experiencing with digital networked media: abundance instead of scarcity. I would be interested in how you think these two schemes together. Wolfgang: Bataille applies the word excess to practices that waste energy without return, including sacrifices, luxury, war, and non-reproductive sex. To him, wealth is a matter of expending what cannot be recycled into growth, and it is up to us what form this expenditure has. In principle, digital networked media can be seen as excessive in this way because digital objects are infinitely reproducible, so that in a sense there is always too much, there is always more than we can productively use. However, the commercialization of the internet has led to the paradoxical situation where this excessive availability fuels the growth of Facebook, Google, etc. A few years ago, media activists started virtual suicide platforms that allowed users to delete their profiles, a kind of sacrifice, if you will, that is reminiscent of Bataille’s thinking. Cornelia: If we continue this thought, and bring in the notion of sharing, it becomes necessary to distinguish more precisely between sharing and exchange as an economic transaction. Could you please generally explain the difference of these two concepts? Wolfgang: Unlike exchange, sharing is not reciprocal. It does not consist of the mutual give-and-take that forms the structure of exchange, both of economic exchange, as in a market, and of symbolic exchange, as in the giving and returning of gifts, words, or other symbols. Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) showed the importance of symbolic exchange in capitalism, and takes the Marxist critique beyond the merely economic. Bourdieu has also developed a critique of symbolic exchange around his notion of cultural capital. But they both stop at the point where a formal representation of reciprocity is no longer possible, the point Baudrillard later theorized as “impossible exchange,” in his book of the same title. Cornelia: It appears to me as if symbolic exchange was somewhere between economic exchange and sharing… Wolfgang: Almsgiving, like gift-giving in general, is a form of symbolic exchange, which in Bourdieu’s thinking affirms and stabilizes social hierarchies. Symbolic exchange determines who is on top and who is at the bottom. By tipping a waiter you, and the waiter who accepts the tip, agree on this. This verticality of symbolic exchange explains why giving and receiving of gifts in relationships between people who want to be equal, such as the modern couple, is often such an awkward affair, sometimes resolved by giving up the idea of a gift altogether. Baudrillard argues that symbolic exchange has many forms that support the functioning of economic exchange—for example, the law and the state, which intervene when economic exchange fails, as in bankruptcy, unemployment, or by setting base rates. This too shows how symbolic exchange is bound up with political power. Organized crime, black markets, or state-controlled economies function predominantly in this way. Cornelia: That means we actually remain in a sort of economy with the gift-giving, while, as you have already indicated, sharing is something that leaves the realm of economic relationships behind altogether. I think this is where we should continue talking about the philosophical concepts which you are exploring in order to develop the concept of sharing. And I’m thinking of phenomenology, for example. Wolfgang: Once you realize you cannot theorize sharing in terms of exchange at all, you face certain problems that are similar to theorizing everyday experience. Sharing is indeed an everyday routine, as such it does not have its own truth, or at least it does not stand out as an object available to scientific investigation or to the aesthetic privileging that happens in art. Duchamp’s ready-mades were a response to this difficulty of the everyday. What would an artwork look like that is not set apart from the profanity of everyday experience? His answer was, perhaps like a urinal, perhaps like a bottle rack. Phrased in ontological terms, Heidegger undertook a similar enquiry in his Being and Time (1927), where he sought to understand being through everyday Dasein, the simple fact of our being-there that is always already assumed, whatever question we may ask. He uses the term Mit-sein or being-with, to understand being as always already shared being. According to him, there is no way to understand the meaning of being other than as shared. As I find myself in the world, I have already shared this world with others. Being cannot be separated from sharing, and the others come into appearance as others because of this sharing. This is why sharing in the commons, as described by Ostrom, defines a political subjectivity. To me, it also offers a point of departure for understanding why an economy of exchange on the way to totalizing itself, as in the current advance of neoliberalism, has such difficulty with the notions of otherness or difference. Exchange must, in order to function, render otherness or difference meaningless – turn it into a “farce” as Žižek says. The only meaning that it leaves for otherness is the unrestrained negativity of random violence, which is just another caricature of a quest for meaning. Cornelia: What is not nice about sharing? Wolfgang: For one, once we understand sharing as a limit to economic expansion, an anti-dote to the economic principle itself, it questions a deeply held belief of Western culture. It represents an outside that can be scary because it cannot be regulated by law – because the law is also an exchange operation. Pirates, who did not recognize the law of the sea, had a strong sharing culture, which came back to life in digital piracy. Also, at the moment of sharing, we cease to be as self-contained individuals, and enter the sphere of intimacy. There is a vulnerability that comes with sharing that is expressed in the problem of “oversharing” on social media, where users offer intimate information to others they do not really know. Because of this, sharing as a practice was traditionally limited to smaller communities. And finally, we also share things like the exhaust fumes and noise of our cars or the crudeness of our advertising billboards. It’s not always nice. Cornelia: Now, both of these concepts, exchange and sharing, exist in parallel – offline as well as online. I would like to ask you to describe and unravel this coexistence with regards to digital networked media and also talk about the – maybe intentional – confusions that are emerging from this. Wolfgang: Today sharing is often confused with exchange because of the way we use the word in online communication and the hype around the sharing economy. This confusion is an easy one to make because of the very nature of sharing, but there is also an obfuscation that is part of the business plan of the digital media industry that considers sharing as a profitable form of “customer engagement.” The confusion is easy because sharing is a communal phenomenon: it is because our being is always already a being-with-one-another that we can share and experience meaning. This is also why Jean-Luc Nancy can say “meaning is the sharing of being.” But in corporate social media and the sharing economy, subjectivities are formed through structured forms of communication that providers prefer to call “sharing,” benefitting from the anti-economic potential of the digital (its excess) and the connotations of niceness that come with sharing. These subjectivities are shaped to match business plans, they form around the users’ status as customers, as subjects of exchange. But meaning cannot be exchanged, only shared. This is why so much of social media communication is either commercial, or trivial, as in the classic cases of cat videos. There is an erosion of meaning through the dominance of exchange, and a lot of sharing of meaningless content, because what matters to the provider is the profit that comes from customer engagement, from making users do things that affirm their status as customers. But this is due only to the commercialization of digital networks. It is not inherent to digital technology, as for instance the case of Wikipedia shows. Cornelia: To conclude our little conversation, one could say that “sharing” as an essential form of being with others has gained a new dimension through digital technology. At the same time this new form of sharing in the realm of digital files and knowledge is dependent on a technology which is totally embedded in the cycles of capitalist production, i.e. exchange. I think here is one crack in the concept. Another friction I see in the fact that neoliberalism expands its logic of economisation into all possible domains of life and, through the sharing economy for example, has started to blur a clear distinction between sharing as a way of being or becoming subject and economic exchange. What is at risk here? What is it that drives your research? Wolfgang: What drives me is the belief that with a better understanding of sharing we can gain more clarity about the limits of exchange. This is necessary, because the current neoliberal rationality sees a frontier instead of limits. This frontier is a temporary boundary to be pushed forward, a site of emerging markets and venture capital. Helped by the rise of corporate digital media and the disappearance of a serious alternative to capitalism, this frontier has advanced into the political sphere, into subjectivity, and into rationality itself. Wendy Brown offers a compelling analysis of this process in her latest book, Undoing the Demos (2015). What is at risk here is the possibility of forming meaningful political communities in the most basic sense of the word, and along with it the possibility to communicate anything political. Therefore, an improved understanding of sharing may help formulate a political argument against neoliberalism, which is the only type of argument that can be expected to be effective. And I agree, for an argument to be communicated, communication channels are needed that will not instantly turn the sharing of ideas into an economic transaction. We can still learn from the tactical media movement in this regard, and perhaps with the dominance of corporate social media and their business strategies, tactics is even more important than before. Digital media do still offer a real, non-utopian possibility of sharing, and simply remembering that is a first step. The fact that criticism of the sharing economy is becoming more widespread is also a positive sign. It opens some space for a real discussion of sharing. Cornelia Sollfrank is an artist and researcher living and working in Berlin. She is associate researcher at the University of Dundee (UK) and was until recently guest researcher at Aarhus University (DK). The combination of conceptual and performative approaches in her work result in the production of research-based practice and the writing of practical theory. Main fields of work are copyright and intellectual property, feminism/cyberfeminism, self-organisation and commons. Her current project Giving What You Don’t Have (GWYDH) explores artists’ contributions to the production and maintenance of commons. Website: http://artwarez.org Wolfgang Sützl is a media theorist, philosopher, and linguist. He is based at Ohio University’s School of Media Arts & Studies (USA). He is a visiting faculty at Transart Institute (USA/DE), and at the MA program in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck (A). His chief research interests concern media theory, media phenomenology, media aesthetics, mass communication theory, and the role of media in conflict. He is currently working on a book on the phenomenology of sharing, and a textbook on the evolution of media. Website: http://wolfgangsuetzl.net First published in APRJA – A peer-reviewed journal about _. Excessive Research (2016) http://www.aprja.net/?p=2883 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org # {AT} nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: 16.0 [oldboys] Next 5 Minutes nathalie oldboys@lists.ccc.de Mon, 30 Jun 2003 12:11:34 +0200 i don't know if it is technically still time to propose at N5M conf. However, what do you think, if we proposed very simple things, like : - scanning the girls 5 minutes presentation of "our" work (anybody who identify as woman), so we get to know each other, - pool party as was talked about in berlin ? so we plug with the whomever we feel possible connection with. very simple, degres zero of intervention. a+ nathalie --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de 16.1 Re: [oldboys] Next 5 Minutes Cornelia Sollfrank oldboys@lists.ccc.de Mon, 30 Jun 2003 22:55:12 +0200 dear boys - and girls, what is schedule from our side so far is a party with female musicians, performers and dj line up at melkweg: "fem snd" further more two meetings, one in france and one in berlin, resulted in a project called 'pool-prj' which is a basic concept for audio interventions at events, n5m would be first opportunity. as i am in the editorial group, i would be happy to see other suggestions from your side, although most of the program is set up already -- but good ideas are always welcome. as soon as there is a public draft of the programme i will post it. best, c. >hi, but why scanning the girls? again? >feel like we never go beyond "introduction' of 'our' work. >is this a form of congratulating ourselves how far >we have come to? or another form of seeking recognition >from the others? > >consider the theme of n5m for september-- > >" The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core >thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. >These four thematic threads are: >"Deep Local", which explores the ambiguities of connecting >essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts. >"The Disappearing of the Public" deals with the elusiveness of the >public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and >considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'. >"The Tactics of Appropriation" questions who is appropriating whom? >Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become >effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore >lost? >"The Tactical and the Technical" finally questions the deeply >political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the >development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and >constraining its tactical use.' > >maybe can be more tactical in bringing in forces? > >best >sl > > > > > > > > > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de >For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de -- ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ___ ___ ___ ||a |||r |||t |||w |||a |||r |||e |||z || .org ||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|| |/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\| take it and run! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de 16.2 Re: [oldboys] Next 5 Minutes nathalie oldboys@lists.ccc.de Mon, 30 Jun 2003 23:54:05 +0200 > >hi, but why scanning the girls? again? yes never ending >feel like we never go beyond "introduction' of 'our' work. why should it be "introduction", it could be 5 minutes on a topic >is this a form of congratulating ourselves how far >we have come to? or another form of seeking recognition >from the others? neither it's basic found your way in the crowd > >consider the theme of n5m for september-- > >" The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core >thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. >These four thematic threads are: >"Deep Local", which explores the ambiguities of connecting >essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts. >"The Disappearing of the Public" deals with the elusiveness of the >public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and >considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'. >"The Tactics of Appropriation" questions who is appropriating whom? >Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become >effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore >lost? >"The Tactical and the Technical" finally questions the deeply >political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the >development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and >constraining its tactical use.' > >maybe can be more tactical in bringing in forces? > >best >sl > > > > > > > > > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de >For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de 16.3 Re: [oldboys] Next 5 Minutes shu lea cheang oldboys@lists.ccc.de Mon, 30 Jun 2003 20:03:02 -0400 >i don't know if it is technically still time to propose at N5M conf. > >However, what do you think, if we proposed very simple things, >like : >- scanning the girls >5 minutes presentation of "our" work (anybody who identify as woman), >so we get to know each other, > >- pool party as was talked about in berlin ? >so we plug with the whomever we feel possible connection with. > >very simple, degres zero of intervention. >a+ >nathalie > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de >For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de hi, but why scanning the girls? again? feel like we never go beyond "introduction' of 'our' work. is this a form of congratulating ourselves how far we have come to? or another form of seeking recognition from the others? consider the theme of n5m for september-- " The program of Next 5 Minutes 4 is structured along four core thematic threads, bringing together a host of projects and debates. These four thematic threads are: "Deep Local", which explores the ambiguities of connecting essentially translocal media cultures with local contexts. "The Disappearing of the Public" deals with the elusiveness of the public that tactical media necessarily needs to interface with, and considers new strategies for engaging with or redefining 'the public'. "The Tactics of Appropriation" questions who is appropriating whom? Corporate, state, or terrorist actors all seem to have become effective media tacticians, is the battle for the screen therefore lost? "The Tactical and the Technical" finally questions the deeply political nature of (media-)technology, and the role that the development of new media tools plays in defining, enabling and constraining its tactical use.' maybe can be more tactical in bringing in forces? best sl --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: oldboys-unsubscribe@lists.ccc.de For additional commands, e-mail: oldboys-help@lists.ccc.de 17.0 <nettime> interview with armin medosch Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 11 Jul 1997 18:42:07 +0200 (MET DST) Interview with Armin Medosch (Telepolis) the following text I wrote in response to questions of the danish journalist erik kjaer larsen. I thought it might be interesting for nettimers too. It is about internet laws in germany. Hallo Erik, find here some URL´s and some commentaries to your questions: > I gather from Telepolis informations that the laws > are generally very unpopular in Germany, at least with > the opposition. That's not precisely true. The law is unpopular amongst economists, researchers, users. But concerning political parties in parliament the split goes right through the parties themselves. The only party with a clear position are the Greens, they are against the law. Within the SPD there is a small group which is net-wize and against the law. But the majority of the SPD Parliament members doesn´t understand anything and just wants to secure their influence on the regional level (many regions are spd-governed). And also the leading christ-democrats are split. There is a hardline law and order enforcement group around Minister Kanther, which tryed to bring in these sharp paragraphes about liability of isp`s. There is the economy-friendly liberal group around Rexrodt, which would rather have liked to have another law. Ruettgers, the one who conceived the law, is somewhere in the middle. he doesn´t seem to have a real opinion of his own. You can find out about diverse positions in a funny photo story about the parliamentary discussion with cites of original statements. Fotostory http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1230/fhome.htm Bundestag beschließt Multimediagesetz http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1220/fhome.htm Kommentar Multimediagesetz http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1201/fhome.htm Rechtsunsicherheit als Programm http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1117/fhome.htm > If you can find the time, I would also ask you to >specify the most obvious threats to freedom of speech, >coming from the new laws. Are they in reality similar >to CDA... No, I would not say that. The CDA is a completely other cup of tea. "Free speech" was not in the centre of the german discussion. It was rather that the government wanted to hold ISP´s liable for illegal and harmful content on the net. The idea was/is, that if an ISP has got notice of illegal content which he is providing access to (he is not giving the information, just acces to it through the internet) then he should block access (block a certain newsgroup, a website). There is strong incidence that the Kanther-Hardliners purposefully created a test-case with the leftwing newspaper "radikal". This magazine is forbidden in germany since it was found guilty in several trials of supporting terrorist action in the eighties. For ten years they could not produce an issue in germany any more. So their latest issue was put on the server xs4all in holland. Last September the german state prosecuter wrote a letter to all ISP´s that they should block acces to xs4all. Unfortunately for the state prosecutor it is not possible to ban a single website, instead the whole server has to be blocked. But xs4all is very popular and soon there was a huge wave of protests. The accused webSite of radikal was mirrored on 60 -70 servers around the world. So just a few ISP´s followed the wish of the prosecutor and tryed to ban, but many didn´t. It is yet an open question if those who didn´t block will be accused by the state prosecutor. Then in January 97 the government did the next unwize strike on the net. They accused Angela Marquardt, former vize-director of the post-socialist party from east germany (follow up party of SED) that she supported terrorism by displaying a link on here homepage to the "radikal"- page. Actually the prosecutor sayed that she was "providing access to terrorist material" through this link. This lawsuit raised the question if users can be hold liable for links they supply on their private homepages. In June Marquardt was spoken free, but the argumentation of the judge was very formalistic and didn´t touch that basic question about users liability for links. So you see, in germany the discussion is rather not about indecent speech, you can say "fuck" if you want, but about political radicalism of the extreme left and the extreme right. As often the government choses the left as open target because the right is much more dangerous and federal police is said to be in serious investigations about right wing activities but does not want anything to go out in public in a too early state because that might warn the neonazis about police inquiries. Marquardt case see here http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1236/fhome.htm This special concern about radicalism is a heritage of germans special history - the third reich and the RAF (Read Army Fraction) terrorism in the seventies and early eighties. Because of fascism in the german bill of rights the right of free speech is not given to neonazis. Any holocaust denials or activism of neonazis is strictly forbidden and not considered free speech. Because of the RAF this was extended also to the radical-left. Another area of specific concern is organized crime in general and child pornography in particular. Thats why Minister for Inner Security affairs Kanther wanted to forbid strong cryptography and wants to hold ISP´s liable for content. Law enformcement agencies of the state should have access, to his opinion, to all communication channels which people might use. Thats why allready in 1996, when the telecommunications law (not to be mistaken as the new multimedia law) was passed, a paragraph was included, that the state should have secret acces through special phone lines to all customer databanks of telecommunications providers (phone companies, so to say). Without the provider or the customer even taking notice of it they can get their connection data. This is not the same as wiretapping. They are not listening automatically to phone conversations (this needs still a verdict of a judge). But they can easily find out, who talked to whom at which time. They can find out who uses phone sex or other special services. Especially journalists are very suspicious about this paragraph because they fear that the anonymity of informants cannot be secured any longer. Also people involved in political affairs can easily become blackmailed if they do phone sex ore other things which seem to be socially not accepptable for public persons. > Do you think the insellösung could/would be adapted by other countries? I think that Germany is not heading for an "inselloesung" any longer. They obviously lost the battle with xs4all and they lost the radical case. And maybe they even got sick about being mentioned in one sequence with Singapore and China when talk is about internet censorship. So Kanther drew back from his cryptography banning plans. Probably not because of protests of the left but because of industry protests. Quite a significant effort is done in germany in research about cryptography with major companies like Siemens and Daimler Benz involved. Cryptography is free now in germany, at least for the next two years (try-out phase). Also it seems that they don´t see the ISP´s liability for content so narrow minded any more. Instead of state action they seem to favour now rating systems like PICS. The Bonn conference and the Ministers declaration about the internet published on 8th of July marks a turning point in the position of the german government. Instead of an "inselloesung" they try now to find concensus about how and to which extend the internet should be regulated on a European level. They probably found out that one country alone has not even the technical possibility of gaining controll over the net. What should they do, build a huge firewall around the german net? The tendency goes, as in economy, towards the building of huge power blocks - Europe, North America, the ASEAN states. The Bonn declaration is an attempt to formulate a European position: Not the internet as a "free trade zone" as Clinton has proposed recently, but as a mixture of regulation, self-organisation and economical liberalism. Bonn Declaration http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1244/fhome.htm > Was Rexrodt one of the laws protagonists? > I may sound a bit paranoid, but it could look like the > Bonn declaration of last weekend is just a fancy > facade atop a hidden EU-internet-agenda? So I wouldn´t say that this is paranoid. But also it is not so "hidden". It is, as I said above, about forming a European position within the triad of economical superpowers. There is a number of issues involved with this and the driving force to act is economical growth and the creation of new jobs. So the Europeans disagree with the USA in a number of issues. For example the domain name question. The EU opposed the IHAC proposal for new top level domain names. The Europeans are also no longer pleased with the fact that all top-level-domain name root servers are located in the US. The Bonn Declaration reads like a sundays sermon to me. To gain the foremost goal of economical growth and staying at least in touch with the technological development they have, to my surprise, included a number of social issues. They say that the net should not cause new exclusions, the gap between information rich and information poor should not become bigger. They even talk about public access terminals in libraries and that europes chance is content on the net. Governments should improve possibilities for citizens to get informed and to participate in democartic processes. They even declare "good will" to support development countries to get connected. So has the wind changed? The turning down of the CDA by the Supreme Court might be further incident. Maybe it also influenced the Bonn declaration. But I think we should be careful with any prognosis at this state. Just some examples: The EU is also in favour of extending copyright to databanks "sui generis", that means that any statistical data displayed on the net is copyright protected. The WIPO conference in Geneva in December 96 turned this proposal down which could have a very negative effect on educationel purposes because financially week educational organizations will not have the money to pay for acces to data banks. Also the rating systems issue will become big in the EU in the next months. Nobody knows yet where the legitimation for rating authorities should come from. Companies and Organizations rate on a very arbitraily basis. Also the EU seems to believe that the further building of the technical infrastructure for the net should be done merely by market forces. So it is hard to believe that an information superhighway, which is entirely created and owned by companies will not lead to new exclusions or would out of humanitarian reasons give free acces tothe poor, the unemployed, the homeless people and the people of the (non-geographically understood) third world. CDA http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1235/fhome.htm > Could you help me to specify the role of > Rexrodt/Bangemann in all this - I heard they stood > behind the Bonn conference, and apparently Bangemann > is also the architect of the INFO2000 scheme.> There is not much to say about them. They are blunt neo-liberalists. Rexrodt, as his liberal-democrat collegue in the Kohl-cabinet, Schmidt-Jortzig, Minister of Justice, have not got much to say in the government. They might do some typical liberal statements in public but the decisions are made elsewhere. Bangemann probably wants to be seen as the grounding-father of the european information-highway. But as a technocrat he lacks any vision of cultural dimensions. Germany is very federalistic. So lots of the real power is in the hands of regional leaders like Stoiber, minister president of Bavaria, Schroeder, minister president of Lower Saxony and Rau/Clement, leaders of Northern Westfalia. These are the richest and most poulated states in Germany. There is the car industry, the defense industry and the media power. These regional "barons" often unite against their own party leaders and the federal government. Especially Stoiber (CSU, very right wing) and Schroeder (SPD, probable "Blair-like" candidate for the next federal elections) are acting joined forces when it comes to a strong DMark, a delay of EMU and a pro-industrialist position. So, and this is a remark going back to the Multimedia law, this law would be maybe even not so bad, if there was not a second law. This second law, a kind of contract between the federal states of germany, gives regional leaders control of the internet to some extend. The two laws try to create an artificial separation between internet services adressed to closed circles and other services adressed to "the public". The public part should be treated in a similar way as radio and televison with all laws counting for press, radio and tv being extended to the internet. But where is the separation? Can a real audio server be compared to a radio station? Is a mailinglist adressed to the broader public, if anybody can subscribe? So both laws went through parliaments now and both come into force on 1st of August. But in the parliamentary discussion it became obvious, that even the lawmakers are not very pleased with the results. The split between regionalists and internationalists goes right through the parties, the government as well as the opposition. Those MP´s who have got some idea of the working of the net know that the split between closed and public services is artificial and will cause many unnecessary lawsuits. Companies are threatening that they will operate german internet business from abroad (IBM, CompuServe) and will only come back, when the "legal dust has settled" (Hermann Neuss, IBM). So when passing the laws an addendum was creqated that the law maybe should/could be soon revised. > I went to a INFO2000 congress in Denmark recently. > It was disastrous - EU talks about content, but no > money is apparently given to those who actually > develop content. Only for as far as it is commercial. Thats right, thats one of the problems. It is easy to write down a sermon of twelfe pages and call it "Ministers declaration". At the moment the EU not even has a department for something as digital culture or media culture. There is the arts funding programme "Kaleidoscope" with a very limited budget and there are all these programs of DG XIII. There is a lot of money at DG XIII, but small cultural content providers will find it hard to get it. The big consortiums of research departments of multinationals like Siemens or Philips, together with Universities are in the race there. So how can three small registered societies from, lets say Hungary, Danmark and Netherlands can compete with these giants in teh race for funds. Telepolis also tryed to get in touch for information about the multilingual program. We would really love to have the possibility that articles that we write in german can be translated into english. We are only able to translate into the other direction ourselves. But we didn´t even get a letter back from the EU. So I would be in favour of a europeanwide campaign to support small content providers throughout Europe (deep Europe, as syndicalists would say) and to support the free publication of publicly interesting material through EU money. I hope all this could be of any help for you. yours armin > --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 18.0 <nettime> interview with bruno latour Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 3 Sep 1997 18:03:16 +0200 (MET DST) "There is no information, only transformation" An Interview with Bruno Latour By Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel August 16, 1997 Bruno Latour (Paris) is a philosopher, specialized in the antropology of science and technology. He is a professor at the Centre of the Sociology of Innovation at the l'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris. He is called "one of today's most acute, if idiosyncratic, thinkers about science and society." Amongst his books, published by Harvard University Press, one can find "We have never been modern", "Aramis, or the love of technology" and "The Pasteurization of France". His Documenta lecture can be seen or heard at: http://www.mediaweb-tv.de/dx/0816/gaeste_frame.html Geert Lovink: At the moment there are two concepts of the computer: an abstract, computational machine, based on mathematics and language. Opposed to this we have the future computer as an image processing device, an interactive television set. How do look at this distinction between the language based machine versus the image based medium? Bruno Latour: I do not believe that computers are abstract. There is a very interesting article, 'On the Origin of Objects' by a computer philosopher called Brian Cantwell-Smith, in a book about digital print. He made the comment that the fact that there is (either) 0 and (or) 1 has absolutely no connection with the abstractness. It is actually very concrete, never 0 and 1 (at the same time). The distinction you suggested is slightly misleading. The origin of this (distinction) is lying in the notion of information. There is only transformation. Information as something which will be carried through space and time, without deformation, is a complete myth. People who deal with the technology will actually use the practical notion of transformation. From the same bytes, in terms of 'abstract encoding', the output you get is entirely different, depending on the medium you use. Down with information. It is a bad view on science and a bad rendering of contemporary critique of images, all this fight against the naturalization. GL: Still are the two views of the computer: either it is a machine which is still owned by the scientists, or it is going to be an image processor, which will soon enter popular culture. BL: I am not sure if I agree with the terms of the divide. To say that the computer is a scientific, abstract machine is largely misleading. There is a book called 'The Soul of the New Machine'. That is the right expression. You can find that in the work of Brian Smith on the embodiment of the computer. Afterall it is made of sillicon. It has its own embodiment on the level of digits and bytes. The computer is not a reservoir of abstraction, scientificity and technicity. Science and technology for me does not mean abstract. It means highly socialized, extremely embodied and localized. There might be badly designed computers, or interfaces that are not ergonomic. But the idea of an abstract computer that, so to say, falls in a humane dimension which will be threatened by this eruption is absurd. Computer as a foreign body, a meteorite. Even since Pascals first calculating machine, the socializing has been going on. Michel Serres made the argument that all what we are talking about concerning computer is Leibniz' dream, finally materialized. The idea of a universal language that will code and encode everything, the idea of free accessibility of gigantic libraries is Leibniz' idea. So finally are doing what Leibniz has proposed. But it became a machine that never works exactly the way we want and was dreamt of in 17th century. It is the history of what I call the history of the immutable mobile. The notion of the true contradictory function of immutability and maximum mobility. It is linked of course to the history of the West, to maximize these two contradictorary functions. Elisabeth Eisenstein makes this same point in her history of the printing press. Digitality is the extension, one step further of mobile types. It is not a revolutionairy element. The moving pixel is added to the movable type. I always react negatively against the idea that technology is a foreign body inside the humane. It does not come from another planet, it is highly socialized and connected with a long history. Negating this typifyes the danger of techno-enthousiasm. I would add to the Peoples Communication Charter that is hanging here on the wall: 'Do not believe that the computer has a short history.' The computer is a perfect example of how non-modern we are. The possibility of shifting boundaries between images, text and things and virtuality is a completely classical antropological feature. Now in Paris, people are using a visualized 'Second World', where you can rent flats. People who are living in the drab 'banlieues' at the periphery can now have virtual flats on the Champs Elysees. But that is nothing compared to what it is to live in the society, which is a virtual reality from scratch. It materializes on the screen, with the notion of avatars and second reality. But it is not a revolutionairy break from being in the society. My argument is exactly anti-Virilio, if you want. GL: At the end of your lecture you suggested that we should step back, out of flow of images. Do you also think that there is the danger of information overflow? BL: My argument was always the opposite. There is a heritage of the iconoclastic dispute, which is nowadays renewed around this notion of the overload of images. Lots of images were destroyed because people were overloaded. That was exactly Luthers argument. Too many images which hide the important features which is itself not visible. My argument is an iconophilic one, which is always the opposite. One image, isolated from the rest, freeze framed from the series of transformation has no meaning. An image of a galaxy has no reference. The transformation of the images of the galaxy has. So, it is an anti information argument. Pictures of a galaxy has no information content. Itself the image has no meaning if it cannot be related to another spectography of a galaxy. What has reference is the transformations of images. Being iconophilic means following the flow of images, without believing that they carry information. It is neither iconoclastic in the sense of: let us get rid of the image because what we want to access is the invisible, the innefable. On the contrary. If we follow the logic of the images, they themselves past into one other image. Images demonstrate transformation, not information. But then there is the contradiction the very daily practise of transformation and the talk, the hype about information flows, internet universality etc. It is the same with money. When you talk with financial specialists, it is highly localized, confidence based, small networks of people calling one another by first name. Again, if we go outside, we talk about hugh flows money going from New York to Hong Kong in a second. We have a tremendous hype about globalization, immediacy, unversality and speed. On the other side we see localized transformations and there seems to be not connection between the two. Somebody like Paul Virilio is interesting because he, rightly, attacks the hype. This is good common sense critique. But we never study the practise. So the computer is not an abstract machine. Nothing is chewing like. Everything is highly incarnated and situated in sillicon chips. There is this bizarre love-hate relationship. Virilio is typical in this. He loves to hate the techno hype. And the technicians very often hate to love. But there is another way, in between. Pit Schultz: But there is the notion of secrecy and hermetism. Specialists and technicians do have secret knowledge about the implementation of the modes of transformation. Average people do not know how financial markets work, how currencies are transformed from on into the other. But these tranfers have a lot of impact on the society. The transformations become myths and are causing fear. BT: But is it secret or is it localized knowhow? My feeling is that we should not add to the myth. No myths about local knowhow! The notions of information, universal immediacy, globalizations, add to the myth. It is not very surprising for the common public that you need a lot of work in order to produce an image. Look at the cloud chamber which is here at the Documenta, or Hamilton's display. When you talk about particles, no one will understand it. When do speak about bubble trails in the bubble chamber, invented by Wilson to study clouds, it becomes extremely simple to understand. Secrecy exits in research labs for legal reasons, for pattent reasons, but it is much less important than is usually being said. A lot of mystery in the science practise, which I know best, comes because we render things more obscure. And intellectuals should not render things more obscure than they are. It is a mystery we like to have in order to debunk it. The notion of localized practise is so common sense. I do not know how sausages are made. Sausages are obtained through a lot of transformations as well. And since I do not make a hype about sausages I do not see why we should make one out of computer images. Like what you do here in Hybrid Workspace: introducing groups week after week in the practise of technology. That seems a perfectly sensible thing to do. Nothing is hidden, expect through our love to hate. GL: Universities are now closing their public part of the internet and are building up their own, closed, parallel intranets. A lot of data that were publicly available will be drawn back. This goes together with the privitization and commercialization of much of the scientific research. How do you look at these developments? BL: I am not enough of an expert in this. What I know is that you cannot ask scientists to work publicly, immediately connected to millions of people. The notion of openness and immediacy is a complete nightmare. But this is different from the notion of private knowledge. This is process, again, has been going on for centuries in chemistry. One of the aspects is the legal one. How much is private and how much is appropriated? Openness is not very productive. You need to have local niches. Isolated, provincial, unconnected disciplines have been shown very successfull in the past. You need to have your own little corner and we will see what the consequences of the internet will be on scientific work. Scientists keep on subscribing to very expensive journals because they need the stamp of hierarchical knowledge. As long as the Net does not find a way of providing this, it will not achieve the authoritative status with the scientific community. Publications on the Web are still very traditional. It has not moved much, with the exception perhaps of e-mail. GL: How would you then judge attempts, like nettime, to develop a so- called 'net criticism', locating itself inside the technology, no longer judging it as an outsider, in order to overcome the phase of the hype, without going back to cultural pessimism. BL: If you find a way to deterritorialize, to dissolve localities and hierarchies, there might also be ways to reconstruct hierarchies and come with filters, tastes, judgements and values. Everybody is complaining about the lack of hierarchy in the Net. The more unmediated access you have, the more closed and highly hierarchical and critical sites you will find. In our centre we invented a system called 'semiotext' which gives maps of internet texts by clustering the words into a system called Leximap. It gives you highly hierarchized maps. This sort of system will proliferate. It gives you depth of vision, which can be given a critique. It will be a highly elaborate site if people know that they can find good critiques there. Again, everything which runs against the notion of information will happen just by itself. Universality, fastness, immediacy will not suddenly be there, despite the hype. On the contrary, local transformation, hierarchy, taste, critique: that will happen. The idea of information as immutability and mobility being non-contradictory, being able to flow everywhere, does not work at the level of science, nor at the level of the computer or politics. We can make a save bet that it will not happen. GL: How do you see the relation between real and virtual spaces, the ruptures and possibilities to connect them, like we do here, in Workspace? Do you believe in the so-called synergy of all media? Here we work with video, the Net, we have the tradition of film, and print of course. We have all these different media here. Should we encourage the hybridity of all these machines? BL: Hybrid is a word I like. But you know also there this no instantaneous access to these machines. You need to train people. it will never work exactly the way you want it. You need a lot of different cables. They are hanging on the wall here. Sometimes television works with another medium. In France we never get something done because we have the SECAM standard. Everytime the hype is deflated and you say that you will locally connect media to produce a few new effect, is a perfectly reasonable statement for me. To connect all with connect is pure ideology. When it comes to multimedia... I was was in Colmar, looking at the Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Gruenwald. It is hypermedia: the different panels are openening and closing, depending on the days of the week and the feasts. It includes painting plus sculpture plus the reading of the gospel, the mass. The rule is: whatever medium there is, you will always find someone to make a connection with them. But this is not the same as saying that there is an instantaneous connectibility. The digital only adds a little speed to it. But that is small compared to talks, prints or writing. The difficulty with computer development is to respect the little innovation there is, without making too much out of it. We add a little spirit to this thing when we use words like universal, unmediated or global. But if way say that, in order to make visible a collective of 5 to 10 billion people, in the long history of immutible mobiles, the byte conversion is adding a little speed, which favours certain connections more than others, than this seems a reasonable statement. To say that we are living in a cyberworld, on the other hand, is a complete absurdity. (edited by Patrice Riemens) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 19.0 <nettime> interview with Cornelia Sollfrank Josephine Bosma nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 7 Jul 1997 21:44:11 +0200 (MET DST) Cornelia Sollfrank is a professional artist from Hamburg Germany. She regrets doing too much work, nine projects at the moment. She spends a lot of her time organising her work, putting up schedules, making lists, creating databases. She was interviewed at the nettime meeting in Ljubljana in May this year. She is one of the women involved in organising the workspace block at Documenta about cyberfeminism. * Q: Could I say you are mostly known for your work with the group Innen? CS: Thats certainly a very important part of my work. In this group I am together with three, meanwhile four other women. The concept of the group if that whenever we show up in public, we all look the same. Its a bit confusing for people to identify a single person. We never use our own names when we show up with Innen, we always say 'we', we all have the same opinion and we all look the same. So we created the identity of one person consisting of five different. Its the opposite phenomenon of what is known as schizophrenic, where one person is split up in many. We are suffering from the opposite symptom: we are many and we all became one. I won't talk about the philosophy behind it. I just say it works well. Q: You were asked by Geert Lovink to fill up one of the blocks in the Documenta workspace. What do you want to do? CS: First I said no, because its not *me* that is going to do it. I won't do it as one person. So I asked some more people if they would like to contribute or join me for everything and we set up an organisation which is now responsible for this block. The name of the organisation is "Old Boys' Network". Its the first cyberfeminist organisation worldwide as far as I know. What we are going to do at Documenta is we are going to think about what cyberfeminism could be. As far as I know there are no definitions or there are many different ones. We'll try to bring together all the different notions of this term. We'll think of strategies of how this term could perhaps help to set up a new goal, a new political goal. Q: You say you want to explore what cyberfeminism is or find a new definition: does that mean it doesn't have one yet? CS: They are so different that they are really no definition. It also seems not very spread. Its only in a few countries, a certain group of people uses this expression. One plan of our Documenta appearance is that we want this term heavily spread all over the world. We want everybody talking about cyberfeminism. Q: But why if you don't know what it is, if you don't have a definition yet and you don't know what cyberfeminist issues are, why the hell do you want to spread it all over the globe? CS: Because people will ask themselves what it is. They will find out that they won't find out, so the next question is: what could it be? They have to start thinking for themselves what they want it to be. Its very open so maybe what I want it to be, could be the definition of cyberfeminism. The basic question is: where do I work, what is my goal, where do I want to go to. I want to use cyberfeminism to rethink these things. Q: Does that mean you are missing something in feminism or you want to continue something from feminism into the new digital age? CS: I think the phenomenon about cyberfeminism is that it became kind of tabu in the nineties to be a feminist. Nobody actually wanted to talk about it. This certainly has reasons for women. I think we all live of the benefits of feminism, women, but also men. There are however some very problematic aspects that came along with feminism. It took many years, it took lets say the nineties to think about these things. What were good things we use and what were the bad things, to become aware of it. I'ld like to break this tabu of feminism and rethink the whole history of feminism. I'ld like to connect to it again after this whole period of not using it anymore. Q: How do new media come into that? CS: All kinds, mostly as a means of distribution, of exchanging, of connecting. Q: Do Donna Harraway's ideas come into it at all? The cyborg notions of technology and biology being sort of undermined by some of these new technologies, that produce new models of different ways of looking at gender, does that come into it at all? CS: Certainly. She is very important. She used this model of a cyborg as a projection without gender. So as a model for trying to think not genderrelated. Thats very interesting. But I don't think it is the right time to use these big names. For me cyberfeminism is a concept for every single person to start thinking by themselves and not reading the big thinkers. Q: Do you think there any specific issues for women online? CS: No, I don't think so really. * --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 20.0 <nettime> Interview with Rem Koolhaas Pit Schultz nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 13 Jul 1997 03:48:25 +0200 (MET DST) Interview with Rem Koolhaas by Tom Fecht June 26, 1997 in Workspace at Orangerie, Kassel (first transcription, audio version available at http://www.icf.de/cgi-bin/RIS/ris-display?868751729) Tom Fecht for Kunstforum International: I would like to continue a little bit the discussion we had last night with Edward Said. There was a very important statement, as far as I understood it, in the context of the division of labor in the field of aesthetic production. He made a very important point about the role of intellectuals being confronted with expertise. And he made a very strong statement, which made a point very clear in the political context of Palestine, which I think, we can take the risk to generalize a bit. He said that "every time there is a cry for identity we should be careful because scandals and lies are around" Rem Koolhaas: Because what? Fecht: "Because scandals and lies are around". And he had a pladoyer to offer instead several identities to allow transformation for future partnership. This was one of his essentials. So when I look to your manifesto which has been published in 95 about the generic city, the city without character, identity is one of these important obstacles to think freely about the future. So I would like to get to the geographic elements in your terminology of identity. When you talk about the centers, this becomes a very important point. Maybe you like to give some points to that question. Koolhaas: Yes, maybe we should not assume that those texts are known. But anyway, as an architect I became aware at a certain point, that there was a strange obligation of our profession to call the dominant condition of the contemporary urban environment, and when I say dominant I don't mean the centers but relatively recent urban substance, that most of us live in, to always call it identity-less and to always refer to the identities of the well-known centers, the identity of Paris, the identity of Berlin, the identity of ... So I noticed a kind paradox: On the one the vast majority of people was living in so called identity-less conditions and there was still the discourse was mostly about preserving identities, establishing identities and exploiting identities. So basically I reversed the questions and decided to make an inventory which I called the "generic city", the general city, the city without qualities, the city without identity, which is simply an inventory of a new urban condition that is very pervasive in Asia but which is equally pervasive in America and in Europe, and try to explain or basically try to explain to myself maybe in the first place what the virtues of this identity-less space could be and obviously one of the enormous virtues is that once there is no identity you are also liberated from a whole series of obligations, a whole series of assumptions and a whole series models. Fecht: When one looks at your installation in the Ottonaeum which is one of the two important key installations in the whole Documenta if one compares it to the one in the Friedericianum of Van Eick, the room right next you has the installation of Reinhardt Mucha, which shows sort of shrines of pieces of architecture, an archeology of architecture. In your manifesto you raise the point that architecture is one of the most important media to register history on the horizontal level, when it comes down to archeology and you are scheming up with next century to have rather an archeology of the horizontal where you stop digging and instead you need an endless supply of airport tickets to move around the world. Koolhaas: Of course the whole article on the generic cities has a level of irony. What I am fascinated in is that kind of compared to earlier civilizations that actually left traces. It seems as if our civilization is doomed partly because larger and larger parts of it are taking place in cyberspace but also because our style of building is less and less permanent and more frivolous and flimsy. It seems that this literally age old tradition of leaving a kind of imprint of civilization in the form of an architectural layer, that we will be the first generation not to do that any more. But what you are saying is on the other hand between Mucha and ourselves: It is very interesting for me that at the moment that architecture has lost an enormous amount of its original credibility that many artists are becoming seemingly obsessed with architecture. And I don't know whether this is whether that is simply because they don't know how completely eroded on the inside the credibility of architecture feels or whether they actually may have something to contribute. Fecht: I can see that architecture becomes a field of vision for a lot of artists and in your manifesto you raise the point that exactly at that moment in history when the city started to die out, you can observe the discussion of art in public space. And you make the equation that if you add two dead things you can't get the thing alive again. So this is not a dracula, the performance doesn't work. So I would be curious if we come back to the beginning question of the division of labor, not to say 'industrial' division of labor in aesthetic production what kind of potential you see in the artistic production to maybe come to this point of changing identities, transforming for future partnership between the art, artists and maybe even the question of authorship. Maybe you can even give some details of the organization of your office. Koolhaas: OK, I think one thing which is really liberating about the Documenta as a whole is that all the professional kind of identities have been leveled and taken away and that there has been a much more even condition where somehow the theme is the urban condition and how we inhabit the urban condition, it's illuminated by people called artists and people called architects, and also be people called photographers or scientists. For me it really represents an enormous relief and a sense of freshness that we are no longer forced to pretend to have certain competencies and abilities, but it seems what the main theme of the exhibition is that there is a collective and that each of us makes part of this collective and that therefore the old play of vaguely different roles that still the collective responsibilities are asserted above the individuals and professionalised identities. I think that is a very liberating theme of this exhibition. I am very curious whether in reviews that eventually will come out. Fecht: When I spoke several days ago with Katherine David, one of the key points for her conception was that she sees the urban area as one most essential and important aesthetic and social experiences of the 90s... Koolhaas: I don't think so. Ironically it has nothing to do with the 90s, their interest here... what is happening now, and I think the 90s are just marking the condition that whether we want it or not or admit it or not, for the first time almost every one on the world lives in an urbanized condition, or is about to live in an urbanized condition. Fecht: So the whole terminology of architecture, the city, doesn't work any more the way we used to handle these terms. Koolhaas: No, I think that for instance in China and about what I will talk about also tonight. [see links] There are conditions where a village, or a person in this village, owns a fishpond, sells the fishpond to a developer, the developer builds a skyscraper in the fishpond, the entire village moves into the skyscraper, so some farmers live with chickens and goats on the 42 floor, and around the skyscraper there are rice fields. I think that things that we, in our minds keep separate and place very far apart, with a kind of suddenly telescoped, as if according to a computer program like Photoshop where you can simply combine everything in a single image that you want to combine. So it seems as if certain inhibitions that have traditionally organized architectural and everyone's space have disappeared and we are suddenly in a situation which is much more absurd and potentially much more dangerous but where anything can be combined to coexist with almost anything else. And I think that in that context, public art and public space as they have traditionally been interpreted are both extremely dubious, because public space is an organized form of space which implies a certain behavior and insists on a correct use. And I think that is already too authoritarian to really function in these conditions. And in the same way art which is supposed to represent this kind of publicness, also in my eyes at least is no longer believable. I think that in the last ten years it just has become bigger and bigger and more and more desperate. Fecht: When you wrote about your generic city you said the generic city is what's left when important parts of urban life takes place in cyberspace. Which explains why we lose places and streets as public locations. To what extent are these medias in their aesthetic potentials useful to reorganize the tools and the skills of architects and in terms of education and practice. Koolhaas: That is a very interesting question because architecture, in my view, is a profession that consists of concrete entities that are built and that have a real existence. Or even though, of course, you can also create a kind of virtual architecture in cyberspace or can have a kind of architectural experiences in cyberspace. But I think the more interesting aspect of architecture is still the more concrete architecture. But nevertheless I think there is an enormous influence of virtuality on architecture and you could say and it is only a partly a caricature that probably out of a sense of insecurity some of the best architects these days are trying to make their buildings immaterial, as if they don't exist. And trying to endow them with that kind of glamour that computer aided images have, the perfection and the sterility maybe also. So there is in a way a kind of strange simulation of virtuality in real architecture. But what is for me more interesting is the kind of shamelessness and amorality that basically the computer implies in terms of the ability to combine everything with everything else in single frames, that kind of lack of resistance, and the absence of necessity for discipline, that all these are in effect deeply effecting architecture, but the built form of architecture. Fecht: In the portraits given in the guide of the Documenta, there is a strong emphasis on the importance of theory in your architectural practice. Koolhaas: Basically I don't think that architectural theory exists, that's a side I am very modest about, of course there is thinking in architecture, and what I have noticed in my architectural practice is that it is incredibly difficult to combine the production of buildings and some kind of intellectual reflection because the production of buildings is really a very brutal and exhausting process. What I have always been concerned about is that how in the typical architect's career there is an initial beginning with ideas, then an enormous effort to make the ideas real and then at the end of this effort a kind of exhausted, empty condition where there are no ideas any more. That is why in our work we try to alternate between research and reflection and that is also why I am teaching at Harvard University because this is the only way in which, against the consumption of ideas, of the practice, we are able to find domain of renewal. Fecht: Do you see any emotional or moral qualities in architecture that might survive the processes of profound changes in the next century. When I look at your book of the "small, medium, large, XXL" it appears to me like the manifesto which some of your critics put in the context of the manifestoes by Duchamp or Manetti and the futurists, so when I think about Marshall McLuhan's book "the medium is the message" which was a book that had an element of this free-folded typography, where the message was not that clear, this was one of the points we had in the discussions last night, that it is important to see that the borderlines got out of focus. You describe architecture or activities in the aesthetic field as the possibility to give an urban fashion to the planet. What is this free fold? Is it a movement of search which you could also find at the Documenta? Koolhaas: No. To the extent that the book was called "free fold", we were only talking about the format of the book, because the problem of the book is to create a container or an envelope for work and ideas that in themselves don't make any claim to consistency. Because I think that Said didn't speak about consistency, for me the need for consistency and the way only consistency earns respect, is one of these other dangers of the intellectual, because I think inconsistency is at least as important so therefore in the book we had a lot of different projects, a lot of different essays, a lot of different insights, and I wanted exactly to avoid the impression that it is one theory, one line, one argument. The issue was how can you develop a container that still allows the diversity, the conflicts and the contradictions to remain evident. Fecht: When you take this container: What do you think are the most urgent tasks in the education of architects during the next decade speaking of Europe. In your installation in the Ottonaeum you make a strong point which is basically statistics: How many living unions are constructed in one night, two architects, three computers. So it is a quality which changes by quantity in a dimension which is hard to imagine for European traditional architectural education. Koolhaas: I am always very bad in saying what people should do or I am already bad on the level of the individual, I am certainly bad on the level of a continent, but I think that, just as an example, I negotiated a situation with Harvard University where I said I would teach there under the condition that I would not be involved in design, or design education. I guess that basically suggests that I don't believe in design education at this moment. And that I think that the discrepancy between issues that could inspire architecture and the education has become so big so that it would be probably much better to suspend design education for 10 years, and to introduce 10 years of solid research. I am sure that there is vast research to do in the urban condition in East Europe, in Kazachstan, where ever. The pretension that you can still tell people how to operate is becoming for me personally more and more unthinkable. Fecht: To what extent you could imagine a cross- cooperation between artists, no matter what field. Do you see any chances in your economic and developing structures to include artists in this process or is this rather a position of analysis and observation. Koolhaas: It is hard to say, and you yourself started with it already, that the basic idea of specialization is one of the things that inhibits forms of thinking. For me it is more interesting to think about brains, and to assume that artists also have brains, and the artists have a very particular reflection of intellectual processes. In that sense we work with friends which happen to be artists or sometimes we actually formally invite somebody because he has specific reasons to do it. It is not the need for architecture to encounter artists, but it is more to combine different kinds of brain power. Fecht: One specific question in the context of identity. Last night we had this interesting position of Mr. Said, where he basically said: Many identities are much better then one. But we can't understand history without memory. Since architecture is a very important element of storing memory and history, what function could memory have in the context of architecture from your point of view looking at the next century. Koolhaas: Well I am very bad to tell people what to do and I am also incredibly bad in looking forward, I don't know why that is exactly but I think I have an obsession with the present and I am extremely reluctant to make any claims or dictates for what is going to happen. We have already talked about the way architecture leaves less and less traces. What I guess is that some other domains have to take over the role of memory from architecture. Exactly this traditional doesn't work any more, for instance you can look at Berlin now to see very clearly what is happening because to the extent that architecture embodies memory the present reconstruction of Berlin is a kind of blatant attempt to extinguish and to eliminate certain kinds of memories, the memories of communism, the memories of the fifties, the memories of a kind of sober, optimistic moment of modernity. So already see that this kind of responsibility to embody memory is no longer part of the inner self-image of the profession. So, there is such a kind of ruthless judgment in terms of what is good and what is bad that the most intelligent part of the profession which for the sake of argument we should assume, is involved in redoing Berlin is actually basically a single empty memory operation. Fecht: I don't know if you had the chance to look at the most part of the exhibition. Let's take for example the installation of Syberberg, called "Memory Cave", the cave is explicitly not architecture, it is an element going beneath. In this context Syberberg starts with Plato's metaphor of the cave, and he gives some images of the Potsdamer Platz in the context of the Reichskanzlei, and some images out of the car, a few days later, all these images interfere with memory which looses its location, which obviously no longer has a consistent place. Is this an aesthetic approach which you could feel to get into closer communication with advice for a solution. Or if you look at the national library which has been recently opened in Paris, where you have this metaphorical element and you have practical implements of the building in the same time. In this context, could you reflect on memory maybe. Koolhaas: I think this building is a kind of desperate attempt to impose a memory on an entity which, as you say, in terms of its pragmatic needs has nothing to do with a memory. Therefore the only consistency, if I can make a confession, that our thinking in our work have had in the past, is that we refuse ever to be bitter about anything that happened in the past and we try to, without being foolish, try to interpret the inevitable, which allows a forward movement. To the extent that we no longer have the responsibility to symbolize memory or to represent memory or no longer have the responsibility to represent anything, I think it is extremely exiting for us, then it means that we can be completely new, completely dumb, completely inarticulate, completely inert, completely meaningless. It simply reintroduces a vast amount of possibilities. Fecht: thank you very much. Eike Becker: Just a very quick question. A lot people came here to this exhibition and they expected something similar like the gestamapet kunstwerk or so on. They identify where they identity of one single artist or so on. The question of Gestampt kunstwerk.Then the question of collage, what is your position towards collage, what is your position to these two area. Koolhaas: Are you talking about Documenta as a whole? Becker: Yes, Documenta as a whole, and of course, the relationship of gestamptwerk and collage to your work and the works of others. Koolhaas: I don't whether I can answer the question, but for me in spite of the criticism we have heard and read I think what is extremely exciting there is a very thematic and ambitious and uncompromising situation in this Documenta. Greater Urban and all its aspects has been represented as the dominant and continuos setting. Whether its gezamptkunstwerk or not, I think gesamptkunsterk is a kind of romantic notion and I think that there is a kind of, very insistence on a romantic view in whole ex and an insistence on cooling the temperature kind of rather than creating an overheated expectation an almost clinical quality which I think is extremely stimulating because it allows you for the first time to really look clinically at a number of things and relate make your own connections, between them instead of being guided by hand of the gestampgtkunsterk.in terms of forcing you tom make those decisions so the clinical quality also has a certain freedom for creating your own raptor. IN terms of collage, I've always been uncomfortable with the notion of collage, because I've always been much more interested in the notion of montage, I think because the montage is basically the planning of a series of events or the planning of a series of visual or other episodes. Whether its stories or in a movie, or episodes in a painting. I think that collage is something that anybody can do but montage introduces an abstract strategic value which I sense here in the hand of this exhibition. It is much more a montage than a collage. OK, thank you. more info: Rem Koolhaas lecture within the 100 days / 100 guests program: http://www.mediaweb-tv.com/dx/rv/28dx0622.ram (only with real video player) fan page with many links: http://studwww.rug.ac.be/~jvervoor/architects/koolhaas/index.html --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 21.0 <nettime> bandwidth interview with saskia sassen Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 16 Jul 1997 19:18:04 +0200 (MET DST) Bandwidth and Accountability An Interview with Saskia Sassen By Geert Lovink Held in Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel July 11, 1997 GEERT LOVINK: What will be the topic of your lecture tonight and will you speak about bandwidth? SASKIA SASSEN: For me, no matter where I start. I will arrive at bandwidth... The subject is cities as strategic places for economic actors, and possibly, for a new kind of politics. In that new kind of politics I am thinking of such diverse actors as immigrants, but also net activists. LOVINK: Let's talk about the geography of cyberspace. We have a lot of maps on display here, in Hybrid Workspace, and they show the inequality of (the distribution of) bandwidth worldwide. These figures are giving a dry and precise picture. SASSEN: Many people are of course aware about this basic architecture of the networks. But to have the data so precisely is extremely important. One of the concerns for me has been to understand the differences between private digital space and the public one. A lot of theoretical work has been done on public digital space, like for example about the Digital City in Amsterdam. I have been concerned with private digital space. And with what I see as a colonizing of public digital space by private (i.e. corporate) actors. We have three phases of the Internet. The first phase is that of the hackers, where access was the issue, making the software available. The second one, when you begin to have the interest by private actors that did not quite know how to use it. It still was mostly a public space, in some ways protected. And now a third stage: (the invasion of cyberspace by corporate actors: it's really combat out there. So for me, the Internet becomes a space for contestation. I am here not only thinking about multinational corporations. I am thinking of all kind of actors, including the misuses of the Net, which is something serious also. The bandwidth capacity is forever a very difficult issue. It is not clear to me if the capacity will be endless, like in the notion of the old frontier, where you had 'endless land'. But it is not really endless. It takes a number of events to discover that. Certain laboratory production of capacity are enormous, in term of bandwidth. But I am not sure what happens once it moves from the lab to people and companies. There are two issues: the economics of introducing the new technical capacities taht are possible. And economics matters. We allready now have poor men and women's e-mail, where you wait forever. If you can pay, you will have a high speed connection. The other issue is a 'de-greening' of the pratices in the Net, which I find very disturbing. The issue bandwidth consuming multimedia, for instance, where things could also have been done via e-mail. LOVINK: In order to have a broad, general debate about the issue of bandwidth, it might be important to see how we can visualize this topic. Which metaphors do we use, what kind of images? How would you describe the bandwidth topic for a wider audience? SASSEN: I grew up in Latin America. Anybody who has spent some time there or in Africa, knows what it is to get a international, long distance call going. You have to wait, sometimes for hours. You don't just get on the telephone and get access. Why? Because it is a question of the capacity. You will experience the notion of inadequate carrying capacity. Today, those of use who use e-mail through institutions have also had that experience. In Europe, in the afternoon it is difference than in the morning. Why? Because it in the afternoon the USA has woken up and has invaded the Internet. You get to wait a much longer time. If you have a lot of money, believe me, you will have a fast lane. In Bombay or Sao Paolo, you will find different circumstances. For instance, there are poor and rich universities. Some universities in the US, in order to save money, shift part of their bandwidth to commercial users after 5 o'clock. And you will sit there forever to get a connection. LOVINK: The campaign here, 'We Want Bandwidth', could be part of a strategy to re-imagine what the public part of cyberspace could look like. We could complain that the old parts of the public realm are disappearing. But we could as well start reinventing new public spaces. SASSEN: It is not disappearing, it is being colonized. One of the key issues is to develop and promote more different sub-cultures. In Latin- America there is a whole lot of net activity in Spanish (Castillian). The more diversity we have, the better. The colonizing of the space is going in many different directions. It does not only have to come from private companies. Even if it is just e-mail. Whether it is poor women in India connecting directly with a group of poor women in New Jersey, or labour unions that are beginning to do more international organizing because they are on e-mail. It is really a question of maximazing the activity on the Net, and militance, if you want. LOVINK: On the other hand, we have this economics of the networks. Simultaneously, with stiff competition and a drive towards monopolization. Maybe this comes as no surprise. What may look like chaotic markets, is in reality quite frightening. Specially if look at the mergers between the telcoms. SASSEN: This is a very real story, this joining of large firms across borders. One of the ironies is that in sofar as fiber optic cables does remain a very important way of getting the communication going, in order to provide global services, these companies have to cover the whole, actual geography of the globe. Hence the necessity of the mergers. At the end we will have a limited number of very large global companies. Going global is the name of the game. When we talk about regulation today, we tend to give it a narrow meaning, which has to do with the government regulating content. That is a totally different notion, compared to regulation access and accountability. We need to free the concept of regulation from what it is. We should innovate and start to think how we can regulate those big conglomerates. They are reshaping the topography of communications. They are now moving into Latin-America, where the telecoms are being privatized. For the upper middle classes and above, this will be fine. The problem are lower income communities, and more isolated places. Even in the USA there are people who cannot even afford a telephone. In sofar as the global telecoms are dealing with a condition that is essential to us, whether we look at it as people, who have forms of sociabilities. Or if we look at it as democracies, where communication is necessary. But now these firms are privatized and not accountable, which means we might run into scenarios that are very nasty. (Edited by Patrice Riemens) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 22.0 <nettime> interview with susan georg Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 22 Jul 1997 13:34:49 +0200 (MET DST) Demystifying the Virtual Power Structures An Interview with Susan George By Geert Lovink At Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel July 16, 1997 [Susan George is the vice-director of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and was from 1990-1995 on the board of Greenpeace International. She is a well known critic of the Worldbank and the IMF and has publiced several books on the debt crisis.] Geert Lovink: I was surprised about the opening statement of your 100 days lecture. You stated that economy and ecology are at war. Here in Germany, many from both the corporate world and the ecological movement think in terms of collaboration and harmony. Influenced by New Age, they think that the two might go together in the end. You called yourself an 'alarmist'. Susan George: For the first time in history, we do not have much time ahead of us. If New Age people think that everything can be made into sweetness and light, they have not examined power relationships very carefully. I fear that if people can be persuaded that these two paradigms can be made to match without deep changes, it will distract them from the kind of politics that we have got to do. You are speaking from a very German point of view. Germany is at the very forefront of ecological awareness. Where I live, in France, people are way behind in such things as recycling. For the first time, France has got now green MPs and a green minister. Allthough the United States might have a high degree of awareness in some areas, politically speaking this has not been translated into reality. The kind of radical politics that I was trying to talk about has not yet reached any kind of level where major changes are going to come about. Many of these changes are taking place at the international level. And that's where it is going to be most difficult to act. Many of the destroyers of the planet are acting with inpunity, because they are acting at the international level. They are not transparent and are answerable to no one. GL: You have been on the board of Greenpeace for many years. Are you optimistic about the growth and strength of the ecological movement? SG: I left the board at the end of 1995. The new administration tends to engage a lot less in confrontations. Personally, I think that is a mistake. Confrontation and exposure are still very much needed. There are areas where one can cooperate with businesses. Yesterday I mentioned the insurance industry which is getting knocked out. They incurred $ 50 billion of losses within the last ten years. Why? Because of global warming and the increasing frequency of storms. Even if George Bush and Bill Clinton were not convinced of global warming, the insurance companies are. And they are listening to Greenpeace and teaming up. The case of the Greenpeace refrigerator has been overblown badly. It was clear that the manufacturers were not interested in listening, or doing any research about new technologies that would not destroy the ozon layer. What Greenpeace did, with a couple of scientists from East Germany is simply to show that it can be done. The same holds true for a car engine, that would use much less petrol. But who wants that in the oil industry? That is what I mean with confrontation: embarrassing the decision-makers by showing the consumer that it can be done. These products are also coming to developing societies like China and India, highly populous countries, where a substantial middle class is now in a position to buy refrigerators. If all of China is going to have refrigerators with CFCs, we might as well put on our hands and sunglasses and hope for the best. Not all manufacturers have switched, even in France. You live in a paradise here. GL: In your lecture you did not mention the debt crisis. Could you give us an update? How do look at the recent developments, having done more than ten years of research into it? SG: I only mentioned the debt crisis in relation with the ecological crisis in the South and the East and the capacity of the Worldbank and the IMF to impose neo-liberalism. As soon as a country has no other source of fresh cash, it has to go to these international institutions. Then they are in a position to say, we lend you money, but on the following conditions. That is how they have been able to forcebly integrate into the global economy close on a hunderd countries. I published my first book on the topic in 1987, having worked on it for two years. There comes a time when you have to leave a subject alone. In the last year, I have prepared a report on Mediterranean debt for the Italian government. Most activists are concentrating on Africa. As well they should. But what I discovered in the cases of the Maghreb countries, Egypt, Jordan, etc is that the scale of the problem is much greater. The impossibility of this debt ever being payed back is exactly the same as for black Africa. The boomerang arguments (the impacts it has on the North) hold true and Europe has allready started to pay heavily for the debt crisis in the Southern Mediterranean rim. GL: Within circles of cyberculture, money has been looked at from the angle of virtualization. Most of capital is now virtual, no longer related to the realm of the production of material commodities. It is seen as a closed, 'other' computer network, next to the Internet, and where the money is circulating constantly, all over the world. SG: The existence of those financial electronic network is not a secret, but it is difficult to get access and knowledge about it. Without electronics, economic globalization could not have happened. In the foreign exchange market you got $ 1.2 trillion circulating every day. Less than 5% of that represents actual cash transactions. Most of it is just making money out of money. When I looked at the quite boring annual report of the Bank for International Settlements, a serious institution, the central bank of the central banks, in Basel, you detect a note of utter panic. What they are saying is that the financial markets are inventing new instruments, much faster then we can get a grip on them. The IMF stepped in when we had the crisis in Mexico, in Russia and now in the Phillipines. My question is: when we have the big crash, as we are going to have. quite soon, where is the IMF that is going to move in? There is nothing big enough to counter an accident like that. When it is going to come, this crash is going to create tremendous suffering, as it did in Mexico in january 1995. Workers lost their job, malnutrition rate immediately went up, the suicide rate and the crime rate are way up. The effects of electronic markets actually fall down on society. GL: In his article in the 'Atlantic Monthly', George Soros has also warned for this to happen. He is supporting a lot of the NGOs, worldwide. How do you look at the growing importance of the NGO-sector? SG: I am not aware of growing power of NGOs. I am not well informed about the activities of his foundation, but I would love to meet him. I think he has got the right attitude towards the stockmarket because he does not follow the herd. He also proved that central banks are totally powerless when confronted a determented army of speculators. I want to say here that these people are perfectly identifiable. One should not treat this market as something mysterious, like giving the law on high, like God speaking to Moses and then we all have to follow it. This is 30-50 major banks, about the same number of brokerage firms, and a few, mostly US pension funds, which are in on this. 250 major guys doing all this. There is no reason, in my view, why, if governments got their act together, and were a little bit less cowardly, then there is no reason why these transactions could not be taxed. The moeny should not go to the UN. But there is no reason that one could not constitute international funds which could be democratically managed. One could palliate the debt crisis and write off debts with that sort of a fund. GL: This campaign here in Hybrid Workspace is dealing with bandwidth. We are trying to map who is owning the cables. What are your experiences in visualizing those abstract structures? SG: To be honest, yes, I was able to name the major players in the debt crisis. I began to do work on those emerging markets. I could not carry it out because it was too expensive. I was able to interview people in South Africa because I was there for a conference. The same thing for the Phillipines. That is another reason why Soros is important, because he is demystifying a lot of what the markets are doing. Being one of the players himself, he certainly is not down on his knees, worshipping them. That is one of the dangers. Capital is like a religion. The antropologist Fabricio Sabelli sees institutions like the IMF depending on believe systems, with the Worldbank as the mediaval church with its heaven and hell. The same thing is true for the market. There is a good deal of popularizing to be done, in this case, to demystify the Internet. And do remember that half of the world has never made a telephone call. (edited by Patrice Riemens) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 23.0 <nettime> Paul Garrin on bandwidth Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 21 Jul 1997 15:09:18 +0200 (MET DST) Telephone interview with Paul Garrin We Want Bandwidth! By Geert Lovink 12. of July 1997 - at Hybrid Workspace Documenta X, Orangerie, Kassel audio version : http://www.icf.de/documents/RIS-DATA/868984455/868984455,3.ram see also: http://wwww.waag.org/bandwidth Geert Lovink in Kassel: People that are visiting Documenta might find the whole topic of bandwidth a little bit abstract. They are not really familiar with it. Paul Garrin in New York: Let me make it clear to the average layperson. understandable bandwidth -what that means is that one of the acronyms of WWW is World Wide Wait. So everybody is waiting around the world for the pages downloading, because there is not enough bandwidth. GL: Yes, everybody knows that. That's a way to enter the whole story, and then up to the next chapter - content and the economic aspects behind the telecommunications business. PG: Definitely, and the question of who owns the bandwidth is a big issue. Because it is all the big telecom companies. And although there are many, they are becoming fewer as they merge. MCI was just eaten up by British Telecom, and Sprint is about to be eaten up by Deutsche Telekom, probably between the next 18 months or so, Deutsche Telekom has already a 20% interest in Sprint, I believe. Deutsche Telekom makes invoices into the United States in terms of telecommunication infrastructure through Sprint, then in terms of public relations through the Guggenheim Museum. "Control the art and you control the people". GL: They are then also directly involved into the Content Business which is the next level. PG: Exactly and this is the next trend of what the Bandwidth owners are starting to do, which is now, for example, Time Warner and Disney and Microsoft buying up Network Capacity all over the place and they are also content providers, if you can call it content. What is happening here, and what is going back to what I was talking about at Next Five Minutes back in 96, was discussing the idea of the permanent autonomous network. Which is the only way we can assure our presence: to buy the bandwidth because there is no guaranty of survival, especially if the Big Content Providers are buying up connectivity to control the content. There is no guarantee. As I said in my article "The Disappearance of Public Space on the Net" about the encroachment of any kind of public space or free space on the Interment by Big Media. The Old Media companies are buying up New Media and are imposing the Old Media models, such as, for example, Push Media. This is the way how old media powers deal with new media, two way interactive media equals transmissions in both directions, but it is two way in the sense that they pump the content to the consumer and the return pipe is a thin pipe just to suck the data of their credit cards. GL: Critics might say "we want more bandwidth", the slogan of this campaign (at Hybrid Workspace), that's why we criticize the so called Push Media, maybe we are not quite well aware yet what we ourselves might do with all the bandwidth. How do you see that? PG: Well, I say it is not necessarily a question of how much bandwidth, but that we have any at all and, of course, what we do with it is of vital importance. That has always been the problem with the net and the web, that there are plenty of places to go, but nothing to see. And this problem might potentially be solved by artists and creative people who have something to say. I don't think this should really be an issue because we have all the tools before us, so lets not plunder them. We have all the access in front of us, lets not waste them, lets not waste time, because the more time we take to establish our presence, the more the spectacle and the creator, the more the encroachment of the commercial media will be, which will ultimately insecure any efforts by independents. GL: The latest update of Name.Space, lets tell it to the listeners.. (see http://namespace.autono.net ) PG: The case against Network Solutions, Name.Space filed back in March, alleging anti-trust against Network Solutions Inc., is now in front of the judge of the Federal Court of New York at the United States Federal District Court. And this week is a week of paper work, as it goes right now, publicly the case is proceeding, and Network Solutions has basically admitted in papers they have published on their homepage many of the things that Name.Space has proved. Such as there is no technical limit of the numbers of top level domains, even quoting the inventor of DNS, that the Domain Name Service and the software are a highly scalable system and that there is no technical limit of the numbers of top level, or second level or third level domains, that the limit of 36 characters of each level is not necessary. So as it looks, things are moving forward in our direction, and we are very optimistic about them coming out in our favor. GL: Yes this article that you were posting on nettime was very interesting.. PG: It appears that the United States Department of Justice, I guess, got wind of the Name.Space antitrust lawsuit against Network Solutions and themselves approached Network Solutions and as we see into possible anti-trust practices. GL: An interesting move, isn't it? PG: It has nothing directly to do with our case, or any direct influence on our case, because this is done under a separate jurisdiction, not of federal law, but however it is interesting that somebody else is taking it very serious. GL: Can you explain to us a bit how you are moving yourself from the topic of Bandwidth that you are raising to the practical project of Name.Space because name.space seems to be a little bit on the symbolic level, having to do with Names, and the freedom, and bandwidth seems to be a very hardboiled economic topic. Is that true? PG: Well, these two things are highly related and as in my statement before: if we want to insure the presence of free media on the net, then we have to buy our bandwidth. How to do that? To create an economic structure which is basically a self-sufficient, self-supporting network. This type of thing I thought that the idea of creating name.space as a service to potentially fund the bandwidth that we need. Apparently the market for Domain Name Registration is a high one. In 1997 Network Solution add 90.000 domain names a month charging a 100 dollars up front for two years. If you look at the map, that 9 Million dollars a month is cash flow at that rate. That is only selling com, net and org domains. Now on name.space, thanks to the public who have suggested many new top level categories, we have over 400 top level names available at the moment for registration. So at that rate, at 25 dollars each, the potential is there. At least a couple of million dollars a month, in cash flow. This kind of money coming in independent hands such as ours, probably is a bundit enough to fund our networks and to support our cooperative partners in Europe and even hopefully sponsor some other activities for producing media and holding conferences. So I think that it could be a very important aspect of independence of not only buying and providing bandwidth and server resources, but also supporting content production. GL: The question was, I can imagine that we could do something like name.space, could we even make a jump and start a kind of autonomous and go to that very hard level of providing bandwidth ourselves or even owning it. PG: Well, this is always a question of scale, scale is a question of money, if it turns up that we end up making money in the billions, sure we can lay fibre, and buy up satellite links. I wouldn't say that this is in our 2 year plan, but I wouldn't rule it out either. In fact I am known for my capacity for reinvesting resources and therefore if we do make that amount of money I am not that kind of person that buys fancy clothes and a Porsche and moves to a house in the country, I would put that into infrastructure. (transcribed and edited by Diana McCarty and Pit Schultz) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 23.1 Re: <nettime> Paul Garrin on bandwidth Joerg Heiser nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 22 Jul 1997 14:21:54 -0700 Geert Lovink wrote: > > Telephone interview with Paul Garrin > We Want Bandwidth! > By Geert Lovink > > 12. of July 1997 - > at Hybrid Workspace Documenta X, Orangerie, Kassel > GL: The question was, I can imagine that we could do something like > name.space, could we even make a jump and start a kind of autonomous > and go to that very hard level of providing bandwidth ourselves > or even owning it. > > PG: Well, this is always a question of scale, scale is a question of > money, if it turns up that we end up making money in the billions, > sure we can lay fibre, and buy up satellite links. I wouldn't say > that this is in our 2 year plan, but I wouldn't rule it out either. > In fact I am known for my capacity for reinvesting resources > and therefore if we do make that amount of money I am not that kind > of person that buys fancy clothes and a Porsche and moves to a house > in the country, I would put that into infrastructure. Dear Geert, dear Paul Garrin, yes, nice move, the name.space idea. But please talk more precise about - who of us is part of the "we" in alternative/"autonomous" projects of owning fibre, satellite links etc. - what form of (economic,political) organisation/powerstructure you talk of when you say "autonomous". Co-ops? Syndicates? Bandwidth-NGOs? Inc.s? Oligarchy? And: do we want our future Richard Bransons rejecting fancy clothes and penitentially walk in humble rags? We Want Porsche ---joerg heiser --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 24.0 <nettime> interview with Makrola Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 25 Jul 1997 17:01:36 +0200 (MET DST) note: the interview posted yesterday with Ackbar Abbas was edited by Linda Wallace. ------------------ A visit to the Makrolab in Lutterberg The Documenta X project - Marko Peljhan/Projekt Atol http://markolab.ljudmila.org Communications equipment check with Marko Peljhan and Brian Springer Lutterberg, july 20, 1997 By Geert Lovink Makrolab is a research station up on the Lutterberg, 10 km from Kassel. It is an autonomous solar and wind powered communication and survival tent, full of equipment. One night I went there to find out about the first results of the project. Like Workspace, Makrolab had lots of technical problems in the first weeks of documenta X, but now the lab is up and running. In the coming days Makrolab will post an own text on nettime about the system. GL: Could you explain us what kind of interception equipment you have here? This machine here says 'Microwave Videolink Transmitter - Designed for Makrolab.' BS: It is a 10 gigahertz microwave link, going to the Documenta Halle where the video console of Makrolab is located. It is used to relay video information from the lab's side to the Halle. Beside that there is a video switcher for the cameras that are related to the console. Here is some short-wave and two meter gear which we for example use to monitor the Mir transmissions. MP: You must have special decoding software to work with short-wave digital transmissions and different modulations. All what you hear now is different kind of HF modems or encoders. Tele-printers which use different standards. A lot of it is encrypted and there are specific NATO and Russian systems with specific baud rates that are almost impossible to decode. It is not like baudot weather services or stuff like that, it’s much more complex and hidden and there’s no readily available information on it. When you hear and identify a baud rate of 81 or 73 or 96 p.e., than it is probably some NATO transmission and you know that you cannot get the message. But there’s other systems which are very easily de-codable or even voice services which are usually not scrambled. What we hear now is p.e. information about the weather over the Atlantic, the Shannon volmet for the air traffic flying towards Europe. On another channel we hear Stockholm Aero, and HF aeronautical station for transatlantic and transpolar routes. What we can decode quite easily is the SELCAL signals transmitted by aircraft, together with their position, wind, temperature and fuel status. With the short wave setup we have it is of course also possible to transmit, and every night I try to talk with some stations, yesterday it was Estonia and Belarus. In the past two days it was Mir packet radio time, three times a day and more. We try to get the Mir signals when it over flies Europe. As you know Mir was in trouble, but now they repaired their electricity circuit, and today they were resting, communicating with radio amateurs of the world. I’ve put some signals information on the website. BS : On the other machine we are receiving signals in the L-Band around 1.5 giga hertz. It is a communications receiver. It could be use for mobile phones, but they are mostly regionally located. We were specially interested in crossing boarders and boundaries. Across five countries or more, like INMARSAT, which is a satellite telephone system, a briefcase size. Maybe you saw Peter Arnett using this during the Gulf War, speaking to CNN. There are still vestiges of the INMARSAT system that are analogue based, which do not require any special digital decompression. So here in Germany you could be listening to America, Ireland or Teheran. This is where communication start to get interesting, where the medium does what it does best, which is communicate. And where culture does what it does worst, which is communicate. We are investigating if the collision of these best and worst characteristics can create a interesting stage for intervening in the trans-national flow of information. MP: What makes this set of radio amateur gear perhaps specific is the context in which we are operating. The result is only becoming visible only after quite a long period of time and a period of reflection. We have just started. GL: Brian, you have been doing satellite interception before. You released a videotape where you see politicians getting ready, doing tests for an open camera. BS: In the United States, these satellite feeds which were un-encrypted video transmissions, either by television networks or by corporations, were accessible. One could find the Philip Morris Television Network every now and then, doing a corporate teleconferencing. From their lawyers point of view it is a private transmission. And then it is my point of view that this is public transmission because it is not scrambled. Anyone with a home satellite dish, which is 4 million, can receive this. The issue here is: what is a common carrier, and what is a broadcast? A broadcast is something that goes out to a mass public. A common carrier is something like a letter. But what happens if a letter is broadcast across a whole continent, when it is not encrypted, not in a digital but in an analogue form? A lot of contradiction can arise of what is public and what is private. The satellite’s broad beam pushes these contradiction to the surface. GL: Could you compare that kind of work with video feed with current research on the audio spectrum? Coming from the States, it is such a televised nation. There is a hoard of images, spewing forward. Everyday at 6 p.m. when the local news starts, maybe 15 news reporter, are standing in front of chart buildings, dead bodies and blown down houses, getting ready to report the days carnage to the local television viewers. With the satellite TV feed you could see these reporters before they go on-air. These satellite out-takes can sometimes be revealing.. Now it seems everyone who appears on a satellite feed knows someone might be watching and/or taping them, so now that candid stage has disappeared. Here the audio is interesting because it is still an open stage at times.. MP: I have not worked with satellite video much, just for a year now. One year ago we put on a 3m dish on the roof of Ljudmila in Ljubljana. In Europe there are less feeds. What you get is pre-taped material that is sent to different broadcasters. I have been working with short wave for a long time, since the early eighties. Short wave is the cheapest and most accessible way of communicating over long distances and still widely used. I think that almost everyone has the experience of suddenly hearing a female voice giving out four-letter codes for five hours on their own AM radio receiver. We listen to those here too and try to make some sense and basically map them. There is information available on the Internet about the frequencies secret services use, but things are changing quickly in that world. And basically every posted data is already old data. Audio and data traffic on SW is still not so accessible, compared to video, where you just hook your TV up to a satellite receiver and a dish and there you go. GL: Brian, you experienced the closing of the open video channels. Most of it is now encrypted. This is also happening in the audio spectrum. Do you see the same patterns occurring there? BS: The open windows are slowly closing. It is a unique opportunity to have one last glimpse at the curve of the analogue spectrum before it closes forever. Analogue seems to be more natural, curved, not binary, with less protection for the information contained on these channels. GL: So we have to move than and crack the digital spectrum. MP: The big game is to move forward to digital domains. A complete set of new knowledge is needed. We heard rumors that digital communications, for example banking information were cracked. That is illegal and basically a criminal offense but tells a lot about the safety of our own data being transmitted and re-transmitted over the networks. The encryption that is currently used by states in diplomacy is very hard to decrypt. You must have the key, that's it. Intelligence services are working more on getting the keys than to decrypt. The human is the weak element of the chain, not the signal anymore. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Appendix: this is why we built makrolab the process of following a certain problem could be metaphorically expressed as travel through the areas of a big organism. the existent cognition systems explain various parts of the ur-animal (e.g. the foot, the organ, the tissue, the structure, the particle...) by means of links they create topographical areas. viewed from inside in the man who thinks, explores, learns, experiences and feels the latter form and organize themselves as complete experiences, whereas viewed from outside they manifest themselves as neutral objects: tools, books, images, plans, calculations, data bases, models, systems... the exhibited object, the makrolab-console represents the external, fragmentary view on the makrolab - research station, which is set on the hill lutterberg. makrolab is designed as an autonomous, modular communications and living environment, which is powered by sustainable sources of energy (solar and wind power). it is designed for a long existence in an isolated environment and can withstand extreme natural conditions. it has it's own research and experience goal. the station is built as a combination of various scientific and technological logistics systems. makrolab makes use of scientific and technological tools, knowledge and systems, but it projects them in the social domain of art. we, the authors and crew make use of the system of art for the shaping and representation of an integral empirical and creative experience. telecommunications as the main aspect of the project is concentrated on the discovery and recording of the events which take place in the densely populated abstract areas of the electromagnetic spectrum. the electromagnetic spectrum is a part of the global socio-political space, which is invisible and immaterial on one hand but presents a productive factor of general living and social conditions on the other. it can be sensed only by the means of suitable interfaces and specialized knowledge. the telecommunication activities of makrolab are created as the process of transcribing invisible and vague micro-environmental activities into traditional, three-dimensional textures - documents. the research station makrolab on the lutterberg hill nearby kassel (which is at the same time one of the exhibited works of art at the documenta 10 exhibition) is the primary conceptual and material plan of the project which has yet only started to follow its objective, and which constantly shapes its contents and lives its own individual experience. 19.6.1997 --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 25.0 <nettime> interview with Gayatri Spivak Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Sat, 26 Jul 1997 14:19:34 +0200 (MET DST) Pax Electronica: against crisis-driven global telecommunication An Interview with Gayatri Spivak By Geert Lovink July 23, 1997 At Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel http://www.documenta.de/workspace "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, born in India, is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. Her name is primarily associated with the concept of postcolonial studies and along with Edward Said and Homi Bhabba she is regarded to be one of the most important representatives of this Anglo-American theoretical field. Her literary analyses and theoretical writings have invariably dealt with the deconstruction of neocolonial discourses and a feminist-Marxist approach to postcolonialism, particularly to the schematized forms of representing women in the Third World. During the summer months Gayatri Spivak works with a non-governmental organization in Bangladesh to organize an educational program for women and a teacher training course." The ofifcial Documenta X biography You can see the lecture of Gayatri Spivak (real video) on: http://www.mediaweb-tv.de/dx/0724/gaeste_frame_e.html The Global Knowledge conference she is referring to was organized by the Worldbank and took place in Toronto from june 22-25 june 1997. See also: http://www.globalknowledge.org/ The protests against this event were impressive. Read the report on: http://www.tao.ca/earth/lk97/archive/0119.html Geert Lovink: You are writing by hand? Gayatri Spivak: It is not so much deliberate, but I just can't help writing by hand. One types by hand also. It is not that the hand disappears, but if I start typing, or working on the screen, I am dinosaur. I find that it disappears from me. I have a secretary but she certainly does not type the stuff I write. I am from the manual typewriter era. The extraordinary editing capacities of the computer also touch me. That second typing on the screen is a creative moment. It is just not the first moment. Is writing the first moment we do not know. I consume the affect of writing by hand. Another reason is that I do a lot of work in areas where there no electricity at all. GL: Here we try to mix real and virtual spaces, old and new media, thereby polluting the clean, bright concept of high-tech. We are trying to get away from the autopoetic, self-referential tendencies and ideologies written into both the hard- and software. GS: The high-tech is an epistemological constraint I want to escape. That's the secret of hybridisation. The biggest hybridisation is of course the sexual encounter which you want to escape and at the same time are seduced by. Yes, epistemologic constraints seduce me because they are outside of me, while at the same time I want to escape them. This is how the game of hybridisation in my life goes on. GL: Do you consider the computer as a machine of exclusion? Or is it just a tool? GS: It does seem to me that in one way the computer is part of an empericisation of the desire for virtuality. This made D.H. Lawrence write some time ago that the sexual encounter is the eternal virginity of the soul. To an extent, real virtuality is the imagination, which does indeed exclude. It constantly makes you other yourself and other the Other. So it is not as if the computer is alien to the way we are. I don't see a distinction between natural and artificial intelligence. I think that's bogus. At the same time it can become exclusive, an instrument of a certain narcissism, a simulacrum of reaching the other, which is exactly a withdrawal of the responsibility. In a much broader, political sense, it can be exclusivist because of the stratification of the world. But that's another story. Like most answers: what is poison is also medicine. GL: In what direction would you like to see this new genre of 'net criticism' grow into? Is there something we could learn from literary criticism? GS: I can only tell you what my notion of literary criticism is. The imagination is the possibility of real virtuality. The claims made for virtual reality are sometimes, somewhat empiricised. The imagination is the possibility of being somewhere that is not the Self. This is related to being human, as already being open to a connection with something other. That is what to be human is. Otherwise the infant would not be able to invent his or her mother tongue. That is how the infant begins, by creating a language which then the parent learns, as it were. Through that it develops into a language with a history. That is the synthesis with the absolutely Other which is monitored by the imagination. You could look at literature in this way, as a kind of machine for the training into relating with the Other. I am not in the business of getting information from the South and then doing research in the North. I teach Marx to Americans. And I do practical work in Bangladesh so that I can learn. I say to my American students, let us now imagine that there has been no history. Nothing has happened, this text is about to be written. It is not that one denies history. We learn to learn from the singular and the unverifiable -- that is what the literary is. It is hard to describe because it is a doing thing. It sounds romantic if you talk about it. I believe that this literary critical practice has connections with the notion of virtual reality, but I don't know what they are. You will have to think about it in your own way. I don't see the literary primarily as a field of expression. I see it as a field of being impressed: 'gepraegt'. Perhaps that is one way of looking at the Internet. If I ever got into developing net criticism, I think I would probably be as eccentric as I am in the field of this literacy stuff. Maybe you could pull me in and see what peculiar comes out of it. GL: For a country like India it seems of strategic importance to introduce cyber-technologies. Do think that this has a priority over other infrastructure, like roads or electricity, or even over education or food? GS: I don't think that is a choice anymore. Here in Kassel I will talk about a conference that took place in Toronto on June 25, called 'Global Knowledge'. The actual agenda said that the so-called developing countries should be given preferential treatment. It was all about selling access to telecommunication-as-empowerment as such. There is this picture of a very tall and lovely African woman, in her cloth, with a spear her right hand and a cellular telephone in her left. It is scary. Global telecommunications combined with actually women's 'micro credit' is spelling out the importance of finance capital. In a situation where financial capital turns over twenty-five times more than world trade, states are undermined and the possibility of social re-distribution is being questioned, it is a luddite idea to think that one can stop the world and that a developing state can chose whether to prefer electricity, food, roads, seeds, bio-diversity, or primary health. This is not a choice because telecommunications are being sold as access to all of this. The idea of the Pax Electronica, coming from the Pax Romana, the Pax Brittanica and the Pax Americana is a very welcome notion when one is not aware of the worm in the rose. McLuhan was the avatar of this Global Knowledge conference. Both McLuhan in his 'Global Village' and Lyotard in his 'The Postmodern Condition' suggest that with telematic societies, what pre-writing societies used to have -- the oral cultures -- will come back. The first world will be able to access the internal, unmediated richness of the oral culture. Not only go back, but go forward. One of highlights of the Global Knowledge conference was a school in Alaska for the Inuits, so far West that if you cross the water you cross over to the East. That is the ultimate notion of the slogan 'Go West, Young Man'. McLuhan said that today's Third World has lost touch with the holistic view, and in the telematic world we will go back this immediacy. Lyotard's example in 'The Postmodern Condition' is of the Gashiahoo Indian, the native Canadian American. There is certainly an allure here to the post-affluent, superannuated hippie -- the walking wounded from the sixties. I got news of this conference in Bangladesh, I was not in Toronto. What was striking was that the mailing from this conference has already started. The so-called least developed nations are already getting the letters. If we protesters take our time, we will have missed the boat. It is no use vaulting the World Bank. The notion that 'women are truly stepping forward to an unexamined notion of global feminism through telecommunication' is very scary thing. GL: Could you tell us about the work you have been doing in Bangladesh, regarding the media situation and the question of access to telecommunications? GS: I am not connected to an NGO, as the Documenta brochure says. I am not connected to anyone. Since you can't work complete alone, I am friendly with, tolerated by, a group that is an alternative development policy research collective in Bangladesh. They are deliberately not an NGO, they pay taxes. In the current post-Soviet conjuncture we have to be very critical about this new, rising NGO-culture. They call themselves a consulting agency. They produce research that is not government sponsored or NGO sponsored. NGO is not really a category. You can't define something simply by saying that it is non-governmental. An organisation is content specific, funding specific, structure and salary specific, who evaluates, what kind of advisers exist, etc. In India there is now a new category called 'people's movement' which is neither a new social movement, according to the European notion of the greens. Nor is it an NGO thing, to the extend that a people's movement must be a group whose work will survive even if the funding is stopped. The critique of the NGO is that in the New World Order of economic restructuring, whereby barriers between state economies and international capital are one-by-one removed, you need something which can take over the 'economic citizenship', as Saskia Sassen calls it, and this is done by the huge structure of collaborative NGOs. This is called the 'international civil society'. In 1995, after the GATT was concluded, immediately the World Trade Organisation began making the GATT something that could be enforced. In this context, NGOs are not a useful group to work with as they are too involved in the New World Order -- in terms of big players like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation as the economic arm and, unfortunately, more and more, the United Nations as the political arm. GL: How does this group you work with look at global telecommunications and to whether access is important? GS: Yes, access is important. This group I work with brings out a journal in Bengali called 'Informatics'. They use the English word in Bengali script. What they are interested in is strategy-driven, rather than crisis-driven, access to telecommunications. Certainly not the idea that simply access as such is empowerment. In the old days we used to say that rights are an empty notion. You have to bind every freedom to a content, so that in its binding a freedom is exercised, otherwise you only have non-exercised guarantees. When they are exercised you have riots and violence. They are trying to effect the charges that are being imposed, so that your idea of a public space becomes class-fixed. This is an up-hill battle, especially when the telecommunication will be sold 'for free'. GL: Could you tell us more about this group: who they are and what they are doing. GS: They are called, in English, Alternative Development Policy Research. They focus on ecological agriculture on a large scale. One of their main projects is the struggle against pesticides, chemical fertilisers and bio-piracy. Bangladesh has 12,000 kinds of rice. As monoculture is coming in, the farmers are having buy back their own seed. What they also do is the struggle against the international population control lobby. Not against family planning. Against pharmaceutical dumping, coercive contraception, etc. These are the negative uncertainties. They are part of the Third World Network and are connected to the Asian Women's Human Rights Council. The development of a notion of informatics fits into this. They are also active on the cultural front. They are profoundly connected to Bengali Sufi: a detheologized islamic-hindu combinations on the ground, which is very different from either bourgeois secularism or virulent nationalism. This comes through their attachment to music. Also they are involved in the reform and restoration of old Arabic-Persian words in Bengali, which surpressed in the 19th century when Indian nationalism picked up Bengali and made it into something more Hindu. What I am interested in doing is learning to learn from below. I hang out with extremely deprived groups to see how their children should be taught. I am with the children so that I can find ways of telling the teachers what to do. Now this is very slow work, one on one. I have been doing it for the last ten years. You can't do it by reading Paolo Freire. Each place is different and the teachers are full of good will, but extremely ill-educated. I can't do this for long because the teachers, given the way in which they have developed, cannot believe that the ideas that I am giving are any good at all. The workshops given by NGOs or the government are so different from what I say. If they start obeying me, everything will be ruined. If there is going to be democracy in the world, the largest sectors are the rural poor in the South. And there is no other way of doing this. More and more I feel that I don't want to give time and skill to the resource-rich. My teaching in the United States is no longer filled with the kind of enthusiasm I had during the eighties. I tell my students that. On the other hand it is fieldwork for me, to study the ignorance of the advanced student who wants to do good. I am of course seduced by the comfort and money there, and to have this money is useful if one is as quixotic as I am in the other work that I do. What is also useful in the United States is New York. I love New York and this is a contradiction in my life. I am a real New Yorker. (edited by Linda Wallace) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 26.0 <nettime> interview with catherine david by marleen stikker Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 27 Jul 1997 14:40:09 +0200 (MET DST) Bandwidth in the Context of Contemporary Art An Interview with Catherine David By Marleen Stikker At Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel July 15, 1997 http://www.documenta.de/workspace http://www.waag.org/bandwidth Catherine David is artistic director of Documenta X. Marleen Stikker is co-director of the Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam. Marleen Stikker: We have been doing quite a bit of research these last days on the topic of bandwidth. Being here, it is nice to see that our type of work fits very well into this Documenta. Lots of projects here seem to be works-in-progress, not so much finished, fixed art objects like paintings or sculptures. Is this particularly your taste or it is a general development we all have to get used to? CD: If you look at the old articulations of the exibition, it is not so new to be attentive to certain phenomena and to articulate this esthetically. On the other hand, it is the task of Documenta to be attentive to contempory developments. If I were asked to work for MoMa or Beaubourg, it would be a little different. Some people who are deeply against the absence of what they used to identify as paintings and sculpture, are not very aware of the tradition of Documenta. Those artforms are existing as a phenomenology. I am still able to recognize what is a painting and what is a sculpture. But I am afraid that it is not relevant if want to understand the cultural articulations of many artists to-day. This Documenta is in good timing with the moment. If we want to consider the state of the world, to name things, before making final decisions, it is interesting to deal with what the world is like now. Of course this speaking of the world, what you do here, is a position, a priority. Globalisation is not a dream thought, it is not a fashion, it is a reality. It is a collection of economic, political and cultural phenomena, which have certain positive and challenging aspects and other ones which are negative and dangerous. The whole idea of the Hybrid Workspace, connected to the 100 days program, and sometimes in polemical relation to the exhibition, was to speak more openly about the world, and not to use globalisation as an alibi. MS: I understood that Workspace was asked not to put artworks on the walls. It was set up as a workspace, not as an exhibition space. Is this an important distinction for you? CD: My position was clear, to have no art on the walls and not to use the art alibi as an authorisation of the Workspace. I know some of my collegues are not sharing this position. I don't care, because if you look carefully at young artists' works, the radicallity stops when they are confined to an art space. The space is now articulating the notion of information and discussion, in connection with contemporary research and positioning. I did not feel the necessicity to have artistic alibis on the walls. We have enough images, we have enough text and information. It did not turn out as a the design showroom. But the way the groups are now using the space speaks for the designer and the understanding she had of the project. MS: We, at the Society for Old and New Media, work a lot with artists and designers. But we do not consider ourselves an art institute anymore. Many people have left the art discourse because they do not know how to cope with the art discussions. Would you like them to return? Should the art discourse be reanimated? CD: It is up to you to decide if you are in or out. Most of the works in this Documenta are testifying in favor of an antropological approach of the world. It is not necessary to be anti Beaux Arts. The Beaux Arts corresponded to a specific historical moment. Many of the artists have been preoccupied by a radical critique of hierarchies and specific connoisseurs of competence. If people are so preoccupied by making a strict definition between art and non-art, one answer could be a sentence by Fahlstroem, probably thirty years ago, "When Tosca is dying, it is not on stage." We are very busy making critical distinctions. I am surprised that people are not a bit more attentive and faithfull to the tradition of Documenta, which had never been to be an art fair or a consensus hall space, where anything goes. MS: Never before (at a Documenta) have there been so many different forms of presentations: lectures, films, video, radio, internet and here, the Hybrid Workspace. Yet at the same time you are having a clash with the media. Some have made very personal, violent attacks against you. CD: People are disappointed, they do not have the usual eagerness. It is difficult to think for themselves, to consider phenomenas with their own tools. We have never worked with media, to answer your question. It is stupid to see new media as the devil or as the panacee which will solve all problems. In this Documenta, we did not privilege at all the 'exhibitionism' of media. We do have heavy-duty techno-logistics, but that is not the first thing you see in the show. The question is not new. We could go back to the historical debate about photography, around the turn of the 20th century. One could mention Walker Evans or Rossellini, who did a lot for the reinvention of the human body, as much, or even more than many painters. Or Jean-Luc Godard, or 'Level Five' by Chris Marker. This film is all about computers, human memory, and it is one of the most powerfull contemporary works on the notion of crime, the crime of Okinawa. MS: In the Documenta-Halle, the 'Kino', the works of some Net- artists are presented. Normally, this work is viewed within a Net-context, but here they are presented of-line. So they have become frozen artworks. Has this been done on purpose, in order to stop visitors surfing, reading their e-mail, or looking at Playboy? You wanted them to stick to the context of Documenta. But some of these artworks are indeed organisms, which are functioning best within their 'natural' environment, the Internet. This type of communication art is not ready yet? CD: First, this was the decision of the curator, Simon Lamuniere, to have frozen screens, and not to have people using the computers as telephones. This was an esthetic and also an economic decision. Secondly, there is also a problem with artists working with the Net: why are they so easily restituting the museum and the object imitation in such a mobile medium? The most complex and challenging work on the Net, and the only one which is not frozen, is the 'Equator Project' by Philip Pocock and others. MS: The Bandwidth-project here is trying to make power structures visible which are invisible to most of us. Saskia Sassen spoke in her lecture about the privatization of public space. There is no accountability anymore. Do you see the public space being more and more endangered? CD: The bandwidth problem is one example of this global phenomenon of the privatization of public space. I can't come up with a solution. Yet I am not too anxious. Maybe, the figures shown here about the economic power behind all this are surprising to many people, especially here in Germany, where one is so used to the Habermas distinction between the public and private space. But it is no longer helpful to extend to the outside the bourgeois distinction between the pubic, which is salon, and the private , being the bedroom. People are surprised if you tell them that the atrium of a bank or a shopping mall is privatized public space, occupied by private police. The same hols true for a street full of advertisements: it is not a public space anymore. You can discuss this space, being invaded, both ideologically and physically, which is becoming invisible also, dealing with virtual qualities. This is what makes the art of the seventies problematic, because it was done by people who believed that because they were acting outside of the museum walls they were automatically critical, succesfull or efficient. MS: The sphere of the private, the livingroom and the bedroom, is now also being invaded by home shopping channels. Your home is becoming one big push button, saying 'Buy!'. This is the cyber-orgasm of people who are now putting money into these new technologies. So even your home will not be private anymore. CD: Yes, but people are developing ways of protection, barriers against this. At the same time you can discuss what kind of public space the big American museums are, since they are completely controlled by trustees. What kind of public space is this? Who is deciding about the collection, etc? This is one of the most complex phenomena at the end of this century, this permanent renegociation of private and public space. Related to this, are many recent, social phenomena where people are creating new forms of intimacy, sometimes under severe circumstances of deprivation. MS: New technologies also give people the possibility to become broadcasters themselves. Artists also want to be producers and distributors themselves, and not be dependent anymore on the 'sacred' art institutions. We here demand more bandwidth, but what effect will this have on the art industry? CD: The art scene is full of symbolical and imaginary order. And I am afraid that the fetish is a very strong component of this scene. The disappearance of galleries and museum will not happen overnight. I am not so mechanistic, but I do believe that a more open and accelerated circulation of information and activities could diminish the priviliged place of certain institutions. Again, this is not new. Works from the sixties and seventies have this dimension of the activity, the development of a process, which has been, at the best frozen, at worse completely erased by a certain way of presentation. The reproduction/registration of these works are sometimes more understandable, more accessible in the form of tapes and pictures. With the development of the culture industry, it became more and more obvious that the museums became places of cultural consumerism, without quality, quality in the meaning of Robert Musil. Without the power of imposing a specific quality. As an alternative, the phenomenology of the place could answer the phenomenology of the work. This is much more challenging then going on building boxes again. Museums today tend to become a space of order and power at the very moment all this is vanishing. As far as I know, a museum means a permanent space which is hosting a collection which has been put together by a group of persons according to a set of rules. You now have many places which are called museums, but where nothing is permanent. The building was so expensive that there was no money left for the collection. We should perhaps going back to the first idea of the museum, the one in Alexandria, which was well known as a meeting place of the Muses. I am afraid we do not have Muses anymore, but the concept of the museum as a meeting place, which is a little distant from the immediate resolutions, which is for me the definition of a critical space, could be, again, a very interesting possibility. MS: A last question: would you like to have more bandwidth yourself? CD: Is it very important to have more bandwidth, but we should also think of alternatives, of ituations where there are no computers at all. To take a step back, and asking also for more "bare feet-technology". And again, not being mechanistic. Access might be a human right, but we should also be able to articulate the dialectics of those without access. (transcribed and edited by Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 27.0 <nettime> interview with ariella azoulay Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 28 Jul 1997 15:03:16 +0200 (MET DST) Jeruzalem, the Internet and 'other spaces' An interview with Ariella Azoulay By Geert Lovink Outside Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel July 23, 1997 Ariella Azoulay is the director of the Program for Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Camera Obscura School in Tel Aviv and studies in Paris. For many years she was director of the Bograshov art space in Tel Aviv. Her article "Clean Hands" appeared in the documents 3 publication. In her 100 days lecture, Ariella Azoulay spoke about Jerusalem and the multipicity of spaces in this city. She also showed the work of the two Israeli artists Aya and Gal who now have a website where they present their work being shown at Documenta X. You can see and haer the 100 days lecture of Ariella Azoulay at: http://www.mediaweb-tv.de/dx/0721/gaeste_frame_e.html Geert Lovink: In your 100 days lecture you mentioned Foucault's concept of the 'other space'. You related this to virtual spaces. On the other hand you spoke about a very real space: Jerusalem. Has this 'other' space an in-between character or is it indeed different? Ariella Azoulay: I wanted to ridicule this concept. Foucault used this term for the first time in the sixties, in a lecture he gave to architects. He referred to specific types of spaces -- prisons, schools, etc. He wanted to describe spaces which exist within the social space, but which have another logic. The way you enter is different, there is control over the borderlines, control by subjects, by people. I think Foucault missed something here; maybe he could not think of it. I am using the hand as a main framework and perspective to analyse activities within spaces. The hand is an accessory which permits one to go in, and disconnect from spaces and objects. When I am speaking of the hand as a slave of two masters, I am putting the subject and the space in relation to allow navigation between spaces, objects and people. In this way, I am deconstructing the subject as a metaphysical entity. As I am speaking about space, everything can become 'heterotopia'. The subject is also a part of other spaces. Sometimes my hand is part of this space, sometimes it is in the (virtual) other space. We cannot create clear demarcations. We are, in fact, speaking of a network of relations which permits the interference between objects, subjects and spaces. GL: In opposition to your view is the idea that cyberspace is a utopia, a dislocated environment one emigrate to and have multiple, fluid identities. Disconnected from the body, the pure spirit can reside there, forever. In your model there are many more layers and you switch from the one to next. AA: The fantasies of the cyber ideologues are exactly what I am trying to escape from. In my view there are no parallel worlds. I am all the time in-between these worlds. In our postmodern reality we are constantly in-between. But we have so much ideology that pretends we can choose: to be in this or that world. It is the ideology of either-or. In reality or in cyberspace. Do I want to be a consistent subject with a history and biography or do I want to invent myself all the time? I cannot be both. We are compelled to make choices, to affirm our subjectivity. I try to escape this. For me, the choice is in the navigation through multiple spaces and moments. GL: For the virtual class and its digital artisans, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians seems so ancient and anachronistic. The fight over such a small piece of land -- and geography in general -- seems so futile, so atavistic. I am not so sure if this is the right view on things. But there is some truth in it. The future frontiers in cyberspace and the conflicts over land seem so distant from each other. AA: It is a very delicate question. You should behave in a prudent way. I must be very careful not to play into the hands of the government by saying that land is not important. If not, then why should we give the Palestinians the land? If national identity is not important, why then should we recognize the Palestinians as a national subject? I find myself obliged to be in favour of national identity because this might be the only way to stop the occupation. But of course I cannot believe in it. GL: It is said that the gap within Israeli society is growing between those who live in very modern circumstances and others who pretend to live out of the present, in some imaginary, religious time frame. AA: Most Israelis are living under postmodern conditions. They are completely intertwined in the Western networks of globalization. At the same time, many of them want to impose an ideology which is in conflict with their own daily practice. They are selling arms to Micronesia. The moment you pick up the phone, you are living two identities. You are here and your voice is there. Your identity is not one entity. When it comes to history and national identity, they want to impose one story and erase the different, other spaces in order to homogenize the story. Today we are facing the conflict between the heterogeneous spaces and practices in which we are living, all of us, and the desire for the one homogeneous space and identity. GL: In your lecture, you urged us to look at the present of the city of Jerusalem. Only then might we get away from the homogenoeus claims of those who are either captured in the past or those who are feverishly preparing for the Messiah who might arrive tomorrow. AA: What is paradoxical here is that while I am speaking in favour of 'other spaces', it seems like I am utopian. But the heterogeneous spaces are present; a great variety of relationships exists, even between Israelis and Palestinians. It is impossible to speak about variety. We have to describe everything within this big paradigm of the conflict. The 3000 years of the existence of the Israeli presence in Jerusalem and the many centuries of Islam presence are metaphysical subjects. Beyond the concrete world. But since the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the birth of national identity, we are living under the regime of the subject. The subject is a metaphysical entity which does not live in the present. When I see people on the street, I do not see subjects. But we are all the time called to affirm ourselves as subjects who know to choose, as if we were outside of the world. Subjectivity is what prevents us from seeing our presence in the present. We do not have any authorship of our actions. We are acting on the world and we are being acted upon by the world. All the time you are trying to observe where there is an 'ouverture', in order to multiply the space where you are living in, not to reaffirm the one space of your subjectivity which is beyond the world. GL: What is the role of the Internet in all this? Has the hype arrived in Israel? AA: I have no statistics. There is more and more interest. I know some artists who are working with the Net, like Aya and Gal. There is a magazine now called 'Captain Internet'. In the art world it did not arrive in a big way. The hegemonic Israeli art is painting. For me it is interesting to see how this CD-ROM installation of Aya and Gal is looked upon here in Kassel. It was conceived as a driving tour around the YMCA-Tower in Jerusalem. Their 'other space' is now transplanted into the space of Europe, of globalization, spaces evoked very loudly in the Documenta. The passage of the work from Jerusalem to Kassel only underlines the impossibility of the one point of view, which is the view from above, from the outside. (edited by David Hudson) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 28.0 <nettime> interview with luchezar boyadjiev Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 29 Jul 1997 11:38:21 +0200 (MET DST) How to turn your liability into an asset Contemporary art and the political and economic crisis in Bulgaria An Interview with Luchezar Boyadjiev By Geert Lovink Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel June 20, 1997 Luchezar Boyadjiev (Sofia, 1957) is working currently as an artist. His background is studies in art history and theory, pursued both in Bulgaria and the United States. Recently he had shows at the 4th Istanbul Biennial, Chicago (Beyond Belief in the Museum of Contemporary Art), Liverpool (at LEAF 97), in Koeln and Berlin, and the anual exhibition of the Soros Foundation in Plovdiv. Geert Lovink: Could you explain us the current situation in Bulgaria from your point of view? - For a long time, the Bulgarian communists have stayed in power, after having changed their faces. Recently, a lot has happened in South-East Europe... the demonstrations in Serbia, the first non-communist government in Romania, anarchy in Albania... What is the reason of the apparently unique position of Bulgaria? Luchezar Boyadjiev: The more time passes after 1989, the more differences there are between each country in Eastern Europe. In the past, Bulgaria had a privileged position, in terms of being one of the closest allies of the Soviet Union. The country enjoyed an almost free supply of raw materials, crude oil, electricity. An utopian situation, having no worry about how to produce and make a living for its citizens. Now, it looks as if time has stopped after 1989. We realized this only recently. On the surface, a democratic reform took place. A free-market economy was introduced, of which I am not a fan, but which seemed to be the only way out of the deadlock. As it turned out, there is no capitalism, so consequently, there is no opposition to capitalism. This applies also to the social situation. A redistribution of the old money of the regime is now taking place among its loyal followers who are now top bankers or mafia leaders. This is not capitalism, it is Monte-Carlo money. Easy come, easy go, no re-investments. In the 1994-1996 period there was a full-fledged socialist government in power which had no agenda whatshowever. It supported the infrastructure of the organized crime. At the end of 1996 there was a severe banking crisis. This government was sticking to the state owned property, lending money to non-productive sectors in order to hold down the social unrest. The result was hyper- inflation, each day new rates were issued, five or ten times higher than the day before, a situation other countries had been through five or six years ago. This situation resulted in a lot of street unrest in January and February, which started with people breaking into the parliament. GL: It has been said that the protests in Sofia were inspired by those in Belgrade. Through the television images one got the impression of a large, diverse and creative movement. LB: The situation in Belgrade was totally different because in Serbia there were legitimate elections and the results were simply not recognized by the governing power. In Bulgaria there were no elections. People went out on the streets simply because they could not take it any longer. Given the quality of life, if I can permit this expression, you can either fuck or eat. You can not at the same time buy condoms and meat. In those weeks there was a great feeling of unity on the streets. It turned out that there was a new generation of students. Unlike the 89 generation, the new students are not leaving the country. They want to stay, work and have a decent life. They are fully aware that no matter who comes to power, they will be corrupt. Like Jenny Holzer's slogan: 'Abuse of power comes as no surprise'. These students will go on strike again. As of July 1st Bulgaria will have lost its independance. It will be put under the control of the International Monetairy Fund. We are going to have a currency board and the Leva will be tied to the German mark. It is going to be hard. But ironically, it is a way of having a tangible feeling that somehow there is a relation to the world. All East-European countries want to become part of NATO or the European Community, or of both. No one is inviting Bulgaria, yet we are still discussing the possibility to join in. There is this utopian feeling that all things will change overnight and everything will be allright. So there are illogical emotions towards Western Europe and towards the rudimentary remains from the distant past, like the former monarch, who showed up in Sofia a year ago, with huge masses on the street, simply crying on the streets. But he never returned - clever guy. GL: The media situation in Bulgaria seems to be mixed: lots of radio stations, software piracy, loosening control of the State over television, some Soros publishing activities, combined with a considirable amount of chaos. Is this correct? LB: Absolutely. After 89 the student TV-programme Kuckkuck made a perfect simulation of a news announcement concerning a nuclear acident on the Danube river. It was so convinving that people behaved just like after Tchernobyl. This programme was immediately stopped. The state channels became more and more commercialized. The few private channels are also not of much help either. The only usefull media are some private, independant radio stations. Recently, there was a report in Nettime about software piracy in Bulgaria. Of all the Comecon-countries (the former Sovjet equivalent of the EC), Bulgaria was allocated the task to do develop computers. Funny enough a factory for hardware was built in the village of our former dictator, just to show how progressive he was. The computers they produced were not of high quality.But there were a lot well educated programmers, which were not allowed to work on their own programs. Industrial espionage was heavily encouraged and the Bulgarian spies were given the task to get hold of software. That led to programmers not working on their own programs but breaking into other people's programs. As a sort of revenge they created a lot of computer viruses. Some of those are still around. That tradition continues: a group of youngsters in the Black Sea city of Varna was arrested recently. They managed to steal the codes from credit cards of tourists. They used these cards to order computer parts through the internet in the United States. They were so confident that they gave their own home addresses for the parts to be delivered. Till somebody got a Christmas card from a company he did not know at all, thanking its best customers. That's how it was traced back. GL: What the current influence of computers and new media on the arts and culture? LB: It is growing. Recently, three media labs opened in Sofia. In the past it was stagnating. Now this is, again, a substitute for a physical reality. When you have a deficiency of the physical reality, you have some hopes that in the virtual reality you may find some compensations. For example, in Bulgaria there is no museum of contemporary art, for the good or the bad. One could make probably make a virtual museum and appropriate some existing space, make a CD-ROM, a website somewhere. Almost like a computer game. Video is also compensating for the lack of possibilities. It is a symptom of crisis and of a utopian hope. GL: Now that the production is almost at ground zero and the country is bankrupt, virtuality seems the only solution. Is this what you are saying? And what is the role of the artist in all this? LB: Everything that could be sold is being sold and this is the only way to make fresh cash, as they say. Bulgarians have this survival capability, which is very high. The absurdity is taking place on many levels, not only in the media, the economy or the social situation. Concerning art, in the past in Bulgaria there was no dissident movement. The regime found flexible ways of accomodating deviations in the sphere of art. Non-conventional art started in the mid-eighties. It was not underground by any definition. You cannot really say that it is backward. In any case, there are not more than 25 to 30 people working in the field of contemporary art. Then comes in the Soros Foundation and its Centers for Contemporary Art. When the Center in Sofia was about to be opened, in early 1994, the Soros Foundation itself had changed. George Soros had given more authority to the local branches. The Sofia Center is an outcome of this bigger power of the local branch. It was established by the local office, not by the international network, Suzy Meszoly and the headquarters in New York. The good thing is that it has more programs, related to theatre, music, literature, not only visual arts. The bad thing is that it was quite provincial. It took them four years to make more relevant exibitions. Bulgarian art is always first and foremost content-oriented art. It does not really matter what the medium is. The message is one of absurdity. How to turn a liability into an asset. The best Bulgarian art deals with this aspect. A liability in terms of inferiority, identity or provincial complexes, is turned into a bombastic statement or one sort or another. GL: How did the artists you know responded to the current economic and political crisis? They responded in a very direct way. For about two months, we had a special meeting at 4 p.m. each day, in front of parliament. Artists would meet and have a lot of fresh air, jump up and down and demonstrate. We used cans full of coins to produce a lot of noise. The big change compared to 89 is that people, artists including, can change things. After these seven years of having simulated reforms, without actual change, people all of the sudden became dissidents. They lost all their feelings of nostalgia for the security of the past. Unfortunetely that also implies to the word socialismm which is compromised in many ways. A new party was founded in the winter and is already called in the parliament 'the Euroleft'. It brings together former socialists, liberals and intellectuals. It is a significant sign that very soon there will be the possibility to name things with the proper name. Soon it will be possible to work on alternatives and create progressive, radical movements, without being immediately branded a communist. GL: Will the World Bank also take over the branch of contemporary art? You have been stating this in the catalogue 'Menschenbilder - Photo und Videokunst aus Bulgarien', an exhibition organized by the IFA-galery in Berlin, held in february-march 1997. LB: Traditionally, Bulgaria has been in and out of its own history, as well as in and out of European History, as if it was a supermarket. The country has always been performing better when it was not independant. Whenever it was part of a larger empire, be that the Byzantine , the Ottoman, or the Sovjet Empire, or an ally to Germany in two World Wars and now (it has tied itself up to) the German mark... My only suspicion is that we have always tended to side with the losers. I don't mean to offend the Germans, but I would hate to see this happen again. If you are familiar with the Moscow conceptional circle of the late eighties and early nineties, approximately over a hunderd people... The only people that remained as a presence in contemporary art in the West are Kabakov and to a certain extend Dimitri Prikov and the Medical Hermenetics. There is a lot of interest and the potential for reciprocal exchange. The reason is that there is no infrastructure in Russia. The same holds true in Bulgaria. There is interest for not more than two artists at a time. If it is ever there it is stable because it is based on individual artists. We certainly cannot sustain reciprocal exchange. We do not have any infrastructure to speak of. Outside the Soros Center there is hardly any sponsorship for art. The annual budget of the Soros Center is probably ten times larger than that of the Ministry of Culture. So I developed the idea to have an international curatorial board, to control contemporary art in Bulgaria, like the currency board. It would be easy to fill up an exhibition hall. Than you start sending information, right now the most important aspect: exchange of information. Not necessarily for promotional purposes. Just to keep the communication lines open. Every visitor coming to Bulgaria is influencing the situation there, in a good and in a bad sense. People tend to be disoriented afterwards. To avoid this problem, we could have an international board. Would you like to join? (edited by Patrice Riemens) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 29.0 <nettime> interview with Tom Keenan Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 1 Aug 1997 16:34:55 +0200 (MET DST) Note: Hallo from Workspace. At this moment the group 'Deep Europe' is here. Besides this, we concentrate on the newsgroups which are already operational at http://www.documenta.de/workspace. Please join us there. This is also an experiment for a (possible) new interface for the nettime community. From then on we will have many parallel newsgroups, not just this one channel of the mailing list. The ultimate aim will be to serve our critics, the poor ecologists that suffer so much from the info overload disease. In the future they will no longer feel the pain of deleting valuable documents. They can surf through the newsgroups and feel free and healthy! - Geert ----------- Media Wars and the Humanitarian (non-)Interventions An Interview with Tom Keenan By Geert Lovink July 12, 1997 At Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel "Thomas W. Keenan teaches at the Institute for English Literature and Media Theory at Princeton University. He has translated the works of philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault and is the author of significant articles on deconstruction and postmodernism. He has expressed his views on current topics such as AIDS, armed conflicts, urbanism, new technologies, multiculturalism in the age of globalization, etc. He contributed to the catalogue of an exhibition at the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona with an article on the future of the museum as an institution. His most recent work, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (1997), has a decidedly political orientation. Keenan is presently writing a book on humanitarianism and the role of the mass media, based on the media coverage of United States military intervention in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia-Herzegovina." (official documenta info) Tom Keenan was one of the organizers of the 'Data Conflicts' conference on (new) media and politics in Eastern Europe which took place in Potsdam in December 1996. Tom's 100 days lecture "Publicity and Indifference: Live from Sarajevo" is available on real video. He's promised to send the text of the lecture to nettime: http://www.mediaweb-tv.de/dx/0712/gaeste_frame_e.html Geert Lovink: At this moment the bandwidth campaign is going on here. What is your view of this claim? Tom Keenan: It is a good idea to stress the topic of the politics of cyberspace. Not merely the ritual formulations about the need for universal access, which has become a slogan in the United States. Not just 'We Want More Bandwidth' but 'Bandwidth' as such. Last night, Saskia Sassen spoke about electronic space and the formation of new claims. She talked about a host of new political actors, both of the corporate multinational type and the local disadvantaged groups. But I was troubled by her notion of presence, which I understood as the public space, the city, as a space of presence into which actors enter and present themselves. But the idea of 'self-presentation' brings up all the questions of the Self, identity and essence. 'Because I am who I am, I make this demand for articulation, expression, access... bandwidth.' After 30 years of philosophical criticism, the fabled deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, maybe we have developed new ways of [defining] what a claim is. For me 'We Want' means: precisely because I don't have and take for granted something that is mine as a naturally given posession. Because it is not here now, I want it. That is a claim without any ground or basis in the present. It is a projection, a desire, articulated in relation to something absent. It does not mean that I just want it for me. It would be an achivement, an attainment, a conquest to get bandwidth. It will be the object of political struggle. It will be a creation, not something which was already yours, but which you just did not have yet. It will cause trouble, it will invent something, distrupt; it will fabricate something new. GL: What will be the topic of your 100 days lecture? TK: Tonight I will be talking about the role of the television news media in the conflict in Bosnia. We now understand that fighting takes place not just on the street, between bunkers, with artillery, but with the 'artillery of the press'. The media as weapon. I am trying to understand two conflicting interpretations of the role of media in contemporary warfare. One school bases its claim on the Gulf War and the conflict in Somalia. People understand this as the causal power of images. If I show something on television, then something is bound to happen. Sarajevo seem to present the counter to that argument. The more things were shown on television, the less anything happpened. There was this notion that television induced a narcosis, a stupor or voyeurism, which deprived us of the capacity for action, rather than spurring us. An example would be Snipers Alley in Sarajevo where several cameras and reporters of the international news media waited for people who were certain to be shot if they walked across this street in daylight. Both the camera team and the UN was in the same voyeuristic position as we were. There is a generalized pleasure in viewing. A strange kind of intervention. One has a sense here of an omnipresence of media as entertainment, even for the so-called victims. GL: The War in Bosnia did not have a mobilizing effect. People could not identify themselves with any one of the parties. They all seemed victims and guilty at the same time. There was a similarity between the 'passive' behaviour of the television viewers and the incapability of France, the UK and the UN to stop this war. TK: There is a direct analogy between the semi-distanced position that defines that of the news media. That is part of a 'journalistic' ideology and self-understanding to not get too involved. Certainly in Bosnia journalists played with this. A lot of them became less than detached. A feeling of involvement emerged, but structurally, the position of the media remained analogous to a military force that intervenes on humanitarian grounds, claiming strict neutrality among all the parties. We treat this one the same as that one, which is exactly the structure of the camera which looks at all potential subjects with a leveling force. It does not distinguish between the images that it presents. We need to refine the notion of passivity. There is no such thing as passivity or inaction. The arrival of the cameras, like the arrival of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of NGOs, relief agencies, Red Crosses. All of those interventions transformed the situation on the ground and on the screen. In the same way as the presence of the camera induces certain events. There is a magnetic appeal there for things to happen. Likewise, the passivity of the humanitarian, inadvertently, leads to a transformation of the situation. GL: Still, we have to face the fact there was no large anti-war movement as there was in the days of Vietnam. TK: The outcry did not occur. What energy there was, was immediately rechanneled into a humanitarian response. Rather than saying, 'We need to intervene, we need to stop the genocide', we said, 'Poor, suffering people need food, help, shelter, tents. There was an opportunity, a vehicle of expression, but it inadvertently become a pro-war movement. It began prolonging the war by stabilizing certain zones of conflict, by rewarding the clearing of populations on ethnic grounds. By financing and feeding, the humantarian efforts rendered unnecessary a military and political intervention and offered an alibi. GL: The situation in Bosnia is contained now, but a lot of the issues are still open, not only the media question. New facts are being brought up, as in the case of Srebrenica, where the Dutch battalion 'witnessed' the slaughter of thousands of civilians. Or the topic of the rising power of NGOs and their involvement in those conflicts. TM: It is interesting that this very weekend we see once again the return of the international news media to Bosnia in the days following the arrest of one indicted criminal and the killing of another. The purest indicator being the return to Sarajevo of Christiane Amanpour of CNN. There is the story that in the Central Operations Room of the Pentagon there is a map, with little pushpins, to keep constant track of Christiane Amanpour. As a military event, the location of this reporter is considered an item of national security. NGOs represent a very radical step: the notion that international politics can be conducted by non-state actors. Foreign relations are no longer the province only of states, diplomats, militaries or of transnational corporations. Other parties can cross borders in an organized way and intervene. The risk that brings with it is the ideology of humanitarian neutrality or non-partisanship. When they intervene they always take sides which gives the most to the dominant regional force, the bad actor. One has to compromise with the dominant power. What is astonishing is their profound immunity from critique. If there is a contemporary sacred cow, it is humanitarianism. The only ground, at least in the United States, for criticizing a humanitarian agency is that it wastes money. For every dollar we gave to save the children, 50% of it went to pay staff. In fact, many organisations are too effective. Their effectivity consists in handing over relief goods to the parties that are by and large responsible for causing the shortage of food and medicine. And in the willfull blindness for the non-intervention intervention strategy. That is where a critique would have to begin. To their credit, there are maybe one or two brave human rights organisations. I would mention African Rights in London, which published in November 1994 an important and still underrecognized white paper called 'Humanitarianism Unbound', which tries to understand the lack of accountability of NGOs in crises like Bosnia or Rwanda. There is an increasing state-like behaviour of non-state actors. One of the places to organize this kind of critique would be around the notion of 'independant media'. We are in a conceptual bind right now. We have inherited the notion from the campaigns against communist dictatorships where the state was seen as absorbing or preventing the creation of any public sphere or civil society. Western or transnational agencies invented the notion of independance in relation to the state, which was seen as a totalizing force. Independent media became simply anti-state press agencies. Now the number of actors in the former communist states has multiplied in a way which is hard to calculate. UN, EC or Soros have a very hard time understanding what independant might mean in relation to a state which is no longer simply totalitarian. In Rwanda, which was not a communist state but a one party state for a long time, independant media were created and fostered after the 1991 agreement between the warring parties. Roughly 90% of the money went to incalculable extreme political movements, mostly radio, run by the most militantly fundamentalist (Hutu) militia. Year after year, there were reports back to the Untited Nations about the success of the independant media project. Many voices were represented, etc. And it was precisely those media that fostered, and in some cases even organized genocide in Rwanda. (edited by David Hudson) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 30.0 <nettime> Interview with Ken Jordan geert nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 08 Mar 2004 15:57:53 +0000 ASN: Reinventing Social Networks Interview with Ken Jordan By Geert Lovink Mid 2003 a wave of excitement over something called the Planetwork conference in San Francisco reached me. Apparently an alternative and innovative attempt was under way to redefine the Internet, a medium so much plagued by corporate and state control, trolls, spam and viruses. Planetwork was founded in 1998 by Erik Davis, Jim Fournier, Elizabeth Thompson and David Ulansey. It is a network in which activists mingle with technologists. It’s aim has been to connect issues of global ecology and information technology. Politically speaking Planetwork is a civil society initiative that strategically positions itself as part of Silicon Valley, while at the same time celebrating the Seattle protests against corporate dominance. A typical post-dotcom phenomena, one could say. They are not so much driven by selfish libertarian greed, as once propagated by Wired. Rather, they are an incarnation of the hippie values and ideas that once circulated in the Well. I know, in California such distinctions may seem problematic, but it is nonetheless important to stress that there is still, or again, a progressive agenda within the IT-sector. The first Planetwork conference took place in May 2000. As a result of this meeting a LinkTank group was formulated, resulting in a ‘white paper’ entitled The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next-Generation Internet. The Augmented Social Network (ASN) is a proposal for a ‘next generation’ online community that would strengthen the collaborative nature of the Internet, enhancing its ability to act as a public commons that engages citizens in civil society. How can the Internet revitalize democracy? ASN is not a piece of software or a standard as such but rather a techno-social contract. One could also see the proposed network of trust as a set of rules, a (belief) system hardwired in solid social relationships. This ‘meta’ aspect of ASN doesn’t make it easy to understand—or to develop. The paper was presented at the PlaNetwork conference "Networking a Sustainable Future" in June, 2003. It's available as a PDF at http://asn.planetwork.net/whitepaper.html. An HTML version is at: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_8/jordan/index.html. New York-based Ken Jordan is one the ASN authors (together with Jan Hauser and Steven Foster). Ken is a pioneer of Web-based multimedia. In 1995 he led the development of SonicNet.com, one of the first online music zines. In 1996 he was involved in the general interest zineWord.com and the action sports site Charged.com. In 1999 he co-founded the alternative global news portal MediaChannel.org. He is currently a writer and digital media consultant. In arts and theory circles he is known for Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, an anthology (co-edited with Randall Packer) that traces the ‘secret’ history of digital multimedia. With Ken Jordan I discussed the call for ‘trust’ and the question of sustainable social networks. Is the Internet consensus culture cure or disease? Instead of merely posing the ‘power’ question, like in the case of ICANN and WSIS, the ASN initiative points at exciting conceptual realms out there in which civil society is not just a user, not a victim of governments and Microsofts. Instead, it positions itself in the driver’s seat and takes place at the drawing board of the network society. GL: Ken, what motivated you to develop the proposal for an Augmented Social Network? KJ: The way information is organized, who has access to it, and under what circumstances access is permitted -- these questions are central to how power manifests in society. Digital technology is already transforming the way we engage with information. Our communications tools are shifting the political landscape in ways far more profound than what is suggested by, on the positive side, MoveOn.org, or, on the negative side, Carnivore and its intrusive, controlling peers. But while the consequences of living in a "network society" have received attention, in your writing and elsewhere, we've barely started to discuss how digital technology could evolve, over time, to contribute more effectively to democracy. Software, by its nature, is programmable. So doesn't it make sense for civil society advocates to ask what we want software to achieve, see if the products available meet those objectives, and, if they don't, attempt to build ones that do? For some reason, especially since the late 1970s, the active assumption has been that business and government will design our digital communication infrastructure for the rest of us. Useful tools, it is assumed, will magically appear. Almost no one pays attention to the public interest issues around our communications tools until after the new technologies are introduced, and their benefits or dangers become clear. Civil society groups like Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and EPIC spend most of their energy reacting to technical innovations that have already been prototyped and released. It has been nearly a decade since the Web ushered in the era of popular digital culture, and we are increasingly aware of the capabilities inherent in information technology. But where are the civil society advocates who are proposing and developing next generation infrastructure and software in the public interest? I mean, not only faster bandwidth (or insuring the protection of freedoms we already have, like downloading media files), but new technology designed to better support democratic engagement in communities and governance. GL: Given the importance of networks in society, and the way that networks contribute to democratic action by challenging traditional concentrations of power, you would expect attention to be given to the design of tools that improve the efficiency of creating human networks. KJ: The Augmented Social Network is meant to be one such attempt. It focuses on the issue of how your identity is represented in the digital space, and what that representation should enable you to do. In particular, it addresses how to find others online with similar, relevant interests or expertise, in a context that engenders trust, so that you can form groups with them more effectively. It's a technical architecture for an Internet-wide system that enables appropriate introductions between people who share affinities through the recommendations of trusted third parties. It is Internet-wide -- rather than a closed, proprietary system -- in order to connect people across divergent social networks. It would also support the distribution of media and the creation of ad-hoc groups using the same Net-wide recommendation system. GL: Could you give me an example of how it works? KJ: We present a number of detailed scenarios in the white paper, but here's a simple example. Suppose you're working on a solar energy project and need to find someone with very specific expertise to answer a difficult question. You post the question to the three solar lists you are a member of, you use Google, but you don't find an answer. The ASN would allow you to pass the question forward through a targeted series of friends-of-friends who are solar experts, in a semi-automated manner, crossing the borders of distinct social networks, vastly increasing your chance of connecting with someone who can help you. Another example: you are looking for someone to help execute a solar energy project in Honduras. You have lined up the funding, but you need an engineer on the ground in Honduras who has experience doing solar projects. The ASN would enable you to connect to an engineer with the appropriate expertise through a series of third party recommendations, so you can feel with some certainty that this person can be trusted. The idea is to take technology that is already developed, that already works, and put it to use in the public interest. It would require the adoption of a set of standards and protocols, and the writing of some software applications. But the ASN is more the repurposing of existing technical systems than the invention of something new. And it would provide crucial functionality to support a wide range of progressive initiatives, from complimentary currencies to alternative media to chaordic (distributed) governance to grassroots organizing. When we presented the ASN at the Planetwork conference in San Francisco last June, its value in all these areas was apparent. GL: Planetwork was a hybrid post dotcom and post 911 conference, that perhaps without GW Bush would not have taken place. Do you agree? It seems like an exciting coalition between technologists and activists. Hopefully more than a nostalgic return of the sixties. KJ: The first Planetwork conference actually took place in May 2000—charged by the energy that followed the WTO protests in Seattle. A number of people involved peripherally with the annual Bioneers conference, which focuses on new environmental technologies that promote sustainability, wanted to bring that work into a dialog with the emerging information technologies. There was a strong, visceral sense, especially after Seattle, that we need to shape a practical alternative to top down, corporate globalization–and that this alternative has to be grounded in emerging technologies. There's been a bias on the American left against computers, in general, and the potential for digital communications to contribute to civil society, in particular. In the popular left imagination, computers start with two strikes against them: they were birthed by the military, and they spread through the relentless marketing of soulless corporations. Moreover, having access to computers meant an additional budget line for progressive groups already stretched too thin -- which implied that they were tools for the privileged. The dot com boom only reinforced this impression, with its emphasis on stock options rather than the public good. For these and other related reasons, there wasn't much contact between progressives working on issues like the environment or global justice, and IT professionals in Silicon Valley. Planetwork deliberately aimed to make links between these two cultures. Some 500 people attended the conference. I wasn't there, but I heard from many who went that it was a galvanizing moment, opening their eyes to possibilities they hadn't considered before. GL: How exactly did Planetwork lead to the ASN proposal? KJ: One of the people there was Brad DeGraf, a pioneer in computer animation. It struck him that what we need is a kind of green, global justice AOL, a communications infrastructure that would enable members to coordinate their actions politically, and aggregate their financial power into a force for change. He proposed this idea to two of the Planetwork organizers, Elizabeth Thompson and Jim Fournier, and various others he thought might be interested, including me. This led to a weekend brainstorming session among the redwoods in Ben Lomand, California, in September, 2000. 25 people attended, a mix of IT professionals, environmental activists, independent media pros, and a couple of experts in socially responsible investments. About two thirds came from the Bay Area, the rest from the East Coast. It was a freewheeling, dynamic conversation -- unlike anything any of us had been part of before. At the time, activists and technologists rarely discussed the blue sky possibilities for digital communications. Of course, by that point environmental groups has started to use the Internet – the success of Seattle was due in good part to email and the Web; the IMC launched during Seattle -- but in these cases activists were using existing tools already common in the business sector. They weren't thinking about next generation development of applications and infrastructure, the way IT people do. At the same time, IT engineers rarely discussed with activists their long term strategic objectives, how they intend to build a movement. GL: Even today we face a gap between digital and activists worlds, isn’t? KJ: This first meeting of the group, affectionately nicknamed the Web Cabal, led to another half dozen convenings in San Francisco and New York over the next year. The initial 25 participants extended to a total of about 50. We quickly moved away from the notion of a centralized, AOL-like infrastructure to exploring different models for a distributed, global, targeted communications network—a next-generation Internet honed to serve civil society. This system would not only provide a platform for activists (and all citizens) to meet, communicate, and organize much more effectively, it would encourage the use of complementary currencies and other alternative forms of exchange. In early 2002, two Cabalists, Jan Hauser and Steven Foster, were asked to write a white paper describing the rough technical architecture such a system would require. While many in the group contributed ideas, Jan and Steve had done most of the heavy lifting to map a practical technical architecture. Jan had been a chief architect at Sun for 15 years, and Steven is the matching technologies expert who did Veronica, the popular pre-Web Internet search engine. At the Planetwork conference, actually, Jan gave a keynote speech that proposed an interactive P2P communications infrastructure as an alternative to centralized, hierarchical, broadcast media. The ASN brought together ideas Jan had been playing with for a while. The two finished a draft in the summer of 2002. I began to write a new version of the white paper in the fall, made the politics overt, added theory and context, while referring to their technical draft and consulting with them and Neil Sieling -- another Cabalista – for feedback. A draft of the paper, titled "The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next-Generation Internet," was circulated to the Web Cabal—now formally named LinkTank— in the spring of 2003, and Jim and Elizabeth decided to make it the centrepiece of the second Planetwork conference, which was set for June. Jan, Steven and I presented the paper there, and it was later published by the web journal First Monday. GL: Where is the ASN initiative at the moment? KJ: The ASN is a blue sky vision for the future of online community. It stakes out some conceptual territory, presenting a civil society vision of how the Internet could evolve -- particularly addressing the issues of Identity and Trust (two packed terms that have a pretty specific meaning in this context). It provides a clear alternative to the dangerous direction the Internet may well be heading in -- a corporate/government panopticon. But it's not enough to stand against digital disempowerment and control; we need to stand *for* something. The ASN shows that by coordinating the writing of standards and protocols between several different, previously separate technical areas (persistent identity, interoperability between community infrastructures, matching technologies, and brokering) you could add a layer of functionality to the Internet that would be greatly in the public interest. The ASN is not a piece of software or a product. Building a single application won't make the ASN come into being. It's not something you can write a business plan around, because the intention is to introduce functionality that is in the public domain (like email). For that reason, it is hard to fund. At least, in today's environment. Remarkably, there is no existing constituency to support IT projects of this scale that serve the needs of civil society. There are no venues, no institutions, where you can get support for a project that looks ahead five years and says: here's how we'd like to see the Internet's infrastructure develop in order to meet the challenges facing democracy. Universities don't support this kind of thing. Foundations don't know how to evaluate proposals for them. Everyone assumes that either: (1) the Internet and its core functionality are complete, the main development phase is over, and the only way it will change over time is to get faster (which of course ignores the history of how the Internet was birthed and evolved, since the type of functionality supported by the Net changed considerably in its early decades; the Web, now considered a core functionality, wasn't introduced until the Net was 20 years old); or (2) industry (or genius hackers like Napster's Sean Fanning) will drive improvements to the Internet, so the public doesn't have to think too much about how it will evolve, because the market takes care of all things (which of course ignores the fact that the Net was initially designed by coordinated teams in the non-profit sector motivated to make something that contributes to the public good). The ASN doesn't require any "new plumbing" in the guts of the Internet. It's a meta-layer, basically, that goes on top of what's already there -- as the Web did. But like other protocols and standards that make up the Internet and its core functionality, it proposes a new set of agreements that, together, would add useful tools to the Net -- things that could increase the Internet's ability to support civil society. We could put together a development program that would lead to the establishment and adoption of the ASN. In fact, we've got a draft of such a plan. But we found that there's no one to send it to. There's no obvious place to go for support. GL: Why isn’t ASN turning to the open source community or see itself part of it? KJ: Open source development is fantastic for some things, and not so great for others. It's a less than ideal environment for the creation of complex systems that require a lot of coordination. Of course, the ASN depends on software that adheres to open standards. But the writing of the code, the development of the standards, requires a dedicated, coordinated team. Which is not something that happens easily on open source, volunteer projects. I'd love a bunch of kick ass programmers to prove me wrong by volunteering to crank ASN code! When we wrote the paper, we hoped that the rationale behind the ASN would motivate the progressive foundations to spring some seed funding. Didn't happen. But what did happen was that the ASN inspired a lot of folks to think in new ways about the civil society implications of our communications infrastructure. Some of these people are developing projects inspired by the ASN. One of the more interesting projects comes out of the Social Science Research Council, spearheaded by Robert Latham. It's not the ASN per se, but it could help lead to the ASN. Another is a complimentary currency initiative called Interra, which uses information technology to help geographic-based communities to make better use of local resources and, at the same time, generate support for civil society initiatives. Greg Steltenpohl, the guy behind Interra, was also part of the Web Cabal. We also know of various commercial and non-profit efforts that intend to introduce aspects of the ASN into online community infrastructures now in development. We're involved with some of them. But how that will turn out is hard to say.... GL: Why do you think identity and trust are the key problems of today? KJ: Online identity is not an issue that we chose. Rather, as they say, it has been chosen for us. There are a number of industry-supported initiatives that intend to bring a market-centric notion of digital identity to the Internet, such as Liberty Alliance and Microsoft's WS-*. Which will win over its competition, and the exact way online identity will be handled, is far from clear. But much energy is now being devoted to setting standards for how individuals will be represented online -- how aspects of your personal history will be aggregated into a persistent, digital identifier of some kind. Most of this stuff is not nefarious, or explicitly about control. Nonetheless, it lends itself to abuses that could threaten democracy. That's not an inevitable consequence, but it warrants concern. It's also worth considering: do we want the Internet to devolve into little more than a virtual shopping mall? If online identity is narrowly designed only to facilitate your behavior as a consumer, and doesn't support the ways you act as an engaged citizen in a democracy, the future of the Net looks pretty bleak. At the moment, there is no civil society voice at the table while these standards are being set -- other than privacy advocates. Of course, privacy-- the securing of our personal information so it is not used without our explicit consent -- is critical. That's a given. But a civil society notion of online identity should do more than just protect privacy. It ought to encourage direct participation by citizens in their communities, and with their government. GL: We managed to get along fine for all these years without a global approach to digital identity. Is it really such a problem? KJ: The pioneers of digital communications, like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, didn't give much thought to identity. Back in the 1960s, Engelbart's oNLine System (NLS) assigned each user a non-transferable identification—it didn't allow for anonymity, nor did Engelbart assume that users would want to be anonymous. Online communications, in the beginning (say, 1965-72), were designed to facilitate trusted relationships between known peers. Most NLS users were based in Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute; later the NLS was extended to other offices, but still every user was known in a broader social context. They were co-workers who knew each other. If someone acted in an untrustworthy fashion online, it led to consequences offline. So much of how we communicate online today came out of the NLS—including key suppositions about how information and identity should be represented in bits. Engelbart somehow assumed that people interacting online would do so in a straightforward, trustworthy manner -- there would be no separation between their online and offline identities, which were fully disclosed, always available. Engelbart's vision is of a system for digital communications that encourages a compassionate, connected society that values collective action, and is based on a high level of mutual trust between collaborators. The NLS was meant to serve groups of people participating openly toward shared objectives. For instance, the oNLine System would support the thousands of people collaborating on the design and manufacture of an airplane—or, more ambitiously, the international community of scientists working on complex problems like global warming. The representation of identity online, in these contexts, is a relatively straightforward matter. For that reason, our digital communication tools give us sophisticated ways to identify and organize documents, but not individuals—even though the NLS (and the Internet, following NLS's example) was intended from the start to connect people to one another as much as it connects people to digital materials. When the Internet was launched in the early 1970s, and Net-wide email came into use, the direct connection between online and offline identify began to fray. It became increasingly easy for people to represent themselves online with identities that were disconnected from their lives offline. Of course, this gave rise to some extraordinarily creative expressions of self—as sociologists like Sherry Turkle have written about. It led to a wide range of emerging social behaviors and artistic forms that are, at the least, valuable—and for some, liberating. But it also lessened the degree of trust associated with online communications, particularly as the number of people using the Internet grew from the thousands, in the 1970s, to the many millions in the 90s. You could no longer assume that the person introducing herself to you online is who she says she is -- as any AOL sex chat participant circa 1992 would attest. GL: In this context, identity may be ambiguous. But that is far from saying trusted interactions don't take place. In fact, it's the opposite. Anonymity becomes a precondition to trust. KJ: In many contexts, of course, this is a fine thing. In fact, anonymity online is one of the medium's great innovations. But there are instances when you do want to have a strong degree of assurance that the person you meet online is who she says she is. For those cases, you don't have many options for verifying identity in a social interaction. But suppose you did. In what ways would you want to be known to others, so you could act as an engaged citizen more effectively? What would you want others to know about you? How would you like that information to be treated? In what ways could digital tools help you find others with whom you could share information and collaborate -- beyond what already exists today? These are the kinds of questions that lie behind the ASN. Online identity is an issue that civil society advocates need to address. It's time to put mind share and resources toward a forward-thinking approach to identity. GL: Might it be better to do without any form of digital identity—and to resist any effort to impose one on the enitre Internet community? KJ: There is an industry and government led juggernaut to establish some form of digital identity -- right now. Today. Digital identity management is a $2 billion a year business, and growing. Corporate tools for milking identity data for possible profit -- including the resale of that data on the open market, and the aggregation of that data in centralized systems -- are becoming very sophisticated. It's worth recalling that most of the uses of this information are benign: retailers keep track of your purchases in order to offer targeted discounts so you keep buying the same brand of toilet paper, for example. But once a system is in place, it can present a slippery slope to abuse. Of course, you could choose to drop off the grid, not have a credit or debit card, never rent a car (with its mandatory GSP device), etc. But for most of the population, that kind of resistance is not an option. It's not even clear that getting off the grid is an effective political response, given the challenges facing the planet. It may be a justifiable personal response, driven by disgust for technocratic consumerism, but it's lousy politics. It doesn't ignite change of the kind necessary to address the problems of six billion increasingly interconnected people. The fact is, the establishment of identity standards is already in full swing. It's happening. But it may not be too late to influence the direction it takes. Once you start to design more sophisticated types of online group interaction (beyond what is common on the Net today), identity inevitably surfaces as an issue to be addressed. You can't facilitate a wide range of trusted interactions without the assurance that the person you meet online is who she says she is. Somehow, her identity has to be verifiable. For that threshold of certainty to be reached, for that mechanism to be in place, most of the concerns people have about the controlling potential of a corrupt identity system will have had to be dealt with. And if you can deal with those concerns, you may as well start to think proactively about what to layer into the system that supports democracy -- because the untapped potential there is tremendous. GL: Some of the ideas of the ASN seem to be present in new flavors of social software. How does the ASN compare to websites like Friendster, LinkedIn, or Orkut? KJ: Frankly, as interesting as some of these sites are, they fall far short of what the ASN would do. They are like small toy versions of the ASN, with relatively limited utility. To begin with, they are not interoperable. They're all "walled gardens." The profile information and the relationships that you accumulate on one site are not transferable to others. In addition, these "walled gardens" tend to have profiles that are narrowly focused around a handful of interests. But if you happen to be expert in several different areas, each of which is addressed by a separate social networking site, useful connections made on one site will not spill over to another. The ASN would make the connection between "friends of friends" Internet-wide—it would connect people across disparate social networks. Secondly, the profile info on these sites is thin. It is not nuanced. The same profile info you hope will attract a date can be read by your mother or your boss (as Danah Boyd points out in an analysis of Friendster). Your digital representation should be context sensitive. Moreover, the profile information on those sites is static. It's not effected by your actions on other websites, by decisions you make during the course of your day, etc. Whereas, a dynamically updated profile would be more accurate and useful. Third, one of the intents behind the ASN is to give you greater control over your own profile information; it's a system for profile management. It calls for a new class of services: identity brokers. These services would manage and update your profile info on your behalf as you instruct them to. Along with the creation of identity brokers should come a "digital bill or rights". You should be able to decide who has access to your profile info and who doesn't. You should own that info. You should be able to manage your "profile accounts" with great flexibility -- trusting the brokers you choose to use. That's not the way it works on these social networking sites, which basically treat the info they have about you as a class of "customer information." Lastly, the social network sites are exclusive, restricted groups. You have to be invited to join by a member. They are as much about keeping people out as making connections between those who are "in." By being Net-wide, the ASN helps to pull borders down, not put them up. The introduction of strangers through trusted third parties becomes something far more interesting when it's available to everyone—like email or web pages—than when it's an exclusive club for a few. GL: Suppose we need one, what would a civil society vision of a global digital identity look like? KJ: What digital technology makes possible--inevitable--is that each of us will have at least one representation of ourselves that is continually present in digital space, acting on our behalf. Digital profiles are not passive. They respond to inquiries; they are interactive by design. We are not used to thinking of our identity as something that we can deliberately construct, but in the digital space, that construction will become increasingly frequent. What kind of attributes would you like to have exposed to others, and in what contexts should they be exposed? Every person should be able to make that choice for his or herself—rather than having it made for us by companies or governments without our approval. Moreover, I have certain interests—in new environmental technologies, for instance, or in experimental theater—which are not addressed by profit-minded industries. Frankly, most of my interests are in quirky, fringe subjects that are essentially ignored by the market. I want to make sure that the systems for digital identity allow me to express those interests -- including my political interests--and to network with others who share them. If we leave it up to the market, those subjects (and the billions of others like them) will simply be ignored. GL: ASN seems like the product of a typical Californian blend of technologists, activists and business people. Is it more than a nostalgic return of the sixties? KJ: I'm not one for nostalgia. But some aspects of the sixties wouldn't be so bad to bring back—like civic engagement, the notions that things can be better than they are and that every citizen is responsible for making it so. My sense, however, is that what's going on today draws as much from the critical theory of the eighties and nineties as it does from the sixties (tho maybe, since I'm "chairman of the board" of the theory publisher Semiotext(e), I'm biased...). Now that we've digested Foucault's critique of power, Baudrillard's dismantling of the "real," and Deleuze & Guattari's invocation of the rhizome, the question remains: what political options do we have before us that can forestall global environmental collapse while engaging citizens more effectively in the democratic process? Information technology offers useful tools that weren't available to previous generations -- tools that could conceivably change the way power operates within groups. To state the obvious: information equals power. Perhaps if information is distributed more effectively, power too could be better distributed throughout society. The notion that it is inevitable that power will aggregate in a few hands, corrupting those who have power, and contributing to a never-ending cycle of cynicism and oppression... maybe it's time to re-examine that assumption, using the critical apparatus shaped by Foucault, Deleuze, and others? It may be possible to apply some of what we've learned from critical theory to the design of new communication tools, which in turn could support new social and political forms. Is it possible to introduce systems of behavior that could keep us from blowing up the planet, while supporting our ability to act as individuals in a free society? It's not clear to me that the answer is a resounding yes. But the question certainly seems worth pursuing. This Spring, Elizabeth Thompson and I will launch a Planetwork Journal -- on the Web, free -- for examining this intersection between IT and governance, alternative economics, environmental technology, etc. Maybe I'm just naive. But, as I just said to my girlfriend, I like to cultivate my naivete. GL: What struck me is the obsession with ‘trust’ amongst peers. Why is that so important? KJ: Trust is the basis of any community. This should go without saying. But for us lefties, it's useful to emphasise the role played by trust, because this focus leads to an appreciation of civic cooperation and the public sphere -- which is quite removed from the dominant, neo-liberal mythology of the lone wolf individual, unfettered by government to pursue profits in the name of progress. Much of this free-market-uber-alles agenda seeks to undermine what's left of the commons, privatizing community assets while asserting that the commons has become obsolete. It's a drive against openness in government and self-sustaining communities. What had once been transparent in a community is put into private hands, and made oblique. By refocusing attention onto trust in society, we bring a deeper appreciation to what we share together, and the aspects of our community that require a collective commitment by all citizens. In face-to-face relations, we have a myriad of ways to measure and engender trust. Online, however, our tools for establishing and maintaining trust are weak. The intent of the ASN is to use digital tools to extend the trust we place in those we know in the flesh to others we do not, in order to organize with them effectively toward mutual goals. If you could feel the kind of trust you have for friends-of-friends offline for the contacts you make online, that has great potential for creating valuable networks. GL: It could also be a challenge to go out and meet your adversary. I am referring here to the work of the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, whose critique of Third Way democratic (media) culture point at this possible reason of the current ‘democratic deficit’ that people experience. KJ: Perhaps, but ASN's focus is on standards, software, and protocols that bring people who share interests and compatible capabilities into contact. Whether some use it to seek out people they want a tussle with... that's up to them. But doing so would require deliberate effort. GL: What would an Internet look like that is no longer based on trust and consensus but seeks confrontation? KJ: It would look kinda like what we've already got, no? GL: No, I have to disagree with you here. The Net as we have it now is one that is based on trust and consensus. People are slowly but gently forced to only have exchanges with those they already know. What the 70s and 80s legacy of experts talking to themselves has done is create a huge wasteland, and as a response closed virtual communities have been created where this ideology of consensus still florishes. But no one really wants to deal any longer with the desert out there. Take newsgroups. I don’t think that a reintroduction of concepts like trust is going to turn these abadoned public spaces, these deserts, into oases. KJ: But aren't you saying that the lack of trust on the Net has driven people to stick close to those they are familiar with, inside walled gardens, and to not wander far beyond their existing social networks? The point of the ASN is not to revive newsgroups, but rather to enable targeted connections between strangers who share interests in the context of a particular project. It is to provide a strategic doorway between walled gardens, to be used only under certain circumstances. The ASN introduction would take place as part of work toward a specific objective. That's what the architecture is meant to support -- whether it gets used for other things as well, we'd have to see... GL: But the Internet as it is now would not be possible without the engineering cultus of consensus. KJ: Well, there's consensus on one level (the underlying technical infrastructure) and lack of consensus on another (the organization of content and the presentation of identity). The challenge is to introduce standards and protocols for the way information and identity is organized online that is an appropriate, logical extension of the way the technical infrastructure has developed. That is, it should be distributed, transparent, secure, enable interoperability, and adhere to open standards. The ASN is an architecture for one part of such a system. And it's meant to suggest the need for other similarly conceived initiatives. GL: How does the ASN relate to Internet governance and the process around the World Summit of Information Society? KJ: The ASN has got to be build using open standards. That's a given. You would want those standards and protocols to be approved by governance bodies such as the IETF and OASIS -- where it's appropriate. Some of the standards necessary for the ASN have already been approved. But there are a ton of wonderful standards that have reached the approval stage that have never been adopted, or are not widely adopted. And adoption for the ASN is key. We think we could get it working in phases, start it with limited functionality among a group of online communities, and scale it up from there. How does this relate to the WSIS? There needs to be a civil society position on our digital infrastructure. The WSIS was supposed to be part of a process to bring that about. From what I've read (I wasn't there), the results were decidedly mixed. No question that access to the Net, the digital divide issue, is substantive and real. But to get bogged down in that carries great risks. We need to develop a progressive technology agenda that can match those of business and the Department of Homeland Security -- one that looks at the same fundamental tools, and suggests how to configure them to enhance citizenship. It's geeky stuff, but hugely necessary. Where is the funding to support this kind of work? GL: The conversations amongst peers that the ASN supports may be useful for pragmatists that want to solve problems. But one of the dilemmas we actually face because of our media technology is social enclosures that the Net and its current architecture foster. KJ: There is, of course, a concern that targeted media, such as blogs or narrowband broadcast networks, will further divide people from those who don't share their assumptions and opinions. Some critics write about an echo chamber effect, where you only get media you agree with. Is that what's happening today? I'm not so sure. A greater threat, to my mind, is the control of major media outlets by a shrinking number of global corporations. The problem isn't that, say, "conservatives" turn to one set of media outlets while "liberals" turn to another. The far greater problem is that the economics of the media business forces the creation of a handful of focus group-based target markets, and eliminates all content that doesn't fit within one of these pre-defined buckets. Independent, controversial, and idiosyncratic voices have an increasingly difficult time reaching a sizeable audience. This is a form of censorship, one that reinforces banal, conventional thinking. The ASN is designed to help independent voices find audiences--in a decentralized, grassroots up manner. The Internet has already shown it can be used this way, of course. MoveOn.org and the Howard Dean campaign are everyone's favorite examples of this bottom up dynamic at work. But given the number of people online, success stories like these should be far more frequent. One reason they aren't is due to the fact that the Net, while it has a distributed infrastructure that allows for bottom up networking, is not designed to help you find relevant things quickly. As folks like Engelbart and Ted Nelson ad infinitum continue to insist, the Web isn't organized very well. What the ASN seeks to provide is a meta-layer of functionality that makes the Net far more effective at linking you to relevant people and media, based on your affinities and relationships. It's a networking enhancement that takes advantage of the distributed nature of the Internet, strengthening it by adding a strategic layer of trust. Links: Planetwork http://www.planetwork.net Augmented Social Network (ASN) http://asn.planetwork.net/ Planetwork 2004 conference (San Francisco, June 5-6) http://www.planetwork.net/2004conf/ Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (anthology) http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 31.0 <nettime> Marion von Osten: email interview with Brian Holmes geert nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:11:49 +0000 Fwd with permission from: Marion von Osten <marionvonosten {AT} gmx.ch> "The Spaces of a Cultural Question" E-mail interview with Brian Holmes by Marion von Osten in preparation of "Atelier EUROPA. A small post-fordistic drama." opening at 2nd of April 2004 in the Munich Kunstverein. Marion: You are editing the next issue of Multitudes on cultural and creative labor. Can you explain why and out of what perspective you look on cultural labor and creative work, i.e. do you think it is possible to explain the inner dynamics of post-Fordist production modes due to this specific form of work and its conditions? Brian: Actually we have prepared what is called the "minor" of Multitudes 15 on the theme of "creativity at work." The basic notion of immaterial labor is that the manipulation of information, but also the interplay of affects, have become central in the contemporary working process even in the factories, but much more so in the many forms of language-, image- and ambiance-production. Workers can no longer be treated like Taylorist gorillas, exploited for their purely physical force; the "spirit of the worker" has to come down onto the factory floor, and from there it can gain further autonomy by escaping into the flexible work situations developing on the urban territory. These notions have made it through to mainstream sociology, and several authors have taken artistic production as the model for the new managerial techniques and ideologies of contemporary capitalism, with all its inequality, self-exploitation and exclusion. The most recent example is Pierre Menger's "Portrait de l'artiste en travailleur" [Portrait of the Artist as a Worker]. We don't see it exactly that way. Of course the individualization of innovative work practices exposes people to flexible management; and linguistic and affective labor is vital to the capitalist economy in terms of shaping the mind-set in which a commodity can become desirable. But we also focus on the real autonomy that people have gained. This is why we have devoted the "major" of the issue to activist art practices, and the theme of "research for the outside." We're also very interested in the ongoing struggle of the part-time cinema and theater workers in France, concerning the special unemployment status which they have won since 1969, which provides a supplemental income making it possible to live an artist's life in an efficiency-oriented capitalist society. The right-wing, neoliberal government of Raffarin wants to dismantle this unemployment regime, because they know that those who benefit are actively producing another ideal of society. Marion: Do you think that the production conditions of cultural labor and creative work are different nowadays than in the past, and when they differ, how would you describe the changes? Brian: Well, not only is there far more invention and spontaneity involved in relatively ordinary work today than as little as thirty years ago, but also, creative work has moved away from the genius model of the individual artist and towards collaborative process, often mediated by sophisticated communications machines. Many people trace the roots of these developments back to the Hollywood film project, which is always unique and requires a specially assembled production crew. But Hollywood neither invented cooperative production, nor has any patent on it! A journal like Multitudes can be made almost entirely through unpaid cooperation. It's a kind of gift economy. The creative aspect is what makes these kind of volunteer initiatives desirable to people, who often do not feel they can really trust or enjoy personal relations that obey the bottom line of making a wage or a profit. Businesses may try to imitate this way of functioning which would be great for them, because it's so cheap but they usually don't succeed. The great Internet krach is a kind of homage to the fact that you can't make a profit out of interpersonal exchanges. That's why you now see the communications technologies being reorganized around the notion of intellectual property, where there is still the hope of extorting some money. Of course, you could explain all this cooperative creation as a search for prestige and publicity, which brings monetary rewards later on. That kind of demystifying critique is necessary, but insufficient. It's vital to understand the preconditions which make the "gift-economies" possible, such as education, access to information, access to tools and distribution and even to lodging and work space which does not require full-time employment to pay for it. Artists in the Western societies tend to look at these things individualistically: if they have the preconditions what Virginia Woolf summed up as "a room of one's own" they just do their art. But the individual solutions leave us all very vulnerable to the more powerfully organized groups in society, don't you think? It might be useful to imagine how these basic conditions for creative work could be provided for more and more people, and defended when they come under attack, as they are now (think of the massive attacks on free education, or on the political freedoms of the Internet). I think you'd find that in our time, the huge problem of how to make democracy actually deliver on its promise of emancipation comes down to this question: How to achieve greater access to knowledge and culture, to their transformation and transmission? Because regaining democratic control from the media oligarchies requires achieving exactly that. Marion: In Germany and Britain, with different political papers like the Schröder/Blair Paper, but as well in managerial literature, artists' working life and diverse methods of creating meaning have been quoted for the model of an entrepreneurial self, a subject which synchronizes life and work time under the banner of economic success. I think that this quotation of the artist as a role model was very harmful for collective and critical cultural practices in the 90s. The French situation seems to me a bit different. I see that the cultural producer and the notion of immaterial labor is much more set in an understanding of subversion or even resistance. Brian: France is a country which traditionally values all kinds of sophisticated cultural production, and it has a relatively strong institutional left which has been partially articulated around the idea of cultural democratization since the Popular Front of '36. So you have a lot of institutionalized space for creative practices; and although the socialist culture minister Jack Lang tried to make these cultural activities "profitable" in the 1980s, that has always been a kind of fiction, because the cultural sphere has mainly expanded with the backing of the state. From the cynical viewpoint, you can say that when the socialists came to power they bought off an important constituency, the artists, and surrounded them with an incredible amount of bureaucratic control so they wouldn't make any more trouble. This means you have much less of an "underground" in France, and consequently, less of that typically Anglo-American dynamic where the pop-culture and advertising industries constantly prey on the underground, to siphon off talent and market subcultural desire. So despite the situationist echoes that still linger, and despite all the Italian exiles who have produced such interesting theory in France, until recently the resistance was mainly from the professions, the theater and cinema people in particular always with the unions as a model of collective action, deeply entrenched in representational politics. Only recently has this resistance become actively subversive in the strong sense of really questioning contemporary social roles and positions. With any luck, the right's attempt to force a complacent cultural class out of their state sinecures will produce even more of the new and virulent activist critique that we're seeing from the part-time cinema and theater workers. Marion: Do you think that when artists or cultural producers are addressed as a new role model in society, it is a sign that they should start to organize themselves politically and/or collaborate with other political movements which resist and fight against neo-liberalism? Brian: Clearly I do! Now we can see that the privileged position which cultural production held in the European social democracies of the eighties and nineties is always expendable, from the managerial viewpoint. You can be cut like any other client of the obsolete welfare state. If artists want to go on developing experimentation outside the narrow frames of elite patronage and state-backed cultural tourism, they have to develop critical discourses that provide other foundations of judgment for the distribution of resources, beyond "taste" and box-office measurements. But those discourses won't spontaneously emerge from within the cultural establishment. Other people have to be brought into the game, who have "normally" been excluded. I'm talking both about directly oppressed groups, and about people who are somehow interested in social equality, both of whom would formerly have had no time for the art world with its elite games of prestige and posing. But why is there any space for such people at all? Because elements of the existing art discourses consider aesthetic experimentation as a starting point for the transformation of what in French is called le partage du sensible: the division and sharing of the sensible world. This is why describing how artistic practices work within protest contexts can be useful for opening up the cultural spaces. I've argued that it suggests the need for at least a partial change of museums into something more like resource centers for transversal communicational practices, where artists and social movements come together, where identities and disciplines blur. We can now envision some attempts to network these kinds of attempts across the national borders. Gerald Raunig and his collaborators are trying explicitly to do that, with their multilingual Republicart website. The urgency is to begin developing frame discourses, shared positions that can exert a more coherent pressure on decision-making within the cultural infrastructures. I'm not talking about a point-by-point program. I'm talking about building up a recognizable, coherent and compelling discussion about the desirability and viability of a democratic, socially transversal, politically oriented cultural/artistic sphere an open, dissolving "sphere" in which the material and legal preconditions of multiplicity become a matter of collective concern. This kind of discussion (what you might also call a "problematic") becomes a resource for specific arguments, gestures, judgments, actions. Maybe this is how you change the world from a basis in cultural production. Marion: I find it interesting that immaterial labor or its notion has come out of the understanding that the industrial complex has been transformed. The car industry is still a role model for "new labor" discourses, as one can see in the Italian operaist movement around the Fiat strikes, as well as the Hartz commission in Germany, on new forms of labor organization, monetarization and the idea of Ich-AG, or self-organized one-person firm, based on ideas developed before the background of transforming the VW Factory. Even the word post-Fordism relates to the concept of Henry Ford and his model of car production and consumption. Gramsci said that Fordism, or the car industry as a meta role model for modern economy, would be an ideological turn, to make us believe that there is only one understanding of production and capital accumulation. This was a critique put forth by feminism as well, which claimed other forms of labor to be relevant in the industrial age, as well as nowadays. Would you say that the term immaterial labor is epistemologically rooted in the industrial concept of labor, of controlling bodies, optimizing time and production flows, organizing efficiency, and pushing everything towards commodification? And how, if so, can we free this term from that classical concept and develop a term that reflects non-work, care-work, the production of the social, etc., not only out of a perspective of capitalist accumulation? Brian: This is a key question for the Multitudes group. The answer might consider the term "immaterial labor" and the arguments behind it as a kind of transitional moment. Those arguments were first elaborated from an observation of the "refusal of work" in the wake of the big strikes at Fiat and so forth; but also from the realization that the bosses had deliberately changed the very conditions of labor, to make traditional strike techniques ineffective. Work was increasingly automated, factories could become smaller with electronic co-ordination between distant production sites, the remaining workers were implicated ever more deeply by giving them higher levels of training and responsibility. But many people had left the factories quite voluntarily, in advance of the bosses' strategies, setting themselves up within the smaller, self-organized production chains of the new "industrial districts" of Northern Italy. The great strikes and the innovative pioneers of the new labor patterns could be seen as the driving forces of a change overtaking the entire industrial system. This transformation prompted a fresh reading of the Grundrisse of Marx, and particularly of the so-called "fragment on machines," which points toward the potential for labor itself to become obsolete through technological progress, freeing up time for the cultural and intellectual development of workers, and in the same blow, dissolving the possibility of exploitation on which capital accumulation is founded. That kind of reading, first developed in Toni Negri's "Marx Beyond Marx," became a way to chart a future for the class beyond the wage-bargaining which had become the major function of unions, and indeed, beyond the condition of salaried labor itself. But from that point forth, two still-unresolved challenges opened up for the relation between theory and practice. One is finding new epistemological grounds for describing cooperative production. Today you can look for clues in Maurizio Lazzarato's book "Puissances de l'invention" [Powers of Invention], which develops an understanding of production on the basis of what the late-nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde called invention and imitation or what Deleuze called difference and repetition. The idea is to show that production has always been based, not on the directive capacity of capital, but on the human faculty of innovation something like what Marx called the "general intellect" which is at the origin both of the forms of products, and of the very machines which produce them. But Lazzarato is also willing to consider the invention and imitation of all kinds of affective and imaginary production forms of care-giving, social forms, artistic forms and he understands "machines" in the Deleuzo-Guattarian way, as social assemblages. Feminist and culturalist perspectives, which re-examine our very motives for production, could add a lot to what is still an overly economic and semiotic discourse. We need new and persuasive explanations for what is worth doing together in society, and why certain activities should be granted the resources for further development, without always invoking the current excuse: "Because they make money." But then another major problem must be confronted, which is not only theoretical. It is the fact that the technical conditions which provided a justification for the existence and exploitation of salaried labor in the Fordist period have changed entirely without any substantial change in the basic social relations. Paolo Virno says that three functions which have traditionally been separated in the self-understanding of the Western societies, from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, are now impossible to distinguish. These three functions are labor, conceived as the suffering expenditure of body energy; intellectual activity, which is silent and solitary; and political action, which takes place through speech in public. With our intellectual and communicational forms of labor in the capitalist economy, Virno says we live in a condition of infinite publicity without a public sphere. And the impossibility to make public meaning out of our virtuoso performances that is, the impossibility to make concrete changes in society is a humiliation of that which is at once the highest and most common of our capacities, namely the capacity of speech itself. This humiliation is a political affect, which calls for a response. I think that cultural producers, today, are humiliated by the conditions under which we labor, by what you might call the institutional market. Can we respond to that? Can we use a more-or-less natural resistance to the contemporary forms of exploitation as a starting-point in the attempt to make a world out of our new understandings of what might be worth doing together in society? The question would probably have seemed exaggerated just a few years ago. Almost no one would have asked it. I find that life gets a little more interesting as the spaces of this question gradually open up today. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 32.0 <nettime> Interview with Mouch Peter Luining nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 26 Mar 2004 17:43:11 +0100 Interview with Mouchette Of course everybody knows Mouchette or better everybody thinks (s)he knows Mouchette. Here's an interview with Mouchette that I made for the P2P show that momentarily is held at the Postartum galery in L.A. It tries to uncover what's behind Mouchette and focusses amongst others on issues as "the life of a virtual character", copyrights and art institutions. Peter Luining: - Mouchette has been for quite a while on the net. How did you find out about the internet and are there any specific reason why you started with "Mouchette"? Mouchette: Internet arrived very early in Holland and it was like a democratic revolution. For the first time in the history of information, a medium was created where every receiver could become a sender. There was a sort of euphoria, an utopia of the information age was suddenly made true. Everything you saw on the web was something you could make yourself and put out there for everyone to see. I didn't have much technical background but web technology was very simple at that time, so if I could do a web page, a child could do it too. I was very amused by the phenomenon of the personal homepage, which I immediately experienced as a popular "genre" in that medium. I am the kind of person who thinks that art is never where you expect it, and that art is only in the eye of the beholder: a true descendant of Marcel Duchamp. PL: - By now everybody knows that there are links to Mouchette and the movie by Robert Bresson, you were even in a legal fight with the heirs of the director, could you tell something more about links inspiration? Mouchette: I knew I wanted to make a young girl's character. There were others I liked. It could have been Alice (by Lewis Carroll) or Zazie (from "Zazie dans le Metro" by Raymond Queneau) but they were too well known (Zazie in France) and their lineage was already claimed so much. I liked the dark aspects of the character of Mouchette, she was not cute, pink and pretty, although I must say I didn't know the film very well at that time, I'd only seen it once. I was very impressed by the art of Robert Bresson. His film making was so pure and minimal, with essential facts like a greek tragedy. His actors didn't "play" or "pretend", they embodied the character by their physical presence only and plainly spoke out the text, he always chose non-professional (amateur) actors. The work I created in reference to the film (the Film Quiz) is a homage. Too bad Bresson's widow didn't see it like that! She didn't like the spirit of it, a certain cold humour. The dispute ultimately worked out in my favour: I had to remove the work from my site, but through the solidarity of the net.art community it got hosted by more than 50 different sites. PL: - You give shape to a character on the internet, a lot of art on the net is about playing with identity, especially in the early days. We nowadays see a tendency in art that is called identity art in the true sense, meaning searching for were do I stand, who am I, going back to your roots, through self. Do you think Mouchette still fits in this last category or do you think she is a product of a certain period? Mouchette: For me identity is something that exists between the "I" and the "you", it's not just a personal investigation. Mouchette is constructed by her public. When they love her, when they insult her, they make her who she is. And I design everything like this: words as questions, identity as an empty space where people project their desire. That is why it is still growing since the beginning, and that is why I never get bored with it because I'm not just looking at my own (artificial) navel; and evolve with the public, with the development of the internet itself. I'm just another drop of water on the internet ocean, changing with it. PL - Mouchette's website seems to be visited by a lot of people that aren't aware of its art background. Do you think this, crossing over different audiences, is a typical thing of net art? Mouchette: No. I think most net.artists want to throw their CV and artist's statement at your face before you see their work. Their work can usually be understood by a child of 10 (which is a good thing) but they want to force it into the art context that way. I think net.art is a form of public art, art for the public space, it should be accessible for any kind of public, at any level. Let the curators and the art institutions see Mouchette as art if they can, but if they can't, it's only their problem. I'm not going to exhibit my artistic pedigree and references to make my work fit into their frame of mind. They are the ones who should change their frame of mind and understand what the internet public already sees very clearly. So if there is some crossing over to be done, it's on the side of the art institutions, who should find a new place between the net.artists and the public. PL: Interesting. The point that you make about the "institutional" artworld sounds very similar to ideas of a lot of early "net artists" that saw/see themselves not as artists (Michael Samyn, Heath Bunting, Graham Harwood) but tried/try to get this different "frame of mind" through too. What's your stance/view on this? Mouchette: It's nice to know that on internet you can propose your work outside of ANY art context and that surfers who stumble on it by chance will have some fun, some pleasure, some first-hand emotion without having to relate to any known work of art or to any critical theory. Yet, if your work can still function on that level and offer analytical content to those who have an artistic or intellectual background, if your work can be approached on several levels at the same time, then you know you have the right frame of mind. Yes, that's the best of both worlds, an ideal position. I know it doesn't always work like this, so if I choose to ignore one type of public, it's the artistic public. When they're smart enough they get the intellectual content by themselves, without having it explained. And I know this analytical approach is going to come out in my work one way or another because it's present inside of me. PL: Something related to this is that I know Mouchette won some art prizes on festivals you had to apply for. If you do enter this competitions do you just send your url or are you going for the full form. What I mean with this is: does Mouchette adapts on this level to get her "frame of mind" through? Mouchette: In the very beginning I didn't connect to the art world at all, but the art world connected to me at some point. Takuji Kogo (Candy Factory, Tokyo) was the first one to pick it up as art in 1997, he made collaborative exhibitions in his gallery, he introduced my work to Rhizome. Net art people had no difficulty in seeing it as the creation of a grown up and developed artist although nobody told them. They spread it, commented it, linked it. So it was easy for me to enter my work in net.art competitions. Besides, most of them didn't request any artistic references, you only had to send your URL. When I have to give more details, I never break the rule of the anonymity of the author and never disclose my gender. I'm still within my rules in this interview. I like it when my work participates in the artworld and I would make the effort to bring it to them if I can stay within my rules. I want to add here that this "mystery of the author" serves no personal purpose, only an artistic purpose. But it makes it all the more difficult to connect to the world of art as much as I would want to. PL: And linked to the question above: do you see yourself as an artist or net artist? Mouchette: From the beginning I always saw myself as an artist, not a net.artist or a something-artist, just an artist. For me net.art is not separated from the rest of the arts. It should be brought to the public by museums and other art institutions. PL: Ehhh. Above you say that net art should be seen as a form of public art, art for public space, to bring it in the white cube is something different. Explain. Mouchette: Art in the public space should be enjoyed by the passing people without any reference to the art context, that's what I meant. It can be integrated in the street context to such a point that it's not even seen as art, but still experienced as something meaningful, or useful, or disturbing etc... When envisioned through the art context, the standpoint is different and what makes it an artwork is a particular mixture of the work itself and the public participation to the work. That's why I don't see a contradiction between general public and art public: it's just a different standpoint for the same work. mouchette: http://www.mouchette.org p2p: http://www.postartum.org/p2p/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 33.0 <nettime> Interview with the Winner olia lialina nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 13 Jun 2004 22:51:24 +0200 In 2004 Art.Teleportacia artist in residence Dragan Espenschied and his GRAVITY won the People's Voice at Webby Awards. Here is a short interview with him. Longer and older GRAVITY interview is still online. http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/GRAVITY/ http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/nominees.html#net_art http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/GRAVITY/interview.html ol: congratulations with people's voice. drx: thank you and everybody else who has voted for GRAVITY. ol: have you expected that you would win people's voice? drx: i expected that i would win both: jury and people voting. ol: why don't you have a webby awards winner button on your site? drx: i looked on the webby awards site for it, but have not found it. ol: have not they sent it to you by e-mail? drx: no. ol: have you looked in the junk folder? drx: i did. ol: and? drx: it is not there. ol: can it be it was attached to their congratulation letter? drx: i never got any congratulation letter from the webby awards. i was also not informed that my work was nominated. ol:this is not nice. you have to pay 50$ to submit your applications, and they don't even inform or congratulate you. drx: i have not applied and have not paid. ol: that explains why they don't communicate with you! they only send e-mails to those who applied and paid. drx: and they nominate those who have not! ol: right! now we know! ol: and the last question: do u think "net art" was the right category for GRAVITY? drx: net art is a nice category, but best practices, music or travel would fit as well. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 34.0 <nettime> Interview with Jeanette Hofmann geert nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:00:03 +0000 Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance Interview with German policy expert, Jeanette Hofmann By Geert Lovink Berlin-based researcher Jeanette Hofmann is a key player when it comes to German and European Internet policy. Late 2000 she briefly reached international media fame when she got elected as an ICANN at Large member. Besides her busy international agenda she is also a professor at the University of Essen where she is teaching governance-related issues. In this online interview Jeanette Hofmann talks about her ICANN experiences and her current involvement as a civil society member of the German delegation for the World Summit of the Information Society. I got to know her work in the mid nineties when Jeanette worked on an interdisciplinary research project that mapped the Internet as a set of technical, cultural and political arrangements. GL: You recently published a paper (in German) called 'The Short Dream of Democracy on the Net.' Your conclusion is a rather sombering one. How would you describe the current situation related to ICANN? You state that nothing has been learned from the failed At-Large Membership experiment. Would you even go that far and see a backlash happening right now? JH: The argument of my paper goes as follows: In the last decade, a growing number of international organizations has established cooperative relationships with NGOs. There are two reasons why international organizations are willing to talk with NGOs. First, NGOs provide specific expertise. Second, international organizations are struggling with a widening democratic deficit deriving from the fact that international agreements are out of reach for most people. Those affected by international policies are unable to participate in the decision making process. Likewise, international organizations are not accountable to the people. Diplomats cannot be voted out of office when they act against the peoples' will. Cooperating with NGOs, however, makes international bodies appear more open, fair and thus legitimate. Civil society groups, on the other hand, are eager to get involved in international policy making because participation is seen as a first step towards substantial changes in international policies. What looks like a win-win situation for both parties turns out to be problematic for civil society. Evidence from most policy fields shows that participation of NGOs so far doesn't lead to significant policies changes. ICANN's five At Large directors, for instance, had hardly any impact on ICANN's DNS policies. While cooperation between international organizations and NGOs may improve the reputation of the former, it clearly creates legitimacy problems for the latter. As soon as civil society organizations assume formal roles in international forums, their representativeness and legitimacy are also called into question. Ironically, NGOs are charged with the democratic deficit they once set out to elevate. ICANN has been an excellent example of this mechanism. After the At Large directors' elections in 2000, ICANN's inner circle successfully challenged the legitimacy of both the At Large membership and the elections. Thus, most people today recall the ICANN elections as a complete failure. The elections were regarded as a disaster because they lacked, guess what, representativeness. Of course, the elections were unrepresentative! It is impossible in global environments to hold representative elections. As far as I remember, nobody ever expected the ICANN elections to globally representative. Not even the governments in ICANN have succeeded in establishing a representative body with all nations participating in the Governmental Advisory Council. The same holds true for the Internet industry and the technical community. By and large, it is a tiny minority which really cares enough about Internet names and numbers to participate in ICANN. However, the lack of representativeness has been raised particularly as an issue with regard to individual users. The At Large membership was the only group of stakeholders which was critizided and finally disqualified on the grounds of a lack of representativeness. Once disqalified as illegitimate, the remaining stakeholders happily agreed to kick individual users out of the ICANN board. ICANN's organizational reform in 2002 thus put an end to the original idea of fair, equal participation of individual users in ICANN. A majority of stakeholders chose to get rid of the weakest stakeholder in the game. As a result, representation of individual users on the board has been reduced to one liaison person without voting rights. Seen from this perspective, ICANN's reform constitutes a backlash –for Internet governance in particular and for the notion of a democratization of global politics in general. GL: Could you imagine that Internet governance will have to be drawn up from scratch? Are ICANN, but perhaps also bodies like the IETF beyond repair? You and others have tried so hard to reform ICANN from within. If you got a chance how would you start again? JH: I have watched both organizations for several years. In my view, ICANN and the IETF are very different beasts. (I don't know enough about the Internet Society and therefore won't say anything about this body.) One crucial difference refers to the fact that the IETF is not a formal organization, it lacks any exclusive boundaries or membership criteria. Unlike most other standard setting bodies, the IETF regards itself open to everyone who wants to participate. There are no membership fees or similar means to select participants. By contrast, ICANN has spent a lot of time on defining its boundaries consisting, among other things, of admission and decision making procedures. While the IETF depends to a great extent on bottom up processes, ICANN at times seem to regard them as inevitable noise which lowers efficiency. The IETF cannot develop standards without active participation of its members, the Internet industry. The IETF thus needs to motivate those who are affected by its norm setting function. ICANN, on the other hand, works on the assumption that democratic bottom up processes are unnecessary. It is just technical coordination what ICANN says it is doing, not political decision making. Even if this were the case, it makes one wonder why technical standard setting bodies go through some effort to create legitimate decision making procedures. As a result the reform efforts of ICANN and the IETF followed very different strategies. ICANN started with a reform proposal by its president, tasked a board member with its implementation and pursued a top down approach. The IETF chair founded a working group instead which was open for everyone to join. While the IETF initiated a process that sought to involve the whole community, ICANN followed an exclusive approach. To be sure, ICANN's supporting organizations were invited to comment on the various proposals put forward by the reform committee but the status of these comments remained unclear. The reform process failed to create more trust in the ICANN structure. Without trust, however, there is not much motivation for voluntary participation in a process such as ICANN. GL: So much in the current debates over global governance seems to go back to the issue what place governments and individual nation states have within global governance. What has been your ICANN experience? Ideally, what would be the place of the state? Do you believe in a federal structure? Should, for instance, bigger countries, in terms of its population, have a great say? JH: The role of governments touches upon two contested issues, national sovereignty and transnational democracy. Both issues have evoked fierce debate at the preparatory conferences of the World Summit on Information Society. Developing countries in particular have pointed out that the spread of the Internet affects matters of national sovereignty. An international regime would enable more political control over both infrastructure development and data traffic. This is why many developing countries would like to see an UN body such as the ITU assume a more responsible function in the area of Internet management. Among the driving forces in this process are new communication services. The revenues of national telecommunication monopolies are threatened by the advent of Internet telephony. In addition, the digital divide, problems such as spam, worms and viruses are mentioned as reasons for an intergovernmental approach to Internet regulation. Interestingly enough, the debate on Internet regulation was initiated in the context of WSIS, not of ICANN. ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee used to predominantly reflect the world views of OECD countries, not those from the south. The second issue, transnational democracy, has been a matter of extended debate in the academic world. One of the central questions is whether democratic procedures, which were once designed for territorial nation states, can be adapted for transnational policy fields. According to the skeptics in this field, democracy doesn't work outside of the nation state. Democracy, from the skeptics' point of view, is a national institution, and the transnational sphere fails to meet the basic requirements for it to work. Foremost among these requirements are a common language as foundation for a public sphere, solidarity among the people as a condition for "redistributional policies", and a clearly defined constituency as a precondition for majority ruling. Since none of these criteria are met outside of the nation state, democratic world politics are but a utopian idea. The advocates of a democratizing world politics argue, however, that democracy should not be treated as a static concept but rather as a contested, open-ended process. Instead of referring to and hiding behind established democratic routines we should keep in mind the huge transformations the original concept of democracy has undergone since its inception. Originally designed for Greek city states, democratic principles were thoroughly rethought in order to apply them in differing ways to the emerging territorial states. So, why should it not be possible to revise democratic principles once again in order to adjust them to transnational settings? Some preliminary suggestions have been floated in recent years. Among them is the concept of deliberative democracy, which proposes to replace majority ruling by persuasion, consensus and compromise. Since it is impossible to establish majorities beyond the nation state, it is necessary to use other means for legitimate decision making. The concept of deliberative democracy suggests strengthening discursive capacities such as reasoning and negotiation, which are already supposed to play a major role in political everyday life. Some observers expect that new schemes of deliberative democracy might evolve along the lines of given industries and policy fields rather than regional divisions. The transnational public sphere would thus be structured primarily around problems, industries and organizations. Experience with ICANN shows, however, that such models can only work within a framework of minority protection and additional democratic achievements as layed out in the constitutions of nation states. While the nation state attaches rights of participation to citizenship, the post-national world would grant those rights to people who choose to participate in certain policy fields. Transnational policy fields would be populated in a tripartite manner by government, industry and civil society. Governments would thus be an important stakeholder among other important stakeholders. Governments do already cooperate with the private sector in many policy fields. It is now about time these public private partnerships get extended so that also civil society interests are taken adequately into account. No matter, what such policy arrangements would ultimately look like, a crucial point seems to be how the exercise of power in the transnational sphere can be restricted and its abuse prevented. What we need, it seems, is a Montesquieu for information society who devises a modern model of power division taking into consideration the leverage of digital technology. Such a model of power division would limit and disperse the amount of control enabled by both the Internet's architecture and the structure of the Internet's industry. GL: In the case of the Internet, the status of the US government is obviously a special case. One can think of a historical claim, but also in general about the sheer size of its economic, military and political power. How do you look at this? JH: To be sure, the current unilateral management of the DNS root is unacceptable on principle grounds. In the long run, policy authority over the root, the address and the name space must be divided among several bodies each of which should be composed of multiple stakeholders consisting of civil society, industry and governments. On practical grounds it could be argued though that the present situation constitutes a pretty stable and more or less acceptable arrangement. In my view, the US government's power over the Internet has been to a large extent a theoretical concern. The US government would never dare to disable a major country code Top Level Domain such as .fr, .jp or .de. Because the US government's control over the DNS root has been strongly criticized and closely monitored by many stakeholders, it can be assumed that the DOC makes rather careful use of its power over the root. If I am right, it is quite a challenge to devise policy authorities that are not only structured in legitimate ways but can also be trusted to act with the same caution as the USG does today. Within civil society the idea of an intergovernmental root convention has been aired. Such a convention would basically establish a national right to an entry of the respective ccTLD in the root server file. No single government would have the authority any longer to decide single handedly over the existence of Top Level Domains on the Internet. GL: You have been visiting WSIS as a member of the German delegation. Could you share some of your personal impressions with us? Did you primarily look at WSIS as an ICT circus for governmental officials and development experts or what there something, no matter how futile, at stake there? JH: For observers, UN world summits may indeed look like a circus with people traveling around the world for the sake of traveling and doing nothing but producing papers the gist of which remains obscure to outsiders. Yet, from a participant's point of view, the world summit is not primarily a circus but an opportunity for negotiation. What makes UN world summits special is the diversity of people both in terms of cultural or geographic origin and their functions and competences. Representatives of governments, civil society and private sector organizations from all over the world meet for several weeks to discuss the proper meaning, their visions and the challenges of a global information society. This is both a laborious and an exciting effort with lasting effects on most participants' world views. At a minimum, you become aware of the extent as to how your political opinions reflect the common sense of your political culture. More specifically, the WSIS process has been relevant for procedural as well as substantial reasons. The first aspect refers to the world summits' rules of procedure. In the case of WSIS, the rules of procedure turned out to be a bone of contention because governments had different opinions on the status of NGOs and the private sector. For example, should non-governmental actors be granted an observer status and if so for what type of meetings? Should they have the right to speak to the plenary or at working group meetings? Should they be supported with travel grants as their governments are, etc. etc. Each world summit has to decide anew on its rules of procedure. The interesting point is that these rules evolve over time or perhaps even from summit to summit. The formal status and the political weight of NGOs in particular are increasing. For the first time, NGOs got meeting rooms on the conference premises. Likewise, speaking slots for civil society and private sector at plenary meetings become institutionalized. Civil society in turn decided to set up a formal structure consisting of an international civil society bureau which represents a broad variety working groups, caucuses and families. The international civil society bureau forms an interface between NGOs and governments and facilitates communication between them. It seems rather unlikely that subsequent world summits would discontinue these structures and processes. Worth mentioning in this respect is the fact that a growing number of governments accepts civil society people as official members of their delegation. Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and Germany are among the pioneers of this new form of cooperation between government and civil society. Hence, WSIS clearly marks a step forward towards exploring new modes of interaction between governments, civil society and private sector. WSIS has been an important process also with regard to our political understanding of information society. The fact that the ITU of all UN organizations was charged with organizing the summit led to a conceptual framework which focused primarily on information and communication technologies. The summit thus started out with a fairly technical understanding of information society. Now, the first paragraph of the December 2003 WSIS declaration affirms the commitment to "build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society". Also, the declaration emphasizes the "universality, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelation of all human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to development, as enshrined in the Vienna Declaration." Democracy, sustainable development, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are described as "interdependent and mutually reinforcing". The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is mentioned as "an essential foundation of the Information Society". It is safe to say that civil societies' persistent interventions have had a significant part in the changes of the declaration's underlying concept of information society. Thanks to civil society's participation, the WSIS declaration has stripped of its technocratic approach and reflects now a more political notion of information society. Political in the sense of that information society is put into context. This implies a notion of communication as a basic human need and a fundamental social process. It also implies awareness of the unequal access to and benefits from information and communication technologies, and it implies a serious commitment to capacity building and social empowerment in order to overcome the various forms of digital divide. The main insight I gained from participating in the WSIS process concerns the fact that information societies depend on the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Without adherence to human rights and basic democratic principles, information society is but a sham. This might sound like a trivial point. However, the declaration's paragraph on human rights proved to be one of the most contested ones. The WSIS process shows that respect for and compliance with human rights can never and nowhere be taken for granted. The vision of a people centred information society thus implies necessarily a commitment to defend human rights. GL: Cynics knew at forehand that WSIS would never have any outcome. The United Nations together with the ITU seemed such an odd coalition, doomed to meaningless. On the other hand, WSIS, together with Verisign do put up serious pressure on ICANN. There is a 'Kofi Anan' initiative to come up a new framework for ' global Internet governance'. Will the libertarian US-led engineering class, which still dominates Internet decision making bodies, allow alternative proposals to be further developed? They seem happy with the status quo. JH: Your question seems to assume that there is one group of stakeholders, which is able to effectively control the governance structure of the Internet. I don't think this is the case. I do not even see that any of these groups has a clear, comprehensive vision of the Internet's future. I see Internet Governance rather as an open-ended search process with different groups pursuing more or less contested short-term goals, some of which may contribute to the groundwork of a long-term regime for the net. Part of this search process is an ever changing composition of key actors. The active involvement of UN headquarters is just the latest development in this process. Again, I don't think it has been anybody's explicit goal to get the UN involved. The founding of the UN working group on Internet Governance is the compromise between conflicting government interests. While most OECD countries believe in self-governance with little or no government participation, many developing countries would prefer an intergovernmental regime for the Internet. The UN was chosen as a neutral and legitimate organization to host a working group being tasked with developing a definition of internet governance, identify public policy issues related to that definition and finally developing a general understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of governments and all other actors involved. Due to its narrow time frame, we can hardly expect the UN working group to come up with ground braking new ideas. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the symbolic import of the UN working group. For the first time the meaning of Internet Governance is not just taken for granted but subject to political consideration. I think it is good to have a public debate on the question as to who should do what in the field of Internet Governance. An actual example is spam. Spam has become a threat to the most common and important Internet service, email. Should this problem be tackled on the national or on the global level? Will there be technical solutions available in the near future? Do we need new regulatory tools in order to ensure compliance with national laws? I think it is a step forward to discuss these questions in a systematic manner within an inclusive, transparent framework. We need such debates because it is less and less clear how the freedom of all individual users worldwide is best served. I used to believe in a strict hands-off approach opposed to any government intervention on the grounds that governments would impose a national logic on the first transnational communication infrastructure and thereby transforming it. Furthermore, like many other people I suspected that government intervention would suffocate the Internet's innovative pace. Today, I find it less obvious that self-regulation is able to maintain in the long run what we like most about the Internet, the freedom of communication. The UN working goup is important also with respect to its composition and working methods. It has been stressed during the process of setting up of the working group that the overall acceptance and legitimacy of its outcome depends to a large extent on its composition. It can be expected that in addition to governments and supranational organizations civil society and the private sector will also be represented. Such modest experiments in creating legitimacy in global politics are very important as each of them forms a milestone for other people and organizations to refer to. Despite the sceptics' view in democracy theory, there is in some organizations a growing willingness to work on more inclusive approaches to international policy making. It remains yet to be seen whether such tripartite models will have any substantial impact. Now, coming back to your question, I pursue a non-cynical approach to the WSIS process as you can see. GL: Besides policy work you started teaching at the University of Essen. What do you teach your students, how do they respond and what have been your experiences so far? JH: I've been teaching "politics and communication" for two semesters. I usually do a course on Internet Governance. There are not that many people in social sciences who look at the Internet as an evolving social space. In Germany and perhaps in Europe in general the Internet is predominantly seen as a mere tool that people have to master in order to use it effectively. I thus see my classes as an ongoing attempt to refute such reifications. In my view, the net is still a very dynamic place with its technical and social norms being subject to constant transformation and reinterpretation. So, one of the things I try to teach my students is that even the mere use of Internet services has repercussions on its further development. Think of Anthony Giddens concept of "structuration" where structures and agency mutually constitute themselves. I guess my main point is that I want my students to understand that their behaviour actively shapes (network) structures instead of passively using them. A second course I taught this year revolved around globalization and democracy. The last third of the course discussed the draft treaty establishing a convention for Europe. The punch line of the whole exercise concerned the contested majority rule. As I've mentioned earlier in this interview, democracy can be regarded as a pretty dynamic enterprise. It is actually quite ironic: while most people associate democracy with majority ruling, the composition of majorities itself is everything but a clear-cut procedure. The negotiations surrounding voting rules and the weighting of votes in the European council exemplify quite well that constitutions do not consist of a fixed set of politically neutral procedures. Rather, they reflect the configuration of key actors, their political traditions and beliefs as well as the power balance between them. At the same time, we looked at the EU convention as an attempt to create a working confederation as apposed to a federal state. It remains true though that the EU itself couldn't become a member of the EU as it doesn't meet its own criteria of democracy! So, I guess I try to share with students what I find personally interesting about politics. What I do find interesting doesn't depend so much on the subject matter but on the perspective. Politics get interesting when you look at them from an active citizen's point of view, somebody who cares about and feels responsible for society. Now, most students feel comfortable with the idea that they are mere victims of a more or less corrupt political process and therefore really couldn't care less about its details. So, how do they respond to my preaching approach? I think I succeeded when I convinced them to look at political challenges from a politician's perspective who faces a million dilemmas but has nonetheless to make decisions and bear all the consequences. One of the students made it know in the last meeting that he had now subscribed to a newspaper and seriously intended to read it. This is something I won't forget. --- Jeanette Hoffmann's homepage: http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/people/jeanette/index.shtml # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 35.0 <nettime> Interview with Warren Sack Trebor Scholz nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 24 Jan 2005 11:04:30 -0500 Interview with Warren Sack on New-Media Art Education by Trebor Scholz TS: In a recent interview members of kuda (new media center, Novi Sad) addressed the lack of non-proprietary software in the corporate world. But nevertheless, kuda strongly opts for open source / free software in education as: "The cadre of designers and programmers that relies on proprietary software to find a job, is no different than the Fordist proletarian subject but without proletarian consciousness. We can link the ideas around software to Marx=B9 notions of the necessity for the proletariat to own the tools it uses= . As of now, software and hardware tools are in not in our hands." There are examples of universities in the U.S. that are in the process of entirely switching to open source software. How do you see possibilities fo= r open source in an American academic context? WS: As implied by Kuda, this is both a question of consciousness-raising an= d also of functionality. There are specific marketing and litigation strategies of disinformation that are actively undermining the necessary consciousness raising. These strategies of disinformation are similar to th= e ones big media and big industry have been using for at least a century: the= y are strategies of "seamlessness." By this I mean that powerful interests want you, the consumer and citizen, to ignore the seams that articulate the parts of computers and networks together. A perfect example of this, right now (December 2004), is AOL's current marketing campaign. AOL assures us, in television ads, that they can create "a better Internet." This is willful obfuscation. The Internet -- as a net of nets -- is, by definition= , outside of the control of a single entity: AOL can't change the Internet even if it wants to. But, what AOL wants people to believe is that AOL is the Internet. And, from personally experience, I can tell you that many lay people think this is the case. When, for example, I've demonstrated to novice users who have AOL accounts that they can "see the Internet" from a standard browser that is not the AOL technology, they have been rather shocked. To them it is seamless: there is no difference between AOL and th= e Internet. This serves AOL's interests because people are then led to believe that there are no other alternatives. Another good example of this was Microsoft's -- legal claim of a few years ago -- that their Windows operating system and the Internet explorer web browser were inseparable: that one could not be shipped without the other. (Or, Microsoft's current run-in with the EC courts contending that its Windows Media Player is integral to the Windows operating system.) This turned out to be technically trival to prove to be false -- the application and the operatin= g system can be separated -- but the U.S. Justice Department must have spent = a pretty penny to convince the judge in charge of the case. So, my point is this: to propose open source as an alternative within any given work contex= t requires some amount of consciousness raising that is being actively worked against by large concerns that would like the public to believe -- not just that their products are "better" -- but that no alternatives exists. But, then there is also the issue of functionality: open source software is frequently designed and implemented by experts who have little or no insigh= t into what non-programmers might need or want. Setting up and maintaining a Linux server, installing an open source database system like Mysql, using open source alternative's to commercial software (e.g., Open Office), etc. can be a hassle even for those of us who are experts. In fact i do not hav= e anything against non-open source software by companies that build solid tools and do not engage in disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, it is usually the companies engaged in disinformation that also build lousy software. There is a crafty business rationale for doing this, for making your customers your alpha testers: the company saves on quality control personnel and also gets customers to check in with them frequently. "Staying in touch" with your customers by having them check in with you every week to patch the lousy software is unethical, but effective for fostering a relation of dependence. Any strategy to adapt open source software should take into account the fact that some commercial software is a nice complement to open source software. For example, working with Apple= , Macromedia and Adobe software is usually a pleasure: they write solid, easy-to-use software that doesn't need to be patched every second day. These are good complements because (1) They do something better than open source. For example, one could use Gimp to edit digital photos, but Gimp is ultimately a good but imperfect attempt to mimic Adobe Photoshop. (2) Such software comes from companies that build on top of open source software, work in coalitions to establish common, non-proprietary standards= , and who work hard to provide alternatives -- rather than fighting for absolute dominance and the elimination of alternatives. One must also keep in mind that open source is not anti-corporate. When Richard Stallman's notion of free software gained a wider interest, the principles and "open source" corporation-friendly moniker was established to differentiate it from Stallman's more radical idea of "free software." IBM and other large companies are now heavily invested in, develop and critically depend upon open source software. So, my answer is yes, universities have a lot to gain by moving some of their business to open source software. But, I don't think there are good open source alternatives for all categories of software. Actually it is good to remember, conversely, that there are non-commercial alternatives to several crucial categories of open source software, categories that are the foundations, the very "backbone" of the software layers of network technologies (e.g., DNS-BIND, OpenSSL, sendmail, and, arguably, the Apache web server). So, the commercial vs. open source distinction is a false dichotomy and the more important criterium to remember when one does choose to work with commercial software is to ask whether or not the company producing the software is an ethical company. An "ethical company" might be an oxymoron in a conventional Marxist's lexicon, but I think this is a crucial problematic to address if one hopes to understand our current circumstances of post-industrialization. TS: How does your writing of media philosophy enter into your teaching? Which books or essays do you find most helpful in your teaching? WS: I believe that its important to understand that technologies incorporat= e frozen -- i.e., reified -- social, economic and political relations. For example, if you have DSL in your home, you almost certainly have more bandwidth coming into your house than you have going out of your house. In other words, structured into the network wiring is the assumption that you are a consumer, not a producer of information because the engineering has been done to make it easier for you to download information from the Internet rather than to upload information. Information technologies contain many forms of catachresis (frozen metaphor) that more often than no= t started life as quirky philosophy projects and are now "frozen", but workin= g as silicon and gold components. For example, the 19th century philosopher, George Boole, had a project (An investigation into the Laws of Thought) to try to algebraically deduce truths that is now literally printed into the very foundations of computers: we know these foundations in contemporary technology as "Boolean Circuits." I try to teach my students that each of these frozen decisions could in fact be undone and replaced with something else. What would result might be an entirely different technology. This sor= t of investigation/thought experiment is also the basis for my own research and scholarship: I am interested in challenging and finding alternatives to the foundations of computer science and network architectures by locating the presuppositions built into contemporary, new media technologies. An example of this kind of work is the "Translation Map" that Sawad Brooks and I did (translationmap.walkerart.org) in which we re-read the founding essay of the field of machine translation, a text written by Warren Weaver in 1949. Weaver proposes to understand translation as a problem of coding and decoding. We show the absurdity of Weaver's proposal -- and the 50 years o= f work in machine translation that has been done based on Weaver's proposal -= - and we illustrate a possible alternative by prototyping a network technolog= y for collaborative editing in which translation is understood to be a form o= f collaborative work between people, rather than as a de/coding problem to be handled exclusively by a machine. To impart this perspective to my students, I like to have them read original documents from the history of technology (e.g., like the texts included in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort's "New Media Reader" (MITPress)) and also to read work from scienc= e studies and critical theory that describes technologies as assemblages of socio-technical relations. Bruno Latour's book, "Science in Action" is on= e thing students in my "Introduction to Digital Media" course are asked to read. TS: In a recent interview Ralf Homann, faculty at Bauhaus University, told me that Walter Gropius demanded an educational practice in the arts that focused students on economics from very early on-- Gropius thought of the artist as a polished, perfected craftsman. He claimed that academies separate art from life, from the "industry." Today, there is no such thing as "the industry" for which students could be prepared. It's not like in other areas where a predictable skill set secures a job. In new media the skill sets are drastically changing and what was justifiable and useful yesterday may be irrelevant and dated tomorrow. How do you address this dilemma? WS: On the one hand I disagree: I think there are very specific "craft" skills that are relatively stable and that can be taught to students of digital media. For example, programming is a general skill that is essential to the construction of all digital media. Even if one does not know a particular programming language, if one knows how to program it is really not a big challenge to learn another language. On the other hand, I agree: there is no one industry for which students are being prepared. Digital media of today is like writing was to Plato's Athens: it is a "solvent" being incorporated everywhere and it threatens to dissolve and rearrange disciplinary boundaries as well as industry differences. Every department in the university must today wrangle with the questions of new media. Some of the oldest departments, e.g., departments of classics, have been the most innovative in addressing the possibilities and problems of ne= w media. A lot of what computers and networks do in industry and government i= s to automate processes that had previously been done by hand: forms of production, like bureaucratic procedures are being automated. Bureaucracy -= - which means literally "rule by the bureau, or the office" -- is being replaced by "computercracy" -- rule by computational methods. Larry Lessig and other legal scholars have been very articulate in pointing out the legal ramifications of this kind of transformation. But, if people don't think too deeply, computercracy ends up looking a lot like bureaucracy. For instance, the so-called "desktop metaphor" that structures the interface most of us use when we operate a computer, is a relatively direct borrowing from the technology of the office -- files, folders, trashcans, desks, etc. So, the crucial challenge is to teach fundamentals -- that may in fact be "crafts" -- so that graduates can rethink computerization where ever they find themselves. about Warren Sack http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/SocialComputingLab/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 36.0 <nettime> interview with CNN's wolf blitzer nettime's_bloggee nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 29 Jul 2004 02:18:55 -0100 < fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_07_25_fafblog_archive.html#109102674245058489 > Tuesday, July 27, 2004 Fafblog: THE WOLF BLITZER INTERVIEW Here at the convention there isn't that much to do right now other than eat tiny quiches an finger sammiches an hang out at panels drinkin wine but we're still havin an ok time with that. Me an Giblets have been hangin out at such panels as "Blogging: Transforming the Medium of Media" an "Blogging: A Radical New Media of Blogging" an "Blogging: Blog Media Bloggity Blog Media Bla-blog" where we have lent our expert advice to confused broadcast journalists whose minds are dazzled by the oh so confusin world of computer wizardry. It was here that me an Gibs were interviewed by Wolf Blitzer so that he might better understand the Heady An Complicated Emergent Phenomenon of Blog Journalism. WOLF BLITZER: So, Fafnir and Giblets, what IS a blog? FAFNIR: Blogs are the future Wolf. GIBLETS: Yes! They are MADE of the future! We extract the future's pure temporal essence an squeeze it into cables an modems an T3 lines it becomes a blog! F: A blog... of the future. WB: How much thought goes into your "web blog" "posts"? F: Oh we do not think at all when we post! That would defeat the entire purpose! G: Blogs must be spontaneous intant reactions to the lightning events of the everyday! Giblets fires up a random news article, pounds his head against the keyboard several times, an hits the "publish" button for the purest of pure blog posts! F: Otherwise you are not truly flowin in the electric consciousness Wolf. WB: Do you think blogs are transforming the discourse in America, and if so how so? F: Oh they definitely are Wolf. There is not much that can resist our transformin internet power. G: We are MADE of the internet. We course with its febrile energy! F: An we will make the discourse faster because blogs are faster. When someone starts talkin bout somethin that just happened five minutes ago someone else will say "oh I already heard about that yesterday, borin" an they will drop it cuz it's borin. G: When someone starts talkin bout somethin else they will change subject not in the middle of the sentence, but before the other sentence was actually spoken. F: It will be just that fast. WB: Fascinating. Now, blogs just don't do the kind of rigorous fact-checking and editorial work that we do here in the mainstream media... F: That's very true. Not like you have at CNN or MSNBC or Fox! G: Some days we sit around thinkin "Oh man if only we could maintain the journalistic rigor of Robert Novak or Charles Krauthammer or Brit Hume!" F: Or Judith Miller or Chris Matthews or CNN's Bill Schneider! G: But then we would lose our cuttin-edge appeal Wolf Blitzer. Our cuttin-edge appeal. WB: But given that bloggers might be biased, or play "fast and loose with the truth," and given the increased importance of blogs today, should Americans be concerned? F: Yes they should be very concerned. We are an unchained force of nature Wolf Blitzer! You cannot stop us once we spin out of telecommunicontrol! G: Bow before the power of blog Wolf Blitzer! Bow before the power of blog NOOOOOOW! WB: But that means the mainstream media would be defenseless before an onslaught of raw unfiltered opinion and skewed news! F: It could lead to... a blogpocalypse. G: A rain of electronic fire and doom upon all mankind! F: An the mainstream press would be helpless to stop it. G: Heeeeellllpleeeessss! BOWBEFOREGIBLETS! WB: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, Fafnir and Giblets. F: Thank you, Wolf. Can we interview you now? WB: Sorry, I already have an interview with Tim Russert scheduled. F&G: Awwwwwwwww. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 37.0 <nettime> Zagreb interview with Michael Hard Ognjen Strpic nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 19 May 2002 08:42:36 +0200 Zagreb interview with Michael Hardt by Ognjen Strpic [broadcast on Croatian Radio, Third Program, 12. 5. 2002] While we wait for publishing of Croatian translation of Hardt-Negri's Empire, Michael Hardt visited Zagreb, where he gave two lectures, organized by past.forward (theory module of net-club mama) and performing arts magazine Frakcija. Between the lectures, we talked about some of the less discussed aspects of their work in Empire. OS: How do you think the theory you and Toni Negri proposed in the book relates to protestors in Genoa or Porto Allegre? They seem to have embraced your theory as their own. At the same time, you are, say, very sympathetic towards the protestors' efforts. MH: The way I see it, these globalization movements and our book have proceeded on sort of parallel paths, in fact they've both been interpreting the same questions and reality and coming to the same conclusions. And this is at least in two regards: one central aspect of our concept of empire is that there is no center to power or rather that form of global power has changed, that it's no longer based on dominant nationstate on its own and that it is now composed of a network of powers. This is our notion of empire. I think similarly these movements have not been organized around, say, a notion of US imperialism. Had they thought that, all of these protests should have been at the White House, or at the Pentagon, or on Wall Street. Rather, the way I think is that they've been experimenting with the new form of power. In other words, they've targeted international organizations like the G8, and supernational organizations like the WTO, or the IMF, or the World Bank. So in this way they've been trying to understand the new form of power, the way a movement understands something, which is some kind of experimental form. I think that in fact none of these organizations that they have targeted with the protests is itself the center of global power. In other words, IMF is not in control of globalization, in itself. And if we were to destroy the IMF tomorrow, it wouldn't make the world immediately a better place, in fact, probably worse. So I think that one shouldn't try to read the protesters as they've identified the new sources of power, rather, it's a much more distributed and therefore seemingly amorphous system of power that they are trying to confront. So in a way each protest is sort of an adding experiment to that. It's in that sense I think that our analysis of the new form of power as empire and the movement's analysis of the new form of power is proceeding along the parallel path. The other way in which our argument seems to me very similar to these movements' is that one of the political results of our analysis is that we think that the only adequate way to confront, say, the problems of globalization, or the forms of global domination under which we suffer now, is not by creating isolated local zones of protection, or even re-enforcing the powers of nationstates, we think that rather an alternative have be proposed at an equally global level. I think that's also true of at least what I understand as the dominant elements within these globalization movements. I don't think that the dominant elements are the ones that are properly anti-globalization. Rather, the movements themselves have been globalizing, constructing global relationships. In that sense, it doesn't make sense to call them anti-globalization movements, they're more properly understood as alternative globalization movements. In other words, they are protesting against the current forms of globalization, but in the name of, or in the desire for, alternative forms of globalization. So I think that in those two regards our argument which is conducted in a very philosophical plane, and the workings of these movements, which is obviously conducted both theoretically and practically in a different register, that they've been moving on parallel paths, and that's why they in a way agree well with each other. OS: Your idea of empire, at least in my reading, doesn't bear any particular ideological baggage by itself. It's reception however, perceives it as distinctively Leftist. How do you see it in this respect? MH: Well, OK. The book _is_ primarily an attempt of the analysis of contemporary form of power, and in that way it can in simply naming the forms of power today, which is I think the primary object of the book, it could be appreciated by people of many different ideological formations. We conceive it as a communist project, we present it as a communist project, thinking here of "communist" in the tradition, let's say of democratic globalization, the communist tradition that is not oriented towards formation of states and even of national control, but as a movement of increasing non-national democracy. In any case, there is a certain ideological position that defines our own efforts, but I think that such a book is not restricted to those of that ideological position. And in fact, what seems to me interesting about the reception of the book, is that it runs counter many of assumptions about Left and Right, and that's why it has been a useful analysis for many to, say, disrupt what had seemed like the commonplace assumptions about globalization. Just for instance, many have assumed in the US that those who are on the Left are necessarily against globalization. Any in many, sort of basic or profound ways, our perspective is completely _for_ globalization. But the problem with our contemporary world in many ways is not that we have too much globalization, the problem is we have not enough. That really we need to globalize equal relationships, democratic relationships, the problems with our contemporary form, say, the control of dominant corporations, the control of the US military, of various other forms that constitute this imperial power, the problem is that in many regards that it blocks globalization, it blocks the possibility of constructing democratic relationships across the globe. So, in that sense I think it's not … the first moment, I think, of a Left, or I would say democratic position, should not be against globalization, what interest me much more are the possibilities of globalization. I just presented it in one way which I think the perspective of the book has run counter to what people thought were necessary Left and Right positions, and that has allowed them to appreciate the argument even without of course agreeing with our perspective, which I think is not necessary for a book like this. OS: In what respect, then, it is a communist project? First of all, one should say that the much of the European modern Enlightenment thought, but especially communist tradition, especially certain element of the communist tradition, have been the first and most vocal proponents of globalization. Think of the slogans of First International, for instance, not only "Workers of the world, unite", but "Proletariat has no country, its county is the entire world", there are at least elements of the communist tradition, ones that most interest me, that have always been interested in globalizing relationships as a potential for liberation. This is not also exclusive for the communist tradition, it's also part of other elements of modern European political thought. So, there are certain ways in which, and we argue that there are certain points that it's in fact not capital, or it's not the forms of liberal national governments, but in fact it's the force of liberation and in some sense the communist tradition that has been leader in globalization. The other way in which it is a communist book is that is argues for an absolute democracy, for democracy founded on relations of equality, freedom, and social solidarity. I mean, I think that those three … code words belong to the French Republican tradition, but also belong, in my mind, to the best elements of the communist tradition. So, that also seems to me that it's the way it's a communist book, but it's demanding an absolute democracy. Then, the most fundamental way would be that it's the analysis insists on the fact that while capital has historically brought many possibilities for liberation, that finally the operation of capital prevents the realization of democratic relationships. In other words, that it's not an accident that the capitalist relations perpetuate poverty and wealth, disparities of both the wealth and power, and that they prevent democratic social constructions. It's in fact intrinsic to capital and therefore the project for democracy will ultimately have to be anticapitalist and develop a social form that is noncapitalist in that sense. That at least is recognizable as the communist project. OS: Isn't it Braudelian notion of capital as antimarket, as opposed to market, the one you really object? MH: I don't think that any capital functions without state regulation. I mean, this is just a factual, historical claim. All of the propositions of free market, and of capital based on free market, have been … false. I think that free markets are always constructed by political regimes. I think this is true in the nineteenth century hayday of the ideology of free market, and that this is equally true in our contemporary neoliberal phase, that it's not, say, the autonomy of the economic, it's not that the forces of capital or economic forces, or market forces, function freely. That they always require state, or say, regulatory forms. In the academic framework, the general reference for this argument I have just made is Polany's book "The Great Transformation", which argues precisely that. I would rather pose it differently; I think it's right to say, at least as an analytical tool it's useful to think of different elements of the current form of power, or elements of capitalist rule, some of which are potentially positive and some of which are clearly negative. I would rather say that other elements that capital has brought historically are potentially positive, the one I already mentioned is this extension in that sense of globalization of relationships. Another is what one could call socialization of production or the organization of social cooperation. I mean, capital has historically operated the function of bringing together workers, classically in the factory, bringing them together and having them cooperate together and proposing the terms for that cooperation. And that social cooperation is, it seems to me, has an incredibly liberating human potential. What I would say then is that capital, well … creating and in certain sense historically proposing social cooperation, also limits social cooperation, and that one could imagine pushing social cooperation further beyond the bounds which capital can tolerate. So, the same way I think with globalization in certain respects. There are certain aspects of globalization that capitalist relations create globalization, but finally restrict it, and that pushing them further might be the way to move. The same thing with social cooperation, the capital even obliges us to cooperate socially in certain ways, but then blocks the fuller pursuit of that cooperation. OS: I'm now interested in two issues you you don't write about in the book. One is contemporary discourse on justice in political theory. Another is multiculturalism. Do you think those two topics relevant to your proposal? I'm talking about the authors such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, James Scanlon, Brian Barry… MH: I should start by saying that for us, or for me, the concept of democracy is much more central than the concept of justice. That said, I think it's not an either/or alternative. I think that much of the work that is done under the rubric of liberalism and therefore the framework of justice, and therefore the framework of right, and that's the way it's posed in authors you mentioned, their general project is oriented towards a notion of right rather than a notion of good, and that's what defines it's liberalism in their general estimation. I think that entire project can be translated in something that resembles our project, I think that they're not in different universes. When on thinks of the original Rawls framework of his first book, A Theory of Justice, it is a procedural investigation, but it is also oriented towards, let's say, tendency toward equality in terms of both decisionmaking and also distribution. I think it's an attempt at the constructing the basis of democratic relations. And in that regard that I would try to say that two perspectives, one that focuses on democracy, which is ours, and other, which focuses on justice, are not totally separate. It seems to me that there's a certain amount of confusion with the term multiculturalism, and that very different things are included under that term. Because there are ways in which the term is used in entire tradition of critical race studies and also therefore race struggles, in addition to gender studies and therefore feminist struggles, are included under the term multiculturalism and are thought of as streams or currents within multiculturalism. I think that they are central to our attempts of analyzing forms of power, especially within a cultural framework of the empire, but not only cultural, I think the problem with multiculturalism is that it is often assumed, by people using the term both for and against it, that we can separate the cultural from the economic and the political, I think that none of these are merely cultural, both fields of analysis or fields of political activity. In other words, I don't think that struggles or studies about and sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, for instance, or feminist studies about sexism, or race studies, I don't think that any of these are cultural in a limited sense, I think that they are all always already also economic and political questions. What I'm trying to do is to distinguish certain conception of multiculturalism from another; there's one conception of it which I think is not accurate, that it's true our analysis our analysis doesn't deal with. But there's another, which is very important to our kind of analysis. How so? Just for instance, part of analysis is trying to recognize, say, the new forms of racism that are implied within this new imperial structure. In other words, that there is a certain paradigm of racial oppression and therefore racial antiracist struggle that served as a paradigm in previous stage, what might be called a stage, of imperialism and that also functioned in the United States throughout much of twentieth century, we think that the form of racial oppression has changed now and therefore requires different kinds of antiracist struggles. Here we're drawing directly on work that's done in race studies, in critical race studies, antiracist movements. So, if that's what is meant by multiculturalism, than it's certainly central to our analysis. As a more practical, movement question, it has to do with our concept of the multitude: there was, especially in the US, but also in Western Europe and probably elsewhere, there seemed to be a choice between two kinds of political organizing, an exclusive choice. The one that I experienced in 1980's in the US, see if it resonates with you elsewhere, is that there were two choices of political organizing: on unity model, or on difference model. The unity model is really the one that seemed more traditional; party structures often function this way. There was really one central access to political organizing, and it could include different elements, but they were all subordinated. For instance, one could say class politics is central political struggle, and then we could have people interested in sexism and racism, and other social problems, but they were all secondary to one unity so that's the unity model. In reaction to that was formed, very powerful in the US, especially growing out in the sixties, developing in the eighties, what is often called identity politics, is really organized around differences, in other words, we need a separate movement for black lesbians, separate movement for Central American gay men, so the difference of one's identity would determine the difference of one's struggles. Now I think that there was a kind of dead end of political organizing between these two models, and one could, I think, easily see the limitations of each. And both of them, although in a way they formed polar opposites, they were both fundamentally based on the notion of the alternative, of the exclusive alternative, of identity and difference. Our attempt with this concept of the multitude is to recognize the possibility of a different kind of political organizing. Rather than been based on, say, alternative between identity and difference, it's based on continuity between multiplicity and commonality. In other words, multitude is meant to name a possible form of political organization that is internally differentiated, in other words it's always a multiplicity, and yet it can act in common, which seems to me to be at least conceptually a different access to these two previous notions. And I think, moreover, that these globalization protest movements have functioned on this model of the multitude, rather then on models of identity and difference, because for instance groups that we have thought of in a previous way were objectively antagonistic, even contradictory to each other, say, trade unions and environmentalists, suddenly, starting in Seattle, function together, and the contradiction doesn't play out. One could say, as we often say, that in network structure that every opposition is displaced, or is triangulated by third term, and then a fourth, in the web of relationships. So, this seems to me again a way the conception of multiculturalism as based on a logic of difference in identity as the primary organizational conception of politics isn't exactly the way that it's functioning today, in our analysis. If that's what one thinks by multiculturalism, then we're thinking of something very different. OS: What exactly do you mean by multitude, and what is its role as a second central concept of your book? MH: The book proposes two concepts, empire as a form of power, and multitude names both the subject that is exploited by empire, that is controlled by empire, the subject whose labor and activity supports empire, but it also is the subject that has the potential to create an alternative society. Now, it seems to me that the concept of multitude in our book is used in at least two ways that itself constitutes one of contradictions in our book. In certain ways it's a very selfcontradictory book, which is a good thing, I think. In one sense, multitude is used to name the multiple human force of liberation that has always existed. In certain ways, it names that almost ontological force of human creativity and liberation that has certainly existed throughout the modern era, but even previously. It's the force that always refuses domination. This is one of, say, principles of our analysis that we propose as almost an axiom that we ask others to accept, but I think most accept this, which is that humans always eventually, and this is one of wonderful things about humanity, refuse authority, refuse domination, rebel against forms of oppression. And that is in a way the primary force of the multitude that we use, reading as a sort of guide to history. It is the continual revolt of the multitude against forms of slavery, exploitation, and other forms of oppression. So, that multitude always has existed and will always exist, in that sense. In another, in a very different sense, the multitude functions in our discourse as something that has never yet existed and it's a project to construct now. And what multitude means in this sense is this is a political subject capable of creating a new society. In a way one could put the two together and say that seeds of human creativity, of a democratic humanity, of a liberated humanity have always existed and they've always been manifest in this continual revolt against forms of authority. So, the second notion of multitude is really a realization of those seeds, you now, the realization of those potentials that have always existed. What that means, slightly more concretely, this project of construction of the multitude is possible today, what multitude would mean in this sense, what the construction of the multitude would mean is what I would call a becoming communal struggles. In other words, rather that seeing the various forms of liberation as separate form one another, or even sometimes antagonistic to, or contradictory to each other, recognize how they can become common. Just in a way we were talking of traditional language of multiculturalism, that struggles against racism, struggles against sexism, struggles against class structures, could be posed not as irrevocably different and separate, but recognize their common project. I guess what multitude as fundamental concept is asking is that difference can exist within a society, even within a political subject, and that political subject can nonetheless act, without being unified, that it can remain a multiplicity, and still govern itself and that's what I think fundamentally democracy and freedom require, that we can find a way to govern ourselves without reducing the differences among us. OS: One more issue remains to be addressed: the question of terrorism, political violence in its standard usage as killing or harming someone, probably innocent, as a means to express political views. MH: I think another element of terrorism in a standard usage, which equally should be criticizes, I mean, I perfectly agree with you that one should condemn the use of violence against innocent persons out of frustration or inability of political expression, that is certainly for one. The other thing I think is characteristic of terrorism as it's commonly conceived, and equally should be opposed, which is symbolic acts of violence, because this seems to me characteristic of both Right and Left terrorism through the last twenty or thirty years. It's not just violence, it's that the violence is highly symbolic, and I think that those symbolic acts, violent and nonviolent ones too, first of all have very dangerous implications, because they are really not directed at the act, they are directed at a symbol. And also they don't construct anything, they're completely negative acts in that sense. In both of those ways I think you're right, if I understand your suggestion, that one should in unreserved and fullhearted way oppose to terrorism. One should also say, however, that we I think I speak with the vast majority in this we are not opposed to political violence. Political violence, is seems to me, it's not so simple that we can say in a categorical or principled way, that we are against political violence, because there are times, historically, in which political violence is necessary, not just justified. The struggle against fascism during the Second World War, for instance, it required the form of violence. Most of the modern revolutions, revolution in the US, French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Algerian Revolution, these required, I think, political violence. I would in such situations advocate use of violence and I think that vast majority of other would also. The reason I point this out is that I think that the question of violence has to be decided in specific contexts; sometimes it's appropriate and useful and sometimes it's not. That's a matter of political debate, unfortunately it seems it would simpler if we could answer the question philosophically and in a principled way, but I think rather it's always a political question. For example, there are many discussions within these globalization protest movements about use of violence. We find it's here the destruction of property and the purposeful confrontation with the police. These are the two things that those advocating use of violence in these protest propose or insist on. And I think it's a difficult question, I argue against use of violence in these cases, not because I have any great devotion to Starbucks or McDonald's or their windows, but because I think that it poses divisions between a movement that are false divisions, that it destroys the common projects of those involved and that's why it seems to me inappropriate and I argue against it. On the other hand, those who argue for it have many convincing points. The first is that they argue that they should be free to do what they want, in other words, I or others who do not favor the violence shouldn't be able to tell them what to do. They should be able to do what they want as long as they do it in a way that doesn't endanger the others. I think one should remain in discussion about this, but ultimately one is free to do what one wants. A more powerful and unfortunate argument they have, though, is that the media, mainstream media especially, is really on their side, in the sense that the media only reports acts of violence, this is especially true in the US, but it's also true elsewhere, there can be a demonstration of a hundred thousand people, and if it's peaceful it won't get reported in the US media. If there are windows broken, it will get reported. In fact, the great media success of these movements so far has been precisely because there's been violence, and even when there's been serious injury, as in Gothenburg or death as in Genoa, that's what the media actually reports, so those advocating the violence say: "Look, this is the way the system works, our entire struggle would be useless unless there were violence and it's reported." I think that's unfortunately a very convincing argument. My argument against it is that the representation in the media is not the most important aspect of these movements, that the internal construction of community, common projects, that their constituent aspects to the movements are much more important than their media representation. But in any case, I think that this, like many cases, in this instance the question of political violence, and here not violence against persons, but violence against property, is a complicated one and one that requires political discussion rather than principled objections. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 38.0 <nettime> Browserdays: Interview with Mieke Gerritzen geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 9 May 2002 10:38:17 +1000 Five Browserdays Later - An Interim Report Interview with Mieke Gerritzen By Geert Lovink A lot has happened since the Amsterdam-based designer Mieke Gerritzen and I came up with the idea to do a 'Browserday' in early 1998 (www.browserday.com). After the design competition took place three times in Amsterdam (1998-2000), the event moved to New York (March 2001) and Berlin (December 2001). On May 17 2002 Browserday will be back in Amsterdam. Four years after we had the initial idea Mieke and I sat behind our laptops and had an e-mail exchange to re-assess the concept. Initially a team of people organized the Browserday, with Jeanine Huizinga, David Garcia, Eric Kluitenberg, Michael van Eeden and Marleen Stikker (amongst others) in the core team. The browserdays 1998-2000 were a collaboration between the Dutch organizations such as the Society for Old and New Media (www.waag.org), De Balie (www.balie.nl), Paradiso (www.paradiso.nl), with involvement of the Rietveld, HKU and Sandberg design schools. In 2000 Mieke Gerritzen, the main force behind Browserday, took the competition on board of her new company, www.nl-design.net, and pushed the competition in an international direction. Even though the event from the start had the label 'international' it took some time to get design schools outside of the Netherlands interested. The next step was to try and see if the concept would also work outside of the safe and cozy environment of Amsterdam. I attended only the first two Browserdays in Amsterdam and then moved to Australia. However, my role in the Browserdays circus continued, helping to formulate the topics, doing research and compiling (xerox) readers with relevant texts related to the specific topic of each individual event. The core idea, for me, had always been to break open the new media design practice and put the designers in a multi-disciplinary environment. And show that designers, instead of merely being users, could intervene in the making of the applications they worked with. If it was true that tools were shaping the work, then it was also up to designers to directly contribute to technological developments. The browser was the Internet application par excellence. In a rapidly changing media environments 'tools' such as the browser were nowhere near neutral. Their technological parameters were cultural and economic in nature. Browsers are our windows to the world of information and communication. They are highly political applications as the initial clash of 1998 had shown. But the Browserday competition also proved that the browser concept, as such, could also be an incredible trigger for the techno-imagination. The politics and aesthetics of data navigation tools were going to be with us for a great part of the 21st century. That much was clear. GL: The last, fifth Browserday took place in Berlin. Have you seen progress in the submissions over the years the competition is running? It is being said that 3 or 4 years is a long time in terms of technology development. Is that also the case for concepts and design proposals made by students? MG: I don't think 3 to 4 years is such a long time in terms of technological development. The technological revolutions never stop. As long as people stay working on it, technology will stay an endless growing fantasy. Of course technology need heavy dose of knowledge, but every new step forward will require new ideas and dreams of seamless possibilities. That's what I mean with fantasy. Technology needs utopia; otherwise there is no drive for progress. The economy needs technical development to keep the market going on. It's impossible to distinguish between short and long term development. Talking realistic, I think everything up till now is short-term development compare to the hundreds of thousands of years which will follow. In the millions of companies, institutes and laboratories are mostly people working in a hurry to serve their stockholders and clients. At the moment technical development is a strongly money-driven. The International Browserday is an educational (and entertaining) event focusing on technical developments. Its not related to money and as a result it is also not related to technical realism. It is related to technical development in terms of "fantasy". It's all about the public expression of creativity. The International Browserday started in 98, based on the discontent over the old-fashioned desktop computer browsers. It was the time of the "browser war" between Microsoft and Netscape. Three Browserdays later (with its theme: "the end of the browser") in 2000 we started a new direction, placing the browser issue outside the PCs. Many devices now have browsers, such as mobile phones, PDAs and other 'wearable' technologies. During the years in which the event took place browsers have becoming a more and more independent product. The desktop computer is not the only machine anymore that is using a browser to navigate data environments and applications. The Browserday gives us also the possibility with every new topic to show a bit of history of technical development by theoretical papers and technical practice. There is, and there is no progress in terms of the applications and work shown at the different browserdays. Progress is something you can see if people working for a long time on the same thing. But we are not living in the age of sustainability. The progress I saw at the browserday in Berlin is that students feel more responsible for social and political aspects of the world they live in. This is different compared to the first browserday, where more people try to come up with navigation system in the hope to become a millionaire, which was a somewhat normal expectation at the time. Designers joined the digital technology development only 10 or 15 years ago. The browser is an interesting object to reflect on what is happening in the world of technology. Another sort of progress I can see is that the Browserday competition is becoming part of the everyday curriculum at design schools. People know what we talking about, even tough it's not a standardized format. How the Browserday program looks like is an open question. GL: Some people told me that the browser demos as shown during the browserday remain a bit simple. Perhaps these critics have too high expectations. What would you call a good outcome for such an event? MG: The format of browserday is three minutes. Students and young designers have exactly three minutes to show their demo design. Having only three minutes forces people to prepare their presentation very tightly. You can only show the very essential parts of your idea. It is about making choices. You have to look at your own work and pick out the most personal and characteristic part of the idea and use all the creativity you have to present this on a clear and special way to the public. The event is a show. It is what I would call event-education. The stage presentation is part of the design. Designers these days are more on stage than they have been in the past. Being a designer is getting close to becoming a pop star. I don't know if this development is a positive one. On the other hand, designers are more forced to explain their design. If a designer has no strong vision about what he or she is making, their presentation will be weak. If he or she has a strong vision but no interesting work to show, their presentation is also weak. So both sides are important, which makes life of a designer not easier. Browserday shows 30 presentations on one day and of course they are diverse. The presenters coming from all kind of disciplines and experience. Quality is different. But the real interesting ideas are short listed and shown again in more details at the same day. This means that the audience will see more and can think about the "better" ones. Though, browserday shows different quality but is never boring, because of the three minute format. A good outcome for browserday is when the event shows at least a couple of interesting new navigation ideas. Another outcome I like is if there are some presentations that show more a statement about the position of the browser, a critical vision that shows the designer's personal opinion. I also like it when there is a mix of disciplines and media. All these elements show the potential diversity of design, in a world, which increasingly looks the same. Browserday is not only about new media or technological development; it's about opening up spaces for creative thinking-if only for a day. GL: I have noticed a shift in your work and rhetoric, away from the dotcom-type businesses, towards issues related to design and new media education. Has the dotcom crash had an effect on the browserday and students' expectations? MG: Yes, more applications are critical towards information overload. I am happy that during the last browserday in Berlin there were more attendees than ever before. The Internet depression did not directly influence digital media education. Students are not used to make a lot of money and I'm glad they can study and do their experiments without the pressure of a money- driven structure. With the dotcom crash the new media development did not disappear I even expect a more interesting climate for new ideas soon. The hype is over and what is left are diehards who apart of just making money are probably more interested in the real issues which the digital world confronts us with. GL: To what extend does the Browserday differ from popular Flash design competitions? Would you call a browser meta design? Where exactly would you say is the interface design aspect in browsers? MG: Browsers are navigation systems and they all need a graphic user interface. For browserday we ask people to think about browsers in general. We invite people to come up with ideas how, where and which information you could get. That's a big thing to ask. The design aspect here involves everything; before you can start with a concept you have to find out what you think about the existing browsers and about the function of a network. So here you can start being critical about the situation of the communication technology of today and you have to think about future possibilities. Here you start to create your own vision and take position on a new navigation idea. This is all part of the design. Next step is writing the concept and creating a demo presentation model. We ask for a demo design because these tiny free us our minds from the technical and commercial restrains. The Browserday is about ideas, not about sophisticated programming. One of the important issues for browserday is that so much is happening all the time in the world of new devices, tools, economy and marketing strategies, hypes that at browserday these things are getting more clear and people get a chance to react on these development in a critical fashion. Browserday is an event unrelated to specific software or hardware platforms or standards. It is an educational event, which stresses the importance of both critical and visionary conceptual thinking. Later on, in their professional life students will use these conceptual skills. Schools should not stress too much emphasis on learning software as these packages are constantly changing. Software is becoming redundant in such a short time. The interface design aspect of a browser is literally everything what makes people move in the digital sphere. If one is only using sound for navigation that's interface design as well, or hardware but also the visuals. Design is a wide area. So is interface design, since it's not clear how communication hardware will develop and where wireless technologies will go. GL: Why do we stress the importance of the quality of software and talk about the politics of Internet applications? Do people really care about such issues? Isn't the excitement over such issues something of the mid and late nineties? How do students and schools respond to the very idea of building your own browser? MG: The politics of Internet applications is only interesting for economic purposes. The last years digital media students and young designers were all very busy making money. Since the dotcom crash people are getting less interested in Internet in general. They shifted their attention to mobile devices or digital gadgets like MP3 players or new computers such as the new i-mac. Apple for instance has done many steps back and is more and more using outworn metaphor. They are only restyling.... but why? Because we don't need more advanced, faster processors at the moment. Software runs perfect and we don't need more memory. This means Apple focuses on the consumer instead of the professional market. They have started to restyle instead of further developing their products. For instance, software such as i-photo is just an easy-to-use photo album online, a shell for pictures. It all started with the launch of their new OS X operating system, which looks like an interface made out of ordinary future. Students like to build their own browser. The idea is really funky but they are not very conscious about the politics of technology. Since 911 they are more critical. They want to make the world a better place, but only after I told them designers have this power and opportunity to change. They don't need to further spread the unified global look, developed by marketing departments of large corporations. Recession is really good, in that respect. GL: You have worked with a variety of schools and students from all over Europe and the United States. Could you tell something about the different schools and their models for new media pedagogy, which you find most inspiring? MG: There is no difference between Europe and the United States concerning design education. The whole Western world looks similar in that respect, both universities and art schools. All these institutes need to do is restructure, offer new courses, start new departments and of course every institute will do this in its own way. The teachers, their world, ideas and passion they bring in will make the real difference. People will create the characteristics of the educational environment. Special activities and events are important to force students to create vision and motivation. Learning is a never-ending process. Good teachers are still learning. If people are busy with interesting topics, coming from actual problems or tendencies in the world, we will forget about the bureaucracy and structures we have to deal with. In the case of Browserday I found more difference between the Netherlands and Germany. In Germany I did not found so many critical or political people, they were more following the trends. The American and Dutch people were more conscious and critical, they try to make statements. In this case I was happy to see that in these moments of recession, people try to come up with ideas and visions instead of market-valuable products. It's always difficult to find students who are studying to find their message and their own visual language, maybe 3% of the students is really interested in their social environment. If you want to make a point in this world, you have to believe you can change the world. Nobody is talented. If you want to become a star you have to work and you have to study. It's a fight with yourself. Most of the people and students are consuming, they have no ambition. The Browserday is something you have to go for. It is not part of the regular curriculum. Browserday always presents a topic from the world of technical development connected to the actual situation of our social environment or our behavior. If students care they pick it this topic and start creating a new better world. This way of challenging people gives more motivated students than the regular program at universities and schools. It' s just a trick to find the people who feel responsible for their life and from others. New Media education will become soon more interesting, the first generation digital designers and developers are graduated and are now able to teach. That will make a difference because up till now we could stimulate students to break walls, but the real experience now is coming from the new generation media designers. I sometimes wonder why so many students are not working like crazy. I grew up with the idea of fighting and working to create a good and interesting life. Not all of them but most of the students are easy going. But life changed; there is more money. Most people only work 3 days a week instead of 5. There's more time for entertainment and shopping. These changes in the work place are also influencing education. If people do not automatically have the need to learn we have to challenge them. That's why I think event-education is important for the future. It's a combination of learning and entertainment. GL: It is obvious that students don't need to be taught how to use this or that application. They often know more than the teacher. All right. They need to discover their own style, methodology, how to develop a concept, get the necessary critical theory to interpret the larger framework. But how does that translate into a curriculum? MG: A curriculum should not be a list of soft- en hardware knowledge. The curriculum will be a list of projects and work. Software these days is developed for mass use, but to create special work you'll need creativity and vision. Students need to know about software, stretch the limitations of it, they should control the software instead of software controls them. I don't want to see software anymore if I look at their applications, unless its part of their concept. At the moment we live in the age of style poverty. Software generates too much images and styles created by tasteless people. I am sorry to say that but the evidence is overwhelming. People just use existing styles and do come to school anymore to develop their own design vocabulary. This is what makes the world so poor and boring. We are losing culture due to the homogenizing forces of globalization. What we need instead is subjective madness; a radical individualism which aims at esthetic singularity. GL: How has the established design world responded to the Browserday events so far? MG: The design world has reacted positive so far. People appreciate it, not only within design world, by the way. Browserday is a cross media event. It is a mix of technology, theatre, sound, design, art, theory and political statements. The diversity makes it a popular and entertaining event. Young designers and students who prepare their presentation also like it because they have the opportunity to present their ideas to a large audience. They really exercise and we help and stimulate them to show the strongest part of their concept. GL: The browserday events could be called a structuralist design approach. Because of the emphasis on the power of applications the story telling aspect of design is getting a bit in the background. There is no idea in design as such. The application is the message. You also seem to distance yourself from the sixties approach in which design is being subordinated to social movements and abstract Marxist criticism. MG: The browserday invites people to transform their vision into an application. To be honest, I am more interested in visions then applications--if they were to be separated. During a browserday we can show that designers are able to combine these two elements. The process of combining techniques and ideas is their story. Their presentations are showing a way of thinking, a way of looking to the world. An application has power if it has a message. I think browserday is already famous because of the critical and different look (engagement) at the world of technical and economical development. By living in this world it will be always a struggle to deal with structures and systems. Browserday as an organization will try to be invisible. And I know its not possible, but we try I think being creative is the best in total freedom. So how can you create an environment where people will get inspiration, attention, freedom, context and information? For me most of the educational institutes are too much bureaucratic and rule-minded. Browserday at least will try to be a more open and a moving organization without a physical place, working and giving personal information via email and the web. Design for new media has proved to be a field in between the structure of organization and the system of technological possibilities. A browser represents information and it needs a system and structure to make this happen. To come up with extreme and new ideas you need to be free of too much influence coming from the bureaucratic over structured society we live in. GL: Your not a big fan of theory, is that right? You don't seem to care so much about the latest fashions in cultural studies, post-colonial theory, visual culture or critical contemporary arts. You are not fond of the banal Bauhaus comparison either. Where should new media design students get their inspiration from, presumed they want to read texts in the first place? MG: Theory may be important for theorists. But for designers or people doing creative practice it is more important to develop theory out of their own experiences. They don't need all this information from books and history. There is a difference between reading and hearing statements, and creating them yourself. Designers are practitioners and they find out themselves what their 'message' is. They probably express this in their own language, which won't be text. This keeps the way open to develop their own theory, shown through their work. I stimulate the development of strong, new, visual languages and by knowing too much of written theories it doesn't help creating new work and mentalities. People should concentrate and be self-confidential when they create their work. Too much influence from others is no good. Of course it would be naďve if they remained unaware about the context of their own work. But they will know if they are the type of person to analyze. And they always get help of theorists. In fact, they should more often work together. Yes, I am not so much interested in the latest fashion of whatever. Fashion is important if we look to the world in general. But fashion is first and foremost an economic factor. It is mass manufactured. There is also fashion in theory and this indicates that no that many people thinking different. People who created a new and special theory or visual or technical thing are not part of fashion but show a new personal and characteristic view. That's what I'm interested in. Not in fashionable mass taste or knowledge. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 39.0 <nettime> Re: Zagreb interview with Michael Hard Brian Holmes nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 22 May 2002 02:02:04 +0200 "One could imagine pushing social cooperation further, beyond the bounds which capital can tolerate," says Michael Hardt drily, in his interview with Ognjen Strpic in Zagreb. What Michael Hardt calls "communism" lies essentially in this social cooperation. And he's right, in the sense that the empirical beacon of a pragmatic revolutionary politics is founded on phenomena of free cooperation, right now, in fact, before our nose - or with our concourse, in the best of cases. Hardt is less dry, or even enchanted, when it comes to the multitude: "Our attempt with this concept of the multitude is to recognize the possibility of a different kind of political organizing. Rather than been based on, say, the alternative between identity and difference, it's based on continuity between multiplicity and commonality.... groups that we have thought in a previous way were objectively antagonistic, even contradictory to each other, say, trade unions and environmentalists, suddenly, starting in Seattle, function together..." I would like to submit that this sudden cooperation - which has also been short-lived, in the case of US trade unions and environmentalists - results from the perception of EXTREME WEAKNESS ON THE SIDE OF ALL SOLIDARITY-BASED MOVEMENTS. In particular and exceptional circumstances, desperation suddenly breaks the barriers that our societies are so devilishly good at erecting between interest groups and even between individuals. The political question is then: HOW TO GO BEYOND THE SUDDEN INSPIRATIONS OF DESPERATION? Here lies the weakness of all the rhetorics based on an invocation of absolute democracy: "The other way in which [Empire] is a communist book is that is argues for an absolute democracy, for democracy founded on relations of equality, freedom, and social solidarity. I mean, I think that those three code words belong to the French Republican tradition, but also belong, in my mind, to the best elements of the communist tradition. So, that also seems to me that it's the way it's a communist book, but it's demanding an absolute democracy." The historical fact is that is that democracy, as we know it, contains an absolute contradiction. Social solidarity - i.e."fraternity" - was added to the French republican slogan in 1848, when the "National Workshops" were instituted to give work, and therefore sustenance, to the masses of unemployed urban-dwellers left without any resources by a classic capitalist recession (the one based on the railroad bubble, which so many have compared to the internet bubble, by the way). What people realized during the revolution of 1848 was that there was no substantial equality, and therefore no effective liberty, for people enslaved to the liberty of others (the bosses). But who had the power to create the National Workshops? An organ of redistribution: the state. The alternative globalization that Hardt calls for (me too) involves a rethinking and a reinstitution of the state, or at least of solidarity. This raises screams from the rank and file of the autonomists. But I say: you really are the "rank and file" so long as you continue to believe that the enthusiasm of global cooperation gets rid of any need to think about how global redistribution will be carried out. In fact this rhetoric is coming from people who know better. Whoever calls themselves "communist" has some idea about effective equality, and what it entails: the socialization of education, access to tools, and protection in the case of life-accidents, at the very least. Abundance for all as a feasible utopia. How to create those conditions, starting not from "human nature" but from actual conditions, is the political question. "How things get managed, that's the interesting thing," said Toni Negri in one of his interviews on the pre-revolutionary situation in Argentina. In his review of the book, Zizeck said that Empire was "pre-political." His argument was that the call for global citizenship would immediately provoke a fascist reaction in Europe, and was therefore unrealistic. Look around you today. I'm for the abolition of all borders. But that ALSO means a total reappropriation of the European state, and then of the American one, to make it not just into a universal welfare state mending the lacerations of capitalism, but much more: it means inventing procedures of delegation and representation capable of directing the tremendous wealth of modern technology toward the largest number of people, without creating a new version of bureaucratic oppression. Again, the political question. Not so easy. Let's not kid ourselves. This can only be achieved when we all have first faced a situation of DESPERATION. Solidarity doesn't grow on trees. And unfortunately, DESPERATION is coming. The shit is going to hit the fan, and the question of political violence is not going to be limited to breaking the windows of Starbucks, or to the way the media can distort such acts. Perhaps when the Palestinians are DESPERATE enough, they will adopt Ghandian non-violence, when faced with the ABSOLUTE OPPRESSION of modern military technology. Perhaps we will move toward GENERAL STRIKES in European and American cities, total stoppages of every function, whenever our outdated "leaders" show their heads. But for that, we have to look around and see that people are literally starving, next door, that lives are falling apart in our lovely European and American cities, for lack of an address to the political question. The NEOFASCISM gathering all around us is only the symptom of society falling apart under the pressures, the anti-state or anti-society pressures, of NEOLIBERALISM. But the worst is, you have to face both the symptom and the cause. In solidarity with Michael Hardt, Ognjen Strpic and all those who are trying to THINK POLITICS today. Brian Holmes # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 39.1 <nettime> Re: Zagreb interview with Michael Hard Ognjen Strpic nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 23 May 2002 17:38:42 +0200 dear Brian, thank you for your kind comments on the interview. i was wondering would a reader of the interview have the same impression that i had, that is, that communism Hardt calls for is "communism" in quite a special meaning. but it is this enchanted dance of the multitude on the edge of fascism that worries me most. this totalitarian potential of Empire that Zizek warns about stems not only from its appeal for global citizenship. this loosely bounded solidarity, a movements' ability to "recognize their common project" is exactly the strategy of totalitarian movements. i guess you might think of many historical examples, but what comes to mind here in Croatia is so-called "Headquarters for protection of dignity of Homeland War" lead by a paraplegic veteran Mirko Condic and supported by virtually every right-wing movement in Croatia and Herzegovina. (Homeland War is "official" name for the war in Croatia and, tacitly, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina on behalf of Croatia) basically, what they oppose is extradition of Croatian Hague-accused war criminals. in the elaboration, their position might be described as one that holds that notion of crime is suspended in a just war and that Croatian soldiers and non-soldiers who did what they did (which becomes irrelevant) are by definition impunible. the protestors are in part war veterans (and their families), but there are many other otherwise politically invisible people, too. what's that got to do with Hardt-Negrian communism of the multitude? in a word, everything. what they are effectively doing is while "remain[ing] a multiplicity" (in terms of economical class, state-nationality -- many protestors are from B&H and other countries, party-political -- Croatian right is very fragmented and Condic doesn't represent any party, &c up to right-wing environmentalists and the "apolitical") they "recognize how they can become common". and they really do. they "solidarize" with their fellowmen. meanwhile, they heartedly resist cultural, political, and economical aspects of globalization, criticize the government for being neo-liberal in terms of weakening of social programs, submissive foreign policy, corporations taking over local business etc. prime minister called them "undemocratic" and refused to comment on their proposals drawing on legitimacy of his elected government. he could have just as well called them revolutionary. in my mind, it's a hell of a symptom. ps. > Perhaps when the Palestinians are > DESPERATE enough, they will adopt Ghandian non-violence, when faced > with the ABSOLUTE OPPRESSION of modern military technology. i have a deja vu reading this line: almost the exact words Ghislaine Glasson told me over a glass of wine in Sarajevo. i felt enlightened :-) Ognjen Strpic # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 39.2 <nettime> Re: Zagreb interview with Michael Hard Brian Holmes nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 24 May 2002 20:12:10 +0200 Hi Ognjen (and all you Hardt/Negri readers) - Let's go just a little further with this. You write: "i was wondering would a reader of the interview have the same impression that i had, that is, that communism Hardt calls for is "communism" in quite a special meaning. but it is this enchanted dance of the multitude on the edge of fascism that worries me most. ... this totalitarian potential of Empire that Zizek warns about stems not only from its appeal for global citizenship. this loosely bounded solidarity, a movements' ability to "recognize their common project" is exactly the strategy of totalitarian movements." Well, I actually didn't read it that way. You know, I've been saying for years that we really need much broader solidarities, to face up to the transnational power now wielded by capital, and by those parts of the state-systems that support capital's global extension. And I don't think the movements Hardt is talking about are potentially fascistic in any way, he's basically talking about the kind of people who went to Porto Alegre and hung out on its fringes. In the course of the last two or three years, though, some things have radically changed. With the transition to Europe, as with "globalization" generally, there is a crisis in representative democracy. The governments can no longer represent many people's desires for a better life, because as the countries lose sovereignty, the governments lose power to do anything accept render their states, enterprises and the most adaptable part of their population more fit for the demands of transnational capital. So the democratic systems come under a lot of stress, and populism arises, mostly in a fascist form. The fascists are really a serious problem, because they combine with and provide the excuse for the traditional and neoliberal right to give us a new version of the authoritarian police state, bound together with other such states in a globalizing alliance. But far left movements also arise, whose intentions are as yet unclear. I situate myself there (because I believe that redistribution is necessary, and that predatory capitalism much be controlled, if not entirely transformed). The notion of the "multitude," as I understand it, is supposed to encourage this far left. But the promise of the multitude is not that of some swirling rainbow nebula of humanity, surging up in magical mobility to change everything. That's a great image and it translates some of the wonderful suprise of the reappearence of resistance movvements, with new techniques. But it's not precise enough. and I think it now should just be abandoned. Imprecise evocations open up too much danger for populism, I think that's the point in the example of the "Homeland War" veterans. The promise of the multitude is that of an operative intelligence of individuals and small groups, able to generate agency through the networked extension of an almost personal trust, which is based both on continuous critical debate and on cooperative action. This new extension of agency is a potential, which at moments is realized to some degree. It promises much more permeable organizational structures, where you do not immediately delegate your intelligence and will to some representative, where you engage in extensive debate and gain some agency and productive responsability. The experiment is to see how far these new organizational processes can go. It seems we will need them to put any viable solidarities into effect, as things get worse in the world, which unfortunately they are almost sure to. I don't think that experimentation takes place in a vaccuum, though. It's something like the issue I was discussing with Keith Hardt, in the "barter" thread. Is it possible to name all those non-contractual, non-market principles on which a multiplicity of human exchanges in reality depend? Is it possible to acquire a much clearer understanding of what kind of solidarities the transnational networks are based on, how and why they function, and how they interact with existing representational institutions? As the actually existing governments really begin to falter, and as I see (rather closer than I'd like in France right now) the pitiful, prepolitical hodgepodge that passes for thinking among the far right movements, I find that the left needs clear and pratical expression of the way we organize, the problems we face, and the specific directions in which we are looking for solutions. But take a movement like Kein Mensch ist Illegal. It calls for the dissolution of all borders and it convokes a transnational cooperative network to rework, amplifly and promote that general call, mostly through specific actions of solidarity. Zizeck said that such a call, which is also found in Empire, would lead to fascist resistance. In a way that's happening - not so much because of the actions of the far left, but primarily because of the continuing impoverishment of many countries, and the transnational labor movements brought about by neoliberalism. To which you can add the positive desire of people everywhere to participate in the new mobility. Myself, I believe one should not abandon the call for open borders in favor of a return to closed national society (which is always a fiction). But we have to begin to forsee the consequences of that call: in Europe it entails at the very least development programs for the neighboring countries, useful, productive forms of transnational credit, different kinds of education inside the European territory (not just education against racism!), better housing for immigrants, better wages and working conditions. In short, quite a radical change of the economy. But a real one, that operates in detail and does not just conjure away the hated state in the hope that spontaneous cooperation will resolve everything. I guess that's what Michael Hardt means when he says that we wouldn't necessarily be better off just by getting rid of institutions like the IMF. I wish he'd be more precise though. That's the main thing, not to go on evoking this epochal change without any discussion of what it will entail. Accepting the need to have a strategy to work toward that kind of change - OK, a complex, permeable, incomplete strategy, but still a strategy that can be constantly critiqued and made better - seems to me to be the difference between having a political fantasy and a political aspiration. Spontaneous cooperation without any representation would only be possible in a world with no enemies - cf. the anarchist republic in Spain. By the way, I was told by a fellow in Spain the other day, that according to the living memory of someone my friend had known, the thing that really marked the anarchist revolution in Barcelona was that they literally threw the money away, they threw it out into the street like garbage! After which they invented other means of exchange. Then again, I do think we could throw away the IMF's structural adjustment programs - and I support the replacement of the the WTO too, as gatt.org has just announced! best, Brian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 40.0 <nettime> Interview with Calin Dan geert nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 3 Apr 2002 09:40:13 +1000 'I am a believer in the symbolic aspect of culture clashes.' Interview with Călin Dan By Geert Lovink Călin Dan is a Romanian art critic, curator and artist, based now in Amsterdam. For me he is one of the people embodying the post-89 circumstance of Europe. Călin is equipped with an enlightened form of nihilism (to be found in E. M. Cioran--a cult figure for the Romanian intelligentsia); he practices black humor (like Caragiale--another cult figure for the same); he has a vivid interest in anthropology (see Eliade); and sometimes in metaphysics (Noica/Liiceanu). Born in 1955 in the Transsylvanian town Arad (next to the border with Hungary) in a middle class family, Călin Dan had a mixed career under the Ceausescu regime, managing to achieve a reputation in the art circles while keeping a low political profile, and he survived the dark eighties as an art historian and journalist. He was therefore quite well trained to enter the chaotic period after the bloody 'television revolution' of December 1989. Together with the artists Dan Mihaltianu and Iosif Király he formed in 1990 the art group subREAL and started to produce conceptual installations. Their style was dirty and minimal, full of ironical references to Romanian history and to the political moment--the dubious post-communist leadership of Ion Iliescu. In 1992 Călin Dan was appointed director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) Bucharest. In that position he initiated the first media art event in Romania, Ex Oriente Lux, which opened in November 1993. As a somewhat regular visitor to Bucharest, teaching media theory and video at the Art Academy, I was part of this event, working together with Călin on a special issue of the journal Arta and on the catalogue of the show and on the program of a two days conference. During that intense period I made a first (unpublished) interview with him. The conversation below was recorded in Amsterdam, February 2000 and edited by Călin in the following months. A lot had happened in the six years since we first collaborated. The government withdrew all funding for Arta in 1994. The same year, Călin produced another mega-event, the exhibition 010101..., using for the first time in the Romanian context features like community oriented projects, interactive displays of content, on-line communication. The event generated an important body of work produced in collaboration with 14 artists, a documentary film and an impressive catalog. In 1995, Călin Dan and Iosif Király (by and since then the only members of subREAL) were invited for a one year residency in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. They traveled there with the photo archive of Arta, practically saving it from destruction by neglect from the part of the authorities. As a result of the works produced there, subREAL became almost synonymous with 'artists & archives'. Unlike in other cases originating in the Former East, subREAL did not intend to reveal any scandals about compromised artists or alleged secret agents, working for the powerful (at the time) Securitate. The 600 kg heavy archive was primarily material illustrating Art History as a concept. Nevertheless, this was the archive of a communist, state-controlled art magazine, closely tied to the rich and influential Union of Artists, an organization embodying the official ideology as far as the art scene was concerned. From 1996 Călin established himself in Amsterdam as an artist. After having worked during the years with video, after using the computer mainly for word processing and e-mail, he entered abruptly in a media recuperation phase, and produced a lot of graphic material commenting digitally on (again) art history (mainstream Western art this time). After that he got engaged in the exciting world of 3D computer games. In collaboration with the newly established V2Lab For The Unstable Media, Călin developed between 1998-1999 the interactive installation Happy Doomsday!. Călin chose for the purpose two fitness chairs used for training the arm muscles, and interfaced them with the computers through sensors reading the movements of each user. The machines are performing the functions of joy sticks, generating navigation/participation in a multi-user 3D environment, which is a simulator of European war history based on the political map of the continent. GL: The complete version of Happy Doomsday! was shown in Vienna's Museumsquartier, in ZKM--Karslruhe, and at the Rotterdam Film Festival. How does it feel to have completed such a big project, which is, if I may say so, your first as an interactive media artist? CD: Basically it feels good, if I look at the people crowding to work out on my machines. I am happy mainly because this gets my initial hypothesis confirmed: there is a possibility to communicate with your public in a way which is both enjoyable and serious. That was the main expectation behind my choice for the computer game formula: to get an entertainment tool which leads the audiences somewhere else. That is why I put my trust in interactivity and in the pop culture formats. GL: Budget-wise working at Nintendo must be different from working in the structure of a media arts organization such as V2'Lab, even though you got there a very generous support. How would you describe the aesthetics of computer games in connection to this type of technical and financial limitations? CD: Building a computer game starts with decisions painters have to make when buying the canvas, the brushes and the colors. If you are rich enough you go to the best shop. If not you end up with a piece of cardboard. It happened to Van Gogh. So, in the end much depends on what you are able to use it for. In bigger words--what kind of visions haunt you. You do not need the latest version of Maya or a super-computer in order to develop a good piece. Mind you that I am not necessarily in favor of the poverty approach. At least not as far as the knowledge of the field is concerned. You have to understand what is going on the market. Only after having your research done, knowing what is on top and below your capacities, you can position yourself properly. We ended up in the medium-lower scale. We worked with 3D StudioMax, and we used World Tool Kit as game engine. It is fine compared to older software but its kid's stuff if you look at what is used now in the commercial world. On the other hand, I do not see yet enough authoring knowledge enabling people to contain the illusionist powers lying in high-end software. Without that knowledge, generated in a thin zone between Technology and Cultural Tradition, we are easily carried away by the fascination of the new, sometimes in unknown directions, but mainly in versions of a Barbie environment. That kind of knowledge is a delicate product and needs time to develop and mature. While when working with lesser tools you are on the familiar ground of poverty, and therefore forced to be inventive. GL: Is this the distinction between the workshop-based digital artisan, as Richard Barbrook has described it, and the industrial way of game production? CD: I do not see a structural difference between low and high scale production, if the production mentality is there. As soon as you leave the studio and start working outside of the art system, you are forced to abandon artistry. If you run a project like Happy Doomsday!, with a staff of fifteen, or Super Mario with--I don't know, a team of two thousand maybe?--it burns down to the same thing. You have to meet deadlines, generate ideas at high speed, keep your drive. And mainly, work with people, know what are the limits of your decisional powers, when to force into a certain direction and when to give up, when to accept failures and when to fight beyond. Talking of deadlines, maybe that's where the differences occur. In low budget projects, deadlines are basically impossible to meet. Not necessarily because of bad planning, but because we talk here of a domain where process control is very limited and where we practically do not know what we are dealing with. You cannot quantify the work and drop deadline dates unless you have an open pocket. And even then. At Nintendo, the above mentioned 'Super Mario' (a drag content wise, if I am allowed an opinion, but an ambitious experiment in interaction and in physical responses of the interface) was delivered with two years delay. GL: What is the relation of Happy Doomsday! with the present situation of digital art? CD: The game was designed for two users who meet in a real-time rendered 3D-environment, a feature which implies quite some work. I think the public likes it; not necessarily the critics or the digital arts community. Happy Doomsday! is not trendy enough: not enough techie stuff in it, not enough play with randomness or with any other imports from the surface of scientific research. Besides, a strong physical interface grounded in a specific location is different from a permanent web presence. That's also not cool enough in those times of high bandwidth propaganda. But more important to me, there is a mutual distance here, based on different visions on the functions of art. I personally don't believe in net art as a distinct visual territory, and obviously net art sets a tone in today's digital discourse. I appreciate net art for some ideological stand points, but I am not sure that the methods to fulfill them are appropriate. Net art looks very much like an in-house product, with solutions easy to absorb in main stream web design. I sometimes have problems in drawing a clear visual distinction between a net art product and a smart commercial web site--not enough resistance there, I would say. Next to this, net art raises an interesting marketing issue: if you don't try to reach out with intriguing, interesting physical interfaces your web site will be lost in the electronic void. Getting into the public sphere needs more than a URL printed on a T-shirt and much more than obstinate promotional campaigns. Unfortunately, or luckily so--I am not sure. An exception in my view is Shulea Chang's Brandon project, due precisely to the fact that it is interfacing with people, with institutions and with the city at the same time (http://www.waag.org/brandon). Brandon provides an example that interfacing to the public should not be just a metaphor, since your audience is not just a matter of speech. An interface is also a sculpture, and the social body you aim working with is fluid material that can be modeled. Beuys had some good visions in that direction. But that is ancient history--before the net ambitions. I think we should be more concerned by the expectations of the audiences. People are very simple but very sophisticated at the same time. This ambiguity makes them so hard to catch and then hold, since it is so difficult to stir both aspects: their simple curiosity and their deeper needs as well. GL: Before Happy Doomsday! you worked mainly as an editor, critic and curator. Your work as an artist member of subREAL was never that technical. What skills did you learn in the process of putting together such a big interactive computer installation? CD: Not very much. I started my high school education in computing, and did some programming in Pascal when I was a kid. I left that track very early and studied art theory. Afterwards I always worked in teams, as an editor, curator, manager. What the 90s brought in my life was the discovery of today's neo-pop culture: advertisement, clubs, fashion. That was totally different from what I experienced before the TV revolution allowed me to both travel and zap. My option for the fitness machines as interfaces and for the game paradigm as a support for my discourses come from this. If you want attention you have to use attention-tested techniques. But for the rest, Happy Doomsday! came very much along the line of other big projects I did back in Romania in the early 90s, 010101..., or Ex Oriente Lux. GL: Could you describe the Happy Doomsday! environment for us? Is it an ironic experience? CD: First of all, Happy Doomsday! is definitely not an information space; it started that way, but it then became a narrative (after all, I am from the Balkans, where people love to tell stories). HD! is a game that deals with enormous issues--(political) history and war--in a ridiculous way. Starting with the fact that you have to pump up your muscles while impersonating a country which tries to destroy another country: it's grotesque! On the other hand you have topics like money, vampires, nano-technology, urban guerrilla, wars of the future. The method is self-ironic: I am constantly deconstructing my own thinking processes, which is good, since I am a trend determined animal. The topics are real, but also media induced, and therefore vain. The situation is open, non-oppressive. GL: To me you are very much a post-89 artist, a New European, not anymore from the East or West. You moved from Bucharest to Berlin. You are based in Amsterdam and recently have spent three months in Vienna. How do you look at Romania, ten years after the Fall of Ceausescu? CD: The more distance I get from Romania, the more I am interested in it. Which is a normal process, I think. Besides that, I developed a conviction that local circumstances considered, each and every different country in Eastern Europe is a very interesting lab of the future. The conflicts between various co-existing historical times are much more violent there, compared to Western societies, even though these conflicts exist here as well. The welfare state is dragging the foot here as it tries to survive, if not in the governmental budget policies, then at least in the mentalities of the people. The transformation from a welfare to a neo-liberal system is implying a jungle of legal-to-personal changes, impossible for individuals to follow, even if information would be totally transparent. That is because psychologically speaking we are living in a cotton environment and do not necessarily feel what is being decided in Brussels, Strasbourg and elsewhere. While in Eastern Europe the impact of the so called globalization, new economy and so on is much more drastic and more on the surface, precisely because of the specific conditions, which leave those countries more vulnerable to changes. What makes the situation there more challenging for the researcher and the activist is the relative innocence of the local populations, which is usually misinterpreting the painful collapse of the local economies as a transition towards the vanishing welfare state order. Which is of course a procedure of political mythology: there is no such a transition there, just a fall into the reality of neo-liberal disorder. One has to admit that this is a most interesting dynamics. GL: Do you have any plans to do work in Romania in the future? CD: I am a believer in the symbolic aspect of culture clashes. Not because they seem so trendy now, if we look at the inflationary ethno-anthropo tendencies in music, fashion, art. But because working with remote cultures can still provide us with a lot of information about who we are and where we stand. This is certainly linked to my personal experience but also to the strong traditions of anthropological research that Romania developed in the last century. I would like to use this scientific tradition by working in Romania or elsewhere, but always in a remote area, using wireless technology. To build multi-user computer games for peasants and hunters, with customized content, and interfaced with household tools. We still have the chance to grab there a fundamental way of understanding the world and to give it a voice. In a few years from now it will be too late. People in the Romanian countryside watch TV and meanwhile they still believe in vampires; sometimes they even act accordingly, sticking a piece of wood through the heart of deceased people suspected to be werewolves. You can offer to those neo-peasants Internet culture as a shamanic mirror. Not for bringing new belief systems into their lives, but for analyzing old ones; also for checking once more if there is real magic in computer environments. Which I think is the case. GL: Let us go back in time a bit, to Berlin in 1995/96 when you started to work with the photo archive of the former art magazine Arta. You went way beyond the reworking of communist art history. CD: The 'Art History Archive', as Iosif Király and myself baptized the project, became so successful basically because we avoided at all times and sometimes against the expectations the obvious political connotations the material had. It is significant that one of our works, dealing with an omnipresent official artist of the time is called 'The Man Without Qualities'. In the context of power, art people become shadowy figures, they start to look alike, no matter the political system or its economic infrastructure. Men without qualities gravitate in the high circles of Western cultures and in the shadow of corporations that play the game of art investment and public spending. In the A.H.A. projects we always started by looking first at the historical data. From there on we extrapolated to a symbolic level. And then we looked for similarities in the art of today. In the beginning of the nineties when we started working together we denied being artists. It was commonplace then to hate art. Recently we got back on this issue. We use art as a platform for meeting people, for surfing different cultural communities. The quality of communication and information is higher there, less tough if compared to the technology or to the business sectors. subREAL's new series 'Interviewing the Cities' is precisely about that. Meeting people on the basis of their trade as artists, curators, collectors, architects. GL: Can you tell the story of the negatives you found in the archive? You started working with them at Akademie Schloss Solitude; part of the work produced there was exhibited in the Romanian pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennial. CD: In Berlin we worked with an archive of black-&-white photos. After a year of research we knew it almost by heart, and therefore had no curiosity for the negatives in the collection, thinking we knew what the prints would be about. There were dozens of boxes with negatives. In the end we decided to have a look at them any way, and that was a moment of revelation. The images in the b/w archive were cropped from 6 x 6 negatives. Artworks are usually long or wide, never square. Therefore paintings and sculptures were just one part of the image, while a lot of things were happening in the picture around them. It took us two years to process this source material in various formats. Its powers of connotation looked endless. After that, in the fall of 1999 we went further, and started a new archive--ours--by taking photos of people from the cultural world. The new project is called Interviewing the Cities and started in Vienna. The procedures are standardized: we go in the studio of a person we do not know; we introduce ourselves, with a display of books and images of our work. Then we look at the work of the person we visit. We talk about it. It is a complex therapy of mutual interrogation. After that we take two photos, one of the person, another of a piece of work. Iosif and I are always in the picture, waving a back drop cloth behind the subject, precisely as in the old negatives of the Arta archive. Some people find this cynical. I think it is just matter of fact, and somehow humble: an old technique created through the objective need to give a profile to the subject in an environment full of accidents. We are there as the 'servants of art', no more than that. GL: The portraits of the city series have got something extra, something timeless. They do not have that harsh, almost alienated brightness displayed by most of the contemporary photography you see in galleries. CD: subREAL is using old aesthetics. There is no relation to commercial photography in our work. Handmade photography becomes more and more an old medium. In the future it will be praised or despised like painting is today. Because it is handmade, precisely. Today's digital mass photography is completely different. We believe in old photography because of its rhythms. We are actually interested in moving the universe of our photographs in sculpture and painting. GL: Does Interviewing the Cities have an anthropological aim? You have now finished two series, Vienna and Amsterdam. Do you intend to give an overview of the cultural scenes in such places? CD: It does not offer the context for a systemic approach. It is not a scientific research tool, but a diary where events are provoked, if you like, while a lot of room is given to chance. The series will gain anthropological value in time, I am sure. That is already obvious after just two layers of experience: the images from Vienna are so much different--in a subtle way--from the Amsterdam ones. But I think it is too early for me to elaborate on the topic of difference in an interesting way. I am now looking forward to work in the next town--Helsinki. GL: In October 1999, ten years after the fall of communism, a survey show on East-European contemporary art was organized by Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Is there something like a post-89 conceptual/media arts generation? CD: Exhibitions like After the Wall are always good because they bring topics together. The art there, in what I would call 'the region' is very diverse, and the differences kept working despite the political unification of the cold war era. Russian artists are still very interesting, while Russia is a miserable country. We, the Balkan people are not the top of the pop; there is something divisive and small there. The weaker part of subREAL comes from the Balkans, whereas the better part is Transsylvanian. I must admit that I have a special interest in Hungarian art, probably also because as a Romanian I should not like it. I find the Slovenian environment smart and sophisticated. Things are happening in the Baltic states also. Certainly the cultural borders within Europe are blurring. There are artists which are already absorbed by the international scene, while others stay local. They are not lesser artists, they just have another destiny. GL: Can we now stop using these regional label that people always feel slightly uncomfortable with? Parts of the former Eastern bloc are already members of NATO. Some of the countries will soon enter the EU, whereas others are fresh battlefields, poverty zones. Belarus is still a post-communist dictatorship. And then there is Russia, which seems a case in itself. CD: As far as things develop normally, which is hard to believe, art will go its way. People from the region can focus now more organically on the region's needs and figure out wider strategies. Local and regional networks are slowly building up next to Western influences and policies. Also, a shift seems to be operating on the periphery. This buzz word from the beginning of the last decade starts to be operational now, and the connections on the North-South axis became suddenly real. This is an extremely interesting period. Also a somehow naive one. In perhaps thirty years from now we will have a very different look at the turn of the 21st century. We will not understand why things were not moving faster, and why were we so enthusiastic about the wrong things. But that happened before, didn't it? (Orginally published in the Atelier magazine, SCCA, Bucharest) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 41.0 <nettime> Interview with Richard Wright / Bank of Tim matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 12 Apr 2002 10:42:23 +0100 Growth Through Idleness The following interview with Richard Wright covers material related to the Bank of Time. It was carried out by email over late March, early April 2002. Mac and Windows versions of the screensaver are available from http://www.theBankofTime.com/ MF: Your recent project, The Bank of Time is a screensaver that also involves a variety of other processes. Can you give me a brief description of the work? RW: Yes I can. The Bank of Time is a screensaver that saves your idle time. It uses this idle time to grow virtual plants on your desktop. It also uploads this idle time to the web site where it ranks and displays everyones time in a Performance Table. Your idle time is turned into an investment that grows as you watch on your desktop. Growth through Idleness. An economy of lost time. The plants grow in (somewhat speeded up) real time by downloading time lapse images. After each plant has "matured" it goes on to decay and die. After which the user can chose another plant to grow in an endless cycle of boom and bust. The more idle time the user accumulates the faster the plant will grow. This also means that their name and plant will rise further up the Performance Tables as their growth rate increases. Soon everyone will be working hard to waste as much time as possible. MF: If people are going to use a screensaver, one that uploads data to a central hub, why would they not choose to use something such as Seti {AT} home or the software produced by Oxford University's professor of computational chemistry which allows the use of 'idle' machines to search through chemical data to search for possible information on the structure of cancers or anthrax molecules? RW: Of course, that is turning idle time into an economic resource. That shows how the computerised environment can define and capture all forms of time. Even the irrational moments of absence or non-purpose can be absorbed into its economy. But the primal form of absent work is the investment. The form of "work" which appears at the dawn of capitalism. Investment is the way that you can create value without labouring, it is a way of "making your money work for you". Investment substitutes effort for risk. But that risk is only worth taking if you can be reasonably sure that your investment will continue to grow despite minor fluctuations. You wouldn't want your idle processor cycles to be used to try to solve problems like how many angels you could fit on the head of a pin. You couldn't be sure that such a problem could ever make progress. But perhaps problems like finding extra terrestrial intelligence or finding a cure for cancer will eventually prove unsolvable as well. There is a risk involved. Perhaps all those processor cycles will have been invested unwisely, the scientific equivalent of the dot.com bust. The Bank of Time project tries to complete this image of risk. In financial promotions the germinating plant or seedling is a constantly recurring image. For savings accounts, shares and investments it expresses the myth that your money will grow naturally and inevitably towards its maturity. There may be an element of risk, but it is possible to minimise this through wise management and faith in the potential of modern economic policies. The fact that the plant will wither and die after its mature phase is conveniently ignored. But this fact is recognised in certain cultural forms such as during the Baroque. At that time the image of the faded flower was a constantly recuring motif that expressed, in contrast, feelings of insecurity about the current state of European affairs and the instability and transience of the political and economic climate in the C17th. So I would say that people would chose The Bank of Time over any of those other geezers because at least they always know what the result of their "investment" will be, even if that result is not in accord with the most Bullish forecasts for our economic and scientific futures. MF: The design aesthetic of the site is notable for looking absolutely disimilar to an artists site. No nods in the direction of low-tech, info-accidents or quirkiness of structure. It looks like a small organisation web-site, designed by someone trained in graphic design. Why? RW: The design of the web site is a pastiche of the design of web sites for bank and financial services. I didn't want a web site that told the viewer that this was an art web project. I wanted something that would appear unthreatening to people from outside the art community. It seemed unlikely to me that many "normal" people would take the risk of downloading an executable from an unknown web site and entering their email address unless it looked safe. The unusual function of the Bank of Time is quite explicity stated and does appear to be in contrast to the pedestrian design of the site, but I wanted to see what would happen if people were lead more gently to the full implications of what was intended, like a trojan horse. The design also means it fits quite comfortably into magazine cover CDs, shareware and screensaver download sites. Of course, this may have had the effect of putting off people who are from the media art world who might see it as an innocuous hobby site, but they have had things tailored to their tastes for long enough. And besides, the art world has had a tendency to slavishly follow trends in popular media rather than recognise already existing projects by artists that address similar issues. So one day if the project continues growing in popularity it could become a trojan horse for the art world as well. MF: I recently heard from Lynda Morris, curator at the Norwich gallery, that one of the important functions of art is to act as a repository for memory outside of the 'productive' time of capitalism, a form of time which serves to erase memory and differentiation. She was referring to elements within art on a representational level, such as Gerhard Richter's paitings of the Red Army Fraction, or the art historical memory of the refusal of a visa to Picasso by the US because of his party communist opposition to war. This creation of a space for memory or of valuation over time is also often a capacity of specialised cultures in general. You can think of political or religious currents obviously, fan cultures, music scenes, emulators. It seems you use the space of art to describe a different potential for time, though not of memory but idleness. RW: I once described my work as trying to get people to remember things that they would rather forget - the Eighties, the Millennium Bug, etc. And in The Bank of Time there are references to the dark side of commercial iconography that is always ignored. Such as the use of images of young plants and seedlings in advertisements for investments and savings banks to suggest an idea of financial growth leading to maturity and dividends. The fact that after a plant has reached maturity it will inevitably wither and die is never acknowledged of course, that part is forgotten just as the fact that your investments can go down as well as up is relegated to the small print. But in The Bank of Time the users have to witness the plant proceeding through its entire life cycle from germination to death. So there is a level at which I try to restore a full image that has been partially forgotten. But also it is true that media allows you to move beyond representation just as the information society is not just about representing social entities but actually constitutes the very fabric of society. And this gives you some access to peoples patterns of behaviour through how they are constituted by computerisation and their desktops for instance. The Bank of Time visualises the users idle time which is not really the same thing as repesenting it. It means that the user can control the image by becoming aware of and learning to regulate the growth of their idle time, a form of perception which occurs as much through the mechanism of work patterns and time management as it does through the mechanism of memory. There are all sorts of aspects of the Bank of Time that are included for reasons of visual aesthetics. When I first built the project I remember having discussions with colleagues who tried to get me to drop the whole notion of having plants growing on the desktop. They found this aspect superfluous to the central idea of rationalising and resourcing idle time. Without this, the screensaver would simply have consisted of a display of the users accumulated idle time and related statistical information. But this one dimensional conceptualism that currently dominates avant garde art and media art is harmful. I would say that without the motif of the growing plant the Bank of Time would not really be understandable. MF: One of the interesting aspects of the work is related to this accretion of visual modes. In a way it's kind of like the display on a video game, where you might have say, ammunition and health indicators, direction info, plus a 'realistic' main view with layered depth: a compound visual space in which a patchwork of styles and rythmns operate in the same frame. In Bank of Time, there's a strip of user data like a news-ticker giving the extent of use in seconds, user name and plant species; a foreground image, sharp photographic, of a patch of soil which leaks a plant; a backdrop which looks like a kind of painterly cloud; a few types of rain spatters, which look as if they are hitting the inside of your screen as a window, a lense; the software logo and a link to the website; a small version number and copyright declaration tucked into a corner. It a very mixed visual space, with some elements operating in relation to others, others discrete. Your work in video is also very dense visually. here though there seems also to be a certain density of interfaces to data-architectures as well as symbolic styles. RW: Yes, it's the info image, the image that incorporates many data objects by reducing things to numerical representation (or visualisation). But unfortunately that also implies a kind of info perception, that the viewer can absorb and integrate a variety of different levels of perception - affective, informative, symbolic and so on. A growing problem with the video work was of coming up against the practical limits of this in a format that is viewed in linear time, especially in a theatrical context. Multimedia is a way of accomodating this, specifically by building into the structure of the work the specific temporal conditions in which the work is to be viewed. I suppose this is what they mean by "logistics of perception". The Bank of Time tries to base its particular "logistics" on cultural forms - Baroque allegory and the iconography of the time economy. The Bank of Time is technically an animation of a plant growing, but where the viewing logistics of the animation have been reconfigured. The frame rate of the animation is controlled by the user's idle time. The more idle time they accumulate the faster the image is updated. It is a form of film making in which the cinematic representation of time is reconstructed by the computerisation of the viewers organisation of their time. This was where the idea for the work originally came from in fact. MF: Perhaps related to this is amount of time it takes to 'watch', or simply to be aware of. The life-cycle of a plant is shrunk down, but at the same time, you extrude the length of time which would normally be spent looking at any one piece of visual material, a film, installation, picture, and so on. It's longer than a novel, but less than a garden, but also the way in which you experience it is less direct, it's something that goes on in the background, in the corner of your mind's eye. RW: Like a Warhol film, it has a lot to do with the experience of duration. Can you feel time passing? In the early stages of a real plant you can almost see it grow, maybe a centimeter or two a day. The ability of time lapse cinematography has already changed how we can feel time. We can compress the life history of a plant to a few seconds and suddenly we can see what was there in front of our eyes. We can see the plant moving, it has a choreography. The Bank of Time might be said to reverse this point of view by intensifying the experience of our own cycles of time through the image of a plant. MF: Following on from the work's relationship to more familiar art practices, I heard Pit Schultz say recently something along the lines that Network Art or Media Art will never be 'properly' established as art practice precisely because it is too much already a part of media culture. There is no distinction, in both sense of the word. Obviously such a situation has its advantages, but it also seems interesting in relation to video. There is a desire, stuck on perpetual loop since its inception, within video art scenes to establish some kind of functional distribution mechanism for the work. Might we see in the way that BoT has circulated an example of how Net Art achieves this distribution, but in a way at the cost/advantage of a certain institutional invisibility - because it fuses so much with general, popular, media cultures? RW: Is it too subtle? Too cunning for its own good? Has it been set to "auto-recuperate"? At least I have made no money from it so I cannot be accused of acting in bad faith. The Young British Artists are also now part of media culture - their work is part of media because it is Art, while the Bank of Time is part of media because it is Media (Art). So everything is absorbed, high-brow or low-brow, it's a question of whether you can pull it off on your own terms. At least media artists presumably go in with their eyes open, it is a practice that can at least recognise and reference its own position in the media universe. The curse of the Avant Garde - to find ever new ways to be even more painfully aware of your own marginalisation. But that's still a step in the right direction... MF: Yes, but perhaps there are also many scales and speeds of media culture. Not just those that are implemented as mass culture for sure. In that sense, I think the comment was intended to talk about a potentially wider, or more varigated, field of play available to such activities. RW: I would say the terms in which the original question was put is the problem. The original comment seemed to be concerned with the way in which media culture prevented media art from becoming established as a canonical form. Media art could become a specialised media culture, a network of officially sanctioned web sites and distributors, which is what has pretty much already happened. But of course this isn't really the kind of media culture that we like to imagine. The big opposition to this is seen by the establishment as being mass culture, from which Bourdieu teaches us it must "distinguish" itself. Whether media artists can create yet another more "varigated" alternative is a different question, not necessarily of interest to the "proper" art world (nor, unfortunately, to Bourdieu). As far as setting up your own media art "ecologies" is concerned, that's fine. As long as you realise that you always need an "interface" with the rest of the masses, otherwise it's just media art cliques. Other than that, this is just too big a subject to take on here. MF: I like the idea of non-local time-agglomerations being networked, a particular pocket of a time space being linked via network to other such pockets. (And you can see this also in companies working across timezones, love affairs via text, any set of relations which accentuates certain kinds of shared time.) Obviously such relationships between time and space are not only cosmological, but political - think of the extraordinary condition imposed on Mexico's joining NAFTA that it adopy Daylight Savings Time. Bank of Time seems to form another, topological and intensive rather than cartographical and extensive relationship between time and space? RW: I suppose generally once the regularity of events or relations can be recorded, ordered and compared then you will get pockets of time space emerging extemporaneously, Captain. In fact my work days are frequently conducted under the auspices of the TV schedules - "Womans Hour" is breakfast, "Crossroads" is dinner time, and "The Simpsons" is tea time. And I feel comforted that millions of workers over the nation share a similar time space depending on their sense of humour. I just hope nothing funnier that "The Simpsons" is ever transmitted at 6 o'clock or I will be in danger of choking on my chipolatas. MF: Following on from that, has any cross-networking of Bank of Time users occured? RW: Such cross-networking may have happened as there are now thousands of users subscribed, but that's up to them. I wouldn't have imagined so as the relationship between the users is not personal. One thing that I wondered would happen and actually does happen is people in the same workplace all installing the screensaver and then racing them on their machines. It just goes to show how desperate people are to relieve the tedium. It's not too dissimilar to the kind of spy software that employers use to track the work patterns of their employees. But given the right incentive, we see that people are only too willing to give away that sort of information - as long as it's spy software that ensures people waste more time. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 42.0 <nettime> interview with jordan crandall Roseira nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 15 Apr 2002 12:55:46 +0200 (MEST) Jordan Crandall and I would like to submit this interview for the list. Thanks! Rosanne Altstatt Director, Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg/Germany Interview with Jordan Crandall on the “Trigger Project” by Rosanne Altstatt Rosanne Altstatt: Even though you are most well known for your film and video work, I’d like to start this interview with a question about your diagrams. Their dynamics are so different from the slick impressions your moving images make. The pencil drawings are more intimate, like an inward spinning force. What is the relationship between the two? Jordan Crandall: My work begins with these diagrams. They are the key to everything. They map the processes that give rise to the structure, content, pacing. And many of them are in a very personal zone, close to the body – they are dealing with the space between eye, viewfinder, and trigger. I’m probing deeper into a psychological realm, and so I’m very glad that the diagrams evoke that intimacy, even as they are also connected to larger militarized systems. And they also really show the work of the hand, which is just as present as anything technology-mediated. RA: During the first week of our exhibition you held a workshop which acted as a production phase of your new work “Trigger”. What did you hope to accomplish in the workshop? JC: In order to precisely orchestrate this dual projection installation, you have to conduct many tests. The scale of the Edith Russ Site for Media Art is perfect for testing the dynamic between the actors on screen, the projection scale, and the audience viewing patterns. We are in the process of improvising the actual film set and shooting various test scenes. Then, immediately, we can project these tests on the walls and see how they work. From these tests, the final storyboards will be developed. So three things are going on: a mock film set allows us to generate test footage; the test footage is projected on the wall in order to see how it works when installed; and a final storyboard coalesces as the exhibition plays out. RA: “Trigger” will be projected onto opposite walls. Why did you choose this form? JC: I want to integrate the viewing audience in the drama between two characters as they hunt each other. You will have to physically turn your body to face one screen or the other. So you can never really encapsulate the entirety of the production from a comfortable external position. You can't master it as you can if you are focused on a single screen. It moves quickly and you're always going to have a different experience, because your body has to be as hypervigilant as the actors on screen. You have to be quick, attuned, agile like a good soldier. RA: Are you really making a parallel with soldier-skills and viewer-skills? JC: To the extent that they are sharing a condition of hypervigilance, when all of the senses are heightened. RA: The story has to do with two soldiers watching each other through their sights. This seems like a familiar theme from many Hollywood war movies. Did certain films come to mind while conceiving “Trigger”? JC: Yes, there are lots of Hollywood precedents, countless war films that I've seen. My references are small moments, usually structural and involving some kind of subtle camera intrusion. You wouldn't know it unless you were looking for it. There is a scene in Kubrick's “Full Metal Jacket” for example where the film camera pans up as the soldier's rifle raises up, and it tries to align itself through the soldier's gun sight. You have the camera, the audience eye, the soldier's gun sight, and the soldier's eye all trying to align in order to ‘get the shot’ – the shot that ‘takes’ the picture but also the life of its human target. Through the alignment of eye, machine, and viewfinder some kind of artillery issues forth, connected through the conduit of the hand on the trigger-shutter, where human beats and machine beats synchronize. I'm looking for a camera that is never innocent, the sights that are always subject to control technologies and conventions, and the constitution of the shooting-victim. RA: I'm not so sure everyone in the camera's viewfinder would consider him or herself a victim – but what would the constitution of a shooting-victim be? JC: I don't necessarily mean that to be the case. But there is always a power dynamic. The shooting-victim is a casualty of the image-seeking apparatus and/or gun. I’m trying to make a term that evokes the violence also perpetrated by the camera and all that it stands for. RA: After going to acting school, you began making films and videos yourself. What made you switch sides? JC: I enjoy experiencing both sides of the camera. And now there are not only two sides, but many. I want to try out all of them. RA: You must be referring to the use of various camera technologies and perspectives – something of a post-cinematic language, which I’ve read about in your previous interviews. JC: Yes. With the use of surveillance and tracking systems, and with military-derived images such as those from night vision cameras or those streamed from camera-mounted smart bombs, we have all kinds of new visual formats in play. I'm interested in the ways that these new systems become internalized, and how they become part of new visual languages that challenge cinematic conventions as well as the power dynamics inherent in this. I'm also interested in the difference between terrestrial and aerial languages and the whole lexicon of analyzing and reassembling terrestrial motion from the air. RA: What is your visual vocabulary for “Trigger”? JC: There is a play between cinematic (terrestrial) surveillance and satellite views. I also use an eye-tracked synchronization system, which automatically aligns weapon and fighter gaze, even if they are not connected. This questions conventions of cinematic continuity and cohesion while it also raises contemporary issues of networked embodiment. There are specific targeting formats I use which operate as new forms of perspective-construction – certainly in a more military sense but as generalized control technologies nonetheless. Overall I am orchestrating a fracturing and linkage of viewpoints across human and machinic systems, and linked to very specific camera orientations that are politicized. The speed and efficiency of the networked flows, sorted through the logics of the database, constitute an artillery-like force. There is the question, now more than ever, of what a camera constitutes and who is the agency connected to it, and how to visually represent a complex and often very non-visual system. RA: Tell me what you mean by agency in this case. Are you talking about who is steering the camera or the purpose behind the use of the camera? JC: Both. The form and observing capacity of the seer, along with its intention and its ability to act. We don’t ask these questions with the use of a film camera because the cinematic technology is so normalized. That is one of the reasons it is so interesting to use militarized technology. It is not yet internalized so one has to immediately ask about the agency behind the camera. What is the difference between how a policing system watches and how we watch? How the military sees and how the media sees? It also brings these questions to bear on how we see through the very normalized technologies of mass media, in a way of instituting our own personal kinds of policing. We say, “‘I’ stand here against ‘them’,” and we fortify a border. We justify an attack, personal or otherwise, against an opponent against which we stand. There are all kinds of combat situations in everyday life, all kinds of border-shaping processes that suggest who we are and what kind of person we are becoming. Bunker-building begins at home. In the setting of “Trigger” there are structures that evoke hybrid home-bunkers in various states of construction, in order to suggest metaphorically this processes of fortifying barriers on the domestic front. RA: You are talking about the three structures we will have as the film set in the exhibition hall: a bunker, a wooden wall with a window, and a cement block house. But you also refer to combat situations in everyday life and personal policing. What kinds of personal bunkers do you think we are building as a result of increasing surveillance of everyday life? JC: Surveillance can help generate a kind of safety bubble – a realm where we feel we are being protected against crime. It’s fortified by ideologies and practices. It’s also part of a process of subjectivization, a bubble of interiority that helps to determine the contours of the self. It is also linked to the formation of group identities. There is a mobile and protean architecture to it. We have all our little vehicles that we travel around in like cars, in a culture that oscillates between atomization into fractured units and grand unifications, visible in concepts like the national missile shield. RA: As you've stated in previous interviews, “Drive” (1998 – 2000) and “Heatseeking” (1999 – 2000) are very much about movement, flow and the rhythms of the body. Though these two series did have a violent edge to them, “Trigger” promises to be much more about vision as a weapon. Yet many decades of increasing camera surveillance has led to people being more comfortable with the idea of being constantly watched. Don't you think the tension has lessened? JC: Yes. Which is why I am interested in two things here. The first is the erotic, because there are the pleasures of being observed, which we are only beginning to discover and which are very difficult to square with certain political agendas, such as those dealing with privacy issues. Being observed, surrendering one's private life to the gaze of an other, can have a distinct erotic edge, especially for a younger generation. The second is politics, because we have to confront the agencies behind the lessening of this tension. Whenever surveillance is justified in the name of safety or protection, it is we who have to go on high alert. This cuddly, friendly surveillance – justified in the name of convenience, safety, efficiency, reliability, and stylishly glossed with a modern décor – is a dangerous thing when its politics are vanquished. For the most part, we're not talking about surveillance cameras anymore, but tracking networks connected to vast database systems, which are increasingly invisible as they are pervasive. RA: There is a definite erotic edge to “Trigger”, yet you cut some of the scenes with a sexual character that were planned. JC: All of those scenes will still be there. What I cut were the explanations, because it is so difficult to articulate this erotic dimension in text form. I've decided to let the erotic play out in visual and structural terms without feeling the need to write about it. I don't want to theorize about it – I want it to be something that undoes theory, something that traffics under the surface and questions all of the tidy conclusions that we make. In a sense, the erotic is the great other. We've got to pay attention to what it tells us, but what it tells us is not subject to our laws of order. The question is how to maintain that tension and develop a politics from it – a politics that would seem to contain its very antithesis. RA: A politics of the erotic? You've lost me here. JC: Well, I don't really know what it means either. It doesn't add up, but I guess that's the point. It is a politics that would undo itself. I'm trying somehow, through visual and diagrammatic work, to ventriloquize it. It's like Lyotard's matrix figure – a ‘form’ that figures recurrences, but which in the end is not really a form but a kind of anti-form. In a basic sense, though, you could say that if there is an eros of power, there is a politics of that eros. RA: The erotic is not just the great other, it's the variable in the systemized machine. When I start thinking of the erotic's role in a possible electronic human system, I come up with all sorts of romantic notions of ‘love’ breaking the rules and short-circuiting the network. JC: Well said! Short-circuiting, but also rewiring, in a way that may not be entirely functional. RA: In “Trigger”’s storybook, you write of the soldier as an integrated weapons platform. Armies have tried to make soldiers more efficient by enhancing their capabilities – more recently with electronic weaponry – since the beginning of time. Yet since September 11, high-tech seems more like a weakness than a strength. After all, the terrorist attacks on your state of residence, New York, was low-tech but high-concept. It turned out to be extremely efficient. Does this have any bearing on your views of the integrated weapons platform? JC: In all aspects of the military, efforts have been underway to more closely tie human, armament, and combat network. In the Army's ‘Land Warrior’ program, for example, which is still in development, the soldiers are outfitted with headgear that allows them to see in any weather condition, day or night, and with a 360 degree panorama. They are connected to communications networks, and a head-mounted display allows realtime information to overlay their field of vision. The goal is to become a more efficient, lethal, networked, fighting machine. There is something of the ‘Borg’ here, with the soldier becoming part of a hive mind. There is even a military concept of ‘swarming’: small, agile, highly mobile bands of soldiers armed with arrays of communications gear and networked weaponry, and heavily connected to airborne support. In Afghanistan, soldiers aimed handheld lasers at targets while laser-guided missiles were launched at these targets from planes. Soldiers on the ground, satellite systems, planes, and precision weaponry constituted a seamless flow, orchestrated through various command centers. This is the soldier as integrated weapons platform. I don't think September 11 has changed this concept, or the US's undying faith in high technology. What it has changed is the ways in which we justify increased military presence, and increased police presence in general – towards something that would be more like an integrated policing platform. The fears of the public are inflamed as the powers of military, the FBI and CIA, and various other kinds of policing and monitoring agencies, increase to meet a need. I don't think that the US would admit that high technology is a weakness in any way. It just means the technology isn't good enough yet. RA: What about ‘human intelligence’ a.k.a. spies – like in the WW II movies where they meet on dark nights while crossing bridges, infiltrate each other's lairs, go deep under cover? It seems that there is more than enough data, but not enough human resources to process and analyze this data. JC: Yes, but the human is there to feed into the technology. It's part of the technology. The human intelligence is linked to the machine. It's mediated by machinic systems. The human becomes a necessary component – it is never discounted. But it is of value in its having been made adequate for integration with the intelligence and communications systems (and vice versa). Technology sets the terms, it modifies the capacities of the human. But in the end, technology is just human ingenuity, the extension of the human. Humans, machines, and combat systems are indelibly linked and we don't necessary know where one component ends and the other begins. You're absolutely right about there not being enough human resources to process and analyze the data. But what is our answer is to that? Building more and better machines. RA: What would be the base of an ‘integrated policing platform’. Instead of the single agent, all electroniced up, we would have ... JC: ... formerly isolated database systems linked up in shared networks. Common interfaces to share data across various intelligence and policing agencies in as close to realtime as possible, with suspicions eased between governmental agencies that have been historically walled off from each other. New alliances between police, military, and industry. New cooperations to share intelligence information between countries. RA: Are you suggesting the privatization of the military? Is this science fiction or are there some real efforts taking place beyond the tradition of the militia? JC: The ties between military and industry are so strong already, and there is a strong symbiotic energy that you wouldn’t have if they we fully absorbed into one another. The military is business by other means. There always have to be other measures available. We’re backed by an apparatus of war and work. In business, we have a tool; in war, we have a weapon. RA: Remaining on the subject of an integrated police, military, and industry: where would this leave privacy laws? Do you think they will become obsolete? There are all sorts of buzzwords I can throw in here: new world order, globalization, war against terror ... JC: There have been so many privacy debates online, and attempts have been made to politicize this very urgent subject – at the same time that some have tried to articulate the private/public divide in different terms, such as to replace a unified concept of privacy with a heterogeneous one like ‘zones of intimacy’. But at least in the US, the debate hasn’t caught fire, people don’t see it as much of an issue anymore. People have been willing to surrender privacy if it means more convenience, if it saves them time, and if it offers more protection – especially now, post-September 11. The concern for safety trumps any concern over threats to privacy. In a sense, it has finished off this already much-beleaguered subject. It urgently needs to be politicized, especially in light of the lack of opposition to the increasing of governmental powers that could threaten civil liberties. But the terms of the debate need to be reworked. The term ”privacy” needs to be unpacked: it’s fraught from within. RA: Should we redefine privacy? JC: It is a matter of deciding what is absolutely crucial to protect and against what it should be protected. It changes through time and cultures, it’s not really a stable concept. RA: Let's play out a worst case scenario: In twenty years from now absolutely everything is networked; no loopholes. What then? Do you have any predictions on human behavior? In your work, the different camera perspectives charge the atmosphere. Do you think this would have the same effect on everyday life? JC: New forms of detection are always countered with new forms of deception. There is always a dance between the two. I believe that total surveillance is an impossible concept. There are always going to be things that slip under the radar. In the war on Kosovo we had expensive precision-guided missiles fired at cheap decoy tanks. The Serbian military also strategically switched off their radar in order to obfuscate their ground locations to the aerial electronics of NATO forces. You can even see how this detection-deception dance refigures materiality: look at the form of the stealth fighter, which was built as a series of flat planes in order to evade radar detection. We want to increase our ability to see while evading detection by others, and our opponents want the same. So rather than a vector of one-way progress in detection technologies, we have a matrix. Progress occurs in matrices of detection and evasion among combative actors who are each trying to gain the edge. So I’m interested in evoking the increased powers of surveillance, but rather than think only of how we’re becoming totally surveilled, I’m interested in the ingenious ways that we develop to jam the signal. To appropriate it, to reshape it in a way that is often soft and undulating, not hard-edged. Much has been written about voyeurism, about the erotics of seeing, but I am very much interested in an erotics of display – of being seen by sensed presences – and how that connects to modes of deception and the dispersal of the fields of action. The playing field is often not where we expect it, or structured in terms of the codes that we know. In spite of the exponential increase in the powers of surveillance technology, we still have to ultimately know where to look – this is the space that is constantly being rewritten by the players. RA: Let’s get back to classic, narrative, storybook cinema. Everybody plays by the rules, but love breaks it up. Yet your works have no actual ‘story’, do they? JC: Not really, although they do have some narrative pull and you can read all kinds of narratives into them. But I hope to frustrate that, just as I hope to frustrate binaries of construction/anarchy or attraction/repulsion. My works have the structure of systems, they’re structured along the lines of various circuitry diagrams and I think they have a more matrix-like structure, almost like a database. But I have to admit that I think of “Trigger”, at least on some level, as a kind of love story. It is a courtship between the two actors, at least in a database reality. This interview is included in the publication “Jordan Crandall: Trigger Project”, published by Revolver – Archiv für Aktuelle Kunst on the occasion of Crandall’s exhibition at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. April 6 – June 9, 2002 info {AT} edith-russ-haus.de www.edith-russ-haus.de # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 43.0 <nettime> Interview with Micz Flor: Tactics of Streaming geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 25 Apr 2002 08:40:34 +1000 Tactics of Streaming Interview with Micz Flor By Geert Lovink Micz Flor is a multi-talented cultural worker. As a programmer, artist, teacher, writer and project manager Micz has been organizing a variety of events, net projects, magazines and temporary media labs (see: http://mi.cz/cv.htm). I got to know Micz in 1997 while working with him in the team of the Hybrid Workspace project (Documenta X/Kassel: http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/). One year later he organized his own temp media lab in Manchester. Micz is a cool, busy and ambitious person that loves to tinker and play around with media and code. Laid back, in a Berlin minimal techno manner. Very post-German. Micz Flor lived and worked in London, Liverpool, Vienna and Prague and is now back in his base, Berlin. In 1999 he got very involved in supporting independent media in Former Yugoslavia. Lately he has been working for the Camp lab in Prague which trains journalists all over the world how best to integrate new media in their work. In this capacity Micz travelled to Indonesia and other Asian countries. On his Crash site (http://crash.mi.cz) you can see his streaming video about Radio 68H Indonesia, Reaching Everyone. Radio 68H is an independent radio network for hourly news programmes and magazine formats. The local hub in Jakarta maintains the network and redistributes local news via satellite. Radio 68H consists of over 250 radio stations. As a 'tactical' medium uses email to collect and distribute MP3 reports from all the archipello. There will be a longer documentary version on Indonesia's Radio68h available soon, as part of the 'Scattered Frequencies' mini-series on radio networking he produces together with Philip Scheffner. The first part on an independent radio network in Nepal is already available. Another of his webfilms, EUrope on your Doorstep looks the impact of European funding the economically underdeveloped region of Liverpool (UK). In Berlin Micz has lately been working on www.fluter.de, an online youth magazine, developed for German Ministry for Political Education (www.bpb.de). This project has been initiated by the company of Micz Flor and Tanja Lay, named Redaktion und Alltag (http://www.redaktionundalltag.de/), one of many small webdesign and content offices working out of Berlin. Micz's specialty is connecting hi and low tech taking all local circumstances into account. However, his passion lies in streaming media and radio in particular, which started in Berlin with his involvement in the net.radio group called convex tv. Micz won several awards for his net.art works but is hesitant to label himself an artist, feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the way in which the art world deals--or rather does not deal--with new media and its social and political aspects. The following interview focusses on the current situation of streaming media networks and standards. GL: What makes net.radio in your experience so different from normal radio? It is important to further explore these differences? Or is it just a matter of adding another distribution channels to the growing list of (new) media outlets? MF: Net.radio is very different from normal radio. In fact, net.radio - and the hype surrounding it - made 'normal' radio reconsider itself. In the early days of audio streaming over the Internet, many 'normal' radio stations were trying to jump the bandwagon and went 'online'. In those days, you would find websites of radio stations to provide nothing more but the station logo and a button saying 'live' - launching an external player. This clumsy attempt of translating an established medium into a network environment really put a finger on the strength and weaknesses of radio as we knew it; the linear, one-way, no-frills-no-thrills transmission it is. Only recently, 'ordinary' radios put more effort into living up to the world wide web, providing an adequate environment to which listeners can come, dwell, contribute, search, discuss and get on-demand material. But in return, this process of redefining 'ordinary' radio when it goes online has also put a finger on the strength and weakness of net.radio; the lack of definition and tangibility. In fact, net.radio seems to be everything normal radio is not ... and it is on the Internet. This is a very powerful starting point for experimental net.radio projects. It is not so much the question if it is important to explore the differences between the two. First and foremost it is not 'ordinary' radio - and then it's just anything else as long as it is online. Of course, audio streaming is more and more becoming a central part of the growing list of new media channels. But at the same time, we are all still waiting for the new front end, the browser of the next generation, where all these media outlets are coming together at the screen and speakers and what else of the user, listener, or whatever you would want to call the next generation receiver. This client 'solution' is not there yet. And that's a good thing. So far, not even multi-national lobbies such as Microsoft or AOL managed to prune the Internet into the shape they would dream of. In fact, every attempt to shape the multitude of formats, players and codecs has only put strength to alternative solutions. Peer-to-peer distribution channels, such as Gnutella is one example, alternative audio video formats such as Ogg or DivX are another. GL: The Xchange network which established itself in 1998 has been relatively stable in seize since its first year. Whereas the overall Internet has grown exponentially, going through the dotcom period of intense financial speculation, many non-profit streaming initiatives have remained low key. How would you explain this? Would this be related to the relatively growing (self)isolation of the new media arts? Or rather with the problems of the streaming media sector at large? MF: I would assume that many of the more experimental initiatives in the net.radio field have reached a certain level of saturation already early on. And now they stay that way, keeping the financial turmoil at an arms length distance. I doubt that this has to do with a tendency for self-isolation. The experimental net.radio scene is based on an intriguing mixture of challenging sonic liking, obscure technical interests and a radiant interest in new distribution channels. No surprise that many of these people were online early on, playing with Internet broadcasting formats and finding a like-minded audience years before the big hype. So the motivation of such closely knit communities never really went towards establishing business solutions and supplying sustainable business plans. If anything, throughout the hype period I sensed some level of frustration and suspicion towards all these start-ups who would take half-baked ideas and rake in venture capital. It restricted many communities in terms of their free flow of ideas, as one would never know if someone else would listen in, pick it up and get some money from this idea, simply because she or he looks better in a suit. In a way it seemed as if the 'avant-garde' of net.radio was mostly surprised by the cash flow surrounding it. Coming from inside the system, nobody really understood how and why this should make any real money and certainly not the sums flying around at the time. Looking back on these days, I am sure many of the early DIY streaming experts think "I could have told you" as well as "I wish we had driven a million against the wall, that sounds like fun." GL: Would you say that the technical limitations and the confusion of standards for streaming media over the past five years have been a good or a bad thing? MF: The confusion is still going on. But within all the confusion some developments are getting clearer. The most prominent yet quiet development over these years of confusion was the clear separation of media player and streaming format. In the early days, to encode your media for the Internet, to stream it over the Internet and listen to it at the other end came all in one box. Take RealMedia as an example. They started very early on and for a long time provided the only reliable and compatible solution for streaming media. In order to stream RealMedia content, you needed their RealEncoder, their RealServer and the RealPlayer to listen to the stream. Today, MP3 is a very dominant format for streaming audio on the Internet. In order to do this, you pick one of many encoders, one of many server solutions and one of many too many players at the client side. It is all using the MP3 standards, but there are even many codecs who provide different quality and require different processing power when encoding or decoding the audio. Most users have some media player on their machine. So let's take a closer look at commonly used players, such as WinAMP, RealPlayer, The Windows Media Player or the Quicktime Player. Most of such applications are little more than a shell providing clear definitions to developers of audio codecs. So in order to establish a new form of audio compression, you should not only think in terms of quality. You should also develop your codec to be compatible with many or all of the commonly used players, so that people can listen to material which uses your format. MP3 is a good example. You can play this type of audio with almost any player. Going back to your first question, bringing together all different types of new media channels into one player - or browser - seems to be an issue for many streaming media players. RealMedia for example is putting great effort into making their player compatible with many available formats. Even Flash films can be player in the RealPlayer, a format which usually is embedded in ordinary web pages. All this seems to aim towards establishing a browser of the next generation, including all formats available on the Internet. The fact that WinAMP is also capable of displaying HTML web pages in an extra window is also indicating this development. So the confusion remains, but the confusion is not only tied into the standards and formats, it is also tied into the rules of the game of developing players and codecs. It's almost like a chicken and egg question: if you want to establish a new player, make sure it plays as many popular codecs as possible. If you want to establish a new codec, make sure it can be played on as many popular players as possible. As for the technical limitations, they will always be part of the rule set. But, the more time goes by, the more solutions become available live and online which were never originally developed to be streaming media formats. Again, take MP3 as an example. At the time of development, this codec was meant to provide the audio track of Video CDs. Only few people would have thought that it could become a standard for streaming live audio over the Internet. The available bandwidth was just too poor and the processing power it took to encode MP3 in real time was too much to allow live streaming. And now you have it. And the confusion is far from over. As the separation of players and codecs is a fact, media itself become less and less clearly defined. Quicktime was one of the first to think of media files not only as linear, frame based data-streams. Instead they thought of their media files as containers where you can dump all your individual media into and add a time line and that's that. So audio might be using one type of compression and video another. And you could even add some stills, and text and so on. At the other end, the Player will take a look at the media container, pick up the time line and the instructions and see what codecs are available to play what's in the container. In this case you might find a situation where the player will play no video at some parts, because it lacks the right codec for the image, but the audio is fine. Later on, it all looks just perfect. Thinking of media as a container is far removed from the close connection between content and technology that we know from the analogue world. Try to play an audio tape with your VHS player and you know what I mean. Understanding media files as containers will be the base camp. So there you have all the confusion you want in one box: the player is an empty shell, the media file is an empty container and inside is a multitude of media using a multitude of codecs. You were asking if I thought such confusion is a good or a bad thing. It's certainly a lot of fun to look at. I guess as long as the concept of the 'media file' remains as open as it is today, it is very adequate in allowing adjustments. Some technical limitations suddenly are no longer obstacles pulling some formats suddenly into the ballgame. At the same time, there is always enough room to throw them out again at some point, as many solutions used on the Internet today for streaming media still carry restrictions of their former use - again, take MP3 as an example. The confusion shows one thing clearly. Those big players with the financial muscle to flood the market with their solutions don't seem to be providing the best solutions. Or why else would the confusion remain and smaller developers suddenly become essential players in the game. GL: Where would you like to see the critical and cultural streaming media practices go to? Unlike pirate radio or mini FM net.radio does not (yet) have legal troubles. Do you see the freedom to narrowcast turning into a closed and self-satisfied, stagnating subculture? Napster was a lost opportunity. MF: It is hard to imagine that streaming or exchanging audio over the Internet would face the same restrictions and out-of-proportion penalties that mini FM or radio piracy are threatened by. Having said this, the Internet also provides the best possible framework by which restrictions and penalties could be coerced on deviant users. Confusion again. What a complicated way to charge someone who listens to FM radio. There is no way to track reliably and on a large scale who is switching on their receivers to listen to a programme. What an easy thing to track who is listening to a programme over the Internet. And in most cases there is already a payment process in place: the phone bill. From that point of view it seems so easy to imagine restrictions and charges for Internet listeners and broadcasters. The fact that there seems to be a legal gap where net.radio has escaped into, says little about the endurance this situation might have. The silence and indecisive actions from legal bodies only hints at the scale at which adequate means of restrictions are required to tackle the 'problem'. The silence is anything but peaceful and the partial eruptions as in the case of discussing new forms of copyright laws hint at the direction this might take. As the independent scene is using the new distribution channels for their means, and with little success of the large multi-national corporations to use the same channels for their means, the big players have chosen different paths. Copyright lobbyists are not fighting over peanuts in court with some net.radio broadcasters from Manchester. Instead they are working behind the scenes to implement an all-encompassing solution. In the case of software piracy you can already see how lobbyists managed to get governments on their sides. In the Czech Republic for example, the government can ask you to present your software licenses alongside with your receipts when checking your books. Why? Well, for no other reason as to do the work for the software industries and identify cases of software piracy - which will then be taken to court. It sounds like its against the law, but most recently this practice has become law in itself. The government turned itself into a tool for the software industry. Unfortunately I believe it is on that level that multi-nationals are using their muscle to put these levels of coercion into place. GL: Which are issues for 'tactical' interventions for you? MF: Using a combination of old and new media still provides a powerful tool against national regulations in many countries. The ANEM network, which was established in FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) by local radio stations like B92 and others across the Balkan region is still a good example. In the FRY at the time there was no way you could get a national license for radio broadcasting, neither could you get the technology into place to have a network of transceivers which would carry a signal throughout the country. However, local licenses for smaller stations were possible to get. So in order to bring independent news to many regions of FRY, news were collected and produced at a central hub in Belgrade, then streamed out of the country through the Internet, picked up by a satellite transmitter and put onto a satellite. From there, all the decentralised, small stations could receive the signal with an ordinary satellite receiver and rebroadcast it on their local frequency. The combined radio footprint of all the participating radio stations at the time reached around 65% of Yugoslavia - without breaking any laws, without any expensive technology and without dismantling the decentralised nature of the network, as only a small percentage of their programme was used for news coverage. A similar network has established itself in Indonesia, using the audio track of a spare TV satellite channel to get the signal into the sky. There, over 250 stations are participating in the network. And we are currently working with some local radio stations in Nepal on a similar situation. However, Nepal provides even more obstacles as independent media is a very young phenomenon and neither the network technology nor the journalistic experience are in place to manage the structure. GL: Often people associate streaming media with broadband and fat pipes. You have worked with streaming media initiatives, for instance in Indonesia. Is it fair to wipe out technological differences worldwide (in terms of resources and infrastructure) and say that streaming media is there to be used by all, under every possible circumstance? MF: Streaming media is available in almost any corner of the world where technology is available. In most cases streaming media would mean nothing else but a phone line. Using a cellular phone, you are using streaming technology on a low bitrate of about 8 kBps. The Internet, of course, is not available in all corners of the world. The Indonesian network I described above started their services with providing news bulletins over the Internet. Based in Jakarta, they could find a provider which would host and distribute their files. But with only one governmental ISP in the far regions of the country who themselves only had a 56k modem connecting all users with Indonesia and then going into the backbone hell knows where, this was not a feasible solution. Today they are retrieving news from remote stations via cellular phones, digitise the material, add their own commentary in the studio and then push it up onto the satellite. Without a reliable, safe and reasonably fast Internet connection in place, such tactical networks need to be centrally organised. In Nepal the situation we discovered is even more difficult. A commercial TV station, broadcasting satellite television every day, is producing the shows and news in Nepal, then they put the tapes into a suitcase, someone flies to Bangkok and they put the material on the satellite there. So television will deliver yesterdays news. This might sound strange, but once you are about 200 kilometres outside Kathmandu, print media will possibly be two days late anyway. And then you might realise that there are not that many people who can read. Sometimes it is surprising to see that online here in the West we might be able to get radio stations from very remote places in reasonable quality. The reality is that you might not be able to pick up the signal 10 kilometres from the station itself. In many cases, streaming over the Internet is only available because some local ISP puts a radio receiver into their office and takes the signal off that radio and into the Internet there and then. The station producing the programme might not even have an Internet access itself. So you can see that right now it is easier to get a streaming signal out of developing areas and into the Western world than providing the information to a neighbouring village, island (Indonesia) or valley (Nepal). The development for radio networks in these areas is lagging behind, but creative solutions are filling the gaps the infrastructure leaves open for the time being. But building a decentralised network does require a reasonable infrastructure to allow the exchange between stations in the periphery, without requiring a central hub. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 43.1 <nettime> Interview with Micz Flor: Tactics of Streaming geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 26 Apr 2002 07:03:20 +1000 Tactics of Streaming Interview with Micz Flor By Geert Lovink Micz Flor is a multi-talented cultural worker. As a programmer, artist, teacher, writer and project manager Micz has been organizing a variety of events, net projects, magazines and temporary media labs (see: http://mi.cz/cv.htm). I got to know Micz in 1997 while working with him in the team of the Hybrid Workspace project (Documenta X/Kassel: http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/). One year later he organized his own temp media lab in Manchester. Micz is a cool, busy and ambitious person that loves to tinker and play around with media and code. He operates in a laid back, Berlin minimal techno style. Very post-German. Micz Flor lived and worked in London, Liverpool, Vienna and Prague and is now back in his base, Berlin. In 1999 he got very involved in supporting independent media in Former Yugoslavia. Lately he has been working for the Camp lab in Prague, which trains journalists all over the world how best to integrate new media in their work. In this capacity Micz traveled to Indonesia and other Asian countries. On his Crash site (http://crash.mi.cz) you can see his streaming video about Radio 68H Indonesia, Reaching Everyone. Radio 68H is an independent radio network for hourly news programs and magazine formats. The local hub in Jakarta maintains the network and redistributes local news via satellite. Radio 68H consists of over 250 radio stations. As a 'tactical' medium it uses email to collect and distribute MP3 reports from the entire archipelago. There will be a longer documentary version on Indonesia's Radio68h available soon, as part of the 'Scattered Frequencies' mini-series on radio networking he produces together with Philip Scheffner. The first part on an independent radio network in Nepal is already available. Another of his web films, EUrope on your Doorstep looks the impact of European funding the economically underdeveloped region of Liverpool (UK). In Berlin Micz has lately been working on www.fluter.de, an online youth magazine, developed for German Ministry for Political Education (www.bpb.de). This project has been initiated by the company of Micz Flor and Tanja Lay, named Redaktion und Alltag (http://www.redaktionundalltag.de/), one of many small web design and content offices working out of Berlin. Last but not least, his hobby label SueMi http://sue.mi.cz has been releasing a number of 7-inch vinyl records. Micz's specialty is connecting hi and low tech taking all local circumstances into account. However, his passion lies in streaming media and radio in particular, which started in Berlin with his involvement in the net.radio group called convex tv. Micz won several awards for his net.art works but is hesitant to label himself an artist, feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the way in which the art world deals--or rather does not deal--with new media and its social and political aspects. The following interview focuses on the current situation of streaming media networks and standards. GL: What makes net.radio in your experience so different from normal radio? It is important to further explore these differences? Or is it just a matter of adding another distribution channels to the growing list of (new) media outlets? MF: Net.radio is very different from normal radio. In fact, net.radio - and the hype surrounding it - made 'normal' radio reconsider itself. In the early days of audio streaming over the Internet, many 'normal' radio stations were trying to jump the bandwagon and went 'online'. In those days, you would find websites of radio stations to provide nothing more but the station logo and a button saying 'live' - launching an external player. This clumsy attempt of translating an established medium into a network environment really put a finger on the strength and weaknesses of radio as we knew it; the linear, one-way, no-frills-no-thrills transmission it is. Only recently, 'ordinary' radios put more effort into living up to the world wide web, providing an adequate environment to which listeners can come, dwell, contribute, search, discuss and get on-demand material. But in return, this process of redefining 'ordinary' radio when it goes online has also put a finger on the strength and weakness of net.radio; the lack of definition and tangibility. In fact, net.radio seems to be everything normal radio is not ... and it is on the Internet. This is a very powerful starting point for experimental net.radio projects. It is not so much the question if it is important to explore the differences between the two. First and foremost it is not 'ordinary' radio - and then it's just anything else as long as it is online. Of course, audio streaming is more and more becoming a central part of the growing list of new media channels. But at the same time, we are all still waiting for the new front end, the browser of the next generation, where all these media outlets are coming together at the screen and speakers and what else of the user, listener, or whatever you would want to call the next generation receiver. This client 'solution' is not there yet. And that's a good thing. So far, not even multi-national lobbies such as Microsoft or AOL managed to prune the Internet into the shape they would dream of. In fact, every attempt to shape the multitude of formats, players and codecs has only put strength to alternative solutions. A peer-to-peer distribution channel, such as Gnutella is one example; alternative audio video formats such as Ogg or DivX are another. GL: The Xchange network, which established itself in 1998, has been relatively stable in size since its first year. Whereas the overall Internet has grown exponentially, going through the dotcom period of intense financial speculation, many non-profit streaming initiatives have remained low key. How would you explain this? Would this be related to the relatively growing (self) isolation of the new media arts? Or rather with the problems of the streaming media sector at large? MF: I would assume that many of the more experimental initiatives in the net.radio field have reached a certain level of saturation already early on. And now they stay that way, keeping the financial turmoil at an arms length distance. I doubt that this has to do with a tendency for self-isolation. The experimental net.radio scene is based on an intriguing mixture of challenging sonic liking, obscure technical interests and a radiant interest in new distribution channels. No surprise that many of these people were online early on, playing with Internet broadcasting formats and finding a like-minded audience years before the big hype. So the motivation of such closely-knit communities never really went towards establishing business solutions and supplying sustainable business plans. If anything, throughout the hype period I sensed some level of frustration and suspicion towards all these start-ups who would take half-baked ideas and rake in venture capital. It restricted many communities in terms of their free flow of ideas, as one would never know if someone else would listen in, pick it up and get some money from this idea, simply because she or he looks better in a suit. In a way it seemed as if the 'avant-garde' of net.radio was mostly surprised by the cash flow surrounding it. Coming from inside the system, nobody really understood how and why this should make any real money and certainly not the sums flying around at the time. Looking back on these days, I am sure many of the early DIY streaming experts think "I could have told you" as well as "I wish we had driven a million against the wall, that sounds like fun." GL: Would you say that the technical limitations and the confusion of standards for streaming media over the past five years have been a good or a bad thing? MF: The confusion is still going on. But within all the confusion some developments are getting clearer. The most prominent yet quiet development over these years of confusion was the clear separation of media player and streaming format. In the early days, to encode your media for the Internet, to stream it over the Internet and listen to it at the other end came all in one box. Take RealMedia as an example. They started very early on and for a long time provided the only reliable and compatible solution for streaming media. In order to stream RealMedia content, you needed their RealEncoder, their RealServer and the RealPlayer to listen to the stream. Today, MP3 is a very dominant format for streaming audio on the Internet. In order to do this, you pick one of many encoders, one of many server solutions and one of many too many players at the client side. It is all using the MP3 standards, but there are even many codecs who provide different quality and require different processing power when encoding or decoding the audio. Most users have some media player on their machine. So let's take a closer look at commonly used players, such as WinAMP, RealPlayer, The Windows Media Player or the Quicktime Player. Most of such applications are little more than a shell providing clear definitions to developers of audio codecs. So in order to establish a new form of audio compression, you should not only think in terms of quality. You should also develop your codec to be compatible with many or all of the commonly used players, so that people can listen to material that uses your format. MP3 is a good example. You can play this type of audio with almost any player. Going back to your first question, bringing together all different types of new media channels into one player - or browser - seems to be an issue for many streaming media players. RealMedia for example is putting great effort into making their player compatible with many available formats. Even Flash films can be player in the RealPlayer, a format that usually is embedded in ordinary web pages. All this seems to aim towards establishing a browser of the next generation, including all formats available on the Internet. The fact that WinAMP is also capable of displaying HTML web pages in an extra window is also indicating this development. So the confusion remains, but the confusion is not only tied into the standards and formats, it is also tied into the rules of the game of developing players and codecs. It's almost like a chicken and egg question: if you want to establish a new player, make sure it plays as many popular codecs as possible. If you want to establish a new codec, make sure it can be played on as many popular players as possible. As for the technical limitations, they will always be part of the rule set. But, the more time goes by, the more solutions become available live and online which were never originally developed to be streaming media formats. Again, take MP3 as an example. At the time of development, this codec was meant to provide the audio track of Video CDs. Only few people would have thought that it could become a standard for streaming live audio over the Internet. The available bandwidth was just too poor and the processing power it took to encode MP3 in real time was too much to allow live streaming. And now you have it. And the confusion is far from over. As the separation of players and codecs is a fact, media itself become less and less clearly defined. Quicktime was one of the first to think of media files not only as linear, frame based data-streams. Instead they thought of their media files as containers where you can dump all your individual media into and add a time line and that's that. So audio might be using one type of compression and video another. And you could even add some stills, and text and so on. At the other end, the Player will take a look at the media container, pick up the time line and the instructions and see what codecs are available to play what's in the container. In this case you might find a situation where the player will play no video at some parts, because it lacks the right codec for the image, but the audio is fine. Later on, it all looks just perfect. Thinking of media as a container is far removed from the close connection between content and technology that we know from the analogue world. Try to play an audiotape with your VHS player and you know what I mean. Understanding media files as containers will be the base camp. So there you have all the confusion you want in one box: the player is an empty shell, the media file is an empty container and inside is a multitude of media using a multitude of codecs. You were asking if I thought such confusion is a good or a bad thing. It's certainly a lot of fun to look at. I guess as long as the concept of the 'media file' remains as open as it is today, it is very adequate in allowing adjustments. Some technical limitations suddenly are no longer obstacles pulling some formats suddenly into the ballgame. At the same time, there is always enough room to throw them out again at some point, as many solutions used on the Internet today for streaming media still carry restrictions of their former use - again, take MP3 as an example. The confusion shows one thing clearly. Those big players with the financial muscle to flood the market with their solutions don't seem to be providing the best solutions. Or why else would the confusion remain and smaller developers suddenly become essential players in the game. GL: Where would you like to see the critical and cultural streaming media practices go to? Unlike pirate radio or mini FM net.radio does not (yet) have legal troubles. Do you see the freedom to narrowcast turning into a closed and self-satisfied, stagnating subculture? Napster was a lost opportunity. MF: It is hard to imagine that streaming or exchanging audio over the Internet would face the same restrictions and out-of-proportion penalties that mini FM or radio piracy are threatened by. Having said this, the Internet also provides the best possible framework by which restrictions and penalties could be coerced on deviant users. Confusion again. What a complicated way to charge someone who listens to FM radio. There is no way to track reliably and on a large scale who is switching on their receivers to listen to a program. What an easy thing to track who is listening to a program over the Internet. And in most cases there is already a payment process in place: the phone bill. From that point of view it seems so easy to imagine restrictions and charges for Internet listeners and broadcasters. The fact that there seems to be a legal gap where net.radio has escaped into, says little about the endurance this situation might have. The silence and indecisive actions from legal bodies only hints at the scale at which adequate means of restrictions are required to tackle the 'problem'. The silence is anything but peaceful and the partial eruptions as in the case of discussing new forms of copyright laws hint at the direction this might take. As the independent scene is using the new distribution channels for their means, and with little success of the large multi-national corporations to use the same channels for their means, the big players have chosen different paths. Copyright lobbyists are not fighting over peanuts in court with some net.radio broadcasters from Manchester. Instead they are working behind the scenes to implement an all-encompassing solution. In the case of software piracy you can already see how lobbyists managed to get governments on their sides. In the Czech Republic for example, the government can ask you to present your software licenses alongside with your receipts when checking your books. Why? Well, for no other reason as to do the work for the software industries and identify cases of software piracy - which will then be taken to court. It sounds like its against the law, but most recently this practice has become law in itself. The government turned itself into a tool for the software industry. Unfortunately I believe it is on that level that multi-nationals are using their muscle to put these levels of coercion into place. GL: Which are issues for 'tactical' interventions for you? MF: Using a combination of old and new media still provides a powerful tool against national regulations in many countries. The ANEM network, which was established in FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) by local radio stations like B92 and others across the Balkan region, is still a good example. In the FRY at the time there was no way you could get a national license for radio broadcasting, neither could you get the technology into place to have a network of transceivers which would carry a signal throughout the country. However, local licenses for smaller stations were possible to get. So in order to bring independent news to many regions of FRY, news were collected and produced at a central hub in Belgrade, then streamed out of the country through the Internet, picked up by a satellite transmitter and put onto a satellite. From there, all the decentralized, small stations could receive the signal with an ordinary satellite receiver and rebroadcast it on their local frequency. The combined radio footprint of all the participating radio stations at the time reached around 65% of Yugoslavia - without breaking any laws, without any expensive technology and without dismantling the decentralized nature of the network, as only a small percentage of their program was used for news coverage. A similar network has established itself in Indonesia, using the audio track of a spare TV satellite channel to get the signal into the sky. There, over 250 stations are participating in the network. And we are currently working with some local radio stations in Nepal on a similar situation. However, Nepal provides even more obstacles as independent media is a very young phenomenon and neither the network technology nor the journalistic experience are in place to manage the structure. GL: Often people associate streaming media with broadband and fat pipes. You have worked with streaming media initiatives, for instance in Indonesia. Is it fair to wipe out technological differences worldwide (in terms of resources and infrastructure) and say that streaming media is there to be used by all, under every possible circumstance? MF: Streaming media is available in almost any corner of the world where technology is available. In most cases streaming media would mean nothing else but a phone line. Using a cellular phone, you are using streaming technology on a low bit rate of about 8 kBps. The Internet, of course, is not available in all corners of the world. The Indonesian network I described above started their services with providing news bulletins over the Internet. Based in Jakarta, they could find a provider that would host and distribute their files. But with only one governmental ISP in the far regions of the country who themselves only had a 56k modem connecting all users with Indonesia and then going into the backbone hell knows where, this was not a feasible solution. Today they are retrieving news from remote stations via cellular phones, digitize the material, add their own commentary in the studio and then push it up onto the satellite. Without a reliable, safe and reasonably fast Internet connection in place, such tactical networks need to be centrally organized. In Nepal the situation we discovered is even more difficult. A commercial TV station, broadcasting satellite television every day, is producing the shows and news in Nepal, then they put the tapes into a suitcase, someone flies to Bangkok and they put the material on the satellite there. So television will deliver yesterdays news. This might sound strange, but once you are about 200 kilometers outside Katmandu, print media will possibly be two days late anyway. And then you might realize that there are not that many people who can read. Sometimes it is surprising to see that online here in the West we might be able to get radio stations from very remote places in reasonable quality. The reality is that you might not be able to pick up the signal 10 kilometers from the station itself. In many cases, streaming over the Internet is only available because some local ISP puts a radio receiver into their office and takes the signal off that radio and into the Internet there and then. The station producing the program might not even have an Internet access itself. So you can see that right now it is easier to get a streaming signal out of developing areas and into the Western world than providing the information to a neighboring village, island (Indonesia) or valley (Nepal). The development for radio networks in these areas is lagging behind, but creative solutions are filling the gaps the infrastructure leaves open for the time being. But building a decentralized network does require a reasonable infrastructure to allow the exchange between stations in the periphery, without requiring a central hub. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 44.0 <nettime> Interview with Toni Negri about Porto Alegr geert nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 30 Jan 2002 14:58:51 +1100 (fwd. from the generation-online and posted to nettime with the permission of arianna) Hi, this is an interview that first appeared in Le Monde and then in La Stampa. I have quickly translated it into English. See what you think. The original french and the italian translation with links to the papers below. Arianna Porto Alegre Sad Empire, Toni Negri philosopher By Stephane Mandard On the eve of the World Social Forum, which will take place from the 31st of January till the 5th of February in Porto Alegre, we have interviewed the Paduan philosopher Toni Negri, charged with armed insurrection and currently under house arrest. Numerous representatives of the liberal anti-globalisation movement have turned Empire, the book you wrote with Michael Hardt, into their 'little red book'. Do you agree with them? "Porto Alegre is not the Paris Commune! However, the World Social Forum is an important moment, a place where an extraordinary generosity and militant abilities are about to meet. I am in agreement with the spirit and the objectives of the movement: to construct, at a global level, an opposition to liberalism and to develop a possible alternative, within the framework of globalisation. It is a fundamental stage in the construction of a counter-Empire. The anti-liberal movement, on the other hand, gives expression to many different positions. And I don't agree with all of them." Are you referring to the anti-Americanism that tempts some parts of the movement? "My impression is that these associations are made by the adversaries of the movement. To be anti-American is completely idiotic. One needs to overcome the false view that makes of the American government the sole enemy. The American government is the most important amongst the powers to contest, but it isn't the only one. It wouldn't exist if the ruling classes of world capitalism didn't give it their complete support. The most important struggle, for the anti-liberal movement, is to manage to mobilise American workers." What positions do you distance yourself from? "From the fact that we really need to break with Third Worldism, and Porto Alegre must do it. Third Worldism is a pernicious illusion: it hasn't struggled against capitalism because it's never seen it as only one thing at the global level. If we wanted to put together a world forum and a world workers organisation we'd need to deal with this very precise awareness: that there no longer is a North-South separation, because there are no more geographical differences amongst Nation-States." How do you explain then the presence of a trend that supports national sovereignty, and its representation at Porto Alegre by Jean-Pierre Chevenement? " I think that this is precisely the weak point of the movement. A weakness that cultivates the illusion of going back to a pre-globalisation era. The Nation-State is surpassed. Globalisation was not caused by the will of American power. Moreover, the real anti-Americanism is that of the makers of national sovereignty. Empire, globalisation, derives from the fact that Nation-States can no longer control within their borders the movements of capital and conflicts. For three or four centuries the nation-state has been a formidable locus for the development of capital and the regulation of society. This historical situation is surpassed because not even the Americans manage to preserve the nation-state form. We find ourselves in the paradoxical situation where the US president is elected with foreign investments: the capital of Saudi oil barons is so completely integrated with the government of American affairs that we can really no longer say that the nation-state still functions." Does the war undertaken by the west against terrorism risk to criminalize the anti-globalisation movement? " I'm afraid it could. What's happening at this moment is neither a war nor a police operation. It could well be a new form to exercise imperial force. It is a war that becomes less and less destructive and increasingly ordering and constituent. It is obvious that there will be an extension of liberticidal laws. Having said that, I am fairly optimistic, because there is a resistance to organise, counter-powers to oppose to this phenomenon." Does the struggle of the Porto Alegre opponents inaugurate what you call 'a new phase in the struggle of the exploited against the power of capital'? "I believe so, I hope so. But the problem isn't just a matter of fighting capital; it is also one of organisation. I hope that Porto Alegre will allow it. We must say that we don't want to live in a world like this, that we want to get away from a power that tries to manipulate even our lives, our affects, our desires. Today the exploited are not just the manual workers, but also the social multitudes: workers, surely, but also students, flexible-workers, unemployed, immigrants, women, black market workers, interns. It is important to be well aware that we find ourselves faced with new political subjects. The new left cannot but emerge from the anti-liberal movement." Why? "In Italy, for example, the rebirth of the left will come from the movement: more and more ex-militants of the Italian communist party are approaching it." But there are groups, such as Attac, that refuse to become a political movement. " I think that the movement has no intention of limiting itself to contestation: it is a movement of counter-power. It certainly isn't fascinated by power, and the liberation from this flattery has been a painful process. Nonetheless power must be subverted. How? Once we used to distinguish between different stages: first a workers and unionist resistance, then an insurrectional phase and finally the constituent one. Today there is neither a distinction nor transition; there is simply the movement. The new political subject that the movement embodies is increasingly a constituent subject of resistance, a subject of struggle and creation. It opposes whilst proposing alternatives. It chooses to flee from power and it designs another world. That world is possible, but the multitude needs to get organised." The movement is almost co-substantial to the Internet. Is it its best weapon? "Internet is a tool, certainly a precious one but it can fall under the control of the capitalist system. On this terrain, today, the conflict is evident. But it is not only a question of control, there is that of property, in the case of Internet that of patents and intellectual copyrights. Amongst the militants I know the problem is increasingly not only that of private or public property, but also the definition of a new common good. People start thinking that all services -education, health and transports, social welfare - must be considered a collective good, including those linked to intellectual labour. It is a question of defending the Internet function as a tool of the movement, but it is also the material problem of organising a new society." http://www.lemonde.fr/recherche_articleweb/1,6861,260198,00.html http://www.lastampa.it/EDICOLA/cultura/463575.htm _______________________________________________ Generation_online mailing list Generation_online {AT} coyote.kein.org http://coyote.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/generation_online # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 45.0 <nettime> Interview with Doug Henwood geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:43:45 +1100 Finance and Economics after the Dotcom Crash Interview with Doug Henwood By Geert Lovink Doug Henwood is one of the few marxist economists whose opinions and analyses of the world of finance and trade are being taken serious by the mainstream media. Seen as a toy rebel Wall Street analysts love to hate him. Doug is very friendly and open, quite the opposite of what you may fear dogmatic revolutionaries turned crusty academics look like. Unlike most of his comrades Henwood is able to remain in dialogue with his liberal and conservative opponents. In public debates he can surprise you with his marvelous negative dialectics. Online he is sharp, short and precise. In an interview with salon.com Doug Henwood described his position as such: "Wall Street is populated by some of the most cynical, greedy bastards on earth. But it's not enough just to say that. The last thing I want to do is sound like a guy on a soapbox moralizing. It's not their personal moral characteristics that create the system they populate. Capitalism is essentially an amoral system based on exploitation. And Wall Street is part of the class struggle, to use an unfashionable term. But most people don't realize this, so the market looks incomprehensible to them." (http://www.salon.com/it/feature/1998/12/21feature.html). Doug Henwood publishes his own monthly newsletter on economics and politics in the USA and the world at large called the Left Business Observer. It's a subscription service, actually not all that expensive, specially if you compare it with the thousands of dollar one has to pay for newsletters from for example Esther Dyson or George Gilder. Lately you can pay online with a credit card and get a .pdf version. Separate from the LBO newsletter is the LBO mailinglist, a very active and high volume debating list which deals with all the US-Americans cares of and disagrees about. Henwood is also a contributing editor of The Nation and does a weekly program on WBIA radio in New York. His book, The State of the USA Atlas, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1994. The book which made him famous is simply called Wall Street and was published by Verso in 1997 to great acclaim and impressively vigorous sales (over 20,000). His upcoming book A New Economy? will be published by Verso in a little while. Henwood postphoned the publishing last year. He can now write the history of this once so fashionable financial discourse. GL: With technology stocks in ruins, how do you look back at the hilarious phase of dotcom.mania? What is merely a media hype, in terms of a hyped up ideology, a simulacrum perhaps, with out of control stock values, pushed up by vapor capital. Or rather something more substantial? In other words, how, in your analysis, does the manic tulipomania aspect of the New Economy, relate to broader economic changes in the nineties? DH: Surely there were real technical changes - faster processors, better graphics, bigger networks. But, as they often do, investors got way carried away with that, and those that didn't spin tales of New Paradigms got caught up in them. More broadly, the long U.S. bull market - which began in 1982, was interrupted only by the 1987 crash and the brief 1990 bear market, but basically ran for almost two decades - was at first a response to fundamentals. First, there was a long upswing in corporate profitability, reversing the long downslide of the 1970s, that began around 1981 or 1982 and ran through 1996 or 1997. It made perfect sense for stocks to rise in reaction. And second, there was the great political victory of liberal capital - the vanquishing not just of the USSR, but even of "nicer" versions of capitalism like social democracy in the North and import substitution in the South. That was a real gain for capital, and the bull market was its financial reflection (just as "inflation" in the 1970s was shorthand for the threats to capitalist control, from wildcat strikes to street demos to the Third World's demand for a new redistributionist economic order). GL: To what extend is the dotcom bashing not a mirror effect of the dotcom pushing? Scapegoats have to found. Journalists and the Wall Street Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating conflicts of interests of financial analysts. Consulting firms such as Accenture may have played a dubious too. Do we have to expect new codes of conduct and a regulation of the (online) brokerage industry? And what difference does that make? Would it stop the ongoing influx of money into mutual funds? Has the popular belief system of owning stocks suffered fatal damages? DH: Fatal damage, no. It's going to take a long bear market for that. So far, it's just some cuts and bruises; the broad U.S. public hasn't given up yet. When they do, it'll probably be time to buy, too. After a bubble bursts, there's always a search for a scapegoat. In the 1980s, it was Michael Milken and his junk bond universe - even though Wall Street busily emulated him, and he initially had the approval of the authorities to do his work. (A friend who worked in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the 1980s told me that the central bank was nervous about Milken and his cronies, but didn't do anything, because the Reagan administration had given the junk bond cowboys and corporate raiders a green light.) And now it looks like it's going to be Frank Quattrone and his shop within Credit Suisse First Boston - another west coast bad guy, just like Milken, even though everyone on Wall Street was trying to get in on the game. No doubt there will be calls for self-policing and new codes of conduct, but this is so much at the heart of the way speculative markets work that it's hard to see how you could "fix the abuses" without shutting the whole damn thing down. GL: Until mid 2000 there was hardly any radical critique of the new ecomomy, not even in leftist academic and activist circles. The so-called Seattle anti-globalization movement is mainly focussed on issues of labor, trade and debt. There is a bit done on global monetary policy, but not much. There is this odd historical singularity of Seattle and the tech stock craze reaching its peak in December 1999. Do you see a change here or is the stock market still, by and large, terra incognito for political and cultural critics? DH: Mostly the latter, except for the occasional symbolic reference. It's common among cultural types, ranging from airheads like Jean Baudrillard to serious and generally admirable people like Fredric Jameson, to regard finance as divorced completely from the real world - either irrelevant or malignant, but almost never seen as integral to the functioning of modern capitalism (and by modern I mean since the emergence of the large publicly owned corporation at the turn of the last century). The corporate form depends on stable and happy stock markets; they're the institutions through which ownership is arranged and rearranged. And the markets can have a big effect on the real world - as the dot.com bubble shows to a historic extreme. GL: So you critique the notion of a parallel universe where capital circulates. Money has not migrated to heaven, as Hakim Bey once stated? Could you extend a bit on where this idea of the 'relative autonomy of finance' getting out of hand, is coming from? DH: You could certainly get that otherworldy impression just from watching capital bounce around. Something like $1.2 trillion a day, for example, passes through the main New York bank wire, which includes most of the world's legal transactions involving the U.S. dollar. That's an unimaginably large amount - a value equal to U.S. GDP turns over in a bit over a week, and to total world product in about a month. So it's easy to conclude from this that it's just pure speculation, unmoored from any relation to the real world. But to conclude that would be to over look at least two important facts: 1) speculation itself has real world consequences, like, say, the remarkable inflation of the Southeast Asian bubble and its disastrous breakage a few years ago, and 2) financial instruments, no matter how rapidly they're turned over, represent claims on real-world assets - bonds are a claim on a firm or government's income, and shares are certificates of actual ownership, and shareholders have become increasingly assertive over the last two decades in setting corporate policy (downsizing, outsourcing, etc.). That's the last two decades in the U.S.; shareholder activism is just beginning in Europe, and the consequences, unless they're resisted, should be lower wages, less generous benefits, more tenuous employment, and pared-back welfare states. Since most people aren't aware of the effect of the shareholder revolution, they ascribe the increased nastiness of economic life to abstract, agentless entities like "technology" and "globalization," as if there weren't identifiable sets of interests behind those forces. GL: What do you think of Robert Kurz' idea of casino capitalism? In general, how do see, contemporary marxism analyzing the unprecedented growth of the >financial sector over the last twenty years? It seems that not much has >happened since Rudolf Hilferding wrote his study "Das Finanzkapital," back in 1910 (except for your 'Wall St.' of course). DH: I'm very critical of Hilferding in Wall Street for many reasons, most relevantly to this exchange, for arguing that the German-style model of capitalism, with a handful of big banks owning big industrial concerns, was the future of the system, and that the Anglo-American stock-market system was on the way out. He couldn't have been more wrong; as the gloomy Wall Street economist Henry Kaufmann put it a few years ago, we're seeing the Americanization of global finance. Even development finance for the poor countries is coming more and more from bond and stock markets, with less from commercial banks and official development banks. Hilferding's lingering influence - given a shot in the arm because Lenin took up his analysis in Imperialism - is one reason contemporary Marxists have, with a few noble eceptions, paid little attention to finance. Also, many Marxists think of finance as purely secondary or epiphenomenal, a derivative or reflection of the real action in production, rather than being something with a life of its own or something having any influence on production. This seems especially wrong when you think about the role of financial markets and institutions in arranging ownership; like I said before, financial instruments are claims on other people's incomes, and shares are certificates of ownership of the means of production. Why Marxists should pay so little attention to these instruments of class formation and power is a mystery to me; maybe they don't go too far beyond the level of appearance, and sometimes it appears that finance is epiphenomenal or parasitic. This neglect certainly can't be blamed on Marx himself; while vol. 1 of Capital reads a bit like a goldbug's tract in places, elsewhere - vol. 3 of Capital, Theories of Surplus Value, the Grundrisse - Marx wrote some amazingly prescient and evocative things about the credit system and the joint-stock company. The problem I have with terms like "casino capitalism" is that it can imply there's a nicer, non-casino capitalism we should or could somehow get back to, and also implies that production itself is free from the speculative motive. But for most industrial capitalists, the making of goods or provision of services is just a means to the accumulation of money. Expanding your hoard of money is what the whole system is all about. GL: Third Way liberal-social democratic circles are still promoting deregulation. What do you think of calls from ATTAC and similar movements to regulate global finance, for instance through the introduction of the Tobin tax (a micro tax on financial transactions)? DH: It's better than nothing, but I think it's at once too little and too much. Too little in the sense that just taxing transactions doesn't address the relation of the financial markets to the assertion of ownership and class power, and too much in the sense that capital regards any attack on its freedom of movement as the political equivalent of revolution, and will fight it accordingly. So I don't entirely see why you should take on such a big battle for such a minor goal. In politics, which is all about compromise, it doesn't make sense to start out already compromised; why not make maximalist demands to start with, even if you're going to do little more than win reforms? GL: What would be a maximalist demand? Closure of futures markets? Cracking down on dubious IPOs? How can the shareholder society be undermined, other then see ordinary people being punished, losing their retirement funds? DH: Well, there was the old Swedish approach, wage-earner funds, which got quashed because Swedish capital didn't like the idea (and they were considerably watered down between original conception and actual implementation). Basically, these were pots of money funded through taxes on corporate profits whose aim was to buy up outstanding shares and manage them on behalf of the working class as a whole. What I'd like to see over the long term is outside shareholders eliminated. They serve no useful social function. I know that seems fanciful in today's political environment, but you never get anywhere in life without making big demands to start with. I'd also like to make the point that there's something illusory and fetishistic about the very notion of retirement funds. Individuals or families can save for a while, then draw down their savings, but societies as a whole cannot. Today's retirees can't be sustained using yesterday's savings - the money has to come from today. Effectively, today's stock buyers are what fund today's stock sellers. Just like a public pension system, a private one depends on the cross-generational transfer of funds from workers to retirees. GL: If, as you say, expanding your hoard of money is what the whole system is all about, then were is expansion of the overall amount of assets border to inflation? If the accumulation of capital is not related to anyway, with capital a free floating signifier to say, then this is hardly a sustainable model. I am not apocalypic in nature, and neither are you, I guess. What do you think about a total crash of Wall Street? It seems so likely, if you think about it, and has been predicted numerous times. Greenspan is said to have a crash prevented from happening, for example in August 1998, during the almost forgotten hedge fund crisis. DH: It seems unsustainable, for sure, but it somehow manages to sustain itself. Even with the Nasdaq so far off its peak, U.S. stocks remain overvalued by historical standards. You're right that I'm not apocalyptic - if anything, I'm the opposite, easily convinced the big bourgeoisie will save itself from ruin one time after another. A crash is always possible, but I think it's more likely we'll see a long period of weak stock markets and below-average returns - after almost two decades of unprecedented bullishness. GL: Are Tom Peters, George Gilder or Kevin Kelly liable for what they have about the unlimited potential of the New Economy? What do you think about such calls, to bring intellectuals to court, because they pushed technology stocks up? What type of intellectuals do we deal with in this case? Are they responsible comparable to the progressive intellectuals in the West supporting Stalin during the thirties? And do you find yourself liable for what you write in your Left Business Observer newsletter? As the title says, you are only "observing." Is it useful to push the discourse into the direction of making everyone compliant? DH: Not at all. In the cases of analysts who were making recommendations of ludicrous stocks that their investment banking departments were underwriting, I think there should be some liability - civil and criminal - there. But as for shills and intellectuals (and with the likes of Gilder and Peters, it's hard to tell which they were), I'm all for defending their freedom to be ridiculous. If grownups are self-deluded enough to believe them, what can I say? I'm something of a free-speech fundamentalist. Henwood's homepage: http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html His e-mail address: dhenwood {AT} panix.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 46.0 <nettime> Interview with Charles Green geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sat, 8 Dec 2001 08:57:21 +1100 The Art of Collaboration An Interview with Charles Green Australian Art Critic and Author of The Third Hand, Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism By Geert Lovink Charles Green has written an extraordinary rich and well-documented work about conceptual art in the late sixties and seventies. As the title indicates The Third Hand shapes art history in a methodological matter. Collaboration is a metatag to order works. There is no talk here about schools or chronologies. Instead there are specific contextualized works, events, happenings, installations, breaking away from painting and the cave of language, meant to capture art. For Green, collaboration became an entry point to open up histories which, despite their fame, are at brink of being forgotten. Collaboration is not so much a mode of production as it is a trajectory. Green is drawing traces which makes it possible to tell stories and make the often abstract and complex conceptual art works alive again. This alternative way of reconstructing art history pays respect to the original intentions of the artists. In separate chapters Charles Green deals with Gilbert & George, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burns, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison and a few more. Having collaborated myself a great deal, for instance as a member of the media theorist association Adilkno, my interest in this topic grew when Klaus Theweleit published his Book of Kings (Part I, 1988) in which he describes the psycho-analytic aspects of artist collaborations. Theweleit's account is a bloody one and deals with the (male) violence, using female partners to metamorphorize into a next, higher stage of art production. Charles Green has refrained from psychologism. The Third Hand is not dealing with the internal dynamics. Instead teamwork is presented as an almost necessary step towards 80s postmoderism and its questioning of identities and reconfigurations of meaning. In this email exchange Charles and I have tried to put the 70s conceptual art experiences into the contemporary framework of new media. GL: After you have done so much research, would you say that the origin of collaboration in art since the sixties is lying in the crisis of the 19th century ideal of the artist as universal genius? CG: No, I don't see a crisis created by an ideal of universal genius as behind any origin of collaboration in art as a widespread phenomenon during the 1960s. In my book, The Third Hand, I was trying to be both more specific and more generalized, and above all my narrative was relevant to art practice right now. On the one hand I wanted to re-explain in a very focused way a narrow, definite period - the ten years or so between around 1968 and 1978. You see, I think that period is absolutely foundational to art today, but its significance got lost during the period of classic postmodernism in the 1980s and then again in the identity politics-based early 1990s. The period is one of those fascinating phases, riven by crisis and exploding with possibilities and multiple futures, that require very patient rethinking, and this rethinking is just beginning now. I'm certainly not the only person to want to do this, but I chose to think this through collaboration, and it so happens for multiple reasons this is important all through visual culture, including internet culture, now. I find most of the explanations of that time, in art history at least, myopic. This is partly on account of the authors' generational status, as members of a generation that came to self-consciousness immediately AFTER the period. I'm thinking of writers like Hal Foster, for example, who are slightly too young to have first hand experience of the period. And of people who did, I know also that participants who write, figures like Lucy Lippard, Harald Szeemann, Benjamin Buchloh, the artist Jeff Wall, have part of a story to communicate but not a panoramic view, since they are so implicated as participants in the action. On the other hand, since my main area of interest both as an artist and as an art historian is the art of our time, is contemporary art, I wanted to see if an intuition, that the art that interests me most represents the resurfacing of those 1968-78 points of origin but at different points on the map, was right. The most exciting art of our time often centers around new media, around really wild new forms of author/artist, often OUTSIDE New York in centers like Taipei, Seoul, Sydney. We DO see much of the best art circulating in the globalized networks of curated exhibitions, so I'm not hypothesizing an excluded canon at all. But throughout the book, I saw the 20th century, not the 19th, as the locus of the problem: the memory crisis best formulated by Benjamin is manifest at the start of modernity, but it intersects throughout this 20th century - so different in the 21st century - with the refusal of optical and visual knowledge traced so clearly by Martin Jay. That is one aspect underneath the late 1960s crisis, but it is still only one aspect. Another was the shift in the nature of artistic work; yet another - my particular concern - was the shift in the nature of the artist. All occur in response to crises specific to that moment but present, as your question suggests, from the start of modernity as well. I suppose ultimately the collaboration area that interests me lies in the tensions thrown up just BEFORE there is any clear sign that the transition from modernism to postmodernism is underway. I definitely do not think that collaboration in art is particularly radical, not that it arose in the 1960s. But I do think that at this foundational time it occupies a specially instructive place. GL: In the period you discuss, from the 60s to 80s, specialization has become a general social phenomenon, there is more than the 'defeat of painting'. Don't you think that collaboration within the arts should be seen in the broader perspective of a rapidly increasing division of labour and professionalization during that period? CG: The idea of a defeat of painting so close to conceptual artists' hearts - and I started my artistic life as an art student making conceptual art works alongside paintings at the very start of the 1970s - was really always something else, and this is clear in those artists' writings and statements: Painting was a cipher, a metonym, standing in for the 19th century idea of the bohemian artist that artists came to despise. This is the identity that you mentioned a moment ago. GL: One could say that the artists you discuss are not so predicting such a shift in an avant-garde way but rather responding to and reflecting this long-term trend so visible on the work floor, within academic disciplines and in everyday life. We see advanced forms of the division of labor reflected in hybrid art practices transcending singular subjects and media. Or is this reading perhaps a banal and mechanical Marxist interpretation? CG: You are very right at one level, but there's more to it than that, for the productivist aesthetic implicit in Marxist-oriented modernism was also rejected by those artists, at least for the most part initially, though that model, which ends up entailing a more conventional idea of collaboration - the collective - returned later. Their collaborations were not so much a way of connecting with a social project - though it was in the case of Art & Language AFTER its start, whose history I leave to the many other people who are working on it - as a way of working out if it was possible to engage in such activity. As time went on, and so many writers have traced this, the desire to see political action in art through collective work increasingly replaced the desire to see if collaborative action could facilitate, through the removal of the artist, a new zone between art, writing and history. THIS zone fascinated me, not the ability to connect art and politics, and I think it is implicit in a lot of the activity around now, in defining the new intermedia genre in contemporary art, only some of which involves new media, and some of which involves a kind of dumbed-down sneaker aesthetic. GL: What can you tell us about the art of collaboration? Gilbert & George re still together but Marina Abramovic and Ulay broke up in a rather sad way. People these days invest a lot of their time and energy in (online) collaborations and get deeply disappointed when collaborations are falling apart. I have to think here what Michel Foucault writes about friendship. You have are collaborating yourself. You must have thought about this. CG: Abramovic and Ulay apparently met again recently on the occasion of Marina's 50th birthday, and they danced the frozen tango position immortalized in one of their endurance works together, or at least a friend tells me so. There's something else to remember. Collaboration is not the same as friendship, and by friendship connotes cooperation. Friendship is always fragile since its contract is so unenforceable. Demands in and on friendship are always ultimately unsustainable, unless friendship is governed by an economy of civility. Collaboration involves much, much more. Collaboration involves the articulation of contractual relations. As I worked on my project, which as I said before started out as an attempt to explain a foundational moment in art that was specifically important to me, I realized that artistic collaboration was one lens through which to explain the wider world of artistic change. It was a microcosm, and I'm an art historian rather than an art theorist, whatever that is, horrible term. But it was also important at a certain moment for the reasons I mentioned earlier - outmoded ideas of what an artists does, where, and how, even why, all these had to be defeated if a convincing post-studio art was to emerge (I'm borrowing, as I do in the book, Michael Fried's priority: the art of a specific time has to convince its viewers of that time, and it can't do that through stale clichés). Then way after that, and here I come back to your question, I realized that the typology of types of collaboration I had drawn up (cooperation in collective, short-term cooperation; corporate, bureaucratic groups or partnerships; married couples and families; and finally intensely and publicly bonded couples who created "third artists") also formed itself into a narrative, for certain types of collaboration were answered by others as each proved to be inadequate in the solution of artistic problems. Productivism gone mad. The final type of collaboration I list - the couple who identify themselves with their art - is exemplified by both Marina Abramovic's work with Ulay, but also by Gilbert & George. I don't know that there are any rules about collaborative longevity, but it seems to me that the collaborations that modeled themselves on family structures, with the collaborative identity rather like a castle wall behind which roles could be swapped and reversed - was an easier model to sustain than this unless civility was the basis of relationship, which it overtly is with Gilbert & George, who are even models of cooperation and generosity to intrusive art critics like myself. Self-revelation was implicit in the "third hand" collaborations, and is unsustainable since its comprehension, even by the artists themselves, always comes a moment after experience, which in turn comes a moment after the event of illumination, as Buddhist theology argues. I'm interested that you mention the difficulty of on-line collaborative sustainability. I know that sustainability and the particular types of collaborative contract are linked. The problem lies, again, in confusing collaboration with friendship. Collectives are not the same as collaborations. All of the artists I researched worked together for long periods of time. It is highly unlikely that Christo and Jeanne-Claude, or Ann and Patrick Poirier, or Helen and Newton Harrison, or Gilbert & George, or a host of others, would choose to work outside their collaboration. Too much invested and too much mutual pleasure is obvious. But other collaborations, like Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn, who later joined Art & Language, were not based on sexual partnership at all, and even in their case the contractual relationship seemed to have been articulated fairly early and fairly clearly. When we started to work as a collaboration - Lyndell and I - we realized that we needed to commit to working together for the rest of our lives, and slightly later we realized that we had to completely abandon any idea of part-time solo production. We can give over a whole series of work now to one of us to produce - that, I think, is not unusual - but everything is under the umbrella of teamwork. GL: Brion Gyson and William Burroughs are discussing collaboration in terms of the creation of a 'third mind.' Other artists in your book use similar terms. It is almost as if a new identities, a new persona is created. Where is this will to become someone else, to design another identity is coming from and what's exactly so liberating about this desire? CG: What is liberating is liberation. What is liberation? Freedom from the prison-house of language, or reconciliation to it, as in successful psychoanalysis? Artists who constructed doppelgänger or doubles were involved in flight outside the prison-house of language--if it can be judged to have been successful-and this was possible precisely because of collaboration, which means the teams' escape as individual "artists" from their personal bodies into the uncanny but mobile realm of phantoms. Buried in my footnotes in the book are constant arguments through, not references to, the concept of absence--the absence as ground familiar from well-known post-War philosophy, from Heidegger & Co., but also specifically through later Mahayana Buddhism that denies the ultimate reality of all essences. Abramovic and Ulay happened to have become involved directly in this philosophy from one point of their collaboration, and they were acknowledging a sophisticated, non-Western, quasi-deconstructive precedent in Mahayana Buddhism. But I'm not doing anything so obvious as conflating absence with the restoration of the past, of a spurious humanism, however well-intentioned, that seeks to oppose "spirituality" against "deconstruction". Abramovic/Ulay's performance actions are NOT Buddhist, just as Barnett Newman's zip 1960s paintings are not Kabbalism. It's more complex than that. GL: So you're saying that collaboration, in these specific cases, is an act of disappearance, not born out of a Will to Production, to create a new born identity, out of a desire to break through the limitations of the Self but to neutralize. Not 1 plus 1 makes 3 but 1 minus 1 is zero. Is the drift towards absence perhaps a secret history, underneath the perhaps all too obvious psycho-analytic dynamics between the two parties involved? CG: Good point. Absence is ground. It is a secret history, entangled with the more public history of the impact of Buddhism in Western culture and art, especially post-1945. Not that Mahayana EXPLAINS anything artistic, but is it another contextual framework for understanding what is happening. You see, in the West we are awfully Ameroeurocentric. So when we think about camouflage and withheld identity and withheld self-disclosure we look to particular, belatedly canonic texts, to writers like Callois or Bataille. But on the ground, amongst artists, a whole other genealogy is already at work, BEFORE we even get to the task of interpretive frameworks. The exceptions - and their work is immensely exciting - are the books of Leo Bersani and Alysse Dutoit, books like Caravaggio's Secrets or Culture of Redemption. This is a very sophisticated anti-psychoanalytic method of reading texts. It's critically important if we think about improvisatory authorship, or artistic collaboration. GL: These days more and more theorists are questioning the revolutionary potential of the identity change. New identities are becoming commodities. One could almost see such 'third bodies' or shared spaces as an natural next step in the capitalist development rather than a subversive practice. But that's perhaps nothing new. Such a cynical analysis of the late sixties perhaps destroys the primal drive of that time, which was so full of energy to discover other dimensions. CG: I can see that.. Through the 1990s the discourse of the Other, of marginalized groups, became just another rhetorical lingo. Sarat Maharaj is particularly acute and cutting on this topic. And so I'll be interested how he and Okwui Enwezor negotiate this in the process of creating Documenta XI. The question is - and it's easy to answer - whether authenticity and inauthenticity can be mapped onto the contemporary landscape any differently to the 1980s (Saint Andy Warhol's decade). How do we imagine September 11? Do we blame? What are the ethics in taking human life under any circumstances? Similar questions came up in Australia in the early 1990s, as artists realized that the image haze of image-scavenging simply could not include Aboriginal motifs. GL: Within theatre, film and music collaboration is a necessity otherwise there is not art work to be experienced in the first place, except for a solo work performed by the artist him or herself. Within new media art a collaboration between the programmers, designers, curators and installation builders seems almost essential and this process is only getting more complicated with the development of more sophisticated hardware and software. There are hardly any new media art work produced by a single person. However, often there is no shared authorship as you discuss in your book. The collaborations between the visual artists you describe seem to happen on a fairly equal basic. In many cases however there are big fights over authorship which all have financial repercussions in terms of reputation and careers. You're not really touching this topic in your study. Is that because the idea of collaboration within the conceptual arts discourse is still a young one? CG: No, not at all. Many of the players are still alive and litigious, so it is sometimes hard to work out the truth. Conceptual art, especially, has been marked by a fierce, absolutely fierce series of attempts by many different artists to claim primacy and position, and in the process old friends become enemies. You are right, though, to suggest that the discussion of collaboration is young, especially if it has the significance that I ascribe to it. There's been very, very little analysis of the issues I describe, though a lot on other areas. Strangely enough, most artists have a massive investment in their own interpretation of their works, and in actively policing other interpretations. This desire to police the audience now seems both distant and odd, but those artists were determined to avoid "misinterpretation." One artist said, "What I say is part of the art work. I don't look to critics to say things about my work. I tell them what it's about." All the art that really interested me - and most of the art that currently interests me - involves, to some extent, the abdication of authorial intention as the exclusive determinant of reading. I have run foul of this before. Recent moral rights legislation will concrete and solidify this control, and artists have been very reluctant to understand that the few cents they derive from copyright fees will be offset by more and more strict rules against appropriation and copying, which is how artists have always worked. This will have a huge impact of web-based art. Traditional expressive modes or production are privileged under these legal regimes, and these are by far the most aesthetically bankrupt. GL: Certainly. Over the last decades collaboration has become so closely tied to legal issues. Is the legal business in danger of destroying the aura of collaboration? What would you advice artists if they are thinking about engaging themselves in a long-term collaboration? Would you encourage them to make contracts or is that a step in the wrong direction? I have seen many cases in which the bureaucratic partner in crime ran away with the contracts, IP, ownership of content, equipment and brand recognition, while the creative partners were left out in the cold. Who's the happy one remains to be seen. Is there anything to be learned from the seventies generation? CG: I don't want anyone to think that I'm valorizing or glamorizing artistic collaboration. It's inherently no more important than anything else. I'm not the least bit impressed by any supposed aura surrounding any mode of production. And the legalism of conceptual artist collaborations was part of the point of the work. The discourse surrounding the work WAS part of the work. Contracts aren't worth the paper they are printed on in the art world, which is why the artist/dealer contract movement never got anywhere, much like resale royalties (droit de suite), but is why its spin-offs (dealers usually now spell out in writing the terms of their association with each artist) were useful. The point about artistic collaboration is that it is a test in which individual identity is subordinated to a so-called higher good - the work of art. It's a lot like working on a magazine. Not everyone is suited to cooperation, but the art world glamorizes narcissism and has an incredibly short attention span. My simple point is that self-presentation is constructed, usually self-consciously, and that the resulting figure is sometimes central within the work of art. The lesson of the seventies generation is that they did not compromise, and that they worked out protective structures to allow that. I approach new media from the point of view of a participant in the world of contemporary art, and it's worth understanding that the two are not the same. I gave a paper at a conference recently - "Dislocations", which was organized by Cinemedia (Melbourne) and ZKM (Karlsruhe). Peter Weibel and Lev Manovich were the keynotes. Weibel's point, apart from his sci-fi, William Gibson behaviouralism and the mistaken idea that memory exists, was good: new media is in a bleated revolutionary, avant-garde phase in which the invention of new technologies and forms is more important than the deconstruction of those forms; new media, however, he says, has a long pre-history from the period around the 1970s onwards. The other keynote, Lev Manovich, was thinking in the opposite direction, horizontally, at the level of a taxonomy of data-base-based new forms, principally of internet cinema. But listening to Lev, I wondered if his disdain for narrative was echoed in the impoverished visuality of many of his quasi-interactive Internet project examples, and why, given the role of montage in most of these new works and theories, Jean-Luc Godard's theories of montage and sound (both pre and post Histoires du Cinema), we are compelled to reinvent Godard's wheel. As Peter Lunenfeld reminds us all in Snap to Grid, this milieu faded to black. I suppose the thing that worried me about Lev Manovich's presentation was the way he was positing video artists like Doug Aitken and Douglas Gordon (we can add Mariko Mori, Shirin Neshat, Matthew Barney) as belated popularizers, the same way avant-garde film-makers used to look down on art-house movies. He was working straight out of a productivist set of criteria, horizontal and unstratified, in which technological take-up and formal difference govern attention. What kind of cultural dynamic is at work here historically? Are we witnessing the re-creation of the same space as that once occupied by alternative, experimental, avant-garde cinema? GL: I suppose art critics are in a better position to answer this question. I would say that we are in worse situation, compared to the golden days of Godard. Art, and with it experiental electronic arts, has become isolated and can therefore no longer claim an avant-garde position. Within this tragic, inward looking position, having been neutralized of any substantial potential, art is hidden within academia, self-referential circles and the thick walls of the museum and galleries. The caved art system has created its own autonomous space in which it can celebrate its won freedom. The price for the gained sophistication is its isolation from society. No matter how innovative, subversive or creative media works are, they seem unable to bridge the Disciplinary Divide. So, yes, new media artists can reinvent Goddard's wheel and create a exciting new school of digital modernism (or give it a name) but their works will remain unknown-and will be of homeopathic influence on the global mediascape. There is a total lack of mediation between the artworks and popular culture. This situation prompted pioneer computer game developer Brenda Laurel to publicly distance herself from art (and activism). "It took me years to discover," she writes in her latest post dotcom essay, "that I couldn't effectively influence the construction of pop culture until I stopped describing myself as a. an artist, and b. a political activist. Both of these self-definitions resulted in what I now see as my own self-marginalization. I couldn't label myself as a subversive or a member of the elite. I had to mentally place myself and my values at the center, not at the margin. I had to understand that what I was about was not critiquing but manifesting." (Utopian Entrepreneur, The MIT Press, 2001). How sad (and true) this all sounds, specially if one compares it to hopes and dreams of the roaring twenties--and sixties. This is why many in new media culture re-label themselves and work as designers and look for a way out in science, architecture and film. Brenda Laurel thinks that "culture work" is a more appropriate description of what she does. CG: I hate to remove the drama from a text, but I agree with you completely, and I'm speaking from the other side of the wall, as an artist and as an art historian whose life has been bound up in art. So the problems are double. For a start, Manovich's horizontal taxonomic approach is good reportage and important right at this moment but it trivializes the issues and the stakes. The cards then get dealt behind the scenes. We know by now, from indexical events like the Whitney Biennial, that the art world has been slow to take up technological innovation except in marginal and cosmetic ways, and because new media is only partly concerned with itself as art, it tends to have a somewhat touching and definitely naďve belief in either art or its irrelevance. This overlaying of "art" onto information, this understanding of the aesthetic as a surplus, I wrote somewhere recently, inevitably obscures the very information function we value about the internet. It occludes any archival function - any real data-base truth-value - in terms of information storage, even as it insists on a memorializing and educational function (not at all the same thing as an artistic function). Why make art when you can take a photograph, write an e-mail or make a film? The alternative lies in understanding the priorities involved in contemporary art, for a start. The necessary commodification involved in a successful art practice eliminates certain trajectories, but not in the way you'd think. Scarcity, branding, uniqueness, aura, charisma, all survive the elimination of the unique work, oil paint, traditional media, and personal manufacture and handiwork, even complete deskilling, which was a basic 20th century avant-garde tactic. But if we take all this on board, we still have to admit art's almost total loss of a vanguard cultural position. I'm still left with the question of how to explain the art world fascination with new media right now. Increasingly, the term "intermedia" is being used to define works that involve translation and retranslation from medium to medium. Often, as in the works of the South African artist William Kentridge, this results in a suite of works in different media ranging from animated films through traditional prints through to puppets. My point is that copying and compositing are definitely NOT the sole domain of new media right now. But right now, in many people's minds, new media occupy a role related to and ALMOST equivalent to intermedia. There's a window of attention that briefly coincides with the windows of technological innovation and media evolution, but it's none of the three that ultimately govern attention except in a sub-culture. Geography, culture, injustice, globalization: all of these forces periodize new media instantly. Charles Green, The Third Hand, Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, University of Minnesota Press (USA)/University of New South Wales Press (Australia), 49.95 AUD. More info: www.unswpress.com.au and www.upress.umn.edu # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 46.1 Re: <nettime> Interview with Charles Green David Garcia nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sat, 15 Dec 2001 11:26:45 +0100 This is a timely and critical discussion and Išm looking forward to getting hold on Charles Greenšs book. Nettimešs history of a "creative tension" with the visual arts and artists makes this an interesting context to explore these ideas. There are so many points to be raised by this interview but I just want to develop a few. And I want to add that as I am yet to read the book the points raised are addressed to the interview only. Charles Greenšs desire "to see political action in art through collective work increasingly replaced the desire to see if collaborative action could facilitate, through the removal of the artist, a new zone between art, writing and history. THIS zone fascinated me, not the ability to connect art and politics" Although I accept that every author must focus on what fascinates them I really wonder whether it is possible to understand any of the significant work of this time outside of the political. Not in the sense of art in the service of particular campaigns but of a broader movement. This period was saturated in utopian optimism of an intensity that is difficult to imagine today. The freedoms won when large numbers of artists threw off Greenburgšs formalist constraints and began making works unmediated by the conventions of spescific mediums was widely perceived as part of a wider emancipatory movement. This is the era which marked a move from experimenting with form and materials to experiments with language, contexts and roles. In this regard Dan Graham is an interesting figure. Lucy Lippard..Dan youšve been called a poet and a critic and a photographer. Are you an artist now? Dan Graham: I donšt define myself, but whatever I do, I think is defined by the medium.... He might have added that what he does is defined by the role he adopts. The point is that once released from the requirements of any spescific medium the artist is free to explore hybrid identities:"artist, scientist, technician, craftsperson, theorist, activist, could all be mixed together in combinations that had different weights and intensities." This is the moment when the aspect of the art-world which nourishes atavistic personality cults is momentarily weakened not only making collaboration easier but also allowing a more spescific role to emerge: artist as visual researcher. When regarding the emergence of new approaches to research and collaboration in this era it is important not to overlook the immense influence of radical forms of psychology. At the time a battle raged (every bit as bitter as between free software and propriotory coders) between the two rival psychological models of the age; American behaviorists and the European phenomenologists. R.D Laing one of the the leaders of European phenomenological psychology (seldom read today) described the polemical divide in a way that could also be seen as almost programmatic for much of the important art of this era: "We can see other peoplešs behavior but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other persons experience, but only his behavior The other personšs behavior is an experience of mine. My behavior is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the otheršs behavior to the otheršs experience of my behavior Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience" Interestingly although Dan Graham and a number of others who were generally on the Laingian side of the argument but the actual works, the video recordings, installations and performances tended towards the cool laboratory like approach of the behavioral psychologists. Without wishing to descend into technological determinism the introduction of video in this era plays an important role. It was in the 1960šs Sony introduced the "industrial standard" video "portopacks". Although never a commercial success this format immediately became a vital tool for three distinct classes of practitioner; artists, political activists and behavioral research scientists. The role of video in articulating the importance of representation for both artists and political activists has often been explored, and we might even speculate that the shift from class politics to the politics of identity may in part have arisen through greater access to the tools of mass media representation. But although this kind of work can be seen in general terms as part of this process, in other respects it is closer to the methodology other great beneficiary of video; the behavioral sciences. The critical importance of the introduction of video for certain areas of behavioral research is often overlooked. Researchers (particularly in the field of Developmental Psychology) have stated that its introduction has been of comparable importance to the telescope for astronomy or the microscope for life sciences. Even today video remains the basic research tool for almost all close and systematic observation of human, non-verbal behavior The artists who understood this fact also gave primacy to reception and behavior, allowing them to extend the notion of collaboration to the audience. In these works the psychological and social nexus created by the social context becomes the subject. David Garcia # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 46.2 Re: <nettime> Interview with Charles Green Dr Charles Green nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 16 Dec 2001 12:49:47 +1100 David Garcia's response to the fibreculture interview by Geert Lovinck with me regarding my book on artist collaborations, The Third Hand, is thoughtful and wise. He asks "whether it is possible to understand any of the significant work of this time outside of the political. . . . This period was saturated in utopian optimism of an intensity that is difficult to imagine today. The freedoms won when large numbers of artists threw off Greenburg's formalist constraints and began making works unmediated by the conventions of specific mediums was widely perceived as part of a wider emancipatory movement." He is right, and these are exactly the points I make all through my book, which takes great care to name and explain the wider psycho-social context, and the different way that artists conceived of their activities, which was much more holistic and complex than the simple connection of art to politics as this had been imagined before. Mr Garcia notes that he has not read my book, and I think that when he does he will find that I have tried to home in on exactly the now-obscured motivations and distinctions he thinks should be remembered. This recovery, and the analysis of a foundational moment beyond the 1980s context of a transition into postmodernism, was one of my chief motivations in writing a revisionist history of art that has importance to contemporary visual culture beyond a narrow history. Charles Green # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 47.0 <nettime> Interview on 2 year anniversary imc --DeeDee Halleck dhalleck nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 02 Dec 2001 23:50:50 -0500 Interview with DeeDee Halleck by Jakob Weingartner How would you describe the strategy of indymedia? The Seattle Indymedia site was inaugurated as part of setting up an Independent Media Center so that all of the many movement media comng to Seattle could collaborate. There was a growing realization that radio, video, print and art groups could effectively work together on specific issues. Before Seattle, there was the case of the impending execution of independent radio journalist Mumia Abu Jamal. Although there was no physical center, nor a coordinating web site, a national meeting of alterntive media folk made a committment to try to collaborate a campaign. In the space of very few weeks many of us worked collaboratively to make a media blitz to counter the State of Pennsylvania’s assigned date for execution: radio programs, videos, satellite broadcasts, special print inserts, posters and a CD Rom were made with, for the first time, a real sense of collaboration between different media. Throughout the country there were continual messages against the death penalty and in favor of a new trial for Mumia. For the moment, it worked, and the state postponed the execution. (Though Mumia is still in jail and may still be executed.) With the convergence of many groups to Seattle in 1999, we knew that the sort of campaign that had been waged to save Mumia might be an effective way to get the message of the anti-corporate movement before the public. So we planned to do a similar sort of cross media collaboration. The web site was just to be a place where we could post our work. Before Seattle happened, I don’t think anyone really imagined that the web site would be such a popular and effective tool. Sure, many groups have web sites, but the dynamism of the Seattle site was phenomenal. This was to a great extent due to the unique potential of the Catalytst soft ware, which made it easy for everyone to post not only text, but photos, video and audio files. Catalyst was developed in Australia by Mathew Arnison and others for use by Australian activists. Mathew just happened to be in Boulder shortly before Seattle and was able to introduce Manseur Jacobi and other tech people to the Catalyst code. The strategy per se was just to make it as accessible as possible, not only for downloading, but also for uploading. I think that only after the site went up and became so effective that we began to really understand what a powerful tool it was. Does indymedia want to put pressure on the mainstream media in order to force them to alter their news coverage? Or do you follow a concept of, let´s call it „counter-information“? If that´s so, do you see the danger of addressing an inner circle of already leftist people? There is a constant struggle within indymedia as to what the attitude should be towards the main stream media. There are those who think that indymedia can pressure corporate press to be more honest. I think that yes there have been stories that we “broke“ and forced main stream media to take notice and report. There are those who think we should court the press and get them to „cover“ indymedia and that „legitimates“ us. I pretty much disagree and I guess I am in the camp that says fuck the corporate media, let’s make our own! The distrust of mainstream media has been codified in one version of the "IMC Blueprint" with the following rules: "Try to get mainstream media to schedule times to come to the IMC so it is possible to let everyone know they were are coming. If possible, we try to clear a the scheduled mainstream media visit through a general meeting. 2. All mainstream media doing articles on the IMC should register as mainstream media - it is even possible to give them special passes to wear while they are in the IMC. 3. Someone from the outreach team can accompany mainstream media at all times when they are in the IMC". Sometimes IMC activities do catch the interest of the press and greatly increase the number of visitors to the web site. As related by "J.M.G." in a process discussion: Creative applications of the Internet technology during the S11 protests demonstrated the ability of the Net to not only function as an organizational tool but also as a form of civil disobedience in cyberspace. The tongue-in-cheek link to JohnFarnham's 'You're the Voice' - chosen as the S11 song - and the clever 'hactivism' which redirected users from www.nike.com to www.S11.org, generated considerable discussion within the press, radio and television media. This publicity alerted new audiences to the existence of the site incrementally increasing the number of hits the site received. The old media was important in publicizing and drawing attention to the new, highlighting the fact that, although the Net is an important new tool, activists still largely rely on coverage in the traditional media and cannot rely solely upon the emerging communications networks." Main stream critics have snidely put down the indy media activity as being contradictory: using corporate tools such as the internet to attack corporate agenda. Indymedia makers have countered that that is a time honored guerrilla tactic-- to turn the tools of the oppressors against them. However, a more considered rejoinder is that the internet was developed in a collaborative process through public funding via educational institutions. The creation did not spring from a search for profitable products to market. The entire effort was subsidized by public grants and nurtured in an atmosphere of mutual cooperation, not unlike the process of indymedia itself. The early internet researchers were not initially making products that the commercial sector could (and would) develop. As e-commerce takes over much of the band width, it is efforts such as indy media that are preserving the authentic interactive potential of the internet and, as such, preserving its role as a progressive public resource. As to the question of preaching to the choir.. well, first of all the choir needs information and „to be preached to“, otherwise how can we all sing together? But with the sorts of numbers indymedia is generating in terms of daily visitors, we are certainly going beyond any concept of „inner circle“. This is a broad audience. But moreover it is not passive: there are almost as many posts as there are visiters. Indymedia recently celebrated its 2 years of existence. If you look back at the development of the antiglobalisation-movement and the implementation of independent media in it, which goals have been reached, where have you failed? What has changed? Certainly we have changed the perception of the public in terms of global trade organizations. No one looks at the WTO or the World Bank as being a benevelent organizations any more. That is clearly a huge victory. In terms of failure, I think the biggest problems are the same problems we see in the world around us: the vast inequities in access to resources, the deeply rooted problems of racism and sexism and the ever present temptations of consumer culture. There are few indymedia centers in the South. Women and people of color are still in very much the minority at indymedia centers and many of the creative young people who have learned to make media at indymedia are sucked off into the corporate world so that they can pay off their credit cards. How has the strategy of indymedia changed through this 2 years? (Perhaps you would like to answer this question chronologically, starting with seattle, over washington, prague, genua etc.) I don;’t see „change“ per say, but just a sort of evolution and growth, which varies depending on the location and the persons involved. One exaample of a particularly active group is dcimc, which is making a 24 hour radio station, a tv channel that scans all the other imcs and posts a sort of roving video string. Also DC has perfected the use of the imc archives as counter surveilence: checking for images of police undercover provacateurs, recording police abuses (such as taping over their badge numbers with black tape and excessive violence) and other sort of vigilant activity. Genoa was amazing in the production of breaking news. It was a global interactive event. how have the wtc/pentagon bombings changed the work of indymedia? It is hard to say what the ultimate outcome will be. The images of black bloc kids at globalization protests seem curiously out of place in the current image climate. But the imcs have been very useful in providing an alternative to the jingoism of corporate press. Certainly the New York IMC has played a very useful role in uniting the community of media makers and artists in the WTC area.. Is the imc being exposed to a lot of hate in this heated up situation since it so openly opposes the „war against terror“ lead primarily by the us-government? There have been individual indymedia people attacked, but nothing so far, in terms of specific repression. I would say that the danger is more of intimidation: with Ashcroft’s draconian laws in effect, one wonders where the sword will fall. An interesting aspect to the new legislation is that anyone attacking property or threatening US business interests is in the same catagory as airplane hi-jackers. The ongoing or even concluded process in which the media-output is being mainstreamed as far as the war in afghanistan and it´s propagandistic counterpart in the usa is concerned is quite terrifying. What has to be done in order to deconstruct the hegemonic, and if you want to go that far, imperialistic discourse dominated by the us-government from your point of view? Which role should the independent media play in the anti-war movement? It is very important that the independent media make cogent criticism of the corporate media. Just as the WTO struggle is a global one, the stuggle against corporate media needs to be made global: we need to have a global initiative to preserve the airwaves and bandwidth for free speech and creative expression. In 2003 thre will be a global media meeting in Geneva at the International Telecommunications Union. This should be the „Seattle“ of media: we need a convergence and a demonstration of the need to nurture local media initiatives and to save satellite slots for grass roots communitcation. The question is how can the grassroots use of information technology be cultivated in the "vast wasteland" of global commercial (and military) hegemony of technological resources? Perhaps it is time to look at the ITU and to reinsert the public into their agenda. The ITU was organized before the United Nations, as a global agency to assign radio frequencies to prevent interference between nations. It has the task of designating both global spectrum and satellite paths. Both of these resources are essential infrastructure for any communication project. At the current time, most of this supposedly global resource has been assigned to commercial entities and military users. With the collapse of the Eastern Block, the demise of the Non-Aligned Movement and the privatization of national telecommunications agencies, there is no organized resistance to the commercialization of the world telecommunications infrastructure. This is why the Murdochs and the MTVs of the world can have free access to their target "markets: we are in the bull's eye. An example of how communities can successfully "tax" corporations to reconfigure communication infrastructure is the public access movement in the United States. Begun in the early seventies, community groups and visionary city officials were able to extract from cable corporations provisions that ensure public access to cable channels and equipment. Although this movement has been ridiculed in the popular press in the US (a press for the most part owned by cable corporations!) it has flourished in many cities and provides a model for the rest of the world as to how excess communication profits can be directed into "affirmative action" for information equity. The local and regional models of collaboration and participation such as public access and the IMCs can be the foundation to design a global system of information resources that sees humanity not a markets to be exploited, but as participant citizens. Why not a global standard of participatory communication, asserting the public nature of global information resources, such as earth orbits and spectrum? The imc’s show the way. The imc started off as a project that´s tightly linked with the anti-globalisation movement. Edward Said recently visited vienna and in an interview doubted that the antiglobalisation-movement can be transformed into a „new peace movement“. What would you reply? If we can’’t do that we are in big trouble. The United States Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress last month, states that any act that could be deemed dangrous to human life, or forcing government officials to change their policies, can be construed as domestic terrorism. According to Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, it is not a stretch to predict that this will be used against any future anti-globalization protests, or at the very least against the leaders. This law makes what in the past is civil disobedience into domestic terrorism, so that acts on which there were certain sentencing limits, and makes them much more serious. Under this law it means certain acts can be called terrorism and punishable with twenty years in jail. Even thowing a rock in a Starbucks window. If there is glass that breaks and could be construed as endangering human beings, that action can be tried under this act. There is also a part about blocking mass transit. So that demonstrators blocking a main thoroughfare or a train track could be arrested as terrorists. This directly targets Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass. This law takes actions which in the past were not seen as major crimes and makes them punishable as domestic terror. There is finally a growing reaction to the militry tribunal idea. The reality is sinking in and actually the resisitance is from both the left and the right. Let’s see what happens in the next few months. Here in europe nothing is being heard about the american peace movement. Why? Perhaps because European media takes their cues for internal reporting of the us from what is reported on CNN. Of course thre is no recognition from CNN as to the peace movement. In the usa as well as in europe authorities are forcing the implementation of extensive surveillance over it´s citizens. The only solution is to resist. For one thing this stuff is very expensive. As the recession settles in, it is going to get harder for the gov to tax us for all this new equipment. How does the new peace movement adress this issue? On all fronts: vigils, actions, theater, art, and IMC posts! What I am doing is working on a daily news program with journalist Amy Goodman. We are doing two hours a day of news over satellite, community tv, public radio and the internet. www.democracynow.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 48.0 <nettime> Interview with McKenzie Wark geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 29 Nov 2001 22:43:46 +1100 Everyday Life, Third Nature and the Third Class An Email Exchange Between Geert Lovink and McKenzie Wark The New York-based Australian media theorist McKenzie Wark and I have had a number of exchanges over the years, ever since we came across each others work, around 1995 when I read his first book Virtual Geography. Our topics of conversation ranged from 'Englishes' and the role of language on the Net, German and Anglo-Saxon media theories to the changing role of cultural studies. Most of the material we compiled has not been published. The following dialogue took place in January 1999, got updated recently and centers around abstractions such as the masses (I studied 'mass psychology' in the late seventies), the media and the position of intellectuals. GL: You seem to be attempting to redefine our relation to the masses, the everyday day, normalcy, indeed, media. These things are related in such an odd, new way, so complex, so banal at the same time. Words do not fit together anymore. They do not belong to their original, common meaning. They start drifting. Take my favorite punching bag, the concept of 'masses'. They're not gray anymore, they shine, in flowery colors, silver (for the corporates) and green/yellow for the sporty types. Masses celebrate, they no longer bow towards the ground. MW: I don't know that I'm attempting to redefine our relation to the masses, rather it's a questioning of whether there ever were masses for us (whoever 'we' are) to have a relation to. The idea of the mass has a particular history, going back to 19th century concepts of the mob and the crowd, which were supposedly domesticated by 'mass' media. The postmodern narrative about the breakup of the mass seems to me to rest on the fantasy that these prior concepts described something real. What I think makes more sense is to question whether there ever was a mass, other than as a fetish object via which communication professionals, in public relations, advertising, spin doctoring, or mass communication studies, could claim to have an object of expertise that was amenable to analysis and control. The idea of the mass assumed an object on the other end of a technology, via which the expert, who has knowledge of the object, can assist power, which owns the means of communication. Look around, however, and what do we find? WE don't find the masses, if by masses we mean something that is homogenous, but distinct from the media technology that instumentalises it. We find a patchwork of intersections, or more interestingly, non- intersections. Often media and people just share the same space, having nothing to do with each other. Often it seems we are looking at what Guattari calls 'subjective machines', in which it is impossible to unscramble the human and tech elements. There was a moment when English-language cultural studies, in its revolt from the old communication paradigm, reversed the poles, saw the people as active and sovereign users of media, rather than media as a technology via which the powerful caused something to happen to the powerless. 'The people make meaning, but not with the media of their own choosing.' Rather than a tool of domination, media became a tool of resistance. But what if it isn't a tool at all? What if, rather than reversing the relation between media object and human subject, one considers the two together as a productive machine? One way of describing the field in which techno-media and human culture co-evolve and co-produce is 'everyday life'. Everyday life might be a site where the 'second nature' of our built environment is traversed by media vectors -- our 'third nature'. An environment which we come to think of as 'natural' out of the habit of inhabiting it. My first book was called Virtual Geography, a term which might be another way of describing this zone of potential events and relations within which the subject experiences its distinctness out of its struggle to cohere amid the lines of force that produce it. Both 'us' and 'them' (whoever we are, whoever they are) are all always situated in this same virtual geography. There's no outside. So in terms of method, we proceed empirically, inductively, within this material immersion. There is nothing outside the vector. There's no way to separate us from them. No 'intellectuals' versus 'masses', other than as a fantasy. A fantasy in which intellectuals receive their identity out of their resentful hostility to the masses, who appear as a homogenised 'other'. But this is just a pathology of subjectivity. A fetishising of the self. The masses, it turns out, are not homogenous, but come in all colors and flavors. So while I agree that 'masses celebrate', it may be not that 'they no longer bow towards the ground'. Maybe they never did. The perception of this change may be derived from the mismatch between a previous theory and a current reality, rather than between a previous reality and a current reality. Maybe the theory didn't apply then either, let alone now. Because one thing that has changed is that 'we' (whoever we are) see and hear what these people who are (not) masses see and hear. It's no longer the case that the media are stratified into different environments -- one for us, one for them. The vectoral property of the media means it traverses every fence, every wall, every skin. Second nature is everywhere doubled by a 'third nature'. It crosses all boundaries and borders, including those of self and community, of self and other. But that's just a theory. It has to be tackled from the other end, from observation, and from conversation. It's about geography -- working out the virtual geography of the overlay of second nature (the built environment) with third nature (the media environment). Knowing the lay of the land that the masses do not inhabit, because there are no masses, but in which rather the everyday exists, as a virtual world of potential interactions. By identifying the contours of the everyday, a space is defined within which it is possible to experiment with new kinds of liberty. GL: The masses never existed, one theory says. They have always been phantoms, or rather Projektionsflaechen, objects of common fears and desires. But this also means that they never have disappeared, or can be re-invented. The same can be said of everyday life. I am not much of a supporter of this idea. Of course, all concepts lack reality, and can easily be taken apart into numerous smaller parts, which again fail the reality test. MW: Perhaps, but I think Marx was right to counsel us to look always for the line of abstraction that is at work in the world itself. Abstractions are not just concepts in people's heads. Abstraction is a force at work in the world. Modernity is the will to abstraction made concrete. Marx identified commodification as one abstraction, made possible by the general, quantitative equivalent, money, by its accumulation, as capital, by the relations of private property that underpin it. But I think there is another abstraction, what I would call vectoralisation. Relations of production can become more complex, spatially disagregated, because of communication vectors. What holds it all together is not just a quantitative equivalent, the circulation of money, but a qualitative equivalent, the circulation of information. And information, no less that land, labour and capital goods, has become a form of property. I think those are abstractions that are not just concepts, but are at work in the world. Our understanding of them is always imperfect, but one explains more phenomena with fewer concepts if you follow the lines of abstraction that produce the experience of modernity itself in everyday life. GL: Marxists rather say: classes, not masses. I have not heard that for a while either. Masses must have become unpopular somewhere in the 1970s. Classes have actually disappeared not much later, in the mid-eighties. It was a courageous act from Kroker/Weinstein to come up with the term 'the virtual class' (in their book Datatrash, 1994). Of course there were some Marxists still using the term, even refining the terminology (within their system of scientific socialism). I can also think of such diverse Germans like Robert Kurz, Joachim Hirsch, Elmar Altvater, the Frenchman Etienne Ballibar and of course the Italians around Antoni Negri. Still, they have not come up with a dynamic, actual image that would fit into the academic-artistic circles of the nineties (an exception could be the concept of 'immaterial labour'). MW: Marxists always say that the concept of class will make a comeback -- and for once I agree. In much of the 'overdeveloped' world, the labour movement cut a deal with capital within a protected national market. While the envelope of the nation appeared relatively secure, people worried instead about the envelopes of communal or self identity. But media vectors have gone beyond troubling the boundaries of self and community, and now trouble national boundaries just as much. The proliferation of ever faster, cheaper, more flexible media vectors with a more and more global reach makes possible the colonisation of more extensive spaces by commodity relations. The national space, and the national compromise between labour and capital has come undone. This shifts the anxiety toward one of two options. Either towards a resurgent nationalism, or towards a resurgent class awareness. Either one tries to fend off one's anxiety about the permeable borders of the nation, community, and self by hardening the national boundary against the other. Or one follows the vectoral line that traverses self, community and nation and discovers the class interest that potenitally forms along it. One either demands more boundary, or one starts to question who owns and controls the vectors that both traverse and incite the boundary. This is the problem that bedevils the 'anti-globalisation' movement which, even on the left, falls into anxiety about borders rather than seeking a new deal for the vectoralisation of space, one that abandons the dialectic of self and other and takes up instead one based on embracing the vector but seeking a global, vectoral world with plural forms of ownership, not just private ownership, in which justice and wellbeing has a place alongside profit and 'productivity'. But we need a new concept of class to grasp vectoralisation. Marxists still think only of the force of production, steel and concrete, as being material. The forces of communication -- media vectors -- are also material. And like the forces of production, they and their products can be turned into property -- intellectual property. If capitalism starts with the enclosure of land, continues with the accumulation of capital goods as private property, its next phase grows out of intellectual property. I would explain it in the following fable: First comes the first, who work together to wrest a space of free action and the possibility of free time from the earth. This class builds a second nature out of raw earth. Second comes the second, who quantify and profit by the labours of the first. This class organises the tyranny of second nature over the earth, and over the first, who make second nature. Third comes the third, who qualify and interpret the actions of the others, creating a terrain of referents for every action, a third nature that exactly covers second nature, which rationalises, justifies, questions, idealises, condemns, interprets its instrumental relationship with the earth. This is the class to which we belong, but we are drawn again and again to identify with the others: with the nobility of the first class and its labours; with the power of the second and its Property. And why not? The third class creates the image of the others' loves for themselves, and even of their relations with each other. (It is for this that they keep us). We are always a class for others, we intellectuals, (or 'symbolic analysts' as Robert Reich calls us), for we make every myth of a group's roots and origins -- even this one. We were never yet a class in itself, and certainly not for itself. We are the class that exists, not by taking the earth as its object, and not by taking another class as its object, but by the making subjective of all that the other classes have made and apportioned as object. Time to get over our crush on the noble worker, or of the bold entrepreneur -- for that is simply to love in the place of the other the image we put there for the other, whether they want it or not. We must become the very rifts that traverse us, for we are nothing but the conscious and creative form of relation-to-the-other itself. And there is nothing 'immaterial' about my labour, thank you very much. It's a hell of a lot easier than a factory job, but it's still work. Work that never ends -- there's no knock off time for the third class. It's all work, work, work. Was it Verlaine who, when sleeping, put a sign on his door that said 'poet at work'? And here's the kicker: like any other worker, we have to sell the information we transform to the owners of the means of communication -- to publishers, universities, networks, dot.coms. Class is all about property, not status, as Marx shows. The third class is all about intellectual property. Which is why struggles around copyright on the internet need to be put in a class perspective. It's the enclosure of the commons all over again. And one strikes this enclosure in everyday life: the court cases against Napster, the contracts that force us to assign 'electronic rights' to publishers, the worthless stock options of sacked dot.bomb employees along silicon alley. GL: What is the social within the wider framework of new media? Are we allowed to use, and introduce, such terms as 'cyber masses'? How about Richard Barbrook's emphasis on the guild system, when he speaks about the rise of the 'digital artisans'. The only term which is wide spread seems to be the 'community'. The term has by now been misused in such a way that we can hardly use it any longer, even pronounce. In some cases, it might even be useful to use it: chat rooms, avatar worlds, mailing lists. But then I doubt whether 10,000 plus users can be a community. I wonder what social term then could there be for us, within the framework of a political critique, useful and lively concepts, that somehow actually exist. They can even be potential constructs, that expire after a while, like 'everyday life'. As Guy Debord says, 'But theories are made only to die in the war of time.' One theory that won't lay down and die, the vampire of the left, is its crazy notion of opposing the market with something else. Stalinist bureaucracy, the gift economy, anything. But these alternatives all come with their own terrors. I'm not arguing that there is no alternative to the market. There are lots. They are ways of escaping from capital, rather than opposing it, however. It's a question of a diversity of kinds of diversity. The market is good at diversity -- there's no subcultural kink it can't assimilate to its axioms, as Deleuze and Guattari say. The market chews through radical fashions like any other junk food -- it's a myth to think of opposition to capitalism as outside of capitalism. On the contrary, the oppositional movements merely confirm capital through their resentment of it. The irony is that it is capital that succeeds in subverting the market, not its radical opposition, which end up being commodified. Through concentration and monopolisation, capital attempts to escape the competitive pressure of the market. Whatever its limits, the market does allocate resources better than monopolies, be they corporate or state bureaucracies. Manuel Delanda is quite right about this. There are limits to what markets can do, however. This is the real, ongoing political struggle -- to affirm the inadequacy of the market, to affirm the plurality of ways of allocating resources, of existing collectively or autonomously in the world. Not all differences can be reduced to a price. As Lyotard says, justice does not have a common measure. As a card carrying social democrat, I believe in a diversity of kinds of diversity -- a 'mixed economy'. Not the fantasy of doing away with the market. To replace it with what? Open source software is a good example. For the source code to be free -- that's a good example of the commons at work. But an open source operating system like Linux still needs the market. Programmers make high level tools for each other based on the source code, and exchange them in a gift economy, earning kudos and building a resume with which to get a well paying job. Meanwhile, if you want to actually use Linux, you're better off with one of the cheap but still commercial versions. Programmers have to be paid to do the dull stuff like build an installer or some tools for the mere hapless 'user'. So at its best, open source a hybrid -- gift economy plus commodity economy -- that's what a bazaar is. It's better than that catherdral to monopoly greed, Microsoft, which uses the privatisation of the source code of the operating system as leverage for a monopoly. Like all monopolies, it works by roping off territory. In this case, the territory of the desktop, although most monopolies rope of national territories, like the monopoly phone or broadcast corporations. The paradox of globalisation is that corporations suffer from it to the extent that it exposes them to the market, breaking open their neat little national monopolies. So you see them all scramble to make deals to recreate their monopoly power. We've seen a great wave of this in communication industries in the 90s. Ironically, the progressive policy is sometimes to insist that capital work within the market, rather than subvert it. That, and setting limits to market based resource allocation in the name of justice, equity, liberty -- other kinds of good besides 'efficiency'. Some business interests resist globalisation -- and oh how they talk about 'community' when it suits them! They're all for th national community or the regional or local community when they don't want to face competition, and of course the workers stuck with some half-assed deal with these local monopolists can easily be persuaded that it is in their interests to put the rights of the local community over the rights of workers elsewhere to get jobs, make a living. They stick to the old boundary, rather than creating their own vector. And the 'new conservatives' on the left join the racist, nationalist right in cheering them on. Ralph Nader joins hands with Pat Buchanan in opposing 'globalisation'. If Marx teaches us anything, it is that there is a little bit of us, our labour, in every commodity, and there is a little bit of every commodity that goes into our own make up. The myth of community is one that severs these connections. It just groups the people on the fetish of their apparent sameness -- ethnicity, locality. It does not deal with the real, abstract force of sameness in the world -- the rendering of diverse things equivalent in the commodity form. the rendering of diverse spaces traversible by the communication vector. Everyday life could be a way to retrieve an awareness of this abstract force -- which is what Henri Lefebvre was trying to do when he coined it. Its also a way of perceiving what connects the third class with the first -- those who work with their heads and hands -- where ever they are in the world. It's a way out of the trap of 'working class community' as opposed to the 'intellectual community'. Both sell their labour. Both work in a commodity economy. Both have an interest in the commons -- in the capacity to escape from the market into other economies. GL: I started to reconstruct the original fascination and (re)discovery of the everyday life in the seventies. There must be an old anarchist/dadaist saying: 'The enemy is the Public.' It was on a poster from the Berlin Tiamat publishing house which I had in my room. Similarly, one could state for the sixties: 'The enemy is Normalcy.' The hated of the boring, petty bourgeois lifestyle of parents, and society in general must have been unbearable in those days. Perhaps it still is. In this view, normalcy is a void, a black hole, desert of some kind. Now how can this despicable realm ever have turned into some mystique? What is the secret of the everyday life? And are we really sure that we want to reveal its mystery? And does it have one in the first place? Studying the everyday life we will find out how power functions, right? We can thereby understand why resistance and alternatives do not have a real chance. But why not stick to the outside-alien-outlaw position? I don't think there's any mystery about how we got from the outlaw position of the 60s to the celebration of everyday life. The outlaws got tenure. The outlaws got elected. Danny 'The Red' Cohn-Bendit in the European Parliament! The German Greens are in the federal government. This just shows how the outlaw margin is within, rather than opposed the everyday. It is a differentiation within, not a dialectical other outside of it. The interesting outlaws reveal I think what kinds of tactics already exist as a potential with everyday life. Radicalism in art and politics is about the virtuality of the everyday. It is an experimental, empirical way of discovering possibilities. Who knows what the everyday can become? Nobody knows, until the art outlaws, the style avant garde, the sex freaks, the theory wranglers and vector hackers invent new possibilities. I'm fond of outlaws. I lived through punk. I grew up on the myth of the Surrealists, the Situationists, Fluxus, Warhol's 'silver factory'. I wrote a tribute to the Sydney Libertarian 'push' of my hometown in my book The Virtual Republic. But I'm trying to shake off a bit of old fashioned bourgeois culture in myself, in my belief that the Big Name Authors in these movements are the sole creators of their own radical otherness as if it were their own private property. I think the everyday culture they work against yet within deserves a bit for credit for creating them. Which is why, in my book Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, I cojoin everyday life, popular culture, and social democracy. All the 'common' things, the plurality within which the extraordinary emerge. The idea of the mass is convenient in that it presupposes an oppositional minority. And it sees these as opposed 'communities'. But the everyday is all about difference, diversity, multiplicity. Ironically, I think that's the 'radical' position now. Not making a fetish of your semiotic difference, but rather intuiting the vectoral relations that produce the possibility of identity in the first place. If you grasp the relations of production that give rise to identity, both the production relations and the communication relations, then you can see a whole universe of possibilities for envelopes within which to live, rather than just fixed identities. You see, rather than this self, this community, this relation -- the 'virtual republic' of multiple differences that could be in negotiation and relation. That would be my 'postmodern' social democracy. GL: The 68-post-leftist-green-social-democratic-realo-pragmatists, now in power in Europe cannot deal anymore with today's outlaws. What they formerly took to be subjects for them are now mere objects of 'policies'. Warhol became high art, expelled to museums and private collections. Or don't you think in those terms of 'fatal' decay? MW: Oh yes, what the band Devo called 'de-evolution', the accommodation of the marginal within the axioms of capital, or the capture of difference as something to be administered by the state. But why should this surprise us? It's only a certain romanticism that leads us to think one can escape the banality of the everyday flux of market and state, society and culture. The paradox of the most 'radical', the most revolutionary movements in art and politics is that it is precisely those which become pure signs, pure spectacle, pure commodities. The Situationists are nothing but intellectual property now -- for books and art shows, for building academic or curatorial careers. The digital underground is already entering this process. What is less 'soluble' in the waters of the marketplace, ironically enough, is social democracy. It is a tradition that still functions in terms of organisation, which still can get its hands on the state, can still open little spaces for culture. Meanwhile Che Guavara's picture is used to sell products. Gramsci is a publishing industry. Punk is a back catalogue. Revolutionary romanticism is just the R&D of commodified desire. But while it is the role, I still believe, of radical art, theory, politics to be exceptional, to escape the common order, everyday culture and politics are really something else. It's their business to be mundane. But there's work that has to be done there. One has to work within everyday life for a culture that doesn't polarise into an us and a them. Which doesn't stigmatise or attack the other. Which doesn't forcible homogenise those who imagine they dwell within its envelope. One has to work for a majority who believe in a politics that respects liberty but uses state resources to create a commons, that makes possible a diversity of forms of economy, that is committed to the step by step overcoming of human misery. Its a question of accepting the modesty of one's role as an intellectual, within the space of the everyday, not in totalising -- and totalitarian -- otherness to it. It's a question of overcoming the theology of negation -- the priestlike power of moralistic refusal. One becomes, yes, an artisan. Selling one's labour to owners of the means of communication, but also working in a gift economy, in forms of solidarity and exchange that are not commodified. Creating tools, vectors, concepts, narratives, images that affirm the power of mulitplicities and the multiplicity of power. Ken's new site: http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/wark/ Geert's new archive: www.laudanum.net/geert # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 49.0 <nettime> Interview with Lev Manovich Daniel Palmer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 18 Oct 2001 10:40:00 +1000 [The following interview was originally published in the Australian arts newspaper, Real Time, Issue 44, August-September, 2001, p25 http://www.realtimearts.net/rt44/lev.html ] Lev Manovich: how to speak new media Interviewed by Daniel Palmer Lev Manovich suggests that if it had one, the subtitle of The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) would be: "everything you always wanted to know about new media (but were afraid to ask Dziga Vertov)." Indeed, cinema is especially privileged in his ambitious examination of the continuities of new media with 'old media.' Currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, Manovich was born in Moscow and holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture. Working with computer media for almost 20 years as an artist, designer, animator, computer programmer and teacher, his work has been published in more than 20 countries, and he frequently lectures on new media around the world. While working on a new book, Info-Aesthetics, his current artistic projects include Software for the 20th Century, a set of 3 'imaginary' software applications, and Macro-Cinema, a set of digital films to be exhibited as an installation at Cinema Future at ZKM next year. Manovich will be in Australia at the end of November to speak at conferences in Sydney and Melbourne. DP: Why the language of 'new media'-which would seem to be a historically variable term-and not, for instance, 'digital culture' (given that you suggest that your method might be called 'digital materialism')? LM: I decided to use 'new media' because this term is a standard one used both in the field and in popular media. At the same time, the term is open enough, a kind of a placeholder, and I like this open character. Historically, I think it appeared around 1990. Its emergence marked the shift from understanding the computer as a tool in the 1980s to a new understanding that the computer also came to function as a new medium (or, more precisely, a number of mediums: virtual space, network, screen-based multimedia, etc). DP: Your book starts with scenes from Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, ends with a chapter called 'What is Cinema?', and a spool of film appears on the cover. Why is cinema so central to your understanding of new media? LM: There are a few answers to this question. Cinema has been the most important cultural form of the 20th century, so it natural that new media both inherits many conventions from cinema (similar to how cinema itself inherited conventions from previous 19th century forms, in particular the novel) and also contains a promise of replacing cinema as the key form of the 21st century. Methodologically, I find the theory of cinema is more relevant to new media than, say, literary theory, because, cinema is a cultural form also heavily based on technology; and the evolution of film language is closely linked to the technological developments and changes in cinema's industrial mode of production. Finally, I was originally attracted to new media in the early 1980s (then called 'computer graphics' and 'computer animation') because I saw in it the promise of being able to create films without big budgets, lots of heavy equipment and big crews-something which tools like DV cameras and Final Cut Pro running on a Powerbook has finally made possible, although it took about 20 years! DP: Why a formal analysis of new media? LM: Artists, designers, as well as museums and critics, need terms to talk about new media work. We can talk about a painting using such terms as 'composition', 'flatness', 'colour scheme' and we can talk about a film using such terms as 'plot', 'cinematography', and 'editing.' With new media, the existing discourse focuses on 2 extremes: either purely industrial terms such as 'Flash animation' or 'JPEG image' (which all describe software used and don't tell you much about the work's poetics and the user's experience of it), or rather abstract theoretical terms created during the previous historical period (between 1968 and 1989, ie between the student revolutions of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet Communism) such as 'rhizome' and 'simulation.' I would like to help develop a vocabulary that will fill in the gap between these 2 extremes. The focus of my work is on trying to come up with new terms, which can be used to talk about the works-both their formal construction and also the interaction between the work and the user. So, to be more precise, my analysis is not strictly formal as it is also concerned with what literary theory has called 'reader response', the user's experience of new media. DP: One of the distinctions you make in the book is between the database and narrative as competing symbolic forms. What is the significance of this contemporary shift to the database? LM: The shift to the database can be understood as part of the larger shift from a traditional 'information-poor' society to our own 'information-rich' society. Narrative made sense for cultures based on tradition and a small amount of information circulating in a culture-it was a way to make sense of this information and tie it together (for instance, Greek mythology). Databases can be thought of as a new cultural form in a society where a subject deals with huge amounts of information, which constantly keep changing. It may be impossible to tie it all together in a set of narratives, but you can put it in a database and use a search engine to find what you are looking for, to find information which you are not aware of but which matches your interests and finally to even discover new categories. In short, a narrative is replaced by a directory or index. DP: In your archaeology of the screen, a central opposition that you arrive at is that the contemporary (realtime) screen alternates between the dimensions of 'representation' and 'control.' LM: I think that the opposition 'representation-control' provides a practical challenge to artists and designers of new media. There are 2 dimensions, which can be distinguished here: spatial and temporal. Spatial: how do you combine controls with a fictional image flow? For instance, how do you integrate menus and hot spots in an interactive film screen? (This is often done by not having any menus on the screen but by allowing the user to control the program through the keyboard.) Temporal: how do you combine immersive segments and control segments? Typically the way this is done so far in computer games and other interactive narratives (for instance, in a very interesting Blade Runner game from a few years ago) is that an immersive section is followed by an interactive section, to be followed by another interactive section. More successful are the games where the 2 modes co-exist, such as first-person action games like Mario and Tomb Raider. You are the character and you continuously control it through a mouse or a joystick. There is another way to think about this opposition since we are talking about computer games. Traditional 'non-interactive' narratives (books, movies) are more concerned with representation and narrative immersion, what can be called 'narrative flow.' In contrast, all real-time games, from tennis to Unreal require the user to exercise continuous control. So the challenge and promise of combining a traditional narrative form such as a movie with a game is how to combine the 2 logics of narrative flow and realtime control into a new aesthetics. DP: At one point you suggest that the computer is the ultimate and omnipresent Other of our age, and you say that the space of new media becomes "a mirror of the user's subjectivity", but for the most part you do not theorise the subjectivities enabled by new media. LM: In The Language of New Media I am more concerned with formal analysis of new media works and their historical formation than with users' subjectivities. I am hoping to deal with the latter topic in more length in my next book, where I want to think through the common types of behaviour/subjectivity in our culture-information access (for instance, web surfing), information processing, realtime telecommunication (talking on a cell phone, chatting online) and so on. DP: Can you elaborate on the link you make between the post-industrial mode of production and 'variable media'? LM: Post-industrial modes of production use computer-based design, manufacturing and distribution to enable massive customisation. This involves constant updates of product lines; large sets of models/variation for a single line of products (think of hundreds of different sneaker design as can be seen in Niketown and similar stores), and the idea that a given product can be customised for an individual customer. Manufacturing involves materials, ie 'hardware'; since new media is all 'software', in new media computers enable more radical and more thorough customisation than in manufacturing. For instance, the user of an interactive site can select her own trajectory through it, thus in effect automatically 'customising' a work for herself. Or, when you visit a commercial website, its engine can automatically pull the information about your previous visits and your location to put up a customizsed version of the site for you, including which language version you get, the ads displayed, etc. DP: Are there any current directions in art or popular culture of particular interest to you? LM: I am interested in all directions in popular culture and their interactions: dance culture, music, fashion, internet culture, computer games, graphic and industrial design. I am trying to educate myself about electronic music because I am convinced that the logic of digital media historically has always manifested itself in music before visual culture. In part this is because visual culture, in particular popular visual culture, is often representational, ie, photographs, illustrations, movies, all represent visual reality which puts limits on how images may look like. So it is in music that many key new ideas of digital media revealed themselves first: algorithmic composition, sampling and mixing as a new form of creativity, and online distribution of culture (MP3s on the internet). As far as new media art is concerned, I am very impressed by Lisa Jevbratt's software which currently forms the basis of the online exhibition Mapping the Web Infome (http://www.newlangtonarts.org/netart/infome). Lisa invited a number of people (including me) to use her software to create their own Net Crawlers and to visualised the data they collect. In her words, "Just as the Human Genome Project strives to map the mysteries of the body's DNA, Mapping the Web Infome develops ways of representing the master plan behind the codes that created the Web. The newly commissioned net art project deploys software robots as cartographers of the continually changing internet and the resulting images chart the hidden relationships that lie beneath the screen's surface." DP: Is net art dead? LM: If we understand net art as an artistic and cultural practice which focused on a modernist analysis of an early period of the web (1994-1998), it is dead. As an institutional label for new media art as a whole, it is very much alive and gaining more and more recognition. What I don't like is that museums, art galleries, media and other cultural institution often use the term 'net art' as a stand in for 'new media art' (or 'digital arts') as a whole. As a result, the attention goes to net projects while many other distinct digital practices such as interactive computer installation, electronic music, interactive cinema, and hypermedia are ignored. In short, a particular practice is used as a stand in for the field as a whole. It happens in part not only because net art is the cheapest practice for museums to exhibit but also because we still do not have any real alternative to an aesthetic theory based around the idea of mediums. So now along with painting, sculpture, art on paper, film, and video we now have 'net art', ie art which uses the medium of a network. Lev Manovich http://www.manovich.net will be speaking at College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, November 23, contact Ivan Dougherty Gallery, tel 02 9385 0726; and (dis)LOCATIONs conference, Cinemedia's Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, November 30 & December 1. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 50.0 <nettime> Interview with Kevin Murray geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 4 Jul 2001 21:31:14 +1000 Interview with Kevin Murray By Geert Lovink Kevin Murray, writer and curator in Melbourne, Australia, is a refined and knowledgeable person. I hesitate to say exotic because it is such an outdated term. Let's say he is singular. A sophisticated intellectual with a preference for the alien point of view. The variety of his interests are no doubt unique. He is an Albania expert, if I may say so, and familiar with East European cultures. He works as a part-time artistic director at Craft Victoria, a regional crafts organization, rather unusual for a new media curator. Kevin has a significant online presence, currently as the online editor of Art Monthly. On top of that he has also been on boards, organized conferences, has an impressive list of publications, and is very much involved in Melbourne's cultural life. Always in a critical manner, as the following e-mail interview shows. GL: Coming from a visit to New Zealand you are in South Africa at the moment. What are your activities there? KM: I am mostly trying to find out how black and white interests engage with each other in the 'new south'. The New Zealand case seems paradigmatic of the reciprocal relationship that might exist between two races in the post-reconciliation era that beckons. Thanks partly to historical circumstance and the Maori spirit of friendship, it is possible for the European descendents in New Zealand to call themselves indigenous in a way that is less fraught than in other ex-British colonies of the south. This identity has a nominal and concrete expression. On an official level, the Maori word 'Pakeha' is used to denote those of European stock who inhabit the land. Culturally, the 'Stone, bone and shell' school of New Zealand jewelry has carved (literally) a distinctive tradition out of European metal smithing, Maori motifs and indigenous materials, such as pounamu (South Island jade). How does this compare to the paths traveled by Balanda (non-indigenous Australians) and Umlungu (non-black South Africans)? Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have well established sporting links, mainly through rugby and cricket. I am interested to explore the kinds of cultural links that might accompany these exchanges (www.craftvic.asn.au/south). It is possible to claim that the end of apartheid has led to a reduction of cultural ties with South Africa. We knew how to support the struggle of a repressed people, but we don't really have a grasp on how to relate to the 'new South Africa', other than fear and trepidation. Australia is home to a large expatriate South African and New Zealand population. Rather than becoming a Club Med nation for white businessmen, we need to keep open links to their origins. All this is given urgency by the slide of southern currencies. The financial failure of the Melbourne Biennial is testament to the increasing costs in staging events within a northern framework. I've heard talk since in South Africa of south-south connections, such as trade links with Brazil. It would be good to try a few of these in the cultural circuit, rather than presuming a radial framework where everything must go through the centers. GL: You have a special relationship to Melbourne trams. KM: Trams rescue Melbourne from being just another large Western city. Their practical utility as public transport is sublime. But privatization has made Melbourne's tram system as a site of struggle, with an enduring alliance of ex-conductors agitating against the evils of a world operating on remote control. Trams provide the props to fantasize that a city like Melbourne actually has a soul. One of the wonders of the new South Africa is the emergence of the mini-bus network that covers the nation with frequent service, cheap fares and daredevil feats of driving. In Cape Town, mini-buses with names like 'Poor Man's Friend' and 'Who Let the Dogs Out' provide instant contact with people and friendly advice. The jockeys who hang out the door collecting fares and shouting destinations seem a reincarnation of Melbourne's lost tram conductors. GL: One of your projects dealt with the question of coincidence in history. What would have happened if Australia would have become a Portuguese colony? Or Dutch? What fascinates you in playing with alternative scenarios? KM: The 'what if' histories help place reality in a meaningful context. The Portuguese colonization of Australia is a particularly apposite speculation given the situation in East Timor. Since the First Fleet, the relaxed morals of the Portuguese colony in Rio have provided a contrast to the god-fearing path of British colonists. Now in East Timor, the new Australian colonists come up against the Portuguese. The Portuguese supported the struggle for independence on the world stage and have a natural sympathy with the people. However, they left virtually no infrastructure in the country despite centuries of colonization. What if Australia was Portuguese? It may have been a mess, but it would have been an exciting one. I've been interested in the power of fictions for a long time. My PhD was titled 'Life as Fiction' and the project How Say You (www.kitezh.com/howsayyou) explored the creative potential of pseudonyms. The logic is that our experience of reality is always framed by an understanding of how it might have been otherwise and how it could be different. Changing the horizon of possibilities is one way of altering our reality. Plant a utopia and see what fruit is bears. GL: You have recently done a show about digital weaving. It was focussed on possible similarities between craftsmanship working with textile and the "weaving" of websites. The analogy between writing code, linking documents and the computer as a loom is a whole history in itself. What is your strategy here? Is it your purpose to unveil broader cultural patterns, thereby tempering the expectations of the New which still surrounds the computer? KM: While outmoded technologically and conceptually, the crafts have an active role to play in contemporary arguments. It is not just a matter of advancing crafts into the digital age, but of keeping our feet on the ground as the kite flies higher and higher. Crafts offer an uncanny 'shock of the old' to counter the saturation 'schlock of the new'. Similarly, tribal systems such as Albania's challenge the increasingly abstract cultures of the west. Now to weaving, I'm not so much interested in the similarities between making tapestries and building the Internet. Weaving is 'women's business '-immediate, tactile, communal and expressive. The Internet is 'men's business'-diffuse, abstract, individual and utilitarian. The weaving metaphor is a bridge that enables travel between the two worlds. The results are live discussions where men and women explain each other's practice. In Adelaide (www.craftvic.asn.au/loom), we included a string theorist into the conversation, which is even more abstract than the Internet. What emerges is not a common understanding, but a live encounter-maybe a dialectic, but without the synthesis (further, you could say male and female is the warp and weft, crossing but never joining, but that shows how entangling the weaving metaphor can become). GL: New media arts in Australia has turned out to become a very specific, not to say narrow discourse. You also work in other arts fields and curate shows in the "contemporary arts" sector. Could you give us an ethnographic view on how this particular set of ideas and arts practice has come into being? Where does, for example, the fascination with hardcore science and biotech in particular come from? KM: Where I live, the public face of new media was constructed at the end of the 20th century by a specific state government agenda to catch the next wave of economic growth (Alan Stockdale was both state treasurer and inaugural minister for multimedia). While previous state governments sponsored arts that counterbalanced the mainstream, the Jeff Kennett agenda was to support whatever could be labeled as 'contemporary'. Celebration of the techno-simulacrum became government policy. This peaked with the election campaign based on jeff.com.au site, which included a GrandPrix shockwave for potential young male voters to take a spin (it still exists as www.jeff.com.au, but has been made-over to the new crew). What I've tried to do over the years is bring new media into the same critical discussions that include other visual arts. In Binary Code (www.kitezh.com/bc) we tried to get art critics and new media persons talking to each other. The result was mutual indifference. In two CD-ROM shows, Bug (www.kitezh.com/bug) and Chip (www.kitezh.com/chip) we tried to find a non-technological thematic-insects and psychoanalysis-for the small screen. The fear is that new media succeeds as a form of technological evolution, but fails as a medium for expressing anything of the world outside itself. These shows heralded works that succeed in conveying something beyond the medium, but I'm still worried. More broadly, I'm interested in shifting the art-craft debate into the newly wired contemporary gallery. Video and photography have displaced painting from the contemporary art space. Painting now shares more in common with ceramics and weaving than it does with screen art. Whereas before, the critical difference was between 2D and 3D, today it seems whether the work is inside or outside the screen. Getting the screen to relate to the outside world can be an inspiring challenge. One of the thrills of the Museum of Sydney design was the way it combined ethereal Pepper's ghost effects of video floating on glass with the hard-core physical substance of chains and milestones. Rather than an escape from the wet world, digitization seems a useful detour on the road back to the world of flesh. As photography migrates to the screen, the darkroom finds a new meaning (www.craftvic.asn.au/darkroom). As the world becomes more densely wired, the realm of offline becomes more significant (www.kitezh.com/offline). GL: You are working part-time at Craft Victoria Gallery where you did a show called "Instrumental". The centre mainly focuses on such things as glass, wood, building violins, jewelry and textile. How does the computer fit into this world? Could computers been seen as instruments? They are usually portrayed as tools, isn't it? KM: I find the contrast between 'bench' and the 'screen' particularly useful. The bench is a horizontal surface, on which objects can be handled and worked. Put objects on a screen and they fall off! This stupid difference actually bears further thought. The floating world behind the screen provides a perspective for understanding the mysteries of the bench-making a smooth edge, finding the grain of the wood, throwing a pot, turning a tree into a violin. Things fall into place using the gravity of the bench. The ur-text of new media, 'Myst', christened the computer with the sacred status of tool for the mechanical world. Players operated their computers like mechanics, fixing the broken contraptions of a fallen world. But this is largely a fantasy of computing, which connects it with the familiar material world. I disagree when people say about their computer, 'it's just a tool'. It seems a miserable cap on the imagination to reduce the screen to a mere practical device. It's a machine for navigating a path through the ocean of information. It has the promise of evolving new collective forms of understanding that are beyond the scale of the bench. GL: In 2000 you curated the "Loom" show in Adelaide. Its website states: "' The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves' wrote Lady Ada Lovelace describing Charles Babbage's first mathematical calculator. As with many other creative arts, our traditional image of weaving is being challenged by the evolution of ever more complex forms of machinery. The image of a patient weaver at the loom seems to be increasingly rare, even nostalgic." You noticed that much of today's weaving occurs at the computer screen. How do you see the relationship between textile weaving and the digital world wide web? Is there any interaction between these two worlds or is it just an analogy? KM: What's to be gained by reducing a computer to a loom? It grants the virtual world a material lineage; it introduces a gender politics of labour; and it provides an aesthetic license. Maybe more. The loom metaphor can be a very productive, but it has a limit. As an interlacing device, the loom is a comprehensive mechanism where shuttles create a weft that encompasses the horizontal structure of the warp. The Internet is clearly more rhizomic in nature, with branches bifurcating endlessly. From the other end, textile arts are migrating to the screen. There's a Jacquard loom at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles that enables weavers to 'print' a scanned image into tapestry form. It's not quite as simple as that, though. Weavers still need to manually translate screen colors into thread structures. This 'flaw' offers a window for artistic expression. It will be interesting to see how long that stays open. Louise Lemieux Bérubé has some stunning tapestries of dance photography (http://www.lemieuxberube.com)-there's a contrast between the instant of the camera and the measured time of the tapestry. GL: The Loom show focussed on possible similarities between craftsmanship working with textile and the "weaving" of websites. The analogy between writing code, linking documents and the computer as a loom is a whole history in itself. What is your strategy here? Is it your purpose to unveil broader cultural patterns, thereby tempering the expectations of the New which still surrounds the computer? The website says: "As with many other creative arts, our traditional image of weaving is being challenged by the evolution of ever more complex forms of machinery. The image of a patient weaver at the loom seems to be increasingly rare, even nostalgic." You notice that much of today's weaving occurs at the computer screen. How do you see the relationship between textile weaving and the digital world wide web? Is there any interaction between these two world or is it just an analogy? KM: I'm not so much interested in the similarities between weaving tapestries and building the Internet. Weaving is 'women's business' -- it's immediate, tactile, communal and expressive. The Internet is 'men's business' -- it's diffuse, abstract, individual and utilitarian. The weaving metaphor is a bridge that enables travel between the two worlds. The results are live discussions where men and women explain each other's practice. In Adelaide (www.craftvic.asn.au/loom), we included a string theorist into the conversation, which is even more abstract than the Internet. What emerges is not a common understanding, but a juxtaposition -- perhaps maybe a dialectic, but without the synthesis. You could say male and female is the warp and weft, crossing but never joining, but that shows how tangled the weaving metaphor can become. GL: Could you tell us something about your involvement with Albania? It is perhaps not the most obvious topic of interest for a Melbourne art curator. How do you keep informed about the ins and out of the Tirana scene? How would you describe contemporary Albanian cultural politics, ten years after the fall of communism and the opening of the country? KM: The world has become so homogenized now, the best way to experience something foreign is to stay at home. Getting to know Melbourne's Albanians initially led me to enjoy all the exotic features of a foreign culture --haunting music, strange language, difficult food and conversations about the fundamental things in life (http://home.mira.net/~kmurray/world/albmelb.htm). But then, I began to realize how similar they were to Australians -- more Australian than Australians, you could say. They had a trust in higher authority that Australians share -- Albanians seem just a little more expressive about it. There is a very good Albanian artist in Melbourne, Arsim Memishi (www.kitezh.com/soil/exhibit/ttszam.html). Being an artist is quite foreign to their sensibility, so Arsim's projects most of his creativity into building kitchen cabinets in a business with his brother -- making houses in Melbourne's poorer western suburbs. After the end of communism, artists literally came out of their closets (painting has been forbidden without official license). Expressionism burst forth in quite unadulterated forms, like bits of paint rags stuck to canvas. The wholesale dismissal of social realism and folk culture seemed another sad fracture in Albanian culture. In the west, we are getting very little news about Albania. This silence suggests that great advances are being made in that country. News from other sources confirms this and some Melbourne Albanians are returning from Tirana with ecstatic accounts of the motherland. This enthusiasm is tempered by the situation in Macedonia, where most Melbourne Albanians originate. Their inherent fatalism has been renewed as the political situation unravels. GL: Is Albania a mirror for you? How does it relate to the state of Australian multi-culturalism? Ghassam Hage has analyzed it in his book White Nation. He came up with a radical critique, relating the state ideology of multi-culturalism with the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. Human rights organizations are criticizing the harsh conditions in Australia's detention centers, which are hidden in the middle of the deserts, far away from the urban centers. Immigrating to Australia has become next to impossible, in sharp contrast to the common perception overseas. It's only allowed if you belong to the rich and bring in enough resources, like the whites from Zimbabwe and South Africa. And particular bad if you're from Middle East or let's say Kosovo. Is this situation reflected in the arts? KM: Albania is a piece of Europe that has drifted into the orient. Much of its history has been in the thrall of the east: five centuries of Ottoman rule and five decades of Maoist-style totalitarianism. This has been punctuated by brief periods of 'enlightenment'-the Albanian renaissance of the late nineteenth-century and the experiment with democracy in the early 1990s. The dream is that Albanian might transcend the grip of the east and enter the world of freedom in the west. For Australia, the situation is exactly the reverse. For most of its colonial history it has been beholden to the values of the western world, as evident in the White Australia Policy that underpinned its birth as a nation. Of late, its cultural struggle has been to embrace the world of its neighbors, to be part of Asia. Both Albania and Australia seem to be pushing against the grain of their own cultures in order to be part of their immediate world. Albania resists the pull of the east that Australia gropes for. Australia seeks to wrest itself from the west that Albania aspires to. Perhaps they should just do a swap. Despite this symmetry, there is a significant difference in the kind of isolation each country experiences. Albania is isolated from the rest of the world by three mountain ranges: the Pindus, the Dar and the Dinaric. The geographical isolation has bred a culture that seems out of step with the rest of the world-a world of honor, revenge, pantheism and national pride. Isolation is also a plight that Australians have complained of, as in the legendary phrase 'the tyranny of distance'. Of course, this is a chimera. Australia is far from isolated from its immediate neighbors, such as Indonesia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Borneo. The colonial mentality bemoaned the distance from the Western centers. Since the Russian threat in the late nineteenth century, there has been a fear that Australia would be cut off from its mother country and left to fend for itself in the region. Thus the fraught hospitality offered to people seeking shelter on its shores. Asylum seekers are kept in prison-like conditions in the least hospitable parts of the Australian continent. Kosovars were given only tentative hospitality before being shipped back to their shattered homes. If only Australia were as isolated as Albania. While mainstream culture is hooked into the West, Australian artists continue to develop links with Asian cultures. This has become a well-trodden route for artists seeking to incorporate oriental themes into their work. The result has been some quite evocative and deeply personal work. The plight of our 'exotics' imprisoned at home needs to find a voice as well. The media sensationalises their presence, while artists seem best placed to take the human measure of their condition. Kevin Murray's writings plus his CV can be found in his extensive web archive: http://home.mira.net/~kmurray # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 51.0 <nettime> interview with Eugene Thacker Josephine Bosma nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 30 Mar 2001 09:25:58 +0200 "To not be satisfied with just the screenal net art." Eugene Thacker is a writer, theorist and artist. I know his work mostly through his collaboration with the New York based net performance group Fakeshop, but he has also done solo projects and is mostly a writer. Eugene Thacker's work centers around bio tech, science fiction, experimental literature, art and science. He just finished his Ph.D. in cultural and literary studies at Rutgers University. We talked at DEAF '00, The Dutch Electronic Art Festival organized by V2 last november. JB: Can you tell me about your background? Your work with Fakeshop made me wonder if you have a background in art at all? Eugene Thacker: My background is not in art actually. My background is more in critical theory, and literary theory. Basically I come from literature. In college I was really involved in the experimental literature community, zines and so on. When the web came around I got into that and hypertext. Like a lot of people at some point it made sense not to just limit yourself to just text, but to try to work in different media. I have always been interested in approaching things from a theoretical viewpoint, as well as exploring the same issues in, for want of a better term, an artistic domain. Sometimes getting different results, sometimes seeing what you can learn from doing those kind of activities. The intersection with the sciences for me is much more recent. It arises out of a real, deep interest in the body and the relationship of the body to different technologies. At some point I was doing a lot of work with theorists like for instance George Battaille and science fiction writers like Ballard or Blumlein, looking at how they were seeing the body reconfigured by different technologies. How they were seeing different kinds of anatomies, how they were imagining different kind of anatomical formations that were contextualized by desire and so on. At some point I felt like I was dancing around the topic, not really confronting it directly. Part of that was disciplinary. In the US it is not yet widespread to simply jump around in these very different disciplines. So I decided I should really open some anatomical textbooks. What is going on with anatomy research now? Where is it? I felt like for me it was a change to more directly deal with philosophical and political issues of, say, the anatomical body by looking at actual research that was going around, but looking at it through that theoretical lens. So Bataille was always there. I was looking at things like the Visible Human Project - where they sliced up a body and archived it in a database - through that lens and in the process I was trying to understand the science as well. When I was in college I was a biochemistry major, and I worked in a pathobiology lab for a number of years too. This was before graduate school. I was very interested in the science part of it, but also in the ethical part of it. It is easy to look at things in hindsight to make sense. At the time I was really interested in the science fictional aspect of it. You know a lot of science fiction is quite tacky, it really gets into the nuts and bolts of the details. I think that was what was going on earlier on. I quickly found out working in a lab, where you're one of dozens of people working on this tiny minuscule issue, wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to do. Then I switched over to the humanities. So I had this weird cycle going round. I started there and now I am going back to biochemistry and genetics, but through a very different viewpoint. That background has really helped me, so it was not so hard to look at genetics research itself, because I had some of the basics of what scientific knowledge was. To try to answer your question directly: I have always been trying to balance the humanities and the sciences in what I am doing. JB: And the arts as well? ET: Yes, definitely, which to me is much closer to the theoretical work then it is to the sciences. My artistic dealings with these topics have mostly been extrapolations of the theory that I was doing. I haven't yet really explored direct collaborations with different scientists. I think there are other groups that are doing that in an interesting way, but it is not what I am interested in right now, which is mostly writing in different types of discourses that are going on. JB: Did you only do art work together with Fakeshop and how does your artwork relate to your writing? ET: I mostly started working as an artist because of the web actually. Like I said, I was doing writing before. I really came to think of myself as an 'artist' when I was working with the web and I was doing not just text, but html, image, video, sound, exploring all these different things. I have done a lot of different projects dealing with biotech. One was shown at Ars Electronica in 1999, a project about the Visible Human Project, about the notion of digital anatomy. This is a project by the National Library of Medicine in the US, where researchers took the body of a convicted murderer, a convicted criminal, and they proceeded to slice him into a thousand or so pieces, in transverse corrections. Then they encoded each of those slices into digital files and made a database out of it. It was going to be used for medical education, for research, to assist surgeons in virtual surgery and have all these medical applications. Of course it is this incredibly gothic moment, of this corpse that was reanimated in the computer basically. It was a very fascinating field to look at in terms an objectification of the body by the sciences. Anatomy is one of the oldest traditions of that approach to the body. Here is a contemporary instance of anatomical science which is coming from this long tradition in the West, and it is now engaging with computer and Web tech. One of the most intriguing things about this is that this is a body that was archived into a database. This database, as a mode of categorizing the body, seemed really interesting to me. I got a license to use those images in the database and started creating a kind of counter database of images. What you can do very simply is take each of those sections and line them up in animation cells and create an animation. You can create these animations as if you were flying through the body. Using morphing programs and also basic animation you can create completely unrecognizable anatomical animations. These are bodies that 'slipped through the cracks' of anatomical categorizing. The theoretical jumping point was again Bataille's notion of the formless, a term that confronts ambiguity through structure, but 'undoes' it in the process. It is trying to locate this slippage, this moment of unrecognisability. I did that using digital anatomy and virtual surgery, as well as using 3D modeling. It was a piece about databasing the body. JB: Has your writing been connected to your artwork mostly or have you also done independent articles? ET: Yes. Most of it recently has concentrated on biotech. But I have written a lot about new media and also science fiction. Right now I am trying to work on the relationship between science fiction and science. Trying to find more provocative ways of talking about that. I wrote an article in Art Journal that was about new media artists that are engaging with the technosciences. They are trying to find complex ways of bringing up some of the issues that are of controversy in them, such as Biotech Hobbyist, or Critical Art Ensemble, or Mongrel. Each are approaching different issues, using different strategies, different technologies and each group are coming up with different responses. The thread that I used to contextualise that was science fiction in art practice, using that as a critical tool. JB: When you are exploring this issues in the net or in the web, you are exploring them in the anatomy of a body that is also still being developed, which is also being criticized. How do you relate your investigation into these sciences to this highly unstable environment you are presenting a lot of your work in? ET: What you just pointed out is one area for new media art to work in. To work with the instability of the medium, the certain points where it resists an instrumental codification. To intersect that instability with some of the bioscience research, I think there has yet to be an interesting project that deals with bioinformatics, which has to create very articulate databases, which have to be updated, and that can be highly flexible. This is all based on having a stable medium. This is an online genetic body. I think there is a wonderful opportunity for somebody to do a really great new media net art piece and work with those instabilities. What happens when you get scrambled code? What happens when you get noise online with these genetic bodies? What happens when your connection drops? You can imagine all kinds of very unstable instances that are not just oppositional, but they are raising problems that are part of the medium, the technology. JB: Is that the line you would also like to pursue? Which direction would you like your work to go most of all? ET: In terms of the new medium, the artwork, what I am pursuing now is this relationship to science fiction. That is why I am working with Fakeshop. For us a point of departure for a lot of the pieces are science fiction films. They tend to be particular films from the late sixties to the late seventies. What they do is they create these immersive spaces, these spatially oriented bodies or networked situated, modeled, posed bodies that are contextualised in many different ways. What is attractive to me about this is that science fiction on the one hand can form the function of critique. It can take some of the scientific knowledge out there and speculate on that, put it in an imaginative context. To bring up certain social and political issues. That is part of it. The other reason is that science fiction can create these affective spaces. If you have ever seen an installation that is immersive and you walked in, that can be a very powerful experiential moment. When we are doing a specific piece, like Multiple Dwelling which was about the film Coma and biomedicine, we get very interesting responses. That is not exclusive to science fiction of course, but it has the same affective resonance that I identify with writers like JG Ballard, who is very much about creating haunting technological spaces. JB: A technical question about the Fakeshop performances: what is your experience with a possible difference between an online and a real life audience? ET: The response of an audience member's body to the space they are experiencing the piece is of course very different from an online viewer. To generalize, what usually happens is that the people that physically present in an installation space experience that affective immersion, that "what have I walked into" type of feeling. For obvious reasons that is not present when you are an online participant. What the online participants experience is...I don't want to call it telepresence, that has too much baggage, but they experience a certain real-time connectivity. Especially if you can create a participatory structure (where you are not just watching a RealVideo stream) and create a certain participatory network that is very different from the way you are implicated in an installation space. A good example again is the Multiple Dwelling piece. The physical installation has bodies and performers in there. Then we create a virtual space. The connection between them is the body of the performers. In this futuristic hospital those bodies get digitally encoded and mapped in VRML space. That is the Web component. At the same time you have an online networked 'community' being created say through CU-SeeMe and participants can re-transmit back, if they feel like it, their own bodies. These can then be re-assembled in the installation space. On the desktop, on the screen. These participants are also chatting. The chat texts always take on these organic, weird, evolutionary, strange results. It is the networking of the virtual and real spaces and the different experiences that each of those people have that to me is exiting. It is exiting because you are insisting that net art is not just screenal. You are rubbing it up bodily materiality, you are making it confront that. It might fail miserably, or something interesting might happen, but it is really important to do. To not be satisfied with just the screenal net art. JB: What could be a strategy to deal with institutions that very often do not wish to confront the physicality of net art? ET: I have been really frustrated by it, for several reasons. I can only talk about my experiences in the States which is very different then in Europe I think. In the US it is difficult to find institutions, even individuals, willing to take an open ended, risky maybe, but essentially creative view to approaching this kind of art. I am not a curator, but I recognize you have to deal with these issues: how do you buy this art, how do you collect it, how do you exhibit it, how do we fit it into the tradition of art museums that our culture has? People like Steve Dietz are addressing these issues in the U.S., but it is tough to find an arresting way to present this work that can have impact. Yes, I think that creating a kiosk or having dedicated computers is great, but people always say "I can look at this at home". Why go to this reified space and look at the artwork there? I think maybe one area to look at is institutional support of this art. Don't commission net.art pieces, commission net.art projects that are multi-platform, that can exist in different contexts. Why not commission projects where you are going to ask somebody to do a work where one part is going to be an installation? It might mutate and become just online, it could become another component. We should develop some kind of modular way of thinking of how, if an institution is going to fund work, how that is going to be done. Maybe it should be more creatively thought out to accommodate these different contexts that we have. It is about challenging, impelling the artists to work in a multi contextual ways. JB: It is not so much challenging the artists to work in a different way I think, but impelling curators and the audience to look at this work in a different way. To show that the internet is not about a bodiless cyberspace... ET: You're right. I experience this a lot in teaching. I always try to do a section on hypertext, for instance. For the majority of students this is totally new. They go through this experience saying "I had no idea there was stuff out there like this. I go to my MP3 site, or use it for online shopping!" A very important step therefore is re-contextualising the medium. It has become a cliché now that it is dominated still by e-commerce and online shopping. What I was talking about is maybe go a step further then that and challenging net art again to keep working with infotech with the Web, but to also be dissatisfied with that to some extent. To try to explore different, mutated, adaptive ways of making artwork that is flexible to different contexts. I agree with you that I have more confidence in artists to do that then in people that are running institutions that have to deal with their own politics and histories. JB: I don't really agree on this last remark either though. By giving institutions some kind of eye-opener you can show them it actually is more interesting for them too to look at this work in a different way. ET: I think we do agree. Part of the impetus is in changing the modes of thinking. Fundamentally what is the issue is challenging people's modes of thinking about certain technologies, which develop out of certain historical moments. This is a specific instance in that, and that is valuable to have. I don't mean to totally critique screenal-based net.art. I just think it is a challenge for net.artists to take this different perspective. In doing that you are taking into account your audience, which is always in different contexts physically speaking. Where are they going to see it, how do they get their information? Rhizome and other web sites are out there, and they are not hard to find, but how do people get the information about it in the first place? How do they become implicated in networks where they can find out about this stuff? Then how can they have a transformative experience and go back to their computer to look at whole experience differently or think reflectively about it. It is the habituation process: it is a black box, you check your email, it goes wrong, you go crazy or whatever... JB: Going back to the first part of the interview. In the panel you said there was no communication between the sciences and critical, cultural theory. Don't you risk with making art that you are not being taken seriously at all in both these fields when you criticize bio tech? ET: I think there is always a threat of recuperation going on no matter what. What is at issue is the discourse is, who has the authority, the legitimization to speak on a certain subject? I definitely feel the challenges involved in that, because I am not a genetics researcher and formally speaking I don't have that background. It is a real challenge for people in the US in the sciences to think about this issue of who can speak on a topic, who can ask questions about it, and based on that, how will that be received? The experience we were talking about in New York with the Gene Media Forum [an exhibit of artists dealing with genetics presented by Exit Art, and funded by the Gene Media Forum, in the Spring of 2000] was a good illustration of that. I think it is great they had this exhibition of artists dealing with the net, and it is great to have this panel of CEO's from biotech corporations. But I didn't really see a lot of communication going on between those two groups. For instance in that panel nobody from the biotech panel brought up art. Nobody even said that it was important, even as lip service. It was totally absent from the discussion. There was no communication to begin with, so that recuperation could happen. It is happening in a much more silent way. The way it was happening was through the funding of the exhibit and then it's location in the safe space of the gallery. There are a lot of difficult challenges that are going to come up in collaborative instances of art that is critiquing biotech. It might be that it ends up in the same position as certain forms of bioactivism end up: people crying and whining about something. The science community always feels threatened by that because it is very oppositional. So it is a risk to work on this in art, but maybe one way of working is breaking down those boundaries and saying that in some instances you need to take an oppositional stance and confront issues. In other instances it is a lot more complicated then that. The willingness to do that, the risk of maybe compromising certain traditions or positions seems to me worth doing. - Eugene Thacker e: maldoror {AT} eden.rutgers.edu w: http://gsa.rutgers.edu/maldoror/index.html Pgrm. in Comparative Literature, Rutgers Univ. CURRENT: "Strength of Binding between Ultrahigh Molecular Mass Polyethylene-Hydroxylapatite Composites using 3D Spring Lattice Models" {AT} DIAGRAM <http://www.thediagram.com> "Molecules That Matter: Nanomedicine & the Advent of Programmable Matter" {AT} nettime: <http://www.nettime.org>. "Regenerative Medicine: We Can Grow It For You Wholesale" {AT} Machine Times (DEAF_00, V2 book, http://www.v2.nl/deaf) "The Post-Genomic Era Has Already Happened" {AT} Biopolicy Journal <http://bioline.bdt.org.br/py> ŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹ also: FAKESHOP <http://www.fakeshop.com> ŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹŹ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 52.0 <nettime> Interview with Boris Groys geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 4 Oct 2000 11:48:48 +1000 Interview with Boris Groys, German Art Critic and Media Theorist Art critic Boris Groys is teaching philosophy and aesthetics on the School for Design Karlsruhe, Germany. Amongst his books, all in German, are Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988), Die Kunst des Fliehens (together with Ilya Kabakow, 1991), Ueber das Neue (1992), Die Erfindung Russlands (1995) and Die Logik der Sammlung (1997). The following e-mail exchange took place in response to Groys' latest work titled "Under Suspicion - A Phenomenology of the Media" which came out early this year. GL: Strategies for cultural and artistic production, in your view, seem to go in circles. All forms of expression, media and esthetic experiments have been polluted, corrupted, played out. The pressure of globalization, to join the free flow of opinions, styles and meaning is high. There is no other option than to join the info market. In opposition, you have proposed to pose the media ontological question. The overall presence of empty signifiers is flattening all creative or subversive efforts and one of the few strategies left you suggest is to question what is behind the world of the spectacle. Wouldn't it be better to remain silent and disappear altogether? In your analysis, all imaginable answers seem to be caught within the system. There is nothing left which cannot be deconstructed. Not even Boris Groys. If neither elitist avant-gardism nor cultural populism show us a way out, what does? Should your readers give up all hope and surrender to good old European negativism? BG: You are probably right: it is better to remain silent. But, unfortunately, there is such a thing as curiosity. And I am, personally, always very curious about the things happening around. And in the first place: about how and why the cultural phenomena like theories, art movements, certain fashions are emerging, moving, spreading around - and disappearing. The question is not: Are they good or bad? Or: Are they true or false? But, rather: Why are these cultural phenomena present in the social space at a certain point in time? It is being said that cultural products are spreading because "people" like them. Or, they say: The cultural products are reaching mass circulation because there is some power, money and influence behind them. But it is also possible to say that certain cultural products are multiplying and spreading merely because of their viral nature. It is also possible to say that the fate of cultural phenomena is determined by history, by being, by language, by writing and so on. Or, it is possible to develop a sociology of culture as represented, for example, by Bourdieu. But all these theories and explanations are themselves also cultural phenomena. So we still have to ask ourselves: how and why these explanations are spreading in their turn? It seems to me that some cultural phenomena are spreading around precisely because the people believe - in one way or another - that these phenomena are not just phenomena but that they give a deeper insight in the space and in the interplay of forces behind the scene. If a cultural product is in circulation, it is already an explanation in itself. And if this cultural product is not getting any distribution, then there is nothing to explain. This is why I do not try to formulate a new explanation. I am trying to describe the conditions under which some phenomena thrive, as explanations of their own cultural success. GL: The subtitle of your latest book is "A Phenomenology of the Media". I was surprised to read that you are working towards a philosophical program for the media, in rather traditional terms. You do not touch upon new fashioned topics such as trans-humanism, trans-gender or any body-machine matter. Which role do you see for the traditional discipline of philosophy? Should reading of classics be encouraged or would you rather push new forms of cultural criticism, which are not so concerned with the rewriting of the few dead white male thinkers? BG: The word "phenomenology" in the title of my book means only that I do not attempt to give any new, different, personal, additional kind of theoretical, scientific explanation of why certain cultural movements are spreading. Instead, I try to show that every cultural product is an explanation of its own presence and multiplication in the first place. So I practice some philosophical, phenomenological epoch. It is a very traditional gesture, indeed. But this gesture seems to me to be most appropriate for the investigation of the cultural movements in the open space. Until recently I was preoccupied with the processes taking place in closed spaces like the museum. In that case, it is possible to formulate a theory because there is a institutionally secured position for the external observer of the cultural processes. In open spaces, there is no such secured position. This is why the phenomenological epoch becomes necessary. It is a way to introduce a position of a spectator into a field where this position is not given from the beginning. Topics like trans-humanism, trans-gender or body-machine do not interest me in this particular context because these discourses believe to have answered the question "What is behind being human" in a very traditional way of "crossing the borders" between the human and non-human. That is, of course, O.K. But the question of the spectator remains open here. Is this spectator human, or non-human, or placed beyond this opposition? And in any of these cases - how does this spectator knows about his or her own position in relationship to this opposition between human and non-human? The only way to know such things is to believe in your own theoretical discourse. But I cannot believe in my own theoretical discourse - and I also cannot believe in any other theoretical discourse. So the only way for me is just to investigate why, how and under which conditions other people believe in various theoretical discourses. GL: Tell us more! How then do you write a sentence, or make a statement in public, if you do not half way except it, at least as a temporary thesis? Bringing up an idea does not automatically mean that it is turned into a hermetic belief system. BG: Of course, if somebody says and writes something it can always be seen as a thesis. But, in reality, it is not always effectively seen in such a way: Very often the people just don't react, just don't take you seriously, just don't see that there is a thesis. So I am interested in the question: What does make somebody's thesis to look like a thesis? My guess is that you have to propose some insight, something which "goes deep into the heart of the matter" to be taken seriously. Or, to put it in another way, your discourse has to conform to the certain expectations, having to do with the phenomenology of suspicion, e.g. with the wish on the side of the reader "to go deeper", to "get an insight". By the way: If my discourse would eventually turn to be a hermetic belief system for a greater public, I would have nothing against it. Rather, I would find it very flattering. GL: Could you explain the title of the book? For me, personally, "Under Suspicion" has a somewhat dark, continental European connotation. You are stating that it is the Other and its subjectivity which makes us suspicious. Why is the Other associated with danger and a possible crime? You are rejecting the "atheist" position that the world merely exists of empty signs, with nothing behind the profane space of the media. Why does this attitude results in paranoia, and not in curiosity? Suspicious of what? Looks like a weird mixture of Calvinist and Stalinist culture of guilt to me. Catholicism during the times of the Inquisition. Or the cult inside certain leftist circles, where every act or expression is seen as being in immediate danger of being appropriated by the System. BG: Actually, I wanted that the title of my book should remind the reader of the crime fiction, Hitchcock movies or spectacular journalistic investigations. Our media always try to bring an "inside story", to allow us to look behind the scene, to show us the places where "the fate of the world is determined". This is the context that is interesting to me - not so much Catholicism and Stalinism. But, of course, religious or leftist, or, for that matter, also rightist conspiracy theories are also relevant in this context. And the atheism? The atheist believes that there is nothing behind the signs. That is O.K. But for me atheism is merely one religion among many others. GL: I understand. Everything is ideology. There is no science. Facts don't exist. But which crime has been committed? I agree with you that the method of deconstruction is based on the implicit presumption of a committed crime. I like the idea of the media critic/theorist as a private investigator. A fact is, though, that most media and communication students are not trained to do this job. Media studies, as well as media art, are primarily focussing on the (historical) structures of media technologies and its ever changing platforms and standards. Information equals noise, that's the consensus. Who is doing qualitative content analysis, apart from a few linguists, activists and investigative journalists? BG: That is precisely the point that I tried to make in my book. The technological characteristics of the media bearers, like TV, Computer, Internet etc., are taken generally as a completely satisfactory explanation of what the media are. This faith in the technical know- how is produced in the people's mind by a combination of a very naive interpretation of the McLuhans "The media is the message" with a very naive interpretation of Saussurian "the language precedes every individual speech act". But how do we know a priori what can be said? We have to explore, to investigate, to use TV, Computer or Internet to find out what their medial possibilities are. We can only know post factum how a certain media operate - and only in a very preliminary, incomplete way. The technical description a priori does not tell us anything meaningful about it. Nam Jun Paik used TV in a very idiosyncratic way - not as it is "technically" supposed to be used. And that is why his work is so instructive. But I must confess here that my book was severely criticized by almost all its reviewers precisely for "concealing the fact" that the public already very well knows how the inner core of the media looks like - because it has all the technical instructions how to use the computer, Internet etc. GL: For decades now, cultural studies have emphasizing the "construction" aspect of news, information, images. They neither represent Truth, nor are solely made with the purpose to fool its audience. Media analyses are much complex these days, and so is the perception of the audience. Do you see the playful strategies of irony, difference, and multi layered meanings and interests as a useless, failed project? Your statement that media are, in essence, always lying looks to me as a somewhat populist, regressive step back. Perhaps the cultural studies discourse has not yet been success enough? Or at least in your circles, on the European continent? BG: Well, it is not so important for me if the media are lying about the "reality" or not. Let us suppose that they are telling the Truth, only Truth - and nothing beyond the Truth. Also in this case, they are still concealing how they do it - how they tell the truth. Every truth presupposes a scene of its appearance - and conceals this scene at the same time. The "constructivist" theory is incredibly naive because even if it does not believe any more in the accessibility of the world outside us it still believes in the possibility to explain how we construct the truth about the world. But that is precisely the problem: We have neither access to the world nor to our own construction of the world. We don't know and we can not know how we construct the world. Of course, we know - at least since Magritte - that a painted apple is not a real apple. I guess that is what you mean speaking about irony, difference and cultural studies. The problem is only that we still don't know what is the painted apple per se. Magritte, Cézanne and many others tried to clarify that but they failed. My book is not about the relationship of the painted apple to the real apple. My book is about the relationship of the painted apple to the painting. And the book states that this relationship is and must remain forever unclear - even if we know what the "painting technique" is. GL: In your previous, brilliant work, "On the New" you have described the way in which new ideas and concepts are being developed and launched. "Under Suspicion" could be read as a follow-up. Have you indeed developed "new" ideas about the laws of cultural production, if I may ask? BG: Our cultural space has a complicated topology: there are closed spaces, open spaces and mixed spaces. In my book "On the New" I tried to describe how the closed spaces, like museum, library, university, are functioning. Being caught in the closed space, the people are interested in the open spaces - in crossing the borders, breaking the rules, discovering the new. But being left in the open spaces, the people get more interested in the closed spaces - in getting the insight, discovering the hidden, getting the access to the forbidden. The closed spaces are the spaces of curiosity directed to the outside. The open spaces are the spaces of suspicion directed to the hidden inside. The insider is curious, the outsider is suspicious. In our mixed reality, we are, of course, both because we are always insiders as well as outsiders. GL: New media, for example, can easily be deconstructed as a repetition of the same old mechanisms. Still there is a lot of excitement, debates, and not to forget economic opportunities for a great deal more people than previously employed in the old media (and arts) sector. BG: Well, but my question is: How are these old mechanisms look like? It seems to me that the people working in the media - people like you and me - are, as I said, insiders and outsiders at the same time. Now, the things are moving all the time and, therefore, we are also changing our places all the time - yesterday we were insiders in one respect, today we are outsiders in the same respect, but maybe insiders in some other aspect - and tomorrow? Who knows. But this permanent topological change of our cultural space seems to me to be the reason for the permanent activity you are speaking about. Every morning we wake up on a different place in the cultural space because this space somehow moved overnight. And, of course, it makes us nervous. GL: Anxious too, perhaps? Change as a danger, not a challenge? One can even get used to permanent change, I suppose. Our globe is indeed going through rapid, radical transformations. For example, one can easily accept, and deal with the fact that the nature of media these days is lying in their ability to (digitally) manipulate. There is no "natural" image anymore. All information has gone through the process of digitization. We just have to deal with the fact that we can no longer believe our eyes, our ears. Everyone who has worked with a computer will know this. BG: I think I am not so much anxious about what I am looking at. I am rather amused by that. And, of course, looking at the things around me, I am not so much interested if they are true or not. And I feel no angst about them. And I am very little interested in the "real". Actually, I am only anxious about how other people look at me. And if I speak about the changing world, I doesn't mean the spectacle of permanent change taking place before my eyes. I am perfectly comfortable about this kind of spectacle. But I am not so much comfortable about the possible change of my own position in the eyes of the others. Am I still insider? Or have I already became an outsider? I guess it is just the inner voice of my Jewish ancestry: The way the others look at you is changing permanently - and this change may be dangerous. Boris Groys, Unter Verdacht, Eine Phaenomenolgie der Medien, Hanser Verlag, Muenchen, 2000. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 53.0 <nettime> CTHEORY Interview with Paul Virilio John Armitage nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 19 Oct 2000 08:39:34 +0100 Article 89 - CTHEORY Interview with Paul Virilio _____________________________________________________________________ CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 23, NO 3 Article 89 18-10-00 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker _____________________________________________________________________ CTHEORY Interview with Paul Virilio: The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space ========================================== ~Paulo Virilio in Conversation with John Armitage~ ~Translated by Patrice Riemens~ --------------------------------------------------- Paul Virilio is a renowned urbanist, political theorist and critic of the art of technology. Born in Paris in 1932, Virilio is best known for his 'war model' of the growth of the modern city and the evolution of human society. He is also the inventor of the term 'dromology' or the logic of speed. Identified with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the futurism of Marinetti and technoscientific writings of Einstein, Virilio's intellectual outlook can usefully be compared to contemporary architects, philosophers and cultural critics such as Bernard Tschumi, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. Virilio is the author, among other books, of _Bunker Archeology_ (1994 [1975]), _Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology_ (1986 [1977]), _The Information Bomb_ (2000 [1998]) and, most recently, _Strategie de la deception_ (1999). His analysis of the Kosovo War is the subject of his conversation with John Armitage below. *John Armitage*: Professor Virilio, to what extent does your intellectual and artistic work on the architecture of war, and architecture more generally, inform your thinking in _Strategie de la deception_? Is it the case that, in common with other so-called 'postmodern' wars, such as the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the architecture of war, along with architecture itself, is 'disappearing'? How did you approach the question of the architecture of war and its disappearance in _Strategie de la deception_? *Paul Virilio*: Well, let me put it this way, I have always been interested in the architecture of war, as can be seen in _Bunker Archeology_. However, at the time that I did the research for that book, I was very young. My aim was to understand the notion of 'Total War'. As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance. More specifically, under the Occupation, we in Nantes were denied access to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was therefore not until after the War was over that I saw the sea for the first time, in the vicinity of St Nazaire. It was there that I discovered the bunkers. But what I also discovered was that, during the War, the whole of Europe had become a fortress. And thus I saw to what extent an immense territory, a whole continent, had effectively been reorganised into one city, and just like the cities of old. From that moment on, I became more interested in urban matters, in logistics, in the organisation of transport, in maintenance and supplies. But what is so astonishing about the war in Kosovo for me is that it was a war that totally bypassed territorial space. It was a war that took place almost entirely in the air. There were hardly any Allied armed personnel on the ground. There was, for example, no real state of siege and practically no blockade. However, may I remind you that France and Germany were opposed to a maritime blockade of the Adriatic Sea without a mandate from the United Nations (UN). So, what we witnessed in Kosovo was an extraordinary war, a war waged solely with bombs from the air. What happened in Kosovo was the exact reversal of what happened in 'Fortress Europe' in 1943-45. Let me explain. Air Marshall 'Bomber' Harris used to say that 'Fortress Europe' was a fortress without a roof, since the Allies had air supremacy. Now, if we look at the Kosovo War, what do we see? We see a fortress without walls - but with a roof! Isn't that disappearance extraordinary?! *John Armitage*: Let's talk about your theoretical efforts to understand and interpret the Kosovo war in _Strategie de la deception_. Is the campaign in the air the only important element that other theorists should pay attention to? *Paul Virilio*: Let me emphasise the following points about the Kosovo War. First, while the United States (US) can view the war as a success, Europe must see it as a failure for it and, in particular, for the institutions of the European Union (EU). For the US, the Kosovo War was a success because it encouraged the development of the Pentagon's 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA). The war provided a test site for experimentation, and paved the way for emergence of what I call in _Strategie de la deception_ 'the second deterrence'. It is, therefore, my firm belief that the US is currently seeking to revert to the position it held after the triggering of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s, when the US was the sole nuclear power. And here I repeat what I suggest in my book. The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future, and I stress this important point, ~it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident'~ that is the continuation of politics by other means. The automation of warfare has, then, come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Needless to say, none of these developments will help the plight of the refugees in Kosovo or stop the actions of the militias operating there. However, the automation of warfare will allow for the continuation not only of war in the air but also of the further development of the Pentagon's RMA in the form of 'Global Information Dominance' (GID) and 'Global Air Power' (GAP). It is for these reasons that, in my new book, I focus for example on the use of the 'graphite bomb' to shut off the Serbian electricity supply as well as the cutting off of the service provision to Serbia of the EuTelSat television satellite by the EU. And, let me remind you that the latter action was carried out against the explicit wishes of the UN. To my mind, therefore, the integral accident, the automation of warfare, and the RMA are all part of the shift towards the second deterrence and the explosion of the information bomb. For me, these developments are revolutionary because, today, the age of the locally situated bomb such as the atomic bomb has passed. The atomic bomb provoked a ~specific~ accident. But the information bomb gives rise to the integral and ~globally constituted accident~. The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'. And, of course, we have already seen some instances of systemic risk in recent times in the Asian financial crisis. But what sparked off the Asian financial crisis? Automated trading programmes! Here, then, we meet again the problems I noted in earlier works with regard to interactivity. Moreover, it is clear that the era of the information bomb, the era of aerial warfare, the era of the RMA and global surveillance is also the era of ~the integral accident~. 'Cyberwar' has nothing to do with the destruction brought about by bombs and grenades and so on. It is specifically linked to the information systems of life itself. It is in this sense that, as I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of ~rupture~. For me, the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the war in Kosovo in 1999 are the prelude to the integral accident. *John Armitage*: How does your description above of the chief theoretical aspects of the Kosovo War map on to the important themes of your previous writings? I would like to start by charting your theoretical and architectural interest in questions concerning the two concepts of military space and the organization of territory. For example, even your earliest research -- into the 'Atlantic Wall' in the 1950s and 1960s -- was founded on these two concepts. However, before we discuss _Strategie de la deception_ and the war in Kosovo in some detail, could you explain first of all what you mean by military space and the organization of territory and why these concepts are so important for an understanding of your work? *Paul Virilio*: These concepts are important quite simply because I am an urbanist. Thus the whole of my work is focused on geopolitics and geostrategy. However, a second aspect of my work is movement. This, of course, I pursue through my research on speed and on my study of the organisation of the revolution of the means of transportation. For me, then, territory and movement are linked. For instance, territory is controlled by the movements of horsemen, of tanks, of planes, and so on. Thus my research on dromology, on the logic and impact of speed, necessarily implies the study of the organisation of territory. Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation. Hence I am always concerned with ideas of territory and movement. Indeed, my first book after _Bunker Archeology_ was entitled _L'insecurite du territoire_ (1976). *John Armitage*: In _Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology_, you write of the military and political revolution in transportation and information transmission. Indeed, for you, the speed of the military-industrial complex is the driving force of cultural and social development, or, as you put it in the book, 'history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems'. In what ways do you think that speed politics played a role in the military and political conflict in Kosovo? For instance, was the speed of transportation and information transmission the most important factor in the war? Or, more generally, for you, is the military-industrial complex still the motor of history? *Paul Virilio*: I believe that the military-industrial complex is more important than ever. This is because the war in Kosovo gave fresh impetus not to the military-industrial complex but to the military-~scientific~ complex. You can see this in China. You can also see it in Russia with its development of stealth planes and other very sophisticated military machines. I am of course thinking here about new planes such as the ~Sukhois~. There is very little discussion about such developments but, for me, I am constantly astonished by the current developments within the Russian airforce. And, despite the economic disaster that is Russia, there are still air shows taking place in the country. For these reasons, then, I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide. However, this situation has arisen because the sovereignty of the state is no longer accepted. This is also why we are witnessing states rushing forward in order to safeguard themselves against an intervention similar to the one that took place in Kosovo. This is one of the most disturbing, if indirect, aspects of the war in Kosovo and one that I discuss at length in my new book. Of course, one of the most disturbing features is the fact that while we have had roughly a ten year pause in the arms race where a lot of good work was done, this has now come to an end. For what we are seeing at the present time are new developments in anti-missile weaponry, drones, and so on. Thus, some of the most dramatic consequences of the Kosovo war are linked to the resumption of the arms race and the suicidal political and economic policies of countries like India and Pakistan where tons of money are currently being spent on atomic weaponry. This is abhorrent! *John Armitage*: Before we turn to consider the aesthetic aspects of the 'disappearance' of military space and the organisation of territory in Kosovo, I would like to ask why it was that in the late 1970s and early 1980s you first began to consider the technological aspects of these phenomena? What was it that prompted you to focus on the technological aspects at that time? *Paul Virilio*: Because it was from that time onwards that ~real time superseded real space!~ Today, almost all-current technologies put the speed of light to work. And, as you know, here we are not only talking about information at a distance but also operation at a distance, or, the possibility to act instantaneously, from afar. For example, the RMA ~begins~ with the application of the speed of light. This means that history is now rushing headlong into the wall of time. As I have said many times before, ~the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!~ Globalisation cannot take shape without the speed of light. In this way, history now inscribes itself in real time, in the 'live', in the realm of interactivity. Consequently, history no longer resides in the extension of territory. Look at the US, look at Russia. Both of these countries are immense geographical territories. But, nowadays, immense territories amount to nothing! Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space. Hence not only the crisis of geopolitics and geostrategy but also the shift towards the emergence and dominance of ~chronostrategy~. As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed. *John Armitage*: But what about the cultural dimensions of chronostrategy? For instance, although modernist artists such as Marinetti suggested to us that 'war is the highest form of modern art', Walter Benjamin warned us against the 'aestheticization' of war in his famous essay in _Illuminations_ (1968) on 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Additionally, in your _The Aesthetics of Disappearance_ (1991 [1980]), you make several references to the relationship between war and aesthetics. To what extent do you think that the Kosovo War can or should be perceived in cultural or aesthetic terms? *Paul Virilio*: First of all, if I have spoken of a link between war and aesthetics, it is because there is something I am very interested in and that is what Sun Tzu in his ancient Chinese text calls _The Art of War_. This is because, for me, war consists of the organisation of ~the field of perception~. But war is also, as the Japanese call it, 'the art of embellishing death'. And, in this sense, the relationship between war and aesthetics is a matter of very serious concern. Conversely, one could say that religion -- in the broadest sense of the word -- is 'the art of embellishing life'. Thus, anything that strives to aestheticise death is profoundly tragic. But, nowadays, ~the tragedy of war is mediated through technology~. It is no longer mediated through a human being with moral responsibilities. It is mediated through the destructive power of the atomic bomb, as in Stanley Kubrick's film, ~Dr Strangelove~. Now, if we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media. Today, the media handle information as if it was a religious artefact. In this way, the media is more concerned with what we feel about the refugees and so on rather than what we think about them. Indeed, the truth, the reality of the Kosovo War, was actually hidden behind all the 'humanitarian' faces. This is a very different situation from the one faced by General Patton and the American army when they first encountered the concentration camps at the end of the Second World War. Then, it was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious. *John Armitage*: Almost inevitably, reviewers will compare _Strategie de la deception_ with your earlier works and, in particular, _War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception_ (1989 [1984]). Indeed, the very first chapter of the latter book is called 'Military Force is based upon Deception'. Could you summarise the most important developments that, for you, have taken place in the relationship between war, cinema, and deception since you wrote _War and Cinema_? *Paul Virilio*: For me, Sun Tzu's statement that military force is based upon deception is an extraordinary statement. But let us start with the title of _War and Cinema_. The important part of the title is not _War and Cinema_. It is the subtitle, _The Logistics of Perception_. As I said back in 1984, the idea of logistics is not only about oil, about ammunitions and supplies but also about images. Troops must be fed with ammunition and so on but also with information, with images, with visual intelligence. Without these elements troops cannot perform their duties properly. This is what is meant by the logistics of perception. Now, if we consider my latest book, _Strategie de la deception_, what we need to focus on are the other aspects of the same phenomenon. For the strategies of deception are concerned with deceiving an opponent through the logistics of perception. But these strategies are not merely aimed at the Serbs or the Iraqis but also at all those who might support Milosevic or Saddam Hussein. Moreover, such strategies are also aimed at deceiving the general public through radio, television and so on. In this way, it seems to me that, since 1984, my book on the logistics of perception has been proved totally correct. For instance, almost every conflict since then has involved the logistics of perception, including the war in Lebanon, where Israel made use of cheap drones in order to track Yasser Arafat with the aim of killing him. If we look at the Gulf War, the same is also true. Indeed, my work on the logistics of perception and the Gulf War was so accurate that I was even asked to discuss it with high-ranking French military officers. They asked me: 'how is it that you wrote that book in 1984 and now it's happening for real?' My answer was: 'the problem is not mine but yours: you have not been doing your job properly!' But let us link all this to something that is not discussed very often. I am referring here to the impact of the launch of the television news service CNN in 1984 or thereabouts. However, what I want to draw your attention to is CNN's so-called 'Newshounds'. Newshounds are people with mini-video cameras, people who are continually taking pictures in the street and sending the tapes in to CNN. These Newshounds are a sort of pack of wolves, continually looking for quarry, but quarry in the form of images. For example, it was this pack of wolves that sparked off the Rodney King affair a few years ago in Los Angeles. Let us consider the situation: a person videos Rodney King being beaten up by the cops. That person then sends in the footage to the TV station. Within hours riots flare up in the city! There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon. But what interests me here is that what starts out as a story of a black man being beaten up in the street, a story that, unfortunately, happens all the time, everywhere, escalates into something that is little short of a war in Los Angeles! *John Armitage*: In _The Vision Machine_ (1994 [1988]) you were concerned with highlighting the role of the military in the 'contemporary crisis in perceptive faith' and the 'automation of perception' more broadly. Has the Kosovo War led you to modify your claims about the role of the military in the contemporary production and destruction of automated perception via Cruise missiles, so-called 'smart bombs' and so on? *Paul Virilio*: On the contrary. The development and deployment of drones and Cruise missiles involves the continuing development of the vision machine. Research on Cruise missiles is intrinsically linked to the development of vision machines. The aim, of course, is not only to give vision to a machine but, as in the case of the Cruise missiles that were aimed at Leningrad and Moscow, also to enable a machine to deploy radar readings and pre-programmed maps as it follows its course towards its target. Cruise missiles necessarily fly low, in order to check on the details of the terrain they are flying over. They are equipped with a memory that gives them bearings on the terrain. However, when the missiles arrive at their destination, they need more subtle vision, in order to choose right or left. This, then, is the reason why vision was given to Cruise missiles. But in one sense, such missiles are really only flying cameras, whose results are interpreted by a computer. This, therefore, is what I call 'sightless vision', vision without looking. The research on vision machines was mainly conducted at the Stanford Research Institute in the US. So, we can say that the events that took place in the Kosovo War were a total confirmation of the thesis of _The Vision Machine_. *John Armitage*: Let us turn to vision machines of a different variety. To what extent do you think that watching the Kosovo War on TV reduced us all to a state of _Polar Inertia_ (1999 [1990]), to the status of Howard Hughes, the imprisoned and impotent state of what you call 'technological monks'? *Paul Virilio*: There can be no doubt about this. It even held true for the soldiers involved in the Kosovo War. For the soldiers stayed mostly in their barracks! In this way, polar inertia has truly become a ~mass phenomenon~. And not only for the TV audiences watching the war at home but also for the army that watches the battle from the barracks. Today, ~the army only occupies the territory once the war is over~. Clearly, there is a kind of inertia here. Moreover, I would like to say that the sort of polar inertia we witnessed in the Kosovo War, the polar inertia involving 'automated war' and 'war-at-a-distance' is also terribly weak in the face of terrorism. For instance, in such situations, any individual who decides to place or throw a bomb can simply walk away. He or she ~has the freedom to move~. This also applies to militant political groups and their actions. Look at the ~Intifadah~ in Jerusalem. One cannot understand that phenomenon, a phenomenon where people, often very young boys, are successfully harassing one of the best armies in the world, without appreciating their freedom to move! *John Armitage*: Jean Baudrillard infamously argued that _The Gulf War Did Not Take Place_ (1995 [1991]). Could it be argued that the Kosovo War did not take place? *Paul Virilio*: Although Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space. For instance, the Persian Gulf War was a miniature world war. It took place in a small geographical area. In this sense it was a local war. But it was one that made use of all the power normally reserved for global war. However, the Kosovo War took place in orbital space. In other words, war now takes place in 'aero-electro-magnetic space'. It is equivalent to the birth of a new type of flotilla, a home fleet, of a new type of naval power, but in orbital space! *John Armitage*: How do these developments relate to Global Positioning Systems (GPS)? For example, in _The Art of the Motor_ (1995 [1993]), you were very interested in the relationship between globalisation, physical space, and the phenomenon of virtual spaces, positioning, or, 'delocalization'. In what ways, if any, do you think that militarized GPS played a 'delocalizing' role in the war in Kosovo? *Paul Virilio*: GPS not only played a large and delocalizing role in the war in Kosovo but is increasingly playing a role in social life. For instance, it was the GPS that directed the planes, the missiles and the bombs to localised targets in Kosovo. But may I remind you that the bombs that were dropped by the B-2 plane on the Chinese embassy -- or at least that is what we were told -- were GPS bombs. And the B-2 flew in from the US. However, GPS are everywhere. They are in cars. They were even in the half-tracks that, initially at least, were going to make the ground invasion in Kosovo possible. Yet, for all the sophistication of GPS, there still remain numerous problems with their use. The most obvious problem in this context is the problem of landmines. For example, when the French troops went into Kosovo they were told that they were going to enter in half-tracks, over the open fields. But their leaders had forgotten about the landmines. And this was a major problem because, these days, landmines are no longer localised. They are launched via tubes and distributed haphazardly over the territory. As a result, one cannot remove them after the war because one cannot find them! And yet the ability to detect such landmines, especially in a global war of movement, is absolutely crucial. Thus, for the US, GPS are a form of sovereignty! It is hardly surprising, then, that the EU has proposed its own GPS in order to be able to localise and to compete with the American GPS. As I have said before, sovereignty no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory. And localisation is an inherent part of that territorial control. As I pointed out in _The Art of the Motor_ and elsewhere, from now on we need two watches: a wristwatch to tell us what time it is and a GPS watch to tell us what space it is! *John Armitage*: Lastly, given your analyses of technology and the general accident in recent works such as _Open Sky_ (1997 [1995]), _Politics of the Very Worst_ (1999 [1996]) and _The Information Bomb_ (2000 [1998]), what, for you, is the likely prospective critical impact of counter measures to such developments? Are there any obvious strategies of resistance that can be deployed against the relentless advance of the technological strategies of deception? *Paul Virilio*: Resistance is ~always~ possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a ~technological culture~. However, at the present time, this idea is grossly underdeveloped. For example, we have developed an artistic and a literary culture. Nevertheless, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy. This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture. Even among the elite, in government circles, technological culture is somewhat deficient. I could give examples of cabinet ministers, including defence ministers, who have no technological culture at all. In other words, what I am suggesting is that the hype generated by the publicity around the Internet and so on is not counter balanced by a political intelligence that is based on a technological culture. For instance, in 1999, Bill Gates not only published a new book on work at the speed of thought but also detailed how Microsoft's 'Falconview' software would enable the destruction of bridges in Kosovo. Thus it is no longer a Caesar or a Napoleon who decides on the fate of any particular war but a piece of software! In short, the political intelligence of war and the political intelligence of society no longer penetrate the technoscientific world. Or, let us put it this way, technoscientific intelligence is presently insufficiently spread among society at large to enable us to ~interpret~ the sorts of technoscientific advances that are taking shape today. Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, Paris. -------------------------------------------------------------------- CTHEORY editors would like to thank Paul Virilio for participating in this CTHEORY interview, John Armitage for conducting and editing the conversation, and Patrice Riemens for translating the interview. _______ John Armitage is Principal Lecturer in Politics and Media Studies at the University of Northumbria, UK. The editor of Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond (2000), he is currently editing Virilio Live: Selected Interviews for publication in 2001 and Economies of Excess, a forthcoming issue of parallax, a journal of metadiscursive theory and cultural practices. _____________________________________________________________________ * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology * and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews * in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as * theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape. * * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker * * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Austin), * R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln), * Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San Francisco), * Timothy Murray (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson * (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross * (New York), David Cook (Toronto), William Leiss (Kingston), * Shannon Bell (Downsview/York), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), * Sharon Grace (San Francisco), Robert Adrian X (Vienna), * Deena Weinstein (Chicago), Michael Weinstein (Chicago), * Andrew Wernick (Peterborough). * * In Memory: Kathy Acker * * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK), * Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Victoria, B.C.). * * Editorial Assistant: Richard Moffitt * World Wide Web Editor: Carl Steadman ____________________________________________________________________ To view CTHEORY online please visit: http://www.ctheory.com/ To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit: http://ctheory.concordia.ca/ ____________________________________________________________________ * CTHEORY includes: * * 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory. * * 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture. * * 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape. * * 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers. * * CTHEORY is sponsored by New World Perspectives and Concordia * University. * * For the academic year 2000/1, CTHEORY is sponsored * by the Department of Sociology, Boston College * (http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/soc/socdept.html) * * The editors wish to thank, in particular, Boston College's * Dr. Joseph Quinn, Dean, College of Arts and Science, Dr. John * Neuhauser, Academic Vice-President, and Dr. Stephen Pfohl, * Chairperson, Department of Sociology for their support. * * No commercial use of CTHEORY articles without permission. * * Mailing address: CTHEORY, Boston College, Department of Sociology, * 505 McGuinn Hall, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. * * Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, * Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale * Canada, Toronto. * * Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/ * Documentation politique international; Sociological * Abstract Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political * Science and Government; Canadian Periodical Index; * Film and Literature Index. _____________________________________________________________________ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 53.1 Re: <nettime> CTHEORY Interview with Paul Virilio richard barbrook nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 20 Oct 2000 12:44:08 -0400 Hiya, Isn't interesting how the Kosovars seem to have completely disappeared from Virilio's analysis of their own national liberation war. This master-thinker is so excited by American technology that he misses that most of the serious fighting against the Serbian occupation forces was carried out by the UCK partisans using relatively low-tech weapons. Since this all happened 'off camera', it might as well not have happened for Virilio... Later, Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Richard Barbrook Hypermedia Research Centre School of Communications and Creative Industries University of Westminster Watford Road Northwick Park HARROW HA1 3TP <www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk> +44 (0)20 7911 5000 x 4590 ------------------------------------------------------------------- "While there is irony, we are still living in the prehistoric age. And we are not out of it yet..." - Henri Lefebvre ------------------------------------------------------------------- The HRC is involved in running regular cybersalons at the ICA in London. If you would like to be informed about forthcoming events, you can subscribe to a listserver on our website: <www.cybersalon.org>. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 54.0 <nettime> interview with mi_ga josephine bosma nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 07 Sep 2000 11:10:15 +0200 mi_ga stands for Mindaugas Gapsevicius. He is a Lithuanian net artist, and one of the founders of the o-o domain. o-o was initiated in 1998 and is one of net arts' independent outposts. The group around it is quite young compared to a lot of other artists and artgroups, and their attitude is interesting. One project related to it is the asco project, which is a spam art project coming from the '7-11 family line' of net art. mi-ga has set up the asco project with the French net artist d2b. Unlike the spam engine created by Frederic Madre early this year, which was just one part of the Palais Tokyo mailinglist, the asco spam engines are the center of focus and activity of asco. JB: What is asco? mi_ga: It is ascii art, and the idea was to make it very infantile. Not a serious ascii art mailinglist. We store everything on the net. JB: What is this interest in spamming in a certain net art community? Why is it so popular? mi_ga: It is just fun. You can change stuff and spam. You can see how things are changed.. JB: You don't take an existing text and change it yourself? mi_ga: You can change something inside the engine through a web interface. You can play with it and make a spam. JB: What is fun about it? mi_ga: The fun is to get infantile ascii art. JB: Instead of what...? mi_ga: Not instead of anything. JB: You just like spam art? mi_ga: yeah. It's cool. It does not look good. It is cool. JB: I see. Would you say that spam art is a kind of grafiti? mi_ga: Well... we were not thinking about grafiti at all. If you want you can say it is grafiti. Let me show you three versions of spam. (He shows me the d2b site) Maybe it is web grafiti, I don't know. Here is the last version: cross words. It spammed quite a few lists: 7-11, Palais Tokyo, nettime... You can change the cross words. JB: They always look the same. If there are changes, they are very subtle. Each one looks very much like the others. Should one look closer? mi_ga: You can change the content yourself. The form of the spam can be different. You have to go deeper, deeper, deeper to know what is going on. If you just push the button it stays the same. Here are archived messages of the list. Each number you see on this site contains an archive. Each archive contains fifteen messages, in a random way. JB: We see particular urls used as text or content for this spam you show me now. 7-11, kalx, potatoland, m9ndfukc, d2b, mouchette, salty, xtreme, your o-o, the 0100etc people. Is there a special bond between those urls? mi_ga: This spam was made by d2b and me together. We chose to put those urls in because they are cool. JB: These are just your favorit urls? mi_ga: Maybe that is why... JB: Do you also have one with urls you hate? With bad net art maybe? mi_ga: I don't look at bad net art. I forget it immediately. JB: So there are no net art projects that come to mind that you particularly do not like? mi_ga: I do not like pictures much. If there are a lot of pictures I don't like it. JB: Because they are hard to download for you? mi_ga: I have to pay for every minute, so I have not much time to navigate or to surf on the net. The story comes down to that I like ascii. Maybe if I would have a very good net connection the history would go into another direction. From the beginning I liked ascii more though. We made our site quite long ago, and it is ascii based, no images. We have something of a campaign where you can find images, but in general there are none. JB: What do you think of the Ascii Art Ensemble? mi_ga: I think they are great. What else to say? JB: Do you prefer eastern european net art over american net art? mi_ga: I think there are no borders. http://www.o-o.lt/asco-o/ http://www.d2b.org/asco-o/ * # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 55.0 <nettime> Interview With Peter Ganick Steven Meinking nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 15 Sep 2000 09:06:23 -0700 This is an interview I did with Peter Ganick which appears in the e-journal README, Issue #3. http://www.jps.net/nada/issuethree.htm Steve Peter Ganick is not a venerated poet in the traditional sense, but it is not due to a lack of effort. _Around A Corner: An Epidermis (1-28)_ is his most recent effort, and it joins his broad catalog of other works such as _Agoraphobia_, _No Soap Radio_, and _<a ' satty>_, to name a few. Each text is theoretically inspired and dense with Peter's dauntless fervor for discursive experimentation. What follows is an interview with Peter that was compiled from a correspondence of e-mails that stretched over several days. Excerpts from some of his texts are interspersed throughout. "then sought as a face in the wilderness sounding something suffering too benign for improvisation himself the prasada offering where nothing else works," - _Around A Corner: An Epidermis (1-28)_ SM: Before we delve more deeply into your experience as a poet, I am interested in your thoughts on the convergence of the Internet and poetry. I've noticed a widespread emergence of poetry all over the Net, from e-mail lists and e-zines to bulletin boards and personal web sites. What do you think of this cyber-poetic emergence? PG: I think, for the most part, that any proliferation of poetry is a favorable trend. The fact that poets of all persuasions can post their poetry on the Internet is a democratization of the art form. Every democratization of an art form is attendant with certain difficulties however, the main being the quality issue. If any poet can have his/her poetry displayed, there is not the usual filtering that occurs when an editor weeds out what he/she feels is not suitable for publication. A very favorable trend established by the Internet, and one that I have taken advantage of many times already, is the possibility for e-mail collaborative texts. Until the Internet, snailmail had to suffice. With its necessary slowness, a critical momentum could never be established. That is why there were few collaborative poems written up to the advent of e-mail. In an e-mail collaboration, the participants can exchange portions as often as they wish or are able. This speeds up the process, and the same momentum that an individual poet establishes in a single work, is augmented when two or more poets work on a poem together. SM: Your POTEPOETZINE and POTEPOETTEXT both do an admirable job of showcasing this type of poetry and work. You are the editor of both projects. Both the text and zine are distributed via e-mail, with the zine exhibiting a collaboration of multiple contributors and the text featuring one particular poet/writer. What are your thoughts and motivations behind those projects? PG: The motivation behind the POTEPOETZINE and POTEPOETTEXT projects is the same as that behind my hard-copy projects: to distribute experimental poetry to as large an audience as possible. In the print media, it has been to publish readable editions that are affordable while being sufficiently elegant. I consider the print media activities of more importance for me, at least at this time. A print book is somehow more "permanent" than an online project. The online zines were never more than a side activity to complement and further the print work of the Press. "The relations set up between an artform (writing) and another artform as 'foil' are similar to keeping oneself free, mentally and spiritually. In the Heideggerean sense, it is a 'free-for' that one obtains in this manner -- free-for-writing." - "A Poetics Statement" from POTEPOETTEXTTHIRTEEN SM: You mention print work, and I don't think I'm being charitable when I say that the amount of work you have produced is impressive. The poetry that you write is also very unique and innovative. You refer to it as "experimental poetry." What does this notion of "experimental" mean to you and the breadth of your work? PG: I have produced a lot of work, both in the publishing medium and in my own writing. The way I write is to not filter the writing at all, then when it's on the page, go back and revise it, however minimally. The forward motion of the writing is what keeps me going from project to project. The difference between projects, or not having two projects be alike, is what I call "experimental." I have always felt that to write the same type of poem twice is not worth the doing. For this writer, to be at the edge of his endurance at all times, helps me go onto newer projects. I have always had a fondness for the long poem. 'Remove A Concept', written in the late 80s to early 90s is almost 4000 pages. 'SPLINTERED', some of which can be seen on my author's page at the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center, written around 1996-7, is around 2000 pages. 'Around A Corner: an epidermis', written in 1998 and to be published by Potes & Poets Press is over 600 pages. The long form gives one a chance to develop motifs and energies, even if only subconsciously. The type of poetry I do could also be called 'abstract,' because of its de-referentialized nature. It is different from, although similar to the classical LANGUAGE poets' work in that it has always been motivated primarily by philosophy, not poetry. In the last fifteen years, I have read around 10 books of poetry, no more. Philosophy, whether Eastern or Western, is the prime source. Poetry, in the manner of which it alters language, is the urtext of philosophy. I write such urtexts. SM: "Urtext" reminds me of the "Urstaat" in Deleuze & Guattari. For them the Urstaat is the ideal model of the despotic state, but the direct reference to Ur is more primary, the first city of the civilized world, an originary form. In its altering of language, do you think the urtext is similar? PG: This is a controversial issue. Certain theorists like Chomsky believe that language capability is innate, something we have at or before birth. If I understand correctly, this capability is common to all homo sapiens. What I wonder is if a writer, through intense practice, can change his/her own, and therefore possibly a reader's, ur-text for language. This is akin to Rimbaud's idea of sensory derangement, but in a more planned manner than he had in mind. Or in a phrase now part of the common jargon that originated in the 1960s, to bend one's mind. However that 1960s phrase is not what I have in mind. Those of us who participated in that period of history are different from it, although many of my peers seem to have forgotten the ideals that motivated us then. Rimbaud, as an individual, seems to have accomplished more in that he left poetry finally. Meaning that he DID alter his ur-text significantly. An inner change DID happen. Something was accomplished. WIRED magazine tells us that "Change is good." When I speak of urtext in language, it is not an actual _first_ language. Rather an _ideal_ language. A language that doesn't exist, except in the minds of poets. The poetry I write is abstract, not non-referential. The Language poets, from who early on I took my model, write non-referential language. This is language that has a relationship to some reference to reality. Namely that of negation. The writing I do is, on the other hand, abstract. Meaning, without relationship to reality. This is its insularity and its vulnerability at the same time. I like to see that the language is a structure that is pure and of-itself. Sort of like the abstractness of mathematics. And hopefully its universality. "perhaps it begins in four echoes the closest of which is word-mind before demanded straits, the cipher has gone awash its tone to replace now & then every caller-frequency," - _Agoraphobia_ SM: How have you been altered through your poetic efforts, if at all? PG: A fair enough answer would be to say: Read the books I have written. But to elaborate a bit because that's the nature of the responses expected in an interview like this, writing has led me to a spiritual pursuit. Writing is a spiritual pursuit, with the word "spiritual" being used in its fullest sense. As a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna, a Hindu saint who lived in the nineteenth century, and having a guru and meditating daily, the spiritual pursuit is a large part of writing for me. Another answer would be to say: Life has changed me, as life changes everyone, and the writing is nothing more than life writing life. SM: You stated earlier that philosophy is a form of inspiration. Who are some of your favorite thinkers? And what about philosophy as a practice gives it this prominent place in your work? PG: The philosophical tradition I am writing from is twofold. First, the Derridean and Deleuzean tradition of what I'll call 'errant' texts. Texts that become intentional only when activated. Their resonance is through the Derridean 'trace' and extended in the Deleuzean 'rhizome'. I like the fact that these two concepts claim to be more than concepts. The other tradition is more vital to the writing I do. It is the Vedantic tradition in the sense of being aware of the consciousness I am writing from more than the words I am writing. What distinguishes this from a 'trance' or 'channeling'? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something. Perhaps the fact that the consciousness claims to be nothing more than a consciousness-producing-words/text. The creative consciousness, in this manifestation. Vedanta is a version of Hinduism for those who do not know this. I am a Hindu. SM: I find the style of your poetry very liberating, but it isn't easy to read, at least initially. When I engage one of your texts it takes time to work through the material. Then, after a short period, a flow is generated and I seem to drift with the work. What are some of your thoughts concerning how a reader might approach your poetry? PG: I think you have hit on it. In a sense, a writer merely writes the text and leaves each writer to find his or her way into it. However, the writing has a relationship to a 'stream of consciousness' type of production, therefore some sort of mindful suspension of thought in the reading process would be helpful. The writing is meditative in nature, therefore should be read in a concentrated manner. It is difficult, as you say, but, I think, if one 'keeps on moving' through the texts, doesn't get stuck anywhere, one will find what is there in each text. As we all know, there is a 'normative' grammar in language. And it seems to me that the task of the poet is to extend that grammar. This can make for difficult going in one of the texts I've written, however, each text, especially the recent ones does a certain 'twist' with form and grammar, maybe more than one. Once that is realized, there should be no problem with reading. "reasons format accuracy THIS FROM THAT and yoga impish ape solemnize manacle you distortion to TEMPLATE INWARD jungle certainty ears form at on dry shape RELUCTANT however din" - _News On Skis_ SM: With elements of your style, approach and influences touched upon only two questions remain: Is there anything you would like to do creatively that is not already represented in your lifework? And what direction, if any, do you plan to take your poetry? PG: Regarding what I'd like to do in the future: that'd be basically 'more of the same'. I find value in writing texts. I hope to be able to write many more. Multimedia or internet work only interests me as it can be applied to texts I can write. I would like to learn how to type faster. The poetry has developed over the period I've been writing on its own. I think I'll just sort of sit back and let it happen. One cannot direct the stream of one's creative activity. One can only be grateful one has it. Resources: http://www.spdbooks.org - Site where you can purchase Peter's books, titles from Potes & Poets press, as well as texts from other independent publishers. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/ganick - Peter's work at the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center. http://www.burningpress.org/va/poteindex.html - POTEPOETZINE and POTEPOETTEXT electronic index of issues. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 56.0 <nettime> Interview with Yukiko Shigata (for MAAP) geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sat, 16 Sep 2000 11:46:36 +1000 (see also: www.maap.org.au for the streaming media event out of the Brisbane Powerhouse on Sunday September 17 with participants from Mumbai, Tokyo, Beijing, Bandung, Seoul, Melbourne and Hong Kong). An E-mail Interview with Yukiko Shigata By Geert Lovink For many years Yukiko Shigata has been curator for new media arts at Tokyo Canon ArtLab. She is very well informed about the latest works and trends within electronic arts, both in Asia and Europe. Because of schedule reasons, Yikiko Shigata was not able to participate live during MAAP festival's streaming media event (Brisbane Powerhouse, September 17, 2000). Instead, a short e-mail exchange was arranged. GL: Over the last 10 or 15 years there have been a lot of complaints in Japan about a structural under/zero funding of new media arts, compared to the size of the country, its wealth and most of all, its focus on new technology. With the spectacular rise of Internet and the capacities of computers, for example to do digital video editing, perhaps young people working with new media don't need institutional support anymore. Do you see any sign in the direction of a more independent media culture? Is working inside big companies still the only option for young people? YS: As you know well, it became much easier for Japanese young people to have access to the computers and other new media equipment, compared with the early 90s. But the point is actually not on the amount of available equipment, but the motivation to use it creatively and tactically, as independent media. The notion of "independent media" and the necessity of having it is rather weak in Japan, being somehow concealed in the society. The necessity of "independent media" rises when (1) the people shares the notion of "being independent" as one of the fundamental human right, (2) they are aware of being in a crisis of individuality by social and/or political reason, (3) they are conscious of role of media. In the society such as Japan (as a virtual "homogeneous body"), it is not easy to find an "independent media culture", compared to elsewhere, especially Europe. Japan is good in producing portable, wearable gadgets. By having smaller, cheaper gadget people's obsession to be on trend will be satisfied. They feel themselves as part of "now, here" in man-machine environment. People are made by the products, such as fetish objects. The new products form an economical loop between the user and the company, and it is not that easy for most of Japanese to get out of it.(of course, enjoy being in the loop and trying to make independent/creative breakthrough does not contradict each other, and only from that point, Japanese young people could be creative). By the way, I think institutional support would make sense, if it provides artists opportunity to make totally new kind of creation. The thing can be achieved with institutional support is different compared to the personal/independent level. Of course very few places in Japan and even in the world where artists can utilize the higher level of equipment and sometimes professional engineers. One of such places is Canon ARTLAB where I work as one of the curators. GL: What do you think of WAP cell phone as a platform? The text message as new Haiku? Or the cracked games culture of PlayStation and Dreamcast? A settopbox interface culture? Are we really getting away from the personal computer? YS: Cell phone is getting more and more popular platform for the mobile communication.text message would be a kind of monologue, coming from the unconscious flow.not formalistic and minimal as Haiku output. (and all the people know commercially, this is the strategy of Europe and Japan to shift more mobile, cell phone-based culture, making initiative in the field far advanced from the personal-computer-based U.S. business). The ways of communication will be surely change by different interfaces, and this would in turn change our style of thinking. At the moment I cannot say that we are getting away from the personal computer, but being conscious of the different of each media, and use them parallel would make sense. At least we have to watch the situation by our own responsibility. GL: Do you know of streaming audio and video initiatives in Japan? Or do we see the same trick of companies like NTT, to make streaming so expensive that no one is going to even think about it? How did Japanese kids respond to the Napster MP3 craze? Does this put the recording industry under pressure in the same way as, let's say, in the United States? YS: There are very few. Tetsuo Kogawa (media theorist) and Jun Oenoki (media artist) are the ones initiating audio streaming. They have the experience of free radio activities for a long time, raising the issues to the public. Japanese kids did not respond to the Napster MP3 craze that vividly. They are rather watching the hype as observers, unconsciously controlled by their existing role in society... not finding the way. I personally am in favor of Napster, Internet culture and the new rules which belong to this new environment. GL: The NTT InterCommunicationCenter in Tokyo has lost half of its budget and will have to move its exhibition space to a much smaller premise inside the Tokyo Opera City building. This happened not only because of the breakup of NTT in NTT-East and NTT-West. What do you think of this development? Is it good or bad? ICC has been criticized a lot for its megalomaniac approach, its narrow definition of new media arts and mafia type of organization. Is this likely to change? On the other hand, last December ICC brought Survival Research Laboratories to Tokyo to do a free performance. Was this a clever way to silence its critics? YS: It is a pity that ICC will be smaller with less budget, in addition to the existing structural problem. It is true that SRL in Tokyo, the wild event realized by ICC, in outside space, provided a kind of critic to ICC from inside. But it's also true that it would not silence the critics to ICC in general. But even that, I think it is very important that ICC goes on, as ICC is only one in Japan and one of the few in the world which exhibits new media arts on a permanent basis. I just hope ICC would be more flexible in organizing independent activities and smaller events, rather showing a kind of "masterpieces" of media art. I think that we are getting out of the time of media arts which represented individual artists by using hi-end machines, in a closed dark space or environment. Going into the 21st Century, we are shifting into the more actual, connective environments, which would be done in/with the public space such as Internet or in the city. These would be more collaborative, communicational activities, such as "Vectorial Elevation" (by Rafael-Lozano Hemmer and his team) and the works of Knowbotic Research. It could be a kind of hybrid of research, communication, activities, between artists, theorists, researchers, curators, etc., interwoven, with the filter of "art". Not art in the traditional way. I would like to keep on being involved in such activities, as one of participants. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 57.0 <nettime> interview with Igor Stromajer josephine bosma nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 02 Aug 2000 13:00:46 +0200 It can be quite nice to see the different approaches to art in computer networks. Have you ever sung your html code? Igor stromajer has. He lives in Lubljana, Slovenia, and he is a net artist. I met him in Moscow last May, where he did a presentation of his work that was rather unusual to some. He had Jodi and Frederic Madre sing at his command, using the vibration of a mobile phone to signal them when to start. : JB: How long have you been making net art? Igor Stromajer: Since 1996. That is when I first saw the net at a friend's appartment. I am a theatre director by education, and at that time I had been working in a theatre for three years. I found out that theatre is not the right medium for me. I wanted my work to be more intimate. I wanted to be very personal. I wanted to go one to one in artistic communication and I couldn't do it in the theatre. Maybe I did not know how, or the theatre is just not the right place for this. When you are part of a theatre audience you are sitting in the darkness usually, depending on the type of theatre, and nobody cares about you. If you would not be there at this performance, then someone else would be at your place, but the performance would be the same. When I discovered that the internet is much more intimate then the theatre I knew it was the right medium for me. Here I can talk one to one: me as a creator of something on the net, and the person sitting behind the computer somewhere is usually sitting there alone. JB: Does it in this case matter then who is behind the computer, who is the audience? IS: It matters that the audience is a single person. As a single person you can go through the project as you like it: with the speed you like, the options you like, you exit the project and come back the next day... you very much decide how you watch the project. As a group audience you do not have this opportunity. JB: What do you think of internet art works exhibited in larger spaces then? IS: As far as I have experience it I do not like it. I think that virtual or digital art should stay on the net. There is no need to put it in a gallery or real space, because it has nothing to do with it. You can -translate- the work though. I was trying to translate a net art piece into the real space when I was singing the HTML structure of one of my projects. That is what I would call a translation of one medium to another, but you have to keep in mind it is just a translation: you then have two seperate pieces which are completely independent. JB: That is how you see it: that they are independent. It does not sound very independent to me... IS: A net art piece or any other art piece could be just an inspiration to do another work of art. The translation made the project so different that only the basic topic was the same: a kind of intimate communication. Otherwise all the structures I used for the singing and everything else was completely different. JB: Can you tell me more about this particular work in which you sang HTML code? IS: It came out of the form of presentation at all conferences and festivals. It is always: if you click here you go there, if you click there you go there.. a technical explanation of what is going on. This is very uninteresting to me. I decided I would just try to draw some attention. That is why I printed the HTML source, the structure, and then I sang it the way it was written. It was a presentation of my project called 'Baltica'. I did it in Skopje and in Berlin at Transmediale 1999. The next thing I did was asking the artistic manager of the national opera in Ljubljana if he could give me the stage for one night, so I could sing the theory of the internet. It was possible, and the ministry of culture agreed to pay for it. The title was 'Opera Theoretica Internetica'. The realaudio is on the net. JB: How do you work towards this intimacy you mentioned inside a project? IS: It is my wish to create a project on the net that the visitor can emotionally communicate with. The project would have to inspire an emotional response, so he or she would not think about what is on the screen or in the speakers. I feel like a sculptor. It is really emotional for me to write HTML code. I do it manually. I do not use special software for this because I really feel so romantic creating something with my fingers. I put a lot of energy in it and sometimes it comes out also (laughs). It depends on the user or visitor how he or she approaches the project. Many times there are several possibilities what to do inside a project. It is up to the visitor how far to go. There is of course also the feedback communication like emails, ftp or different protocols that are included in the project. It is not just someone sitting behind a computer watching something, it is always a two way communication. jb: What is the background of 'Baltica'? Baltica is about a virtual state or country, on the other side. It is something about the line between the living and dead world. It is about what happens after death. JB: But why call it 'Baltica' then? IS: There is no logical explanation. JB: Do you see the Baltics as a place of death? IS: I have been there once after I did the project. It is not meant as a real geographical place, but the word Baltica sounds for me like something that is not of this world. I did it in 1997, when my father died. I needed a place to put him, somewhere. So that I could imagine: where is he now? There. I chose Baltica because it sounded emotional to me, far away. I later discovered a beer is called 'Baltica' in Moscow (laughs), I bought it. They have a light version and a normal version. JB: What was the project that you wrote to Rhizome about, where people could not navigate? It caused some discussion about good and bad web design... What was your impression of the discussion that followed, and what was the title of the project? IS: The title was GPS art. I try to use different machines now, especially mobile machines, to transfer art. I do not want to quite the internet, but I want to try other possibilties. I did a GSM project with mobile phones, and WAP art (wireless application protocol) for mobile phones as well, and I experimented with this GPS (global positioning satelite navigation) art. It is about realtime data processing and so on. It started like an idea, how to navigate with satelites in a global community. I discovered that the main moving force is the mistake. We discover new things and we progress by making mistakes. A GPS system is of course used for navigation: you have it in your car, in your yacht. The basic thing first time users on the net have to deal with is also how to navigate. We are used to click on words or images to go somewhere. If you remove this option, if there is nothing to click on, you have to think about exploring other ways of navigating the net. That is why I removed all the links and I put some suggestions how to navigate there. You had to find the names of the files. It is always structured like this: you have a map, and then there are several files inside this map. They are connected usually so you can get from one file to another. There is also another way, which is when you type the name of the next file manually in the location bar of the browser. This turned out to be problematic to some. When I published this work on Rhizome I got many emails saying: there is nothing to click. People were also looking into the source code if there was a link, but there was nothing. The discussion helped me a lot. Some of it went into a direction I am not interested in. Like 'good and bad design'. I don't think that has anything to do with me. I will of course use this discussion in the further development of the project. The ministry of culture bought me this GPS machine now, so I have it at home. I have to learn how to use it for this realtime data processing. Now I have some simulations inside the project, there are six options what to do, and there is an open section where other people can contribute their content to the project. It is a work in progress. It is the first work that I have done that I have created online from the beginning though. Everybody can see how it is developing. I used to finish a project and then I put it online. That is much safer: you can remove all the mistakes, you can polish it and so on. If you do it in an open way everything hurts: people have the opportunity to see inside the process which can be very painful. This is good. I learned a lot this way. http://www.intima.org * # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 58.0 <nettime> Interview with Peter Lunenfeld geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 31 Jul 2000 15:58:43 +0200 Enemy of Nostalgia, Victim of the Present, Critic of the Future Interview with Peter Lunenfeld By Geert Lovink Peter Lunenfeld might not be introduced here, but I will do it anyway. Peter is teaching in the graduate program in Media Design at Art Center College of Design. He is director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (ITA), and is founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group. He lives in Los Angeles and is the author of "Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Culture"(MIT Press, 2000) which came out in April this year. "Snap to Grid" provides us with a broad and accessible introduction into the topics of electronic arts and new media culture. Lunenfeld hardly ever addresses the insider. As a contemporary cultural critic he manages to contextualize the somewhat self-referential, isolated new media art works. A good example is his essay "Demo or Die", included in the book (and the www.nettime.org list archive). Peter Lunenfeld is also the editor of "The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media" (MIT Press, 1999), and writes "User," a column for the journal art/text. He is editing Mediawork Pamphlets for the MIT Press, "a collection of intellectually sophisticated, visually compelling short works that will unite contemporary thinkers with cutting edge graphic designers to create theoretical fetish objects." The first will appear in 2001. This e-mail exchange, took place in the aftermath of a series of public and private conversations in Los Angeles, early 2000. GL: What direction would you like to see new media culture go? PL: I don't think there's such a thing as a single new media culture. There may have been a decade ago, but by now digital technologies have so infiltrated advanced industrial societies that we have to speak of new media cultures.. What I see today in all facets of cultural production is a kind of ferocious pluralism. GL: The subtitle of your book is "A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures." Imagine if someone were indeed to read it as manual for an Internet startup? What recipes and tips do you come up with? PL: I can't say I wrote Snap to Grid (S2G) with the thought of someone else taking it as a manual for a start-up, but that's provocative. So, what might the entrepreneurially inclined get out of the book? For one thing, they could get a deeper understanding of the aesthetics of demos, of how to communicate in real time whatever it is they've invented, or decided to bring to market. By running through some of the myths about interactivity, connectivity and virtuality, S2G might help them craft things and systems that people actually want. There's quite a bit in the book that amounts to what I'd call "understanding now." I don't know if understanding one's moment actually contributes to the bottom line and in fact, it may be the exact opposite, with those who most willfully ignore the present making the most money off of the future. Be that as it may, S2G does try to discuss emergent technological aesthetics in the light of the historical importance of the end of the Cold War. GL: Do you see any possibility of a critical art praxis and the profit-driven network economy shaking hands? PL: Art and economics are symbiotic, even when they are seen to be in opposition, so I can't see why a networked economy shouldn't spawn networked art. I think that this is a fertile time for those with visual skills to be handsomely remunerated for certain kinds of design work, to take ideas, images and sounds and build products out of them, and even to create lasting equity in commercial enterprises. On the other hand, I've never thought that info-tech capitalist enterprises would enter into a direct payment system for artists' personal explorations ­ except, perhaps, as isolated public relations efforts -- much less support fully politicized critique. Getting back to your earlier question, S2G offers a way to think about culture in general after the wide spread of information technologies. It strikes me that we are all forced to engage with vastly broader ranges of reference than ever before, and that part of what we expect from the next generation of digital appliances is precisely the tools and methodologies to help us render meaning from the flux of information. Artists working in these areas may well be able to shake hands, as you say, with the dot com billionaires, but I'd recommend the artists bring intellectual property attorneys along with them to the meetings. GL: In one of the best parts of the book, "Demo or Die," you portray the digital artist being crushed between their machines -- inherently unstable digital platforms -- and their clients -- ruthless transnational corporate capitalists. Instead of dismissing the demo as an unfinished attempt you are arguing that "the demo has become an intrinsic part of artistic practice." Have the art establishment and their critics discovered this genre? PL: I think that artists understand better than one might assume the intrinsic importance of the demo aesthetic today. As I note in S2G, the demo is closely aligned with the "crit," that staple of art school instruction in which students have to stand up and "defend" their work with colleagues and instructors. The contemporary art world has been dealing with the impermanence of performance for years, since at least the Happenings movement of the 1960s. As for design culture, I think that the expectation for commercial messages is so short that a demo aesthetic is almost built in: if the message sells, it stays, if it doesn't, that message is gone. Commercial culture has always lived by the Oulipian motto "prove motion by walking," even if the average advertiser could care less about Parisian literary experiments. GL: Could we compare the status of the demo with, for example advertisements and other commercial short films? What happened to web design? And what will be the faith of the current Flash craze and their demo artists? PL: I think that Web design calcified incredibly quickly, but that had a lot to do with bandwidth-backwards compatibility. Once an entire generation gets on-line with DSL or better connections form the home, I think you'll see another surge in Web design. I'm usually not so technologically deterministic about aesthetics, but in this case I think that the linkage is so strong between vision and bandwidth that the broadening of the pipe will bring about more design innovation. One of the utopian hopes that we all had for Web design was that the huge number of new voices entering the media would engender radical stylistic departures. On the other hand, the fact that so many of them are new to visual culture's rich and dense history means that too many of them are repeating ­ often pallidly -- other people's proven strategies and successes. Too few Flash animators know enough about the history of animation beyond Disney films and last year's motion graphics to sustain faith in anything beyond the "new." I hope that S2G can remind people that it's not enough to keep up with the tech, you truly have to love the art and its history (even if that love turns rabidly Oedipal and you want to set out to destroy all that came before you). GL: Criticism and texts in general could as well have reached a "concept or die" level. Perhaps all texts are de facto hypertext, because they are read as such. Could you talk about this disintegration into "nano thoughts"? PL: Like almost everyone who comes out of any kind of sustained discursive tradition, I'm wary of the ever more amorphous nano thoughts that fill the infosphere. But I strive to see if there is something to do about this besides keening for the lost era of 400-plus page books and well crafted essays. The Latin rhetorical term, "multim-im-parvo" or much-in-little, seemed to be one place to start. Like so many of my generation, I saw myself as a rediscoverer of McLuhan in the 80s and 90s, after his fall into obscurity in the 70s. He was fascinated by aphorisms, seeing them as probes that the reader needs to unpack and as a vastly more active than essays. It takes a sure hand to craft a compelling multim-im-parvo, though, and as I note in the book, even McLuhan ­ who was a master ­ flopped at least as often as he soared. GL: You read this development in two ways: the first is the potential for increased density, as demonstrated with the aphorism or directed slogan, but the shadowside of this is the rise of vapor theory. Can you say something about the danger of vapor theorizing and at what point texts transform into neologism and sales talk? PL: The failed aphorism is only one small part of the overarching category of what I came to call "vapor theory." Vapor theory is a gaseous flapping of the gums about technologies, their effects and aesthetics, usually generated with little exposure, much less involvement with those self-same technologies and artworks. Vapor theory is one result of the historical condition in which new media emerged. There was an almost fully formed theoretical context for digital art and design even before they were fully functional as media technologies. This certainly did not happen with film, radio or television (though there are some parallels with artists' video of the 60s and early 70s). The late 90s moment of overwhelming, and overweening, hype for the Web seems at last to have subsided, so perhaps that will temper the vapor theory as well. The increasing institutionalization of "cyber-studies" may sustain vapor theory, though, due to the ever-increasing velocity of academic job hunting and publishing for advancement. GL: In your writings, body-centered bio science metaphors are remarkably absent. Nor do you criticize them. PL: I'm one of the few people I know who doesn't want to live forever, so the central attraction of bio-blather ­ immortality -- leaves me cold. I don 't want to have an endless dialogue with Extropians and associated noospheric hangers-on about the religious fervor that they bring to these issues, nor have I been particularly impressed by the work that artists have done in these areas. Too much of it falls into the "when we have the tools, the work we'll make will be wonderful" school of mediocre art/tech. I'm fascinated by what Matthew Barney is doing with biology in his Cremaster films, but that's far removed from what you're asking me about. Perhaps my relative silence in this area is simply intellectual modesty. Just because digital technologies, about which I know something, have moved into the bio-sciences, about which I know little, should I venture cavalierly into this arena just for the pleasure of expressing an opinion? GL: You just mentioned "art/tech." Why do you think so many electronic artists are fascinated by this "arts meet science" discourse? PL: I'm wary of the notion of the artist as research scientist prevalent in new media circles. At conferences, I hear artists going on about how they are now validated in their choice of art as a profession because scientists and engineers respect their "research," and the fact that they are getting money from Intel. This attitude is incredibly odd. Collegiality is a wonderful thing, but in the final analysis, why should artists give damn about what engineers think about them? This "scientific method" is growing rapidly with the megaversity structure, in which artists who can create a practice that apes the forms of scientific research get hired and funded. They hire and fund others like themselves, and thereby build a peer network to evaluate the "results" of their work. This has gone hand in hand with the development of the arts practice-based Ph.D. in the UK and other parts of Europe. Most artists have some sort of "research" component to their own practice. But this research is generally only important as it relates to the work to which it contributes. There are some, select artists for whom the research is the work, but quite often they are working within a specifically conceptual framework and what they tend to explore ends up being the idea of research itself, rather than a specific topic (a metacritical project that is more ontological than empirical). GL: Is this then just opportunism, an attempt to bring the artist to the level of the so-called neutral laboratory engineer/inventor, in effect to "increase" the perceived utility of art in an ever more technologized society? PL: This gets straight to the heart of the matter: art can be "useful," but the glory of it as a sphere of cultural production is that it does not have to be. Researchers and scientists are trained differently and have a different set of expectations for their work - there is an expectation of utility, and often of clarity (avoiding the detours of postmodern science wars for a moment). This whole artist-cum-scientist confusion reminds me of the 1980s when what we saw, especially in the United States, were artists-cum-social workers. For every innovative effort like Tim Rollins and KAOS there were a thousand dreary "community-based collaborative projects" that existed for one reason and one reason only: to get money from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) or local funding agencies. Originally, by putting in some vague pro-social rhetoric, artists could get some support for the work they really wanted to do, but then they came to see the funding scam as their whole reason for being. What began as something of a scam turned into an entire aesthetic. Then, during the "culture wars" of the late 80s and early 90s, conservatives in the U.S. Congress neutered the NEA and this entire brand of practice died out ­ though now I see some of the same people who went after the social work funding going after money and tech from hardware and software companies. GL: Now that we've covered some of the movements you don't like, what about the ones you do? The 60s and 70s avant-gardes ­ in art, cinema and literature --are very important to you. For decades, we have heard that the avant-garde was dead. Has this category risen up and returned in the figure of the digital artist? PL: I'm very careful about using the term avant-garde, even as I spend a great deal of time looking at what other generations did indeed term avant-garde art and media. The very phrase "avant-garde" needs to be given a rest, like a good horse that has been ridden too hard for too long. When stylistic and technical "advances" come from all spectra of digital media production ­ commercial, artistic, scientific, academic, etc. ­ the notion we have inherited of a singular, oppositional avant-garde serves little purpose anymore. If our softwares, music videos, computer games and WAPs are all to be termed "avant-garde," then that phrase has indeed been reduced to a marketing phrase like "revolution." I do not see the digital artist as being an avant-gardist in any classical sense of solidarity or shared artistic destiny; and, in fact, too many mediocre talents have hung on to just such exhausted tropes to support their own, weak brands of practice. GL: I like the way Snap to Grid treats 70s structuralist film as being of central concern to contemporary media art. One chapter is devoted to the work of Hollis Frampton. Do you see any continuity twenty five years later? Or similarities compared to current digital media developments? PL: I wrote about Frampton for a number of reasons. The first is simply out of admiration for his life's work. He was able to meld rigorous art practice with far ranging and vital theorizations of his media, from photography to film to video to digital media. Like his contemporary, the protean conceptualist Robert Smithson, and those who followed this path like painter Peter Halley and video maker Gary Hill, Frampton offers theoretical texts that are supported by, and support in turn, a body of important artwork. These kinds of artist's writings offer ways out of and around the dead ends of too much mainstream, contemporary media theory. One of the things that drew me to digital media in the 90s was that same sense of artists creating the contexts and explications for their own works, on listserves, in catalogues, on conference panels, and ­ perhaps most of all ­ in bars around the world. GL: Can we talk about the preoccupation of new media theory with "the" future? One thing I've noticed about your writing is that it tends to be encapsulated within existing reality. Is there such a thing as "Californian dreaming" which would take us to yet unknown places? Is it out of context to talk about and prototype media-driven utopias? Would dreaming be the opposite of nostalgia? Is there only an intensification of the present possible, and desirable? PL: I don't think I'm preoccupied with the future. I know I'm an enemy of nostalgia, and I'm pretty sure I'm victim of an obsession with the present. My first "User" column for art/text magazine was called "Permanent Present," and concerns the way in which ­ for all the hype ­ our visual culture is not that much different than it was in the mid-80s, after the advent of the Mac' s GUI and the impact of Blade Runner's retro-deco aesthetic. I happen to loathe the idea of "futurism" as a discipline, and find myself much more interested in explicating "now" rather than the "next." I prefer to encounter other people's fantasies of mutable environments and interactive nanotech in science fiction rather than science-fictionalized discourse. I tend to keep my daydreams to myself. GL: With Kodwo Eshun you are saying: everything still needs to be done. What is the role of the critic in all of this? PL: I approach criticism as a way to elucidate that which I admire about art rather than simply trying to fit it into a preconceived straightjacket. I'd like to think that I've been able to explore that ferocious pluralism I mentioned earlier which so characterizes our era. This is disconcerting to those who pine for the certainties of movements, schools, or avant-gardes that marched in lockstep, one after the other. These days, you're on your own, it's up to the individual user to craft his or her own frameworks. Part of the job of the critic is to offer models for this process. GL: Let's go back to Californian dreaming. What about the specificities of Southern California? Is there a critical mass of new media theorists, artists and critics in LA-San Diego region? If so, how are they supporting themselves, is it mainly through institutions? PL: Southern California has a tremendous wealth of resources for both the creation and the investigation of visual culture, especially as that visual culture becomes more involved with electronic, digital and networked technologies. Southern California has three of the top five film schools in North America (USC, UCLA, AFI); three of the top five places to study animation (Cal Arts, UCLA and USC); three top rated architecture departments (UCLA, USC, Cal Poly Pomona); the best independent architectural school in North America (SCI-ARC); and North America's most concentrated high quality training in design and the fine arts (including Art Center, UCLA, CalArts, UCSD, UCI, Otis, and UCSB). All these institutions are within driving distance of each other. There is, therefore, already a body of visual intellectuals here ­ people making, thinking about, and writing on visual culture. Even more, these institutions and those who work in them are engaging ever more seriously with the relationship between the technologies of media production and their aesthetics. I founded mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group back in '95 to enable theorists -- Lev Manovich, Norman Klein, Phil Agre, Steve Mamber, Vivian Sobcheck and N. Katherine Hayles ­ to come together with scientists ­Ken Goldberg, Danny Hillis, Paul Haeberli, and Mike Noll; architects -- Tim Durfee and Marcos Novak ­ mixed it up with curators like Carole Ann Klonarides; and graphic designers ­ including Rebeca Mendez and Somi Kim ­ shared a space with industrial designers like Lisa Krohn and artists ranging from Bruce Yonemoto to Jennifer Steinkamp to Diana Thater. LA is a place where you have to plan spontaneous events, so it's both more complex and more rewarding to spark such interactions. GL: In the context of discussing digital media, could we then speak of a renaissance in Southern California? PL: Naissance, rather than renaissance, perhaps. When Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote "The Californian Ideology," it was a bang-up analyses of a certain brand of Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism and the mush of ideologies offered up in the pages of WIRED (remember when that magazine mattered?). But for some of us who were working here, the tone of the article rankled: "So far, the Californians have proved to be better at making virtual machines than social analyses." This is a typical European attitude ­ the New World makes, the Old World thinks. This is as ridiculous coming from London as it would be from Paris (though I always felt that Barbrook and Cameron had a better sense of humor about their characterizations than did many of their readers, both in Europe and the US). GL: You've talked in the past about the emergence of a SoftTheory in Southern California. Can you explain what you meant by that? PL: SoftTheory attempts to build a methodology that critiques and explicates the present and that grounds its insights in the limitations as well as the potentials of these technologies. SoftTheory is the product of and producer of a high electronic culture. It engages with popular culture in all its forms, but does not attempt to become popular culture. It builds a fluid discourse about visual culture that is broad but rigorous, that has shared concerns but no totalitarian central meta-discourse. On the other side, this is not a high electronic culture built entirely around renunciation. SoftTheory lives in, with and through these technologies in a particularly immersive Californian way. We are not deluded into thinking that 19th century analyses of industrial capitalism are sufficiently supple to engage with the post-industrial, interconnected world. GL: How exactly is SoftTheory particularly appropriate for the West Coast. PL: Let's go through the stereotypes again. If Paris thinks and New York does (the French equation going back at least to de Touqueville), and New York characterizes itself as hard charging while demeaning LA as laid back (the popular image of SoCal crystallized by Woody Allen in Annie Hall), then SoftTheory is a pointedly ironic term for what we are doing. It allows us to preempt both the European criticisms of theoreticism and the East Coast's condescension towards us as entertainment-addled victims of the spectacle. I 'm hoping that a few years down the line, people realize how remarkable the body of work coming out of Southern California is. In addition to Heim's prodigious thinking on VR, Agre's monumental Red Rock Eater news service, and Hayles's already renowned How We Became Post Human, look for Sobchack's collection Metamorphing, and forthcoming volumes from Manovich on the language of new media and Klein on scripted spaces. GL: We've been talking about institutions in general, but how would you program a digital Bauhaus today, what would it look like if you were to open such a school? PL: I hope it would look like the department I'm already in. The Graduate Program in Media Design at Art Center College of Design develops professional design practice in the context of diverse media technologies. We investigate interactive design theory, tools, user experience, and cultural context. While developing core design competencies, we try to be flexible enough so that the curriculum responds to evolution in the field and prepares students for careers of continuing innovation. It is a two year program. During the first year, students engage with the history and theory of new media in seminars, hone their production skills in studios, learn directly from visiting designers and artists, and devote a large percentage of their time to the Super Studio, a team-oriented group project. During the second year, the seminars and studios are devoted to more specific issues that dovetail with the students' own research interests. The Super Studio serves as both preparation and model for the student's individual master's project, facilitating a connection between group and personal work. I'd like to think that the students will be able to distinguish themselves as practitioners, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and even design intellectuals. That's what we've been building towards for the past five years, in fits and starts. One of my contributions is to try to keep the enthusiasm flowing. GL: How would you summarize your approach, then? PL: In the end, what I try to do in my classes, in writings like S2G, and through public discourses like mediawork, is to combine the object and artist specific discourses we inherit from the criticism and history of art with the more systemic analyses that developed in the study of media like film and television. When I was a kid, I read a series of tall tales about a small town boy named Homer Price. In one story, a nefarious con man came to Centerburg to sell an invisible powder that when sprinkled on anything made it "ever so much more so" whatever you liked about it. Donuts would taste ever so much more so like donuts, bikes would ride ever so much more so like bikes, etc. (I was too young at the time to think about its immediate application to sex, but that's another story). I always loved that powder, even though, or perhaps precisely because, it was bogus. Paul Foss, the publisher of art/text, has said that there is an underlying theme of faith to my "User" columns ­ faith in art, faith in faith, faith in something, even if as ineffable as the invisible powder. Overall, my work runs counter to the nostalgia of both left and right. I prefer to spend my critical capital figuring out what makes right now so compelling. I am forever in search of the strategies, media and artists who will make what I think of as our future/present "ever so much more so." Peter Lunenfeld, Snip to Grid, MIT Press, 2000 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 58.1 Re: <nettime> Interview with Peter Lunenfeld richard barbrook nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 8 Aug 2000 21:43:41 -0400 Hiya, Just to clear up a misunderstanding: >When Richard Barbrook and >Andy Cameron wrote "The Californian Ideology," >for some of us who were working here, the tone of the >article rankled: "So far, the Californians have proved to be better at >making virtual machines than social analyses." This is a typical European >attitude ‚ the New World makes, the Old World thinks. This is *not* what the sentence means. What it really says is that the New World makes good things and thinks lazy thoughts. Funnily enough, 'The Californian Ideology' was primarily inspired by our annoyance at the way that the Old World thinks about the Net whatever the New World thinks. Look at the uncritical reception given over here to 'Wired' in '95 - and to Manuel Castells today... Later, Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Richard Barbrook Hypermedia Research Centre School of Communications and Creative Industries University of Westminster Watford Road Northwick Park HARROW HA1 3TP <www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk> +44 (0)20 7911 5000 x 4590 ------------------------------------------------------------------- "While there is irony, we are still living in the prehistoric age. And we are not out of it yet..." - Henri Lefebvre ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you would like to keep in touch with what is happening at the HRC, you can subscribe to our Friends mailing list on: http://ma.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/lists.friends.db # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 58.2 Re: <nettime> Interview with Peter Lunenfeld Peter Lunenfeld nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 09 Aug 2000 00:26:28 -0700 Dear Richard -- There was no misunderstanding to clear up. In fact, your rephrasing, "the New World makes good things and thinks lazy thoughts," rankles even more than the original. It should come as no surprise that some of the earliest critiques of West Coast techno-libertarianism originated cheek to jowl with the hype. Take "Teenage Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading Mondo 2000" by Vivien Sobchack. Sobchack originated this dead-on dissection of "optimistic cynicism" and "the ambivalence of mondoid desire" as a short piece for Artforum in 1991 while she was still living in Santa Cruz, and then expanded it for Mark Dery's Flame Wars in 1993, after she had moved to LA. So, don't blame California (much less the whole of the New World) if too many Europeans took WIRED at face value. "The New World: Thinking rigorous thoughts since 1776." Yours -- Peter # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 58.3 Re: <nettime> Interview with Peter Lunenfeld Jeffrey Fisher nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 09 Aug 2000 13:05:37 -0500 now that we've addressed taking Wired at face value, i'd be curious for the bunch's thoughts on castells . . . any takers? Peter Lunenfeld wrote: > Dear Richard -- > > There was no misunderstanding to clear up. In fact, your rephrasing, "the > New World makes good things and thinks lazy thoughts," rankles even more > than the original. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 58.4 Re: <nettime> Interview with Peter Lunenfeld Doug Henwood nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:09:22 -0400 richard barbrook wrote: >Funnily enough, 'The Californian Ideology' was primarily inspired by our >annoyance at the way that the Old World thinks about the Net whatever the >New World thinks. Look at the uncritical reception given over here to >'Wired' in '95 - and to Manuel Castells today... Since Castells strikes me as a bit of a fraud, could you expand on this? -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer Village Station - PO Box 953 New York NY 10014-0704 USA +1-212-741-9852 voice +1-212-807-9152 fax email: <mailto:dhenwood {AT} panix.com> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 59.0 <nettime> Interview with Catharine Lumby geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 30 Aug 2000 09:10:14 +1000 "The Dichotomy of Pleasure and Power is Too Simple" Critiques on Contemporary Media Moralism An Interview with Catharine Lumby By Geert Lovink The Australian cultural commentator Catharine Lumby is one those rare academic scholars, equipped with the ability to make theory accessible to a broad audience without simplifying or losing any of the points she wants to make. Passionate of the Differences, weary of the Homogeneous. Besides her work as a journalist she published two books. "Bad Girls" from 1997 deals with media, sex and feminism in the nineties and critiques the moral stand of some feminists in their unholy alliance with conservative censors. She explains why feminists need porn and calls for an active engagement of women in all issues related to both old and new media. Women should no longer take the position of the outsiders. They are inside and should deal with that new position, so Lumby. "Gotcha, Life in a Tabloid World", which appeared in 1999 was partly written in New York and digs into cases such as the O. J. Simpson, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the death of princess Diana again from an engaged, amoral position. Taking popular culture as it is - both a billion dollar industry and a fractured mirror of society - might be common sense these days. Still, we somehow can't get rid of the same old complaints about vulgar sensationalism which stand for our Sin and decline of civilization in general every time we find ourselves in the middle of a millennial scandal. I visited Catharine Lumby in her office at Sydney University where she was recently appointed as Director of Media and Communication where she was in the middle of her next project, the protective, paternalistic media images of teenage girls. GL: I suppose it was not your aim with "Gotcha" to convince the general audience to consume tabloid media. They will do that anyway. Is it still necessary to debate with the last remaining intellectuals about the legitimacy of popular media? CL: The polemics of "Gotcha" is addressed to a group of media commentators who represent the interests and values of middle class educated liberals and their hidden elitist ideas in relation to class. My concerns is the way in which the public broadcasting service (ABC) defines who "the public" is. Do they speak to the long-term unemployed, to women? Do they understand the diversity of publics that make our society? Liberals see all commercial media as irrelevant. They judges these media by standards which they see as universal or neutral. Sometimes commercial media is able to speak to people in a language that is accessible to them, addressing issues that are important in everyday life, that are ignored by elite or quality media. I am very suspicious when anybody claims to speak on behalf of "the public". I began this book because I wanted to investigate my own prejudices, coming from a middle class educated background. We need to bear in mind that many interests and values are colliding, which may be incommensurate. There is no universal position from which to judge the quality of information. I am a pluralist, very interested in diversity, supportive of public broadcasting. Often the liberal model is very authoritarian, paternalistic. GL: What is the reason why this liberal class in Australia still holds such important power positions within the media? CL: Australia has a relatively small population (19 million inhabitants, GL). The range of media commentators is rather small too. The baby-boom generation tended to have a smugness about their politics. They are satisfied with themselves, convinced that they are still radicals. In "Bad Girls" I looked at feminism, as a feminist, admitting that feminism has become part of mainstream. It has become an institution. Once something becomes mainstream you cannot assume it remains always radical. For me feminism has to be a constant questioning. Some of the more prominent senior feminists in Australia don't recognize that they have power themselves. Admitting this would undermine their position. Some members of this generation are so convinced that they are always radical that new ideas, from new generations are easily dismissed. With others from my age, I am in my late thirties, I find that is very difficult to even have a debate about these things. You must be aligned with the right if you are dare to disagree with the old left. Speaking positions in the media and the knowledge and cultural industries became quickly occupied and the baby-boom generation hung up to these jobs. Sometimes it is that simple. For younger generations there is no such a thing as a secure job, with a secure speaking position. They are forced to work in-between academia and the media, or in-between the mainstream and alternative media. There is much more flexibility and a tendency to see power as contingent and relational, not as something you unconsciously inhabit. GL: Let's move to the tabloid world. In "Gotcha" you looking into four cases, Diana, Clinton, O.J. Simpson and Pauline Hanson, the Australian populist right wing politician. Have you noticed any developments on that front over the last decade? CL: When I am use this word "tabloidization" I only looked into broad shifts within mainstream news and current affairs media, both in content, the formal shifts such a the sheer competition to attract audiences and the collapse of entertainment and information. These shifts have been intensifying since the eighties due to global capital flows and technological changes. Apart from ethical considerations there are also positive sides to these scandals. The O.J. Simpson case is sometimes dismissed as just a voyeuristic story about a terrible killing. Why do we have a year of coverage of this on CNN? Hang on. This is also a very important case about race relations in America, domestic violence, gender politics. It mirrors society on a deeply symbolic level. The verdict itself split the nation. 96 million Americans watched the highlights of that trail. People could see the trail, make up their own minds and act as a jury. 86% of black Americans thought the verdict was fair. Almost an equivalent amount of whites agreed, which tells you that white and black America are two different countries. All in all an important, iconic event not to be dismissed as non-political voyeurism. GL: Sensational reporting has been around ever since media were invented. After the Frankfurt School dismissal of popular culture which dominated the seventies, and the Cultural Studies response of active, engaging consumer of the eighties, what position has been developed over the past years? CL: That dichotomy between power and pleasure, or manipulation and resistance, is too simple. The media sphere is very diffuse and defecated. People don't belong to one demographic and inhabit different audiences at different times. The consumer in the way market research would like to carve people up doesn't make any sense. People are constantly negotiating their personal, social and political identities in and through the media. They are producing, interacting at the same time as they are consuming. It does not make sense anymore to distinguish between the producer and the consumer. Media literacy has grown. A broad understanding of how images and text are being put together that you did not have with television in the sixties or seventies. You can see that in advertisement which targets at youth audiences. Advertisers are very aware how clued in young people are. Media buy people's attention. At the same time, if they were able to do that, Hollywood would never make a bad movie. They spend millions of dollars on market research and continue to have turkeys. The audience remains allusive and does not exist in a mass manipulative form. GL: Despite numerous attempt to overcome and deconstruct the division between high and low culture, that distinction still is in place. CL: I think it absolutely is. Not because it is natural. Many people are invested in this distinction. There is a certain level of fear about the rapid changes in popular culture. The other night I did a radio program on ABC, a quality program, and they asked me about television. They had people calling in, and at least three of them began by saying "I don't own a television set, but. " and then they would talk about television. How would they know popular culture being bad for everybody? There is a claim here to have some highbrow taste but in reality, how people negotiate culture in the everyday, these distinctions are increasingly meaningless. It is also class-based. Of course you can see some really bad opera and first class Hollywood films. Not all European films with subtitles are good. It all becomes laughable. GL: Internet has come out of its stage of infancy and hype and is rapidly becoming a mass medium. Do you see possibilities for the Net to develop itself in an interesting way or will it go through the usual phases of corporatization, like all other media? CL: The Internet is offering more possibilities for alternative spaces. Because of the rise in media literacy the issue of government control is being debated on such a higher level. Look at the Microsoft case and the level of suspicion amongst users it is causing. As governments and large commercial entities take over or dominate spaces on the Internet, there is still always a possibility for new spaces opening up. It is rhizomatic, in that sense. There are structural reasons to be more optimistic. A little movement in one part of the Internet can force public recognition on a much broader level. You don't have to be able to produce a glossy magazine or a documentary to make some public space. GL: Despite all this we can see a "tabloidization" of the World Wide Web happening, as we speak. It is an ideal medium for rumors of any sort. Would a code of conduct make any sense in this context or should we just except the fact that all information on the Net is potentially unreliable? CL: We need to rethink ethics. What might an ethics for this diverse media sphere look like? It would have to radically critique the liberal concept of ethics which is about imposing an code. This is right and this is wrong. My politics are probably radically democratic. Any attempt to regulate this sphere I would like to come from the grassroots up. We need to give citizens and media consumers access to inexpensive forums where they can have their concerns about the media expressed, like invasion of privacy and unfair reporting. A system of simply fining media organizations does not work very well. What is required is a forum where consumers can negotiate with producers. The sanction would be publicity. Mainstream media often pretends it is outside society, that it is not a powerful institution. It does influence events and people's lives and so not merely reporting. We are dealing here with powerful institutions which need to be under permanent scrutiny. The European inquisitorial model, where you look at things case by case is better than the Anglo-Saxon model which is about an abstract code that you apply. Right across the Western world consumer groups have these concerns. We saw the anger at the media, after the death of Princess Diana. The journalist is the evil person now and has replaced the Russian in popular culture. It needs to be a flexible system of conciliation, bringing parties together, and this includes the Web. GL: Where do you stand in the debate about taboos? If there is a taboo, it needs to broken, reported about, displayed, at any cost. Some critics have started to question this blind response and long for a moral climate in which society can protect, and care, its own taboos, against the inherent tendency to break them. CL: There is no issue that should not be examined. There is always the question of context. There is no absolute line. It is always a negotiation, the balance between public and private interest. Unethical reporting can escape any code. I don't have some fantasy that we could prevent the abuse, also because technologies to spy on people have exploded in such a way . You could be anarchistic and say that anyone can publish anything. That's fine for the Net. My concerns are more targeted towards large media corporations. For instance when you have unbalanced reporting in a situation of war or geo-political conflict, it would be good to have an international body, a forum where people could be heard. If you look at CNN, on many occasions people have raised the question: What is the other side of this? GL: The trend of media reporting on media is on the increase. But that's not exactly what you mean. The programs we have here in Australia, like "Mediawatch", are grounded in traditional, liberal journalism. They look for spelling errors. Journalism has been largely unreflective about its own practice. Objective reporting is given as a given value, rather than a concept that was invented in the twentieth century. In some sense investigative journalism can be seen as the highest form, like Watergate. There is an interesting similarity to tabloid reporting on the private lives of celibrities. Both forms can serve the community well. When I used to work inside parliament as a journalist, I was struck by how stories were put together there, very much like gossip. There would be a rumor, you would call someone to confirm it, they would deny it, but talk to you off the record, thereby adding gossip to gossip. Mostly it is about who likes who. Still, this information is regarded as very important. If you would use the same techniques to bring news about Pamela Anderson's marriage breakdown, it would be seen as the worst form of reporting. The distinctions between high and lowbrow are artificial. They have more in common than recognized. There is a gendered split between trivial and important and what matters to people. GL: Would you be in favor of unrevealing the edutainment industry, reversing the infotainment paradigm, into serious information on the one, and true entertainment on the other hand? Or should we further intensify, radicalize concepts like reality TV? CL: The latter. You can't pull anything back in this rapidly changing environment. It is much more interesting to radicalize media concepts. We are still in a transitional period. Television and even radio have been influenced by the model of printing press. Maybe I am too much of an optimist. I think we heading somewhere much more interesting with multi-channeling and the collusion of the professional and the amateur, the public and the private, information and entertainment. GL: Media and communication studies have become the largest departments inside universities. How do you think all these students should be equipped, knowledge wise? CL: Critical thinking. I am not teaching them what to think. Instead they should be encouraged to want to think., helping them to discover their own curiosity. To recognize that knowledge within universities is just one discourse. There are many points of access to information and ideas. Learn them how to navigate certain discourses and how to speak to different audiences. That's a question of genre and rhetoric. This should be based on a broad humanities education. And perhaps a familiarity with sciences too. You want to equip people for lifelong learning. The information revolution and the intellectual flexibility which is demanded of people is increasing exponentially. Rather than training people vocationally to deal with one piece of equipment or another, you want to give them access to broad skills so that they can think visually, able to manipulate words as well as image and sound. Training only for print or television is old media thinking. GL: How would the new media critic look like? The concept of criticism itself has come under pressure. It has been declared dead by post modernism. It has been associated with cultural pessimism. CL: If critical thinking is posed from a position of authority, from which to judge, that's very problematic. There is no outside. You hope people will be skeptical, which in the best sense means to question everything, including your speaking position. Being suspicious about everything you see and read. An ungoing skepticism. GL: Your new research is dealing with youth culture and youth policies. CL: I am particularly interested in teenage girls. They are a category of people about whom a lot is being said. There is a lot of protective anxiety around them. There is so much said on their behalf but you never hear from them. We hear that they are anorexic, caused by super models and magazines, that they are sexually vulnerable because people want to prey. They are closely monitored in the ways they dress. Despite all this fascination there is this denial that this group has any agency. What is they relationship to this protective discourse and where would we hear the voices of teenage girls? If you simply go out as a media researcher, put them in focus groups and ask them questions, you are replicating the thing you try to get away from. They will tell you want adult researchers want to hear. I don't really buy the idea that any group is voiceless, or powerless. Catharine Lumby, Bad Girls, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1997 Catharine Lumby. Gotcha, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1999 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 60.0 <nettime> Interview with Mark Bain mhc nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 17 Jul 2000 15:50:35 +1100 Interview with Mark Bain-- by Molly Hankwitz and David Cox January 2000 Jan 3, 2000 Artists' Television Access, San Francisco CA MH: Can you talk about the origins of your work and key ideological determinants that lead you to proceed with a body of work looking at resonance and sonic waves? I mentioned a project I thought of using the Brookyn Bridge as a huge sound instrument. It makes a great humming noise if you've ever stood down below it. It really vibrates and hums wonderfully.There seems to be a bit of an interest at the moment in wave theory and notions of transmission of energy and such...is there a reason for that sort of resurrgence of interest, do you think? Bain: It has been a connecting of two different elements in my past, one being, my coming from a family of architects and engineers. I've been around architecture all my life with my grandfather and father and even great grandfather. At the same time, in my youth, working a lot in sound, even playing in bands and things like that. Where those two elements having collided has influenced the work I am doing right now...As far as sound and structures, I have been looking for a certain dynamic that is connected to solid structures and architecture. One of my key interests is looking for a liveliness in stable elements, and, in looking at that, seeing that stable items are essentially not stable, are instable, in fact, so I'm trying to mine these areas --these hidden messages--you might say---of transferring through architecture. I've developed a multichannel system, about 46 geosensors, that I can plant in different places that are highly sensitive vibration transducers that pick up energy which travels through solid materials, and because solid materials have molecules, the energy travels efficiently so you can really listen to areas from great distances. So when you talk about mic-ing the Brooklyn Bridge, of course, that is possible. I've even thought about doing a whole series of monuments, like doing the Eiffel Tower, doing, you know, the Arc de Triomphe or some other places. Lately I've been doing live mixes, basically running a multichannel array of sensors into a mixing console and doing a live mix to sort of put it together on two channel DAT and then I've also started to work with a DV camcorder and using the audiotracks on that to record audio while recording visually the object from which I am recording the sound. For example, on something like the Eiffel Tower or Brooklyn Bridge, it would probably be interesting to use sensors that have radio beacons or radio transmitters so that I could get far away from the subject, videotape it and mix it at the same time, and still listen to the object... DC: Your work seems to examine carefully this idea of there being a secret, a hidden meaning a kind of sub-meaning to buildings and architectures and the intervention of time seems to be an influence with your high speed work as well, films like INSTABILITY, where there is this emphasis on events over time and the hidden becoming revealed through scientific means by revealing patterns that would go unnoticed otherwise both sonically, with the buildings, but also visually, with the films and that seems to overlap a little bit with the culture jammer ethos which seeks to reveal hidden meanings... Bain: People aren't used to listening to their buildings. They might listen to the inside, or sounds outside spaces, but not to the actual architecture itself, so it is always interesting to get that sound and do something with it and lately I've been doing these projects where the sound is recorded and then installed into other architectures so it's the transference of one architecture's acoustic energy into another's. What is interesting about those projects is that for the most part people have a really hard time dealing with those sounds because they are quite heavy. And that is the strangeness of it. These sounds are very very heavy, low-frequency, and maybe not comfortable. You can have a comfortable space or, for example, the field I recorded in Poland....it was a beautiful, beautiful field with this nice vision of a landscape except the sound underneath was like a heavy trembling, it was almost like a sound of fear, sound of energy, sound of something, kind of crazy. MH: This phrase of "architerrorism," with which you have referred to your work, is this still a pertinent idea to you, the idea of terrorizing buildings, as in the 'projectiles' project? MB: For me, the idea of "architerrorism" is interesting in relation to general architecture because, to a certain degree, developers and architects are terrorists in themselves...in the sense that most common people who live in the street or who live in these buildings don't have ownership on the properties, and so the decision to make buildings or to develop areas of cities or towns is really out of their hands. They might have some sort of voting connection to the city or something, but otherwise its pretty much just "money talks" and for me I have a problem with the fact that that is considered legal and right, yet, some of my projects might be considered "terrorist" so maybe we should sort of flip those definitions. MH: Hypocritical in that you are doing it for art and who is the real terrorist? MB: A perfect example of this that is happening right now is Paul Allen who used to be with Microsoft, bought out the Seattle Seahawks, and then he used it in a game with the city. He threatened to pull the Seahawks out of Seattle unless Seattle built him a new stadium. Now Seattle already has a stadium, for football, built in 1976. It's a beautiful structure, actually a structure that my grandfather worked on or built in his firm. So in February, next month, they are going to implode this huge concrete stadium so that they can build a new stadium and to me that is completely absurd. DC: How does that tie over with some of the events happening recently with the events for example of the WTO in Seattle, with this unwillingness to take lying down the values of big money or big corporations? MB: I'm not sure how many people from Seattle were actually involved with the WTO. I think a lot of those people were from the outside, from elsewhere, which I think is good--and Seattle is just an area. But with the example of the King Dome, its...uh well... we've been highjacked. Even at the time when they were voting it in. Essentially Paul Allen funded a whole ballot that was off-season voting, in other words voting that didnt take place at the normal time and rallied all the Seahawk fans to go out and vote for this amendment to keep the Seahawks in Seattle thus to demolish the old stadium. MH: So the politics of architecture and urban planning are very closely linked to arguments related to public and private, and where those interstitial lines overlap. Your work is very much about that in a sense,the public and private, those kind of marginal borders areas. MB: Yes, i think so. DC: So what is going on with your work now, especially the issue of the retrieval of artifacts. I remember when we visited you in Boston last year and you showing us your collection of sort of retrieved, found seismic paraphernalia from MIT. Bain: Scientific debris. DC: Is that hunter-gatherer impulse still at work? And how? MB: That's a certain archeology of technology that has to be considered. There is a strange wastage out there of technology where there is a certain time-frame where things are new and they have to be new and all the old gear gets thrown out even it works perfectly well and that's very common. I see that wastage and there should be something done with that. DC: And do the Dutch sympathize with this? Bain: Yes, I think they do but the prblem with holland is its just too darn clean! There aren't as many scraps to be had. It's a lot better coming over here to the States. In fact I've done projects in Holland and have had to come to the States to actually get my materials and ship them back. DC: Is that because America is more wasteful or because its not as good at being clean? I mean what's going on culturally there, as you see it. Bain: Its larger, more industrial. There is more money here, more technology. MH: So who is influencing your work now? Who is stimulating your work? Julia Scher? MB: She's a freind of mine and she certainly does some interesting stuff with her surveillance installations. She's more of a personal influence. Other people more: Matt Mullican, Gordon Matta-Clark, of course, the Dadaists. Right now its interesting because there is a certain trend I'm noticing of artists working in architecture as a sort of vehicle working within or against or some how involved with art and architecture and its influence. DC: What about the Situationist International and Constant and the idea of the destruction of the derive and playfulness?Are these ideas that you are familiar with and which resonate in your work? MB: Well, certainly play and the idea of taking back a certain amount of energy out of your city and the derive also of going through spaces. There was quite a nice show at the Witt deWitt in Rotterdam last year, of all of Constant's work. He was Dutch. That was quite amazing to look all that work in one place. MH: Amsterdam had quite a lot to do with the Cobra movement and the development of new ideas about the role of architecture in a more open- minded kind of society where commerce was less the defining paradigm. MB: Of course Holland is a strange place architecturally anyway; its all reclaimed land. There's this fear of water in a sense or there's always this idea they are below sea level. DC: They are always keeping water at bay. The dykes and such. MB: Yes, for example I was involved in a show at De Appel in Amsterdam called 'An Architecture' and that involved installing 4 mechanical oscillators into a non-loadbearing wall that was acting basically as a diaphragm. When I activated it it was pumping infrasonic air throughout the whole building--this is a 3-4 story building--and that was extremely effective but the problem with Amsterdam is that all the buildings are connected side by side and so the neighbors complained that objects in their living room were moving around on their tables... MH: Spirits at work! (ha) Bain: (ha) ...so then they called the environmental police who shut down my project. It was only open for one day at the opening and then was shut down. DC: What's happening in the future. What major projects are you getting ready for now? MB: Now, I'm working on an interesting project which will be at Expo 2000 at Hannover. Its nice because it involves enough funding that I can do a creative project. Its going to involve robotic lighting systems and architectural spaces using just light and shadow influenced by Moholy-Nagy early Light-Space Modulator. I'm collaborating with my brother John, and we will be working with off-the-shelf robotic lighting units that they use in theaters and clubs and things, and basically going into the guts of these things and reworking them completely. DC: I saw a copy, I think, of the Light-Space Modulator at the Bauhaus Museum in Berlin. MB: The original one is at Harvard, so if you ever get the chance to see it...(hee) MH: Moholy-Nagy is obviously interested in what happens when you automate the abstract collision of light on surfaces and the kind of patterns that result from the mechanization of the direction of natural forces which I suppose is also, the tendency of Dada to invoke, shall we say, the latent forces at play either in pictures before they're cut up and stuck together or in the natural world before it is mediated by technology. So are we still in the Dada period and is it going to continue well into the new millenium? MB: It still feeds into a lot especially some of the New Conceptualist work. The Light-Space Modulator has always been considered as the object and what's interesting about that is that Maholy-Nagy never really considered it as the object. He looked at it as what was happening with the light, patterns on the wall, in the space itself. That's what I'm interested in completely. MH: People tend to look at your resonating motors and that's not really the work, it's the effect of the work, isn't it? MB: Yes, it's terrible especially for my documentation. It's completely difficult to do documentation except for my recordings because if you put it on slide all you see are the small motors or in the installations you might see large cracks, a cracked wall which i've had in one project, or at one point I had a floor that collapsed as a result of these devices. On another project I'm using one of these machines that is one of these things, a Stairclimber for old people to go up their stairs. I've installed this machine in my studio where I have a large window in the space that is maybe about 6 ft. high meters up and I built a 6 meter beam at an incline that's shoved through this window so what you do is ride this chair outside the architecture... DC & MH: Great. (hee, hee) Bain: You pass the envelope of the wall. and then outside my studio is this non-used space, like this garden, no one is back there, all this grass with a nice view of the canal. I essentially got selfish and built the chair for myself --it's a way to add a new space to your building--so that I could go outside and read or have coffee or something like that. MH: Where the most sympathetic areas of the world for your work? Is it Japan, or? Bain: Well, when i was doing the project at De Apple there was a curatorial program of about 5 people and one of the people was this Japanese woman who was terrified of my work. She was scared shitless about my work. She thought I was going to bring the building down. She was one person who didn't want me to be involved in that show. Japan yeah, maybe it will be a strange facination for them but certainly being in Europe, I certainly get more support and openess for my ideas and because of that exposure, then I can bounce back to the States and there is increasing interest in my work here, so that's good. DC & MH: We should be winding it up now. Thanks. (smiles) Bain: Thanks. (c) all rights reserved, Hankwitz/Cox, 2000 ******************************************************************************** ************************************* Molly Hankwitz is an architect and media curator from the United States. David Cox is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Digital Media at Griffith University. ________________________________ molly cox mollybh {AT} netspace.net.au # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 61.0 <nettime> Interview with Kodwo Eshun geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 25 Jul 2000 11:15:17 +0200 First published in the Online Magazine Telepolis: http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/6902/1.html German translation: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/med/6901/1.html "Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there." A Speculative Dialogue with Kodwo Eshun By Geert Reading Kodwo Eshun's sonic fiction debut "More brilliant than the sun" is a hallucinating, addictive experience. For months, I carried this theory bible on me, inhaling sentence after sentence. As a DJ and music critic, Eshun speaks in record tracks. Sitting on the oblique, waving designer floor of Rotterdam's V2 medialab, the following dialogue did not focus on Eshun's thesis of electronic black music as science fiction. Rather, we were investigating the genre of speculative thought. My experiences with this particular text mode as a member of the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge (adilkno/bilwet) had shown how bewildering yet invigorating it is to go beyond fixed definitions and interpretations. Ignore the academic mind police, journalistic codes and the postmodern Zeitgeist. Concepts can freely and very precisely be pushed, streched, reversed, blurred, recombined, negated, mutated. What are the rules of the intensive textual explorations? Certainly not all bids are succesful. Theory craze can turn into paranoia, disgust, intellectual exhaustion. It is possible to misread the signs of the time in search of the right mix of cultural artifacts and turn cynical as a misunderstood genius. One gets easily lost on the wide planes of immanence. Obviously, a brilliant concept can as well turn you into a millionaire, pop star, or at least a celebrity inventor. For a while speculative thought and the rise of new media had been a productive couple. In September 1999, when this interview with recorded, I felt that this historial situation, the "short summer of the Internet", had already come to a close. Kodwo Eshun's golden days of techno, drum 'n' bass, drugs and psychedelic theory, Deleuze and Guattari and cybernetics must have been revealed to him around that same periode, in the mid-to late nineties. Kodwo was still under the spell of it. We both felt that the primal energy was there. One just has to tap into it, no matter what the historial weather forecast said. To me, negative thinking and speculative thought were allies. The "alien" pole and engagement of the critic in the everyday both move away from the ritualized phrases of today's advertisement and PR discourse. Speculative thought heads way beyond today's visionary - and is much more risky. Rather than than promoting linear growth scenarios, radical models for unlikely futures are being assembled. The game with ideas is all yours. But what are its rules? GL: Where in your biography would you trace the origins of speculative thought? KE: One of the key inputs is McLuhan. There is an interview he gave in 1968 called "Hot and Cool". Here I realized that McLuhan had anticipated my project. He was saying that the extraction of concepts from any field demands that these concepts be used as probes in order to get into a possibility space. Not to contextualize and historisize, tracing the archeology of concepts, where they come from, which is what academics are trained to do. Often it helps if the concept is quite empty. McLuhan was really fascinated by this. It works well with science fiction, specifically J.G. Ballard. Science fiction as theory on fast forward. In Ballard's theory fiction, especially his "Atrocity Exhibition" in 1970, and "Myths of the Near Future", his trilogy "Crash", "Concrete Islands" and "High Rise" and in lots of his essays you have a particular obsessive figure who is trying to work out and stage a particular project: WW III, or the assassination of JFK and Malcolm X all over again. In order to do that they are forced to go out and construct a theory kit. Take for example a painting of Max Ernst, which will then have an aggressively speculative meaning and function, which will then lead you into a new space time. On the other side you have the scientist, who using speculative analysis to understand the anti-hero's speculative projects. Here we have two levels of speculation, embedded inside fiction. The other thing is that Ballard is doing a science fiction of the next minutes. He drops away the Star Wars space opera, with its galactic and robotic elements. What you are left with is a science fiction of nine minutes from now, the technology of plastics, the pill. He is drawing a zodiac of the present. We have the following: speculative theory embedded in science fiction, science fiction re-interpreted as an analysis of the ongoing present. Add that to McLuhan's idea of extracting concepts and using them as probes to get to somewhere new. Once I had found these aspects I became more conscious in applying them to sonic concepts which composers and musicians would adopt. Often they would not make programmatic statements. The concepts would rather be buried in track titles or within an album cover. You would be able to see it, but they would be compressed, abbreviated, and I wanted to unstuff them. One of the key elements I took from Deleuze and Guattari's "Mille Plateaux" was that philosophy should be reconstituted as concept manufacture. Philosophy - Heidegger, Hegel, Merleau Ponty, Lacan - always gave me a headache because it was imponderable. Content manufacture made it more like being an electrician of thinking, trying to find circuit diagrams of the present. D&G were so brilliant when they said: we can't help it if Proust tells us as much how space time works as Einstein does. We can't help it if Henry Miller tell us as much about desire works as Freud does. The theory fiction border is utterly permutable. These ideas came to me in 1994-96, when I met Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and her PhD students Mark Fisher, Steve Goodman, Suzanne Livingston at Warwick's Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. We were all working on the same thing, the permeable membrane between certain concepts, embedded in science fiction, wanting to radicalize certain aspects of Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto. We got a particular boost from music. Sonically, drum 'n' bass meant that we left the song far behind. There was new music coming out every week and this obliged you to come up with a conceptual apparatus which was totally post-human. We were fascinated by the way in which rhythm had taken over. In the sixties it was the guitarist who was the lead figure. In the seventies it was the synthesist. And in the nineties it was the drummer. If you imagine a sonic triangle, with the singer in front, with guitarist and dummer on each corner. In the nineties the dummer had move to the front, and both the singer and guitarist had gone. It was not even a human drummer. It was the evolution of rhythm as information, from the drum kit, to the sampler, to the virtual studio, going from a mechanization to a virtualization and complexification of rhythm. This meant that we could break with the tendency within experimental music, where the further you would get into it, the rhythm would drop away, rewritten into ambience and timbre. Listening to drum 'n'bass meant that it would not necessarily be that way. Rather the other way: you would go further into hyper rhythm. Once we did that it gave us the confidence to use twentieth century sonic concepts, use Stockhausen and Cage and reject their conclusion. Drum 'n' bass was using so much remixology. Key drum 'n' bass tracks were often remixes of previous tracks. All around us people were so sober, so heavy and moral, which used to depress us. We found that we could use all this material as speculative playground and have an adventure of concepts. I was really pleased to find an old essay by Sylvere Lothringer which explained how they wanted people to use Semiotexte books for speculative acceleration. Instead, people started using these text to prove their moral superiority, saying "You are wrong, you have misunderstood Foucault." They used theory for prestige, to block speculation. That is why so many artists used to resent theory. You would get these lame pieces, somebody trying to apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word "ontology" on a cover, instead of taking Parliament to read Heidegger. They always did it the other way round. Theory wasn't being used to pluralize, to see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you listened. When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form. I was really inspired by the Futurists and Marinetti. For ten years I only read critiques of the Futurists, saying they were fascists. In fact, they were the first media theorists of the twentieth century. They were amazed by X-rays, by artificial light and lamps, out in the street, by new camera's and photography. They just wanted to explore how new technologies broke up the solidity of the organism and involved lines of force. Futurism, supremacism and constructivism were the science-fiction of the first machine age. The fantastic adventures of the early modernists, from Tatlin to Malevich. Machines, media and art thinking were one and the same. Some artists are just extremely good theorists. Still hard to find, this material. Go and look for the essays of El Lissitsky. The same counts for the speculative writings of the photographers Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. I realized that Barthes never had an academic degree. And why McLuhan used to structure his ideas with number or the alphabet, not be bored to death by the academic obligation to seriousness. GL: Speculative acceleration, in my experience, can go two ways. The one is going further and further into innerspace, exploring the spaces within spaces. Opposite to this movement is a speculative thought which wants to go out, towards the utopian, the Alien. KE: The first move towards innerspace is the microscopic analysis. It scales right down from the imaginary sound worlds that a record generates in your head towards particular figures within that world. If you talk to people, this is what they are really fascinated by. The sense that all these sonic life forms are crossing from the world of the records into the world of your head. When you put on headphones the functional expansion of your listen capacity your brain grows to the seize of the universe. R Murray Schaefer, the inventor of terms such as soundscape and schizophonics, talks about headphones as a headspace which is not geographical but expansive. Both moves--towards the inside and outside--are endless. The drive towards the utopian and the alien works really strongly. I wanted to break with the compulsory pessimism at the time. During my cultural studies period I used to work on authors such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha. The premis was: because social relations in capitalism are bleak this sets the parameters of our thought. I did not see why this was the case. I felt all thought was being hemmed in, and locked, at certain point. It allowed a fatalism, where the more blocked and frustrated the thought was, the more there was some strange kind of dignity. There was this nobility in pessimism and failure. Then I read D&Gs "Anti-Oedipus", and Foucault who said: "Do not think you have to be sad in order to militant." GL: At what point do you think a concept can hit reality and be transformed into material practice? Speculative thought can easily drift away and become irrelevant. I find it fascinating, almost addictive, to see concepts being implemented into software, network architectures, artworks, living discourses. How do you think it is possible, to get from the level of the individual author, like you and me, onto a level of more complex organization, to jump from individual subjectivity to a level where discourse gets materialized and hardwired, where it gets witten into software and networks? KE: Once I left Warwick University I went abroad, to Vienna in 1996, meeting Berlin people, Paul D. Miller in New York, reading Erik Davis from the westcoast, getting in contact with Nomadsland magazine from Paris, I realized that there are several people with a similar structural position, who had left academia, infiltrating pop cultural spaces. They did not footnote their work and refused to contextualize their work. I wasn't alone. There were sectors in every city who were moving along similar tendencies. GL: We believe that theory can explore unknown land and does not have to reduce its task to recite other people's work. It has a certain avant-garde position in it, a sense of anticipation. I do not feel ashamed by this, despite all the criticisms and the fact that the avant-garde has been declared dead at so many occasions. KE: I have given up listening to people saying all adventures are over, all heroism is done, we are all born too late and have got no options but to sit around and recombine the forms of other, greater people than we are. How many years I have heard this? The grand narratives are all done. There is nothing left to do. It is always told in our own good fortune. Once I started meeting Sadie Plant and Nic Land at CCRU I realized this wasn't at all the case. Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there. Sadie Plant's "Zeros and Ones" is a heroic book with a massive scope. It crossed centuries, it generalizes wildly, it is rigorous, but it is also gigantic. Sadie rejects all metaphors, nothing is like. Everything is scale, can be on the one hand microscopic, and totally macro as well. Everything can be molecular and molar. I felt I was on the same side with all these people who have a common enemy in the delibidinizers, the boring critics who take a sonic event and drain it, for example by reducing the music to the social crowds it attracts. Fat Boy Slim thus becomes students' music. Instead we should see a formal analysis as a first stage of rethinking the social. Phase one was criticizing everything. Phase two was writing, being the hermit. Hiding away, refusing the phone calls, the trips, the jobs. Phase three is now, travelling, the network, when you realize that a book will never bring you any money. It is all about the communication vectors which a book makes possible. My next book will be an afro-futurist anthology with a historical section, with Samuel Buttler (The Book of the Machines) to McLuhan and some of the composers. The second part will start with David Toop and Greg Tate and will travel through Belgium, Germany and France, Holland, the east- and westcoast. It will show the spread of concepts, the linking of science fiction and sound, sonic fiction. Afro-futurism as a transversal tendency running through popular culture, acting to destabilize what people thought black identity was, what pop identity and culture identity were. There was not only a compulsory pessimism in theory when I started. There was also a compulsory ghetto-centricity of black popular culture. Always this hermeneutics of the street. GL: The identification of, let's say, German kids with gangsta rap has proven to be a trap. KE: We could reject this and travel on totally different vectors. I wanted to make what started in Sun Ra as a vector. It was important to destroy the previous, like all avant-garde does and to move forward where black identity is intermittent and hazy, often non existent, nullified. This led me towards Identity as intermittent fluctuation, the epiphenomenon of convergent processes in the body. Identity and consciousness aren't top-down. Artificial intelligence always started with modeling the world. Artificial life instead started from local tendencies, like a small muscle, and several of them combined together make the intelligence of the leg. Identity only arrives later, as communication amongst motor systems. In this way you can get away for the centralized approach which is only crippling and just leads to dead ends. This is where robotics becomes so fascinating. If you see a Hollywood film from the forties, the only role an Afro-American would have is that of an elevator person, the servant. Then read Norbert Wiener from the same period, saying that robots are the precise automatic equivalent of slave labor. Then I realized why all these voices in machines are women's voices, because women used to do all these jobs. I really like Sadie Plant's parallel of women and machines. The rise of automated systems frees women from these drugged roles. GL: Instead of the writer offering some form of compensation, leaning towards a humanist position, and make sense of the world as it self, theory should try to imagine the impossible and transcend from the world of possible connections. Do you think this is favorable option? KE: Ballard said that the writer should access inconceivable alienations. People do not know what they want until they are presented with it. Nobody knows what they desire. There is a machine, but it takes the form of book. You know books are boring. Still, when you open my book it says at the top: "Discontents". The writer is admitting right upfront his irritation, impatience and restlessness. GL: I have experienced cycles in speculative thought, of discovery and excitement, travelling further and further, until you reach a moment of realization (or not). The concept then dies, fades away, loses its magic, and start to feel worn out. In certain cases, speculative thought is being developed in complete isolation. It is even likely that these journeys towards the end of theory are undertaken in uncontemporary circumstances. Th ough the hermit position is not always a voluntarily one. Forms of criticism which are engaging, searching for new languages and aesthetics, could be a way out. In your experience, how are speculation and criticism related? KE: Everywhere around you, the death of critique becomes visible. But critique and criticism are not the same. In my case I started to connect music with art and science fiction. Then you start realizing they are already connected and social disciplinary apparatuses are at work to separate them. Once you see that they are connected, the effort stops to bridge them. You stop being reactive. It turns around. That's when scale becomes more important than analogy or metaphor. You start thinking how across scale and materials general processes emerge which you can see and follow. That's when cybernetics start to become more important. You want to be specific generalist. At a certain point you want to be maximalist. Think of that strange rectangular material in a recent work of the Berlin company Art&Com. Or the typographer David Carson with his giant word objects, which has these twisting 3D forms. I also like the hyper architecture of Lars Spuybroek with its non-Euclidean geometry. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is only a start. In ten years more and more things will use spine vectors. That is why the futurists and constructivists are so useful. They tried to extend the immanent processes which their medium suggested to them, which was coined at a moment of extreme mutation. The digital artists I worked with, all try to understand the psycho-geography and what computer networks are doing to location, topology and place. Where they are when they are on-line and what happens when they go off-line. GL: That's when concepts start to become functionality and are not just anymore idea, ideology or fashion. KE: I started noticing how many neologisms were used in hyper architecture. I counted so many of them! All these architects were obliged to introduce neologisms, to carve out this space they are working in. William Gibson's idea that neologism is the primal act of pop poetics. It is the fist phase of concept manufacture, which depends on immanent analysis of the forms of the medium you are in. Since this medium is the process of extreme change, this puts pressure on your language. I love the idea that digitization does not stop at the screen. Concept manufacture on the one hand is an indulgence of the intellect, on the other an absolute necessity. Everything is being digitally mutated. And all the descriptions are obliged to change as well. GL: Let us look a bit closer at the moment where concepts, distracted from the speculative mind are out, and get transformed due to exposure to the outside. Now in my view some for these transformations are successful, whereas others fail. Like what you said during the talk you gave, here in V2: men find it more difficult to transform compared to women. Could we say the same about the art of metamorphosis onto higher cyborgian stages? Could we speak of failed transformations and successful attempts to become cyborgs? KE: One is always inside mutation and certain ways of understanding are more useful than others. In the world of music the mutation has now moved in R&B and garage. A lot of ideas which were useful in jungle are of no use anymore. That is why in the talk I gave here I used terms I would never have used two or three years ago: intimacy and love. That is, intimacy inside the machine. Now all the energy in pop culture has moved there. That is the risk of the new. I would not say failure. It is more liveliness. Concepts which take the temperature of thought, and those which lag behind processes. New music demands new immanent analysis. Concepts have to live as much as the culture they are accelerating, or complicating. I would not say that have to be in a state of permanent revolution. Not failure or success. It is more rates of quickness and intensification. You want concepts to amplify states of mind, mood vectors. Opening up a possibility space which music suggests but never explicates. Dance music is so covert. Everything is so buried in the song. If you make an interview with musicians they won't tell you anything. They will speak about their personality and keep the sound world totally mysterious. Pop music is a public secrecy. This is opposite to the world of classical music where they will tell you everything about the music, its structure, and tell you nothing about themselves. GL: There are experiments with Internet radio. MP3 suddenly became big. These developments tend to focus on distribution, not on production. How could we imagine networked music? Most musicians, in my view, still work under the conditions of Bach and Mozart. They act like the individual genius, compose a work offline and then dump it online, if they use Internet at all. Can we envision a production of music which is situated within computer networks? KE: This is all true. Say, you go to an MP3 site and there are between 3000-8000 tracks, sitting there to be accessed. The question then becomes which site attracts you, draws you. So far MP3 is only threatening the middle range apparatus of the music industry. You can now have websites which act as virtual record labels and virtual studios, an entire strata of musical structures. It has not happened so far that the network is seen as the starting point of music. Even on the Net it is mainly Sony and other big record companies you hear about. It is only when their bulk starts to become a problem, and their massiveness turns into a flaw that the micro sites of post-media initiatives will start to appear on the radar. So far nobody knows they are there, until you are there, with them. What is disappointing to me about net.radio is that its sonic artifacts are not more radical than the music generated off-line. That is why I do touch the MP3 topic. Instead I would rather focus on something like Earshot (www.deepdisc.com/earshot), which is simultaneously a search engine and an audio interface, combing the sound files the search engine pulls down. GL: Apart from MP3 databases, there are free radios and webmasters jamming together and clubs connecting other clubs. What do expect from these online events? KE: Can you download the parameters of emotion and affect that make a club? It is the sound of music travelling through bodies, the entire affective convergence which makes a club. There was an event I went to in 1996, Digital Diaspora, with Scanner in the ICA in London and DJ Spooky at The Kitchen in New York. GL: But that's already much too public. The pressure of representation in such a setting is huge. I think such linkages can only succeed in an informal atmosphere of freedom and relaxation. We have the technology now to cut out mediators such as record labels, shops and magazines and get in direct contact with each other, on a global level. Mediation is becoming a distraction, dominated by large, controlled portals which will try to monopolize live events. KE: You could be right. The failure of linked project so far has been that things happen on a screen and then everybody is watching them. At some stage we will get music that amplifies the sound of the network. Soon we will witness the birth of an immanent Net sound which is produced and distributed within the networks. I got online only in 1998 and I turned this lateness into my advantage. Old media love the backlash of the Internet which is happening at the moment. Everybody gets caught in this fascination for rejection of no more online, back to the street, to drugs and sex. Under the radar of this fascination a net-based music culture could come into existence. Both the doom and boom aspect of the Net are over. Once they both collapse you get something else. Still, I feel this the lack because it is still not there yet. Net theorists are hoping too much for something to come out of MP3, but nothing is happening. Sonic evolutions happen when people give up on things. It is when you give up on breakbeats, that's when drum 'n ' bass happens and nobody notices it. Hiphop is dead. That is when you get extreme mutations. GL: As a newcomer, what do you think of Internet criticism and media theory, all the work which is done outside of academia? KE: I like the fluctuating bits, where theory loses its authority, deauthorizes itself and starts to become a babelogue. The Babel moment Pattie Smith used to talk about. Rigorous polylogues and all mashed, that is what networked thinking looks like. That's what the readme! anthology of nettime looks like. Crosstown traffic of tones and registers. The next stage could be aphorisms, slogans and instructions. What D&G said: write with slogans. The best of Nietzsche has that. They make you feel brave and heroic. My book was rewritten eleven times, staying offline, making the text more clear, more compressed. If I would think of an online hypertext continuation, I would work with margins, extended footnotes, other text levels. On the other side, one of the worst books ever written is "Imagologies" by Taylor and Saarinen. The level of media theory is so banal, yet the design was so high level. I like the slim book of Lars Spuybroek, Deep Surface. There is lots more to be done yet. The format of the book can be reconfigured in a much stronger way. GL: Is there any future for the cultural industries, cultural studies and pop in the UK under the third way regime of Blair? EK: The convergence of pop and the Blair administration allowed traditional, old media back in. The Dome functions here as an attractor, from Britpop to cultural studies. Well known fashion designers certainly play a role it. On the other hand, there is fashion nowadays which operates at a conceptual level and barely sells anything, such as Vexed Generation from London. For the first time there are fashion theories. I liked the remarks of Bruce Sterling at the end of "readme!" where he says that there will be this demand for new content in the next years to come. The Dome is a wonderful container for all these people, walking around from exhibit to exhibit, showing each other how brilliant they are, captivated by their own excellence. They can stay there, casting a shadow over themselves. This leaves the rest of us quite free to do everything else. Britpop, Demien Hirst and Blair, that's what they think the nineties was all about. Not Sadie Plant. Mutual flattery in the media really works and the Dome is the symbol of this mirror world. It is Debordian spectacle to the max. Some will always carry the Dome around with them. The Berlin Wall came down, but the Wall was still in people's heads for another decade. You can never knock it down, it is stronger than ever. The Dome will be like that for a certain industry. It is not a visionary exhibition like the 1939 World Expo. There will be no spin-off products. Its only result will be a self-satisfied containment of culture. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 62.0 <nettime> a b,-a interview brian carroll nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 28 Jul 2000 12:18:59 -0800 an interview with Anand Bhatt, Architect conducted via e-mail. 18th July, '00. see: a b,-a [2] http://www.ab-a.net/aba_02/ ~ * ~ Q. You have been involved in architectural theory for quite some time now, how relevant, do you think, is it in actual architectural practice today? Also how would you compare the situation hereto that in the west? I should make it clear at the start, that I am not involved in architectural theory. Some of it does creep into the work we do, but it is not architectural theory per se. I have always been fascinated by architecture's abilities to `double' reality. It is a form of representation that is built, almost unconsciously, by people as they come together. Architecture is, in my personal jargon, a Fossilic of the doing, a domain of meaning formed through consensus or otherwise. It embeds information, significances, and even knowledges. And as a representation it is a subject of study. I am quite curious about the point of synthesis that buildings represent: the are shells for a species, the homo sapiens, which is a very delicate animal. Homo sapiens wouldn't survive without buildings, and buildings are everywhere, necessitated by almost all spheres of his activity. And at times there is a sort of self-reflexivity, a self-understanding of this doubling. A meditation on its Arche: its origins [not always and not necessarily by architects], it's significance, its use-value. There is a practical reasoning and Techne [a discourse on technology and technique, not always and not necessarily of the engineering kind] which grows out of it. This latter part separates some buildings from other buildings. It is this separation I study and call, provisionally, architecture. This representation is quite distinct from the deliberate, or as they sometimes call it, `artistic' representation of architecture, mostly done by architects and allied professionals for the approval of other professionals. The meaning of the representation takes on the form of a "secret". They have all these architectural theories, these amalgams of operational hypotheses and dogmas, barring a few, a representation of dominant opinion[s] meant for people "in the know." The profession, as it seems to me, has a greater use for history and critique. People are rather passionate about the two. ~ * ~ It would be very difficult to compare the situation `here' to the situation in the West [and I suppose you mean the English speaking West, with its specific preoccupations]. The dichotomy implied is very restrictive in the way it confines our identities. We always compare ourselves to the West, and that doesn't really work, because in comparing we alienate ourselves. The urge to compare comes about, in my opinion, because the west is quite vociferous. They have the money to print all those glossies and buy tickets for all those professors one sees around, lecturing. They are quite charismatic: their products are good and look exciting, mysterious to us in a way. Their statements are constantly repeated and always slightly differently. Power is constituted through this proliferation of their representations. This places real limits on our imagineability. People here are isolated, and starving for information and are often taught by western trained teachers. We find western products everywhere we look. This has become quite serious with the internet. Western architecture is just two clicks away, and one looks at it in isolation, from the safety of one's home, or a library. So people absorb and then the west creeps into our universe even without our having been there. It creeps into our `internalised' conversations, into our thoughts as individuals. And then, as we speak, into our discourses. We often enact the occident, with a local sheen. It would be nice to see the shape our universe would take if this condition is lifted, or at least, if it became unstable. The under-representation of non-western architecture concerns me. I have a web-site, and it is quite a useful one in this context. We get a number of e-mails from people saying "oh wonderful, finally something that should have been there long ago," or "explain this," or "this is wrong," or "what nonsense!" Some six thousand e-mails went back and forth last year and the few compelling ones came from Latin America, from China and Africa. It is those that really made me think. I have had valuable discussions with people in Argentina, Chile and Peru, for example, because there is stuff on the web site about freedom and class structures, as they have sustained periods of dictatorship and inequality. Or China, because they were never really colonised and therfore they are quite curious, having never experienced it, about my efforts [and I really have to struggle at times] to think and breath freely. In Italy and France they wondered about media technologies and Americanisation, and the limits it places on imagineability. Q. Practice requires a fair amount of articulation that theory very rarely provides; how often do you think theory affects practice? One could establish a number of relations between theory and practice, and I don't believe that theory should provide for practice, barring a theory of practice. Because then theory wouldn't be theory. Let's take an example, you have to do a lot of theory in order to produce a car, and in a sense a car only represents a number of issues of theoretical physics [the laws of motion, e.g.] and chemistry [exothermic reactions]. In consequence there is a lot of theory involved in a car. But theory doesn't provide for the product, or even the practice which brings that product about. That practice comes from mechanical engineering, safety engineering, quality control and industrial engineering, from finance and so on. And the car doesn't even stand for the theories that produced it, certainly not in popular imagination. It stands for status, the pecuniary, consumption, convenience, style and all that. In other words, there is a big derivation involved. Theory and practice are on distinct planes, sometimes in parallel. And one does not draw a direct relation between the two. One has to concentrate on the intermediate, or thresholds by which theory and practice is brought together, which is "conceptualising." I am very short tempered when I teach. I have a reputation for that. Mostly it springs from the fact that students, even practising architects, do not grasp the previous point. They stand in juries and in class and tell me what their concept is [or was], which is quite meaningless. Because then they try and force me to imagine that their building stands for a `concept' and some knowledge. That is captioning, same as in advertising. I would rather they tell me what they experienced in acquiring the concept, why did they choose [in hindsight] to acquire it, how did they connect knowledge on different planes [e.g., the plane of practice and of theory], what they learnt in the process and so forth. These are the intermediate states one would necessarily have to involve, and they often don't. They read their theory books as if they were user's manuals, or guidelines. And then it all becomes very difficult and untenable. One doesn't learn anything and so everything that is done becomes trivial. So theory doesn't `provide for' articulations. One has to seek articulations that spring from theory. One has to find meaningful ways of applying it, and one has to choose the right instruments. The fashioning of concepts. Sophistication. There is always, then, the question of intention. ~ * ~ But then there is quite another take on the issue. If you indulge your sense of humour. What makes you think that an architect makes buildings? Don't architects just theorise buildings? It is the labourers and the contractors who make buildings. All that architects do is to make drawings and specifications: which are unities of architectural representation. And they make a number of propositions in these representations, which are related. And they rely on facts to make those propositions. The propositions follow from facts. And they detail these propositions with information which make them tenable. Their drawings `predict' the building which might be there, because even as they act very sure, they never really know as to what the building is going to look like, into what it will grow and become. So the construction and occupation are really an experiment which validate their propositions. So we can say, when one designs, one is theorising. Or faking theory. Sometimes they call it a Design Thesis. Q. What would you say is your philosophy (or philosophies) behind all that you build? How much of theory do you really practise in your works? I don't think I have philosophies when I build. How could one Philosophize with a Hammer? Nor could I quantify the amount of theory I practice, that would be absurd. I just build when I build. It is a moment. It is an experience, and I record the experience: of dealing with people, of seeing things I had only read about, of making choices and much later of understanding those choices. It is the experience of freedom, as close as we could get to it. It is also the experience of truth, in the phenomenal (or phenomenological?) sense, of becoming-active, becoming-animal and so on. Purification, if you permit the jargon. And one labours over the drawings, one changes and feels the quickening. Take the SoC projects on my web site for example. I knew, when I started, that there existed Societies of Control. That they derived from the great 18th and 19th century systems of confinement. That they had certain characteristics, e.g., they pretended to be `democratic' by allowing individuals to speak and act freely within narrow margins, much like this anonymity-thing on the web. But in reality, they were quite something else. And then, I was faced with the task of making a building which would represent these societies. Now, as an architect, I could not tell anybody to change the world, not with an immediate effect at least. All I could do is to work like a chronicler: to see and record the fact of having seen. Be a witness, and find markers [the Piranesian cage, lines of sight] which indicate my witnessing. In other words, actuate the default of middle practices like architecture: there is no pure determination of order here, nor a pure experience. Only play, an interplay. The Mapping projects are different. Because one changes in advance the model we have of reality, and then builds within the changed circumstances. Those projects `change the world' by default. And they are especially powerful since we wrote the new CADD/CAM technologies. Q. We have a very rich setting here in India for us to evolve our own theory in architecture, yet there is a tendency to peep to the west and base our works on their philosophy. Do you think this is a healthy trend - a step towards globalisation or will introspection help do better architecture? Schizophrenia. That is what I think. We have all become that through the last century. It is the effect of de-territorialisation. Look at your question for example. Our bodies act here, our imaginations seem to dialogue with the west. Our options are curtailed, and that makes me very angry. Why talk about globalisation alone? That is capitalistic. There is also, in fact always-already, the aspect of internationalisation. Specifically, when it comes to labour. There are molecular revolutions, even though governmental [and non-governmental, I would say with some justifiable vulgarisation] organisations try and curtail them. The countryside is becoming-active like never before, the Dalits are mobilizing as never before. There are new capital flows, there are new technologies. There is a new self-assertion in parts of South Asia. And there are stories that need be told, but never are. The left trounced everybody in Bengal recently, the Air-Force had women pilots in the combat zone at Kargil, a number of our cities are actually improving quite rapidly, there is a new accountability in politics and administration and all that without globalisation, which is after all a development in international finance and capitalism. We should be able to think about a world without globalisation, imagine worlds without globalisation. We should start imagining other corporate entities, apart from multinationals and companies. The Army has a corporate structure, our cities have corporations. That latter part of your question implies some sort of crisis, mostly of confidence, which I don't like. I don't like the assumption that we have to specifically contend with a certain variant of capitalism, however dominant. And that we have to contend by introspection, which implies crisis. Introspection is a good method, it is used effectively in Satyagraha. It is a weapon of war. But the present table of contention has no urgencies of that sort, we could still comfortably conceptualise around it and send it out of harm's way. And what do you mean India? An `Indian' theory will always be a schizophrenia, or a wish. It is too vast, too nebulous, too mobile. Can't you see that? To produce a pan-Indian theory, you will have to amalgamate the State, which is of an occidental extraction, and its' patterns don't really match those of its population, not very well. You cannot have a nationalist approach to architecture, because then which nation will you talk about? You can't speak of a regional architecture without being a hypocrite, because you will castigate a fifth of humanity into playing `regional', and regional vis-?is what? You cannot have a `Hindu' architectural theory for that will include the pacific rim and the whole of south Asia and will still be offensive from a dalit and a tribal point of view, the similar for `Islamic' theories, or `Buddhist' so secularisation wouldn't work as a method. The `Gandhian' model and the `Nehruvian' models and the `Socialist' model all are rapidly losing their relevance in light of the de-classified state archives, here and in the former Soviet Union and Britain and elsewhere. And then to what end? Will theory ever be an identity marker? Or a common shared truth? A dogma? That would be mystification. Do the Japanese and the Kenyans have different laws of gravity? Q. Theory often addresses the polemics of context, and context is invariably linked with urban issues. What do you think about the urban designing perspectives in the country today? It really depends on what one means by `context'. The strict meaning would be parts preceding and following the thing under inspection, and in that sense a building has an urban `context', because it is definitely a part of the city. But then I wouldn't know if there is urban design in India. Sure, some people talk about both, urban design and context. But I don't know if the two questions can ever be meaningful because all they do is to describe a certain morphology: specifically, a certain morphology of ideas. And the two are simplistic constructions, so it is easy to string them into `talk'. Far too much is made of contexts. Let's see, `contexts' are constructed almost like sets, they are defined by limits first and then there is, as people here take it, a nominal positive definitionby identity markers. They are defined firstly by what they are not, and so are primarily limiting. And then everybody takes them as identity markers, and define themselves vis-?is what they aren't. That is limiting to the point of suffocation. It may be rather useful to define identities in relation to the imaginary, the symbolic and the `real', vis-?is what it could be, what it imagines itself to be, by not the relations that exist but by its abilities to bring relations into existence. By the abilitiy relations have, especially in affirming our desire[s]. By what it lacks, and by the way we are propelled in relation to that lack. And the same applies to identity markers, they are often rather static. One would prefer dynamic processes as compared to the rather fixed system of sets. That brings us to `urban' design. But then, what is a South Asian urban? Do we have an operational definition of urbanity here? A definition which is not of a Hellenic or a Christian extraction? Or not of an ancient Hindu or Islamic extraction? I haven't seen one yet. So it is difficult for me to say what Urban Design would mean, because I haven't yet seen a definition of the subject matter. It may exist, because I haven't looked too hard, so perhaps you should tell me about it. Q. What would you do that would be different? Nothing. Firstly, because I use entirely different terms when it comes to identity [I don't really like identity grids]. I rather a system of voids, capable of bringing things into existence. I rather like the Cardological and the Ordological systems we just experimented with at the School of Architecture, CEPT, with a City-Machine cycle. As Andreas Fluck said it, "it is a meeting point of lines, a luminous junction in the dark expanses of space and time". And second, `context' and `urban design' are terms that do not denote or explain much. They represent ideas with little explanatory value. So to differ from them would be of little use. If I am forced to, I would integrate them into higher level [by which one means of high explanatory value] systems of ideas. Like bricks. And then dissolve them, and be done with them, replacing them with better quality bricks, with a greater `load bearing capacity'. Thereby coming up with a new construction of ideas, a new `theory' if you please. Q. Do you think that the state of affairs of our urban situation today can be revived and taken control of? To say that the urban system has to be revived would be to assume that the situation is `dead' in some way. And that definitely isn't the case. Our cities are dynamic, Our cities are expanding, and they are increasing in complexity at a wonderful rate. Entire new technologies are going into them, there are quite some innovations in financing them, they have sprung radically different organisations of labour and drives of various kinds. They even have some fantastic pathologies of their own. So I would contest your question: I think our cities are very alive and they have some processes which are unique to South Asia. I sometimes project them on a large screen, and then take a time lapse sequence over the last fifty years or so. And the result is amazing, you see all these mercurial blobs sliding all over the regions and they grow large and then they merge. Entire cities have grown and fused into one another, it is possible to drive in a straight line for a couple of hundred kilometres in western India without ever seeing the countryside. It is factories, and commercial centres and housing and infrastructures all the way. The second part of your question is, are the affairs in our cities controlled? I am sure they are, or they can be with very little effort. If you see the success they had in Surat and to some extent with some of the smaller towns in Western India, where they worked with the basic issues of infrastructure, health and so on. The urban situation was revived spectacularly by the citizens who have had enough, so they didn't stop and listen to the architect or the non governmental organisations [both are often seen as a part of the problem] and took charge. And they had information technology, local television channels distributed news only via cable which showed the developments in real time, they had local organisations and it was all very molecular and rather spontaneous. The establishment was forced to follow. The question is, does an architect or an urban designer have a role to play in this? And I think the time has passed for the so called professionals. The future will have to do with the citizen's expectations, and the answers will come from engineering colleges, from the social sciences and from people who have to work with issues of governance [and not necessarily planners] it will come from information technology [not necessarily the internet] and communication. Architecture and planning are quasi-academic institutions of a colonial extraction. And they were never designed to face our kind of cities. So to transform them to suit will be an extensive and a very expensive job. They will have to find new ways of stating problems, new techniques of teaching, new laws, new modes of practising and so on. And they will have to combat the old colonial or westernextracted prejudices, categories, modules of thinking and all that. Especially the categories, because we just don't have autochthonous categories: consider this, all the professions [architecture, civil engineering, planning] and branches of knowledge which deal with the city came up in response to authentic demandseven facts createdin the west. The Ecole des Beaux Arts had to invent new methods because Paris was expanding like crazy and there were all these new things that Benjamin and Harvey have analysed: so they had the design studio, and then Le Corbusier had to write Towards a [new] Architecture and say `look it doesn't work, you haven't stated your problems in relation to the Industrial Revolution, which is a major fact of your times. Not very well, at least'. The Bauhaus had to work with socialistic demands and industrial production and so they `invented' the workshop method. We teach both `studio' and `workshop' in our schools, but it is hard for me to see a reasonan authentic demand in the city that makes it necessary to teach so. It is a fossilised transfer, it threatens our institutions rather than support them. I would like to see a course-curriculum in South Asia that asks the first questions: what should an architect know? What is his mode of knowing? What techniques of knowing should he learn? Everybody has some sort of a response to these questions, but I would like to have these questions asked. Raw, pure and sharp. And their absence concerns me. At a b,-a, we think it will be more economical to extract another set of professions from the dynamic of our cities: a new series of disciplines and theories to work with those disciplines. This is what we call for all the time. There must be ways of crossing over the thresholds, we say, we must work and find fundamentally new methods at the contemporary level of technology, rather than the late nineteenth century modes used by architects and planners. We see the tremendous waste of energy in our cities so we start with the Solar and Industrial Infrastructures. We don't see much use for the simulation technologies of western extraction so we wrote IO. We don't see tenability of CAD/CAM technologies [AutoCAD and its clones, including those three or four desi numbers] so we wrote Machinic Heterogenesis, and use it. We don't see the relevance of the `theory talk' and the decision-making most people employ so we wrote Grapheme. And somewhere we will have to find new pedagogies, and techniques for the transmission of knowledge. Q. What has been the change in your ideas and beliefs from when you started till date? This is a trick question, isn't it? I don't think there is space here to go into all the stuff I have junked over the years. Or the stuff that got superseded because somebody else had a better version of it. Or the stuff that burdens me. Or the stuff that simply went obsolete because the sciences that I use advance very fast, and it is all very cutting edge. I find that I am returning more and more to the training I had before I did architecture, on the whole. I am more interested in Computing, Engineering and Production, more in Philosophy [and not necessarily criticism] and less in aesthetics [unless you define aesthetics as a study of meaning, rather than beauty. Then I am all for it]. I am more interested in the necessary, and in criticising the Excessive. I am more interested in the inevitable demise of the profession. I no longer know what they mean by `architecture' as defined by the Architect's act. So I am interested in closing it in its present form, in the strict sense of the word. In creating spaces for the new institutions which will surely come about. Q. What has been your most satisfactory project till date? None, and all. I don't think of buildings, teaching or writings as projects. Those are end-products or by-products. The projects for me are sequences of thought. They are organised in a number of series. IO, Mapping Heterologies, On Typology, SoC, Solar and Industrial Infrastructures... some forty-five odd sequences. And each series is a transformation, by itself. I think along these lines, and progressively transform my understanding. So at any given time, some are exciting, they are happening. Some others would be dormant, a matter of patience and research. Some bring spectacular results, like Grapheme, which has gone sailing cyberspace. Some are massive failures. One learns. Acknowledgements: Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi for reading through and correcting the text. Anjali Mahendra and Anubhav Jain. http://www.ab-a.net/architexturez/questions.htm # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 63.0 <nettime> Interview with Frank Hartmann, Viennese Media Philosopher geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 14 Jun 2000 18:35:00 +1000 Beyond the dualism of image and text An interview with the Viennese media philosopher Frank Hartmann By Geert Lovink Viennese media theorist and Internet critic Frank Hartmann recently published a book, in German, with the ambitious title "Media Philosophy". In an e-mail exchange he told me, in moderate terms, that readers should first of all perceive the work as a school book, written for educational purposes. Published in the prestigious "red cover" UTB series, Media Philosophy seems an ideal title for media theory courses. In a few months the book has become a bestseller, Frank proudly reported. After having played down possible expectations of a Magnus Opus, it is worth mentioning that Frank Hartmann's book indeed has a lot on offer for those interested in a continental European overview of media issues, drawn from a philosophical perspective. Hartmann is neither a member of school of German media archeology (Friedrich Kittler) which is arguing from a techno-determinist position, nor does he want to come up with an ethic of what to do with the Human in the age of technology. Instead he likes to present an "integrative approach of media evolution", bringing together technology and society. Drawing upon the work of Vilem Flusser, Hartmann further develops "communicology", an analytical approach of the "medial turn", in which categories such as knowledge, textuality and language have become inseparable from the technologies in which they are expressed. Written as a chronological overview, Media Philosophy starts with Descartes' imaginary space and the birth of the modern scientific author, further on to Kant and his notion of the reflexive subject and the need for publicity, over to Herder and Humboldt, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin etc. Each chapter is closed with a neat summary. Interesting chapters, beyond the usual thinkers and references, for example deal with Fritz Mauthner, an early 20th century German philosopher who tried to deconstruct the "logocratic regime" of language. Unknown to me were attempts of Gottlob Frege, at the end of the 19th century, to develop a new logic sign system - a pure script of concepts, not contaminated by the dualities of meaning. Another, well written chapter interprets Otto Neurath's system of icons as "universal code". It is not exaggerated to say that continental media theory, once it has positioned itself within the tradition of philosophy begins and ends with a critique of language. It is only through the language that we can access the image (Mauthner). A similar argument can be found in contemporary writings on the history of computing and the Internet, in which code-as-language is lying at the basis of all computational commands. Hartmann is not just a Eurocentric. He is well aware of the Ango-Saxon traditions, from Pierce to the Canadians Innis and McLuhan who both developed a "media theory of civilization". Hartmann's scope does not include the US-American mainstream communication studies. Nor did he include the more recent wave of cultural studies with its roots in critical sociology. The last chapters are surprisingly up to date and deal with Internet culture, the notion of the virtual class (Kroker/Weinstein), the emerging genre of "net criticism" and the topology of electronic space. Time to ask questions about the motives behind the making of such an ambitious overview. GL: Frank, can you tell us about your interpretation of what "media philosophy" could be? Are you the first to use this term? Can this new discipline be studied in Vienna? Writing about technology and philosophy already has a tradition. Would the philosophical approach of media and the Internet in particular start from there? FH: Of course there is a tradition in reflecting technology, although continental philosophy especially, tends to purify thought from all materiality. Academic philosophy never bothered too much about media, while language always was present in its discourse. Media would be the realm of aesthetics, of what affects the senses only and not logical human thought. There is this clear obsession with language, with the logocentric tradition, which also reflects the predominance of abstract codes - and therefore text - in western culture. I started to be fascinated by the critical approach of Horkheimer's research group (later called the Frankfurt School) which in the 1930's made the press and audiovisual media as an object of study. This social and cultural studies explicitly was put up against Heideggers approach, which concentrates on the single human situation and which is set within a rather pessimistic 'logic of decay'. By the way, this was about the time when as an undergraduate, McLuhan studied New Criticism in England, which is the second trail leading to media philosophy. The insecurity of western culture which intensified at the beginning of the 20th century has a lot to do with the fact that people started to be aware of how mechanical devices like the camera not only enhanced human perception, but also conquered it. With media restructuring the cultural forms of communication and the forms of reproducing knowledge in society, we witness the rearguard actions of philosophy, like analytical philosophy. As I stated in the opening passage of my book, philosophy should come up with a new approach to reflect all those changes which lead to new media, and the changes induced by media as well. Concerning the term 'Media Philosophy', I think it has been around in the nineties already and it should not point towards a school of thought or the canonization of an academic discipline, but rather follow the order given by Vilém Flusser, who saw the need of 'communicology' as a supplement to our culture's obsession with 'technology'. GL: Besides the critique of language, there is a string of theory which argues from and with images. Coming from art criticism and art practices, there is a less verbal approach which is focussed on the haptic interfaces, the way in which graphic user interfaces are working, how advertisement and images as such seduce the viewer/user. Could you fit this into your definition of media philosophy? FH: Yes definitely, but it is always a matter of how this criticism is done. There is the tradition of Warburg and Panofsky, relating artistic styles and cultural traditions in a new interdisciplinary framework, and there is a variety of semiotic schools... yet something seems to be missing. Did you ever notice how a lot of the semiotic interpretation presented at conferences stays purely descriptive? How all analysis ends in abstract categorizations? Or how film theory imitates the strategies of philology in an obvious urge to be academic? In most of the cases no insight is produced which would go beyond the commonsense of any witty consumer of media products. So what is really done here is not producing theory, but recoding information like transcribing visual information into an academic script. These mostly ridiculous texts, squeezed between two covers, bear the promise to provide access to knowledge otherwise not found. The questions underneath are not answered: how does an interface work? Is there an intuitive interface, beyond all the conventions? A perfect language maybe? I believe that the text, and classical texts at that, represent but a small fraction of what former cultures dealt with as knowledge. These small textual fractions nevertheless are being fetishized as philosophy, which also faces a problem of transmission within book-culture. The discipline of media philosophy has to deal with two crucial points: first, modernity produced scientific knowledge which is too complex to be represented by texts alone. New forms of social information processing request new forms of encoding/decoding to stay functional. This is why in my book I consider Neurath, who visualized informational relations, a pioneer. Second to that, new media already start to remediate the academic discourse. Remediation is a term used by Jay Bolter to express what is happening when new media form meets the content of older media forms. We have to take this very seriously, because the computer currently is re-coding the cultural codes of reading and writing. That it to say, under new semiotic constellations we cannot produce theory in an authoritative way any more, like the academic tradition wants (and sometimes forces) us to do. New media is definitely going to break up the guild principles of knowledge reproduction within academia. GL: For Deleuze, the philosopher works 'alongside' the cinema, reordening the images and signs for new purposes. Could we say that today's philosophers are, though sympathetic to this patchwork point of view, actually more interested to work 'inside' the media? FH: The problem I have with Deleuze is that he tends towards rather enigmatic writing. When I tried to read his book on Spinoza and, as the author put it: 'le problčme de l'expression' within philosophy, I comforted myself with a sociological interpretation of this kind of writing. The exciting thing about Deleuze now, is that especially with the cinema text he was working towards a breaking point within philosophy. This has to do with the medium of philosophical expression as well. The move is documented in 'Rhizome', the popular first chapter of "Mille Plateaux", but also in the "ABCdaire", a video interview series on philosophical questions Deleuze did shortly before his death (go to: http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/Romance/FreD_G/ABC1.html for the transcriptions). This philosopher knew that one cannot go on just by 'raping' dead authors to produce a new text. Immersion truly is the issue here. Anyway, the most interesting texts were not written by repeating what is already there, but by a certain hybridization. Alas, it still is a text. Flusser, at one point, talking about the telematic society, apologized for s till using words instead of images. This apology would not have been necessary if we had interfaces according to human thought, associations and feelings, and not just to technological frameworks and restrictions made by programmers. GL: You are producing web sites yourself and do a bit of programming. I would not call you an outsider, quite the opposite. Is there an imaginary outside position, and if we could think the unthinkable, would that be a favorable option to you? What will happen after the closure of the Net? Should we start thinking to go beyond the Internet already? FH: This is a tricky question. Basically, I do not quite believe in this inside/outside dualism which is fostered by technology oriented media services. There, everything has to be so very hip technologically to be worth mentioning. I am fed up with this kind of hipness when there is nothing else to say than what results in a momentary journalistic surplus value. The prostitutes of cyberspace are to be found everywhere, in all the e-zines and future-zones around the globe. They are insiders in their own way who will swiftly jump on the next train, which probably will be biotechnologies. My guess is that nowadays, people want to have some 'essence' of cyberspace and be as close as possible to the imaginary 'operating system'. See the Linux mania, in all its melancholy - to start all over again, in a clearly protestant move, if not to say a movie in the making, for which Linus Thorvalds took up the role of the big salvationist against the big and evil pope of our sour desktop world. Is this revolutionary now, or rather pathetic? Sorry, I got carried away a little bit. Let us step back and ask what we are talking about. The Internet? A something like 30 year old construction of a new infrastructure for the communication of people and machines. The Web? A 10 year old interface solution for exchanging scientific documents. Are we really in a position to ask what is next? Then we would reveal ourselves as the avant gard elitists, which we unfortunately are, never being there for the revenues when business takes over. The question to think beyond the Internet does not work for me at the moment. Bruno Latour published a book which carries not a title, but a thesis: 'Nous n'avons jamais été modernes', we have never been modern. We cannot afford to be postmodern and ignore the non-modern world around us. There is a vast territory out there which does not wait to be cultivated in a traditional way. Maybe the answer to the question what comes next, is not up to 'us' average white middle class nerds. I do remember an interview with Michel Serres, 'Knowledge's redemption' (Revue Quart Monde, 1997), which contains some of the relevant questions. The text was recycled on lists like <nettime>, but never discussed. Information wants to be free, but in the world today, knowledge requests consumer spending power. To quote Serres: "Knowledge is the realm of non-scarcity, as opposed to the economy. (...) But who says that the knowledge necessary to fix a scooter is less important than knowledge about quantum physics? In a society where garbage-men are more in demand than natural scientists, knowledge is on an equalization trajectory." So while we think about going beyond the Internet, we maybe should listen to some garbage men. They are the ones who clean up after the party. GL: The attempt to develop "net criticism" within the circles around such mailinglists as www.nettime.org are now five years under way. Long enough in this fast changing world to look for preliminary outcomes. Do you see any, also outside these networks of artists, activists and critics? FH: Very marginal ones, as I perceive it. Does <nettime> really work as an alternative publishing medium? I doubt this. People inside new media theory and art may benefit from <nettime> as a distribution channel. There is a chance well lost. I cannot remember for example a discussion of the very relevant topics of sound. Until recently, MP3 and Napster just did not happen on <nettime>. Ok, so let us ask about the role of theory. Theory is needed as an analytical and a reconstructive force, which does not really fit into the wake of this new era of digital networking. The assets of theory will show in a time of crisis, and the success of e-business does not need a media philosophy nor a net criticism, not to mention the quite self contained net.art stuff. Classical critique wants to show the limits of an idea, but the net is not just the idea of some Californian digerati. This is also a political issue. Where is our discussion on e-Europe, which became the official term for the information society? Besides, I think <nettime> is just too full of academic lurkers who are keen not to miss some trendy things. Now I ask myself: knowing that a lot of the interesting stuff happens outside academia anyway, why did <nettime> not take the chance to develop a cool web interface, name it something like E-THEORY or what, and become the virtual center for media theory? This is my serious question to the founders and curators of this list. GL: How is your interpretation of the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler? There is no separate chapter in your book dedicated to the so-called Kassel school of media research (Tholen, Bolz, Kittler etc.) which were so active throughout the Eighties. They now seem to be the dominant discourse, even though they might not like this, a position which is anyway quickly being eroded by the rise of the Internet (generation) and the cold pragmatics of cultural studies which seem fit much better in a climate of budget cuts and the commercialization of universities. You share your critique on the Kittlerian technological determinism with Hartmut Winkler, and others. Is there a debate about these controversies in the German speaking countries? FH: May I stay brief in answering this? Friedrich Kittler is a well respected theorist and an exciting author. Within the German theory tradition, he made the necessary and liberating move from hermeneutics towards the technological approach. It is the first time that I am hearing of a "Kassel School". Let us forget this very quickly. A research project does not make a school. With all respect to the research probably done, this is a wrong categorization. Texts by the Kittler group do not much more than to fetishize the technology approach as such and foster a very German obsession with war. And this is simply not enough, because, whether they like it or not, social innovation is the clue. No technological innovation ever was successful without its social acceptance (human factor alert!). GL: Another aspect you do not address directly is the question of the (virtual) body and consciousness. What is your opinion on transhumanism and extropianism? FH: The times we live in made us forget to think about how the individual can be an asset to the collective, something essential to traditional communities. Online communities work different to traditional ones. The community does not exist but as a projection. We witness all forms of media-induced escapism. Our perception of the self changed, yet all the technologies of the self, according to Foucault, never have been steady but changed with the change of times and the influence of cultures. Cultural techniques have changed our physical bearing, for example to sit at a desk for reading and writing. Now we wear glasses and stare at screens most of the day. But there is something more to it - who said that changing communications would not alter the body? Culture always meant to shape and form the individual and the social body as well. Genetic engineering is one of the consequences, chip implants are only a matter of time. A collection of perfect individuals now does not make a society work better. Extropianism is but one restricted way to think about the future of enlightenment. I do consider it a very pathetic way of western thought. You may fantasize about the future by reinforcing the power of the individual with biotechnologies, which certainly is the topic next to the Internet hype. The future of communication is more about developing the social interface, I think, not the individual body. GL: At the end of "Medienphilosophie" you are putting the question of a "new enlightenment" up in the air. You are someone who would love to promote the creative destruction of post modernism, are you? Can we imagine a techno enlightenment which would be aware of its own power as well as its own limitations? FH: Techno enlightenment is what happens all around us right now. Or should we call it the wit of advanced technology? Let me relate to some personal experience here. When I took my daughter Melissa to a movie in her pre-school days, I had a big laugh when she yelled for the remote control, as soon as some Disney characters which were not hip enough for her appeared on screen. She has her own website and her current mode of being is a power pop-girl (http://www.medienphilosophie.net/melissa). This is great, everything is expected to be disposable at the click on a remote device, but I would not call this a classical enlightenment move now. A six year old does not really make a website herself, but she managed to ask me the right questions. This is the new media generation. There is this nonverbal, yet articulate cultural protest of an unruly performance as opposed to the old time rage against the machine. Our generation had this idea of sending the right messages through the proper channels. For the media generation, this difference of truth is not of much relevance, and also, intelligence does not necessarily mean verbal articulation. Intellectuals feel very uncomfortable with this, because their role in the social setting is being questioned and generally, people (i.e. ordinary folks) just do not follow their pathetic 'Bilderverbot' (iconoclasm) any more. Let us face it: we are living in a society in which people not only put webcams under toilet seats, but others actually watching these images on the Internet. In a very blunt way: before enlightenment, people thought their actions were set by transcendental acts of god and possibly enabled by contingent authorities within this world. Enlightenment told them to refrain from all kinds of images, and meant not to make an image of God, i.e. of any trans-subjective matters. Techno enlightenment still has to show that we can go beyond the so much stressed dualism of text and image. Paradise now. One problem stays: we do no believe in god any more, and still want to enjoy Sunday. Where is the party, who serves the drinks? Frank Hartmann, Medienphilosophie, UTB/WUV, Wien, 2000 The website of the book: www.medienphilosophie.net More on Frank Hartmann: http://www.medienphilosophie.net/Frank_Hartmann. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 64.0 <nettime> interview with SERVICE 2000 matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 23 Jun 2000 14:30:16 +0100 A UK based artist has recently launched a series of sites with domain names remarkably similar to those of some well known London galleries. This interview was carried out by email in the second week of June, just after the launch of the sites, which are as follows, mf SERVICE 2000 29 Uncommissioned Web Sites Available Now From the Following Locations:- http://www.saatchigallery.org.uk http://www.thelissongallery.co.uk http://www.serpentinegallery.org.uk http://www.richardsalmon.co.uk http://www.gimpelfils.co.uk http://www.anthonyreynolds.co.uk http://www.anthonydoffay.co.uk http://www.annelyjuda.co.uk http://www.laurentdelaye.co.uk http://www.stephenfriedman.co.uk http://www.waddingtongalleries.org.uk http://www.michaelhue-williams.co.uk http://www.victoriamiro.co.uk http://www.sadiecoles.co.uk http://www.gagosian.co.uk http://www.whitecube.org.uk http://www.turnerprize.org.uk http://www.thenationalgallery.org.uk http://www.haywardgallery.org.uk http://www.tategallery.org.uk http://www.halesgallery.co.uk http://www.mattsgallery.org.uk http://www.interimart.co.uk http://www.anthonywilkinson.co.uk http://www.rhodesmann.co.uk http://www.vilmagold.co.uk http://www.luxgallery.org.uk http://www.lauregenillard.co.uk http://www.paulstolper.co.uk >>You've effectively constructed a 'false' web ring of some of the major private and publicly funded galleries in London. Do you expect them to notice? How did you choose which galleries to target? Is there any inter-relationship between them? >Well, I suppose its possible they'll notice - I mean eventually. When I >first launched the sites (quietly) two weeks ago I was afraid it would all go nuclear very quickly and the sites wouldn't get much of a life. But I >suspect that same lack of interest in the web that has meant galleries havent bothered to register the variants on their own names has also >afforded the project a certain amount of protection. At one level they're just not that interested or informed about this emergent culture. Its >more true of the commerial that the public spaces. But it tells you something about the way they are looking at the web and not really getting it. In terms of the galleries I chose to participate - well it was just a matter of availability and my credit card limit. The letters ICA can stand for many things and as a result there were no ICA domains left. So hence, theres no ICA site in the piece. The others, it was pretty much on the basis that they occured to me. If they were available, I registered them. In terms of the relationship to one another - its actually geographical, its a route that might be taken by someone wandering round from gallery to gallery. When I was building the sites I started at Euston Station, imagined myself going over the Saatchi Gallery and progressed round from there. Its a trudge round some London galleries. >>The sites on these domains have what must be some of the crappest design going. There's untold animated gifs of opening and closing envelopes, jumping bunnies, rainbow coloured horizontal rules, and the music... did I clock Tubular Bells against a background of dolphins for the Serpentine Gallery? Tasteful. Can you shame people into submission? >Actually the Serpentine has been given a cruel dose of Jean Michel Jarre. (the famous bit from Oxygen) I don't know if I want to shame the galleries. Just to make them aware of something. >>Christ, the granddaddy of all the bad love parade techno. painful. Do you consider that producing such top artwork on sites whose domains are remarkably similar to those of well-known galleries is a way of adding value to what is otherwise a straight act of domain squatting? Presumably if the galleries want to 'buy their names' back, they'll not just be coughing up for that, but for a bona fide piece of web-art? >I really dont consider this cybersquatting. It's outreach. It's an outreach project targetted at galleries to help them understand the significance of the internet as a communicative space. Hence the top artwork. The commercial galleries haven't really engaged with the web because they've failed to see how the web impacts on their business. And to an extent its also true of the public spaces. I was really suprised that the Tate hadnt registered Tategallery in the org.uk domain. I actually had about 60 hits on the name in the week before I even posted anything up. Just people typing in the name on the assumption that was where the site would be. People who wanted to find out about the Tate. I suppose the tate rebrand as TATE and then forget that everyone else in the country, the punters, think of them at 'The Tate Gallery'. That such a mismatch should occur between a gallery and its public - that it wouldn't occur to them to register that and other variants. It tells you something about how web-awareness stands in a gallery context as opposed to a political or commercial context. Except of course for the commercial gallery context - where there's even less of an engagement with the web. Even very developed sites are little more than catalogues. The Lisson has a go at something a bit more adventurous but I mean, have you been to http://www.doffay.com lately? The other thing that differentiates this project from cyber-squatting it that whilst all the sites are for sale the domain names themselves aren't. At the end of the piece I intend to give them to the galleries I've targeted. Its what they get to take home for participating. It really is an outreach project, on behalf of the internet. >>OK, so why the particular aesthetic for the sites? This is a level of web-design only often acheivable by scientists doing side-line home-pages for their other interests in speculative fiction and saddle sniffing. Could you not have done someting less knowingly dumb with the material on the domains if the precise point is to make this particular audience aware of the potential of this something? >Well, I suppose on one level it has to be this awful to really make that point clear. The point being - look, pay attention to the culture you are in because if you don't then something this awful can happen. Its a cautionary tale in that respect. A grey hat stategy, I suppose. Also I do have a great affection for low-fi html, for all the gifs and midi files on those physic students' home pages. It must be the digital naive or something but I loves its garishness. The idea that galleries, whose public image is so important to them in the way it aids them construct value around art objects, should have these crappy sites is I guess a way creating a somewhat entertaining contradiction. For those in the know who are directed to these sites by word of mouth its probably just that. But, of course there is another audience for this work. The 'genuine' surfers who reach my sites through search engines or just tapping in the address on the off-chance. And I'm sure for them the lo-fi design functions in a very different way - something approaching shocked disbelief. I've had a few complaints from art historians who, unaware of the status of the sites, complain that the quality of the design reflects very badly on the galley and on London. >>Do you hope this this functions in some arse-about-face way to land you a dealer? >No, I'll get that from my SFMOMA show. And the email drawings I'm doing next. Much more floggable than a gallery education project. >>Nice that an art career is still that predicatable... >I wish. >>How can you help people to find your sites, rather than the more boring ones that some of the galleries have already got online? >oh, check out alta vista or compuserve for names like Anthony Doffay, Sadie Coles or Saatchi Gallery. In a number of cases my sites score more highly than the official ones. Thus whilst I've had a fair bit of traffic from people getting emailouts about the project - I've also had a lot of hits from people using search engines. And since its a hermetic ring - once people are in....they can just surf on. >>Some of your previous work has been in part about applying art methodologies to the web - ie: the drawings of sites, the limited edition download, which in many ways revealed the procedural awkwardness of these approaches have in a networked context. This time you've switched it around - why? Or what relationships to the two modes of work have? >I take a lot of pleasure in bouncing things between online and offline modes - and you're right that this is in large part to do with exploring what happens if things are transferred or translated in different ways. Making limited editioned digital works or hand drawing web sites onto glass. But I'm not sure this project is such a reversal of these earlier stategies, except in that rather than using the net as a source of material it involves the creation of new content. Underlying all of this is an interest in the operative and presentational structures of the web and how it gets used by individuals and organisations. Thus when it comes to making a piece about domain name registration I can only think of ways in which I can pitch into that process. The sites are a lot of fun but in terms of what it tells you about how the web is being used its the fact of registering very well known gallery names that carries, if you like, the conceptual weight of the piece. It seems like a reversal - because its online not offline - but actually its just the most sensible mode for exploring the possiblitlities offered by the dns free for all we live in, >>How do you understand this work in relation to material by say, Luther Blisset, (the faking of the artist 'Harry Kipper') or by 1001010011.org (the invention of 'Darko Maver') and other hoaxes produced more internally to the art world? Following from these projects, it seems you're moving in a more gentle, as you say, 'educative' direction? >It depends on the audience and how they come to the work. The audience reading this, if they choose to look at the piece will read it as an art project. A web surfer who follows a badly formed link from artdaily.com (and there is one) will experience my serpentine gallery site as a hoax. Depending on who you are the work will appear very differently. >>Perhaps the way to pull gallerists along behind you is rather by producing something that generates the debris they require to feed on as an after effect of its own activity? >It's funny you should say that. One thing I didn't plan when I started this project was just how much extra email I was going to recieve. Every email address within the 30 or so gallery domains points to my private mailbox and I've had about 50 emails from people trying to contact the galleries. In some cases this is people who have made an assumption about an email address - or just added .uk to a .org address. In other cases its people whove followed email links off the actual sites. I'm turing them into a series of large pencil drawings - text translations of the actual emails. So for example one text drawing says "THE EMAIL FROM THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR ARTS AND CULTURE TO THE SAATCHI GALLERY ASKING ABOUT THE REPRINT RIGHTS FOR FIVE IMAGES FROM 'SENSATION'" whilst another reads "THE EMAIL FROM THE JOURNALIST AT THE NEW STATESMEN TO THE WOMAN AT THE SERPENTINE ASKING IF SMOKING IS PERMITTED ON THE PATIO". Little vignettes of art and life. I think they'll be all the nicer because people will probably be aware that I was never supposed to receive them. >>Perhaps the restrained and ironic nature of the sites you have put up under these names would not achieve the effects you seek so much as might the production of intense and vivid network cultures (which may or may not correspond at various moments with art modalitities) >I wonder. It would be fantastic to see galleries actually using their sites for cultural - rather than straight ecommerce - purposes. How much richer many of the official sites would be if they were engaging with those possibilites. In this instance, however, I probably feel my job is to get them looking at the web as a site that can have significance. Rather than be insignificant. And I note that over the last three days my sites have been getting hits from staff at the National Gallery, Royal Festival Hall, White Cube as well as the company that handle the south bank centres web presence. So maybe that process has already begun..... # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 65.0 <nettime> Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 26 Jun 2000 16:09:36 +1000 Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer By Geert Lovink Light, the symbol of physics, rationalism, the spectacle, of heaven and eternity, is a funny substance to play with. It is abstract yet visible, bringing clarity while retaining its religious dimensions. Mexican-Canadian Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a media artist who chose to use light as a material and topic in his interactive installations of relational architecture, technological theatre, installation and performance art. His latest achievement was a project at one of the world's largest and most lively squares, the Zócalo in Mexico City. Via the Internet, participants were able to direct searchlight beams installed on the roofs of buildings around the square, thereby orchestrating and creating their own light patterns and movements. "Vectorial Elevation", set in this grandiose urban space, took place during nothing less than the symbolic weeks of the Millennium celebrations. The response of both Mexico City citizens and Internet users was overwhelming. The installation won the Austrian Ars Electronica Golden Nica award. "Vectorial Elevation" was also shortlisted for this year's Webby Awards. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who holds a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry and a minor in Art History from Concordia University in Montréal and whose work has been shown in over a dozen countries, has curated shows and organised the 5CyberConf (Madrid, 1996) where I met him for the first time. I got infected by his energizing enthusiasm for a technology which is never sterile, never authoritarian, always open, playful, almost grotesque: a magnificent blend of Latin popular festivity and Western techno perfection. GL: Rafael, you are working with light. Can you tell us something about the relation between 'light' and the artistic discipline of interactive works? My first association would be Albert Speer and Pink Floyd light shows. Who are your colleagues in this field? What are the latest developments, technically? RLH: It is an interesting exercise to review the history of visual art in relation to different dominant scientific perceptions of the nature of "light." For example, Barbara Stafford's excellent book "Body Criticism" does this for the 18th century when she examines the impact that Newton's view of light as a stream of corpuscles had on the Enlightenment. Other art critics have done this for Romanticism making a parallel to the Young/Fresnel demonstrations of the wave nature of light, or for Modernism with Chevreul's research into chromatic composition and perception. Today, quantum physics is comfortable with a flexible understanding of the phenomenon of light: interpreting its behavior as both waves and particles in relation to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, under which the instrumentation or experimental methodology used for observation is complicit with what is observed. This acknowledgement of the performative role of the observer, which Duchamp nailed with his maxim "le regard fait le tableau," has been the basis for most explicitly interactive art, electronic or otherwise. An alternate operation to contextualize the visual arts with regards to "light" might be to trace technological developments rather than scientific models. Many texts have already done this, going from the magic lanterns of Della Porta and Kircher to the HIT and Lapis labs' display devices that bypass the eye in favor of direct stimulation of optic nerves, what William Gibson called "Virtual light." But, of course, the latest, and perhaps the final, technological development is that light is no longer fast enough, as described by Jean Baudrillard, Martin Jay and other theorists who have noted the cultural consequences of being bound by a physical threshold with no event horizon. The wait for light to arrive is now a major consideration in most telecommunications events as well as a major design problem for the next generations of computer processors which want to run at a faster clockrate than light can travel through their millions of transistors. It is ironic that living in a fully electromagnetic culture will mean adapting to permanent delay, to light-lag, perhaps by developing an "asynchronous body" which can process in parallel the different speeds of tele-perceptive senses, as distant data packets arrive. (Tech note: it takes light 67 milliseconds to go half way around the world, which would allow an off-the-shelf 300 MHz microprocessor to execute twenty million cycles, -more or less enough for two million calculations. Our telepresent culture will always be two million calculations behind itself). Historically, Thomas Wilfred is regarded as one of the key pioneers in the explicit use of light for creating artworks, in a new discipline which he termed "lumia". His first performance is thought to have taken place in Greenwich Village in 1922. Wilfred invented the "Clavilux", which was an organ-like console that allowed real time or pre-recorded control of light parameters such as intensity, color, movement and focus, and which he used extensively in performance and exhibition settings. As early as 1929 Wilfred patented lumia projectors to be used on the top of skyscrapers, -years later he created lumia "Opuses" for General Electric's and Clairol's buildings in New York City. Other lumia artists that followed Wilfred include Tom Douglas Jones (inventor of the Symphochrome in 1938), Jackie Cassen, Rudi Stern, Robert Fisher and Christian Sidenius (who in the early sixties built a "Theatre of Light" in Connecticut with several lumia projectors). Today, almost all media artists are working with light by using presentation technologies such as LCDs, CRTs, LEDs or DLPs found in displays and projectors. A smaller group of electronic artists are using light beams and effects explicitly, in a less representational role, for example James Turrell, Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn, Axel Morgenthaler, Knowbotic Research, Daniel Canogar, Christian Moeller, Simon Biggs, Michel Iorio, Stadtwerkstatt from Linz, Masaki Fujiyata, and Friedrich Foerster. While it is not very productive to group people who have very different agendas and techniques simply because they work explicitly with light, it is interesting that these artists are mostly active at the intersection between performance art and architecture, which is also where I like to situate my artistic practice. Albert Speer and Pink Floyd shows are definitely important precedents to a performative architectural utilization of light. In both cases, however, the main operation was one of "cathartic intimidation": the message was "this is big, you are small." Even my favorite projection artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko, used that strategy to deconstruct the master narratives of power-affirming buildings. One could argue that the contribution of personal interactivity is precisely the transformation of intimidation into "intimacy". The possibility for people to constitute new relationships to the urban landscape and therefore to re-establish a context for a building's social performance. GL: You are speaking about light in a very playful way. Is it so flexible? The way you use it is very high tech. For me it is almost abstract category. Very metaphysical, holy, it is the sphere of the gods. You seem to be able to use it in very different ways, to make historical and political references, like you did in your installation in Linz (Ars Electronica 97) and for the media and architecture festival in Graz. This was about projection, colonialism and interaction. Both technically and from the narrative point of view complex installations. And funny too. How do you put these stories together and what is the role of the light as a VR element in this? RLH: My installation projects, done in collaboration with Will Bauer, are within a field that I call "Relational Architecture", which can be defined as "the technological actualization of buildings with alien memory". Here alien memory refers to something that does not belong, that is out of place, while technological actualization means the use of hyperlinks, aliasing, special effects and telepresence. In relational architecture, buildings are activated so that the input of the people in the street can provide narrative implications apart from those envisioned by the architects, developers or dwellers. The pieces use sensors, networks and audiovisual technologies to transform the buildings. In particular, light projections are used since they can achieve the desired monumental scale, can be changed in real time, and their immateriality makes their deployment more logistically feasible. I like to make a clear distinction between work in relational architecture and virtual reality pieces. For me, virtual architecture could be differentiated from relational architecture in that the former is based on simulation while the latter is based on dissimulation. Virtual buildings are data constructs that strive for realism, asking the participant to "suspend disbelief" and "play along" with the environment; relational buildings, on the other hand, are real buildings pretending to be something other than themselves, masquerading as that which they might become, asking participants to "suspend faith" and probe, interact and experiment with the false construct. Virtual architecture tends to miniaturize buildings to the participant's scale, for example through VR peripherals such as HMDs or CAVEs, while relational architecture amplifies the participant to the building's scale, or emphasizes the relationship between urban and personal scale. In this sense, virtual architecture tends to dematerialize the _body_, while relational architecture tends to dematerialize the _environment. This is not to say that virtual and relational architectures are opposing practices, or that they are mutually exclusive. Cicero, Churchill and a dozen others have been quoted as saying "we make buildings and buildings make us". This is far from the current urban situation; buildings no longer represent a city's inhabitants. As Koolhaas and others have noted, most new architecture consists of generic, de-featured buildings that reflect market forces and not local specificity (I call these "default buildings"). A housing project in Kuala Lumpur is bound to be quite similar to one in Mexico, Cleveland or Athens. On the other hand, we have what the Spanish architect Emilio Lopez-Galiacho calls "vampire buildings" which are emblematic buildings that are not allowed to have a natural death, that are kept alive artificially through restoration, citation and virtual simulation. Vampire buildings are forced to be immortal due to "architectural correctness" a cultural, political and economic conservative tendency to assign a representative role upon a select number of buildings. Vampire buildings, while culturally incestuous and necrophilic (or perhaps because of it), will always remain protected from erosion, gravity, war, crawling vines, graffiti and the like. So, one important aspect of Relational Architecture is to produce a performative context where default buildings may take on temporary specificity and vampire buildings may decline their role in their established, prevailing identification. Having said this, I am interested in distancing my practice from the notion of the "site-specific", particularly from the postmodern attempts to find and deconstruct essential constituent characteristics of a particular space: I am very committed to the idea that a site consists of an indeterminate number of intersecting imaginary, socio-political, physical and tele-present spaces. Therefore, I like to use the term "relationship-specific" to describe the uniqueness of a discreet interaction between participants, different planes of experience and the relational building(s). What is specific is the new behaviours that might emerge during interaction. GL: Yes, let's go to the messy reality, of Mexico City in this case where you have just finished a pearly piece of relational architecture. Do you see the high tech equipment you have been using there clashing with rampant poverty, a low intensity civil war in Chips, in general the huge social divides in Mexico, or this is just another Western cliché? I suppose you have just intensively enjoyed doing it, overcoming all sorts of difficulties connected with such a complicated set-up. Tell us all about the everyday contradictions you have encountered, compared to the Spanish or Austrian bureaucracies and formalities. RLH: The piece in Mexico City was commissioned by the National Council for Culture and the Arts for the Millennium celebrations. The President of the Council saw my work in Austria, which questioned the notion of heritage and "cultural property," and asked me to use Mexican history as a departure point for a spectacular installation in the Zócalo Square. Now, most Mexican Art this century has had a very didactic, historicist bent that is clearly evident in the Neue Sachlichkeit work of the muralists. Modern masters adopted a "revolutionary" aesthetic that was characterized by a problematic romantisation of indigenous peoples, a militant patriotism, and a fascination with linear models of history. Perhaps what could have been expected is to have a new kind of virtual muralism, consisting of projections of parading national heroes. The last thing I wanted to do is to repeat these monologic mantras. Fortunately, contemporary Mexican art has departed long ago from this vision, starting with Octavio Paz who challenged the concept of "progress" almost forty years ago and José Luis Cuevas who denounced muralism as a "cactus curtain" that was blocking the transit of ideas in and out of Mexico. In any case, the problem of large-scale monologic representation is not only a Mexican phenomenon. Most Millennium shows throughout the world consisted of son et lumiere spectacles that defined a linear historicist narrative of "representative" moments or actors in history. Each of those narratives must be analyzed in terms of their exclusions of so called "minor" histories, because there can never be a comprehensive, exhaustive nor neutral representation and what is shown is always a profile of the current elite. There is a very close connection between representation and repression, particularly when it is applied to what Edward Said calls "identitarian" narratives. Elites have always used such narratives to homogenize and control what are otherwise complex, dynamic social fabrics. The Millennium was the first chance to see the widespread impact of new technologies of representation on the scale and insidiousness of identitarian power affirmation (although it could be argued that they were already evident, for instance, in pokemon consumerism or in the "special effects" capitalism of dot com corporations). >From the very beginning of the design process I knew that the piece had to incorporate interactivity as a way of avoiding historical representation and Lurçat- and Speer-like spectacles. I wanted the main protagonist of the piece to be the participants themselves. Since the minister had asked me to look at Mexican history to find a departure point for the piece I investigated the largely undocumented history of Mexican technological culture. I found several useful precedents, which serve as a legitimate backdrop for electronic art projects, from the research of Gonzalez Camarena on color TV to the popularization of electronic music by Luis Pérez Esquivel. One discovery was incredibly useful: the theory of Cybernetics was postulated by Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenbleuth at the Mexican Institute of Cardiology to explain self-regulation in the heart. Since I became aware of this, I have joked that cyber art is a native Mexican practice! But seriously, to answer your question regarding the potential clash between high tech equipment and the appalling economic situation of many Mexicans, I have to say that Mexico is a very complex, heterogeneous society that is full of contradictions. There is an almost feudal society in regions of Chiapas that continues to systematically impoverish indigenous people; at the same time, Subcomandante Marcos is a networked revolutionary leader who understands and uses the subversive power of "high technology". This is not to say that social inequality and technology do not clash, of course they do, for example in the high tech maquiladora factories in the border towns where management and technology come from the US and the underpaid work force, raw materials and space come from Mexico. My position is that technology is an inevitable aspect of society and it is a key challenge for the media artist to develop it or misuse it to break the stereotypes and create new technological languages. One of the reasons I like to quote the precedents of Mexican technological culture is precisely because I like to think that technological development is not necessarily exclusive to "developed" countries. Think of the software industry in India or the Nortec electronic music movement in Tijuana. The piece was done in the Zócalo Plaza, which is the World's third largest square, measuring 240 by 220 metres and holding over 200,000 people. The Zócalo's monumental size makes the human scale seem insignificant, a fact that some Mexican scholars consider an emblem of a monolithic political legacy; there are almost one thousand protests a year in this site and yet its scale drowns most of them. In order to have an impact on this square it was necessary to deploy very powerful equipment: we placed 18 robotic searchlights with a total of 126,000 watts of power on the rooftops of surrounding buildings like the National Palace, the City Government headquarters and the hotels. On a clear night the searchlight beams could be seen from a 20Km radius and covered the entire historic center of the city, including landmarks such as the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Supreme Court of Justice and the Templo Mayor Aztec ruins. Despite the power of the installation my intention was not to do a cathartic millennium show but a quiet, slowly fluctuating space for reflection. The concept for the piece was for people on the internet to design light sculptures using a 3D interface, submit them to Mexico where they would be queued, rendered by the searchlights in the plaza and finally documented in a digital archive. We connected the searchlights with hundreds of metres of data cable and measured their location with GPS trackers. Custom software was written to interface a VRML simulation of the Zócalo to the servers that could control the searchlights. Three webcams placed in the National Palace, a hotel and a skyscraper would document participants' designs and also stream live video feeds. As with any event that I have ever done in public space, the logistics were intense: we filed several reports to the department of National Security, obtained permits from air traffic control, installed coaxial internet feeds through the hotel's bathroom ventilation, stopped street traffic while cranes lifted the searchlights and so on. GL: I have seen the video you produced which documents the Zócalo installation. It is truly amazing. You have just won the Prix Ars Electronica price in the category of interactive installations. Congratulations. What struck me in the video was the poetry of the searchlights, which are usually only set up to mimic military searchlights, scanning the night sky for suspicious objects. The movements of the ever-changing grids seemed so elastic. This must be a visual trick because the hardware and software you managed to bring together looked so massive. The scale of works you are doing really has transcended from the museum and gallery into large-scale urban spaces. Did you run this art project as a military operation, or rather like a business, a theatre show? Does the virtual spectacle you staged resemble some elements of the big, orchestrated fireworks, pop concerts, rave parties? RLH: The elasticity that you are referring to is in fact the effect that I was looking for the most when designing this project. The smooth morphing between different submitted designs was crucial to evoke a sense of constant transformation and flow. The transitions between positions were as important as the positions themselves. My original notion was for the searchlights to render a new design every second, both to fit as many participants as possible and to match the tempo of a slow heart beat. In the end 6 to 8 seconds were needed per design to allow the searchlights to position themselves and for the three webcams to take pictures. In retrospect I am very glad that we used this slower pace because it invited contemplation and anything faster would have been too aggressive in a city that does not need any more aggression. As you mention, historically searchlights have been used for military anti-aircraft surveillance and their vocabulary of movements have been limited to coordinated "sky scanning" patterns. These patterns have a very different interpretation in Europe, where bombings wiped out entire cities, than in America, where they became associated with celebration, thanks in part to the use of searchlights in WWII victory parades. Once searchlights were adopted by Hollywood-style events, the movements became largely randomized. The searchlights were used to attract people to a single point from which the light beams were originating. In Vectorial Elevation the lightbeams were always in a coordinated state of mutation as they positioned themselves to render participants' designs. The movement was "purposeful" in that every six seconds a unique static pattern would emerge and then dissolve into the next one. The theatrics of power used by Speer and others was also avoided to an extent by the lack of linear narrative: the piece was in operation from dusk to dawn for two weeks, becoming more of an urban fixture than a time-based event. Although I am conscious that the scale was "spectacular" I am happier to compare the work to a public fountain or to a park bench than to a son et lumiere show. The piece was developed by a large number of programmers, designers and technicians in four countries. Even though I was commissioned to design the project in March 1998, we only got to work a few months before the opening. The Internet connection in the control room was installed four days before going live! So it was a pretty tight development schedule. The physical set-up was done by a Mexican company that normally presents large rock concerts and musical theatre, so to them the scale was not a problem. Logistically, I have always thought that my work is more akin to the performing arts than to the visual arts. The installations tend to be ephemeral interventions where the public becomes an actor through interactivity, and they are closer to perpetration than to preservation. I am also particularly interested in the fact that theatre, concerts and performance art are direct, shared experiences where people actively assume different roles, thanks to the "wideband" feedback that is possible with collective closeness. Composer Frederic Rzewski called this essential pleasure of the performing arts "coming together". GL: Could you tell us about the special software which has been developed for the Zócalo? Will there be any spin-offs, used in other installations? Will the software, for example, be available as open source? If you work on this level, what experiences do make concerning innovative and creative further development of certain technologies? Are you optimistic about the role that such kind of new media arts can play? Through your work within the Spanish telecom giant Telefónica you would probably agree that "digital art is the product of transnational corporate capitalism." (Lunenfeld) Could this type of work possibly influence the direction technology is taking? Or shall we, with Peter Lunenfeld, say that the Demo or Die essence of electronic arts is to perform corporate technologies? RLH: We had twenty computers in the control room running mostly custom-made software: linux/apache servers, video reflectors, watermarking processors, DMX control boxes, etc. The main design specification was that the interface should be accessible across platforms, across browsers and without the need for any plug-ins. We turned to Java as the solution but even it had to be tweaked heavily to achieve this goal. Most of the software is too specialized to be useful in other contexts but now it will be very easy to make new versions of Vectorial Elevation for other cities. The only piece of software that may find itself repurposed in some form is a video streaming system that the programmers called "kyxpyx" and which is released as open source. We wanted to have a cheap (free!) alternative to the current video streaming solutions from Microsoft, Apple and Real, and that worked without plugins. I agree that digital art is the product of transnational corporate capitalism. So is the environment we live in and our identity itself. Many years ago I wrote an essay for Leonardo magazine called "Perverting Technological Correctness" where I outlined some strategies artists deploy to corrupt the inevitability of corporate technologies. Among them, I included the simulation of technology itself, the use of pain, ephemeral intervention, misuse of technology, non-digital approaches to virtuality and resistance to what I call the "effect" effect. I believe that artists have been and can be at the forefront of technological development. For media arts, the usual example that gets cited is the development of the data glove by Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti and Gary Sayers under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977. But there are many other examples. Will Bauer, my collaborator for the past 12 years, has been developing a wireless 3D tracking system that we have incorporated into many of our pieces. This integration has been very beneficial to both the artistic and technological developments and we find it hard to distinguish what comes first, if anything. Of course I am aware that most technology is developed for and by the military-economic complex but I am enamoured by the romantic illusion that if art had the military's budget we would create more jobs than they do and develop more interesting technology (including great art bombs!). Vectorial Elevation, relational architecture 4 http://www.alzado.net Re:Positioning Fear, relational architecture 3 http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rafael/fear/ General information http://www.telefonica.es/fat/artistas/rlh/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 66.0 <nettime> interview with chainworkers (english) marcelo nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 6 Feb 2006 12:46:50 +0100 (CET) hi - an interview we just translated into english - with italian chainworkers - on (social) precarity, innovative direct action, bio-unionism, mayday, and so on... - next 17-19 april there is an european meeting for the euromayday network, in milan - just to give you a glimpse on what's going on at this side on political imagination+creativity :) ----- >From labor precarity to social precarity [1] Chainworkers interviewed by María Cecilia Fernández The workers' movement of the nineteenth century was organized around the factory by means of the union, but, at the same time, it created ?societies of resistence,? spaces of social gathering and mutual support. Capitalist production was understood not only as an economic problem but as a social problem as well. The struggle against capitalism signified a struggle against mercantile forms of life, beyond unionization and worker's rights. Presently, the capitalist process of producing surplus value has incorporated as a force of labor the cognitive, comunicative, and affective capacities of human beings. One of the most dynamic dimensions of social production is a type of inmaterial work force. Computer technicians, web designers, workers in advertising, artists and publicists are part of the present social composition of labor. In post-Fordist production, the new forms of labor have raised the question of which forms of social organization will confront the situation of flexibility, mobility and labor precarity, as well as the forms of life of capitalist social relations. In Italy, the Milan collective Chainworkers has been working with the issues of social and labor-related precarity for a number of years. Chainworkers? early efforts were, on the one hand, aimed at the employees of commercial chains and signified an attempt to address that emblem of precarity of the 1990s, the McDonald?s style employee, who, without rights or union representation, is unable to perceive themselves as a worker in the classical sense. On the other hand, the collective experimented with innovative strategies of communication with the objective not only of making available information concerning labor rights in the situation of precarity, but also of creating means for uniting and social struggle beyond unionization. In order to give visibility to the new figures of precarity in Europe, Chainworkers organized MayDay (First of May) in 2001 as a carnivalesque festival in the streets of Milan. María Cecilia Fernández (MCF): What analysis have you made after your first round of activity? Frenchi (F): In the beginning, at the core of the movement the entire question of labor was expressed with rhetorics that denoted powerlessness but not the ability to intervene (?Stop the Precariat,? etc.). In our case, one of our inicial characteristics was a hatred for chain businesses not as places of consumption, but as institutions. But we were very innocent because we thought that the neo-slave conditions of workers in commerical chains would be a condition ?non-imitatible? and that large zones of marginality understood as a certain reproduction of the Fordist market were being created. But we were mistaken: the entire world of labor was moving towards this neo-slave condition. Precarity, as a concept, appeared in 2002, as part of the realization that this was not a new subproletariat that was being born nor just a labor mechanism that was being deployed but a new, more complex social relation between life and work. MCF: How do you define, then, social precarity? F: It is a mechanism of control, a division of labor, the partitioning of human resources, and a selection that generates profits and surplus value for businesses, that mutates and modifies its own structure. This movement from labor precarity to social precarity calls into question our ability to intervene and, as well, questions attempts at revindication that count on a strong historical tradition. For example, the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s, with its refusal of work and its reappropriation of time, or the right to a decent life preserved by a series of civil and social rights won over the course of history. MCF: For Chainworkers what does creating community mean? F: To create conscious relations of solidarity with strong ties, the capacity for communication between all the subjects in the community. The potential to generate an autonomous production that is cooperative, horizontal even assuming the division of competences, strongly tied to the undeniable potential that one can see in others. A community of individuals in solidarity, of friends, but above all a community in the moment that it manages to produce and cooperate and to have meaning. MCF: Which are this community?s different planes of intervencion? F: There are many. First off is collective self-formation. To be in a community is to be in a situation that already supports you. Then, there is a social element, an element of community, an element of communication, an element of play, and, as well, an element of autoredito [ED: the generation of income out of self-regulated jobs and other activities]. All this includes various factors: community, socialization, education, political intervention, closer relations with some groups...that is to say, a strong consciousnes of the territory and the mechanisms that regulate this territory. This is the community that we are creating. MCF: In your experience how has this idea of the production of community taken shape and what does the concept of ?autoredito? signify in your practice? Bombo: I began my professional education in a social center, Deposito Bulk, in Milan. There I recieved something that neither a university nor a job could have given me. Following the do it yourself philosophy of the social centers, I did my professional training, which I presently apply to my work. The discourse of free software and the idea of sharing knowledge allowed me not only to affirm a cultural demand, but also to continue working in the information technology sector with the objective of not just producing and earning more, but of working in a manner alternative to that of the commercial world of information technology. Much later, we began to think of the Centro Sociale La Pergola as a possible place to begin constructing the necessary infrastructure for our project, as well for creating spaces of intervention in the city?from tools and telematic space to an accomodation space that was extremely affordable compared with what Milan had to offer and from here was born the self-managed hostel. Opening a hostel involved us in a project that on a volunteer basis wasn?t going to work and so we solved this by creating jobs that didn?t follow the traditional rules as we considered them a type of social service. MCF: Chainworkers began in 2001 with the MayDay celebration but by resignifying it as the day of precarity. What is the objective of this communicative intervencion and how is it expressed? F: Some years ago, for our government representatives, speaking of precarity was a kin to a terroristic activity. MayDay served as a communicative act to develop a new consciousness. With Saint Precarious, for example, we engaged in subvertising (a technique of diverting and repropriating the language of advertising to create meanings that are either different or completely opposite) against a social fabric that is very catholic. Although we?re really secular, in Italy there is a very strong ultra-catholic tradition. The saint was taken from this popular culture into order to insert it in a non-religious situation. And each icon that sits under the image of Saint Precarious stands for one of the five keys to non-precarity: we should have access to money, housing, affection and the right to communication and transport. MCF: How is the figure of precarity inserted in the discouse of unionism? F: It doesn?t have one, since precarity is extorsion, blackmail and not easily understood with the classic trade-syndicate forms. We believe that speaking of the renovation of the forms of struggle also implies a renovation of the institutions of struggle, that is, of unionism, the art of unionization, and union-style direct actions. Currently, we are mapping out the ?sites of Saint Precarious? that are co-ordinated in a network we call bio-unionism. The conception of biounionism starts from the following premise: if precarity is social and invades every aspect of our lives, it is obvious that our collective action ought to start from each of the sites where our lives take place, both inside and outside of the workplace. The sites of Saint Precarious will be places for legal services, self-education, community solidarity and defense. They will be everything that we can think to create so that our actions of conflict will be incisive, striking a blow against business and its image. They are an attempt to organize a defense, a counterattack. In the end, individuals are precarious because they don?t have access to the information that they need about the conditions of their own contracts. And, above all, they are isolated in relation to others in their workplace. We need to break through this isolation, creating community. MCF: What do you think of the struggle in the area of workers' rights? F: We are convienced that the present situation cannot be modified from inside the political-judicial discourse. The relation of social precarity supercedes the legal-labor relationship and represents business? direct explotation, force and power over the lives of everyone. If a change in the labor laws comes about, it will happen just the same as always: thanks to the ability to create conflict and, above all, to create potent, strong and intelligent conflict. Of the laws that are concretized we called them ?amorticized?; we recognize that 200 Euros more or less a month would change the situation. However, if this money is the reason why you don?t build a political strategy that goes beyond 200 Euros, then you?ve fallen into the monetarization of rights. An intelligent political strategy should pursue an increase in salaries, redistribution, assitance or subsidies, but without losing sight of the fact that the problem of precarity is when they call you at midnight in order to tell you ?look, tomorrow you?ve gotta work? when you?ve already got plans to go to Lugano to visit your family. [1] This version edited from the interview published in Spanish in the newspapers Proyecto 19y20 (Buenos Aires, March 2005) and in Diagonal (Madrid, March-April 2005). Chainworkers were key in the beginning of the European movements against precarity, with communication tools such as their website http://www.chainworkers.org (inaugurated in 1999), the book Laborare nelle cattedrali del consumo (DeriveApprodi, Milan, 2001; Spanish version published in Brumaria nº 3, 2004; and also found at http://www.chainworkers.org/chainw/libro_cw.htm) and in the Milan celebration of MayDay, the Precarious First of May, since 2001 and currently spreading as EuroMayDay to cities across the European continent (see http://www.euromayday.org). Translated by Brian Whitener. _______________________________________________ Euromayday mailing list Euromayday {AT} euromayday.org https://www3.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/euromayday ___________________________________________ brumaria http://www.brumaria.net prácticas artísticas, estéticas y políticas ----- End forwarded message ----- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 67.0 interview with Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com Sarah Cook <new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk> Wed, 30 May 2007 22:28:25 +0100 Dear List please find below another CRUMB interview... it will be up on the website soon! Her interview with me is at: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/009560.php Sarah ---- Régine Debatty is the powerhouse behind the hugely popular blog we- make-money-not-art.com. We sent each other interview questions after meeting on a freezing cold evening in May in Newcastle, and spending the following morning walking around the east side of town in the drizzle looking at how the city is changing through cultural regeneration – her dressed in yellow, me dressed in red (when we are usually in green and orange respectively). Her interview with me is on her blog, and mine with her is here on CRUMB. Sarah Cook: What made you want to start wmmna? Régine Debatty: It started by chance. I had tons of time to kill at the office and met this guy, Max, who had crafted some artistic application for mobile phones that he used in performances. It was totally new to me: "What? You can make art with some tech device?" So I decided to investigate and find out who else was using technology in a creative, unexpected way. Max suggested I archive my research in a blog. You know the rest. SC: How do you choose what to cover and what not to? RD: It all depends on what I’m interested in at the moment. It used to be interactive installations, now I’m more into bioart, critical design, and sustainability. It's totally personal, there's no strategy, plan nor willingness to cover extensively a particular topic. SC: How do you balance the pressure from your readers that you cover their show or project with your own personal interest (what you want to cover)? RD: I'm a totally selfish person. I care for artists and designers but not enough to write about any project that I wouldn't find exciting enough. So I ignore the pressure, I just have my own way. That doesn't mean that the method is the best nor that I’m perfectly happy with it: I make errors of judgment, I hastily discard projects which are interesting, I agree to post something I don't really like just because the artist seems to be such a kind person, etc. SC: Is the fact that you do it for free / no monetary reward a kind of filtering criteria (i.e. if you were paid to do this you might have to write about things you didn't care so much for)? RD: I would never write about something I wouldn't feel comfortable about. Well, I guess I could if I were offered tons of money but it just wouldn't work over a long period of time. I’ve been paid to attend and blog a conference once or twice but the programme was really good so it was a pleasure to do it and it fitted perfectly the spirit of my blog so there was no discrepancy. However receiving money means that I have to write about the whole conference, not just filtering and posting the talks of one or two speakers as I normally would because I’m lazy or in a hurry. I always get better feedback from the readers when I do some extra effort and post as much as possible. But hey, I was wondering the other day whether I am getting too old for that. I used to be a real blog-machine. Now I still attend the talks, write down religiously as much as possible what's being said, go to the hotel room to blog instead of joining the parties, but at the end of the day I manage to post only a tiny fraction of what's been going on. SC: How do you sustain the blog (and your writing life) financially? Where are the compromises? (For example, do people pay your expenses to come and see a project, and do you like it when they do, or does it imply you write in return?) RD: There's a bit of advertising, sometimes it works great, sometimes it's just pitiful. So I write for magazines and catalogues in order to be able to pay the rent. I don't like that. I'd rather focus on my own thing. Besides, English is not my mother language so I feel handicapped by my ignorance of the grammar and vocabulary; it's okay on the blog because I feel that readers know me and might be more tolerant. On the other hand, it would be mean to complain. I’m quite flattered when someone asks me to write for them. Now the travels are covered. Sometimes. If the festival is good, organized by talented people with empty pockets, I don't mind, I pay my plane ticket, give a talk, blog the event. Conflux in New York is such event. There are other festivals or conferences that I feel I have the duty to attend like Ars Electronica. I save a bit of money, go to Ars and enjoy as much as I can. Otherwise I can't afford to travel and get a hotel. Most of the time I’m asked to give a talk so the organizers cover my expense and give me a speaker's fee like they do with any other participant of the event. Sometimes, I’m asked to come and blog a conference or festival, I don't even have to give a talk or workshop but all expenses are covered. If the event looks interesting and the programme is good, bliss! I’ll go for it. If the programme doesn't rock my boat then I decline the offer. Very often though, people would contact me and ask, "Why didn't you come and cover my festival in Canada?" Some just assume that I’m a big organization with loads of money and contributors all around the world. But, hello!, it's just me writing from my kitchen table. The blog is not a business, it's a platform I use to share with others what I’m discovering every day. SC: Because you write about what you want, for your own personal blog (as you described it to me earlier) do you ever get accused of not being critical enough? (I.e. that you rarely write bad reviews of projects because generally you're writing a review in the first place because you liked the project) RD: Yes, sometimes. I try to stay neutral because I don't want to influence the opinion of readers. I’d rather think that they approach an artwork without any prejudice and if they have any, I don't want to be the one to blame for it. I used to be a reporter, staying neutral was something I was "trained" to be and I never felt that there was anything wrong with that. Besides, I don't think my own opinion is worth that much. I'm not an expert, just an amateur. There are enough vocal amateurs on the web these days so I don't feel like adding my pinch of salt. I do believe that I still have so much to learn before daring to utter any well-argued thoughts. I am also aware that declaring that I’m an amateur is a very comfortable, not to say cowardly, position. The only way I express that I don't like a project these days is by not writing about it. It won't mean that a project is bad, just that I didn't find it exciting and compelling enough. SC: You’ve done a terrific number of really excellent interviews with artists and new media cultural producers all over the world - and in many of them ask them the same questions I’ve just asked you about sustainability of practice. Do you think there is a financial volunteerism and precarity at the heart of most if not all new media practice? RD: No. No, because I don't want it to be like that. It shouldn't. But yes, sometimes new media practice is a question of volunteerism and precarity. Not everywhere. I know that the situation in Europe is better than in the US and that within Europe there are huge differences within countries (The Dutch, for example, are better off than Italians.) or regions (Flanders in Belgium is far more generous with new media art than the French-speaking community of the country is). But then I’m not sure it's just new media art, I guess many people involved in art have to struggle too. New media art might be in a worse situation than any other kind of art because not everyone is ready to give it credibility, thus funding. Or maybe the problem is us? We just believe in what we do, are passionate about it (I sound like an ad for an insurance company here) and put the need to pay the rent after our own desire to see a project succeed? SC: You have a few other contributors listed, how does the workload break down between you? Have you ever worked with other freelance writers / reporters for wmmna, and if not, why not? RD: There's no rule. I write my posts every day and if the others have time to write something once or twice a month that's great. I find it extremely hard to find people who can write for wmmna. And do it as well as Sascha, Alejandro and Konomi do. I love you guys! SC: How do you see the field of new media art has changed since you started blogging? (In relation to fine art? in relation to design? In relation to technology / computing research projects?) RD: Now is time to be pretentious. I think that the blog has allowed some works or fields of art and design to get more recognition. Three years ago when I started writing about interactive works, widely read gadget blogs would just laugh at the blog posts. After some time, they stopped laughing and regularly featured some art works in their column. There's still much hi-hi-ha-ha! in their comments but there's some fair amount of respect too. I also get emails from people who write for New Scientist or Wired magazine that thank me for pointing them to artists, designers or other people whose work they would otherwise never have heard (thus written) about. I can also see that because of the exposure many people now want to be part of the interaction design or new media art crowd just because they see that it's "cool" and would allow them to get their name in gizmodo or boingboing (I looove boingboing, don't get me wrong). I've seen that reflected in some recent and badly curated media art exhibitions: gimmicky, shallow and flashy pieces that entertain everyone. I don't know how much good it does to the discipline; they get more coverage but not always the good kind. Do you see what I mean? SC: (Given the work I do at CRUMB about how museums and galleries take new media art on board), from your perspective, are the projects you write about, or artists you interview, any closer to being considered a part of the mainstream of visual art and contemporary culture than before, or are they still in a ghetto (self-defined or otherwise)? RD: I can't really talk about museums. I have discussed this with gallery owners and they have to make a living, don't we all? So some rare pioneers sell screen-based works. Selling a 3D piece is more of a challenge; it's expensive, can look rather unassuming when the plug is off and needs some fixing once in a while. But coming back to screen-based works, there's some light at the end of the tunnel. Several net.artists are now finding a market for their pieces. They've been waiting for 10 years but it seems that things are finally looking brighter for them. There's even a rumour that when one of the New York galleries started framing the computer screen works in nice frames and hung them on the walls, sales got much better. Now one positive area might be magazines. Most of the time they simply ignore new media art but some of them have started to show some interest for "digital" art, they've even asked me to write columns or report. I repeat: I hate to write long pieces for papers but I also get a big pang of pride when I think that some artists whose work I admire are finally featured on those glossy posh pages. That doesn't mean I don't have to struggle sometimes when the editors tell me "Oh, please can't you just write about something a bit more related to the topic of this magazine this time. You know... art!" SC: Do you see what you're doing with wmmna as curatorial in any way (filtering or selecting or linking)? I think the introduction to your interview with Vuk Cosic, for example, embodies some of the best things about curatorial practice – being able to select works from a body of practice, describe them in detail but in plain speaking English, and get readers/viewers excited to find out more with the Q&A that follows. RD: I guess it could be regarded as a kind of curatorial work. I make a selection and exhibit the work in my little art gallery. Olia Lialina said at Transmediale this year that some artists would rather have their work exhibited on websites like rhizome and wmmna than in galleries that no one visits. http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/ flat_against_the_wall/ I'm not so sure about that but it sounded flattering. SC: How does your consulting work fit in to your practice - is that curatorial? RD: I call it consulting to make it short and easy to grasp. The term includes some curatorial work, being part of a jury for commissions, and spending plenty of time discussing ‘online or not’ with students who need advice about their own projects or the best schools to attend. On the other hand, writing on my bio that I "consult" leads to some rather unpleasant emails from people who just "ask my opinion" but in fact hope that I’ll do the job for them. For example, I’m regularly asked to recommend some "cool" art works for exhibitions that other "experts" are paid to curate or set up. But if you're a student and you need some help with deciding which school is best for your interests and expectations or if you're looking for projects that engage with the same topic that you're exploring, I don't mind giving a hand at all. SC: If you could teach new media art critics one thing, what would it be? RD: I'm not sure I can teach them anything; I’d rather ask them to give me some of their know-how. I think my only talent is that I’m a good "vulgarisatrice". It is a French word that can be used in a positive or unflattering light; it means that I can make things easier to understand for a bigger number of people. I make media art more pop. By doing so I give it more visibility but as I mentioned earlier there's always the danger of making it look like something just cool and shallow. SC: You studied the classics (Latin and Greek), which is a nice counterpoint to your work in new media. Who are some writers you admire (whether bloggers or not)? RD: I read and eat so much art and design that all I want to read at bedtime are crime stories. I like Ian Rankin and Minette Walters particularly. SC: I’ve often thought I’d like to be you, or at least have at least as cool accessories and hair clips! I really mean that I’d like to do what you do. Would you recommend it? How do you stay inspired? RD: I recommend it for the feeling it gives me to be the luckiest person on earth (right after Paris Hilton). On the other hand, I find traveling so much tiring and I work a lot. There's a lot of effort behind the scenes, like reading a lot (new media art essays, art and design magazines), trying to see as many shows as possible, writing articles for mags and catalogues in order to pay the rent, preparing the talks and workshops, etc. None of it is too taxing though, who am I to whine "oh, gosh! I have to see an exhibition!" I love it most of the time, but my boyfriend complains (rightly so) that I don't spend enough time with him and when I do I just talk about work. What keeps me inspired is that I just follow my interests and they tend to change. I guess it would be better for my blog if I had stuck to (yawn!) interactive installations. Instead, I only write about them once in a while and dedicate more space to other types of works. I also write more about non-techy art. There are two reasons behind this decision. The first one is that new media art had a strange effect on me: it rekindled my interest in art which might be a good thing, as it allows me to keep my distance from the tech fads (not all that interacts and blinks is art) and look at a new media art piece with a more critical and aesthetics-seeking eye. The second reason why I write more about non-tech art is that I feel it would be good if "traditional" art and new media art could mingle more often. It doesn't happen much in festivals and exhibitions so I just make it happen on my blog. SC: How much harder is it now that you've won 2 Webby awards? RD: Not harder at all, I just keep on doing my own thing. I'm very happy that they chose me but I don't feel that I deserve the award. I'm not fishing for compliments, I mean it. By the way, should I change anything because I received 2 Webbys? SC: I don’t think you should change anything; I wondered if the pressure to keep at it, or do more, had increased with the greater popularity of the site. Which leads me to ask at last, what are you thinking about doing next? RD: That's the problem. I'm spending so much time visiting exhibitions, talking at conferences and trying to write about those that I never take a few days to just sit there and think about where all this could go. Thanks for your interest, Sarah. 68.0 <nettime> Interview with Vito Campanelli about Web Aesthetics Geert Lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 11 May 2007 14:48:36 +0200 Interview with Vito Campanelli about Web Aesthetics By Geert Lovink Ever since I worked with Matthew Fuller in 2004 on A Decade of Web Design, I have been interested in the question if there is such a thing as ?web aesthetics? that could operate beyond the overheated nineteen nineties Internet rhetoric. It is easy to historicize ?net.art? as a pseudo historical avant-garde and then declare it dead, but what?s the point of such an all too obvious statement? The Web continues to grow and change at an astonishing rate. It is not sufficient to criticize Web 2.0 as a remake of dotcommania. Corporate and state dominance of the Web continues to be a threat, but this should not shy us away from a rigorous theorization of the Web in all its aspects. It was on the Web that I first encountered the works of the Italian theorist, Vito Campanelli, culminating in a visit to his hometown, Naples, in October 2006. After an inspiring meeting in-real-life we continued our exchange online, culminating in this online interview. Vito Campanelli is assistant professor of ?Theory and technique of the mass communication? at University of Napoli ?L?Orientale? and a free lance contributor to magazines such as Neural, Boiler, and Memenest. Vito also co-founded the web designers collective Klash. From there, he joined USAD in 2005, a research and development group focused on e-learning. He is also an independent curator, working for cultural events in Naples such as Sintesi, the Electronic Arts Festival, and is the originator of the Web aesthetics research project called The Net Observer. More recently he co-founded the Napoli new media initiative MAO, the Media & Arts Office. Vito Campanelli published the book, L?arte della Rete, l?arte in Rete. Il Neen, la rivoluzione estetica about the artist Miltos Manetas. GL: Let?s start. You?re working on ?web aesthetics?. The first association, of course, would be with web design, HTML and the look and feel of a website. But perhaps that?s not what you?re aiming at. VC: In my research into aesthetic forms of the Net, I make a clear division between commercial expressions and aesthetic expressions, without qualification. I?m not so interested in the latter, while I?m fascinated by the former - those aesthetic forms that exhaust their essence just in being there, without any intent or aim that exceeds the personal expressive needs of whoever designed them. This distinction could seem arbitrary- it could also find a basis if we consider that modern mediated mass communication is poles apart relative to any aesthetic feeling: vulgarity and arrogance nullify any hypothesis of meaning. On the contrary, the research of an aesthetic point of view is the attempt to assign - again - a sense to our human paths. In my opinion aesthetics is the more powerful answer to the violence of mass communication (or modern commercial communication). Mass communication eludes every determination, it aims to be contemporaneously ?one thing, its own opposite - and everything between the two opposites?. Exposing the message to all its possible variants, it finishes to abolish it. Indeed, the goal of mass communication is always the dissipation of any content. The only alternative to the effects of mass communication is a return to an aesthetic feeling of things, a kind of aesthetics not so much ideological, but rather more active (e.g. Adorno) - a kind of aesthetics able to bring again into society and culture feelings of economic unconcern (rather an unconcerned interest), discretion, moderation, the taste for challenge, witticism, and seduction. Aesthetics is exactly this. Talking about feelings and emotions means to free oneself from the communication domain, while facing a category of beauty has become one of the most subversive actions we can devise in contrast to the reigning ?factory of culture and consensus?. Within this view I?m suggesting, technology stays in the background: it creates the necessary conditions for spreading one?s own creativity through digital media. If we accept this position, no matter if a website is made using HTML or Flash, what?s really important is the beauty it expresses. GL: Do you find it useful to build a bridge back to the ?classics? of aesthetics - from Kant to Croce? How should we read such old authors in the light of the Internet and its development? VC: A theory that doesn?t interface itself to the historical presupposition of our thinking is nothing more than a stupid and useless utopia. Nevertheless, the authors you mentioned are not at the center of my thoughts. Kant doesn?t attribute any cognitive value to art, while Croce is sidelined with respect to Internet and its socio-cultural postulates. In Croce?s aesthetics there is a strong devaluation of technique, as he considers it extrinsic to the art and linked instead to the communication concept. Moreover, Croce himself doesn?t pose the question of communication. The intuition-expression is indeed already communication in itself. Croce would never say that the medium is the message. I refer to other authors, above all Deleuze and Guattari, who had the merit of prefiguring the actual rhizomatic structure of the Internet society, and Panofsky, who is a source of inspiration for Manovich. I find the approach of Rudolf Arnheim very valuable: according to him we must build aesthetics, starting from the perceptive and sensory world, not from the idea. If we consider the relational nature of most Net Art, it becomes interesting also trying to read, under a different lens, Herbert Marcuse?s Eros and Civilization. GL: It is hard to move away from the postmodern chapter and the way that era defined aesthetics. Is that a struggle for you? Could we say that we, still, live in the aftermath of that theory storm and merely apply the collected insights of the late 20th century to a phenomenon like the World Wide Web? VC: What you emphasize is a concrete risk and perhaps it is also a reason for the difficulties academia has in opening itself up to a dialectic comparison with the issues the Web has introduced. If we look closely at the more relevant aesthetic phenomenon in the last twenty-year period, Net Art, it becomes hard to refute that this movement, even in its heterogeneity, has introduced new and confrontational aesthetic canons. Above all, it seems crucial to me the overtaking of any distinction between content and form or medium: the interface (that, as Manovich asserts, replaces the form and the medium into the modern paradigm) is so merged with the content that thinking of it as a separate level means to eliminate the artistic dimension. Broadly speaking, I think that authentic advances will be reached when we cease thinking of the Web as an expressive medium, and more of a cultural and social interface. GL: It is said that Deleuze and Guattari?s concept have become so virulent, so active, that they have passed the point of anticipation, and are now an integral part of our media life. It doesn?t mean that D&G and their followers were wrong or sold out. In fact, it points at a new condition of theory in which critical concepts start to open up spaces and come alive, in the midst of the mess called global capitalism. Seen in this light, what role should a theory of web aesthetics play? VC: What happened to Deleuze and Guattari?s theories is merely what always happens: human thought is faster than technical progress. It often occurs that we are not able to understand the true significance of contemporary thought, nevertheless,afterwards, inrereading a book, we see clearly its capacity ofbeing ahead of its time. It?s a situation that characterizes not only philosophy but also, in general, literature. I?m still amazed, for example, at how some cyberpunk novels have anticipated the focal themes of our times, according to simple literary inventions. Gibson wrote Neuromancer(July, 1984) without any knowledge of the Web?s reality, still, he had not difficulty carrying his thought over technologicalart?s state. My idea of aesthetics has - above all - a factual dimension. I?d like to think about a kind of aesthetics busy with ?dirtying its hands? with the concrete and daily world.Its role should be therefore giving back to us a beauty dimension which we can contrast against the widespread vulgarity. To contrast an ephemeral aesthetic act to the actual dogma of ?creativity under command?, means to take oneself away from the alienation that characterizes contemporary creative production. To affirm that aesthetic forms possess a social and cultural (even pedagogic in some ways) value, it means to negate - at root - the modern social organization that comes to measure any expression, including artistic ones, on the basis of market value. Again, to affirm that a message, a form, a thought, has an intrinsic value before the commercial one seems banal, nevertheless is an aversive affirmation if compared to that you describe as ?the mess called global capitalism?. In my opinion, the diffusion of a Web aesthetics is ultimately one of the few practicable ways to liberate our new (digital) world from the slavery in which it has been condemned by commercial communication. GL: It?s so easy these days to proclaim that theory is dead. How do you deal with such cynical observations? Is there an Italian equivalent of pragmatism? VC: To ask an indolent idealistic Southerner a question about pragmatism could sound like a provocation, even if - to tell the truth - you get the point when highlighting the possibility of different approaches. I do believe that there are peoples who, due to historical and cultural traditions, are more inclined to theory, while others are more inclined to direct experience. Even with regard to new technologies, it seems to me that it?s possible to highlight an approach, predominantly European, that tends to make an issue of technique and to design paths between actual technologic conquests and the classic thought. There is another approach, one that finds its fulcrum in California, that appears instead much more focused on technique in itself. Manovich is an exception, but in his theories he continuously betrays his Russian origins. ?Theory?s death? is like ?spring and autumn?s death?: a good topic of conversation for boring living rooms. History teaches us that theory always returns in unexpected ways. Theory is dead, long live theory! GL: Do you teach Web aesthetics? Can you tell us something how students are bridging theory and the immense drive towards tinkering and producing? VC: I wish I was teaching Web aesthetics! Actually, I teach ?Theory and techniques of mass communication? and I try to feed pills of aesthetic evaluations into these lessons. As for students, they seem to me mainly oriented to use the more various objects (PC,digital devices, books, etc...) and not inclined to ask themselves questions about the things they are using. They use them without asking themselves where they come from or which valences they express over the function of use, or even, which evolutionary paths they design? This attitude is probably the fruit of the ruling consumerism that represents, de facto, the only historical reality that new generations know first hand. Nevertheless there is perhaps something more: the more or less widespread resignation and renunciation ofplaying an active and critical role in examining what surrounds us. Most of the students I usually meet seem to incarnate the ideal consumer model dreamed up by marketing gurus. They uncritically accept a lifestyle that other people have designed for them, rather than shaping their own. The picture of the situation could appear tragic, nevertheless, it?s amazing to look at the reactions that you can breed in them when you are able to uncover some conditioned thought processes of which they are victim. When it happens, you can clearly see how a growing interest rises in them, together with the determination to react (also in a creative way). The walk is quite long, therefore it?s important that none of us give up the responsibility to educate and make new generations aware. GL: Can you tell us what your theory of Web aesthetics consists of? Is it a book that you?re working on? VC: I?ve published a book on Miltos Manetas and the Neen movement that, in my opinion, is one of the more significant artistic avant-garde expressions in the last twenty-years. To state that ?websites are the art of our times,? as Manetas did in his Manifesto, means to put intangible and immaterial artworks outside of the art merchant?s tentacles. Indeed, the market still doesn?t know how to sell objects like websites, but if we erase the commercial layer, then Art returns to its natural function: to open windows where mankind can look at its own condition. At present I?ve finished, together with Danilo Capasso, another book that has moved from five questions about digital culture that Lev Manovich thought for us at the occasion of a lecture that Danilo and myself organized in Naples in April 2005. We asked more than 100 persons (artists, theorists, curators, mathematicians, etc.) all around the world to answer to Manovich?s suggestions and then we chose 50 contributions in order to publish them. The book is now complete with two different authors? reflections but - unfortunately - we are still waiting for the editor to make up his mind and pass our work over to the press. This is one of the most significant problems of publishing nowadays: editors are far too slow to follow the velocity of circulation of modern ideas. More generally, I look forward to writing a book on ?the aesthetics of the database? theme and lately, I?ve focused my research in this direction, but - to tell the truth - the visualization forms of data are so numerous that I?m still lost at sea. GL: The first decade of web design was focused on speculative thinking about the potentials of the medium, followed by ?best practices? literature and the long silence after the dotcom boom crashed. Where are we now? VC: We are at the Web 2.0 point, and this indicates an evolution of the way we look at this medium. Despite a lack of unanimity on what Web 2.0 should be, we certainly have made some steps forward - for example, we have dropped the useless antithesis between texts and images: now we consider them as modalities of reading and representing reality, and we believe that a rich medium (such as the Web) has to enhance them both, instead of contrasting them. Nowadays we can easily observe, within the framework of the Net, words that become images and images that becomes words. We have also dropped the ideas that the Web constitutes a return to the oral tradition or to the written word ? indeed, both statements have proven fallacious, and we now prefer to speak about a continuum of languages. These conceptual advances also find a hands-on application in web design, as interface designs are responding to narrative and orientation needs that are miles beyond the early desktop metaphor. As a consequence, the web designer?s role is no longer to draw, but rather to arrange environments for interaction (between users, between image and text, between books and TV, between the symbolic and the perceptive, between the active and the passive, etc...). More generally, I think we have overcome that stage of excitement over the potentials of the medium, and we are now focusing on the nature of the Web itself - its developments and the interactions between the Net and society. I feel tempted to suggest a bold comparison with the situation of falling in love: first comes the arousal over the ?potentials? of a body, then the attention shifts to the nature of the soul trapped in that body (a person takes the place of a body), and finally, all our thoughts are absorbed in imagining the possible relations between that person and people all around us (our family, our clan, our workmates, our flat mates, our playmates, our comrades, etc...). It?s also funny to note that, in accepting this comparison, we have to admit that network culture is a postulate of the early excitement over the Web (an excitement that had been driven by the dotcom boom), as a marriage is a postulate of the initial arousal over a body (driven by a hormonal boom), allowing us to put the two ?booms? on the same level. GL: Is theory in Italy a place of refuge because there is so little institutional support for new media in your country? VC: Yes, it is. In my country new media are like Godot in Samuel Beckett?stragicomedy: all the institutions keep on chattering about the advent of the Internet and new digital tools, but nobody realizes that they already surround us. In this upsetting situation, theory becomes the only way to be in touch with such things. GL: Could we also read the lively Internet scene in Italy as a subcultural necessity from the age of Berlusconi who managed to monopolize both commercial and state media when he ruled as prime minister? And, as a result of that could we say that there is a sort of ?temporary compromise? between autonomous cultures and more progressive part of the (IT) business community? VC: On one hand the lively media scene in Italy is an answer to the Berlusconi monopoly on broadcast media, but we must not forget that the one you emphasized is not the only critical situation, indeed Italy is the country of monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels: Internet and telecommunications, banks and insurance companies, most of the vital business articulations are monopolized by the ?usual suspects?. Onthe other hand there is a very deep-rooted tradition in media activism. It would suffice to remember the experience of Radio Alice that started transmitting in 1976, and introduced techniques such as linguistic sabotage and diffusion of arbitrary information. Many of the actual initiatives are expressly linked toones born at the end of the 1970s, although the needs of that period are replaced with more modern issues. From my point of view, the most interesting aspect in media activism is that it leaves behind the dominant communication language; ?breaking with language in order to reach life? as Artaud said. It?s fascinating to me how the language of advertising, as well as various modes of ideological communication, are revised into the best-made operations of subadvertising. Reusingelements of well-known media such as popular icons and clichés, along with the detournement of contemporary mass culture headlines, are very creative ways to criticize the context we live in. To my great displeasure I have to underline that often initiatives such as street TV or illegal radio exhaust their energy in building a new transmitting source but what fails is content. It?s like building empty boxes: after the initial curiosity, nobody wants really to get in. I don?t see any progressive part of the (IT) business community in Italy. Sure, there is a part that looks ?cool?: it?s the one that scans the autonomous cultures searching for ?coolness?. The point is, there isn?t any dialogue. A dialogue presumes a predisposition to change one?s point of view and I?m quite sure that thebusiness communityabsolutely doesn?t want to put their assumptions up for discussion. GL: You attended the MyCreativity conference in Amsterdam. Do you see any trace of the creative industries discourse in Italy? If Europe?s destiny is going to be exporting design and other lifestyle-related ?experiences?, then Italy would be in the best possible position. Is it? VC: Debate about the creative industry in Italy still has far to go. The term ?industry? is still not used in association with the term ?creativity?, as we usually speak about the ?fashion industry?, or ?shoe industry? or, even, ?furniture industry?. This layout doesn?t encourage the emersion of the creative work?s element as lowest common denominator around the different entrepreneurial activities that bring to life the famous ?Made in Italy? moniker. Creative work is - without a doubt - at the bottom of the product ?Italy?; nevertheless, the emphasis is always on Italian genius (that is, the attitude to invent surprising things), or on ?Italian lifestyle?. I guess that if we took a poll of strangers accustomed to buying fashionable stuff made in Italy, we would discover that they believe they are buying the right to participate in the ?Italian lifestyle?, more than the fruits of Italian creative labor. GL: Southern Europe envies the North for all its festivals, centers and cultural funding whereas Northern Europeans can?t stop showing their excitement for the Virnos, Berardis, Negris, Agambens, Lazzoratos and Pasquinellis. Isn?t that a strange form of symbolic circulation? How do you see this play between ideas and institutional cultures on a European scale? Shouldn?t we just stop thinking in those terms and start working on equal levels and forget all this regional labeling? Eastern Europe, for instance, has suffered for many years from the regional stigma. Where you come from overdetermines what you do. Northerners tend not to respond to that criticism. VC: Maybe the answer is already in your preamble: due to the fact that in Southern Europe it is quite tough to get funding and support for cultural initiatives (especially when you move outside of the mainstream), and many people are more inclined to make intellectual reflections, rather then to plan events. I would like to avoid any regional labeling, nevertheless it can be said, with some justice, that those labels express a state of affairs that is still heavily conditioned by disparities and specificities working on a regional basis. Also if we assume a merely linguistic point of view, it is completely evident that non-anglophone realities suffer enormously from the inability to participate in an active way with the European (or international) cultural debate. This fact pushes these realities to retreat into themselves and to bring to life expressive modalities distinguished by perspectives that are more regional than global. As for Italy, one of the most interesting specificity is that the lack in cultural funding has transformed the country into an amazing training ground for auto-production phenomena. Operating ?from the bottom? is, in my opinion, a key phenomenon these days, indeed, it puts into the cultural economy some truly innovative dynamics, as long these dynamics break (finally) the chain constraining cultural production to the economy of (induced) consumptions and needs. >From this field, to put a lens on the specificity of this Italian phenomenon could offer answers more interesting than the ones you obtain considering Italy in the overall European movement. GL: Is it desirable for you to overcome net.art, media theory, and electronic arts by integrating it into a broader praxis that would not have a techno prefix? VC: My attempt is just that: to free media theory and electronic arts from techno prefixes in order to consider them just as contemporary culture. In a book I wrote a couple of years ago, I stated that we need, now, to surpass the concept of Contemporary Art in order to define a new contest, one able to contain the theory and the culture born during the last years and centered around the new medium: the Internet. Indeed if Contemporary Art?s medium has been Television, it is right to close that chapter so we may open a new one dedicated to the cultural movements produced by the impact of the Net on contemporary society. It?s not just a question of definitions, rather, it is an issue of a cultural shift: giving up the critical and interpretive tools still in use, to build new ones rising from the awareness that the computer (or the database, as Manovich would say) has replaced narration as a predominant cultural representation. GL: Let?s go back to web aesthetics. Besides beauty, could we also use the term ?style?? Is there a positive and critical tradition of talking about ?style? or is that merely something for fashion magazines? Maybe it is not wise to look down on fashion? Is there style on the Net? VC: Nowadays the term ?style? appears to be monopolized by fashion and design gurus, nevertheless, we should be able to overcome the nuisance that this linguistic abuse causes, in order to reactivate a genuine critical debate. To deny the existence of style means to erase more than five hundred years of philosophical and aesthetical reflections: the term ?style?, in fact, has been used since the 16th century with the ascendance of the Renaissance ?maniera? that indicates the personal style of an artist. Style is not a genre and not prearranged forms that the artist can choose according to his preferences. Instead, style is a need because it reflects a way of living, thinking, and imagining the world in which the artist is immersed. Style is a reflection of the times, and very often the choice of a style is not even an aware choice: the artist applies the style of his environment/times without any consciousness (in this sense the critic is much more aware than the artist). Style is always related to an epoch, thus it changes along with the life and the culture existing under the influence of social, economical and psychological factors. This is the reason style (as the expression of an epoch) is not transmitted from one generation to the next. Sometimes the term ?style? is inaccurately described as ?artistic individual preferences? (?le style c?est l?homme?), but we have to refuse this equivocal interpretation: individual forms and preferences need a different denomination, while style is ? today as it was 500 years ago ? the common language of an epoch. If we accept this interpretation, the pretension of ?being without a style? becomes silly and disingenuous: can we imagine an artistic work that doesn?t reflect its times? When I hear speeches about the refusal of style, my mind goes immediately to the characters of an Orhan Pamuk?s novel: My Name is Red. The main characters in this novel are miniaturists of the Ottoman Empire that discuss (and fight and kill each other) around the subject of style, the question is: which is true art? The expression of the individual artist, or a perfect representation of the divine (in which the artist suppresses any trace of his personal vanity)? The Nobel Prize-winning?s novel describes a very paradigmatic situation: two different cultures are colliding (the Ottoman Empire ?meets? the Venetian Empire) and a new epoch rises. There is nothing to do for the miniaturists - a new epoch introduces a new style, and all their efforts to keep the traditional approach to the miniature are in vain. If we look at the Net we can clearly see a lot of genres (mail art, ASCII art, generative art, hacker art, pixel art, and so on...), but we can also identify a style. A couple of the main elements of this style are ? in my very personal opinion ? the remixing attitude and the D.I.Y. practice. Human culture has always been defined by its ability to remix ideas, concepts and inspirations, but nowadays there is something new: the new media advent has extended our potential to such an extent that we remix continuously, even when we are not aware of it. New media force us to do a continuous ?cut and paste? of the endless digital data surrounding us. Thus, we can assume that remixing is the composition method of our times. At the same time, new media give us the potential to get our hands around this growing digital data sea, indeed, we can manage and shape it even if we don?t have particular expertise. So we draw data from an endless source and we recombine them using all kind of digital tools, in few words: we remix culture on our own. In this situation, can we imagine an artistic expression that is immune to the two most popular practices of our times? I don?t think so. Instead, the style of our epoch can be found into what I am tempted to call: R.I.Y. (Remix It Yourself). Obviously, there are other elements that contribute to the actual style, for example, it?s easy to observe how non-linear narrative is taking linear narrative?s place. Instead of denying the concept of style, we should look around us to identify what are the characteristics of our times, and in doing that, we would also understand what the actual style is shaped by. GL: How do you deal with the popular in web aesthetics? Often it is said that popular culture is so trashy. But with Internet culture the masses of users these days are so advanced. Theory and criticism have yet to discover blogs, Second Life, Wikipedia and all that. Having said that, it?s clear we no longer live in the 1980s and have to promote a serious study of popular (media) culture. Cultural Studies has established itself in such a big way, we shouldn?t have to make such calls? Still there is the question, from a theory point of view, whether or not to overcome the popular. VC: What is the ?popular?? This is a good starting point, if we refer to the Web, and broadly to digital media. Common people are the vanguard we need to test our theories, our hypothesis, our projects, and our products too. Who?s discovering a new world like Second Life? Who?s populating our databases, our wikis and our blogs? Who?s testing our new digital tools? We need them to reach a critical mass. As a consequence all the communication is directed to them: ?try this new product for free?, ?trial period?, ?make a free tour?, ?open your own blog?, ?publish your photo album?, these and many others formulas witnessing that we need the masses of users in order to get feedback, to give basis to our theories, to shape our products. We don?t need them just as audience (the TV age model), the Internet age postulates an active participation, thus, the masses are required to turn themselves into players. What would remain of Web 2.0 and social networks without masses? A desert, I guess. With all the digital media and contexts we are creating the masses have also produced an incredible amount of content. If that is actually what we define as ?popular culture?, then the questions are: what are we supposed to do with all this stuff? Is this cultural production significant? Should we spend our time in studying and analyzing it? For sure we don?t have time to do that, so (usually) we limit ourselves to give a bit of our attention to the events that, pushed by mass media, bounce under our noses. The most interesting thing for me is to observe how the top rated/most viewed videos on YouTube are all ?commercial TV like? products; the usual Second Life public spaces (streets and buildings) are crowded with more advertising than Las Vegas (most of them are dedicated to sex); the stick memories of the average MP3 players are filled with the same music you can listen to on any commercial radio station, and shall we talk about the subjects of the photos stored in millions of digital cameras? What I?m trying to mark is that with new media we are repeating the stupidity and the uselessness of our TV formats, the advertising?s invasion of any public space, the boredom of the pop music scene, etc... Vulgarity and the dissipation of any significance are moving from old media to new media, and I don?t see any good reason to spend my time with such ?popular culture?. Besides this, it?s also very interesting to observe how the old media are becoming more and more permeable to blogs and D.I.Y. information. This phenomenon is not due to a fascination in more democratic information sources (the traditional media holders hate new media and people involved with it), on the contrary - the pressure is rising due to the growth of the ?eyes? (digital cameras and all the new devices) that are watching the same events that mainstream media are reporting to us: the possibility of being uncovered are too many and broadcast journalists are forced to tell the truth (or ? at least ? a plausible version of it). As a consequence, blogs have become the major source of news and information about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal (a scandal born thanks to modern digital devices) and the Iraq War. Then the question is: what impact is the blogosphere having on the traditional media?s control over news and information? We also have to consider that bloggers are often the only real journalists, as they (at their own risk) provide independent news in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under control. GL: Is it your aim to promote sophistication in web design? How can we identify, and then design sophisticated communication? VC: I don?t like sophistication very much, I prefer a minimalist approach to web design, with clear and linear interfaces that give intuitive access to sophisticated and very structured data. When you have to manage complex data sets or very rich multimedia contents, the best you can do is design a structure that is very minimal. Indeed, you don?t have to add meaning to the content you are representing, otherwise you make it useless and baroque. Nevertheless, minimalist doesn?t mean careless or dull, instead it means ?not one sign more than necessary?, it means taking care of details, it means being moderate and objective. We also have to consider that there are so many kinds of data that there can?t be one universal formula of access. In fact, some information, such as the structure of a network, need graphic expedients to be understood. Also, there are many realities that have no meaning if showed only in a textual format. In those cases we use graphs, charts, etc., and very often we obtain wonderful and unexpected forms. For example, if you look at the Manuel Lima?s project, Visual Complexity (www.visualcomplexity.com), you?ll easily find many wonderful visualizations of complex networks. In view of such artistic representation of data the problem becomes: where is the line? How much graphic sophistication (or embellishment) do we need to solve a visualization problem? I guess the answer can found on a case-by-case basis, and the only line we can certainly detect is the one between the amount of complexity required by a representation (objective factor) and the self-satisfaction that pushes any designer into going over what is required (subjective factor). (edited by Henry Warwick) -- URLs: Vito Campanelli?s home page: http://www.vitocampanelli.it/ Media & Arts Office: http://www.mediartsoffice.eu/ Web designers collective Klash: http://www.klash.it The Net Observer: http://www.thenetobserver.net Boiler magazine: http://www.boilermag.it # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 69.0 <nettime> Wireless After the End of the WWW Michael Dieter nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 8 May 2015 10:50:10 +0100 Dear Nettime, I thought the following short conversation/interview I recently conducted with the artists Dennis de Del and Roel Roscam Abbing might be of interest to the list. It covers their currently work on post-digital, wireless, radio, DIY and other critical media topics. Cheers, --------------------- Wireless After the End of the WWW: A Conversation with Dennis de Del and Roel Roscam Abbing For the 2015 Fiber Festival (http://2015.fiberfestival.nl/), Michael Dieter spoke with the Rotterdam-based artist researchers Dennis de Bel and Roel Roscam Abbing about their current project on radio transmissions and wireless technologies. At the event, they will run a workshop âWrite the Waveâ which explores the possibilities for reutilizing the radio spectrum as a new commons in the forthcoming âdigital radio switchoverâ. The conversation took place on May 1st at Open Coop, Amsterdam. Michael Dieter (MD): Can I start by asking you a bit about the workshop? What sort of things will you be doing at the Fiber Festival? Roel Roscam Abbing (RRA): We want to start the workshop with giving the participants an insight in what happens with radio signal all around us, everywhere; everything that has no strings attached (wireless) is basically using radio technology, so itâs nice to give the people an impression of what is happening. For the Fiber Festival in Amsterdam, we want to scan the spectrum around the A Lab space, we want to listen to the ferries, to the air traffic into Schiphol airport; well, everything up to the GSM 3G signals which we can hear. MD: And the idea is that then youâll also build transmitters in the workshop to use the FM spectrum, but for data? RRA: We have not really decided which spectrum weâll use. Generally the lower in the spectrum you go, towards 1MHz and lower, the further you can reach, but the larger your equipment needs to be. The antenna always has a relation to the size of the physical wave; in the case of 1MHz, itâs 300 meters. So then you take 1/100 of that you have a three meter antenna, so for FM it would be 100 times smaller, itâs around a 100MHz range, but then you have interference of radio stations. Dennis de Bel (DB): We want to create devices that can be parallel to the devices we already have in our pockets and then create some sort of a parallel network based on existing consumer hardware, but solder it yourself from scratch. Therefore, we still have to decide whatâs going to be practical in the workshop. MD: Do you have a background in radio? DB/RRA: No, no, noâ RRA: We always start working with something that we know nothing about and then you dive straight into it. DB: Then you âdieâ straight into it. MD: So how did you come to work on radio transmission? RRA: We came from different backgrounds. Personally I was researched a lot into the physical infrastructure of the internet and sort of the politics behind that and the implications. I did a few projects and as I was reading about the history of telecommunications, there was this recurrent theme when it came to power over networks. That wireless managed to give an alternative to people who did not have power over cables. At the end of the 19th century, the British had the entire world connected to London. They had all the islands and geopolitical sweet spots that they needed for their shipping network, like the Rock of Gibraltar, and could use these to run that vast cable network. The competing European powers also wanted private communication networks to connect to their colonies, but had a hard time doing so because they couldnât make direct connections. Because of this their telegrams flowed partly through British cables which made it possible for the British to censor or eavesdrop messages or cut it off when they found it inappropriate but then radio happened. So Germany and France were excited and invested a lot into radio technology to make direct links to the colonies so they would not need to rely on British cables anymore. From that moment on you see that wireless versus wired is a bit of a recurring trend so when I started thinking about network infrastructures my interest drifted towards wireless because of the different way of how things can be done.. one can own cables but one can't own radio waves.. And yeah then you also realize there was already an internet as we know it, you already had radio amateurs making worldwide with data connections via radio in the 80s; a bit of forgotten history about a technology that we are only familiar with in the form of Giel Beelen and 3FM. MD: This workshop, of course, is also interesting from the context of critical media theory that runs alongside the history that you are tracing. With Bertolt Brechtâs famous essay on radio picked up by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and then Jean Baudrillardâs response to that, the technology inspired an ongoing discussion on the âtwo facedâ aspects of media and how it always seemed to end up in another centralized arrangement. But this is especially interesting with radio as it stands today; well, I donât know if itâs true, but Iâve heard that some of the spectrum has been abandoned, itâs almost as if it has become available in a new way as the technology is superficially superseded. RRA: Well, that is indeed how we would read it, but I think the people who give licenses wouldnât read it like that. But itâs an interesting thing thatâs happening. As things move to more digital higher bandwidth frequencies, they move from MHz to 100s of MHz to GHz. Longer waves donât get used in that same way anymore, except for RFID chips, so in that sense, a space opens up that can be pirated. MD: And thatâs another a key part of this history, right? Pirate radio or activist uses like Radio Alice in Italy, they encompass a very rich tradition of experimental and political practices. RRA: Yeah and thatâs one of the nice things of the radio wave as an object that it literally doesnât know boundaries. You have radio waves that go across the world all the time, which allowed them to be used for propaganda purposes. You have Radio Free Asia, Free Europe. The other day I was listening to Radio Havana Cuba which uses these very long waves to transmit the Cuban point of view all the way here. In the same way you can listen to radio from Uzbekistan. They air their point of view across the world and there is basically no way to stop it and thatâs a nice thing and thatâs why radio pirates are interesting. Once they transmit, you can destroy the transmitter, but the message is still out there. So I would say that look towards the radio pirate for inspiration in contrast to the radio amateur who is so in love with the technology that he gets a sanctioned license and thereby limits the field of view in a way; they cannot send encrypted communications, they can only use specified bands which can be subject to change. As long as they are perceived as useless, there are amateur radio bands, but as soon there is a new use for it, they are subject to change. Nowadays, for example, there is a discussion about NFC chips using the same band (14mhz) as amateur radio, so there could be a risk that amateur radio jams things like wireless paying cards. So it is not unimaginable that amateurs would not be able to transmit on these frequencies. For their love for the technology, they really have to comply and cooperate with the governments that give licenses. And then you have this other history of people just grabbing the frequency which I find more interesting. MD: Do you have an idea of what kind of content you will transmit at the workshop? DB: There is a reason why the commercial parties are moving up the spectrum because of the bandwidth I guess. So we have some interesting limitations in our system, itâs ultra slow, itâs quite nice actually because you become aware of the materiality of digital stuff like files. For example, you could send an image and see it build up on your screen but it can take up to 30 minutes for a JPEG. But you also have auditory feedback as well. MD: Itâs this old problem of latency and bandwidth. While traveling I became more aware of bandwidth and how the signal varies on your phone significantly, and made me think about how web content is optimized for latency. For instance, when you look at digital content from the perspective of performance optimization, you can see how the itâs arranged in particular ways to allow for speedy delivery, what Wolfgang Ernst calls chrono-engineering. Itâs used in web and app design to target particular audiences in certain locations using certain devices. This is part of the new research program Iâm doing on user interface design practices (rather than art practices). But itâs also why I am really interested in your project, to see how digital content and wireless transmission can work together in different ways. DB: Indeed, you really have to choose what to send what to watch/see. A nice thing is that it really reacts to your body, the proximity, you can either become an antenna or a shield. RRA: This is all analogue electronics which is a bit of black magic; there is a lot of physics going on. You can calculate nice formulas and approach each value of a component, but then indeed your body has its own capacitance and you come close to your transmitter and it sort of shifts the whole signal. DB: Humidity, air pressureâ RRA: Temperature plays a large role. In that sense, analogue electronics are hell, but at the same time with only a few components you can make a transmitter. You really get down to the physics of how radio works. To send radio you need to make a carrier wave which is a wave that oscillates at a certain frequency, which will carry your message basically and then you write your information on that, hence Write the Wave. MD: Are the transmitters that youâll build in the workshops your own designs? RRA: No, actually weâve got these from a pirate radio manual that is floating around the internet. I donât really know the history behind this manual, but itâs really good; itâs called The Complete Manual of Pirate Radio by Zeke Teflon. Itâs a zine with all these designs and also this ideology: âyou should grab the wave!â And a Japanese media artist provided some designs. DB: Yeah, one design is from Tetsuo Kogawa who does narrowcasting sound art, really local hosted radio shows, but using feedback from the radios themselves or musicians; he also did some workshops. MD: Iâve heard that thereâs quite a long history of experimental radio in Japan. For instance, in the recently translated writings of FÃlix Guattari on his time there, Machinic Eros, he discusses the mini-FM community (Radio Home Run) that Kogawa initiated with others in the 1980âs. RRA: The modern transistor radio is basically what Sony made the big player that it is now. The funny thing is that radio started off not as analog but rather as a digital medium with Morse code, turning the transmitter on and off and transmitting discrete values. Analogue transmission was invented only while people were looking at how to multiplex these digital signals, so that you could put two or four signals on one cable, that was goldmine in the nineteenth century. All the âstartupsâ back then â these were the heydays of the inventor geniuses we are so in love today with â were all about multiplexing signals; putting as much data through a cable. And then Alexander Graham Bellâs startup found out that accident that if you multiplex enough signals they begin to resonate at enough frequencies, to carry sound or voice. That was the invention of telephony and thatâs when transmission became analogue in a way. And later when people were looking at sending digital data again, they had to come up with a hack on the analogue system again. This is what the old modem does; modulates and demodulates data into sound and back and thatâs what we want to do with this workshop. DB: There is this software modem that emulates a hardware modem called 'minimodem', for example. MD: Actually, there is another question I wanted to ask you both; maybe itâs a bit of an unfortunate question. But when I was looking at Dennisâ work in particular, I was thinking about the post-digital concept. I donât know if you have any thoughts about it or how you see it applying to your work. *long silence* RRA: For me, itâs a realization that each medium has its own merit. If you take the 2000âs and 90âs wave of technology, everything was inevitably becoming digital and networked. And from that perspective, itâs illogical to see people actually decide what medium they use, based on the characteristics that each medium has and not on something is digital or not. I think thatâs what post-digital is, this realization. Weâre not going to use the internet because itâs the internet, or vinyl because itâs retro, but because of the intrinsic qualities of each medium. But you, Dennis, are the post-digital artist! DB: First of all, Iâm not. Iâm still figuring out what I will be for the rest of my life. Or I hope so at least. I donât see it really reflected in this whole thing that gets labelled as post-digital art. It stays so digital all the time. I donât knowâ It has become a poisoned term. MD: When I was first studying, we were still being taught a lot of postmodern theory and when I shifted to thinking about media, it was really refreshing. Because all of those complex questions about history, time and representation that come with a term like âpostâ could be put aside. And yet, there is something interesting in the way Florian Cramer, for instance, talks about post-digital. He tries to be very precise about it, which I appreciate â especially given that there are other competing terms that are also problematic such as âpost-internetâ, ânew aestheticâ or even âneo-analogueâ. There is a sense though that the digital is not what it used to be. And it feels that there is a historical shift in thinking about new technologies as necessarily progressive politically. Post-Snowden is another term that can be mentioned in this context. And I see some of these themes in the workshop that you are running, in the sense of trying to discover a new stance towards media infrastructures that somehow is also taking account of the current climate. Would it be fair to say that there is some kind of contemporary media politics going on in your practice and how would you describe it? DB: As soon as youâre not uploading your work on Behance youâre political in a senseâ RRA: Uploading to Behance is also a politics.. MD: Let me put it another way, there is obviously a pragmatism to your practice in terms of putting things together in new ways, but is there a radical pragmatism as well where you can see these practices radically scaling? Given that the latency is so limited and that there is kind of slow dimension to putting together DIY radio in a workshop with a small group of people like this. RRA: I think maybe that might be one of the post-digital things about this. This is also the realization that people might have had is that when new technologies are unstructured and undefined, it creates a space where interesting things can happen, like the early web. Thatâs the thing we keep romanticizing about the internet, because it was unstructured and it wasnât fully commercialised, and as soon as things scale â which is, of course, one of Silicon Valleyâs buzzwords, does it scale? â you lose all of that potential. Thatâs why I decided that some things shouldnât scale. And maybe in that sense you could speak about a post-digital theme. Media have specific properties which get lost as they scale. And obviously these transmitters are not a tool.. DB: Itâs not an optimised product. There is a lot of noise which gives a lot of room for discussion.âIf you see an image or a website loading on your screen you just interfere with your body and you break the whole thing. You realize how hard it is and you see whatâs happening. RRA: Itâs not a solution for any sort of thing but its more a way in which people look at other communication infrastructures that they use and get a new viewpoint. DB: Itâs also media archaeology, because itâs really hard to get these components nowadays. Ten years ago, there were still shops, but weâll soon lose it. MD: Where did you get these components? Not at Media Markt I guess. DB: There is only one electronics shop in Rotterdam where you can only by a maximum of five of these components. But we bought Chinese knock-offs online. Itâs almost undoable. DB: I really like to think by myself and work with my hands and when it gets out of your hands, you donât have any control. There is a nice balance between control and uncontrol with these analog components. RRA: And also the scale of the components we use is important because these one can grab and touch. Electronics always trended towards miniaturization to a point now where most stuff is so small you cannot pick it up with your fingers let alone arrange and connect them. Designed by machines, built by machines. DB: Built for the masses, you have to build a million otherwise it makes no sense. RRA: There is a lot to be said about being able to do it yourself. You learn a lot by doing this, also by failing. DB: You burn a lot! -------------------------- Also on Medium w/ some images: https://medium.com/ {AT} FIBER/wireless-after-the-end-of-the-www-an-interview-with-dennis-de-bel-and-roel-roscam-abbing-6837f8ea0a40 -- Michael Dieter "Social Media Expert", Gentequemola, Internet Old West Amsterdam "I'm on computers profusely" - Lil B http://twitter.com/#!/mdieter # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org 70.0 [Nettime-bold] Hacking the Art OS - Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank [1/2] Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Fri, 15 Mar 2002 14:51:45 +0100 [This is the English translation of the original-length German interview, part 1 of 2; copyleft and publication data is given at the end of part 2. -FC] Hacking the art operating system Cornelia Sollfrank interviewed by Florian Cramer, December 28th, 2001, during the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club (German Hacker's Club) in Berlin. FC: I have questions on various thematic complexes which in your work seem to be continually referring to each other: hacking and art, computer generated, or more specifically, generative art, cyberfeminism, or the questions that your new work entitled 'Improvised Tele-vision' throw up. And of course the thematic complex plagiarism and appropriation - as well as what can be seen as an appendix to that, art and code, code art and code aesthetics. CS: Surely code art and code aesthetics are more your themes than mine. I think I should be the one asking the questions here. (laughter) FC: ...no, this refers very specifically to statements made by you, for example in your Telepolis interview with 0100101110111001.org, which I found excellent because of its rather sceptical undertones. If that really is more my area though, then by all means we can bracket it out of the interview. CS: No, no. I didn't mean it like that. Quite the opposite in fact. However that is what is so interesting and difficult about the relationship between these complexes - and which I often find myself arguing about. A lot of things appear to run parallel, or better put, one invests more in one area for a particular period of time, then returns back to something else. To keep an eye on how these various activities link together is not easy. FC: When I look at your work, I notice that on the one hand you are a very important net artist, on the other hand - what nevertheless seems closely related to the this - you work as a critical journalist for among others, Telepolis, and frequently write about hacker culture: for example, you've written about an Italian hacker congress and interviewed the Chaos-Computer-Club spokesperson Andy Müller-Maguhn about the Cybercrime Convention. Am I right in supposing that when you write about hacking, you always maintain an aesthetic interest in net art - and that, vice-versa, when you are writing about net art, you investigate to what extent it tends towards computer hacking. CS: I see myself foremost as an artist, and that is my point of departure for everything else; it gives me the motivation too to slip into other roles. Being a journalist is more a means to an end, because as a journalist I obtain information that as an artist I would not obtain. That means, I instrumentalise this function, as I did at the ars electronica 2001. The theme there was 'Takeover' and I was invited to participate on the panel Female Takeover. An interview that I did for Telepolis with the head of the ars electronica, Gerfried Stocker, helped me understand what he thought about the theme - and how this somewhat vague concept came about. That's why journalism and scrutiny are basic tools of my art. My product though - I don't know if I should refer to it like that - is ultimately artistic, or if you want to call it that, aesthetic. FC: In the conclusion to your review on ars electronica you write: "perhaps art no longer needs ars electronica either". I have to add that I warmed to that remark. (laughter) CS: But perhaps it does! "Perhaps" is what is written and meant. (laughter) FC: The motto of the event does not imply that art wants to appropriate technology, rather to the contrary, that technicians want to control art and make artists superfluous. CS: I saw another 'Takeover' there. Stocker felt it was a 'Takeover' by people working in the free market who have virtually taken over art. And basically for the very reason that they are more creative than artists. His whole concept of art circles around creativity; nothing else seems to occur to him about a possible definition of art. (Quoting our good colleague Merz here, creativity becomes something for hairdressers!) Sure, Stocker's thesis was meant as a provocation to artists - on the lines of look at yourselves for once, what a bunch of boring shits you are compared to the young laid back super-kids in the companies who come up with the wildest things. But even that can be interpreted in various ways. You could open up a wider spectrum to 'Takeovers', just like we did when we discussed and engaged with the issues of 'Female Takeover'. By the way, one result of our panel was that at a future ars electronica there should be a 'women only' ars electronica. FC: In order to come back to the question of defining contexts - such as art and non-art, art and hacking: it occurred to me while reading your article on the hacker conference in Italy that usually the domains of art and the hacking are kept apart from one another. Even if in Italy this division was not so rigorously kept in force. That seemed to be a sociological observation, and not a thesis that you support and want to concretize. Is hacking then for you art and does hacking have something to do with art? CS: Both. As far as sociological theories on art and hacking go, I've come increasingly to the conclusion over the last four, five years in which I have been involved in hacking, that hacking culture always has something bordering on a national...(laughter) flavor. That's why it is interesting for me to visit other countries and especially Italy, where it appears as if there does not exist the slightest fear of contact between artists, activists, philosophers etc. They coexist there naturally, dialogue with each other and create a common language in which they can communicate (laughter), which is something I haven't experienced in Germany. As a female artist in the Chaos Computer Club, I have come face to face with some of the worse preconceptions, accusations and verbal abuse of my life (unfortunately). FC: You said: as a 'female artist' in the Chaos Computer Club. What do you put the emphasis on? Being an 'artist' or being 'female'? CS: On both. As far as gender goes there is a basic frankness involved. When one deals with the same themes identically and speaks the same language, gender means less hurdles to cross. (laughter) Since that is seldom the case it becomes one. The bigger problem however is art. That left me utterly dumbfounded. I was having a nice chat with someone at one or other of the Chaos Computer Club's parties and was asked what I do. When I replied "I am an artist", the reaction I got was a hoarse exclamation: "I hate artists", which left me thinking, oh, that's a pity! That usually makes for an abrupt end to any conversation you might have. I find it very difficult to find new topics to talk about, or reasons to stay and ask questions. That has no doubt to do with the fact that hackers see themselves as artists - and more to the point the only genuine ones - and that everyone else is just an idiot and hasn't a clue (laughter). On the other hand though a connection to art has arisen out of the formative days of the Chaos Computer Club. For example in Bielefeld, where padeluun and Rena Tangens see themselves as being active as both artists and gallerists - although they are by no means equally loved and cherished by everyone at CCC. FC: ...Felix von Leitner for example, one of the most skilled computer experts in the CCC, enjoys giving padeluum a regular bashing ... CS: In the German CCC that has a lot to do with the person padelun - who many simply can't stand. He embodies for some what they are accustomed to in art, and which means the subject is put to an end. FC: Is that not a problem perhaps of the definition of art? Because since the middle of the 18th century, and at the latest since Romanticism, we have a definition of art that is no longer focused on the 'ars', the actual skill involved, but rather on the genius and the aesthetic vision. If one nonetheless sees hacking as art, this seems to have a lot to do with the older definition of 'ars'. CS: That can also have to do with a newer definition of art, if it is exists in the minds of people. For me this has less to do with skill directly, because one person alone in our times does not have the skill to produce something relevant, rather different people with different skills have to come together. A typical hacker would fit into such a team. However it is very tough to get a foot into the German hacker culture with that idea. You probably don't know my work with women hackers? FC: I know the interview that you also did with a female hacker at a Chaos Computer Congress in 1999. CS: ...Clara SOpht... FC: ...right. And you are working on a comprehensive video documentation of this theme! CS: I'm making a five part series. Due to my experience in the CCC, I narrowed my research down and tried to find women who see themselves as hackers. Besides posting to numerous mailing lists and newsgroups, I asked a diverse number of experts. Bruce Sterling, for example, who has written an erudite book "Hacker Cracker", and is seen as an expert in the American scene, or the American hacker hunter, Gail Thackeray, who was the co-founder of the Computer Crime Unit in the USA. They are really specialists who know the scene very well, and all of them confirmed that there are no highly skilled women in this area. That proved very depressing for me. In my fantasies, I imagined there were all this wild women, complete nerds, exotic, anarchistic and dangerous, courageous enough to want to cross borders and break all conventions, psychopathic and with criminal tendencies, politically active, artistic and more: however they just didn't exist. That's when I switched from the journalist-research modus to the artistic-modus and said to myself, I have to try and reshape this boring reality. And that's why I did the interview with Clara SOpht for example, who doesn't really exist. (Laughter) I just started to invent female hackers. FC: Oh, I see! (laughter) Great! CS: I did show the videos which come out of this process in the art scene, where they went down really well, although sometimes certain clever people ask what they actually have to do with art. Depending on the situation I then reveal that the female hackers do not exist or STILL do not exist. I preferred showing them though in a hacker context. For example I gave a talk at the CCC congress on women hackers and showed the interview with Clara SOpht. It was pretty well attended, including a lot of men, who watched everything and then attacked me for not defending sufficiently Clara Sopht's privacy, because she had stressed that she did not want details about herself being publicized. At the end of the event I mentioned casually that the woman did not exist and that I had invented her. Some people were gobsmacked. Quite unexpectedly they had experienced art, an art which had come to them, to their congress, and talked in their language. I found that very amusing. These little doses of 'pedagogy' can trigger off a lot and no doubt help CCC to develop itself further. FC: There you become a hacker yourself, but in a different system from that of computer codes. You do 'social hacking'. CS: Exactly - my favorite hack in the CCC concerned the Website of the Hacker Club, the 'Lost and Found' Page, which I always liked to study after every congress. I found it fascinating to discover what things hackers have on them and have forgotten. I then turned that around. While I was working on the theme 'women hackers', I deliberately left things at the congress so that they would turn up on the 'Lost and Found' page and cause commotion and upheaval. By that, I mean I left things there which normally only women have or possess. The main object was a small electronic device with a display and two little lights that women use to calculate their fertility cycle. I handed that in to the 'Lost and Found' and added that I had found it in the ladies' toilets. Five hackers grouped around this device and studied it ...(laughter) to find out what it is. This ominous device became the center of a lot of heated discussions before it was finally pinned up as a large photo in 'Lost & Found' Page. Those are examples of some of my small hacks at the CCC - back then while in the process of leaving clues to female hacker and characters who do not exist. FC: In the early nineties the art critic Thomas Wulffen coined the phrase 'art operating system'. Can you relate to that in any way? Or do you find it problematic? Your artistic hacks that you've mentioned do not engage directly with the art operating system! CS: I can relate to that in a big way because what interests me most in art is it's operating system, the parameters which define it, and how they can be changed and what the possibilities of new media contribute to this change. What also belongs to the operating system is the concept of the artist, the notion of an artistic program, an artist's body of work, and last but not least the interfaces - who and what will be exhibited and who will look at it. This system is actually what interests me most in art. To intervene and be able to play with it I have to know how it functions. FC: But then isn't it difficult to be a net artist as well? In my perception of net art what astonished me most and what affects you too, is how petty bourgeois, reactionary and utterly humorless this contemporary art scene really is - although one always thought it was the most aesthetically permissive around. In the example of net art, one could see how in the very moment in which no new objects were being produced which lent themselves to being exhibited, that it (net art) lost its footing and was not given proper recognition in the art world. I still find it astonishing how much net art has to fight against this in order to be taken seriously in the first place by the art operating system. Is that not difficult for you, as an artist, to want to try and hack the art operating system, and to do as a net artist? CS: First of all I do not see myself solely as a net artist, but rather as a kind of concept artist. I find the net indeed very interesting, and to be active in it fulfills many of my wishes, but that aside, I also work with video, text, performance and whatever else is required for a particular project. That net art is not recognized in the art world and has problems there is primarily due to the fact that, in my opinion, there are no pieces/objects which can be exchanged from one owner to another in a meaningful way. An art which is not compatible with the art market is hardly of any interest, because in the last analysis the market is the governing force in the art operating system. Another further difficulty is the ability to exhibit. What justification is there to show net art in the 'White Cube'? In that way all curators have to ask themselves: why should we actually show net art here in our museum? Some net artists quickly understood that they wouldn't get far with their non-commodifiable, difficult to represent art in the market, and expanded to working with installations. That has worked well - just as it did with video art. It is not a new phenomenon that is happening to net art. Before it, there was also ephemeral art, Fluxus and performance art for example, or technically perfect reproducible art forms such as video and photography. All these art forms had enormous problems at the beginning, but then opportunities surfaced in the market and certain intermediaries really supported them and managed to create a space for them. And when everything becomes too much, another decade of 'new painting' is heralded in order to let the market recuperate. Nevertheless I think there is an interest regarding net art in the art world. For a long period it was given a lot of hype, and at the moment I see a kind of consolidation. Ultimately there are a few big institutions like the Guggenheim, the Tate Gallery or the Walker Art Center that commission new works. What goes wrong in net art is that artists - I'm talking mainly about the group net.art and that scene - have not developed collective strategies as to how they should deal with the art system - which was one of the great strengths of the Fluxus artists. There is missing a willingness to accept that a problem even exists in the first place. Therefore the result can only be disasterous when the two worlds collide. Attitudes like: " I'll show my work at documenta or in the Whitney Museum, but it doesn't mean anything" don't lead anywhere. That is unpolitical and weakens every single artists' position. Vuc Cosic acted similarly at the Biennale 2001 in Venice. Leaving aside the strange circumstances which lead to him ending up in the Slovanian Pavillion, it was a success for net art and for him personally, and it was generally an interesting Pavillion. And instead of celebrating that - which would have been honest - he tried to convey through his acting that everything was trival and meaningless. Some people found this very unpleasant and there arose quite spontaneously the idea of commenting what was going on. The result was the very controversial 'flower action'. In the name of the Old Boys' Network three cyberfeminists handed him a large bouquet of flowers at the opening of the Pavillion in order to gratulate him and pay tribute to his achievements in net art. I like this action, because it works at different levels: the Slovanian press were proud of their artist, and insiders would remember very clearly Vuk's gesture - as part of the opening of the net.condition at zkm - of laying down a bouquet of flowers to symbolize the death of net art through its institutionalization. A wonderful refernce, I think. I believe too that it was also a bit painful for him. As I said, the lack of a collective strategy for net artists was and still is a big problem. In 1997, a further symptom of this occurred in the form of the first competition for net art a museum has launched: EXTENSION by the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Like the introduction of net art at the documenta x, artists here were very uncertain and didn't know how they should deal with the idiotic and incomprehensible conditions. And so they contributed half-heartedly. This was the time when it would have been easy to hack the art operating system. It was definitely a missed opportunity. FC: You see yourself as a concept artist, and on your homepage there is a slogan that could be seen as an analogy: "A smart artist makes the machine do the work". Is that supposed to mean that concept art actually wasn't concept art before machines started to process the concepts? CS: No, I wouldn't formulate it so radically, so one-dimensionally (laughter). Ultimately one could take slaves instead of machines to produce art (laughter). FC: À la Andy Warhol Factory... CS: Yes, somewhat similar. Or simply craftsmen and women, or keen art students who implement the master's idea. FC: ...Jeff Koons... CS: Yeah Jeff Koons is a good example. I don't think that one needs a machine to realize that idea of art. If the aethetic program is developed with which the artist works then it doesn't matter who produces the actual pieces. And the artist becomes a purely representational figure... He or she simply has to fit well to the 'image' of an artist set as parameter in the system. FC: I want to add on something there. Yesterday I read on the 'eu-gene' Mailing List for generative art - which was set up by among others Adrian Ward - what I feel is the first enlightening definition of generative art. It comes from Philip Galanter, a Professor at the New York University, and dovetails nicely into what you just said: "Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art." I find that an interesting definition, because it not only reflects computer art, but also spans a lot more. CS: Yes, I think so too. It's a good definition. FC: Would you say that what you do is generative art? CS: Not everything that I do. But definitely the work I've done with the net art generator. Whether this set of rules he speaks about applies to my work... I'd have to really give that some more thought. What seems to support this though is that my point of departure is founded on not being creative, in the sense of creating new images or a new aethetic. Rather, I work with material that is already available. This material is then reshaped under certain structural conditions or simply reworked. But I couldn't give a NAME to this program. (laughter) FC: I ask myself, however, whether for you in 'Female Extension' - where you submitted several hundred art websites under different female artist names to the net art competition EXTENSION, and which were in fact generated by a computer program - the generative is simply a vehicle, a means to an end. 'Female Extension' was also a 'social hack', a cyberfeminist hack of the net art competition. How your generators were programmed was actually pretty irrelevant!? CS: In principle, yes. (laughter) However after 'Female Extension' I continued to develop the concept of net art generators. FC: What springs to mind now is that in one of your net art generators, you used the 'Dada Engine' by Andrew Bulhak, which is also the basis for his very humorous 'Postmodern Thesis Generator'... CS: That's right. Unfortunately that is also the most complicated generator and often causes problems. FC: So the net art generators were not inspired by the 'Postmodern Thesis Generator'? CS: No, that was different. While the competition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1997 was taking place, it was clear to me that one of the crucial points was: museum wants to incorporate net art. I wanted to intervene and clarify things: on the one hand for the artists or net artists. I felt we had to watch out with how we dealt with the situation, so that the potential of net art - which had been acquired was used in a subversive way - was not thrown away, given away to easily, and on the other hand, that the museum was given a lesson. That's how 'Female Extension' came about. At the start I intended to make all the web sites manually, using copy and paste, because I was not capable of programming them. The programming happened more by chance through an artist friend of mine. I was very happy with the results; the automatic generated pages looked very artistic. The jury was definitely taken in by it, although none of my female artists won a prize. Through 'Female Extension' and the social hack I got caught up in the idea to conceptualize the generators in even more detail. Three versions have now been around for some time now: one, which works with images, one which combines images and texts in layers on top of each other, and one that is a variation of the 'Dada Engine'. This one is specialized in texts and invents wonderful word combinations, sometimes even with elements from different languages. Two more are in development for particular applications. FC: There is a corresponding simultaneity that can be perceived in various aesthetical processes in your new work 'Improvised Tele-vision'. You are referring to Schöneberg's piece 'Verklärte Nacht'. It was recoded by Nam June Paik, who let the record run at a quarter of its normal speed, and then its recoding by Dieter Roth, who restored Schönberg's music to it original tempo by speeding up Paik's version. Then you join in, by building a platform for the 'ultimate intervention', upon which the user can decide which tempo to choose. That immediately reminded me of the literary theory of Harold Bloom, his so-called influence theory, according to which history of literature is the product of famous writers, who each in turn adopts to his/her predecessor as an oedipal super-ego (laughter) ... and who then again manages to free him-/herself from the predecessor. CS: Oh really? The sub-title for 'Improvised Tele-vision' originally was 'apparent oedipal fixation', which I then discarded again. (laughter) And it was the 'apparent' which was important to me. FC: That is what I assumed. There are - from my point of view - these tremendous artists, like Schönberg, Paik and Roth, who take each other down from the pedestal in order to put themselves on that very pedestal. CS: Exactly. [Laughter.] By the way I've heard a similar theory in art history from Isabelle Graw, who apllied it in a lecture about Cosima von Bonin to talk generally about female artists. FC: ...and clearly your work also uses it, but in a playful way. You wrote that you would leave open the speed at which the piece can be played. CS: Yes, with the exception of the original speed, which cannot be played on my platform. FC: ...with the exception of the original speed. You nevertheless write: "The decision is to be made by the user/listener and not by the composer, or an intervening artist". But you nevertheless set massive limits, for example by not allowing a one to one recording to be heard. CS: Whoever wants to hear the original can get hold of it without any problems. For me what is interesting is the fact that the three artists who worked on the piece before me wanted to determine the one and only tempo possible. That is a gesture which I bypass by offering a tool by which the piece can be played at completely arbitrary speeds. FC: Isn't the contextualisation with Schönberg, Paik, Roth already a defining feature? And also the decision to pack all four interventions into one room, as you did in the case of the installation, which forms the second part of the work? CS: Yes of course! My rhetoric about the ultimate intervention which is made possible through the internet, such as participation, interactivity and self-definition etc. is really a pure piece of irony! (laughter) FC: Yes, that was precisely my question. Whether you really take that seriously or not!? Or whether that is just some naïve understanding of interactivity. CS: It is not naïve, but rather I am making fun of it. And I take my assumptions and lead them through the installation to the point of ad absurdum. On the four walls of the space there are portraits of the four of us. They create the impression of being painted on canvas - but in fact they are nothing more than Photoshop manipulated photos - which were then actually printed onto canvas and stretched onto adjustable wooden frames. Next to each one of them there's an artist's text which refers to 'Verklärte Nacht'. The sound you hear in the installation is a piece which I composed of four tracks: the original by Schönberg, the slowed-down version by Paik and the speede-up version of Roth, which is practically the original, but not really because of the vinyl cracklings and the fact that the speed is not quite the same and is therefore not synchronous, and can only ever approximate the original. On the fourth track I play Roth's version backwards. This is also a reference to Schönberg and his later composition theory as well as twelve tone music, in which the melodic motives are played as crabs and backwards as crabs returning. I was gobsmacked how good the playing backwards worked together with 'Verklärte Nacht'. This music has nothing to do with the web project, the ultimate intervention, but is rather an additional variation of the composition. And I also found the visual transformation of the portraits important; that makes it clear again where I position myself and inscribe myself in the genealogy. I, as a woman, as an essentially younger woman, accuse them of setting things, whereas I leave everything open, moan about how they put themselves on the pedestal and by doing so put myself on that very same pedestal. FC: Precisely. But is that not the tragedy of every anti-oedipal intervention, that it automatically - whether it wants to or not - becomes inscribed in the oedipal logic again? That's what I see in this piece! CS: If that is the case, then that's definitely tragic. Probably that's the reason why I've made it into such a theme. I find the public's reaction amusing, which was partly very aggressive. I received such accusations as: "You don't want to be any different than they are". (laughter) What it is actually about, however, is showing the processes involved, how it functions. That I cannot extract myself from it, if I want to be part of the system, is logical. And that is a decision that I made. Nevertheless I want to know and reflect on what the conditions are - in other words, I want to make that precisely my theme. If it becomes intolerable, then I can always step back. But I lack the belief that a real alternative is possible. As long as I manage to handle this, like how I'm handling it now, then I find it acceptable. It is a state of being simultaneously inside and outside. Another example for this, which once again leads us back to the market compatibility of net art, is the invitation of a five-star hotel to partly decorate their interiors. Actually I was always fairly sure that I was the last possible artist anyone would invite for such a task. But it did interest me and I began to experiment with this. Fortunately I have the net art generators which endlessly can produce for me, which meant I just had to find a way to materialize the 'products' being created. I ended up making prints on canvas or paper and frame everything. That's how I create a series, series of images, and it is astonishing what actually transpires. It is through the arranging however that I manage to tell stories, which of course is massive manipulation. In that way I find the idea of the rematerialization of net art interesting - by packing it into accessible formats and then seeing what happens. I started by being convinced that it was not actually possible. The whole episode took place with a fair bit of raised eyebrows. However, I extended the idea further at my first gallery exhibition that I recently had in Malmö (Sweden). And it was overwhelming to see what the images were like and how they were flushed out of the unconscious of the net and onto the surface. FC: Is that still concept art? CS: Yes, of course. At least for me it is. I have now offered the hotel to let me do series for them. I insist that my images are hung in endless rows in a long corridor (which for other artists definitely is not an interesting place). And of course I hope to make a good deal on it: first of all the money on offer is interesting. But over and above that, this will be the first sale in the history of net art that is worth mentioning! [laughter]. FC: That reminds me a little bit of Manzoni and his strategy in the fifties to sell air in tin cans... CS: Yes, whereby I don't sell air, rather real images (laughter). What is interesting however is that there is no printing technology involved which insures that the images remain in tact. They might well pale over time. I sell them as products, though in a few years they could very well be just white paper, which I also find an attractive thought. (laughter) FC: And with that you once again have an oedipal reference to Dieter Roth, who came up with the chocolate objects in the sixties and which are now preserved by specialised restaurateurs. CS: Yes, or the work with rubbish and mould. The ephemeral is a very important aspect. And the example of the hotel is a successful masterstroke for two reasons. One because I receive money, which is always important, and two, because I set an example to the net art colleagues who lease or sell their web sites for ridiculously cheap sums. FC: I want to try to make the jump from here to cyberfeminism, which is difficult... let's start with the key word 'strategy'... C.S.: I can tell what the term 'Cyberfeminism' means to me or how I work with it, and maybe in that way we can build a bridge. FC: Perhaps I should begin like this: what always troubled me with the term 'Cyberfeminism' was less the 'feminism' than the prefix 'cyber'. Does that have to be? CS: [laughter] That's amazing! If the feminism had troubled you I could have related to that. (laughter) But you seem to be pc... (laughter). The theme 'cyber': that is "what it is all about". I first heard about Cyberfeminism rolling off the tongue of Geert Lovink, and I said to him: what kind of nonsense is that? That was back then when everything went 'Cyber': 'Cybermoney' 'Cyberbody' etc. FC: Yes, that's the point. CS: I pigeonholed it together with all that and treated it like it was utter nonsense. But the term lodged itself in the back of mind without [continued in part 2] _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold 71.0 [Nettime-bold] Hacking the Art OS - Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank [2/2] Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Fri, 15 Mar 2002 14:52:22 +0100 [continued from part 1] me knowing what it is. Later when I realized that I asked Geert again what it meant and if he could send me a few references. FC: [Laughter.] CS: But there was not much available in 1995/96. He sent me sure enough a reference from Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix - and 'Innen', which was a female artist group which I was involved in myself. He sent me back quasi my own context as a reference. That was a real little surprise. That he had done this was definitely no coincidence. So I thought to myself, OK, I assume he knows [laughter] which references he sent to me. I kept mulling over that in my mind. Then came the invitation to 'Hybrid Workshop' at the documenta x. Once again Geert was involved. He wanted me to plan a week or block - not on Cyberfeminism, but rather on one or other female/feminist issue. And this invitation was the catalyst for me to start working on the term 'Cyberfeminism'. By then I had found real pleasure in it and discovered that there was an enormous potential involved and which both Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix had not capitalized on. They had only dabbled in a few areas. What is interesting in Cyberfeminism is that the term is a direct reference to feminism, and therefore has a clearly political notion. On the other hand though, due to this disastrous prefix, which sure enough is a real burden and very loaded, it also shows that there is something else there, an additional new dimension. That this 'cyber' is present does not mean that much - apart from the fact that in all this hype it worked quite well. Taking a pre-fix that has popped up out of a good deal of hype, and what's more using it and attaching it to something else, creates a real power. Especially when everyone cries out (apart from you of course), Oh my God - feminism! It was this potential not to begin again from scratch with feminism, but to find a new point of departure - as well as the motivation to get people to begin engaging again with this term. Theoretically we could have made an attempt to redefine feminism. But it's history is simply too prominent and the negative image too powerful. FC: The difficulty I have with this no doubt stems from an academic point of view. We are in the midst of a discussion about net culture, which includes mailing lists like Nettime and other forums, where one no longer has to discuss the absurdity of 'cyber' terminology. That's been done. Then along comes something that one knows is not to be taken completely seriously. However when I set foot in academic circles, I found myself being criticized - like I was at the Annual German Studies Convention - for debunking dispositively the terms 'cyber'/'hyper'/'virtuel' which are still used there as discursive coordinates. These terms have gathered their own dynamic and have been written down and canonized for at least the next ten years. And it is precisely here that 'cyberfeminism' fits in, as a term which does not sound so experimental or ironic when one puts it into the context of something like Cultural Studies. CS: But what do you mean? Is that actually a problem? FC: Well, isn't it the problem that one thereby creates a discourse which in academia can gather its own dynamic and then no longer...? CS: ...in that case, yes. I fully support you there. FC: Another problem: what always becomes very apparent in the context of Feminism when one reviews its history from the Sufragettes to Beauvoir to the difference feminism of the seventies right up to Gender Studies is that 'Feminism' as such does not actually exist. CS: No, that's obvious. FC: There's an anthology of American feminist theory, which sensibly uses the title 'Feminisms' - uses the plural. Shouldn't it also be called 'Cyberfeminisms'? CS: It's been called that often. For example in the editorial of the second OBN (Old Boys Network) reader it's referred to as 'new Cyberfeminism' and then 'Cyberfeminisms'. Or in a definition by Yvonne Volkart: "Cyberfeminism is a myth and in a myth the truth, or that, which it engages resides in the difference between the individual narratives." I think that is one of the really good definitions of Cyberfeminism. FC: You initiated the cyberfeminist alliance 'Old Boys Network', whose Internet Domain is registered in your name. Organized by OBN the 'Cyberfeminist International' had its first gathering at the documenta x. Is the impression I have right that the group or the discourse consists mainly of women who are active in net art culture? CS: No, that's not right. We did have our first big gathering at documenta x, but especially this documenta, namely the hybrid workspace where we were located, brought different contexts together. Not only the art world, but also the media and activist scene for example. In the 'Old Boys Network' we have always experimented with different organisational forms. The ideal form does not exist. One has to somehow organize a network, because it doesn't exist by itself. Finally however there was no form that functioned really well, which means we always have to conceive of new forms. For a while we had what could be identified as a 'core group' of five to six names. From those less than half were artists. There has always been a predominance of theorists, from the literary experts to the art historians... FC: That means theorists who situate themselves in the context of art, and it reeks as ever of net art. CS: For me personally that's correct. But there are many people in OBN who would refuse to see it that way. Our goal was always manifold. Our main idea was not to formulate a content with a concrete political goal. Instead we considered our organizational structure as a political expression. To be a cyberfeminist also makes demands on us to work on the level of structures and not just to turn up at conferences and hold a seminar paper. On the contrary, it means to tend to financial matters, or to make a website, a publication or create an event - hence to engage in developing structures. And 'Politics of dissent' is a very important term. It means placing the varied approaches next to each other, finding a form so that they can coexist and act as a force field to set something going. That's why we tried to incorporate women from the CCC - female hackers - as well as female computer experts. Fourteen days ago at the third 'Cyberfeminist International', for the first time there were several women from Asia, as well as women from 'Indymedia' [The anit-globalisation news network]. It is very important to keep extending the connections. FC: I find it very interesting that you focus on structures when I ask you about the term Cyberfeminism. Is it then just another platform, another system that you have programmed generatively as an experiment to see what will happen? CS: That's pretty extreme, but yes one could say that. When I was asked to define Cyberfeminism, what was always important for me was building structures, and like Old Boy Network disseminating the idea through marketing strategies. FC: In 1997 Josephine Bosma asked you in an interview: "Do you think there are any specific issues for women online?" - and you answered: "No, I don't think so really". CS: [Laughter.] I still believe that. FC: Yes? - That was my question. CS: After four and a half years of Cyberfeminist practice and contexts such as 'Women and New Media', and a series of lectures and events, I've come to the conclusion that one can divide this topic into two areas. One is the area of 'access', meaning, whether women have access to knowledge and technology, and which is a social problem. The second area is if the access exists, and the skills are there, what happens on the net or with this medium? What factors determine WHAT is made? About that there's very little which is convincing. Mostly it is a lot of arid ill-defined essentialist crap, with which I want to have little to do with because it reaffirms the already existing and unfavorable conditions rather triggering something new. Feminist media theory that extends beyond this definitely is a desiderat. FC: Regarding the phrase 'essentialist crap': is my assumption right that your focus of attention on systems and regulationg structures as experimental settings - whether that is Cyberfeminism or net art generators - can be see as an anti-essentialist strategy, which includes your appropriations, plagiarizing and the use of already existing material? CS: There are not that few female artists whos' approach is the idea that women have to develop their own aesthetics in order to counteract the dominant order. But I've always had problems with that and didn't know what that could be without predicating myself again in strict roles and definitions. That is the problem with essentialism. The claimed difference can easily be turned against women - even when they defined it themselves. That doesn't take you anywhere and is just another trap. Besides one of the miseries of identity politics was that the identities certain communities and groups had developed seamlessly got incorporated, for example by advertisement, what meant a complete turn around of its actual intentions. FC: That would be the case for the art referred to in the two volume Suhrkamp Anthology 'Women in Art' by Gislind Nabakowski, Helke Sander and Peter Gorsen... CS: I don't know that one [laughter]... FC: ...or such art as Kiki Smith's, which I see as the antithesis to your work. CS: Maybe. My problem at present is nevertheless that the theme, Cyberfeminism, has to some extent driven me into the so-called 'women's corner'. What would be a broader definition and would include a more extensive notion of my art is hardly taken into consideration. That is why I am determined to take on other themes. The work about Schönberg was the first step to expanding the spectrum - although as ever I still like to surround myself with many great women. [laughter]... FC: When you say that you want to come out of the Cyberfeminist corner, I have to ask myself whether - as in the Schönberg installation - your anti-essentialist strategy of constructing and producing systems and situations as well as plagiarizing, nevertheless have a feminist component? CS: A feminist component is always implied, because I basically have a feminist consciousness. So all my engagement with the art system includes that aspect, irrespective of what I do. That was the case in 'Female Extension' and ... it is always implicit. FC: What I have noticed is that women are amply represented in the code-experimental area of net art. CS: Really? FC: From what I've seen, yes. Jodi for example is a masculine-feminine couple, the same goes for 0100101110111001.org. Then springs to mind mez/Mary Anne Breeze or antiorp/Netochka Nezvanova, which we now know has a woman from New Zealand forming the core figure. CS: No!!! FC: Yes! CS: Are you sure about that? FC: Yes! CS: I'm currently working on an Interview with Netochka Nezvanova... FC: ...Great! CS: Yes, she tells me everything! What she thinks about the world - and especially about the art world. [laughter] FC: That is someone then who also fascinates you? CS: I find it extremely interesting as a phenomenon, and ask 'her' things such as... how much does her success have to do with the fact she is a woman... Ultimately though there are several people involved in forming the character. FC: But the core is a woman. CS: Great! A new concept of N.N. I have asked so many people about her, and everyone had contradictory information about her. The last theory that I heard led me to the media theoretician Lev Manovich as the core of N.N. FC: [laughter] It is a good concept. Another social hack and a system that is triggered off... And something that dematerializes. CS: That's why I am working on finalizing this concept. I want to kill 'her' by doing an interview in which she reveals all of her strategies - something she would never do anyway. That is my idea... FC: In your interview with 0100101110111001.org you were pretty tough on them - which by the way I thought was good - discussing the 'biennale.py' computer virus. You described that out of it an aesthetic code-attitude would emerge which is not really progressive, because no one can read the code. Would you nevertheless admit that this intervention was a form of 'social hacking'? CS: Of course. That's what it is first of all. The way how the code has been aestheticized is secondary, something that happened more by mistake because the artists probably had not thought so much about the traps of the art system before. The virus clearly was a social hack. And it would have already been sufficient to call it 'virus'. Even if the code would not have worked or would have been just some nonesense it would not have done any harm to the project. FC: Is it then necessary to use labels like 'net art' at all when the medium is not so relevant? CS: I think it makes sense to use such labels in the beginning, when a new medium is being introduced, and actual changes come along with it; in the phase where the actual medium is explored like jodi did for example with the web/net, or Nam June Paik with video. You could compare it with video art - which is in this sense a predecessor of net art. I don't think that it is useful any longer to talk of 'video art'. The ways how video is being used today are established and it becomes more meaningful to refer to certain contents. That is, by the way, the problem of the whole thing called 'media art'- too much media, too little art... FC: Looking at your art, isn't it the case that projects like the net.art generator develop their concept, their systems of 'social hacks' from the media? CS: That's true in this case. But it is not necessarily the way I work. The term 'net.art' functioned also as a perfect marketing tool. And it worked until the moment it gained the success it had headed for. Then everything collapsed. [laughter] FC: Would it be possible for you to work in any context? We met here at the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club. But would it also be possible to meet at the annual congress of stamp collectors, and this would be the social system you would intervene? CS: Theoretically, yes. [laughter] I think anyone who managed to get along with the hackers, the hacker culture doesn't shrink back from anything - not even stamp collectors or garden plot holders. FC: ... or hotel corridors. CS: No, theoretically a lot is possible, but not practically. My interest is not just formal and not only directed towards the operating system. It is an important aspect, but when the arguments and the people within the system are of no interest for me, I can hardly imagine to work there. FC: That would mean at the hacker's convention your reference would be that people here play with systems, and critically think about systems? CS: And what's also interesting for me is the fact that hackers are independent experts, programers, who work for the sake of programming, and are not in services of economy or politics. That's the crucial point for me. And that's also the reason why hackers are an important source of information for me. FC: But that takes us straight back to the classical concept of the autonomous artist coined in the 18th century, the freelance genius. He is no longer employed, and gets no commissions, but is independent and does not have to follow a given set of rules. CS: Maybe you're right, and my image of a hacker has in fact a lot to do with such an image of the artist. But reflecting upon the role of art in society in general, I would prefer to consider art as autonomous, to considering the individual artist as autonomous - given that the idea of autonomy per se is problematic. The idea of art as observing, positioning oneself, commenting, trying to open up different perspectives on what is going on in society is what I prefer. And that is exactly what is endangered. The contradictory thing about autonomy is that someone has to protect/finance it. And it is most comfortable when governments do so, like it was common here in Germany over the last decades. I think this ensures the most freedom. Examples which illustrate my theory are Pop Art and New Music; in the 60s and 70s artists from all over the world came to Germany because here was public funding, and facilities to work which existed nowhere else. I consider it as one of the tasks of a government to provide money for culture. And the development we are facing at the moment is disasterous. A short time ago somebody asked me how I would imagine the art of the future, and after thinking for a while I got the image of a an open-plan office, packed with artists who work there, all looking the same and getting paid by whatever corporation; the image of art which is completely taken over and submitted to the logics of economy. This does not mean that I would reject all corporate sponsoring, but it should not become too influential. FC: Doesn't the new media artist make the running for the others, because they are so extremely dependent on technology? CS: Absolutely, and I think this is really a major problem. They make the running for the others... FC: ... but in a purely negative sense. CS: Basically yes. It is a difficult field to play on. Some artists are thinking of work-arounds, like low-tech, and as another example, I would highly appreciate if ars electronica, which obviously suffers from a lack of ideas and inspiration, would choose the topic of Free Software. They could do without their corporate sponsors, and only give prizes art works which are produced with the use of Free Software. It would be really exciting to see what you can do with it. FC: But not to forget that Free Software is also dependent from corporate sponsors. You almost don't find any major Free Software project where no big companies are involved - directly or indirectly trying to bring an influence to bear. CS: At the latest with the distribution ... FC: Yes, but it starts already with the development. The GNU C-Compiler for example belongs to Red Hat, IBM invests billions in developping Linux further, and these are, of course strategic investments. Almost every well-known free developer receives his salary cheque from some corporation. CS: Are you saying that Free Software, in the end, is nothing but another utopia? FC: No, I wouldn't say it's an utopia which does not become true. The code always stays free, and even if there's a recession, the developers are able to work quite self-determined. - But I do not believe that this equals the type of the autonomous artist. CS: We are mixing up several things now. Hackerdom for example is not a profession. A hacker may be employee in a company, but this has nothing to do with being a hacker. And here you can make comparisons with art. How about being an artist: Is it a profession or not? Would I still be an artist even if I would make my money by practising a different job? I am organized in the German trade union for media workers--in the department for artists--and am interested how generic interests of artists can be represented. Being an artist should be an acknowledged profession, secure, and insured like the Social Insurance for artists does here in Germany (Künstersozialkasse). But this point does conflict a lot with the idea of autonomy. I am not sure myself how it can go together. Although, I basically insist on my professional rights, it often seems to contradict the status of being autonomous. And this uncertainty of the artists very often gets abused, by treating artists unprofessionally, and exploiting them shamelessly. FC: A while ago you have said that you contradicted Gerfried Stocker when he equated art with creativity. Being an artist is a profession for you, and therefore a definable and distinguishable subsystem of society. This would also be an anti-thesis to the idea of 'expanded art' ['erweiterten Kunstbegriff'] à la Fluxus - and to Joseph Beuys' idea of "Everyone is an artist".[Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler.] FC: I would simply add 'potential'. I think there shouldn't be any mechanism or criteria which includes certain people per se, but certainly not everyone is an artist, although everyone could be an artist. But most people don't feel any desire to become an artist anyway. [At his point we switched off the tape recorder and kept on talking about the necessity of doing things on the one hand side, and discarding them again on the other hand. During that the conversation turned to Neoism and its internal quarrels.] CS: Such quarrels can become very existential, very exhausting, and weakening. Things tend to become incredibly authentic - something I try to avoid otherwise. FC: But this is important. When I hear standard accusations, saying that dealing with systems, disrupting systems through plagiarism, fake, and manipulation of signs, is boring postmodern stuff, lacking existential hardness, my only answer is that people who say this, never tried to practise it consequently. Especially, on a personal level, it can be deadly. You have mentioned the group `-Innen' before, a group you have obviously been part of in the early 90s, before the days of net.art... CS: Yes, this was in '93-96. FC: And, if I get it right, it was also a 'multiple identity' concept. CS: Yes, and although we handled it very playful and ironic, it started to become threatening - so much that we had to give it up. We had practised the 'becoming one person' to an extreme by looking exactly the same, and even our language was standardized. And then we felt like escaping from each other, and not meeting the others any more. FC: Is this the point where art potentially becomes religious or a sect? CS: Maybe, if you don't quit. FC: ... if you don't quit. I am thinking of Otto Muehl and his commune... CS: That is exactly the point where you have to leave and go for the unknown, leave the defined sector, and reinvent yourself - which might be not so easy. To do this together, in or with the group is almost impossible. There's probably some marriages which realize to do so, to reinvent themselves and their relationship permanently, to keep it vivid. But with more people than two it's too much. FC: Are your projects kind of marriages for you, or sects or groups? CS: Well, it has a lot in common. That's amazing! It starts already with the reliabiliy, which must be there. Because nothing works, if there is not a certain degree of reliability, also regarding the dynamics, how roles are assigned or how people choose them. FC: Designing such systems also has something to do with control and loosing control, right? In the beginning you're the designer, you define the rules, but then you get involved and become part of the game yourself, and the time has come to quit. CS: Well, certainly I do have my ideas and concepts, but the others might have different ones. The whole thing comes to an end when the debates and arguments aren't productive any longer. With the 'Old Boys Network' we are currently experimenting with the idea to release our label. To think through what that actually means was a painful process. You think:"Oh god, maybe somebody will abuse it, do something really aweful and stupid with it. That's shit." But if we want to be consequent, we have to live with that. And the moment comes where you have to learn to change the relation you have towards your own construct - what might be difficult. FC: What was the case with 'Improved Tele-vision', where the system already had been set? As far as I can see, this work was the first where you did not design the system yourself, but engaged in an already existing process. CS: Yes, that's why it was so easy for me.[laughter] I didn't have to work too hard on that one.[laughter] FC: Can you imagine to consciously leave 'Old Boys Network?' CS: Oh yes - meanwhile! FC: ... and ignoring it for like three years - or longer - and after that period trying to engage again, but with an artistic approach which is observing, like in 'Improved Tele-vision'... CS: Sounds like a good idea, but I am afraid it would not work. My presumptious idea is, that three years after I have left, OBN would not exist any longer. [laughter] CS: At the same time it is a generic name. 'Old Boys Networks' have always been around; usually, they are not exactly feminist. [laughter] CS: One big trap for us was, that we called it 'network', although it actually functioned as a group. And we refused to realize that for too long. OK, there is the associated network of hundreds of boys, but the core is a group. FC: But this seems to be a very popular self-deception within the so-called net cultures. I also say that also 'nettime' and the net culture it supposedly represented was in fact a group, at least until about 1998. CS: And that is the only way it works. There's no alternative way how a network can come into being. At some point there have to be condensations, and commitments. And 'networks' don't require a lot of commitment. FC: So, how do network and system relate in your understanding? CS: I think a system is structured and defined more clearly, and has obvious rules and players. A network tends to be more open, more loose. FC: Now, I would like to know, if in your view, systems as well as networks necessarily have a social component. One could claim that purely technical networks as well as purely technical systems do exist. Your work alternatively intervenes in social and technical networks. But, in the end, your intervention always turns out to be a social one. Can you think of networks and systems - referring to the definition you just have given - without social participation? CS: Not, not at all. Because the rules or the regulating structure always is determined by somebody. Like computer programs are often mistaken as something neutral. 'Microsoft Word' for example. Everyone assumes it just can be the way 'Word' it is. But that's not the case. It could be completely different. FC: ... as Matthew Fuller has analyzed in his text Text "It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word" in every detail... CS: Yes, there are endless individual decisions involved - decisions of the programmer, and from the person who designs the program, and decides how and where to lead the user, and to manipulate the user, making him/her doing certain things. FC: There's also earlier experiments within art, on designing self-regulating systems. Hans Haacke has built in the 60's his 'Condensation Cube', made of glass. On it's side-walls water condensates corresponding to the amount of people who are in the same room. Such a thing would not be of any interest for you? CS: No, I don't think so. It is also typical for a lot of generative art that one system simply is being transformed into another one. I find this totally boring. For me, it is important that the intervention sets an impulse which results in - or at least aims for a change. # The interview by Cornelia Sollfrank and Florian Cramer was # commissioned for the new transcript series of books on Contemporary # Visual Culture published by Manchester University Press in association # with School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and # Design, University of Dundee. A shorter version of this interview # will be published in volume II of this series 'Communication, # Interface, Locality', edited by Simon Yuill and Kerstin Mey, # forthcoming autumn 2002. Please see MUP website: # www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk # This text is copylefted according to the Open Publication License v1.0 # <http://opencontent.org/openpub/>; restrictions on commercial # publication apply. _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold 72.0 <nettime> Interview with Vesna Jancovi Faith Wilding nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 19 Dec 1997 11:34:38 -0500 Interview/Conversation with Vesna Jancovic. Vesna, former chief editor and now director of ARKZIN (antiwarkampaign) magazine, is an activist feminist organizer and writer who lives in Zagreb, Croatia. Faith Wilding is a feminist artist, activist, and writer, who lives in Pittsburgh, USA. This public interview took place during the 1st Cyberfeminist International at the Hybrid Workspace, Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, on September 27, l997. FW: Let's start by talking about what you are doing now with ARKZIN. As I understand it, the magazine started in l991 as a biweekly fanzine of the anti-war campaign. You described it as a bastard form between politics and high/low culture? V: Yes. Now the publication ARKZIN is combined of high politics and grass roots initiatives, culture, sub-culture, putting a lot of attention on women's issues as well and it definitely had an important political role, also in providing the counter information (during the war). During all these years we kept contact with the similar independent medias in Serbia like Radio B 92, in Bosnia especially with the magazine Dani and Radio Zed. Actually a great help to keep these communications and contacts was our BBS, named Zamir which means "for peace," and which we established in '92 with the great help of our Western friends, especially friends from Bielefeld, and also some other international volunteers from Poland, and Katherine Turnipseed from United States, who actually played a very important role in teaching women how to use this new media, new tool. Her project was Electronic Witches and she really did a tremendous job in doing it. FW: So is there already a Cybefeminist movement in Croatia? V: Unfortunately I think it's still very hard to talk about Cyberfeminism in Croatia. A lot of us are basically using e-mail and most of us women who are active are engaged in different social and political activities. So still we are not so much present on Internet and we are not surfing on Internet, but I think the first steps to get friendly with the new technologies are made, and I hope in future there will be more women's presence on the net. FW: You told me some really interesting and important things about how these BBS, these bulletin boards were very influential in helping in the anti-war campaigns and how they actually linked people instantly, to organize them for actions and really get things started. Could you see this kind of tactic as working for women in a particular way? V: Yes, our BBS was important as I already said, in our work with the magazine. It was important as a communication tool to keep the contact with the people we otherwise couldn't reach because telephone lines were broken, but it was also important in keeping different peace, human rights, and especially women's initiatives communicating. Very soon after establishing Zamir BBS and Zamir Network we built up the Zamir Women's Conference, and this conference is used basically by women's groups in different parts of ex-Yugoslavia for exchanging the information, for organizing conferences, for just giving support to each other. Also an important role was to keep us in contact with the outside world, I mean our partners in, especially, western countries. Last December, for example, we organized a big petition for media freedoms in Croatia and BBS was very important to coordinate this action, which was organized simultaneously in different towns. In a similar way it was used in some previous campaigns for keeping the right to free, legal abortion. My experience is that Internet and new medias can be used as a really strong political tool, supporting the grass roots initiatives and building the broader grass roots networks. FW: Yes, I agree. We spoke this morning about the fact that there are really big differences between the different countries in the meanings of Feminisms--in the meanings of Feminist action, and how women use the net. Thewebgirrls, for example, presented the fact that they found women more and more wanted to meet on the web socially, as a social connection, more so even than wanting particular technical information. That seemed to be a particular use for women in Holland (whom they were talking about); but what you're talking about in Croatia--and I suppose this is probably also true of some of the other Eastern European countries where the medium was very much needed as an organizing, survival tool--there is a very different kind of use for it there. In fact, this is something that Cyberfeminism really needs to think about and be very aware of, that we have actually a very tremendous power in terms of these instant connections that we can make now internationally; in the way that we can call attention to various very critical situations that women might be in. You mentioned the situation in Algeria, what's going on there right now and what a big difference it could make there for Western media and Western women's groups to put a kind of watch, put an alert out over the Internet in much the same way that Amnesty International often does. I'm editorializing here I realize.... but, maybe you could give some further thoughts on that and some specific suggestions from your experience on how this kind of organizing, political organizing across borders, might be able to work for the cyberfeminists. V: Well my experience in living in a quite repressive state is that our international connections actually saved us from being arrested or having other big problems. Also, the second experience we made was the great help in our campaigns for keeping abortion legal. We got big support from especially Swiss and German women's groups and so this making internal problems international, or putting them in the international context, made our struggle much easier and really kept us in a much safer position. A month ago, I met a woman from Algeria, who was a representative of a women's group in Algeria who are fighting to keep some basic rights in this new context they have there. (One of our other speakers) inspired me with the idea of how much easier it would be for, for example this group of women too, if they can get international support, if they can inform the international community immediately about the problems they are facing, about death threats they are facing, and also I was thinking about possibility of the Internet as a tool by which some pressure to the governments can be made. So I'm definitely supporting (Babette's) idea of using the Internet as a political tool and using the Internet as a bridge which can bridge the gap between low and high technological countries; as a tool which can give the voice to especially women in the third world. I consider it as actually a very important part of Cyberfeminist strategy. FW: I agree, and it reminds me of some of the things that groups that I've been in have done already, using fax for example as a tool-- sending zillions of faxes. You can really tie up a corporation's or a government office's fax machines if everybody in the organization is alerted to send continuous faxes, to a very crucial number. You can really throw some sand into the wheels there. As some of us were talking about last night, one of the things that we really need to be aware of too, is that the Internet is not owned by us, that it's not been kindly provided by corporations for us to just have fun with, and put up our web pages, and play around with but, in fact it's actually a very contested zone; it's a very controlled, surveilled zone, and if we want to continue to use it for our own ends then we have to constantly be very creative about that and very vigilant to maintain the small hold that we have on that space already. That's something that we need to be very aware of as women too, because as women we need to think about claiming space, re-claiming space, claiming voices. One of the things we talked about was the possibility also of using the Internet as an educational tool for women and you were telling me about the way that you're beginning to organize with some women in Zagreb for women's education. Would you be interested in talking about that a little bit? V: Yes, just two years ago women's studies, a completely grassroots program has started and also we got a lot of support in terms of books and information from our Western colleagues, and I was thinking actually about subscribing women's studies on the Faces list just to make possible for students there to read part of discussion which are going on and to get some important information about books, about sites. Maybe it can inspire some of them to get more involved in this new technology and they'll start to experiment themselves. Also I see the role of Internet as very important in breaking this very nationalistic state of mind which we are facing there. I am sure that people who are using it now, who are really becoming a part of a global village will definitely have a much bigger amount of information and, I hope that for them it will be impossible to be obedient to the system, the regime as it exists now in my country. FW: I didn't warn you that I was going to ask you this question but.. A couple of us were talking last night about the issue of public space and private space, more in connection with art, but very soon it got into a political discussion because of the issue (at least it has been an issue in America for some time) of how artists are being asked to make public art and to go into communities and so-called public spaces to create work that in a way will mediate between museums and certain communities that are usually underrepresented: you know, they'll try to send a black artist into a black community, etc. There are some real problems with the way artists are being used as sort of public relations people for museums, and the way that museums are giving funding to certain projects that really kind of cover up the fact that most public space is essentially lost to us for our use. It's all corporately owned pretty much, it's surveilled, it's controlled, it's there for the market place and not for people just to mingle and to meet and to have social relationships. The Internet could offer perhaps, a new kind of public space although that too is very, very contested, and definitely not just provided freely, it has to be struggled for constantly. So, I was describing a situation that I think exists in America now in terms of public space and the way artists are being used and it's really something that we're not perhaps as aware enough of as we should be. I really wonder if there is a comparable situation in Croatia. I mean, what about this issue of people being able to get together in public spaces and the freedom of people just expressing themselves in their various ways? It seems like there would be some really crucial problems there too. V: Definitely there are many, many problems though they are quite different than in the West. Still, the state has a very, very important and strong control over most of the civic and social sphere. [So] there are just a few small islands, which I would like to call Temporary Autonomous Zones, where the independent social life is possible. Actually what I'm busy with for years now and together with my colleagues there, is just to make these islands bigger and broader and more visible, though it's quite hard. We have three TV channels and all three of them are state owned and controlled though there are some magazines but, we know that TV at the moment is the most influential media. I also don't want to give up completely the fight to influence the existing institutions but I'm very, very much in favor of creating our own spaces, our own institutions, our own autonomous zones where no censorship or no control could be made. Cornelia: May I ask a question? FW: Yes, please! C: I'm very much interested in your personal background. I would like to know how your personal life looked like before the war and how it changed when the war started and how you got involved in the peace movement. V: Well, I'm a sociologist, I was studying sociology in Zagreb University and since '86 I was already involved in Green, Women and Peace initiatives in Croatia. At that time we were very much influenced by--besides all the radical theorists we could read about during our studies--we were very much influenced by especially what was going on here in Germany with the Green Ecological movement; also with the Squatters Movement, with all this blossoming of the alternative culture and somehow that was my initiation in becoming a political animal or becoming politically active. Then war started in '91, a group of us who were very involved in these different civic initiatives got together and said, "Ok, war is starting. let's try to do something!" It was obvious that we cannot stop the war at that stage but also obvious that war will bring lot of social, political and economical changes and that it will be necessary to organize ourselves and to influence some of these changes. How my life looked before the war and how it looked after the war started? Well it wasn't, actually, a very big change, my life just got more intense, I just became more active, working more, and learning also much more... FW: You were telling me really interesting things yesterday about the kind of training that the peace groups undergo, the non-violent training, and the thinking about the theory of it and also the practice of it . I think perhaps we don't know really, we're not so aware of that, at least I'm not, in America, that this is going on. [And] it would be really interesting for me to hear you talk about that a little bit. V: Yes one of the first things we did as the anti-war campaign was organizing the trainings for non-violent action and non-violent communication. Our first group whom we contacted was German group Bund fuer Soziale Verteidigung,.and actually it was a real discovery for me to get in touch with all this theory, with also concrete methods and techniques: how to do it! Very soon we got in contact with different groups, with different trainers and lots of them were willing to come and to give trainings to us. [And] I was actually very surprised how many people, ordinary people got interested in it and the response was really good even in towns which were on the front line, which were for a long time under the shelling, and still somehow it seems that it gave some hope to the people. Out of these trainings, several projects have developed, one of them was working in a small townPakrej, which was divided-part of the town was under Croation control, part of the town was under Serbian control. We were working there trying to do 'social reconstruction,' we call it: actually to make the communications between people from both sides. It was hard , it was tough job, but it worked very well, and it was a model which was later transformed or brought to Bosnia, and now there are some small towns in Bosnia in which this model of work is applied. The other project which came out of these trainings is Peace Studies. Peace Studies are just starting officially this autumn. Though we had organized for two years already, sort of one week events/workshops in which people who are active and who learned a lot through their engagement and through trainings there, participated in disseminating this knowledge to just ordinary people who came and participated in these events. FW: I guess one thing we haven't really discussed that much is what you think is the possibility for a media future for women in Croatia, and also it might be interesting to hear what you think are the most pressing problems for women right now. I know there's many different groups of women, and many different positions, and economic backgrounds, in Croatia, but if you can make, perhaps, some generalizations or comments it would be interesting to hear. V: You are asking me about the future for the women in Croatia? Actually, one very interesting thing has happened during these years of war (and this phenomenon is known from the history as well) and this is that actually all these different civic initiatives--not just women's initiatives and women's groups, but also human rights groups, peace groups, most of them were led by women and actually, though the war is not a very pleasant experience, somehow a lot of women got encouraged, and they really started some projects, and are working still on developing them. And what I think at the moment is important (there is no war situation anymore) is that I would not like to see all these women falling back again to (let's say) ordinary life, which means: life in which they will become invisible again. And I hope it won't actually happen. Besides that, I would really like to see more women getting involved with these new technologies. I am personally also very excited about it and I hope that I will also have more time now, to just play with the Internet and to see what will come out of it. FW: Are there any questions from any of you? Cornelia: I have another question. You mentioned you worked together with people from Bielefeld building up what was it exactly? you have a mailbox system? Zamir, something like that? I would like to know what your experiences have been with women from the West or Western countries, Germany especially, in terms of their cultural background and the difference in the role of women and the different background in Feminism. I'm sure that women in former Yugoslavia have been brought up differently and have a very different system in their mind than we have here (in Germany). I would like to hear something about that. V: Well, though there are definitely differences, especially in the fact that during socialism most of the women in our countries were working so they had economical autonomy, but beside that the problem was this whole, old patriarchal system, which is I guess even worse than in the West. So there are differences, but my experience with working and cooperating with the women's groups from the West is actually quite positive. We could find a common language and we also could learn something from experiences which were made by all the women's groups here. You had twenty or thirty years of experience in organizing, in doing campaigns, founding the houses for women victims of family violence, and all these experiences were quite valuable to us. Because of this we could cope in better ways with some problems which are part of natural group dynamics, conflicts which arise in every group, so it was easier for us-- it's a sort of natural phase in the development of the group. On the other hand, of course, we tried to relate to our own reality and to our own experience, but this communication was, I must say, quite productive and I guess that also women's groups here got something from it. FW: Thank you very much, Vesna. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 73.0 <nettime> Interview Alla Mitrofanova & Olga Suslova Josephine Bosma nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 15 Jun 1997 13:44:38 +0200 (MET DST) This interview was made at V2 Rotterdam, April 19th 1997. Alla Mitrofanova is an art critic, media-philosopher, media art curator at Gallery 21, St. Petersburg. Olga Suslova is a philosopher and media theoretician, also she is editor of the Virtual Anatomy journal. We discuss this journal and its recent theme, the body. From this we also talk about cyberfeminism. Both Alla Mitrofanova and Olga Suslova consider themselves cyberfeminists. *: JB: You said you see yourselves as filosofers? OS: That is because our work is a theoretical one. Of course, our activity doesn't describe itself as a classical process of philosophizing which is opposite to practice, because, and that's evident for us, creation of meta-theory or meta-narrative that is far from vital experience, is a non-productive position today. We can't strictly distinguish or limit where art-practice stops and philosophy begins and we don't pose this question, but if our form of representation is connected with texts and language we speak about philosophy. JB: Is working with media a logical choice for a filosofer? OS: Yes, because working in the internet is actual for the modern situation. Also its necesary to say that while we have these internet experiences as we try to make our internet magazine, we can analyse what happens in it, what problems there are. Internet - is a qualitatively new information space that changes the mode of thinking, it changes process of orientation in the world. Generally speaking the internet is a new type of human reality, a new field of experience, which is invested by libidinal coloured interest as any other reality (social or economic field). That is why reflection upon which of the "libidinal" demands of modern people can be fulfilled or realized in this new reality of the psyche has some provocative moments for us. When we see multisemantic instead of monosemantic, reactivity and mobility instead of stability, instrumentality instead of substantiality in the field of new media, it doesn't mean that they produce this type of activity but it means that these characteristics of modern being are the most visible there. At the same time the Internet is the place for explanation and the instrument of explanation. AM: The internet is a specific functional expression of contemporary culture. Analytical ability, new theoretical tools made for internet research suppose to be useful for current processes in different fields of culture. Internet research has to have an appropriate analytical discourse: not descriptive, not hierarchical, but operative, which is for me schizoanalyses based. This is a half-marginal, half-mass popular hugh filosofical domain which was developed by two french filosofers, Deleuze and Guattari. It is probably the most radical critique of structuralist thinking with bipolar oppositions, a hierarchy of meanings and an illusion of complexity. Schizo analyses counted a multitude of not necessarely connected significations, giving equal rules to each signifier, to each expression. Key word here is that every possible segment should work for own cost, not for the cost of signifier order or of any other structure. The same counts for subjectivity, the body. There are a lot of identities, but you responsible only for what you choose. We always create a conceptual remix of subjectivity and body. It is not a compulsory process, but free choice, an open creative act. So you don't need to worry about somebody's problem and you don't need to worry about narrative describtions of reality. You just have to live in the most strong existential mode. If you are strong existentially you could follow very quickly diffrent activities around, you could participate without having very straight ideas about the way you are and whats going on. So the position is not to describe a world how it should be or how it is, but the position is to act productively, to be a productive functional body or person. I don't try to repeat the filosofy of Deleuze and Guattari here. I don't want to be responsible for the interpretation of their ideas. My ideas are based on my personal experiences which include a destruction of the soviet imperial signifier order by a reshaped economical and territorial state. JB: Is the fact that you work with the experience of others, that you look for the experience of others, and the fact that you say you do communication thinking, is also linked to this? AM: You mean I said that we cannot have our personal practice in many fields? And that we have to take a point above all to learn from somebody else experience? I think it is kind of a democratic position because you cannot be productive in a different sense. You should believe in your social, cultural neighborhood. So you vocalize/focus on peoples creative desires. Its a kind of social politeness to work with the creative ambitions of people, to appreciate that other side (opposite) of everybody's realization. There is no integration of somebody's experience into my personal experience, but there is a communication where some things could be correlative with intimate acts but remain other - detached. JB: What neighborhood are you talking about now, do you mean your working neighborhood, so that means the whole internet or some people on it anyway, or you mean locally around you in St Petersburg? AM: I mean the whole neighborhood which I could reach through different media or through my fysical presence. My ability to reach is very limited, because as a person I could keep for example only a few emotional situations, not more. To have more I would have to develop my personal energy. JB: Why did you choose to have the body as a central point in your work? OS: All through history we can see different types of "body images" that have existed. We can see the variety of body practices that were connected with problems of normativity, esthetic and ethic acceptibility. The "harmonized" greek body, the "spiritual" body of christians, the "exaltative" body of romanthics and many more, but also the body image of the structuralists that was determinated through the figure of the Other was deconstructed by schizoanalysis with the concept of the "process" body-without-organs. The main question for us is: does the body image really change now? Can it really exist as a pure accidental crossing of intensivities? How can we escape the machine of representation, that writes upon our bodies? In the field of these questions the problem of computer experience is the crucial one. We see that in the internet the body image constituates itself as surface, an interface which allows you to move and choose a point of bodygathering for reaction, for communication elsewhere. It doesn't work with space but with a "time" of the body where the body has no strict limits or concepts and is a process. JB: Do you say that because there simply is no real fysical body on the internet? Of course the idea that you are completely free of your body and your gender is a bit of an illusion. OS: Yes, but we don't talk about fysical limits of the body, because some knowledge constructions, some psychic constructions, discoursive and non-discoursive practices regulate our fysical activity and that's why there is a correlation between our presence in the internet and our real behavior outside of the computer screen. While we have no center in the internet space and can choose different possibilities, we can see in real life that our behavior shows signs that there is no center, no male or female position in the field of motivations, and that we are relatively free in the choice of esthetic. AM: I like the question, because it moves you into the center of our problems: Why the body? The body is the last concept that could be renovated among those which we have as a heritage from the big filosofical discourse. The body is a concept. We cannot talk of pure materiality, because pure materiality does not exist without conceptual, visual, functional structures and so on. So there is no pure materiality but there is a concept of the body which includes images, medicine, language, which rules our existential acts, etc. Only in such models can we function as bodies. It means that if different models of the presentation of the body are taken , the whole concept and also fysical materiality would be changed. It means that in different cultures you will have a different body. For example in India a person has a completely different body then we have because it functions differently. They perceive, they act differently. They have different organs for example. They have chakra's, we have something else: liver, heart. They work through chakra's, through energy. A chinese person for example thinks from his navel, not from his head. The navel is a center of empathy and comprehension. Their concept of thinking is not based on a cognitive (in Europe) but on a perceptive interface. The European concept is that thinking is based on reason, on logos. JB: Can you explain the role of the game you created inside your magazine? OS: Its a kind of example of how we can move in our body image, how we can use various fragments of historical and cultural discourse for our needs. It shows how our body image now can be composed of these fragments. We can freely operate from a great number of cultural archives. JB: Do you have a goal with your magazine? Are you trying to give certain ideas a kind of push? Or are you simply experimenting and exploring? AM: We are simply reflecting. Of course we have our own experiences, but as reflectors we have to use the collective experience. We are searching for the experience of different people to try and analyze emerging representative and existential practices. Of course we avoid generalized conceptions and strategies, thats a professional tactic. We have to make a conception on the base of the experience of people which we consider an effective and joyful one. JB: But if your work is a reflection that means you have a question in mind, usually. What was the initial question or problem that made you take the body as a theme for the magazine? Maybe you have already answered this. OS: The main question for me is how and where can the modern body work as a pure possibility. How can we create new body practices? Are we free in a choosing of them or not? How can we escape oppressive systems of representation? Are we really caught by culture, hierarchy and the system of dispositives that operate the body practices or can we create experiments, a freedom of body position. JB: This is always a bit of a sensitive question, but is there a relation between you being female and the fact that you got these questions in mind? AM: In many ways yes, but not only. As a woman I successfully avoid a lot of social and political paranoias (usual traps for men). The most radical theoretical and practical thing I did was two years ago: I got babies. Now I could say that it was a way to extend body, to finish with existentialist axiom that we are isolated in the body and produce inside/outside conflicts. It was the end of my subjectivity based reflective paranoia. Now I have the experience to switch my subjective mode from one to many different directions, which is not paranoia anymore, but probably schizofrenia. But being schizofrenic in this way I found that I produce new problems, kind of body based survival problems. When you direct your subjectivity and body in many different directions, you should leave something inside your body that could renovate your existential ability. You cannot learn it from the European tradition. The European tradition prescribed us to have a body which is totally agonized through language, through medicine, through politics etcetera. So you have to go somewhere else and for example steal something from eastern tradition and you should build a kind of uncultural or unconceptual, but also culturally open space to set up your personal existence, to keep your body. I cannot say subjectivity because subjectivity is a concept that is very much based on social and cognitive representations in the European tradition. Body as a concept is a more productive mixture. If your body as an operative system is too heavy, it does not work. So you have to build an alternative model to centralized your body without being conceptually organized, you should learn to live in an (conceptually) empty stream. Your personal existence should be your energetic motor. Thats why we started the magazine, to develop the strategy how to keep pure existence without cultural prescribtions how it should be. We try to grasp a body not as an image, an object or signifier order, but as a multi functional operative ability. JB: Its funny that you don't make a distinction between identity and the body. At least, thats what it sound like... AM: Identity is a lost concept for me, because identity should be an open operative system akin subjectivity, body. Identity is a temporal assemblage of concepts, it should be diffrent in any event. With flexible this identity we have a lot of freedom now, for example in the internet identity is a game. Identity is not given, but a freely chosen representation mode. Identity could be seen as a data base of possible representations, which you could easily remix as you like. I don't see problems anymore here. The problem goes deeper: how to make your existential operative system more independent and more useful. How to survive being an individual body in a multitude of identities. JB: Do you think the internet is the tool 'par excellence' to explore this way of thinking? Do you think that because of the new visions that the new media communications gave, you were able to think the way you are thinking now? AM: I would not say that the internet is for thinking, if we use thinking as a analytical and descriptive mode. If thinking is an operative system, we have no difference between thinking and practicing. The Internet came not through thinking, not through concepts or images, it came through practice, through functioning. The internet works in the contemporary existential model in the same way as politics for example. Being Russian I have had a wonderful personal experience of the total destruction of the whole political narratives, which were very strong before. Now I see that all narratives, all describtive models as models are not useful in our society. I am lucky to have an experience of self-liberalisation from narrative, images, concepts. Still they exist but there is a distance between the existential stream (pre-conceptial level) and formal representations. It is good to live in a period of radical changes. JB: Do you think that there should be things like v2 east? Do you think it is wise to keep in presentations the difference of background and gender, to make choices for certain artists to be in an exhibition purely based on their background? AM: You could have the most interesting answer from our curator, not from us. We are kind of seperated, segmented. We are not able to keep an idea of East/West, background and figure. Doesn't matter for me where to work, it is cleaner here. Irina Aktagonova rules a politic of group/east/west/high/low/thick/thin representation in the gallery 21 in St Petersburg. I am a part of their network. JB: Are you sympathetic to feminism? OS: In the mode of cyberfeminism. AM: I call myself a cyberfeminist. I think cyberfeminism is a step from feminism, keeping some important terms. I mean gender-sex devision and other operative terms, but we are not associated with political and social descriptions of political feminism of 60th and structuralist feminism concern mostly with defining gender in structura of social and psychic presentations. Our gender could be simply multiplied like any narrative. If necesary I function as man, or as a woman. Playfull gender, pre-conceptual body studies, developing a discourse of the sexual body which is shadowed in our traditional philosophy - that is, what we included being cyberfeminist. Gender is no longer a political repressive concept or social prescription and restriction, it is a data base of images and functions to use freely from, because the whole narrative of classical European filosofy and imaginery and of the social legislative system now is broken into many pieces. Those pieces mean freedom of representation. JB: Fragmentation of classical filosofy means freedom? AM: When classical filosofy was contained in one long narrative, it was dangerous for indiviuality. The big narrative of classical filosofy, of European imaginary, told you: You have to be like this, because the world is described in that manner. But now with the situation of the broken line we have a lot of fragments of models of representation. It means that we could be free in our political and gender choice in images. If you know that, you can act freely. If you don't know you will still be trapped in that long oppression of cultural tradition. JB: What are specific cyberfeminist issues then? AM: Generally speaking the internet reality is a specific cyberfeminist issue. I think that net communication could easily show this freedom of presentation mode: freedom of images, of roles, of subject-concepts. Cyberlife is our new reality. I enjoy to hear from different places of computerbased life about initiatives to express "net feminism", "post-feminism", "schizo-feminism". I think an idea of multiple formalization is placed in the cyber creative and reflective tactic. Of course I constantly hear that there are a lot of problems, with human rights and so on, but I see them as a fight between narratives. If you want to be associated with one of them you automatically should fight with the opposite one. That could keep you busy and falsify your activism. In Russia we have a hugetradition of feminism. One of the most radical things was in the times of the October revolution of 1917. They legalised abortions, provided good medical governmental payed service for it, there were holidays for pregnancy, payment for baby delivery and other laws that gave legal freedom to a single mother, to give her time for social and political activities. Gender stricture was totally destroyed in a few years. A painful experience was when people in the thirties tried to restore gender, they tried to return to the social practices of the bilinear family, but governmental law still avoided social gender stricture. This revolutionary law created a political possibility for free love, so that people did get married until the middle of the 1930's . They thought about free expressions of sexuality in the early twenties especially. Having this experience of feminist radicalism in our past, we don't need to fight for our future. We already have our future in our past. JB: Are you saying now that cyberfeminism is to act from the freedom you have as a woman? To realize you have this freedom and to act from it? AM: Mostly I have a freedom or unfreedom as a social and political person, but social and political roles and identities are peanuts compared to my whole existential task. As a woman I have not enough formal expressions, in discourses there is no cultural expression of the body and the sexualised body. Motherhood and pregnancy are totally hidden under medical and pedagogical discourses. We have silence in the most productive existential experiences. Having freedom we have kind of strong creative obligations to produce more formal expressions in a poetic way. That is what cyberfeminism and other extravagant self articulations are about. "Virtual Anatomy" - http://www.dux.ru/virtual/ * --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 74.0 <nettime> I don't want to be alone in the 21st century Cornelia Sollfrank nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 17 Jan 2003 15:22:17 +0100 Interview: Laurence Rassel by Cornelia Sollfrank Brussels, December 10, 2003-01-11, office of CONSTANT [http://www.constantvzw.com/] I don't want to be alone in the 21st century C.S.: The conference DIGITALES just ended. Would you like to describe what DIGITALES is, and what happened in the last days? L.R.: DIGITALES was started on a very simple idea, to bring together for a short period of time, in the same place, women who were dealing with new technology. When I say women dealing with technology, I mean researchers from an academic background who are using technology as a tool to write, but also women working on the development of technology, then I mean artists using digital technology for their work, and I mean women who decided to use technology to find a job and earn their living and that of their families. I have realized, as an artist working with new technologies, or in culture, that we never meet other women theoreticians or researchers, or women using technnology to earn their living. When I was working for Sophia, the network of feminist studies, my job happened to be in the same street as a training center for unemployed women, which offered training in digital technologies. There I was, this network's secretary and a member of CONSTANT as artist and cyberfeminist, geographically right next to this women training center, and I simply could not imagine that these people would not meet, share their experiences and talk to each other about what it means to be a woman working in the field of technology. C.S.: Could you briefly explain what this training center, and what CONSTANT are? L.R.: Interface3 asbl is a centre and a team for vocational training and integration of women on the labour market in the sector of new technologies. Its aim is to train or retrain unemployed women with different level of education, for a job, and also to answer better society's demands. They are doing a great job there, giving women an education in programming or pc-support and the like, but the training projects are financed by public authorities and the private sector, which means women get in their education what government and companies need now, and not what the women themselves probably would decide that they want to learn. CONSTANT is a Brussels-based artists' organisation linking artistic and theoretical thinking on the Internet and digital communication for/in/with which I work. Amongst other things, we have been doing the annual multimedia festival called 'Jonctions 'for 5 years now. C.S.: Let us go back to DIGITALES, and how it came together. L.R.: Yes, for this we have to go a bit in the past. For me the beginning of DIGITALES, was the 'Cyberfeminist working days'. This was organized in 2000, but only as a cultural event. The idea was to organize workshops. As I had a lot of friends around me who wanted to make their website, edit sound, or use DV, I said ok, I know people who can teach, I can put together a workshop program, but from a feminist/cyberfeminist perspective. And the objective of the event was to make one song, one image and one film. There was a great atmosphere, and people were really enthusiastic with discussions also thinking about why and what they were doing in media, but and also argumenting about being feminist or not... It was nice. And I said to myself, ok, it's nice to be a cyberfeminist but this position stand, reflecting and action should be also brought to others, outside the cultural field, to the working place; I do not mean that making art is not a working place, but what I had in mind was office work, in a company or a call center, whatever. When I met the people from the training center, by chance as I explained, I realized that they were doing a great job of training, but they never took the time to think precisely what it meant they were doing and to reflect beyond. It's ok for women to find a job in that field, but at what price, under what condition, and for which economical system? Regarding the aesthetics of their work, they had no idea about what was going on in net art, or media art. They were trained to suit governement policies and the needs of private companies, and not to be independent thinkers with technology. I was also struck by the idea that academic thinkers produce statistic! s about the place of women in technology but most of them never meet a real person from there, and do not know anything about the condition of the women they are studying. So, what I initiated, was to ask all the different parties to take a bit of time, and think about what they/we were really doing, and exchange our positions; just for a moment. And it happened. C.S.: When did the first DIGITALES event take place, and how many people were involved? L.R.: There were already more than 100 women in Interface 3, the training centre. Plus the organisers' team: Interface3, Sophia, a coordination network for feminist/ gender studies and Constant. So during the 1st Digitales, something like 200 women were circulating/participating if we include the public coming from 'outside' the three organisations involved. C.S.: Could you give some examples of workshops, or lectures or other formats included in the program? L.R.: This year included a wide range: from a Linux install party to building your own webradio, to Dress for Success, a workshop by Isabelle Massu and Peggy Pierrot on writing your CV with a critical eye on the standards asked by the employers to women, this workshop was given with SPIP a free and open software. We had researchers on sexual discrimination at work in the sector of new technology, cyberfeminists, artists, but Mervin Jarman and Marlene Lewis from Mongrel also came to lead a Linker workshop. We had speakers from trade unions, banks, IBM, Amnesty International, we wanted to give a view of what is to work with new technology as a woman, and above all hoped that Digitales was a place where all these people coming from such different fields could meet and talk. C.S.: What is your idea behind bringing the different fields and people together? L.R.. I always say, "I don't want to be alone in the 21st century." Either we go all together, or nobody will go. I feel bored in a society where I cannot exchange anything. That was the selfish part of DIGITALES, to be able to speak with other women working with technology, meaning to know each other and to exchange vocabulary, tools and theory. I myself wanted probably to prove that it was really possible at least to exchange words and tools. And of course, I want to change the world, or save it, like Aki in Final Fantasy ("the question isŠ would I be on time to save the world" (laughter), and being able to exchange knowledge, tools and dreams is a first step. This year DIGITALES #2 also had very concrete results: for example, race issues will be integrated in the politics of ADA, a new platform of Belgian training centers on women and technology. As a consequence of DIGITALES it will be written into their policy and job; they will focus on racial discrimination in jobs applications and launch research, actions and surveys. Another result is that the Flemish and the French-speaking university researchers on women and technology have met in 'flesh', for most of them for the first time, and decided to go on with meetings and exchanges; furthermore we hope that free software and open source software will be taught now in the training centers. Members of Brussels-based free radios have learned sound editing. A group will go on working on the audio archives to be streamed on Constant webradio, etc. I could not have said before DIGITALES that this were the goals of our meeting, but it is what happened. C.S.: What have DIGITALES to do with Cyberfeminism? L.R.: It's hard to explain, pull apart, because it is closely knitted together. C.S.: Could you describe what your idea of Cyberfeminism is? L.R.: Cyberfeminism is different things for me; it depends on where I am, and what I am doing. But one constant thing is to ask myself, wherever I am: ’why', ’what for', ’under which condition', ’for what economic system'; it is about deconstructing situations. Imagine a woman sitting in front of a computer and simply ask all these questions! And the other thing is to be able to project oneself into the future. Not to be nostalgic, but to be able to imagine a future, and to have the vocabulary, and the aesthetics to create it. This is what empowers me, because I can imagine myself with more power, with more knowledge about technology, or being able to deal with biotechnology. Before Cyberfeminism I was not able to imagine my body in the future. As I did not want to be a mother, I did not want to be a worker, I did not want to be a theoretician... Now, I have the option to be a Cyberfeminist, which suits me perfectly! In a way, it includes all the options, but at the same tim! e it is different and much more. It might serve also as a role model: "When I grow up, I will be a Cyberfeminist." [laughter]. Sorry, that I cannot be more precise, but this is how it works for me. And for me DIGITALES means to change, to alter a place slightly, to take it and to shake it; smoothly like a virus, or even like an earthquake... C.S.: Talking about role models, and the deconstruction of categories, how do you see your role as an artist? L.R.: Well, I am trained as an artist, but nowadays when I am asked to provide a cv, I mention first that I am a cyberfeminist. But cyberfeminist is not - yet - recognised as a job, as artist is. And as people know that I am organizing and producing events, I enjoy telling them that I am an artist, because not being a curator or a producer it confuses them, as I am doing what I am doing as cyberfeminist and artist. C.S.: Can you make a link between the organisational work you are doing, the building of structures, and your understanding of art? L.R.: I follow a very simple path. When you learn to draw, you look at something. You learn to abstract from that something elements like light, shadow, lines. You do no longer see a lamp, a table, a woman. Seeing in 2d is a way of deconstruction. When I finished my education, I could draw everything, also from memory. But then I realized that everything I had been told about art and the art world was bullshit. What is the art world? What is the field of culture? Its real place, its real life, its economy? I decided to go and find out for myself, to deconstruct it. Maybe it is a bit arrogant to put it like this, but in a way it was like looking at something you want to draw, and I saw how it worked. At this point I started to create a perception, a sensation. When you are an artist, you put something in place, it may be a product, it may be an action, so as people can feel, see or understand something. For me it was putting people, words, machines together in the same room, and the people being in this place could have a sensation or could understand something, and go away with this understanding. C.S.: Are you talking about creating a situation? L.R.: Yes, situation sounds right. I was a conceptual artist without knowing it. What is really important for me, is what happens in between the images, between the people and the image. I was fed up with showing my canvases and my stuff in an exhibition, for people to say "Oh, how nice!", "How bad!", or "I buy it" and then nothing happened. What I wanted was to create a relationship with the people I am showing my work to. Also with CONSTANT we no longer call what we do ’festival', but we call it situation. C.S.: What do you expect from the situation or from the relationship with your ’audience' or the people you invite to your situation? L.R.: That they go away with something, a word, an image, a bit of practical knowledge; that they stop in the street or when they see a movie, a website and notice something they wouldn't have noticed before. It is like, again I can't find another image, like you put a friendly chip in their mind, it will change slightly or completely their perception. That is what happened to me when I encountered feminism, Chris Marker, cyberfeminism, you, mangas, electronic music, Terre Thaemlitz, sci-fi, hip hop, fan culture, I don't want to make the whole list, there are so, so many people, friends I met, saw, read, that they changed my mind, they let trails on you, in your perception. To be an artist for me was to intervene the in-between people and the world, maybe it is what i call the perception. C.S.: What role plays CONSTANT for in the way you are practising art? L.R.: CONSTANT is/was our undercover identity. We used it as a way to publish what we were doing. It allows to act as artist, but not under your own name, to create situations, organising festivals, meeting days. Being non-profit organisation, a group, allows you to move that way. And now, it is really a group. That is why I say, maybe I can go further now and do my individual work under my name. I do no longer embody a group which did not exist. At the beginning, it was called group, but 'we were only one'. I mean I was one. Then we were two. Now, it is a real group, it has changed, and I can go back to my own things. C.S.: What is your vision for the future, your personal dream? L.R.: I would like to be quieter. Not wanting to change the world all the time, and take all possible action, but to be more relaxed. You know, when you are painting and drawing, you spend hours with an empty mind, just creating lines and colors. It's a pity that my mind is not empty any more. I miss the feeling of time passing by. The other thing is that I want to be rich and famous.[laughs]. When I look at the things I have done until now, besides the organisational stuff, I see myself as a performer. My body, my voice, are in the middle of everything. But I have to protect myself more. Maybe it would be better not to be in the center any more, not to take everything I do fleshly, and personally. But still, it's my job, my profession, and it's hard to step back. C.S.: If you would now start and do work under your own name, what would that be? L.R.: I would like to finish stuff I began years ago. Now, I have the technique to finish them. I took a movie, and we remade it ourselves, edited it, but we played it in my own perspective. C.S.: What is the original movie? L.R.: 'La collectionneuse', done by Eric Rohmer. I thought it was a chauvinist movie, and my favourite one, I know him by heart I wanted to be Patrick Bauchau's part, and when I got a camera I wanted to re-make it inverting the gender roles to prove how chauvinist the original was. But I realized that it was not that easy. So I asked all my friends what they had seen and I made a movie about what they had seen, so there was no movie, but only people looking at a movie. As we all live under the influence of the myth of the author, one thing I am doing is to deconstruct the author. And in this movie, there is no author, only spectators, only viewers. I want to finish that concept, and go further. What I am interested most at the moment is sound; for me people who make music and sound are people who defined themselves as artists and think globally. They choose consciously the technology they use, how their products are distributed, aware of what is happening with copyright laws, how much they get paid for a concert, often they are also producers and produce other people work and when radio is used it is a way of speaking with your own voice, but also inviting other people to speak, for a conversation, or for a monologue... Also I met artists who I really like, I mentioned Terre Thaemlitz, he is writing theory with his audio cd, and at the same time performing on stage dressed as a woman, so wearing content on his own body, using, being all what's possible: to be a theoretician, to be a body, and to be someone producing an art product. Another thing I would like to do is to make a cyber heroine in 3d, because now I would like to confront myself again with representation. Feminism for me came after my art studies. I had already stopped making images. Now, with all what I know, what would be the image of - maybe a woman? -- ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ___ ___ ___ www. ||a |||r |||t |||w |||a |||r |||e |||z || .org ||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|||__|| |/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\|/__\| the ultimate sanity in art! # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 75.0 <nettime> Interview with Robert McChesney Pit Schultz nettime-l@desk.nl Sat, 16 May 1998 00:56:51 +0200 Towards a Democratic Media System: Interview with Robert McChesney Robert W. McChesney is Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has written widely on media history and communication policy. In particular, McChesney's work analyzes the policy debates surrounding the Internet and telecommunication, the effects of corporate control and advertising support upon the nature of journalism, and the debates over public broadcasting and nonprofit media systems. He currently hosts a bi-weekly radio public affairs program on WORT-FM in Madison. Corporate Watch: What's your perspective on the development of the corporate control of the Internet? How is the many-to-many communications structure of the Internet likely to change because of corporate involvement? Robert McChesney: Well, this goes back to the early '90s, when the emergence of the World Wide Web made the Internet appear to be, and have the promise of being, an extraordinarily democratic and interactive medium, whereby people could participate without censor, producing content, distributing it to potentially enormous audiences at very little cost. Material perhaps, in due time, of very high quality, not just text messages, but really high quality video, audio, the whole works. For a time, we had bookshelves filled with views of the World Wide Web and the Internet as being this new technology that was going to completely undermine the existing communications industries; make them unimportant, because the Internet was going to undercut their semi-monopolistic hold over media and over telecommunications. The most famous piece along these lines was by a technology writer named Steven Levy -- you might have seen it two years ago in the New York Times Magazine -- [that] said all these huge media mergers going on in the world are nothing to worry about because these media giants are basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and the iceberg they're going to hit is the Internet with its, as he put it, billions of channels. You see a lot less of that talk today. In fact, you see hardly anything like that today, because that vision that Levy had, and that others before him have had, was based on an idea that technologies have superpowers that override social considerations -- or a view that the market is inherently a thoroughly competitive and democratic mechanism (that's the George Gilder-type view). And in fact, both those views are dead wrong. Two or three years ago, most media and telecommunication firms were very scared of the Internet. They were scared that it could do exactly what Steven Levy said it might do. No one really knew where it was going to go. I think most of the entry to the Internet at that time was primarily motivated out of sheer and utter fear; and just because people wanted to cover their rear ends, so they wouldn't get outflanked. There's still an element of fear today among the media and telecommunications giants about the Internet, because no one still really knows exactly how it's going to develop. But the fear today is less that their entire industries are going to get outflanked, than that specific competitors might get a better deal. The corporate community has got the Internet -- for the most part, it's theirs. It's going to be incorporated into existing and emerging corporate empires: computer, software, telecommunication, and media empires. The ideas that Steven Levy wrote two years ago, might as well have been written in the 16th century, they are so ridiculously out of date. And this is not to say that it's settled. It's just to say that with the totally undebated but still quite important policy -- that whoever makes the most money wins -- you have a situation in which the handful of people who have the most power in the market are dominating the playing field; exactly what you would expect with that policy. That's the situation we're in now. CW: How does that affect the development of the medium from a user perspective? RM: Because there's tremendous pressure right now by the media firms, and really every commercial interest, to make the Web more and more like television, oftentimes we use the analogy of broadcasting to think about the World Wide Web -- channels dominated by corporate, commercial vendors. And there's an element of truth to that. But at the same time, on the Internet as such, there still isn't scarcity; people will [continue to] be able to start websites. I think the metaphor that captures the Internet is much more like book publishing, or magazine publishing. If you go to any newsstand in this country, with the exception of a handful in college towns and very large cities, you're just going to see the same 80-100 magazines being sold that are published by the same five or six or seven firms. That doesn't mean there aren't thousands of magazines. There are thousands and thousands of magazines; some extraordinary magazines that we've never heard of or seen, and never will hear of or see. The Web's always going to have those thousands of extraordinary things. Most people will never see them. When they turn on their WebTV, or their Microsoft or Netscape browser software, or {AT} Home (the TCI cable access service), or AOL -- those websites will be hidden away. You can get to them, but it will take hard work, and you'll have to really hunt and know what you're looking for. What's different, what's the genius of the Internet compared to print, is that if someone is printing a great newsletter in El Salvador, I'll never see it. It'd be physically impossible for me to get my hands on it, maybe. With the Internet, if I know how to get around and get the address, I can find stuff from all over the world. So, it's a qualitative difference in that regard, and a crucial one. But one problem that progressives have had with the Internet and with the Web, is that we extrapolate from our own experience to think that's how everyone else experiences it. In fact there's a very good chance that it'll be a really nice ghetto for a handful of people who know where to go. But [that experience will be] pretty much buried away from the dominant commercial Internet experience being prepared by the corporate giants for the mass of Americans. That's my sense. Now I might be wrong; this is not a done deal. But I think that's the trajectory we're on right now, and short of any policy otherwise, it's going to be tough to counteract that trajectory. CW: One plausible scenario is that Internet 2 is where all the high bandwidth, fancy, commercial stuff goes, and what we have today remains as an alternative medium. RM: Yeah, the market pressure is going to be to offer differentiated service. To have a super high bandwidth, high quality service for business users that will cost more, but they need it; and maybe a similar super high quality service for home consumers over their televisions or computers to those who are willing to pay. And then going down to more or less a clunker service for people who don't want to pay that much, or might just be interested in doing email and textual messages that don't require the same sort of bandwidth. But I think a market solution is very much a tiered system, where people get different calibers of Internet, or computer communications. CW: Is it possible to have a kind of vibrant people's medium around the edges? RM: There are lots of things [on the Internet] that are really useful and help activists and people interested in all sorts of issues that aren't being covered by the dominant media. Although, it's worth noting that as the technological standards for the Internet are developed, to the extent commercial interests play a role, that aspect is not going to be high on the list of their concern. It's not that it won't be there; not that there won't be people arguing for it. But as technical standards are made, commercial interests are looking for ways you can make money off this. I'm not an expert at this, but I think when the cable modem specs were developed, to take advantage of the existing nature of cable signals, the downlink is vastly wider than the uplink. As Heather Menzies [author of Whose Brave New World? -ed.] has put it, it's an interstate highway coming into the home, and a bicycle path going out. The orientation is very much toward sophisticated messages being sent in, and then textual messages to buy stuff being sent out. That's a very rational way to develop a commercial Internet -- to downgrade the interactive aspect, and upgrade the ability to use it as a medium for sending sophisticated commercial messages. CW: How does the Internet fit into the history of other mass media? RM: The Internet is not a new phenomenon. It's a different technology from earlier communications media technologies, but there is a history throughout the 20th century, and probably earlier, of how revolutionary new communication technologies have been developed and eventually deployed. History points to the fact that technologies, while they have tremendous influence and all sorts of effects upon society that are unintended and unanticipated, their fundamental course is determined by how they're owned and operated. It's almost an iron law of US communication media, going back to AM radio in the 1920s, that new technologies don't seem commercially viable at first, so they're developed by the nonprofit, noncommercial sector, by amateurs. When they develop [the technology] so you can make money off it, the corporate sector comes in, and through a variety of mechanisms, usually its dominance of politicians, it muscles all these other people out of the way and takes it over. That's exactly what happened with AM radio. Much like the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, AM radio was the province largely of the nonprofit, noncommercial [sector]. It didn't become commercially viable until the late 1920s, eight or nine years into the radio explosion. And then the successful big networks, NBC and CBS, were able to use their influence basically to hog all the good frequencies in the late '20s and early '30s. By 1934, nonprofit broadcasters accounted [for] sometimes one percent or one half of one percent of all broadcasting in the US, whereas they had been at 40-50% in 1924. There'd been a total elimination of that sector. That's what's happened with FM radio, with UHF television, to some extent with satellite and cable (although the profit potential was seen there fairly quickly), and definitely with the Internet. There you see the historical example perfectly. CW: There is so little public debate about the use of the medium for public good. RM: There's no debate about it at all. But the irony of course, is that the Internet only exists because of government subsidizing it for 20 years at taxpayer expense. And this is not new either, the same thing happened more or less with most other communication technologies; they were established through some sort of public sector subsidy. Radio and television and satellite -- all these technologies were developed through government subsidy, through either the university system or through the military in many cases. Internet the same way. Taxpayers bankroll these things, develop them, and then once they show a profit, they're turned over to the corporate sector with nothing in return to speak of. Except the right to be a consumer and make those corporations rich -- that's the great right we have. It's just simply a scandal; it's horrendous public policy. And now we have this enormous mythology that the Internet is the result of entreprenuerial genius, when in fact it was a government product. There's nothing remotely close to a free market in the communication industries, the computer industries, the media industries. These are, in most cases, what we call oligopolistic markets, dominated by a handful of corporations with no threat of new competition. And they, like the media, have so many joint ventures with each other, at times it operates much more like a cartel. If the US government had not subsidized the Internet for 20 years, the US would not be the leader in it; it wouldn't have existed here. It might have existed in Japan or Germany or Korea or Britain or some other country. Or it might not exist at all. It was the public sector that created it. CW: What should Internet activists be doing? RM: They've got to look at how the Internet's being developed by the corporate sector. Part of the problem of Internet activists is there's a romanticization that the Internet is this groovy playpen in cyberspace, divorced from the ugly world of telecommunications, software, media, and industrial capitalism. That's not the case at all. What we're seeing with the largest telecommunication companies, meaning the telephone companies AT&T, the Baby Bells, British Telecommunications -- they've formed a series of alliances, such that there are really only going to be four or five of these global alliances that rule the whole world in telecom. They're bringing the Internet into their existing empire to make it part of their one-stop shopping, along with cellular phones, long distance, local and paging services. Likewise, and most important from my perspective, the existing commercial media giants are doing everything in their power to completely colonize the Internet. The ten largest media firms in the world (which account now for about half of the venture capital on the Internet, by the most recent statistics I've seen), have TV networks, film studios, record companies, book publishing; and [they see] the Internet [as] part of their empire. So if we're thinking in terms of reforming the Internet, we've got to see it as part of how we view what is a democratic media system. And then see where does the Internet fit in. We've got to take the big picture view of the Internet as part of our media and our communication. Just like the firms who are actually controlling it. We can't parcel it off as some separate entity, because it's really part of the big fight for media reform in this country, and communication reform, to create viable nonprofit, noncommercial sector. CW: Do we need to be working nationally or internationally, since the corporations that you're talking about are not simply operating on a national level? RM: A lot of the key issues are still made nationally. But we have to link up globally too. That's absolutely right. For example, the big copyright deal [WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty--ed.] passed just in December, with tremendous pressure by the largest commercial interests in this country, trying to extend the narrowest interpretation of copyright onto the Internet. Basically to turn people's computers into vending machines as much as possible, with a really narrow interpretation of fair use. Those are issues that aren't real sexy on the surface, but we have to get hip to them, and start fighting on them. The other crucial thing is, if you look at the forces that're taking over the Internet now -- the Microsofts and Oracles from the computer world; the ten largest media firms in the world [such as] Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation; the five or six largest telecom alliances, which are some of the largest firms in the world, firms like AT&T, that do $50 billion a year in business -- when you look at the array of people colonizing the Internet, you get a sense that if you're going to win this fight, you better be serious about politics. This is no time for cyberspace dilettantes to sit around thinking they can change something by flaming someone's email. You're going up against a cornerstone institution of modern capitalism with supreme political power in Washington. The Wall Street Journal, just three weeks ago, proclaimed that commercial broadcasting was hands down the most powerful lobby in the country, simply unbeatable on political issues. Well, the commercial broadcasters are just one of the powerhouse lobbies. The other lobbies are almost as strong as them. So, if you're going to get serious about reforming this thing, not just having your groovy website for you and your cool friends to chat with each other off in the margins, but really fight for the heart of the system, which I think we have to fight for, then you're talking about getting involved, deeply involved, in serious political organizing. Not just some Internet issues, and not just some media and telecom issues, but on broad political issues, because the way we're going to win this fight is to link issues of Internet reform and media reform with broader social struggles. Things like improving the quality of the standard of living people have in this country, redistributing wealth, undercutting the sheer and total domination of the wealthy and the corporations over our political economy. And when we've linked those things together, we'll have a chance. Until then, we'll always be in the margins amusing ourselves. In the current playing field, we can't win. In the current playing field we're dealing with a situation where the vast majority of Americans are totally demoralized and depoliticized, sitting on their couch with a remote control and a bag of chips, convinced that nothing can change. And that is not an accident. That is exactly the education they're receiving day in and day out: nothing can change. What we've got to do is change that equation. Until we change it we can't win. But to change that, there's no mystery about it; it's getting organized. That's how you change things. Getting people educated, organized and participating, off the couch. Put the chips down, put the remote down, start talking to people, get involved, and realize this is our country, not theirs, and take it back. Resources: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, by Edward S. Herman & Robert W. McChesney (Cassell, 1997). An expose and analysis of the corporate takeover of the global media system, covering print media, television, and telecommunications. It can be ordered for US$19.95 at 1-800-561-7704. Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, by Robert W. McChesney (Seven Stories Press, 1997) Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, by Robert W. McChesney (Oxford University Press, 1993). Chronicles the political debate over how best to construct U.S. broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s. http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/internet/corpspeech/mcchesney.html --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} desk.nl 76.0 <nettime> Interview with I/O/D, the Makers of Web Stalker Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 24 Apr 1998 15:32:37 +0200 (MET DST) E-Interview with the makers of the Web Stalker browser Simon Pope, Colin Green and Matthew Fuller By Geert Lovink Made for the First International Browserday, Amsterdam, april 17th, 1998 For more information: http://www.waag.org/ The Web Stalker: http://www.backspace.org/iod GL: 'Everybody is a browser designer' - but it is not everyman's hobby to build one (yet). Where does the idea, to create one's own browser, come from? Normally, designers are working with content and have to make it look nice. But now there is the new profession of the 'interaction designer'. Are you one of those? Are you techno determinists, who believe that the shape of the interfaces is determining the actual information? Matthew Fuller: Hmm, this is one of those statements along the lines of 'Jederman ist ein kunstler'. (Joseph Beuys) These statements sound democratic, but actually have the subtext of meaning *Everyone wants to be like me - the great man!* No, not everyone is a browser designer for sure. And certainly it would be unwise to want to be like us. People should actually have aspirations right? The idea of making another piece of software to use the web with came about for a few reasons. First of all, I/O/D had been working with different ideas of interface and a general praxis around speculative reinvention of the computer anyway. Secondly, we were bored by all the hype. Thirdly, we knew it could be done, but didn't have the skills of the knowledge to do it properly - so we had to do it. As for the normal behaviour of designers I reckon I'll leave that part of the question for Simon or Colin to answer with a firmer grip on the handle of the knife that needs twisting. As for being techno determinists? I guess we are interested in finding this out. What comes into play using the web? The material on the URL being used, which encompasses the programs, skills and materials used to put it together as well as the specific items of data; then the actual hard infrastructure - computers, servers, telephone lines, modems and of course the software running on them, (in short, bandwidth considerations); then the software being used to access the web - a great big pile on top of which sits the Browser, terminal viewer or whatever. All of these elements and how they mix determine to some extent the nature of the interaction. For instance, try using a web site packed full of java-scripts, frames and vrml with a browser from a couple of years back. You'll find that the type of interaction available to you is pretty much fully determined by the technology you have. You're locked out. On the other hand, just looking at all of this misses out on the key piece of equipment in the relationship - the user. One of the things that drove us to make the Web Stalker was that we, and pretty much everyone else don't really use web-sites in the way that they are suposed to be used. Whether it's switching off gifs or blocking cookies or whatever there's an element of street knowledge that you use to get to the stuff that you really want. We made the Web Stalker to work in the same kind of way. It's designed to be predatory and boredom-intolerant. At the same time though, we hope that as a piece of *speculative software* it just encourages people to treat the net as a space for re-invention. Geert Lovink: Web Stalker is showing us the backstage of the browers. Could you explain us how it actually works? What kind of code do we get to see? Is it just HTML or hidden directories of the servers? What do webmasters and sysops try to hide for us and what can we learn from it? Web Stalker as a hackers tool for extra-governmental gangs that are trying to undermine the effeciency of global capitalism? Simon Pope: the web stalker moves only within the limits of html space. any co-conspirators needs to be fore-armed with at least one URL which refers to an html document. give this to the 'crawler', and the stalker begins its process of parsing, hungrily searching for links to other html resources. initiating a 'map' window, opens a channel onto this process, through which urls are graphically represented as circles and links as lines. the stalker will thrive on known links and resources - as long as each html document contains a link to another html document, the stalker will live. pitch it into a netscape, microsoft, macromedia or java-only space and it will soon perish. Colin Green: When we began to use the stalker as our primary web-access software, we became aware of the extent to which html has become a site of commercial contention. Browsers made by the two best-know players frame most peoples' experience of the web. This is a literal framing. whatever happens within the window of explorer, for instance, is the limit of possibility. HTML is, after-all, a mark-up language which indicates structure and intention of a document. There is no imperative to interpret <cite> as <italic>, as there are none which demand the use of 'forward' or 'back' to define a spatial metaphor. Matthew Fuller: We've had reports from users that amongst other things, if you use the Web Stalker on a site with extra content being added to it every few hours, such as some news services for instance, you can start to find files whilst they're still in the queue - before the news 'happens'. Simon Pope: Commercial interests have tried to exploit the web by controlling the velocity of browsing. the stalker subverts this - it confounds the faux-melodrama of the click-thru by automatically making the link for you. Suspense is ridiculed and fluidity is returned to a realm where processes of delay and damming are recognized advertising opportunities. It is here that the convention of the "web page" helps to solidify html, presenting each document as the potential apex of the user's experience. A leaf-node rather than link. Geert Lovink: but is the web stalker not also a bit protestant, in the sense of anti-image - pro code? HTML and the WWW are being presented to us as the big step forward for the normal user, to have an easy-to-use interface. what is so disgusting about all these fancy websites, funny graphics and sexy buttons? isn't the stalker a bit step back, very male and hackerlike in its approach? i don't say that the explorer is female... Matthew Fuller: The Web Stalker establishes that there are other potential cultures of use for the web. The aesthetic conventions of current Browsers are based on the discipline of Human Computer Interface Design. To describe the predelictions of this approach to interface you only have to note that the default background colour in page-construction programs is grey. Progress is marked by the incremental increase of fake drop-shadow on windows. Here, the normal user is only ever the normalised user. Time to mutate. For us, software must also develop some kind of relationship to beauty. This can in one sense be taken as something that only happens in the eyes. But it is also something that happens at a level that is also profoundly interwoven with politics in the development of these potential cultures of use. It is in this sense that we call The Web Stalker 'speculative' software. It is not setting itself as a universal device, a proprietary switching system for the general intelligence, but a sensorium - a mode of sensing, knowing and doing on the web that makes its propensities - and as importantly, some at least of those 'of the web' that were hitherto hidden - clear. Rather than taking an ascetic view we see that a key problem with the Browsers is that they don't allow the Spew to manifest itself *enough*. This software is a call for the voluptuation of the nets and everything they connect to. As the union leader Big Bill Heywood used to say, stroking his belly and sucking on a tasty dog-shit-sized cigar: Nothing's too good for the proletariat. Geert Lovink: After having done Web Stalker, what is the relation between the small, arty, conceptuals anti-browsers and a perhaps more serious one that will be free public domain software? It is maybe hard to estimate how influencial marginal autonomous software production actually this. There are many different estimations about this. How do you see the Amsterdam effort of the 'International Browser Day' in all this? Mattew Fuller: The Web Stalker proposes another model alongside the two other main models of radical software production. The first is obviously that of Free Software. The second is that of programmers working in collaboration with specific client groups whose needs are not met by the programs developed in a 'free' market. A good example of this is the icon-based email program being put together in de Waag. Both of these models are based on a specific or wider consensus. The Web Stalker proposes a complementary model, one that is interventional. That is designed specifically to make a far reaching breach into the material and imaginal space of the technical and social context in which it is placed. Simon Pope: Until recently,there were few points in the development of pc software where source code was opened-up to end-users where applications could be modified or extended. With Netscape's recent announcement, at least there is now an awareness of the existence of this type of development, even if the take-up by end-users (rather than developers) might not be that widespread. Colin Green: We develop software from a very specific position: Lingo has been our language of choice and from necessity for the past 5 years. During that time, there has been a gradual shift in the method of programming, from proceedural to object-oriented approaches. This change happened as much through an ad hoc engagement with Lingo by frustrated users than from the imposition of methodology from another programming language. The result has been that there is no standard way to deal with Lingo, so it's not been practical to share sourcecode - it takes too much time & effort to decipher someone elses scripting. The days of being able to get away with cut & paste of other peoples scripts are over - nothing interesting came out of that approach anyhow... Simon Pope: Also, there has been no real percieved benefit in giving away Lingo scripts. If you can write good enough code to be able to give it away, there's probably very little out there you actually WANT in return. This is changing. Once-novice coders are now gaining in confidence and turning-out software with the intention for others to use it, tear it apart and rebuild it according to their own design. We'll open-up the back of next software project to expose it to this kind of developoment. Matthew Fuller: For us, the Browserday is a very useful initiative. Once the breach has been made, proving that the net can be used and develeoped in ways largely at variance with the proprietary browsers and the interests they maintain, the floodgates can - potentially - open. A thousand different net sensoriums can be launched. The Browserday is important because it was done in a way that was at once informed by both technique and theory without priviliging either and done in a populist celebratory manner. It's not just done to force the didactic proof that software can be -exciting- but also that people can make actual, rather than virtual, reconfigurations of ways of seeing, knowing and doing. And some of the wild stuff that the students came up with!!! In this alone it went beyond the usual dreary parade of technoculture events that people have become accustomed to. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} desk.nl 77.0 <nettime> Interview w/ Vuk Cosi Tilman Baumgaertel nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 30 Jun 1997 08:45:46 -0400 Hi! I enclose an interview I did with Vuk Cosic in Ljuliana at the "Beauty and the East meeting" for your reading pleasure. Those who read german will find a translation of this piece and a lot of other fascinating stuff at the new art special of "Telepolis" that went online {AT} http://www.heise.de/tp/fku.htm Yours, Tilman %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% >>Tilman Baumgaertel, Hornstr. 3, 10963 Berlin, Germany Tel./Fax. 030-2170962, email: Tilman_Baumgaertel {AT} CompuServe.Com<< %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ------------------------------SCHNAPP!------------------------------------- ----------------------- ?: In read somewhere that the first bible in Slovenian was printed in Wittenberg in Germany. I was wondering if you think there is a similar situation with the internet now, if you have the impression that it was somehow invented elsewhere and therefore suspicious, as many west europeans seem to think? Vuk Cosic: No, Slovenia is actually very well-connected. There is also a high number of computers in offices and homes. The number of hosts per capita is higher than in many west-european cuntries, for example in Italy or Spain. At Ljudmilla we have a 256k-line which is the best you can get in Slovenia. So it´s not such a bad situation. We have live-stream real audio and video, and the bandwidth is definitely sufficent. ?: Tell me how you got "on the net"? Cosic: I first encountered the WorldWideWeb in the second half on 1994. I thought: "Wow, this is sexy." You know, the moment, when you see words on your computer screen, that somebody else wrote somewhere else, is like a religious experience, very emotional in a way. I still have a photographic memory of what I saw when I went online for the first time, the different websites I looked at. So I said: "This is cool", and I decided to change my career. Before that I worked as an art manager. I did art exchange projects between countries that were in war with each other, like Slovenia and Serbia. So on the 4th of April 1995 was the last day of my career as an art manager. I had finished a good project, and that day I said as myself: Ok, now I´m into the internet, one way or another. I didn't know if I would end up selling modems, or teaching DOS in elementary school. I didn't have a strict goal, only had this gut feeling to go there. It just was the thing for me. Then I was inivited to the first nettime meeting in Venice - well, and the rest is history. ?: Had you worked as an artist before? Cosic: I had done collages and other art works before, and really the only thing that had changed was that I had discovered a new platform for my creativity. ?: I noticed that some of the pieces on your homepage seem very literary. Do you have a background in writing? Cosic: I originally came out of writing, but then I developed a very strange attitude about which platform I wanted to use. I first have the idea, than I decide which medium it is going to be this time. I did land art, I did exhibtions. I actually have three different biographies. I was very active in politics, I was a candidate for the nobel peace prize with a few friends, because I was a leader of student demonstrations in Belgrade. Originally I am a archeologist by training. I am still sort of working on my Ph.D. thesis, but I did not persue my career as an archeologist. I know that your next question will be 'How come that an archeologist is working on the internet?" I think that it is the same apparatus that has just been turned around on the tripot, looking in the other direction... ?: So you are an archeologist of the future? Cosic: Yeah, I am on that tripod. ?: Back to your career as aspiring net artists. Tell me how you got started in this art form, in case it really is an art form... Cosic: For some reason I didn´t dare to do HTML for quite some time. I didn't want to dirty my hands, until I eventually understood how fucking simple it is. When I finally started, nothing could stop me. I did the first website that could be called net art in May 1996 for a conference called "Net.art per se" that took place in Trieste in Italy. ?: There is this one "found footage" page that you designed that looks the homepage of CNN, except that the main headline is"Net.art found possible" and that the hidden hotlinks all lead to other art websites... Cosic: That was pretty surprising for a lot of people. And I was very surprised that these guys at this conference appreciated my work. And that's the beauty of all of this that developed out of this conference. It's like me and Heath Bunting and Alexej Shulgin and Olia Lialina and Jodi had studios next to each other, where we could look at what the others were doing. ?: What do you mean with "having a studio next to each other"? Cosic: You know, it's like Picasso and Braque in Paris in 1907... ?: But they were physically together... Cosic: The output of a net artists is net art, which is obviously - because of the qualities of the internet - accessible to everybody. And I can see everything that they do in the moment they do it. It usually goes like this: Jodi do something new - and they are crazy, they are maniacs, they create something new every other day - and they send the URL to me, and ask: What do you think about this? And there are collaborations over the net, too, and group projects. We steal a lot from each other, in the sense that we take some parts of codes, we admire each others tricks. Jodi are very interesting in their exploration of technology, but Heath is magnificent in his social awareness and his glorious egotism, or Alexej with his russian temperament. Cyber-Majakowski, someone once called him. I have the feeling that I know the greatest people that are alive in my time, while they are still good. Now we have this communication system that reminds me of the communication between the futurists or later the dadaists. There were two guys in Berlin, four in guys in Paris, two in Russia, and they all knew each other, and there were all 25 years old. How did they get in touch? It was because of the strength of their believes and the good communication channels, because there were a few guys traveling. What we have now is the same: We have some strengths, we have some qualities - even though that's really up to others to say - and most of all we have a good communication system. ?: Which is the internet? Cosic: This time it's the internet. Earlier it was Picabia who had the money to buy an expensive car and travel and print one issue of his magazine in every town he came to. ?: When I look at your work, but also at the works of Shulgin or Jodi, one aspect of net art that catches one's attention, is that it is very self-referential. Cosic: The usual analogy is video art, which was also very self-referential in the sixties when it started. I am not talking about video art today, which has developed in a sort of funny direction. But if you think about pieces by people like Weibel, they were very much about monitors, about 100 Hertz, about all kinds of noise. They were all about this video option you had suddenly as an artist. Then again there are not such easy generalisations. None of us has really done net art that has references to historic avantgardes. There is no real dada lover among us, even though I manically collect the books from this period. But there is no dada web site, which to my mind would be a total mistake. That's for boring people to do. That's why I am doing CNN. That's self-referential in a certain way. We like to think about the net, and how it's made, because we want to understand it. And our process of understanding it is immediately transformed into some form of expression. ?: What is a very striking parallel between net art and video art is that the first that artists did when they discovered television or video was to take these media apart and attempted to destroy them. Now the same thing seems to happen on the net. Cosic: Exactly! I did a lot of HTML-documents that crashed your browsers. I noticed that there was a mistake somewhere in my programming. And than I asked myself: is this a minus or a plus? So than I was looking how to get to that. It was not enough just to avoid this mistake, I was trying to really understand that particular mistake, with frames, or with GIFs which used to crash old browsers, or later Java Script, that does beautiful things to your computer in general. ?: So why is it the first reflex of artists to decontruct a new medium? Cosic: In what we are doing, there aren't any laws. It is like any other art form, it's totally individual. I think, that every new medium is only a materialisation of previous generations' dreams. This sounds like a conspiracy theory now, but if you look at many conceptual tools, that were invented by Marcel Duchamp or by Joseph Beuys or the early conceptionalists, they have become a normal everyday routine today with every email you send. With every time you open Netscape and press a random URL at Yahoo! 80 years ago this action, that is now totally normal everyday life, would have been absolutely the most advanced art gesture imaginable, understandable only to Duchamp and his two best friends. This very idea to have randomness in whatever area, form, shape, would have been so bizarre in those days. Or to do something that makes artistic sense here and somewhere else at the same time! You recall these art projects where there was one guy in Tokyo and one New York, and they agree over the telephone to do the same thing at the same time, to look at the sun or something - we do it with the internet all the time, with web cameras! I see this deletion of remoteness as something very intriguing, and maybe that's one little proof of this weird thesis that the internet is only the materialisations of earlier generations' dreams. I will give a lecture in Finnland in September in which I will argue that art was only a substitute for the internet. That is of course a joke. I know very few people who have so much esteem for what artists did in the past. ?: There is a lot of reflection going on about net art right now. That is very different from other art movements where the artist-genius put some paint on the canvas and it was up to us, the audience, to wonder what this meant... Cosic: Yeah, in a way we are Duchamp's ideal children. You and I and all the people in this conference, we have all read a lot. Let's not be modest about this, because we are proud of that. We read a lot, we work a lot, and we are at the same time creative, because the medium internet is enabling us to be this way. ?: There is a piece on your website where you encourage people to put footnotes on academic texts. That's another thing I noticed about net art, that it is a lot about theory. Cosic: Yeah, that's what nettime does to otherwise normal people. Unfortunately I didn't find enough strength in me to persue this project. Now it is only an invitation for collaboration that never found an echo. There were a few, by Heiko Idensen and Heath Bunting and Pit Schultz, but it wasn't enough. I have them in my mail box though... ?: Does it matter if this project gets finished or not? Cosic: No, there is this state of final incompleteness, as Duchamp once said about his Big Glass. I can open this document whenever I want - I call them documents, not art pieces - and do whatever I want to it. It's cool. I don't want it to be finished. I'm not interested in this project very much anymore, though. ?: Is your homepage a complete collection of all the art project you did on the net? Cosic: No, my homepage is not a catalogue of my works, because there are a lot of things that I am doing when I go to other places, which I never put them on my homepage. A lot of net artists are trying hard to get as many links as possible from important web sites like "ars electronica" or "Telepolis", in order to get many hits on their sites, to get recognized. But to me this protocol is also subject to artistic reflexion. That´s why there are a lot of my works missing on my site. I sometimes give fake URL´s. I used to print fake business cards, and now I do the same thing on the net, just for the fun you can have with misinformation. ?: One of the most conceptual pieces on your website is called "A day in the life of an internet artist", which records your daily activities. Other people call this a homepage, but in your case it is a work of art. Why? Cosic: That was the first time that I noticed that there is a million ways of classifying what you are doing on the internet. The reasons is that on the internet it is so beautifully undefined which plattform you are going to use: text, video, graphics, audio, whatever. You certainly have a problem there, and you really have to go down to the basics. When you go down to the basics, art is really about subjectivity, even if you attempt to do something else. And even the worst formalist experiments in the heroic age of video art are a reflexion of the individual quality of the maker. And I am trying to play/work with that. ?: So it is dealing with the historic art genre of the self-portrait? Cosic: Yeah, sort of. In this particular site I tried to give a vivisection of my everyday communication with the internet enviroment. So there is one part that deals with my net art projects, one that deals with writing, one that is called "job art"... ? Why is it art to have a job? Cosic: I am a little bit puzzled with the term "art". Not because I decline the epithet artist - it´s a nice hat to wear and the girls like it, too. But actually it is a little bit worrying how it puts you into a certain corner. So instead of deleting the word "art" as etiquette for what I do, I gave the word "art" to *everything* I do. ?: Like Yves Klein said: "Everything is art"... Cosic: Yes, but I try to do it in a very practical, everyday way, without too much talk about it. This web site is not accompanied by an essay or anything. Actually there *is* an essay with the same title, but it has nothing to do with the web site. That was another thing I did to mislead the audience. ?: There is one piece on Nicholas Negroponte on your website too. What is that about? Cosic: When Negroponte came to Ljubliana, I had a big fight with him, and we interrupted his speech. Luka Frelih and I went around the city spraying graffiti: "Wired = Pravda". I made it look like a secret internet terrorist organisation. On the website we compare him to Tito. But we did it without fanatism. ?: Today at the conference you proposed a project called "Ljudmila West". Can you say something about this? Cosic: Ljudmila West is a foundation that is set up to help west european artists to communicate, to learn about new multimedia technologies and to contribute to the european integration, because there is an obvious lack of information in this area. So we can not sit with our arms crossed. We should do something about this. Because this is definetely the last moment for the West Europeans to catch on, otherwise they will remain in their closed systems or their closed societies, to quote Popper and Soros. ?: Is this a parody of the rethoric used at events like the V 2 festival in Rotterdam? The west europeans are helping the poor east europeans out of their mess, only reversed? Cosic: I have been to so many art events in the west, where the direction of teaching was not the expected one. It was actually the guys from Belgrade and Moscow teaching those french, british, german fellows things about life. Of course this virtual Ljudmila West project is just a cute little joke, but there is a very serious point to it. And it comes out of very serious frustration. I am not a frustratable fellow, but I noticed this growing frustration among east europeans. So I as an artist react and offer an art project, which is this story about Ljudmila West. Sounds like the name of a film actress, by the way. Interview: Tilman Baumgärtel --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 77.1 Re: <nettime> Interview w/ Vuk Cosi Peter Tomaz Dobrila nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 30 Jun 1997 17:24:44 +0200 (MET DST) Correction... > ?: In read somewhere that the first bible in Slovenian was printed in > Wittenberg in > Germany. I was wondering if you think there is a similar situation with the > internet now, if you have the impression that it was somehow invented > elsewhere and therefore suspicious, as many west europeans seem to think? > > Vuk Cosic: No, Slovenia is actually very well-connected. There is also a > high number of computers in offices and homes. The number of hosts per > capita is higher than in many west-european cuntries, for example in Italy > or Spain. At Ljudmilla we have a 256k-line which is the best you can get in > Slovenia. So it´s not such a bad situation. We have live-stream real audio > and video, and the bandwidth is definitely sufficent. > I just wanna say that 256k-line is not 'the best you can get in Slovenia.' We - Multimedia Center KIBLA in Maribor - have the 512k-line and it can go up to 2Mega. Just for an objective information. Bye, Peter --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 78.0 nettime: barbrook/dery interview by willem van weelden Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 3 Oct 1996 10:37:58 +0200 (MET DST) An Interview with Richard Barbrook and Mary Dery By Willem van Weelden Conducted at Ars Electronica, september 4, 1996 For the Web Journal of the Ars Electronica Festival 1996 http://www.aec.at/www-ars/journal/db/bio/dery1/index.html INTRODUCTION Being the most politically outspoken and controversial speakers of the first day of the symposium, the idea of doing an interview with both Mark Dery and Richard Barbrook at the same occasion seemed as maybe not an altogether original still yet a very sane thing to pursue. Moreover, Barbrook for a large part determined the 'nature' of the discussion in the 'Future of Evolution' net symposium (www.aec.at/meme/symp), by criticising the biologisation of the social sciences, and the paralysing effect it may have on critical thought. Both, Dery and Barbrook share that same critical stance towards the primarilly Californian 'ideology' but given that affliation with eachother's ideas it seemed an interesting thing to give them for the journal the opportunity to speak the differences of their convictions. Thus focussing in on the off-centered, shadowy American quality of Dery's approach and the more historical Arbeiteristic (workerist) European approach of Richard Barbrook. THE MEMESIS CONCEPT Mark Dery: 'I've done precisely what you suggest Richard Barbrook has done which is: restore a sense of historical context to the whole of the discussion on Memetix or Memesis. In fact I've taking us not to the Meta-Meme but to the Ur-Meme: nature. Which is precisely what Richard argued in a different way. He refered to the creeping biologisation of the social sciences or what might also loosely and rather inaccurately be called the humanities but specifically, critical exegesis of cultural dynamics. That was precisely the point of my paper. That appeals to nature as mute inscrutable legitimator of human agency in the social sphere with real delitarious, measurable, profound corrossive impact on the whorp and whoof of peoples everyday lives is a profoundly pernishes gesture nor is it recently arrived. I'm absolutely the historian when I talk in my paper about previous appeals to the beginning of the 20th century: the Eugenics movement in America leaps immediately to mind but we can even go further back to the17th century where as I said in my paper the compressed crania of women, non-whites and other lesser ethers in the lower most wrongs of the great chain of being were adduced as incontrovertable, scientific, biological evidence of their inferiority. WvW: If dialectics is still a usefull tool in structuring the various viewpoints and subleties in the debate then it was this remark that roughly synthesized the core of the one, skeptical camp versus the Meme suggestion, against the camp of scientists and artists who are the defenders and afficionado's of the Meme. This journal has chosen to concentrate its investigations on the former side of the discussion. Still it is remarkable that simple, unelaborated historical facts without a context and random remembrances can be of such a convincing 'nature' that they actually close off, reduce and belittle entire discussions. For, at least in this talk, the whole 'biological' part of the discussion was after the Dery statement more or less left behind, the attention shifting more towards the role the advocates of the Memetic rhetoric play in the media and public sphere, propagating the adoption of 'biological' metaphors and references in social analysis. Thus making way for the political discussion of how to adress the issue of (net-) democracy at the era of the 'end of organized capitalism'. Let this review be of any help in the choosing of positions in the debate. Richard Barbrook: The key point is what Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine and the Extropians and other leaders of this Memes cult are doing which is basically recycling Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism. Which comes, as you know, out of Victorian England. It's a defense of liberal economics against the need for state regulation and state intervention. THE LIBERALISM DISCUSSION MD: I would simply add as a kind of hypertext link to that statement, the term 'liberal' in America means something very different [from the European use of the term. wvw] and I think the boilerplate phrase 'liberal economics' is more usefully phrased for Americans as a 'laissez-faire' Ayn Randian deregulated economics. Not liberalism in the sense of social policies but 'liberal' meaning the least regulated, the least statist intervention. RB: Simon Martin Lips says in his book 'American exceptionism' : 'all Americans are liberals' it is just that they are either conservative liberals or social liberals. And that is part of the problem in the American debate ; it is completly narrow. And he says quit rightly that there's never been really a conservative party. You know pro church, pro aristocracy party since the revolution and similarly there's never been a real socialist party, not even in the social democratic sense. THE COMMODIFICATION OF SOCIAL THEORIES AND THE STATE MD: When Richard suggested they recapitulate Spencerian social theory it is intresting to know that the Spencerian theory was every bit as popular with the monopoly capitalists of his days as the neo-biological downsized demassified decentralized theories of Kevin Kelly are with corporate managerial theorists as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, the last one being the author of the book 'Thriving on Chaos' which is a bizarre carnival mirror, kind of funhouse distortion of Deleuze in a very strange way. The disillusion of the body politics in sort of a flesheating viral fashion into a poddle of anomic atomized cellular units protoplasmicly going their own seperate ways on the one hand echoes delirious excesses of Deleuzian theory at its most outermost bounds, and on the other hand the American millitia movement at this moment, which also embraces very much the notion of micro-political resistance. Where have we ever heard that phrase before? Foucault sits upright in his grave and coughs a bloodbubble! RB: That's the interesting thing there is this link between the new left and the new right which is : anti-statism which actually anti-democracy. Both are against representative democracy. They see the political process as inherently corrupt because it involves compromise, the articulation of interests. The both have the common fantasy of direct democracy. Pure speech actions between people. This is interesting in classical republicanism media freedom was seen as part of participation in the democratic process, it was not the substitute for it. But both the new left and the new right saw the media as a substitute for representative political institutions. Guatarri talks about the community radio stations as the immense permanent meeting of the airways where people engage in direct democracy, bypassing the Italian state. As we know it is a very deeply reactionary idea. Because politics involves being a citizen and that's the reason why I'm an social democrate and not an ultra leftist? You have to accept that we are not we're not just members of supersociety. Both deny this dialectic between membership of civil society and political citizenship. THE FUTUTRE OF THE STATE MD: Since you are looking for differences between us one difference that should absolutely be ilyted but should be tripple underscored italiced and said in fluorescent wired dayglo orange: I'm not a social democrate!!! nor am I an academic neo-marxist!!! I'm deeply, deeply disenchanted with the notion of the nation state and profoundly saddened about the paralist state of constitutional participatory democracy in America at this point which is not to say that I don't think that it is a remarkably robust line of political code and that I don't think it is inherently one of the more liberatory political systems but where Richard and I part company is that in America the federalist paradigm, the government has been effectively brought to heel and hollowed out and turned essentialy into a sickafennic lapdog by corporate power that is evermore global in scope that flows with the frightening liquidity over national borders from whence springs all of this utopian rhetoric in the Wired camp about the end of the nation state, the end of geography in a sort of dizzy vertiginous hyperreal way that almost sounds post-modern. And again the discorporation from the immediate fysical body. But in their hands, in the hands of what a New Yorker essayist called the 'Tofflerist/Gingrichist alliance' all this rhetoric of returning power to the individual and ultimately to the local level is really a very transparant threadbear blind for on the one hand utterly unravelling of the social safety net and laying the full burden of responsibility for the sort of social concerns at the doorstep of the individual, and simultanisously as I said in my paper dismantling the rickety framework of the nation state that even now only just constraints corporate power to clear the way for transnational media monoliths whose power is utterly unconstraint and answerable to noone. So the pernicious, corrosive enzyms of corporate power have effectively hollowed out constitutional democracy in America. And we need look no further than the recent capitualisation to all of Rupert Murdochs attempts to roll back anti-monopoly legislation where essentially all of the inside the beltway powerbrokers basically melt and kissed his ring. This is the moment to my mind where the state is in serious peril. RB: This libertarian rhetoric is of a limited section of the economy and is an ideology in the classic sense of the word: it is a false description of reality. What's intresting is that it is not a really succesful economic strategy compared to the post-war period or the New Deal. State regulations and taxes are like excercises, nobody really wants to do them or have it imposed on them. A good example is universal access. One of the big campaigns of these freemarketeers is to remove universal access from the provision of this new fiberoptic grid. It is literally going to be the virtual class that will be half-wired into the fiberoptic grid and the rest of the population will be left the decaying copper infrastructure. But if you create a massmarket you need the masses to be on-line. So it needs the state to pro-actively built the turn-and-see value in order to ellectrify to.... If I were Time Warner I would want the state to organise the infrastructure and be able sell your commodities. MD: But how do you respond to my critique, my misgivings, profound weariness, my trepadation about rallying around the banner of the state. As a social democrat you sound much more sanguin about participatory democracy's abbility to disentangle itself from the tentacles of corporate power and I would like you to address the way in which corporate power profoundly undermined the fundamental tennents of participatory democracy. RB: Political democracy is centered around state structures. If you are against the state in a very fundamental sense you are against political democracy. It is about participating in political decision-making at a region a national and now at a continental level in Europe. That you have to state first and formost. We are living within a mixed economy and each of these actors play a different role. But we have to be weary of saying that the state is disappearing, because in a sense it is accepting the propaganda but still the state plays an enormous role, in America as everywhere else. You have to be aware not to over exagerate globalisation we are still not at the stage we were in 1914. International trade is less important than it was then. After that we entered a period in which nations became radically autonomous, especially in the Depression era. Eastern Europe as the prime example. Everybody did this, everybody retreated behind the protectionst walls and yes they have been broken down in the last fifty years we reassembled a global trading system, but even now we are still not at the point we were at the beginning of this century. MD: My question hangs in the air unanswered; your response to my question about the extent in which corporate intervention and influence peddling and the enormously long dark shadow of transnational corporate power pass inside the beltway which effectively to my mind parries participatorydemocracy. There is a growing feeling in America which gives rise to the Millitia Movement throwing a lever in a ballotbooth is essentially a sob for the masses and that the real decisions made in the corridors of power have everything to do with pacts and corporate influence peddling and that that acts as a profilactic, a firewall against the real wills and desires expressed by the people. Your response to that is that we first have to concede that we are committed to the state, and the state is a really profound influential entity; I would not deny that the state has a profound influence and still exercices an enourmous impact on the everydays lives of citizenray e.g. in America. The point is that the state is evermore ventriloquised by transnational corporate power. Let me give you a material example; the recent telecommunication legislation in America. A statist, highly interventionist radically deregulatory act. It is the issue that draws all the heat and light from the Wired people because as libertarians they are very concerned with individual rights; it is the Hide-amendment, the so-called Communication Decency Act, which is a hairball! A fleetingly brief mirage, a distraction! The real profound issue in there are the evisceration of common carriage, the roll back of the regulation that would prevent monopolies and given media markets. So this is statist intervention but it is essentially the hamburgler handpuppet given out at McDonald playlands, you know, so, it is operated by corporate power. The pincers of the state close on our lives, but the people manipulating those indefectors are in fact a sort of Deakyanesque captains of consciousness of global corporate power. It seems that you have to take that into account when you sort of robustly singing the athem of statism. VOTING RB: There is a very specific problem in American because fifty percent of the population don't vote, it has to do with the very bizarre constitution that you have that, as you can read in the Federalist papers, was designed to obstruct popular will. Hamilton makes it absolutely clear if you read what he says about it. So it is partly due to the American constitution, so you need constitution reform, the end of the division between legislator and executive , proportionate representation, there is rather a number of measures, and even on a more profound level since Roosevelt there has not been a political project in America wich is of a very consciously articulated social democratic value. MD: That is a distant geographically removed, I think academically aloof analysis of Why Americans aren't voting. If you descend to the ragtag and bobtail and ask them why they don't vote they don't say: We don't vote because we think the democratic project has been brought to its knees by too much seperation between legislative and executive branches. They say : I don't vote because I feel it doesn't make a difference! I feel that there is a profound disjunct, a disconnect, a rupture, a bifurcation between this impotent, again, sob for the masses that I'm adoop a sort of a monkey on a unicycle performance kind of trained act that I play into the illusion of democratic participation when I doodively margin to the polling booth throw the lever and think that that has a profound impact when in fact that impact has largely been subverted by the real powers who have kind of woven their tendrils inside the beltway to the point where they have fenced out real democratic participation. It seems to me that the profilactics alternatives pragmatics progressive solutions you propose don't address the real gut-level visceral embodied quotidian reasons that Americans en masse are saying Don't Vote! They don't vote because it does not make a difference. To me it's a no-brainer that it doesn't make a difference because corporate power has unplugged participatory democracy by vast amounts of liquid capital with which they flooded the halls of representative legislation. If you're going to make the case for the nation state you've got to look who at the end of th ecentury in terminal culture is evermore ventriloquising th enation state My position, my half-hearted animic endorsement of the nation state has entirely to do, following that analysis with the notion that is the last threadbear shopworn, flimsy profilactic evermore rickety firewall between us and the raging fireball of totally unconstraint corporate power that will run rough-shot over individual liberty. -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo {AT} is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} is.in-berlin.de 79.0 <nettime> interview with Keiko Suzuki Josephine Bosma nettime-l@desk.nl Sat, 29 Nov 1997 11:49:05 +0100 (MET) Keiko Suzuki has appeared in the net.art picture quite recently, though she has been around ever since last year, when she appeared for the first time on a net.art hosts website. She is the hostess and moderator of 7-11, the mailinglist for net.art and related bussiness. Her role there has caused quite some upheaval, as her identity is under constant 'attack' and subdued to many hijackings. > - Where are you from I am from small industrial town in the south of Japan. My family owned some business so I could travel. > - Since when are you an artist? I have been an artist for six years. > - Did you show your work in any offline galleries or spaces ever? I have done a few things, but art spaces are very boring and europe is not better that Japan. This East as you call it is just fine for me. I tried speaking to Andreas Broekmann about it, but he was too busy. > - Did you visit Documenta and Hybrid Workspace? Yes, just before it got into full swing. I didn't understand why would people meet and then work instead of play or enjoy their get-together in other ways. I like ice cream very much for instance and have had lots of it in that town. (Hope you don't think I am fat now) > - If yes, what did you think of it Its always worth remembering that form dominate content. So it lost due to its documenta context. Vuk did a good comment with his pirate Dx website; it'll be on a cd in poland maybe. Did you know this ? > - and why didn't you introduce yourself there? I chatted to some people, but I don't feel so important to introduce myself formally. Like I told you, I prefere other places for introducing to people. I met a strange man called Geert with a distinctive laugh. He probably won't remember me though, He was more interested in an Australian woman. > - Why this secrecy about your identity? I don't think there is secrecy, probably more confusion. My name is very common in Japan and also on The Net. I have many home pages you know. It is funny some people say that they are getting keiko identification threats like if they were me. Sure, some friends like to warm this up: Vuk was wearing Keiko nametag in Dessau for instance. > - How did you end up working with Ljudmila? I went to Ars Electronica 2 years ago, which I found very boring, where I bumped into the Ljudmila crew. They somehow seemed to prefer mensch uber machinen; i liked the red hair guy Luka. (keep your hands off him Natalie Jj) > - Why do you prefer Ljudmila over other institutions? I have attended many residency programmes, but they are mostly boring with the exception of Ljudmila. Ljudmila have the best working and playing environment and they don't call it residency. They see it as art itself, which suits me. > - Is net.art your prime working ground, or do you do other things as well ? My image fits well with net.art. I do do other things, but people choose to ignor them: curators/ theorists/ audience have their own agendas. Its quite nice to have hidden areas of myself. Do you think a net.art audience would like non-net.art. I doubt cause they want this and only this and they think they're fast if net.art is fast. > - How would you describe net.art? There has been quite some > discussion about it, as you may know... It is many things to many people. I like the immediacy and transient nature of it, plus nobody controls my distribution. I think I know the discussion from the nettime context and it seamed too dangerous to me. There were so many rough corners in people's words; I was quiet then. I only spoke to people in voice, lot of it is in what they then posted. > - what is the ultimate, most interesting aspect of net.art for you? I would like to turn all baggage into software. Net.art offers the techniques and institutional structures to do this. Some day you will get mail about it. > - You seduce innocent men via a website and make them ridiculous by >showing their mail to you on the 7-11 mailinglist. What is the role >of sex in your work? As in real life, sex is a big motivator on The Net, so I often use it as incentive or a disguise, but I sometimes consider sexuality itself. Concerning the men made ridiculous, they moslty make themselves foolish. I don't find comments like 'Hey babe, I want to fuck you!' very imaginative and therefore not sexy. Sometimes there are some subtle messages sent though, which I enjoy alot. So the list is good for sexylife.org anyway. > - As a female Asian artist, did you ever encounter problems on >your travels or in working situations? (discrimination, sexism, >racism) I ask this because Shu Lea Chang was talking about this >not so long ago, after she had been to Documenta. Fortunately, I fit often into the japanese female cyber punk role: You can imagine me well in a shiny short dress and large silver trainers, with the latest pocket technology. Nobody harasses that, everybody just loves you and I don't mind. > - You seem to have been accepted very easily in the circle of >net.artists and even are called the host of 7-11. How did you >manage to enter this slightly inbred/closed group so easily? I am not sure why. I met these people a few years ago and we got along well. I sometimes suspect that I am useful for them but they are useful to me also. Also they're the nicest crowd around; did you meet alexei or jodi ? They do things and get famous, while others only get famous. > - Do you see any difference in art on the net from the States >and from Europe? Is there a difference between these and art >on the net from Japan? There's no good net.art in states for me, or from japan: there's just good or bad. Although, I like very much this homework in california; it's maybe as sexy as californian ideology. Do you know what I mean ? > - What are your plans for next year? Will you reveal yourself to > a larger audience on conferences or festivals for instance? Maybe a little, but my agent always reminds me that over exposure is death for an artist. I will do work though and go festivals: that's for sure. > - Is there anything you would like to add to this interview, > something I did not ask you about? Its not true that I have had an affair with heath: I do like him, but nothing else. -urls- http://www.ljudmila.org/7-11 http://www.irational.org/pleasur/fucking.html http://www.nagoya-seiryo-chs.nishi.nagoya.jp/kids/8212/H16.HTM * --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 80.0 nettime: Civilizing Cyberspace/Interview with Steven E. Miller Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 5 Mar 1997 09:53:49 +0100 (MET) Civilizing Cyberspace An Interview with Steven E. Miller by Geert Lovink Steven Miller's 'Civilizing Cyberspace' looks like an official manual for net politics, published by big daddy Addison-Wesley. It covers all non-technical aspects, like democracy and free speech, online ethics, universal service, privacy and encryption, creating communities, intellectual property and citizen action. It is written for a broad audience - no academic obscurities here. Each section is illustrated by a interview with leading figures in the field. The book centers around the relationship between the government's agenda, the marketplace and the interest of the industries and the public interest. The state, capital and the public all have their own visions on the 'domestication' of cyber space (that's how I read the title at first). An Internet culture needs to be established, it's wild aspects have to be tamed. But Miller is no sociologist, rather a pragmatic activist, who sees that there is an urgent need to act. No gambling here with problematic notions like 'civilization' or 'the public'. It's time for positive models and getting our hands dirty. Needless to say that this book only deals with the situation in the USA. However, it has a different agenda than the techno-utopian cyber visionaries that most Europeans associate with USA publications such as Wired. Steven Miller is currently on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) which researches and presents a public interest perspective on the societal impacts and implications of computer technology. Organizations like these are still widely unknown throughout Europe, which is a good reason to push for broad Euro-American dialogue and direct contacts beyond the Wired circle. The interview was conducted in Munich, during the 'Internet & Politics' conference, on February 19, 1997. GL: How did your analysis of the net evolve after you finished your book in November 1995, and what have you been doing ever since? SM: The basic political analysis that I laid out in the book still holds. However, things change so quickly in this field that I'd like to update whole chapters to deal with the Telecommunications Reform Act, corporate mergers and some of the new technologies. I am still living in the tension between the humanistically possible and the terrifyingly probable. I still find too many people falling into the techno utopian fantasy that the technology itself will automatically make things happen for the good. But there is nothing inherent with the Internet that automatically leads to democracy. The Chinese are finding ways to harness the Internet by turning the entire nation into a closed system, an Intranet. Giving people online access may turn out to be a boobytrap for the Chinese government, but it is going to take a while. So the key is not trusting that the technology will give us the gift of a positive future, but to think about a political strategy detailing how to build organizations that begin to embody the positive future we want. After spending two years living with the abstractions in the book, I felt a real need to get very concrete, particularly about universal service. How do we spread access, training and meaningful purpose, outside of the elite colleges and homes of the rich? I picked up on an idea that came out of California, from a guy named John Gage, called NetDay. I started an organization in Massachusetts, called MassNetworks, getting businesses to support volunteers who work with schools to build networks. My interest in focusing on schools partly comes from my belief that the consumerist model of a computer in very household will never happen. You've got to worth through mass organizations, local institutions, churches, girls and boys clubs, soccer teams or schools. We worked with 400 schools in October 1996. Across our state, over 5000 volunteers came to the schools to help pull wires and set up computer sys tems. To get 5 computers in every class room, just in Massachusetts, could cost nearly a billion dollars. I don't see it happening, but I want at least make sure that kids whose families can't afford computers at home will at least have some access at school. We worked with the trade unions -- the Electrical Workers Union pulled 30 miles of wires for schools in the inner-city of Boston, including some very low income areas. We created a partnership with 3COM, SUN, Lotus and IBM, another with the Bank of Boston. We got the teachers involved -- if they don't feel ownership of the whole effort they will say 'Thanks' and never use it. Part of our goal was to help schools reconnect to their tax payers, to their community. We have to rebuild public trust in our public institutio ns. The conservatives have been successful in convincing people that the government can't do anything well and the only solution is to rid of the government. It's true that the public sector does lot of things wrong, but it is one of the few collective tools we have available. If we give up on it, we are all left as individual consumers. As a citizen I want to work through collective institutions, because only in that manner do I have a chance of helpi ng shape the economy and the marketplace in ways that serve all of us for the good. GL: In 'Civilizing Cyberspace' you refer frequently to the National Infor mation Infrastructure (NII), Al Gore's plan from 1992. What happened with those plans? Have they been implemented or did they just disappear? SM: In a certain way it is still there. Gore originally spoke about an updated Internet, which he called the NREN, the National Research and Education Network. However, as the election of 1992 came closer, his vision became more and more grandiose. So from a small academic network he started talking about a transformative technology that would be a motor for economic development. At some point it started to include television and telephone and cable television and wireless. It was to be a public infrastructure: just as the highways were build by the government, the information highway would be build by the government. However, soon after Clinton and Gore got elected, they started calling it the National Information Infrastructure. But within months, as their political weakness became more apparent, they ran out of political steam. Essentially, the Republicans hijacked the vision and started pushing the ir argument about privatization and the market as the savior of everything. The vision of the NII, which I call cyberspace, turned out to be a series of strategies about unleashing the private sector. But what is a national infrastructure in that, besides a bunch of subsidies and deregulatory laws? Ironically, they've now turned back to the original idea and appropriated funding to build that original, high speed education network, six or eight different universities that are connecting. The current idea is to build the NREN for the academic community, but as soon as the technology is shown to work they will spin it off into the private sector. GL: There is this notion of the public sphere within cyberspace as a third space, in-between state owned networks on the one side and commercial zones on the other. One could think of community networks, public terminals, bringing libraries on-line, free content and a reincarnation of public broadcasting. How is the current debate in the US about this idea of the public? SM: The problem in the US is that on the national government level there really isn't much discussion anymore about public space. While the rhetoric proclaims boundless benefits for everyone, the actual policy is simply 'let the market go'. But in Europe you do have a chance to have the public sector either build or powerfully shape the infrastructure. Part of what you miss in Europe is the entrepreneurial part of the market. The US has lot of entrepreneurialism but no solid public core. What we both have to come to is a meeting ground. The role for the public sector is to shape the market so that the transmission system, the wires and the wireless, is solid and broadband, accessible and affordable for all. Where you want to have open competition is in the equipment and the switching protocols you use at either end. The public sector should also subsidize and pay for noncommercial content. You can't leave the content sector up the private sector, because all they will give you is commercial manipulation. At the same time you can't leave it up to the state, because all that will give you is boring burea ucracy and safe conservatism. You need to figure out a funding mechanism, either through the tax system or through the commercial system, that diverts a steady revenue stream into independent community content creation. We cannot relate to this as individual consumerism, you need community organizations. So the challenge for all of us how to create a revenue flow that creates non-commercial content. Creating a positive future is going to require a combination of different strategies, a hybrid. It is not private sector, it is not public sector, not community networks. We are going to have our hands very dirty and start struggling. Because experience has already shown that any pure method fails. GL: The inherent, pragmatic and radical net criticism we are trying develop deals with the ideological premises within the software and tries to understand the underlying political and cultural patterns. Could you tell us something about net criticism in the US from your point of view? SM: There is a fine line you have to walk. In the US, net idealism is the dominant flavor. 'Let the market go and it will bring us the future. And the future will be wonderful.' When you critique that, you got to be careful not to let yourself become associated with the people saying that technology is all bad. What I try to do is imbed my criticism in positive formulations, how it can be a tool for community building, small scale economic development, democratic movements. It is not enough to say that Wired magazine is wrong. We should not cut ourselves off from the future. There are many people who critique without rejecting the possibilities the net culture brings. Think of Gary Chapman, who used to work for the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and now works with the 21st Century Project out of Austin, Texas. Or a guy named Dick Sclove, who works for the Loka Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. They both talk about democratizing the technology development process. Phil Agree, working out of the University of California at San Diego, has some of the most incisive critiques of how the conservative movement is using telecommunication as a tool for public relation and building a cult ural movement. I think we have to do the same. There isn't a magazine set up to serve that and maybe there should be. GL: We found out that a net critique should also come with some ingredients for a political economy of the telecom business. Did you have the same experience? SM: There are some many layers to the business. One layer is about the organization of production and we tend to forget this one, how giant corporations use computer networks to rationalize and restructure their productive methodology internally, so that they can have a greater span of control for their top managers, so that they can get rid of the middle layer of managers and push decision making down, without letting go of control . Or how they can transform their production processes, with parts in Malaysia, Japan, Brazil or the UK. It is also a mechanism of coordination between corporations. EDI -- Elect ronic Data Interchange -- where they order and pay and talk to each other about buying and selling electronically. This is a driving force behind the industry. Ignoring this is a myopic short sightedness of the Internet community. Instead, we are entranced by another layer. Telecommunications is also about culture. It is a culture industry, with movie stars. It's sexy and we like that. If we are doing a political economy of the culture industry we have to understand that it is not a product in the usual sense. It is about people's understanding of the world: what is real and what is desirable, what is possible and what is important. Similarly, telecommunications is about human communication and sociability. Who do we talk to, how often, about what. The technology impacts this, too. There is something strange about the nature of information. You don't use it up. If I have an idea, you can have the same idea, but if I have a hamburger, you can't eat it also. How do you get unique profit out of the same information -- by creating barriers to usage through intellectual property. But at the same time there is what has been called the law of increasing returns. In heavy industry, profit margins of pioneering firm s tend to drop over time as other firms develop their own technological expertise. In the information economy, the people who first establish a powerful and secure niche continue to enjoy high and growing competitiv e advantage. Those who are ahead become further ahead and their profit margins increase. This has profound implications for the international impact of the inform ation economy and how Africa, South America and Asia are going to fit in. The good news is that this field is evolving so fast that no one is quite sure how to put together a winning strategy that trumps everyone else. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted on projects that are abandoned. The obvious one is the Microsoft Network, where they spent a lot of money and threw it all out. AT&T set up a whole network system, it's dead. And the company that bought it has just closed it. Business leaders aren't sure what to do, but they are scared to be left out. They are investing in everything that comes along. One might work and if they are not there first, they are lost. I think that the underlying driver is the desire to create vertically and horizontally integrated marketing machine. Vertically, the idea is for one company to own the entire profit chain from idea to production, from distribution to sale, and even the reception of the product by the consumer. A model for that would be the cable television industry. The cable company controls the pipe to your house and because of this monopoly they have been able to extend their power back into the creating of content. So now they own the channels that they then carry. They also own the box that goes on your TV so that you can't get a signal from any place else. That's vertical control, from creation to reception. There are two types of horizontal integration: one is within a particular medium. You have the cable giant TCI buying out dozens of dozens of othe r cable companies. This means that anyone who wants to have access to America has to go to them. Until recent, people thought that the cable industry would be so desperate for content that they would pay money to content providers of every type. Diversity would reign. What happened is the exact opposite, because the cable firms still control the gateway into the home, content producers now have to pay them for the privilege of being carried. The second horizontal integration would be the merging of different indus tries, where you have cable buying out telephone companies, or TV networks buying out movi e studios. The diving force is to gather together all various methods of transmitting images to the consumer. GL: We are now thinking how an update of the majordomo software for mailing lists should look like. A combination perhaps of the web with elements of the BBS in order to make threads and more complex forms of discussion visible. How does this compare with recent developments in the 'free' software branch in the US? SM: There is not a long story to tell. Netscape and Internet Explorer have dominated people's visualization of what the web is. The people who tried to come up with alternatives have been marginalized. Allen Shaw from MIT, who works at the AI-lab, has been working with low income communit ies in the housing projects, trying to build an interface that allows women on welfare to run a local server. There is a group called TERC in Cambridge (Massachusetts) that has been putting together it's own version of interfaces that is mostly for school use. But I have not seen too many alternative approaches reach the mass market. This defeat has to do with our success. When the net started it was a very small community. Hackers knew how to produce an interface for that community and it evolved and it grew. But now we want to expand to have non-hacker communitie s be part of the discussion. Most the hackers have been seduced by all the money to be made by going into business. But even the ones who want to do good... how do we support them and integrate them into the new communities? You can't come up with an interface just out of your mind. An interface is a social interaction. It is not a gift, it is a joint creaton. Steven E. Miller, Exec. Dir., Mass NetDay: netday {AT} meol.mass.edu http://massnetworks.org Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace, Policy, Power and the Infromation Superhighway, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley, New York, 1996. ISBN 0-201-84760-4 81.0 <nettime> Interview with Liza Jevbr Tilman Baumgaertel nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 11 Feb 2000 22:07:03 +0100 in german {AT} : http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/3483/1.html A lot of effort to say nothing... Interview with Lisa Jevbrett Tilman Baumgärtel Only very net art piece deal with and questions the technical infrastructure of the internet as radical as "1:1" (http://cadre.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/c5/onetoone/) by Lisa Jevbrett (http://cadre.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/). "1:1" is not webart, not a clever art homepage, not surface design. The piece is accessible over a web interface, but that is just to access the piece that is about the infrastructure of the decentral net work, with the IP Numbers and the servers. "1:1" is kind of a net critique in praxi, because it is not just a critical reflection of the internet form the outside, but actually enters the net in order to understand it "from the inside out". A net art pices that deals with I.P. Adress - sounds liek an academic, inaccessible work. But actually "1:1! is easy to understand, once you know what an IP number is. "1:1" is not the first piece by Lisa Jevbrett, that is less interested with the surface of the internet, but rather what's behind it. The swede, that teaches at the CADRE Institute (http://cadre.sjsu.edu/) at the San Jose State University and is part of the "c5"-collektive (http://www.c5corp.com), tackeled rather structures than "content in all of her projects (http://www.c5corp.com/personnel/projects.shtml#lisa): her "Stillman Projekt" (http://www.walkerart.org/stillmanIndex.html), that was comissioned by the Walker Institute of the Arts in Minneapolis, made the "cata traces" visible, that ever surfer left on the homepage of the museum, her "Non-Site"-gallery (http://cadre.sjsu.edu/non-site/) hosts error message form the server of the CADRE Instituts. In the works of Lisa Jevbrett, the self-referentiality of net art is taken to the extreme, which paradoxically gives them a added relevance. "1:1" is exclusively about the medium of net art, the internet, but it is not l'art pour l'art; it is an art work and a tool for research at the same time. Tilman Baumgaertel: Could you briefly explain how your piece "1:1" works? Technically and conceptually? How did you come up with the idea? Lisa Jevbrett: The project consists of a constantly growing database of IP addresses and five interfaces to the database. The IP addresses in the database are addresses to web servers. The project uses softbots to find out whether an IP address corresponds to a web server or not (most IP addresses don't), if it does, it stores the address in the database along with information about whether the server allowed access or not. All possible IP addresses will be searched eventually to include all existing web servers in the database. The interfaces provide five different ways of accessing the web through the database. The interfaces also serve as visualizations of the web. Two of the interfaces link to all IP addresses in the database from one image map, one provides random access to the database/the web and two allow the user to experience the IP space as an hierarchical structure. ?: A pretty idiosyncratic concept. How did you come up with the idea? Jevbrett: We (C5) were developing the project "16 Sessions" for The Walker Art Center that needed a way of accessing sites on the web in a numerical manner in order to map data of physical interactions onto networked space. I started to generate a database of IP addresses to use in that process and realized that there was something humorous and poetic with one web page aiming to link to all servers on the web. It is humorous in its hubris and how it is not acknowledging the web as a hypertextual space. A very time consuming project - it will obviously never be completed since there are new servers added to the web every second - that (on the surface) doesn't care about the metaphors, the understanding and the identified issues of the web, such as information overload, categorization, identity etc. A lot of effort to say "nothing". And in the same time I saw it as poetic because of its this hubris, like a medieval map maker trying to fathom an unexplored continent, or a renaissance astronomer aiming to clearly describe our existence. The enormous amount of information involved could give the idea a sublime - a la Kant - quality. ?: Do you see "1:1" more a technical research project or as an art work? Jevbrett: I see it as an artwork that examines the implications of a technical structure and by doing that it is somewhat a technical research project as well. To me it is interesting as art because of how it positions itself as both art and research. ?: How much time did you spend on programming the piece? Did you have any professional programmer working on it with you? Jevbrett: I spend a lot of time on programming. Maybe I would be faster if I actually knew programming from the ground up. I started working on the project in January, but I didn't get to spend all my time on it until this Summer. I love coding and my ideas are developed in the process, so it is very valuable for me to do it myself. ?: A lot of your work seems to focus on the technical infrastructure of the internet rather then on the design of sites or surfaces. Why? Jevbrett: As an artist I have always been more interested in underlying structures and relationships than personal expression or experience. The internet is an environment that makes the non-existence of a distinction between structure and content obvious. Following the thoughts of Pierre Levy I don't think it is possible to do interesting work by focusing on "content" in this environment. I think "The Stillman Project" and "1:1" are focusing on quite different types of structures, however. Stillman is concerned with conceptual structures by making explicit the traces left by peoples navigation through a web site. It is clearly working with the metaphors and issues of the web that we have defined as valid or important. "1:1" does not care about how anyone perceives the structure or the information - except for one interface: "petri" which borrows a Stillman strategy. ?: I guess to some extent you can't foresee how a project like "1:1" develops. Were you surprised by the results you got, for example the many "invisible" servers, that consist of nothing but cryptic messages or password slots? Jevbrett: Yes, I was very surprised. That was one of the reasons for why it turned into a project. When I was first harvesting IP addresses for the "16 sessions" project I saw it as a problem that the database would consist of mostly inaccessible or undeveloped sites and was considering the elimination of those sites from the database. Then I realized that this was a new picture of the web and as such very interesting. ?: I understand that your piece was shown in an exhibition. How did you show it in "real space"? Jevbrett: It is difficult to display net art in a gallery because the audience might not even be familiar with what a web browser is. They don't "find" the piece because all they see is "computer". While using the gallery to make the project something more than a net art piece could be interesting, we at c5 decided to use the space to create easy and clear access to the project. I wanted to create an inviting setup that would make people feel at home sitting down for a long time, just clicking around. We had five sgi's stacked in the middle of a big round table painted in a benign baby blue color. Around the table were five monitors and keyboards each displaying one of the interfaces. By using one computer for each interface we were hoping to make the project less confusing in terms of navigation. Each computer allowed for one kind of navigation: accessing the web through the interface, it did not allow the user to navigate between the interfaces. ?: One way to look at the piece is not to focus on the IP idea, but rather consider the workings of the softbot as kind of a chance operation to generate an image. Can you talk a little bit about your "design choices" for the interfaces? Jevbrett: Design decisions are difficult and uninteresting to me unless they have a conceptual basis. I admire people who can make things look cool, I know it demands a certain sensibility which I probably don't have, but I don't think "designing" is an interesting art strategy. I have two main ways of determining look, either I make things that assume the aesthetics of something known by simulating the functionality and feeling of it, the interface "Hierarchical" is a good example of that - it is aiming to look like "raw" directory navigation. Or I come up with an idea for a system that produces a visual output and I go with it if the output surprises me, that's how the interface "Every" was made. ?: Interestingly the same time you came out with your piece, there were a number of studys of the "size" of the internet, and some of them focused on the number of servers. So apprently there is a need to "map" cyberspace, yet all the maps that are there (including yours) prove that "the map is not the territory". Would you say that "1:1" is about the futility of this kind of "cybergeography"? Jevbratt: Just as a painting always says something about all other paintings, any Internet mapping says something about all other Internet mappings. "1:1" certainly plays with the attempts to contain the web. The difference between "1:1" and the mapping efforts you are talking about is that "1:1" provides ways to experience the web while the other ones are "only" visualizations of the web. ................... I think, and then I sink into the paper like I was ink. Eric B. & Raakim: Paid in full Dr. Tilman Baumgaertel, email: tilman {AT} thing.de MY HOMEPAGE HAS MOVED!!! http://www.thing.de/tilman Current Activities: http://www.mikro.org/rohrpost/ http://www.BerlinOnline.de/aktuelles/berliner_zeitung/multimedia/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 82.0 <nettime> Interview with Interview with 0100101110101101.ORG Tilman Baumgaertel nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 09 Dec 1999 17:00:31 +0100 Interview with 0100101110101101.ORG (Authorized, final version? german version at: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/5572/1.html We hope that somebody is going to recuperate us! Interview with 0100101110101101.ORG ?: You got known in the net scene, because you made a complete copy of the art site Hell.com, and put it on your site. Tell me what you did exactly... 0100101110101101.ORG: We are subscribed to the net.art list „Rhizome“. There we heard that they would open a door to Hell.com for 48 hours, for a show called „surface“. It was only for Rhizome subscribers, and you needed a password to look at it. We had never seen Hell.com, but we had heard about it, and we knew that it was the biggest museum of net.art. So, during these 48 hours of opening, we downloaded all the stuff of their site. This was not as simple as it seems, it took us 26 hours. Then we put it on our website and sent an e-mail with just the URL repeated hundreds of times to several mailing lists and newspapers. ?: Did you get a reaction from Hell.com? 0100101110101101.ORG. Yes, only two hours later, the people of Hell.com send us, and to the company that is hosting our site in Canada, an e-mail, saying that we were in copyright violation of all the artists and Hell.com itself, and that we had to take down the site immediately. They charged us with international law of copyright... whatever. We didn’t do anything, we left it there, and it is still there. Everybody was talking about this action for weeks, so it created a public debate that was a publicity stunt for us and, of course, for them too. We had a huge amount of visits from all the people who wanted to see Hell.com, but couldn’t. ?: Then again, if you have closed site, you probably don’t want that much publicity. I am not so sure how these international laws, that you mentioned, could be executed, by the way. They could probably get your provider to throw you out, but I think you are taking advantage of the fact that you are dealing with some American artists, who can’t afford to hire a bunch of lawyers to sue you in Europe. If you would have done the same thing with the site of CNN, they would have sued your ass of in ten minutes, and you would have taken the site down in no time... 0100101110101101.ORG: You can always be more radical than you are. But that for sure would be interpreted as an explicit political action, as an assault against something. But we are not against anything. We are not some kind of anarchists, that want to bring down web art. We just work with what we find and try to transmit and propagate our ideas. The thing with Hell.com now doesn’t interest us anymore. We had only two days, and when we saw it in the end it was so ugly, that we were very upset. If we would have known that it was so bad, we wouldn’t have copied it! It’s just a design exhibition. There is no idea behind it, no content. I rather agree with Duchamp’s idea of non-retinal art. We present our work without computers, if yesterday there was no projector to show the website, it wouldn’t be a problem, because our work is not supposed to be aesthetic but ethic, based on contents. ?: So what was the idea behind taking this site? To access a formerly closed system, that was open only to a self-proclaimed elite, and make it accessible to everybody? 0100101110101101.ORG: Yes, first of all was the feeling that Hell.com was exactly the opposite of what we think that the web could and should be, but this is not really our own idea. That’s what every hacker do. The difference between us and hackers (in the popular and „misunderstood“ meaning of the word) is that we try to show that our kind of activism is congenital to cyberspace, you don’t have to be a „hacker“, because we have entered the „infoware“ age. Hardware and software ages are finished, now you don’t have to be an hacker anymore, you’ve got enough tools to transmit your ideas without „technical abilities“. ?: So why this fixation on art? Why not do the same operation with the website of CNN, for example? 0100101110101101.ORG: If you take two normal objects, like these chairs for example, and put them together, you create art. If you take two paintings of these chairs and put them together, it’s something else, call it meta-art, anti-art or activism. It’s the same on the net. What is interesting to us is not the creation of art, but the discussion and subversion of art. We should call it „artivism“? ?: So would you agree, that what you are doing is only of interest, or only makes sense at all, because you are doing it within the art system? 0100101110101101.ORG: If you do what we do with a work of art, the operation has a value in itself. If you work with contents that are not art, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the operation from the content. If you steal the CNN site, you are acting against CNN. There are many people doing this kind of hacktivism, think of groups like RTMark and Mongrel, and they are doing great things. But we are not interested in doing this kind of hacktivism. We work on other contradictions like originality and reproduction, authorship and network, copyright and plagiarism. You don’t have to be explicitly political to do something political. ?: So again, you do agree that these acts of recontextualization make only sense as an art practise? 0100101110101101.ORG: Yes. In the beginning it was important for us to make these ideas clear, because these are the presupposition of our way of thinking. Now we can change directions and work with other stuff. The New York Times said it was against the commercialisation of net.art, but that wasn’t our point at all. ?: But the only pieces of yours that got talked about were your copies of Hell.com and Art.Teleportacia by Olia Lialina, and they both had something to do with commercialisation of net art. 0100101110101101.ORG: When we copied Hell.com it wasn’t a pay-per-view site yet, it was just copyrighted and password protected. Anyway before Hell.com and after Art.Teleportacia we did a lot of clones of other people’s sites, we used to do „hybrids“ of the pages by other net.artists that had nothing to do with „commercialisation“. ?: How is this different from, for example, Duchamp taking a picture of the Mona Lisa and drawing a moustache on it? And all the other acts of appropriation and re-appropriation, that went on all through the 20. century, and especially in the 80’s and 90’s - with artists such as Sherri Levine, for example? 0100101110101101.ORG: That is a good question. On the web you can do these kind of actions very freely, without destroying the original, because there is no original; it’s not that we care that much about „originals“, not at all - in fact our off-line works were against „originals“ - but the paradigms of the „real world“ are so rooted that you will never change anything, you’ll always be the umpteenth anti-artist. On the contrary, on the net, you feel that you can change something, you have the power of influence. This discussion on originality hasn’t meaning any longer in the net, Duchamp did it only with reproductions of works of art, we do it with the works themselves since the copy in the net is exactly the same as the original. Everybody can use the data on the net. When we clone Jodi, we don’t destroy their work, we re-use it. ?: Did they ever complain to you? 0100101110101101.ORG: No. They must be upset, because we deconstruct their site. In Jodi’s site, for example, there is an index, but it’s hidden, so it is very hard to navigate the site, and you get lost all the time just clicking and clicking. We just took the index and put it on the opening page, so that you can see exactly where the different parts and sections are. When you copy a site you learn a lot of things about its authors. You see what the hierarchical and chronological order of the site is. It is very interesting. ?: So are you saying that you are basically teaching yourself how to be net artists by copying other people’s sites? 0100101110101101.ORG: No, we use them interactively. We don’t think that clicking on a website is interaction. That is just doing what you are supposed to do. It’s not the work of art being „interactive“, it’s the beholder that can use it interactively. Interaction is when you use something in a way that has not been predicted by its author. ?: But that is in the nature of the web anyway. Anybody can look at the source code of a website, and see how it has been done, and they don’t need some smart artist to do it for them... 0100101110101101.ORG: We didn’t invent anything, we only made it explicit. Of course, we don’t claim any kind of copyright for our way of doing. Anybody can download whole sites. You just need some software, and you don’t have to be worried about copyright infringements. Our point is that there is a different way of behaving towards the work. You can choose your attitude, or what you want to do with the piece. You are not obliged to just look at it. You have the tools to do something else. Cloning is just one of the things you can do with these works. You can modify them, you can add things, you can put them in a different order, you can even destroy them, you can do anything you want. We would like to see some more of this kind of interaction on the net. Because the way net.art is developing now is really the same direction as the normal art scene. You have artists with names and surnames, biographies and works, and they are geniuses, and that’s the surplus value of what they do. ?: As far as I know, no net artist has called him- or herself a genius so far... 0100101110101101.ORG: But in thirty years they will be. Jodi will be called the Leonardo da Vinci of net.art and Antiorp will be the Van Gogh and Vuk the Warhol... Nobody thinks of himself as a genius. Or maybe, in thirty years, if they hear it over and over again, they start to think: „Well maybe I am a genius for real!“. The point is that on the net, as well as in the real world, there is not „geniuses“, inspired by the muse, there is only a huge, endless exchange of information and influences. The „knowledge“ is only a big plagiarism. Even in the „real world“ there are a lot of people doing interesting things about these topics, like Piero Cannata on Michelangelo and Pollock, like Aleksander Brener, who created a new painting over the Malevich’s one... ?: ...and took away the possibility for people to look at Malevich’ „Black Square“... 0100101110101101.ORG: Well, they can look at it in catalogues. ?: Brener is considered to be this Anti-Christ of contemporary art now, the scary anti-artist. Where do you place yourself? 0100101110101101.ORG: We don’t consider ourselves „artists“ but „beholders“. We are not against art, we are not anti-artists. We have seen what happened to Dada or Surrealism and all the other historical avant-garde, it doesn’t matter if you call yourself an artist or an anti-artist, the only thing we care about are „contents“. ?: So you might as well stop doing what you are doing, because it will be recuperated anyway.... 0100101110101101.ORG: This obsession of „being recuperated“ is just a Situationists paranoia. If nobody gives a shit about what you do is not necessarily because you are so radical, but more probably because you don’t have anything to say. Anyway if you meant „recuperate“ as „becoming rich“, we hope that somebody is going to recuperate us! ................... I think, and then I sink into the paper like I was ink. Eric B. & Raakim: Paid in full Dr. Tilman Baumgaertel, Hornstr. 3, 10963 Berlin, Germany Tel./Fax. +49(0)30-2170962, email: tilman {AT} thing.de MY HOMEPAGE HAS MOVED!!! http://www.thing.de/tilman # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 83.0 [Nettime-bold] shulgin_bookchin interview - universal pag Steve Dietz nettime-bold@nettime.org Tue, 7 Mar 2000 03:00:13 -0600 email interview between Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin, January 2000 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Universal Page [http://universalpage.org] is open for public viewing on the occasion of the Walker Art Center exhibition "Art Entertainment Network/Let's Entertain". Funded by the Jerome Foundation and the Walker Art Center, the project was first envisioned and is now being orchestrated by Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin. Both are artists, theorists of the Internet and professors of contemporary art and new media. Bookchin is an American based in Los Angeles, in the United States of America and Shulgin is a Moscow based Russian Artist. Programming: Alexander Nikolaev, Fund of Perspective Research, Moscow. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Alexei Shulgin: Dear Natalie, I know your background (as mine) was photography. How come you ended up in virtual space? Natalie Bookchin: Most of my education in photography began after getting a job at a university as a professor of photography. I had already moved away from photography a number of years before and was working with installations using a variety of different media and materials, including embroidery, video, paper clips, and CD-ROM. But universities, like other institutions, lag behind individuals. Universities have bureaucracies, budgets, and students who are paying money and often expecting a particular product. As the providers, we often perpetuate this exchange in order to survive economically, and squeeze ourselves into the institutions' limited slots, trying to fit within or stretch the boundaries in which we are enclosed. My move to virtual space was also initially stimulated by economics. I was asked to teach a large lecture class called "Introduction to Computing in the Arts" (http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~bookchin/syllabus.html)--and agreed to do it in part because I needed health insurance . . . another long story. This class became my introduction to "computing in the arts." I spent the summer of 1997 online researching and preparing for this class and began running into work and activities of some artists that blew my mind. I didn't know anything about these people, but it turns out that one of them was Alexei Shulgin and another was Heath Bunting. Ultimately, I do not see my move and commitment to virtual space as arbitrary. As a tool, I find the computer to be extremely useful and exciting. As a means of communication, the Internet is more powerful than any other mediated tool that I have come across -- it allows for ongoing, lengthy, and complex communication with fairly large audiences, and also allows for interventionist and disruptive new types of social and cultural activities for limited amounts of money and technical expertise. In the past I was rather unfaithful to media. I was always suspicious of disciplines and over-specialization. Now, for the first time, I have found myself remaining more or less "faithful" to a medium. This is not to say that I will not and do not work in other ways, and with other tools, but I do believe that the Internet and the computer are the most important media of our times. The computer obviously isn't even a medium in the way that we used to think about the term. Even this needs to be redefined. It is a "meta-medium": a simulation machine, and in this way very hard to pin down. I think that because the computer and the net are reshaping most aspects of our lives and redefining what it means to be alive today, it is crucial for artists and others to work in this space, to use it in unexpected and unintended ways, to question and work against the way that it limits our lives as well as to investigate ways that it might be used to "enable" our lives. These technologies have a strange, complicated, and quite ugly history that continues in all its ugliness to this day. In part, because of this curious and problematic history -- although I, unlike others, would not want all artists and intellectuals to abandon their pens and paintbrushes and race to the keyboard -- this is where I am committed to be. AS: What do you mean here? NB: The ugly history of the computer, as we know, includes its militaristic origins and continued uses. Also, given the huge costs of technological development and now the great potential (and success for some) at achieving enormous profits, this technology more often than not falls into the wrong hands and leads to its consistent and rather successful usage for social and economic control. Also, there is the problem of the Internet in particular being seen as a viable substitute for real (physical) experience and human contact. And finally, the computer can make real life appear as an abstraction. The most dangerous and extreme example of this is the way that war and genocide are presented as abstractions and simulations and are so easily removed from their real-world effects. Oh, and I shouldn't leave out the current moment in this technology's strange history, with the recent AOL/TimeWarner takeover as an example of the steady and continuous takeover of the Internet by gigantic corporations. AS: Since the number of ideas that might come to human minds in a period of time is limited and the possibility of spreading information on the Internet are almost unlimited, don't you think that "art on the Internet" will become (if not already is) very repetitive and plagiarist? In other words, too few ideas for such big space. NB: No, not at all; because I think that the Internet and its impact on our lives is constantly changing, evolving, and growing. I do think, however, that the term "art" (as in "art on the Internet") can be used to limit the impact of some activities in this medium. It is at times wiser not to place ourselves or our activities into the category of art, as it can be used to justify and tame otherwise quite radical activities (although others are bound to place us there). The term "art" can be used as a quick way to understand and justify an otherwise complicated series of activities. AS: In official situations you usually present yourself as "artist and professor." To make this list a bit longer, what definitions of yourself would you add? NB: When I am filling out official forms (for customs, health insurance, etc.), I say I am a professor. Definitions are slippery, and depend very much on context. Dictionaries have to be updated regularly, and in this sped-up era, words and their meanings change even more quickly than they did in the past. As for context, in certain situations I have defined myself as an artist. Other times I insist that I am not an artist at all but that I am an activist. There is a range of definitions in which my activities can fall. Definitions -- just like language (and media) -- both limit and enable communication. AS: Is controversy between art and life painful for you? If so, how? NB: Do you mean separation rather than controversy? I'm not sure I understand your question. I do not know how to compartmentalize my life, so there is rarely any easy separation between art and life, unless it is forced upon me. Our collaboration has been a very clear example of my limited ability to separate art and life, and how the reality of our circumstances can make this lack of separation painful (see http://easylife.org/between). The Net can make it seem that we are very close in our work and activities but cannot help us transcend the reality that you are in Moscow and I am in Los Angeles, and there remain enormous distances and disconnections. But I do not mean to suggest that a separation between art and life is my desired state of existence, because it is not. It's just that society is now structured to compartmentalize all aspects of an individual's existence. Any sort of active resistance to a status quo, if it is taken seriously and lived out, cannot help at times being painful. AS: Did you ever consider stopping doing what you are doing and starting something completely different? NB: No. I haven't considered this since I discovered the power of the Internet. AS: How do you see changes in notions of "private" and "public" on the Internet? NB: I see that these changes are profound and massive. AS: Eh, Natalie, you've started with long detailed answers and what is this? NB: What is what? AS: I mean the short answers you just gave. Another coffee, maybe? NB: Exactly! I am going to make a coffee right this minute. Want some? How are you? AS: Fine -- thinking about women. NB: Your questions required long answers. AS: Take your time. The Universal Page is not the first project that you have done with Alexei Shulgin. Why is this collaboration so attractive to you? NB: I found this friendship and collaboration as a result of the Internet. It is quite unique and also a product of our times that I have found this kind of affinity with a man who grew up and lives on the other side of the world both geographically and ideologically. Before working with Alexei I went through a number of unsuccessful collaborative efforts. Collaboration has been extremely appealing to me, in part because I am most interested in making complex and substantial connections with other people and least interested in work that is about self-analysis, expression and self-promotion. In a successful collaboration, you have to leave behind narcissism and the isolated and heroic self quite a bit. AS: Why were they not successful? What have you learned from those experiences? NB: I think that they were transitional collaborations. I was still holding on to older and more traditional ways of making art, which very often goes against giving in to some of the more amazing results of collaboration. They were collaborations made specifically for a museum or gallery space. This is not necessarily a problem, but I think that with collaboration you have to remain open to the possibility that something other than what you are planning and expecting results from your activities, and that includes where your results might end up and what form they might take. AS: That's good, but don't you think that working with another person brings limitations and leaves you less flexibility? NB: These days, my activities include working with a collective, working with you, and working by myself. When I need a break from one, I move to another. Each one has limitations, and each one can bring unexpected and often quite exciting results. I would not want to give up one type of activity for another, and I am happy to report that I don't have to! Each one satisfies, produces, and frustrates. AS: Don't you think that the way your Universal Page looks brings some sad thoughts, like there is no hope and meaning in all human activity? NB: You mean OUR universal page. No. If I thought that there was no hope and meaning in human activity, I would retire (or worse.) I think provocation is different than nihilism. AS: Please change this for the record. What provocation?! We did it without knowing results . . . [ The Universal Page http://universalpage.org/ is the objective average of all public content on the Web merged together as one. A s script crawls and searches the entire Web, analyzing and processing current data and generating an average according to precise algorithms. The Universal Page is a pulsating, living monument commemorating no single individual or ideology but instead, celebrating the global collective known as the World Wide Web. ] NB: True, but I won't change this for the record unless you can do a better job of convincing me! AS: Dear readers of this text . . . What are we doing now? Trying to talk or presenting ourselves for other people? Don't forget about the honorarium: we have to deliver an interesting text! NB: Sad thoughts can lead to new ideas and activities. I think that the Universal Page signals the end of a particular set of activities on the Web -- the artist's Web page -- and asks for a new type of activity. It is the LAST Web page. The ULTIMATE Web page. AS: ??? It's not an average of artists' pages, it's all the Internet. NB: Yes, of course, but it ends up as artists' Web pages, of sorts. And it is being shown in the context of an art museum. I think there are some similarities in this work to our essay "An Introduction to net.art 1994-1999" (http://easylife.org/netart/) in that it can be seen as a manifesto and a plea for movement. Our project could be interpreted as a very cynical statement. but that would be a superficial reading of it. AS: What would be the profound reading of the project? NB: It is (like you and me) a mixture of intense belief and hope in the possibilities of this new medium (and in art in general), together with a strong distrust of and frustration with its extensive hype and its numerous failings. It is also a comment on the cultural loop: the constant swallowing up of "avant-garde" practices by institutions and our constant (and necessary) attempts at resisting this assimilation. It is about the dangers of making universal statements and the importance of specificity. It is as I said before -- a provocation. Today, beginning and ending with a Web page is no longer enough. The conversation that follows and the activities that it stimulates or encourages are what is important. We have yet to see the results. We can only hope! AS: And where will we go after it? NB: This is a key question. One place to go is to RTMark (http://rtmark.com). But there are many other places needed. And not rtmark.com as the beginning of a genre. I am not looking for that at all. AS: What are you going to do next? NB: After the (http://calarts.edu/~ntntnt) series ends at the end of May, I am going to be working on a number of computer games. RTMark and I are going to be working on a game using artificial life whose working title is The Genetic Game, although I am sure this will change, and I am going to be turning my game The Intruder into a freestanding arcade game (see http://calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder). AS: The genre of game seems to be important for you. Why is that? NB: I want to work with a genre that has mass popularity. Many people play computer games. Very few people look at net.art. I want to have some access to this audience of game players. Computer and video games are both enticing and problematic. Computer games are used to justify war and genocide and to teach this way of thinking. Lovers play games. I like the metaphor of gaming to discuss real life: love, politics, war, gender, storytelling, and death. AS: How do you see role of an artist in the modern world, and how has it changed since the emergence of new informational paradigms? NB: The role of the artist is both necessary and irrelevant -- a massive contradiction (a mass of contradictions). I think it is impossible in this era for our lives not to be filled with contradictions. Also, I think it is important to admit to these contradictions and to reject the myth of purity. There is no possibility of purity anymore. Part of what can save us from getting too tangled up in this is to continue to be open, to move and change. No final solutions for me! If you can forgive me using such a simple metaphor, I think that the inability to fix digital information is similar to the inability to fix our roles and activities today. AS: I think it's a very good one. and it gives an answer to the question "Why do artists get on the net?" Seems like your life had reached a very high level of activity and emotionality. Aren't you afraid of loosing all your energy and having a deep nervous breakdown after that? NB: Yes. AS: How do you protect your sanity? NB: I don't know, but I'm open to suggestions. AS: You know my inspiration page (http://www.easylife.org/inspiration). Shall I make another one asking for people's suggestions about protecting sanity for a superactive and emotional artist? NB: It is an appealing suggestion but I am afraid that there is not really a solution. This is the time for superactivity. I am only doing it because I need to. I think that I can protect my sanity by knowing that there will be a time for inactivity following this period of hyperactivity. AS: Why is this the time for superactivity? NB: Because there are vitally important things that need to be done. I was rather confused by your inspiration project, for example, because I cannot imagine the experience of boredom at this moment. Things are changing so fast, and I think we need to act and resist total corporate, technological, and institutional takeovers. Besides, there are many exciting things to do that have nothing to do with obvious acts of resistance, but simply with creating and inventing and playing. Maybe your reaction to this speed was to temporarily shut down and interpret that as boredom? AS: Perhaps. I think that things are changing so rapidly that it is very difficult to observe and understand these changes. It's easy to get lost; information becomes just a noise. But I also wanted to provoke some reaction from people -- similar to yours -- and try to understand what is going on. NB: Did it help? AS: Too early to say, but I've found correlations to some ideas of mine. NB: I have to admit that I look at your inspiration page quite often. Also, I occasionally add to it. Even if I cannot find any solution from the submissions, it is more a matter of it always being a possibility -- i.e., it is about the desire, not the answers. I am thinking of taking a bath now. Should we continue? AS: Should we continue after the bath? NB: Should I look at my answers and elaborate? I answered you quite quickly and could probably revise and or elaborate. AS: OK, take a bath, think on texts. I'm feeling like going to sleep now. Send me stuff. I'll continue tomorrow when I get up. OK? NB: Good night. Sweet dreams. Talk to you later. xn AS: Have a nice day! Xa +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.universalpage.org http://calarts.edu/~bookchin/ http://www.easlylife.org http://aen.walkerart.org http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/jerome/ http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/ ---------------------------------------- Steve Dietz Director, New Media Initiatives Walker Art Center subscribe Webwalker: http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/webwalker/ _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold 84.0 <nettime> interview with Alexei Shulgin Josephine Bosma nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 14 May 1997 16:11:07 +0200 (MET DST) This is a short interview made with Alexei Shulgin made in Januari 1997, at the secret conference on net.art in London. We were both tired and distracted by the surroundings, sitting in a corridor of a pub, people passing, talking loud... Still it contains some information that might add to the net.art thread here in nettime. Quotes from it will be used for a piece on net.art later. ** JB: What do you do in general? AS: In general I do various actions, almost all of them are somehow related to what is known as art. Almost all last year I was involved specifically in the net, but I work outside the net as well. My background is more traditional artforms. I started with photography, then made installations, objects. I curated exhibitions in real space. Little by little I moved towards the net. Still I am considering I have to have some way out of it and that I must keep my contacts in the real world. JB: You posted a kind of manifesto against professionalism on nettime, was that against professionalism in general or only for the artscene? AS: Actually it was not against professionalism, I even don't know whether it was against anything. I wrote it in the form of a manifesto to be more clear about what I was going to say, though some statements look or seem very strong, they were not meant this way. It had to do with this form. What I wrote is an appeal to artists not to become too sofisticated in their skills, not to become masters, because since you become very devoted to what you are doing you turn into a slave of your medium and the picture of the world you have becomes very narrow. JB: You wrote the manifesto came from your heart, that it was not an academic piece.. AS: It was a reflection of my mental and spiritual state at the time. In general I would never make strong statements and strong expressions because how can you be sure that you are right. You can never be right in what you're saying and what you're doing. Sometimes if you want to say something you have to temporarily forget about this dilemma. JB: It seemed a bit of a paradox that you ask people not be skillful when they have to work with new media, with technology that needs quite some skills. What do you think of that? AS: I can't agree with you because pc's or what people are working with today have very nice interfaces and the software we are using can be very simple. Of course many artists go into very complicated stuff like Shockwave or RealAudio. They go into software that really requires a lot of skills and knowledge, but my general idea is what we have with net.art is we have a sort of shifting paradigm in art from the idea of representation to the idea of communication. For communication you don't need a lot of skills. You can use very simple software, which is widely available. To create webpages you should just know the html language which is very simple. You don't have to know a lot, its not necesary. JB: Lets just move on to net.art then. So on the one hand you have this simple technology that people can make beautiful artpieces with. On the other hand there is this sofisticated artworld that is in need, that is hungry for new talent, and which of course is also hungry to show that it knows what is new and what is the freshest. And it wants to get some net.artists into their galleries. What do you think will happen? AS: You never know what is going to happen. But I think this year will be sort of crucial for what is called net.art, because now we see allready a lot of attention coming from traditional art institutions to net.artists. This year we will see a lot of exhibitions and projects realised in the traditional gallery and museum spaces. On the other hand what we have with the net and what we never had before, is that you can not only produce your work, but also distribute it without the third side, without somebody between you and the audience, because the net itself is a global network. I think we will have two trends in the development of net.art. One is that some big stars of net.art will be emerging, having expensive exhibitions in galleries, selling their works. On the other hand we will have a lot of, I would say, underground net.activity, which is at the same time not underground anymore because it can be distributed worldwide. I have no clear idea what we will come to in the end, but I think it will go in these directions. JB: So something from the underground that in the old situation would most possibly disappear into oblivion after a while now will have global reach. What effects could that have? AS: First thing I see, is that its now really interesting and makes sense to make some kind of independent and underground activity, because you in the end publish it on the net. Through the net I see a lot of cases of people finding somebody with similar views, similar ideas and creating international societies, international social groups according to their interests. It not just happens in the art scene, its with everything. The problem of inclusion or exclusion is not so important today, also because of the general decline of the traditional art market system. Of course artists want money, but besides money they want to bring the result of their work to people and now this is possible. I can say that when I started to do net.works, for me it was kind of an escape or way out of the traditional artsystem I was involved in for some years. I had really very bad experiences in it, not only as an artist but also as a representative of a national or international minority because I am living in Moscow and things are different there. Whatever I did as an artist was always contextualised as something specific russian, coming from Russia. The artsystem is very strong and everything is very much fixed in it, so there are special niches for some minorities. I would have to move to the west and start some career again or I don't know what I would have had to do. To always be treated as a russian artist was not interesting at all. The net appeared to be a temporary good solution. In what I am doing on the net nobody cares if the signal comes from Moscow or from whereever. I can put my files on an Amsterdam server or in NewYork, it doesn't matter. JB: What kind of things do you do? AS: I first started with a adaptation of my previous video and media works to the net, so net.versions of what I was doing in video before. This was also connected to my net.curatorial activity. I worked with some other Moscow artists and realised their projects on the net. Little by little I got involved in some international communication around the nettime list. I have become aquainted with other peope who share some of my ideas and who do some artwork that I personally like. What we have now is some group of net.artists that apreciate eachother personally and like eachothers works. We began to do things together. Last year we did some projects of this kind and I think the project that received the most attention was Refresh. It was initiated by me, Andreas Broekman, who works at V2 Rotterdam and is not an artist, and Vuk Cosic from Ljudmila Media Lab, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The idea of this project is to create a loop of pages that automatically switch from one to another. Its possible to make because of a specific function of html language for creating webpages, which allows you to program pages which can jump or be subsituted by some other page without your intervention. The idea was that all these pages are based on different servers through the world. Its a very ambiguous project because when you look at it you see one page coming after another. The idea that the signal always comes from some other point on earth may be the content of this project, but what was interesting for me specifically.. I was sort of the administrator of this project, I was responsible for its functioning. It was incredibly interesting to work with the people, to force them to do something for the benefit of the whole project. The general idea of course is that this thing should work. It should not stop on somebody's page because of too much data put on it or because of some sofisticated scripts people would use. We had to find some compromise between peoples egoistic and creative ideas and the sake of the general thing. We first started between the three of us: Rotterdam, Moscow and Ljubljana, and now we have about thirty pages in this loop. What also is interesting, since most of the information is placed on other servers which I don't have access to, I can't really control it. So we just initiated it and now it grows according to its own rules. JB: Yesterday you said you are very emotional. What kind of art do you like, do you like emotional art? AS: No. I think here we have a difficulty of definition, because I think that, say, early conceptual art is very emotional or: Fassbinders films are very emotional. So what is emotional in art? You don't have to see some manifestations of strong emotions, direct, but I think all good art is emotional, because it is about energy. When you see a good artwork you always feel the energy that comes out of it and the energy of its creator. Maybe its a little bit a romantic idea about art, but I can't find another idea. Just a manifestation of creative energy. * --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} icf.de 85.0 <nettime> James Stevens Interview Matthew Fuller nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 19 Aug 1998 15:05:15 +0100 The following is the initial part of an interview with James Stevens james {AT} backspace.org, one of the founders of the Backspace centre in London. Their web-site is at: http://www.backspace.org. The address of the place is Clink Street, London, SE1. MF>People who are new to the space never seem quite sure if Backspace is a squat, lounge area for multi-media industry casualties, gallery, cybercafe or private club. It's probably all of these except the first. How was it imagined when the place first opened - and how does it run now? JS>To start with there was a loose group who met in London between summer 94 and 95, made up of those interested in the rise of the internet, networking and tech art. During this time Heath Bunting and I met on several occasions and talked about access/workshop spaces 'cybercafe.org' etc. and how to do it. Over this time I met Jon Bains and later via IUMA Kim Bull. Obsolete, was an attempt at working with the web which began in summer 95, to develop new platforms for creative work establish a server onto which we could present our efforts, those of our mates and earn enough money to live on (for a change). This worked very well except the gush of cash from our more corporate clients became a major distraction and point of distortion. Our open studio became temporary family home to the growing group of artists coders and writers working on Obsolete projects, many of whom slept, ate, lived and worked in the space. In addition, our widening circle of friends and interested groups visited us more and more. This expanding use began to collide with the growing client requirements to deliver work and present ourselves. A new space was found in the wharf to somehow accommodate some of these needs and to instate our wish share an access point of presence. I was left to me to follow this through so in March 96 we opened very quietly to engage first users. We adopted a quarterly subscription system which anyone could join, use the equipment and make non commercial stuff to present on our servers. Each member got several hours free with the subscription (=A310= ) then paid =A34 an hour therapeutic. This failed to raise enough supporting cash but did present an alternative to the mainstream cyberafe-commerce. This loose arrangement continued until in March of 97 when it was clear Obsolete should cease and Backspace would have to fend for itself. Over the first year over 400 people took email addresses and used the space, we held web site launches, group meetings, film screenings, events, and mini conferences. Some users held there own training sessions and of course there were many boozy late nights. =46rom April 97 backspace has moved most of the way over into self sufficiency and the 80 or so subscribers each month cover the very basic costs. We have made adjustments to the fee to bring it closer the line and it has settled at =A320 per month. We now have six or seven people hosting 2 four hour sessions a month each in exchange for reasonable expenses (=A310) =46or this they must look after the space and support subscription and help maintain, contribute and develop at whatever level they can. We are closed on Monday to allow for repair relaxation and reflection, though it is very often as busy as the week. MF>Describe backspace: it maintains quite an unusual presence in the area of London that it is in, a smallish tech-cluttered room hugging close to the river in an area that has been increasingly dominated by business, and also internally - it certainly doesn't fit the archetypal layout of a cybercafe. Inside the building, how do all the elements (computers, kettle, music, seats, people) work together? Does it fit into any real or imaginary network of related spaces? JS>Being on the river here has an effect on everyone in the building not just in backspace, and that euphoria permeates all the interaction that occurs. Certainly, part of any great environment is the sense of space that is extruded in its presentation and use. We have always tried to make the best of the qualities of the room, acknowledging its inadequacies and building on a relationship with the location history future etc. The question of business encroachment has become part of the mantra for me of late.. I just have to keep reinstating my commitment to resistance of commercial or cultural co-option and out of the fug at Obsolete it seems more and more appropriate I do this. We are sidestepping the interuption of corporate concerns and I will not now work on any other than sufficiency enriching projects i.e. No Levis or National Gallery no British Nuclear =46uels or whatever their name is now.....We are not participating in the Lottery scrummage for contrivance and inffective capitalisation, rather edging into the areas around us and finding the energy we need to prevail. That is not to say we will not take support cash when it is appropriate and have received two modest payments from the arts council for specifically short project periods. Individuals who subscribe have found to their delight that an application for funding to any of the public funding bodies receives serious attention and is considered a reasonable prospect for award when associated with the space. When possible we will support these projects as equally as we support any other initiated from within the membership. There is little pretention to celebrity from within the group and this is refreshed refocused by the flow of enthusiam, contribution and contact we have with those who come and use the space. These characteristics are reflected in the platform for presentation at bak.spc.org and associated sites, it is a churning wash of ideas experiments and effluent, a non hierarchical representation of the collective state of mind. The use of the space is a meandering and confounding collision of the inarticulate, lucid and languid to the strains of rap and riverwash and no sooner have we settled the arrangement of the facilities and utilities around the room then we are upturned and overdriven. I love it MF>In terms of funding, Backspace itself occupies an interesting position. Can you describe your attitude to state funding and corporate sponsorship? JS>All these models hug a formula for creativity and work practise that reinforces dependency. Whilst any genuine declaration and provision of cash in support of non commercial product ( i.e.,. not a commercial) can be applauded, however it at this point the inevitable distortion occurs, the mediation, whatever..... I am now more adamant than ever that backspace exist free of any dependencies on public or corporate funding and that it flower or fail on its own abilities. We are not employers, teachers or fundamentalist nor are we a web design agency or recording studio, we are not experts we are chaotic and persistent, slacktivist. There have been many opportunities over the last year for me to get very involved with arts council funding in particular. I have spent time talking with funding administrators to see if there is an economic way of dealing with them. Again and again I run into fundemantal problems of perception and projection. On The face of it I think we satisfy most criteria and are in an attractive proposition for them to associate with, yet I cannot bring myself to sort it all out with them. Maybe I need help... or to just look outward and pass them. So far the absence of a fund has not prevented project work from proceeding. If you build and present with components of an appropriate scale then bankrolling and other control issues recede to the background where they belong. I am always looking to ways of consolidating the flow of supporting cash and to this end have recently extended subscription to include ISP for an extra =A35. I still get confronted my those who insist al= l this should be free and are offended by our model of openess and dispair at our non complience. MF>Do you bring any ways of going about things to this project from your background in music that other people could learn from? JS>There are massive parallels with the music and independent film and video scenes that I have been involved with, for as with any public work it is massively embroiled in crippling landscape of mythology and manipulation. Only those who sidestep, re-navigate or coerce prevail with their clobber intact. I drag entrails of experience from previous engagement. My baggage arrived with me on my first days of involvement with the web and contain some tools for survival that I employ alongside those I find on site, to ground and elevate new work. I use them all in a soup of evocation. There is nothing more convincing and compelling to a crew then the realisation of ideas and intentions and little more rewarding then finding support for your actions. There is no map or set of instructions that can be extracted and replicated each situation responds best to a custom set of atunements. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} desk.nl 86.0 <nettime> interview with Mongrel Matthew Fuller nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 14 Feb 1999 13:31:21 +0100 The Mouths of the Thames an interview with Mongrel and some of the people working with them for an intro to Mongrel's work, check: http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Natural/Mongrel/mongrel.html Matthew Fuller: The Natural Selection project at http://www.mongrel.org.uk is an internet search engine that works in exactly the same way as any other one of these vast pieces of software that find data on the web, but that adds its own twists. It is clear that search engines have acquired immense positional importance in the network, acting as a gateway (both in the sense of allowing and blocking access) to material on the web. As a technical and media context it is one that is riven with the most inexplicable density of political and cultural machination. Can you tell us something about the project? Harwood: Well basically, it's the same as any other search engine. The user types in a series of characters that they wish to have searched for. The engine goes off and does this and then returns the results. If you're looking for sites on monocycles, that's what you get. If you're looking for sites on elephants, that's what you get. As soon as you start typing in words like 'nigger' or 'paki' or 'white' you start getting dropped into a network of content that we have produced in collaboration with a vast network of demented maniacs strung out at the end of telephone wires all over the place. The idea is to pull the rug from underneath racist material on the net, and also to start eroding the perceived neutrality of information science type systems. If people can start to imagining that a good proportion of the net is faked then we might start getting somewhere. And as a search engine, from Europe it runs faster than most US based search engines. Enlightenment and a cheaper phone bill - you can't loose. Richard Pierre Davis: Natural Selection started off as part of the project National Heritage and was conceived as a response to all the hype surrounding the internet and in particular far right activity on the net. It snowballed into it's own identity with input from various artists collaborating on the project with Mongrel steering the ship into a one finger salute to the PC clones and all them fronting fakers worldwide. Mervin Jarman: Natural Selection offers an added value to critical work on the internet which is unequivocal in that it allows practitioners to plug their work into arenas that would otherwise be inaccessible. This is particularly because of its constructural texture and its ability to redefine and redirect search strings to specified locations, commonly termed aiding and abating - luring the unaware into a spate of awareness that they may not have voluntarily wanted to realise. H: One of the hidden things about the project is that it's based on a harmless hack on one of the mainstream internet's most popular sites. We corroborate our searches with other search engines. They don't necessarily like us doing this. So we are engaged in a running battle with the site managers of various engines who keep trying to lock us out, trying to stop us reverse engineering their workings and using it to our advantage. Presumably they think we're some kind of commercial competitors. If only... MF: That's an example of a technical conflict going on in the work, which is obviously a very live one since it messes so heavily with control of proprietary culture masquerading as social resource. (Something extended in the cracked software projects in Natural Selection such as HeritageGold: http://www.mongrel.org.uk/HeritageGold) Echoing this, like most of Mongrel's work, Natural Selection doesn't shrink away from difficulty. If people are going to check it out, they need to be looking for more than a punchline, or a nice neat 'anti-racist' or 'multicultural' solution. The nineties has seen a near complete homogenisation of language around race. A fait accompli which trivialises the deep texture of language, culture and racialisation. We seem to have entered an era of a miserablised 'politics of semantics' represented by arguments over phrases such as Bill Clinton's, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" and London's Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Condon's nervous wordplay in trying to avoid the acknowledgement of the institutionalised racism of the police. At the same time, Natural Selection very much delves into this politics of semantics as it is constructed through software conventions and the protocols built into the World Wide Web. Perhaps we can develop this - Matsuko, you worked very much in the image construction and design of the paper edition - Colour Separation. Could you say what the shifting masks and racial stereotypes relate to in the paper? What relationship might the ultra-gridded structure of the edition have to a database? It almost reminds me of a cellular structure in a spread-sheet... Matsuko Yokokoji: Colour Separation is an element of the National heritage 'Campaign'. It functions as a poster and also as a free distribution paper. We made eight stereotypes and four masks. That's the system. It makes a chart of the nonsense of racial categorisation. We could see the myth of racial classifications. In Japan when I was growing up in the 60's and 70's, we knew about it through the media. We knew that black people look like Stevie Wonder, we knew that white people look like Marilyn Monroe. So we actually tried to build these stereotypes out of the photographs of faces of real people. And what we found, in trying to make these stereotypes of the four colours, but mixing in the ideas of the stereotypes from other people in Mongrel too - a real mix - was that these stereotypes were completely unattainable. What we ended up with then was completely untypical stereotypes. Anti-stereotypes. No glamour at all! The kind of people you'd see walking the streets in London. The masks perform operations on the faces. They stitch them up. They are roles that move across the entire spectrum of classification that we represent, across all the untypical-stereotypes. You have White Masks on Black Skin, but you also have Black Masks on Black Skin, Yellow, Brown, whatever... It produces a more complex tangle of interrelationships and conflicts. MF: Mervin, your site for Natural Selection, (http://www.mongrel.org.uk/BAA) seems to be an extraordinarily sprawling mess that almost matches the complexity of the web itself in its wrecking havoc on the stupidity and cruelty of the British immigration system. It jumps in and out of different types of English, different styles of web design, stolen data, data originated by you and by the Migrant Media video collective and others. It generates confusion, but never lets up on the political pressure. What do you think people who end up on the site from the Natural Selection front end are going to think? MJ: An immediate response to your observation would be 'that's the yard in me' you see growing up in Jamaica it is endemic that you learn to improvise, in other words 'tun yuh hand an mek fashion' seen. Now the BAA thing goes out to a primary group of yardies mentionable those who are thinking that the grass is greener on the other side, and the overall analogy of that is not necessarily. the language thing is or has become a form of cultural identity so no longer am I just a English speaking person but to express one self in this kind of broken English dubbed patois (patwa) contemporary it adds flava and undermine bureaucracy. I believe though that it is important for you to understand the fundamentals of my implications and method of construction; to answer the question on the style and chaotic method that seem to be the underline composition you have to imagine things from behind my mask where unstructured and chaotic deranged behaviour is the most intelligent and effective means of communication without being detected specially when dealing with various authority and institutional organisations. this is how the lie becomes the truth vice versa. BAA is consequently absolve from the fact that this policy of abuse and brutality has been perpetrated at against me and others whose only crime is to want to travel the world like Columbus, Marco and the great Admiral Penn and General Venables, with the only difference being their is no 'design' to it as was with The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. And the opposite is true if you were to visit Jamaica. RPD: The BAA site shines a spotlight on the blatant injustice of anyone attempting to enter Britain with the misfortune to be born with a suntan and no British passport but coming from an ex-British colony it actually works against you it gives a insight into how problematic it is to gain entry once you make contact with the immigration system if your status don't fit the bill and you just happen to fall into the category of a yardie [Jamaican gangster]. How convenient it is that the so called authorities can make a decision based on their stereotyped media hype when just a little while ago the British government used to recruit West Indian labour to help build and service Britain. MF: Richard, BlackLash (http://www.mongrel.org.uk/BlackLash) is one of the most sickest, violent anti-police games available on the planet, but the four black stereotypes that players have to choose from are also taking the piss out of 'the community'. What's going on? - and who's the game aimed at - Blonde kids from Surrey who want to play Tottenham roughnecks for a day? RPD: BlackLash is based on a combination of stereotypical half truths and hardcore reality coming from the point of view of a young black male trying to survive inner city life in the nineties hence the name BlackLash. You choose one of the stereohyped characters after which you then proceed to battle the forces of evil that plot to convict or eliminate you from the streets. It also aims to encourage the black community through game culture that it is possible to break into different areas apart from music, and create games that have got some thing to say. Yah heard MJ: I believe BlackLash speaks in volume to the black community, I believe the innovation is a brilliant wake up call for young black people it may look like a classic notorious shoot em up game but my interpretation of the characteristic of black lash is that is a serious wake 'em up call. its all about 'REPRESENT' who is representing whom: 9 question I ask? who are you bout yuh want test bad man crew, little punk its best if yuh calm before mi <underline>machine</underline> (gun) tun onn. <bold>Black Lash<bold> a ask who are you how yuh want test wicked man crew, little punk its best if yuh calm before mi <underline>machine</underline> (computer) tun onn 9. My analysis of this is yesterday - BlackLash. And tomorrow? Seems ironic, but the people will get the message - Peace MF: It seems clear that the variety of competing art systems in the UK are largely designed to exclude work that is socially, technically and aesthetically conflictual, whilst at the same time relying on the retrospective absorption of many such currents in order to validate their position as liberal/open/laboratories of subjectivity/ (delete as applicable). Has Mongrel come up with any ways of dealing with this? Are you ready to be dug up as a particularly noxious but sedated time capsule in twenty years time? H: I think its time we decided to take on the media by mounting it from the rear. I feel more and more that there is no place for us in the usual art/education environment and that we have to make our own. I think we need to design projects that carve out a place in the media and manipulate it < a kind of popular independent media > somewhere between underground music clubs and class war. No one else will realise we make good stuff unless we tell the bastards in a way that takes the piss out of them. I feel confident that if we take on the media now we have the skills to deal with it without loosing touch with who we are. Bollocks to the "sedated time capsule" take it while we are alive. MJ: If the question is as a mongrel am I waiting for something better (a buy/sell out) offer so that we (I) will conveniently shut the fuck up and live a quiet conservative life......Mr Jarman may be but mervin {AT} mongrel no fucking way not on their tiny little willie - the driving force behind my motivation comes from far further than consumerism and giving credibility to or validate any position as liberal/open or otherwise suggested - life is one big road with a lot of signs on both side as a mongrel these signs can either be objective, subjective and/or rejective and my endeavour is to speak when I am not spoken to and that is to speak my truth. MF: In National Heritage and Colour Separation there is a repeated motif of the mask - stereotyped racial features that it seems are literally sewn onto people's heads... MJ: I believe the mask to be one of the most defining aspect of the whole project in more ways than one; the mask represent the mask that I always have to wear at the point of entry into Britain, it represent the mask that I wear repeatedly as I go about my everyday activities in this lovely multicultural state. ...And then it also represent the mask that mongrel has to wear in sourcing resources for the project. So you see the whole National Heritage project is a constitution of the mask. MF: Another mask Mongrel uses is a reversioned copy of the government Department of National Heritage crest on most of its projects. Why? A recuperation of the state? H: When we started the project the government department that handed out the cash for the arts was called the department of national heritage. This department gave 76% of it's money to class A and B as defined by another government department. We decided we wanted to make this Government department complicit with the making of the images. What's important about this point is the relation between the British State's Cultural Elitism and who is paying for it. The top two collections of art in the UK are bought from slavery money, the Tate and the National Gallery. Not only this but the site that the Tate gallery is on was a prison for transporting white slaves or bondsman to Australia and the Southern states of America. If we have to articulate these images then the arts industry should acknowledge their own complicity with them also. MJ: I believe the crest to be a celebration of the diverse British ethnicity after all who are the Brits if not a group of fucking mongrels. You need not go further than Byju's Aryan nation construction (http://wwww.mongrel.org.uk/Byju) for what is 'truly' British, though much undetected by most. This interview was originally put together, mid-february 1999, for the next five minutes reader. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner {AT} desk.nl 87.0 <nettime> The Container update: interview with mervin Jarman matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 27 Mar 2000 14:00:26 +0100 mervin Jarman (mervin {AT} mongrel.org.uk) is an artist and organiser with an eye for infrastructure. He is currently back in London for a couple of weeks having completed the first stages of The Container project. A thorough and ambitious mobile media lab being put together to begin getting both town and country Jamaicans online. The full inventive weight that is going to be released by this project looks set to be phenomenal. This interview was carried out via a series of email exchanges in mid-March. Matthew Fuller: The Container is now in Palmers Cross Jamaica and being readied for conversion. How are you going to change a forty-foot shipping container into a mobile media laboratory? What is the thing going to look like - at least in your mind's eye? mervin Jarman: Conversion will require an insulation layer made up of compacted foam forthe inside. This is to reduce the heat accumulation and is the first layer on the inside. Then we will, with the use of thin ply-board, produce a smooth painted surface for the interior wall. Of course the unit will be wired fo rboth telephone and electricity to IEEE standard. In terms of infrastructure there will be a partition at the far end of the container to house a small administration office taking up about 8ft sq. I am also seeing a tea counter for our expected English visitors who can't go through the day without their cups of tea. And of course any other snacks available in the container. This will then give way to the remaining length of the container:28sq ft. to be dedicated to workstations and storage/shelve space in which the general running of the container will be conducted. Entry will remain at the rear where the doors swing open outwardly and 3-4 bay windows will be installed down one side to offer as much natural lighting as possible. the interior should end up looking like a well-maintained corporate office, that is the look of it. The feeling will be another thing. Externally, the unit must be very attractively decorated so that people will take a curious interest in its presence, it should be eye-catching and also informative in its visualisation. An overall comment would be a well decorated bandwagon that will let people know that the Container is in town. MF: You have arranged for five co-workers on The Container to teach themselves up using some of the first few Macs that have been shipped over so that they can go on to teach others. What is the general level of familiarity with computers in Jamaica? - and beyond straightforward desktop use, in what sort of ways is the internet entering different parts of Jamaican society? mJ: Tricky! Let me answer this back to front: in the areas that the container will be targeting the few persons who I have met who have actually used a computer only got as far as creating a word document or to fill in a spreadsheet as it relates to their job. The internet doesn't even start to come into it as (thanks to the local telephone company) most people believe that they need a separate telephone line to get connected - an expensive commodity.The level of familiarity is virtually non-existent. These people are not part of the 5%ters having access who may be found in some communities. It is sad, as those who know the little that they know see this as an advantage and as a means of separating themselves from those who do not know. A kind of hierarchical structure with knowledge prejudice dominant. Given,(thanks to the mis-information given to the Container before departure), the amount of time lost in getting the Container through Customs and off the Wharf a number of goals were not achieved. It was my intention to find and train up a team of people who would in turn be able to start to introduce the ideas of working with computers to the greater community whilst the container was being converted. They would then effectively be the source of local contact for the project. What transpired was that within the two weeks that I had remaining in Jamaica because of a previously agreed engagement in LA {AT} the California Arts Institute, I proceeded to conduct 5, 1 to 1 crash courses with the five community workers who had volunteered to work with the project. For the project to get maximum community awareness in its limited state I also did a two days workshop with children from the Palmers Cross Primary and Junior High School. This of course was immediately translated to the parents and so I was receiving a number of inquiries on how they could get involved in the programme. MF: What are the most pressing needs for The Container at the moment? What are you planning to do or to get hold of next in order to take things to the next stage? mJ: As you know, when The Container left London for the first time we only had a few redundant computers donated to the project. I guess people never took me serious enough and didn't actually think I was going to do it. So many people on the onset was like 'Yes we will help. We will do this and that.' But when it really came down to it, most of them chickened out. So right now I am re-launching the appeal for donation of computer hardware, software and accessories. The container will be converted on my return to Jamaica in April - the Minister of Commerce and Technology - Phillip Paulwell has assured me that his ministry will be supporting the project and I have also met with Mrs Joshiah from the Jamaica's branch of UNESCO who have indicated their interest to work with us. The most important thing to me now is to source the container with the necessary equipment that will initiate the earliest start to the project and this is easiest achieved if the mongrel population chips in with us on this drive to collect and deliver as much of thesupplies needed for the container as possible (see Essentials under about the container http://www.container.access-it.org.uk ) MF: If you are getting help from the Jamaican Ministry of Technology and UNESCO - why do you need people in Europe and the States with access to money or equipment to support the Container? mJ: Where the Gov. and UNESCO may very well be able to support transportation and maintenance for the Container it is doubtful that they would be able to give all that we need, after all it is written "god help those who help themselves" neither or but!!! In other words the initial capital to get the kit together must be raised by us or by people who support the project. MF: At the moment the world is experiencing a serious change. Capitalism is re-inventing itself into a purer form and becoming global on a far greater scale than previously. Money-power is becoming centralised and more rapid and intense in the way it moves, with a greater number of financial transactions of larger amounts made by institutions of increasingly densely concentrated control. This has been matched with the move towards centralisation of decision-making on a political and economic basis and combined with a global decentralisation of production. Where do different social formations in Jamaica sit in relation to these processes? How can the Container, as itself something of a bent vector of globalisation, learn from the everyday practices of the communities it is involved with to turn the situation to advantage? mJ: Jamaica, both politically and socially, is not ready nor are they aware of the implications of the tremendous tidal wave of infrastructural change and the decentralising effects as you put it. without wanting to sound obnoxious, if they did they would not be hastening to be major consumers of the technology instead there would be a serious drive as to how to become major producers of this technology. As is commonly known around the world Jamaica is one of the largest selling commodity producers. Anywhere you go you just have to look at the shelves in the major superstores for 'Made in Jamaica' - though ordinary Jamaicans living abroad can hardly afford to buy a tin of Ackee. It then stands to reasoning that we should be hastening to identify our niche within this emerging technology as in every economy is necessary to succeed. When you look at the social dichotomy of Jamaica and the multi-levels of talents and acquired/applied skills base it would be indeed interesting to see the kind of products that could come out of the island at the moment those 5% are happy to just consume the stuff that's been rammed down their throats - and don't get me wrong because inside Jamaica we have guys that could run circles around any of Microsoft geeks but unfortunately they are mute. The Container in Jamaica is a virgin thing - it's totally new - and the targeted group of people that the Container will primarily be resourcing are equally virgins to the technology that the Container will host. I am quite excited at the possibilities that will be created as a result of this combination also giving the variety of participants from the international forum that will be applying their services and skills to the Container. I believe that the work coming out of the Container is going to be of exceptionally high quality and that the relevance as diverse as it will be tremendously in the favour of the collaborative energies that had gone into producing it. MF: At the moment, most software is built by an increasingly small number of companies for an increasing number of people doing a wider range of things yet defined by an increasingly narrow cultural, technical and social understanding of what digital technology is or might be. You've mentioned office software so far - what are the other types of software commonly in use in Jamaica - particularly at a street level (ie music) and in what way do you think, if the possibility were there, the people who the Container is involved with might actually inflect or change the culture of software? mJ: the infusion of software into Jamaica's street culture is virtually non-existent. It therefore doesn't offer any opportunity for the eventual end user/consumer to question its emergence and implications. As it happens technology and software in Jamaica is a 'take it or leave it' situation. It is ironic when you look at the reverse here in the UK or even in the wider technologically developed or assumed tech.developed countries - as this debate is being carried by the likes of Mongrel and other such organisations/critical technology advocates. Myself being affiliated with the mongrel crew have indeed seen fit to question the levels under which we have to consume the technology. Living in the UK does not make me exceptional, it's just that intermedience of the technology and in this case software and its delivery has a far greater responsibility to its consumers. This allows for critical debates and deconstruction. Without programmes like the Container, global communities like Jamaica and others would never be in a position to offer up questions. Check it in the past. When we offer up real revolutionaries they have all been jailed. Marcus, Peter, and look what they did to the Legacy of Bob. That's why I think the Container is such an incredible and revolutionary project because it allows street-level emergence into what would be an other wise unchallenged consortium of global culturalisation and then where would we be? What would happen to our dynamics as it relates to production, be that in the Music, Art and Craft, in the way we conduct businesses, and develop our own customised software to satisfy our specifics? It sounds as if I'm going on. But this is something I feel very strongly about. No system should impose its will and/or cultural identity on another, the only way for software and technology to be truly dynamic is to decentralise the decision making process open up the formats to customisation on a more trans-culture and gender context. MF: I think the Container is going to be very much about finding real answers to all these problems. Where do you expect to be in six months time? What do you expect to be going on in the Container? mJ: Somewhere in Jamaica on a beach. In six months the container will have expected to complete a number of workshops with various communities and with support from a number of international artist, this will be demonstrative of the potentials of the Container. In six months time, I assume most if not all the necessary sponsorship and collaborators would have identified themselves so that the Container can be galvanised as part of Jamaica's street culture. Also this is round about when the first major link up via the Container and the UK is expected..... but on that I'll simply say 'watch this space' for breaking news about that! MF: mervin, thanks. mJ: No thank you for taking the time out, and tracking us down. MF: For those reading this interview who want to make something happen, here's that list of items needed to get the Container up and running.... Essential List List of equipment for use in the Container unit: VSat Connection1 Server 14 Computers Mac& PC1 A2 Colour Printer1 A4 Laser Printer1 A3 Colour Scanner Video System Audio System 1 Data Projector 2 CD Re/Writer Word Processing Software PC/MacDesk Top Publishing Software PC/MacMultimedia Software PC/MacWeb Publishing Software PC/MacDatabase Software PC/MacAnti-Virus Software PC/MacOther Software List of supplies for converting the Container unit:3 Double Glazed Bay Windows Hard Plastic 1 Double Glazed Double Door Hard Plastic 180 ft Compressed Foam 40 X 8 ft of Hard Wearing Carpet Disability Access - Portable Lift 2 Air Conditioning Units 4 Standing/Hanging Fans 30 running ft of Desk Top 20 Chairs 2 Petrol 110 - 240 Electric Generator Electrical Distribution Box, Fittings and Accessories 3 double tube Florescent Lamps 8 Gallons of Interior and Exterior Metal Paint 2 Drinking Fountain X 10 Bottles 2 Kettles 1 Coffee Percolator Security Alarm System and any thing else you can off that will be of use to us # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 88.0 <nettime> WebTracer interview matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 12 Mar 2001 14:34:52 +0100 Interview with Tom Betts /NullPointer NullPointer has recently released a beta-version of a new web visualisation application, WebTracer. Downloadable from: http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/-/tracer.htm MF: What are the questions you are asking about the structure of the web, and about the software that is being developed to use it that suggest the approaches to it deployed in WebTracer? NP: Well aware of the legacy of webmapping as a supposed demystifying device and fetishised formalistic perversion of form I do not intend to decorate this project with too much hypothesis of cultural and social intent. (there are others who could grace it much better than myself) However I cannot deny that the intentions of the application are not primarily to aid webmasters in their analysis and development of their own sites but to, as i hope is obvious, repurpose the information that comprises hypertext and the web into another plane of perspective and interaction. The application deals with sites and pages as molecules and atoms, the resulting cellular structures reflect the information structures of the web. I find that the representation of the many shells and layers that guide our exploration and expliotation of cyberspace can help to reinforce the awareness that all information systems are guided by a great number of defining elements. The Hardware used, the Operating System, the Software, the Network Protocols and finally the File Structures themselves all mould the way that users interact with dataspaces and the way that they can create them. MF: When you use the software it is clear that the arrangement of the relations between the nodes carries information in terms of the length of the linking line. What determines the magnitude of displacement from one node to the next, ie, how can a user 'read' the information that the software displays spatially? NP: The molecular structures created by the application are arranged spacially in terms of several different modifiers. The program uses both the order of links as they appear on a page and the relative depth of links within the host webserver's html docs directory. The closer a node is to the base of a WebTracer structure the closer that page lies to the index page of the whole site, additional subdirectories create distinct planes that are positioned up across the vertical axis. Hence sites with strict and deep heirarchical file structures will create tall objects, where'as sites with flat or database driven structures will result in a flatter series of planes or plateaus of information. The order that these levels are built is dependent on the order of their appearance to the user, and each distinct directory path occupies it's own horizontal plane. The color and length of any linking strand represents the direction and distance of that link within the structure that is being established. MF: On your web-site, in the text accompanying some screen-shots of the software in action, you use particular terms to discribe these spatial arrangements such as 'plateau', 'crown', 'tree' and so on. How much are these ways of describing the links a result of the way the WebTracer software spatially organises the display of links and how much are they structures that are inherent to the structure of the particular web-sites that it hits? NP: The particular structural forms that result from a WebTracer run on a site; as 'plateau', 'crown', 'tree' are a combination of both the order in which the program 'sees' the links and their paths and locations on the remote webserver. Although the display routines can be configured differently, the molecular model resulting from a 'trace' reflects very closely the information structure of the target site, both on a file structure level and on an information design level. MF: We already have as commonplace the phenomenon of art and other websites being made to be only viewable through certain configurations of software and access speed, that only make themeslves visible through certain very narrowly configured sets of software devices. The arguments for and against this, echo of course, some of those considered at the inception of the web and are ongoing, with the destinction between pyhsical and logical mark-up of text etc.(oldskool!) For these sites, the import and export filters of software already constitute a hidden micropolitics of which file formats are accepted or are interpretable and which not, based around alliances between the different forms of organisation that generate these protocols and standards. And obviously these systems of gating and reading, of coding and decoding, operate at many different scales - including cultural ones - during any particular period of use of a piece of software. One other related thing that occurs on the web frequently is people blocking spiders, from search engines etc. from their sites - that is to say from people / machines reading their data in certain ways. I wonder, given a perhaps increased emphasis on 'using' or perceiving the data on a site in the 'correct' way, how you perceive the WebTracer operating in this context? NP: Well, there's quite a range of issues you have highlighted here, but as you point out they all stem from the same old internet (or hypertext) argument of freedom of form/media versus control of form/media. As I touched upon, in answer to a previous question, the nature of the internet and associated technological media has meant that different parties see different means to different ends. The ongoing process of encoding the theoretically open system of the web is an inevitable development of it's popularisation and commodification. Reducing information to a series of eight.dot.three file formats and locking those formats into the development and distribution of software applications, serves to create a language that is both arcane and specific. Such frames placed around the dataspace of the net have a dual purpose; On the one hand they contextualise and compartmentalise the medium into bite sized chunks, which users can familiarise themselves with and reflect already existing metaphors or schema; On the other hand they tie up data and medium to statements about ownership and intellectual property. With the definition of a system comes the ability to quantify it and commodify it. A natural extension of this practice is the concern over infringement of these definitions or alternative readings and systems (hence the blocking of autonomous agents e.t.c.). The web has gone from a very open media which grew because of it's inherent qualities of 'openess' into a system overloaded with the imposed frameworks and metaphors of commercialising agencies. There becomes an "official" way to browse, syndicated by whoever has the largest presence in the definition of the term. I'm not saying that applications such as webtracer are in any way countering that trend (in a sense they are providing further reworkings) but perhaps they will make people aware that there are still different ways of viewing any system. MF: You mention the difference between flatter, or database driven sites and those that have a more hierarchically ordered structure. Would you say that one of the things that WebTracer and other pieces of software that map links between sites is to effectively flatten all sites into a 'plateau'? In a sense, yes, but the action is of course not a physical/dimensional flattening but rather a psychlogical reduction of the intricacies of data into one specific analysis. Webmapping software is concerned with certain features or issues in hypertext, the rest it can ignore from it's resulting output. Obviously there are many factors which affect and dictate the production of a web site, but most webmapping software is reductive and formalistic. MF: Following on from this, how do you see people using the software? How do you use it? I would like to see people using it in an almost sculptural way, there is a certain aesthetic kick of of revealing the inherent structure of a site which I think appeals to a lot of people. I would also like to think that it could be used practically as well as an information design analysis tool, but i suspect that it would need more commercial development for this. I have used it for both these purposes, but I think that what I enjoy most about it is the pseudo filmic way you can move from node to node across a mapped site as if it were a medical examination. I have already had many suggestions from users of some very varied and creative ways of using the application from both the designer and the user point of view. MF: There's a bundle of other material on the nullpointer site, from the relocated material of dividebyzero.org to sound generation software in which you seem to be exploring other potential spaces for software to go. What are the key ways in which software can be developed that mainstream software is missing out on at the moment? I think that developing software is a real double-edged sword. As you write new software, you become acutely aware that you will be continually restricting aspects of it's functionality, to suit your needs. You can't help then but reflect on the way this process occurs in all the other software you use and even in the tools you write your own software with. One of the few ways to counter this trend is the open source movement. Open source isn't just about code either, it relates to a whole set of attitudes that can benefit the resulting software. The video games industry thrives on the developer community and is one of the most cutting edge sectors of the industry. There is also a less visual but equally important area within academic developer community (IRCAM,MIT e.t.c.) Each area of the developer community has skills that can benefit the others. In my own work I try not to restrict myself to working only in one community or with one programming environment and I will use code or approaches that are already available and then warp them to my own personal ambitions. I would like to see simpler products coming from the mainstream software market, but with a much greater facility for mods and patches to be developed by the user community. If it wasn't such a janky program, I'd love to see the Quake modmakers get to work on Microsoft Word;) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 89.0 <nettime> Rachel Baker interview / tigertx matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 30 Aug 2001 20:57:12 +0100 This interview was carried out by email with Rachel Baker over July and August 2001 to follow up the tigertxt project an sms network created in collaboration with the HUll City FC zine, Amber Nectar. MF: you recently completed 'Tigertxt' a project working with Amber Nectar, the football fanzine of Hull City to produce a temporary SMS network for the zine and for the fans of the club. What kind of situation was Hull City in when the project started, how did the connection with Amber Nectar come about? RB: I'm just going to start with a bit of context. The football industry in the UK became a point of fascination for me for several reasons it is a massively important motor for the broadcasting industry and hence the Internet industry. It drives huge markets for each, predicated on feeding the passion and identity needs of the football fans. But the Internet has definitly brought some by-product activity along with it. The fans can very quickly form communities and start to self-organise. Corruption runs rife throughout the football clubs and coupled with the fact that the Premiership clubs are hoovering up all the money, the lower division clubs are prone to bankruptcy. This leaves the fans wanting to act, and Internet has helped many of them to form co-ops and independent supporters organisations. This is what happened at Hull City FC, a victim of management corruption and the unfair economy of the football industry. The project started at the point when Hull City FC had been 'rescued' or bought by Adam Pearson, former commercial director at Sheffield Utd. That meant I'd missed the boat on the momentum created by the crisis, when fans didn't know wether they would have a football club or not in their city. I went to couple of Tigers Co-Op meetings with the intention of documenting the process of fans self-organising. This is where I met Les Motherby, accidental media spokesperson on behalf of the fans and editor of Amber Nectar, (Hull City's ubiquitous fanzine). My agenda was to get involved in some local community actions in Hull and the football club situation provided this but I needed someone to introduce me to the whole narrative. The idea for the mobile phone platform was originally intended as a means of developing a communications system for a specific group of people that acted as a gateway between other mediums e.g Internet and print. AmberNectar already covered both of these and they had a presence that was needed for people to relate to. MF: Why did the project last for a fixed period of time? Where there advantages in this? RB:The project hasn't finished as a far as I'm concerned ... we still have some SMS credits left and there is still the possibility of getting some sponsorship for more SMS credits. There are no advantages in the project being temporary because the subscribers don't get a chance to experiment with it and feel confident to use it for their own ends. MF: Within the context of the Tigertxt work another initiative Twinfan came about, what was this? In what ways did it work? RB: Twinfan was set up because I was showing Tigertxt at a digital arts festival in Maribor, Slovenia and I decided it would be fun to use the SMS gateway to get Maribor fans connected with Hull fans. I wanted to attract local Maribor football fans into the gallery. But it didn't really work, probably because there was no real reason for Maribor fans to be interested in Hull fans, PARTICULARLY when invited to be in the context of an arts festival. I was just playing with the notion of football as an international language - which it definitely is... MF: How did the project work in relationship to Amber Nectar and to other media covering the club? What kind of things did it allow to be said? RB: Tigertxt allowed for a raw, personal text commentary by Les at live matches. It also allowed for me to send the odd STATS text , comparing social statistics gleaned from Hull City Council's annual report with Hull City FC stats. It allowed fans to direct their communication at players. SMS is obviously limited as a medium for expressing ideas through language, you only have 160 characters. But football fans are well able to express their feelings simply and directly through terrace chants, which can agitate and affect the state of play very powerfully. But Hull City fans were not in a very agitational frame of mind when we started Tigertxt. They'd had enough of provocative opinions about corruption etc, and just wanted a bit of success on the field. Also Amber Nectar saw the project as a 'service' for their subscribers rather than a political or cultural tool. When I began thinking about this project there were 2 pnenomena that I had decided were significant and I wanted to converge them. 1)empowerment of the football fans in relation to clubs 2)the mobile phone as a tool for producing localised zine media . Evidence for the first phenomena rested on things like the formation of Tigers Co-Op on the part of fans to rescue Hull City FC from extinction due to corrupt management of the Club. I was impressed at seeing football fan culture mobilising itself through new media technologies i.e internet and phone. However, the football fan is not generally politically motivated, only specifically (like road hauliers) - they just want their team to win. They are willing to be exploited as long as the team succeeds and as long as their identitification with a community and with the pursuit of glory, remains intact. They will only get political if the team consistently fails. (i.e Corrupt management of a successful team would not be cause for political activism, its just the norm) For a brief moment Hull city fans were asking questions about the club and even the local council. But that moment has passed. Evidence for the second phenomena rests on the mobile phone used in drug dealing, co-ordinating activist demonstrations, etc. That the mobile phone could work in conjunction with street publishing media i.e the poster, the flyer, the zine, was an untested theory. I just instinctively believe that it could given the right context to do it with - football culture in Hull, may not be the right context. However, the financial interests invested in the technological infrastucture by big TelCo's mitigates against the mobile phone being used as a medium for zine publishing from street to web. Yes, we can cheaply build independent sms gateway servers for the convergence of web and mobile phone and this is exciting, but circumnavigating the owners of cellular infrastructures is just not immediately possible. Having to bulk-buy text messages is proving expensive. DIY zine media is not supposed to be expensive. Mobile phone and football culture both exist within the TelCo's industry and the football industry, and the financial agendas are too huge and overwhelming. With merchandising, Sky, Cable TV, Interactive TV, Internet and media rights, football is big business. The football fan is now viewed as a consumer - they even view themselves as consumers. (When encountering Tigertxt many fans immediately asked 'how much does it cost me?') Its hardly surprising, and the heavy commercialisation of football will get even more extreme with New Media channels looking to further exploit the passion and brand loyalty of the fan. In the delivery of information the football fan is expecting a service wether it be from a fanzine or from Total Football. The fanzines are beginning see themselves as a professional service and buy into glossy presentation. Ultimately their unofficial, critical, independent, uncensored status is under threat - since the desire to make it pay, and for club approval, is overwhelming. The independent fanzine editor of today is the official club website manager of tomorrow. My intention for Tigertxt was as a mobile extension to the Amber Nectar fanzine, with location-based response via SMS feeding back into the Zine publication. (Mobile media by the fans for the fans - how trite!) But this reveals certain idealistic assumptions I made about fanzines, and fans being pro-actively engaged etc. The momentum behind Tigers Co-Op has fizzled out. There is no requirement for 'situationist' media intervention of any kind in Hull since there is no 'situation' any more. Hull City FC is in the play-offs. To believe that fans are interested in generating their own content through mobile phone media may be misguided. The 'service' model remains entrenched. They may as well wait for the official club mobile phone service to arrive. But also, designing an open, independent, 2 way send/receive mobile media model seems to be expensive aswell as romantic. I thought 2500pounds would be enough. Hmm. Amber Nectar could have published at least 5 issues or more of the fanzine with that. (As with streaming servers, the Arts Council may have to recognise the need for providing sms servers for the independent non-profit sector.) So what are the implications of going with the service model and developing Tigertxt as a commercial venture? Ofcourse I was aware of the entrepreneurial possibilities when I began and I have no problems with people exploiting Tigertxt as a commercial venture but that means everybody must win, including Amber Nectar. And I guess it has to be done as a proper business proposal. MF: There's a transition in work by people connected with irational and by others towards work that provides what might be called infrastructure. Programming for particular groups or uses; establishing setting up contexts in which other people carry out the 'expressive' work normally expected from those allocated the role of artist. How has this shift in activity been thought through? RB: It s been thought through in as much as there is a desire on the part of Irational artists to find means of empowering groups rather than an individual artist and that networking technologies can be used effectively to this end, and public art institutions will fund this. However, its always tricky if you are not part of the group in question. I imposed myself on the football fans in Hull so it didnt work out so well. I should have been braver, used my distance and non-integration to challenge them. I used to dislike the elevation of the Artist as sole proprietor of expression in public culture. But actually that might not be a bad system in some cases. There is a general human need for roles it seems. The artist can act as a provocateur or a lever to challenge these roles but it will always snap back superficially to some system that makes sense to everybody. You be the artist, I'll be the football fan. MF: You say that you wanted in some way to get involved in some community politics in Hull. Why - or more precisely, in which ways - did you want to do this? You list a number of ways in which you could be categorically excluded from the fans. Was this basis for the attraction for some kind of involvement? RB: Hull is an ugly, degaded and brutal place to be. Flat and exposed to cold winds on the North East coast it seems like a very inhospitable place to settle. Ive never seen such poor housing and ugly town planning. If I was growing up there I would be very angry, miserable and psychologically disturbed. You just know that the place is run by a council with very little imagination and a lot of corruption. I'm not surprised Hull has some of the highest crime statistics. I'm not surprised there is a large Asylum Seeker community dumped there. I'm not surprised they are regularly harrassed. I AM surprised there's not a riot everyday. There is a tiny art community, mostly generated by the art college. But I noticed that the art produced there is rarely 'socially engaged.' It's actually very high quality, formally and conceptually. As if the best reaction to the poor social state of affairs in Hull is an absurdist and avant garde one, which I can sympathise with. But it's an escape or an avoidance. The escape for much of the local population in Hull is Hull City FC. This is essentially a civic concern at the heart of a community that will collectively and visibly demonstrate their anger at its potential disappearance but not their anger at the levels of poverty in the city or the quality of its housing. To me this is absurd and surreal. And interesting. The passion for the football club is NOT manipulated and not misconceived, its very genuine. Its where all the love goes. A collective grassroots demonstration of any kind is attractive to me in a place like Hull. I look at the crowd in the stadium and I fantasise about the same crowd smashing up the horrible Princess Quay shopping centre. But all the energy and aggression is focussed on the game. And I think its probably better that way. More creative in fact. MF: What was the relationship with the commissioning organisations to the project and the wider context of the institutional framing of the work? RB: The art college was the sponsor. The University of Lincoln and Humberside. Actually I was asked to facilitate a streaming media infrastructure that would available to students at HTBA but there were many problems to do with insufficient networks at HTBA and bureaucratic problems at the college. There was a bizarre moment involving the posters. These were to be displayed in pubs and directed at the football fans. But all the institutions involved in funding or supporting me required a mention on the poster somewhere. Instead of NTL or NIKE, the football fan was to be bombarded by logos from Arts Council of England, Hull Time-based Arts Yorkshire Arts, The Media Centre, Interactive Solutions, Hull College of ARt and Design. None of them seemd to realise that these institutional references would be offputting or unrecognisable to the average football fan. It was an uncomfortable clash but actually I'm more willing to go with it. I'd really like to produce a Hull City football shirt customised with all the above art institution logos. MF: The shirt would be well smart! Would a good way round this, and perhaps a more clear way of understanding the kind of work you are doing be to say that the posters actually form an integral part of the work? It'd therefore be ludicrous to have a sponsor-logo stamped on it RB: Yes the posters are an integral part of the work, and I wouldnt have thought it needed spelling out, but maybe it does. MF: You mention that some of the elements of the project weren't taken up in ways that you might have hoped for, or that the timing or the work maybe didn't fit with the ways things were moving with the relationship between the fans and the club. I wonder, given the rhetoric of community forming and empowerment that is often found in both talk about communications technology and 'socially engaged' or 'community' art, what are the way in which aspects of a multilayered work which are neither spectacular failures, nor spectacular successes can be acknowledged in the work and also talked about and thought through? RB: Well, we have another season to come and I'm aleady receiving email from fans wanting to know if Tigertxt is resuming. Interviews like this one are important for me to reveal the work and I guess it could be published on the AMber Nectar website or the paper fanzine. I would like to leave the community empowerment rhetoric and concentrate on the existing language of the fans (very male and uncompromising) and just maybe challenge it slightly at odd angles. MF: I was wondering more whether, in the context of the networks and contacts that you operate in there was enough space and time given to talking through and learning from projects in a more collective and possibly recorded way. RB: Not really, especially if its football-related because in the context you are referring to there is no real interest in this culture. I suppose a formal presentation of the project at some point could happen if I organised it, expecially at HTBA, but I need to resolve a few issues with Amber Nectar before that happens. MF: But, following that, in what ways do you think texting allows conventionalised uses of language to be challenged or played with? RB: You are working with a limited and simplified use of english. You have to be sensitive to the existing linguistic codes of the target group i.e the hull city FC fans. Its very specific, humour is needed, the right references etc. Thats why Les was doing most of the texting. But I like the idea of randomly dropping in 2 alien linguistic forms:- e.g hard social stats and intimate messages. But this might be too arty and disturbing for the linguistic order of things and be rejected by the Hull City fan fraternity. Still, we must all cope with rejection at times I suppose. MF: I'd like to look at how the project is represented to those not in it. Obviously the primary focus is on the 'social sculpture' the the communicative dynamic that is opened up. But there's this other element, which how the work is then passed on in different circles and contexts. I'd like to thread this back to firstly, the way the work is related to the sponsoring institutions, and secondly, how this very lived network aesthetic that you work with shows itself outside of its immediate enactment. RB: For the institutions, it's: Documentation Documentation Documentation I 'm really rubbish at this. I don't have a good relationship with the camera. But really I needed to record myself giving out the flyers to queueing fans and capturing the posters displayed in pubs and street. I may have to stage it. MF: For the other part? RB: Then there's the archiving of all SMS texts. Which I like a lot, but I had to suggest this to Interactive Solutions before they realised it was an obvious thing to do. Publishing the archive on the web is even more appealing as an artist, but not if you're a commercial client which is who Interactive Solutions ainly deal with I suppose. In mediation and documention, network and process-based art takes on the form of a narrative, a story, a myth which is very important to look after and sustain. But this is hard work and doesn't get funded properly. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 90.0 <nettime> Bifo / Berardi, interview on 'The Factory of Unhappiness' matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 11 Jun 2001 12:15:20 +0100 The following is an interview with Franco Berardi, Bifo, that took place by email during May and June 2001 focussing around the themes of his new book describing the development of the 'Cognitariat'. The 'Factory of Unhappiness', (La fabbrica dell'infelicitŕ. New economy e movimento del cognitariato) was recently published by Derive Approdi. (http://www.deriveapprodi.org/) MF: In your new book, 'The Factory of Unhappiness' you describe a class formation, the 'cognitariat' - a conflation of cognitive worker and proletarian, working in 'so-called jobs'. You've also previously used the idea of the 'Virtual Class'. What are the qualities of the conitariat and how might they be distinguished from this slightly higher strata depicted by Kroker and Weinstein in 'Data Trash'? Bifo: I like to refer to the concept of virtual class, which is a class that does not actually exist. It is only the abstraction of the fractal ocean of productive micro-actions of the cognitive workers. It is a useful concept, but it does not comprehend the existence (social and bodily) of those people who perform virtual tasks. But the social existence of virtual workers is not virtual, the sensual body of the virtual worker is not virtual. So I prefer to speak about cognitive proletariat (cognitariat) in order to emphasize the material (I mean physical, psychological, neurological) disease of the workers involved in the net-economy. MF: The political / economic theorisation of post-fordism which has much of its roots in Italian activism and thought of the sixties, seventies and onwards is now an established term in describing post-industrial, work conditions. You present a variant of this, and one which suggests that the full political dynamics of this change have yet to be appreciated - how can we describe the transition from 'The Social Factory' to 'The Factory of Unhappiness'? Bifo: Semiokapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, and submits them to machinic speed. It compels our cognition, our emotional hardware to follow the rhythm of the net-productivity. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because cyberspace is an unbounded sphere, whose speed can accelerate without limits. But cybertime (the time of attention, of memory, of imagination) cannot be speeded up beyond a limit. Otherwise it cracks... And it is actually cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is spreading thoroughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The current crisis of the new economy has to be seen as consequence of this nervous breakdown. Once upon a time Marx spoke about overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. Nowadays it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. This is why the social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of netproduction is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the virtual class. We are now beginning to become aware of it, so we are able to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, in permanent electrocution. Snafu: This consideration opens up, in your book, an interesting reflection about the mutated relationship between free and productive time. In the Fordist factory, working time is repetitive and alienating. Workers start to live elsewhere, as soon as they leave the workplace. The factory conflicts with the "natural desires" of the worker. On the contrary, in the post-fordist model, productivity absorbs the social and psychological capacities of the worker. In this way, free time progressively loses its interest, in favour of what you call the contemporary "reaffectivization" of labour. On the other side, you depict the net-economy as a giant "brainivore". My question regards the apparent contradiction embedded in this double movement. How is it possible that people are at the same time so attached to their job and so exhausted by it? What are the psychological reasons that push people to build their own cages? Bifo: Every person involved in the Net-economy knows this paradox very well. It is the paradox of social identity. We feel motivated only by our social role, because the sensuous life is more and more anorexic, more and more virtualized. Simultaneously we experience a desensualization of our life because we are so obsessed by social performance. It is the effect of the economic backmail, the increasing cost of daily life: we need to work more and more in order to gain enough money to pay the expensive way of life we are accustomed to. But it is also the effect of a growing investment of desire in the field of social performance, of competition, of productivity. snafu: Moving onto a material level, economic conditions seem pretty irrelevant to the formation of the cognitariat. But, we all know that enormous disparities take place within the net-economy. Do you think that all of the cognitive workers live on their body the same level of exploitation? And what do these workers are really demanding, more money or more free time? Do you think that the stress from hyper-productivity is the only factor in the possible emergence of a self-consciousness in the virtual class? Bifo: I do not think at all that the economic condition is irrelevant. You know, people has been forced to accept low salaries, flexible and unlimited exploitation, a work day with no limits because every single fragment of the social relationship has become expensive. Before the liberist frenzy you could spend a night with friends and go around in the city with few money or no money at all. Nowadays, after the liberist therapy, every human relationship has been marketed. Gratuity has disappeared from the landscape of human relationship. This is why the human relationship is no less and less human. MF: Following from this, in what ways are people developing forms of resistance, organisation, solidarity that shift the algorithms of control in their favour in 'the movement of the cognitariat'. Or in other words, what forms - and given the difference between the 'felicita' of the original title and 'happiness' in English - might the production of happiness take? Bifo: Resistance is residual. Some people still create social networks, like the centri sociali in Italy: places where production and exchange and daily life are protected from the final commodification. But this is a residual of the past age of proletarian community. This legacy has to be saved, but I do not see the future coming out from such resistance. I see it in the process of recombination. I see this movement, spreading all over the world, since the days of the Seattle riots as the global movement of self organisation of cognitive work. You know, I do not see this movement as resistance against globalisation. Not at all. This is a global movement against corporate capitalism. Problem is: where is it receiving its potency from? I don't think that this is the movement of the marginalized, of the unemployed, of the farmers, of the industrial workers fighting against the delocalisation of the factories. Oh yes, those people are part of the movement in the streets. But the core of this movement resides in the process of conscious self-organization of cognitive work all over the world, thanks to the Net. This movement represents, in my view, the beginning of a conscious reshaping of the techno-social interfaces of the net, operated by the cognitarians. Scientists, researchers, programmers, mediaworkers, every segment of the networked general intellect are going to repolarize and reshape its episteme, its creative action. MF: You were involved in manifestations against the OECD meeting in Bologna. What are the tactics developing in that movement and elsewhere that you see as being most useful? What are those that perhaps connect the cognitariat to other social and political currents? Bifo: I do not think that the street is the place where this movement will grow. In the streets it was symbolically born. The street riot has been the symbolic detonator, but the net-riot is the real process of trasformation. When eighty thousand people were acting in the streets of Seattle, three, four million people (those who were in virtual contact with the demonstration thanks to the Internet) were taking part in a big virtual meeting all around the globe, chatting, discussing, reading. All those people are the cognitariat. So I think that the global movement against corporate capitalism is absolutely right when it goes to the streets, organizing blockades like in Seattle, Prague, Bologna, and Quebec City, and next July in Genova. But this is only symbolic action that fuels the real movement of sabotage and of reshaping, which has to be organized in every lab, in every place where cognitarians are producing, and creating the technical interfaces of the social fabric. The industrial working class needed a political party in order to organize autonomy, struggle, self-organization, social change. The netwoked class of the cognitariat finds the tool of self-organization in the same network that is also the tool of exploitation. As far as the forms of the struggle in the streets are concerned, I think we should be careful. This movement does not need violence, it need a theatricalisation of the hidden conflict that is growing in the process of mental work. Mental work, once organized and consciously managed can be very disruptive for capitalist rule. And can be very useful in reshaping the relationship between technology and social use of it. snafu: I'd like to know what the 'keywords of resistance within every lab' that you mentioned are, and to ask what the technical interfaces of the social fabric are? In particular i'd like to understand if, when you mention the techno-social interfaces, you refer to non-proprietary systems such as Linux, or if you have a broader view. But also, if the shared production of freeware and open source softwares represents a shift away from capitalism or if we are only facing the latest, most suitable form of capitalism given in this historical phase. As far as i know, military agencies and corporations use and develop free software as well as hacker circuits... Bifo: Well, I do not see things in this antagonistic (dialectical) way. I mean, I do not think that freeware and open source are outside the sphere of capitalism. Similarly I do not think that the worker's collective strike and self organisation in the old Fordist factory was ouside the sphere of capitalism. Nothing is outside the sphere of capitalism, because capitalism is not a dialectic totality suited to be overwhelmed (Auf-heben) by a new totality (like communism, or something like that). Capital is a cognitive framework of social activity, a semiotic frame embedded in the social psyche and in the human Techne. Struglle against capitalism , refusal of work, temporary autonomous zones, open source and freeware... all this is not the new totality, it is the dynamic recombination allowing people to find their space of autonomy, and push Capitalism towards progressive innovation. snafu: Another question is about the network. It can be used as a tool of self-organization, but it is also a powerful means of control. Do you think that there are new forms of life emerging within the network? I mean, can the network guarantee the rise of a new form of political consciousness comparable to the one emerging with mass parties? At the moment, global networks such as nettime, syndicate, rhizome and indymedia remain platforms for exchanging information more than real infrastructures providing support, coordination and a real level of cooperation (with few exceptions, such as the Toywar). Do you see the development of the network of the cognitarians, from a means of info-distribution to a stable infrastructure? How the different communities - such as hackers, activists, net.artists, programmers, web designers - will define a common agenda? At the moment each of them seem to me pretty stuck on their own issues, even when they are part of the same mailing list... Bifo: The net is a newborn sphere, and it not only going effect conscious and political behaviour, but it is also going to re-frame anthropology and cognition. The Internet is not a means (an instrument) of poltical organisation, and it is not a means (an instrument) of information. It is a public sphere, an anthropological and cognitional environment. Recently I heard that number of scientists all over the world are struggling in order to obtain the publication of the results of pblicly-funded research. "Scientists around the world are in revolt against moves by a powerful group of private corporations to lock decades of publicly funded western scientific research into expensive, subscription-only electronic databases. At stake in the dispute is nothing less than control over the fruits of scientific discovery - millions of pages of scientific information which may hold the secrets of a cure for Aids, cheap space travel or the workings of the human mind." The Internet is simultaneously the place of social production, and the place of selforganisation. MF: After the May Day demonstrations in central London, at the central end of which the police, several thousand of them, penned in a similar number of demonstrators for hours, it strikes me that It's almost as if the police are determined themselves to teach the people that staying static is a mistake. Certainly though, new ways of moving collectively in space are being invented and many of those are being tried out in the street. But perhaps amongst other currents there is also a reluctance or a nervousness about doing something concrete, about using power in a way that might risk repeating the impositions we have all experienced. On the one hand it could be said that this meakness is a strength, (if not just a public expression of a vague moral unease) but on the other it could be understood precisely as a result of this awareness that people have that their actions are always implicated in a multi-layered network of medial reiteration. Centralised networks that stratify and imprison people in the case of CCTV, but that also networks that are at once diffuse but that also contain, as you say, 'exploitation'. Given this, what are the ways in which you claim that this 'net-riot' creates transformation or exerts its political strength? Bifo: I see two different (and interrelated) stages of the global revolt: one is the symbolic action that takes place in the street, the other is the process of selforganisation of cognitive work, of scientists, researchers, giving public access to the results of the cognitive production, unlocking it from the hold of corporations. It may sound paradoxical. The physical action of facing police in the streets, of howling below the windows of IMF, WTO and G8, this is just the symbolic trigger of the real change, which takes place in the mental environment, in the ethereal cyberspace. MF: Returning to the issue of the relationship of bodies to the machines with which they work and to the information structures they form part of, it seems there are two strands to this. One is the relatively straightforward attention to the ergonomic conditions of working with computers, repetitive strain injury / carpal tunnel syndrome, eyestrain, the position of becoming an appendage to a telephone in a call centre etc. The other is how bodies are opened up as spaces to be interrogated by information systems. The obvious example of this is in the way that genetic material is thought about, as something that can be isolated and databased, but also as an 'agent' whose purpose is to deliver 'information' to the flesh that interprets and realises its instructions and which we will see as providing a rationale for the 'improvement' of bodies. Related to this, but occurring in a more diffuse way, is the increased emphasis on diagnosing what can be understood as information processing sicknesses - the recent study that claimed that 70% of all males have some form of autism for instance. Most interesting here is the idea of some of these syndromes, such as Asperger's Syndrome, which it is often speculated is one enjoyed by Bill Gates, are increasingly understood to be productive in certain ways. What might this suggest about the way notions of health in relation to information and productivity are treated? Bifo: I am not able to answer your question properly, because it implies so many fields of knowledge which I have only heard of. I see that the Global Mind is creating a sort of Global body, which is the continuum of distant organisms connected through the nonorganic electronic network. The Global Body is the productive body of the net, but it is also the space where viruses spread, the space of contagion. So therapy should work at the same level, at the collective level. This is the idea of therapy proposed by Felix Guattari. MF: It's clear also that the means of access to becoming a member of this class are becoming hardened as its function becomes more defined. In the UK and elsewhere, in the sphere of education there is a substantial slippage of the mask of Liberal Humanism, with education 'as a value in itself' moving towards strictly instrumental vocational training to create this new workforce. (This is also mirrored in the economic pain that students are made to suffer if they are to complete their studies). You are involved with a Hypermedia course in Bologna. How is an awareness of the composition of the cognitariat built into the course? Bifo: I have been teaching in a public school for web designers and videomakers, but my teaching experience is very fragmented and scarcely academic. But your question is very interesting, because it pinpoints the importance of a new didactic theory. What should we teach to our students? What should they learn? I say that we should make them conscious of their belonging to the process, and we should at the same time show them the possibility of existing outside the process. The danger in the process of the transmission of knowledge is the following: the 'power point' technicalities creating the Novum Organum of Science. Knowledge reduced to a functional system of frequently asked questions, the digital formalisation of didactics, of the method and of the contents of knowledge. You remember that Karl Marx wrote somewhere that the proletariat is the heir of classical german philosophy. It was just a metaphor. But now we can say in a stricly literal sense that the cognitariat is the heir of modern science and philosophy, and also the heir of the modern art and poetry. The social liberation of the cognitariat is also their appropriation of the technosocial effects of knowledge. (Interviewers: snafu, Matthew Fuller) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 91.0 <nettime> Luciana Parisi Interview matthew fuller nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:08:54 +0200 Luciana Parisi Interview "Jungle laws, animals laws, seabed laws: what are you defending mate?" Lee Scratch Perry Luciana Parisi is the author of the recently published book 'Abstract Sex, philosophy, biotechnology and the mutations of desire' (Continuum, 2004). This interview took place by email in September and October 2004. Matthew Fuller: Your use of the term 'sex' is used, in Lynn Margulis' words, in the following way: 'Sex in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender. Sex is a genetic mixing in organisms that operates at a variety of levels; it occurs in some organisms at more than one level simultaneously'. (Slanted Truths, p.285). Part of your research for the book involved taking part in a study group run by Margulis. What were the practices this group was involved in? How did the working life of biologists intersect with your interests? Luciana Parisi: First of all, I must say that Margulis' definition of sex is fascinating as it directly intervenes and cuts across fields of study - the sciences and the humanities. The legacy of the notion of sex as entangled with sexual coupling has been crucial for the definition of gender. The endosymbiotic definition of sex has always struck me due to its potential reopening of what constitutes sex and gender in biological and cultural terms. Indeed, it shows a daring capacity to reinvent the evolutionary history of the human on a vaster time scale traversed by parallel phyla of transmission. In this sense, it enabled Abstract Sex to follow a transversal path to the nature culture, sex and gender dichotomies by investigating the becoming cultural of a non-given nature. Lynn Margulis's laboratory introduced me to the parallel world of bacteria. You can't help but be captured by the complexity of such diverse colonies of the underworld, their collective rhythms of transmission, and their futuristic architectures. People working in the laboratory also participated in the study groups. There were several study groups but those I participated in had scientists from different ages and scientific backgrounds - geologists, oceanographers, molecular biologists etc. These were more like gatherings of people who shared interests in the theory of endosymbiosis and that worked together to sustain it from different angles - the geological research of fossils for example carried out by Mark McMenanim's through his hypothesis of Hypersea. We also went for small expeditions in the woods, for night viewing of stars with astronomers and so on. It was an amazing experience. You could not help but being excited about this adventure in the unnatural dimensions of the natural world. Indeed, rather than feeling closer to a given nature, you actually felt closer to its capacities to vary across scales, from the molecular world of bacterial aquatic colonies to clusters of fungi and extraterrestrial life. Yet the whole atmosphere of adventure had nothing to do with an attitude of 'discovering' nature or 'revealing' its secrets. It was much more interesting and new for me compared to what I had been reading about scientists in the main literature of science studies. I mean here the attitude was closer to a passionate fabrication of what constituted nature, and more specifically a daring fabrication that endosymbiosis posed to the entire scientific community. Although there was a strong sense of sharing a 'minor' science, or better a 'minoritarian' hypothesis in science, there was also a strong sense that the hypothesis had a fundamental impact on what we take nature to be. And here I would like to make a reference to Stengers, who reminds us of the collective and passionate process that presupposes each innovative scientific proposition that dares to ask "And if?". Margulis's hypothesis clearly dares asking: "and if the history of bacteria was going on in the history of multicellulars, and if we should understand ourselves on the basis of symbiotic populations of bacteria?" (See I. Stengers, Power and Invention, Situating Science, University of Minnesota Press, 1997:136.7). Retrospectively, I can say that the study group then was first of all involved in the practice of daring scientific truths, which for me explicitly questioned the Platonic, Aristotelian and Cartesian ontological models and thus pointed to different ethical and political questions. These practices were then an action towards the articulation of a less given natural world. In this sense, the working life of biologists also became relevant to my interest in minor sciences. Yet before being able to see the importance of their practices, I had to twist the critical head that I had inherited from the structuralist and deconstructivist approaches to life sciences. For these approaches scientific truths could not exist outside the text, the binarism of nature and culture, mind and body, power and resistance. Hence, to put it crudely, the object of science is always already inscribed upon, limited from and controlled by the discourse of science, the metaphysical legacy of patriarchy and colonialism - the presupposition of the self to the other, male to female, white to black, sex to gender and so on. On the other hand, however, I had always been suspicious of the vitalist and existentialist belief in the spontaneity of the body - ultimately free from the mechanics of discourse. From this standpoint, the encounter with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza has been crucial for developing an approach to science and technology that neither starts from an ontology of the given nor from an inherited structure that cannot account from change beyond the mere shifting of positions. For my work these critical approaches that have been dominating academic research for the last 20-30 years - I refer to structuralism and deconstructivism - did not enable an engagement with the process of the modification of a body accounting for an entangled nature-culture continuum. In other words, these approaches did not highlight a way to take seriously a process of becoming cultural of nature. On the contrary, I felt strongly at the time, nature was cornered in the hands of a given ontology or in the discursive disciplinary construction of science. In my work the crucial relation between science and culture is defined by a key access to nature as a process under construction. My interest in the practices of biologists then became a question of understanding how they were participating closely in the mutating fabric of life. In this sense, I agree with Stengers who argues that before judgement and the establishment of paradigmatic truth, there is a sea of events in which the object of scientific enquiry participates in its own perception and construction as an artefact. Thus, the working practices of biologists are themselves practices of invention each time daring to reconstruct a given. Of course the difference between these practices will lie less in the scientific discipline per se than in the molecular and molar assemblages that characterize them all. MF: This is an extremely dense and rich text that works on a number of levels to open up possibilities for thought about life, evolution, politics, gender, and it is one that is also very optimistic. In a sense you achieve this by articulating a new grounds for such optimism in a vividly rendered way that also challenges the usual modalities of human optimism. If optimism is the right word, of what kind of optimism is the book an expression of? LP: I see your point. Yet I would like to try and define this notion of optimism in a more precise way. First of all I need to say that a radical challenge to the modalities of human optimism involves an engagement with the process of human stratification. I use this word in the Deleuze-Guattari's sense of collective organizations sedimenting one upon the other across distinct layers, under certain pressures and pointing to singular thresholds. Abstract Sex addresses human stratification on three levels. The biophysical, the biocultural and the biodigital amalgamation of layers composing a constellation of bodies within bodies, each grappled within the previous and the next formation - a sort of positive feedback upon each other cutting across specific time scales. In other words, these levels of stratification constitute for Abstract Sex the endosymbiotic dynamics of organization of matter - a sort of antigenealogical process of becoming that suspends the teleology of evolution and the anthropocentrism of life. From this standpoint, the modalities of human optimism, rooted in the net substantial distinction between the good and the evil and the distinct belief in negative forces, fail to explain the continual collision and coexistence of the distinct layers. Following the law of morality, human optimism would never come to terms with its own paradoxes of construction and destruction. And if it does it is soon turned into an existential crisis giving in to the full force of negating power and thus all becomes intolerable. Once we are forced to engage with the way layers collide in the human species - the way some biophysical and biocultural sedimentations rub against each other under certain pressures and in their turn the way they are rubbed against by the biodigital mutations of sensory perception for example - than the moral stances of optimism and pessimism make no longer sense. Indeed we need to leap towards a plane debunked of ultimate moral judgement. A plane full of practice and contingent activities, where we find ourselves plunged in a field of relation - interdependent ecologies of forces (attractors, pressures, thresholds), which trigger in us modifications that resonate across all scales of organization. Abstract Sex is not the expression of the continual flow of life where everything is in continual becoming in a world of continual interconnection that ultimately makes everything redundant. It is not even expression of an ultimate raw, bare or spontaneous force of life that is intrinsic to the productive forces of the human and will therefore triumph over the apparatuses of capture - good over evil. I think that to understand the challenge that Abstract Sex poses to human optimism or pessimism it is necessary to leap onto a different ontological plane and deal with the abstract assemblages of desire in matter. This implies a radical move from notions of spontaneity and blindness in nature. Every process has then to be considered as the outcome of relations of forces increasing and decreasing certain tendencies in matter. In this sense, Abstract Sex points to a singular process of collision of strata undergoing the biodigital reengineering of life that forces us to engage with what we take a body, gender, and thus politics to be. For Abstract Sex to face - rather than remaining dismissive of - the collision of strata implies a cut from the running flow of life demanding taking a line of flight towards destratification - a felt experience of change on a nature-culture continuum. Abstract Sex is then not the expression of a new kind of optimism, but an evolutionary construction of a sentient modality of living attuned with the stratified and stratifying assemblages of desire. This requires no spontaneous force or ultimate optimism but an enormous capacity to engineer a collective striving: a Spinozist task towards the generation of common notions that build up modifications in living. It requires no longer an emotional as opposed to a rational attitude to life, a positive or a negative tone, but, more importantly, an investigation of the affective dimensions of the body (i.e., its capacities to be affected and to affect other bodies). Thus, it is a matter of changing the parameters of what counts as living and death, constructive and destructive, nature and culture, sex and gender, politics and power. It is a matter of not taking for granted the biological and cultural stratification that compose each body of relations insofar as these are not internally given or externally constructed. They are rather in movement, under a metastable process that goes back in time and forward in the future. Of course changing parameters is not a recipe for happiness. For ultimate happiness is the idealistic state for human optimism. On the contrary, joyful passions are the real immanent engineers of new modifications requiring the collective agreement of bodies-minds and their capacities to push the agreement on a newly constituted level. In this sense, Abstract Sex proposes a schizogenesis: ontology under continual construction ceaselessly intervening in the ontology of giveness and lack. It is not optimism that the book expresses. Abstract Sex only exposes a full warning equipped with key weapons: do not dismiss the daily encounter with black holes, strange attractors, and unexpected changes; cultivate joyful passions and their capacities to become positive actions (the collective intensive building up of new worlds). In particular, the cultivation of joyful passions - i.e., passions that increase a collective power of action - demands an active participation in the mutations of matter. MF: You mention affect and joy here as important guiding and productive principles. Abstract Sex however uses the word 'pleasure' as something whose logic or present configuration should be disturbed. What is the relationship between, or how can we differentiate, the Spinozist pleasures of potentiality and this other pleasure? LP: Affect and joy have in common a certain passion or capacity of being affected open to futurity - becoming. For Abstract Sex, affect and joy involve a masochist assemblage of desire that as Deleuze explains is not guided by the principle of pleasure: the economy of genital and reproductive sex. On the contrary, such assemblage exposes the necessity to be affected so as to produce the body anew in total independence from Oedipal pleasure. The capacity of being affected then points to a supersensorial suspension of pleasure, disavowal of sexuality, expectation of pain, which is better understood as a rhythmic combination of velocities: the coexistent tendencies to slow down (waiting) and speed up (expecting) giving way to new bodily vibrations that have nothing to do with climactic pleasure. The masochist assemblage subtracts desire from its capture in the homeostatic circle of pleasure, where the Oedipal order of heterosexuality and sexual reproduction is there only to reinforce the sadistic tendency to eradicate femininity all together as discussed by Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies. For Abstract Sex, the capacity to be affected has in germ the masochist potential of becoming woman - the destratification from the biocultural regime of pleasure and the sadist desire to accelerate the death of femininity. The capacity to be affected then tends towards a veritable capacity of desiring assemblages to become: a sort of parthenogenesis giving way to a genitaless sex, a nomadic mutating cold (non-sentimental) affectivity. The distinction between pleasure and affect concern the differentiation between a climactic organization of assemblages of desire aiming towards equilibrium versus a nonclimactic order tending towards becoming. Indeed pleasure is here understood as singular aggregation of desiring machines that under certain condition, according to certain tendencies and thresholds lend themselves to the production of quick satisfaction, which assumes the characteristics of transgression so as to return to balance. Here desire is not understood in terms of lack, as the Lacannians do, but in terms of full body of potentials tending towards their actualizations. Once captured in a homoestatic circle that repeats itself without differentiation by warding off its outside, then desire lends itself to the state of pleasure. This state more than being disturbed has to be destratified as it becomes the perfect shelter of the organism, the individual, the signifier for the spreading of sadness, paranoia, abolition, lack infecting all kinds of encounters. Affect and joy on the contrary operate in total autonomy from pleasure as they expose a distinctive assemblage of desire or singular actualization of desiring potentials that emerge from encounters between bodies that agree - i.e. their symbiotic combination enables the production of a new body or a becoming that has pushed these bodies in a new composition. In this sense, the new composition exposes the schizophrenic coexistence of desiring potentials lending themselves to the production of non-climactic or distributive desire fluctuating across regions of intensity rather than enclosing itself in an interior fighting against its outside. It is possible to argue that this fluctuating movement only navigates on an outside of rhizomatically connected regions, slightly changing their rhythm, their vibrations, and thus catalyzing all sorts of microbecomings. In this case the cultivation of joy entails entering in contact with the biophysical dynamics of desire, the metastable ecology of relations that can tend to the parthenogenic diffusion of microfemininity or that can be poisonous and spread sadness - implying a decrease in the capacity to affect and become. For Abstract Sex, the capacity to be affected has already in germs a capacity to experience joyful encounters as an activity of becoming that opens itself up to a futurity entering the present to change a state of affairs. MF: You use the word 'engineering' a number of times, as a process that sorts things out, arranges, modifies and moves materials. But this is done without the figure of the engineer, as something self-organising. When you turn in the chapter on Biodigital Sex the figure of engineering is somehow doubled. It occurs again in the guise of capital-intensive military, pharmaceutical and medical organisations deploying engineers who employ analytical and instrumental techniques in order to ensure that matter does not self-organise but that it operates according to plan, becomes a standard object. How do you see these two forms interacting? LP: Engineering as you say entails a process of selection, organization and modification, which is not piloted by an ultimate designer. Its self-organization however has not to be attributed to a sort of autopoietic system, where distinct parts sustain the whole. To some extent, I have a conceptual problem with autopoiesis as it still presupposes a certain subjection of the parts to the whole with a limited capacity for them to feedback on it. On the contrary, my use of the word engineering entails a double or mutual process whereby each actualized organization becomes a modifying dimension of the whole. Now a key notion that may help to understand how I discriminate between engineering dynamics and the intensive capitalist investment in the engineering of molecular life is the notion of selection. In Darwinism and neo-Darwinism the notion of selection has a negative attribute - i.e. it entails elimination or negative force. The function of selection employed by engineers in the manufacturing of genetic drugs, cells and tissues indeed implies that ill-fitted genetic structures will not be able to sustain themselves and will eventually - or naturally in their jargon - die. In other cases, the selective function may also imply that the ill-fitted traits are pre-established and therefore easy to eliminate once they have emerged as it happens in the now acknowledged realm of biocomputing where the recoding of genes, proteins and sequences enables a rematerialization of molecular life in vitro. Indeed this rematerialization together with the preselection of best and ill-fitted traits will lead us to the conclusion that there is an engineer, a designer of life in the world of biotechnologies or, even more so nanotechnology. As I said the key point lies in the notion and real (read virtual) function of selection. From Bergson to Simondon, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari the process of selection has been turned in a dynamics of production of the new. Selection far from eliminating deviances entails a mutual change of ecological relations (between the organism, environment and pressures) unleashing a virtual force impinging on the relation between the organism and its environment whereby their mutual capacity to change remains indeterminate. In other words, selection even when predeterminate cannot escape unleashing its residual effects in the region of relations (at the threshold of critical joint between one phase and the other) in which it has operated. In this sense, the planning and standardization of an object cannot exhaust the capacity of that object to catalyze a change in its proximate environmental relations. Thus, I see engineering assemblages and their use in the capital-intensive military, pharmaceutical and medical organizations in direct contact as if undergoing a new symbiotic merging. I mean that the use of engineering assemblages cannot occur without ecological consequences on a planetary scale - and without acknowledging the technoscientific capitalist responsibility of accelerating unexpected mutations in an interdependent ecology of relations. The work of engineers therefore is not independent from the consequences of ecological self-organizations. On the contrary, it is as if engineers were directly called in to experiment with the evolutionary capacities of the body. From another point of view however, it is clear that the investment in biotech and even more so in nanotech is linked to a paradigm of control, adjustment and optimization of engineering assemblages. Since the first wave of cybernetics, control remains the most difficult of strategies to manage populations and their environment. Control indeed cannot occur without the unexpected phase of becoming. Its affective power cannot impinge without facing the indeterminate capacities of a body of relations to change - to engineer a new dimension of the whole modifying its conditions with the rest of parts. MF: Following from this, you substantially question the model of capital's subsumption of all life processes (a theoretical moment that defines what might be a bleak telos in critical theory or the moment of a possible total systemic phase-change in accounts such as those of Hardt and Negri in Empire). What are the strata of energy-information that you suggest resist real subsumption, in what manner does this occur, and what are their interfaces to or boundaries against the mechanisms of subsumption? LP: Again I need to start by slightly changing the parameters of the relation between capital and life. In the first place, I want to point out that capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in the Anti-Oedipus, drawing amongst others from Braudel, is the result of long term contingencies and accidents and that modes of capitalization - exchange, trading, commerce - existed before industrial capitalism. From this standpoint, capitalism is not an end product of the human species. The human species, in other words, cannot be considered as the agent capitalism. It is no longer possible to dismiss the impact that sciences such as endosymbiosis, chaos theory and cybernetics have had on the notion of agency. I am trying to say that this agency is not entirely anthropomorphic, but has to include assemblages of biocultural and biotechnical stratification that feed on a kind of increasing social subjection and machinic enslavement of the human species. Yet this enslavement and subjection are not to be seen in moralist terms. Capital is neither intrinsically good nor evil. In Spinozist terms, capital interests above all seem to clash with those of the human species. Yet, this clash cannot be understood without reference to desire - assemblages of joyful and sad passions. It may be important here to remind ourselves of Deleuze and Guattari's question: why do humans desire their own enslavement? That is, in Spinozist terms: how do we account for human beings overtaken (read: possessed) by external forces and reduced to servitude? This is why Abstract Sex appreciates the work that Negri and Hardt do in Empire but at the same time distinguishes itself from it. As you also remind us, Hardt and Negri's emphasis on the phase change of capital importantly points to an ultimate autonomy of the forces of the multitude from the state and from the logic of all-encompassing profit. At the same time however, they assign this autonomy to the forces of life that do not succumb the economy of exchange, alienation and commodity fetishism. For Abstract Sex, the relation between the autonomy of force and its capitalization is not a dialectic one - which accounts for two substances - but entails a symbiotic process, the mutual coexistence of distinct assemblages of desire on a manyfolded plane. In this sense, we need to reframe the issue. It is not that life can resist capital's subsumption. Life is not to be confused with organic living energy as opposed to the inorganic energy of death - e.g., the entropic drive of capital. The challenge then is to change our understanding of energy lying at the core of our definitions of life and death, organic and inorganic. This is why endosymbiosis is so important for Abstract Sex as it forces us to wonder: what if all multicellular organic life is instead a dimension of colonies of anaerobic (nonrespiring oxygen) bacteria? This daring hypothesis forces us to question the entire model of the evolution of capital, based on the entropic selection of the most competitive, the elimination of the ill-fitted and the ultimate tendency to death. Similarly, it forces us to change our understanding of the processes of life as indeed at the same time entangled and disentangled from capital. To say that capital in its contemporary form - i.e., Empire - is a cluster of parasites sucking life from the multitude is to say that parasites are strictly distinguished from life. In other words, I am suggesting that the relation between capital subsumption and life processes is an endosymbiotic one - which points to a mutual host-guest parasiting process accounting for the formation of new worlds, neurocellular modifications of assemblages of desire. It is in this sense that Abstract Sex opposes the capital logic of an all-encompassing subsumption. From this standpoint, I suggest that the term that we are looking for to account for the destratification or becoming of layers of energy-information that are not subsumed is not resistance but lines of flight - a turning towards the collective construction of worlds. This is simply because the notion of resistance presupposes an entropic notion of energy-information. One that has to be fought through negation and warding off. At the same time, this notion may be not useful for Abstract Sex because it presupposes the ontological omnipresence of a given political model that has to be transgressed by exceeding its limits - as in a closed entropic system that can only collapse by running it out of equilibrium. The model of power that I have instead engaged with at an ontological level is a far-from equilibrium cluster of strata of energy-information. Here resistance will be ineffective, it will only increase exponentially the power of that which resistance is directed against insofar as the latter remains blind to vaster causes of metastable changes. Far-from equilibrium dynamics of organization of energy-information require dealing with a turbulent composition and decomposition of causes and their effects. It then requires a leap - the participation towards changing conditions rather than a resistance to them. Such a leap is not a jump into the void. A change in the conditions of life implies a destratification from sedimented states - biological states, states of mind, economical states, sexual states and so on. To embark in such a passage it is necessary to be equipped with weapons that help to address the causes and changes of the mechanisms of subsumption. For example, as we are confronting an endosymbiotic relation - a double parasitism - between capital's subsumption and life where all life processes are being modulated, all its potential activated for profit, we need to equip ourselves with practices that decouple the instant satisfactory pleasure for accumulation from the building up of collective joyful passions. The flight from real subsumption entails the continual reengineering of encounters by means of affective contagion - an anticlimactic practice or experiment of change attuned with the hyperhythmic vibrations of matter. Thus the interfaces to the mechanisms of subsumption are the transversal amalgamation of energy-information falling out or in the middle of the strata. It is here that that reengineering of the biophysical and biocultural cluster of strata is happening. It is here that capital by indifferently precipitating a rapid destratification may well encounter its own monstrous and unrecognizable transformation. MF: Deleuze and Guattari, and others whose work you use in the book, have rendered visible in certain ways a whole host of compositional dynamics operating through matter, culture, social formations, language, and their own manifold inter-relation. One of their reasons for arguing for such a vast bestiary of patternings is, by way of making a more attentive and suggestive account of the world, to avoid or to supplant Hegelian dialects. However, I wonder whether, once this work is begun and underway, we no longer have the need to reject the possibility of also recognising dialectical dynamics where they occur. Coming after, with all its precedents, this vast supplement to ways of understanding and inventing the ways in which things occur we can also find something to recognise as useful in dialectics in which a non-teleological dialectics can be seen as simply one kind of emergent patterning amongst a myriad others. And, if this were so, in what terms might the movements adopting a direct confrontation with those organisations - largely certain companies and states - attempting to turn specific biological processes (not 'life') into directly controllable, restrictively engineered and commodified forms, be considered as part of a wider vocabulary or active reservoir of patternings that can recognised as productive in the terms of the discussion that you make in Abstract Sex? LP: I think that you are touching some important problematics here. I think you are right about wondering whether once we supplement one mode of analysis of power - and you refer specifically to Hegelian dialectics - does it follow that dialectical dynamics no longer exist? Yet, I wonder to extent to which dialectics - even when it may be considered as a pattern, even when we subtract from it teleological synthesis - is the right way to understand compositional dynamics. One immediate reason may simply be that dialectics presupposes contradiction, negation and opposition (or binary distinction), whilst compositional dynamics only involve differential relations, paradoxes and togetherness: moments or aspects of a process that mutually determine and presuppose each other. Another problem with dialectics is synthesis: the reduction of two to one in terms of quantifiable addition. Dialectics gives no account of disjunctive connection between terms belonging to distinct scales for example. It is monist in the sense that it reduces heterogeneities to sameness. It erects a whole above the parts by negating their differential con-partecipation. This negation lies at the very core of the moral law: the necessity of erecting good over evil in order to reach a purified subject position - a transcendent power that can justify its own repression. Dialectics gives priority to judgement over contingent experimentation, negating and suppressing all forces of collective production. At the base of such dialectical moral stance lies guilt: the homeostatic pleasure - the climactic satisfaction - of maintaining sameness. For this reason dialectics is an all too human account of the world, which assumes a master/slave hierarchy of categories - a governing and governed force, the perpetuator and the victim - negating all paradoxical dynamics of a relation. I think that what we need to distinguish is not dialectic patterns from non-dialectic ones, but molecular compositions from molar fascistic assemblages of desire. In this sense, we do not need to reject the possibility of recognising not dialectical patterns but the repressive activity of molar organizations operating by means of binary distinctions separating thought from the body and forbidding thought from feeling itself. Molar organizations are specific layers of the strata that unlike dialectics are always amodally or virtually linked to lines of flights or deterritorialization that define society. You ask how can movements can be considered as part of an active reservoir of productive patterning - i.e. how they participate actively in a dynamics of production - confronting those organizations - you specifically refer to certain companies and states - attempting to turn biological processes into directly controllable forms of commodification. However, as it may be clear by now, I think we need to locate this relation between movements and organizations away from dialectics, and right into the dynamics of stratification and bifurcation - or double articulation - on the strata. We need to engage with the double pincer of content and expression that has nothing to do with signification and meaning but, on the contrary, entails the process of organization of forms and substances on parallel layers of organization of matter (i.e., content and expression). Yet the double pincer is in no way dialectical as it cannot be isolated from the ecologies of lines of flights and deterritorializations participating in the production of a new order. The double pincer then maps the continual process of splitting intensities in the very process of order and organization. In this sense, we may understand the movements adopting a direct confrontation with those organizations - such as companies and states - as productive of new dynamics of deterritorialization of biological processes but also of new power (or reterritorialization). However, I may add that I think that we need to be aware that it is not easy to identify companies and states with molar apparatuses of repression, whilst thinking of movements as molecular dynamics. If we do so, we risk reimparting dialectics onto intensive dynamics of compositions. Abstract Sex exposes that each molar organization is composed of and cut across by parallel dynamics of molecular production that define its paradoxical nature. Simultaneously, each molecular dynamics under certain conditions may arrange itself into a microfascist assemblage spreading through all organizations -i.e. given the conditions it may become molar. In this sense, the commodification of biological processes cannot be disentangled from the wider dynamics of desiring assemblages act to deterritorialize and reterritorialize the biological strata. This is what I think we are confronting with biotech and nanotech, the intersection of biodigital technologies with the composition of new assemblages of desire. Here, it may be relevant to point out that the Spinozist processes of modifications - the asymmetrical conjunction of the planes of stratification and destratification - at the core of Abstract Sex have not to be confused with the evolutionary monism of dialectics. Movements are not something that reacts to a given stability - structure - and sociality is not something that reacts to individualism. Movements as assemblages of desire are primary to the formation of structures, organizations. For Spinoza, movements are modifications acquiring certain dynamics according to certain pressures and under certain conditions that affect - act back - all dynamics of movement itself. A Spinozist monism here entails a belonging together to a process of unpredictable modifications, which implies the necessity of engaging with the very singularity of each compositional dynamics. In order to grasp how movements are not just in dialectical opposition with suppressive apparatuses or are tending towards the final resolution of a conflict, such as erecting a newly born uncontaminated subjectivity, we need to step sideways and try to give a more precise definition of movements, especially social movements. It may be useful then to search for such definitions in the exciting works of Gabriel Tarde and Alfred N. Whitehead, where, in different ways but according to a common concern, define social movements and relations act as primary to all compositional dynamics encompassing all distinct scales and thus physical, biological, cultural, technical (particles, cells, organisms, technical machines and so on are indeed already social movements: i.e., they do not need to be socialised by human existence). From this standpoint, movements cannot be disentangled from organisations. Productive compositional dynamics do occur at all levels. Yet each composition is extremely specific and will never resemble another. This is the sense of grasping the relevance of continual variation in the open feedback between virtual and actual matter. MF: To go back to the way one inherits particular 'writing heads', and how they need to be twisted, or decapitated, you stud each chapter with references to science fiction texts such as those from Greg Bear and Octavia Butler, writers who explore related themes of biology, technology and culture. It strikes me however that much of Science Fiction, particularly as it develops to think through alternate perceptual universes (as well as those it more traditionally works on such as the technical and social) might also take on the possibilities of writing in a way which exemplifies and creates the worlds which it otherwise only attempts to represent. How might you take the compositional dynamics of, say bacterial informational behaviours, or the intense morphological impacts described by Elaine Morgan in her work on the Aquatic Ape theory, and use them to influence, or set up resonances with the behaviour of text, of the info-matter of language in a way which exemplifies the processes that Abstract Sex brings attention to. Perhaps links might be made to the occasional parallel work you are involved in with CCRU? LP: This is the very question that we all need to pose ourselves if we want to build war machines that construct realities and that open up towards the activation of worlds rather than limiting our writing to a representation of what is out there. The encounter with Science Fiction writing with nomadic science (the Aquatic Ape and Symbiogenesis) is indeed a key to access Abstract Sex. Haraway's famous quote reciting that the distinction between science fiction and science is optical illusion has acquired a life of its own in the compositional dynamics of Abstract Sex. This is not only because science fiction offers a commentary on human anxiety and imagination about technology or a critical understanding on how scientific discourses become is popularized. Both of this view presupposes a binarism between the real world and the one that is represented in science fiction books. On the contrary, in the compositional dynamics of Abstract Sex science fiction is already real; it is indeed a dimension of the real as everything else. One that that produces reality. Like what happens in John Carpenter's film In The Mouth of Madness (1995) books have the power to leak into the social because they are already part of social reality germinating its affects. My fascination with the works of Greg Bear and - especially - Octavia J.Butler relates precisely to this germination of affective worlds that comes from the future to lay out the sensory perception of edging present. In other words, these books enter not only the actual compositional dynamics of Abstract Sex as a text but also its virtual tendency to assemble a new entity holding together the microdimensions of reality. Thus the continual intersection between science fiction and science facts in Abstract Sex does not function in terms of content or representation, but enters in the operational dynamics of the writing itself, in the way the text or words become bodies, affects and collective agents setting up a new fabrication of the real. Last year I wrote a little story for Sandwich entitled Abstract Sex: an extract, which has come out this fall (2004). Once the editor received it, he wrote to me straight away asking: what is this? Did what you wrote really happened or is it about to happen? Is this real or is it invented? I thought these were the most exciting questions I had had about my writing in ages. I think that your question really brings out one of the most schizoelements of my writing that have been intensively cultivated in the CCRU machine. Writing is always a collective enterprise involving the clashes of heads - the ecology of partial machines that connect and disconnect across time and space, historical inheritances and geographical locations, modes of thinking and behaving, feeling and acting. Yet the encounter with the CCRU has most clearly for me catalyzed the production of a collective brain geared towards the activation of abstract yet real thought, training therefore the activity of a certain thought that feels and is felt. All the writings and events engineered by the CCRU entity have always been more than an occasional parallel work for me. Actually I think of them as intensive experimentations of the real and as intrinsically part of the production of Abstract Sex. The CCRU emphasis on the production of concepts-actions indeed is not only a practice of writing but an experimental or affective intervention in the social, plugging itself directly on the body without organs and transversally on the strata (i.e., between the strata and the rest). In this sense, the CCRU thinks of words as living bodies spreading like viruses, exposing the generation of unexpected consequences in the social field. Thus, to each notion its capacity of proliferation-intervention. This is why Abstract Sex cannot be accessed exclusively on the level of philosophical enquiry, scientific theory, feminist politics, technological advancements, science fiction. Abstract Sex is above all an entity under construction. I think that affective contagion is the best way to participate in its productive reality. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net 92.0 <nettime> Jussi Parikka interview Matthew Fuller nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:51:51 +0000 Jussi Parrika is author of the book 'Digital Contagions, a media archaeology of computer viruses', published by Peter Lang earlier this year. The book is a speculative meditation on the nature of viruses and their part in contemporary technocultures. This interview was carried out by email in November and December 2007 Matthew Fuller: How do you figure 'the body' or the biopolitical in your discussion of viruses? Clearly it would be possible to simply fall into the trap of equating computer viruses with biological ones, to mistake the metaphor for the thing named. On the other hand it is possible to trace the ways in which the term has been used to mark a cross-over between categories that is about a kind of understanding of kinds of behaviours not delimited by material instantiation, for instance a certain kind of dynamic of proliferation,that makes the term meaningful. What are the stakes in following this through? Jussi Parrikka: Following a metaphorical line of thought from the beginning would have been the easy way out, writing an analysis of the metaphorics and representations of viruses in popular media. Indeed, that was the way much of virus discourse was approached especially in the 1990s, analysing the translations and linguistic passages between diseases of bodies and diseases of networks. Naturally language has been an essential part of the creation of the so-called viral discourse, but I am keen on insisting at least on two things: 1) language and metaphorics should not be seen as primarily or solely signifying systems but as part of wider material assemblages and that 2) the biopolitics of computer systems is about many other things besides language as well (two related issues of course.) So firstly, following Deleuze and Guattari, language works as order-words, which is quite evident in the case of software. Whereas it would be interesting to approach software itself as an order-word (where the execution is a defining part of the event of computer systems), the linguistic acts that frame, stabilised and valorise software could be understood as such acts of power and knowledge that try to give a consistency to the contested questions of "what is proper software?", "what is illegal software?", "what kind of software and network events are allowed, by whom?" Here, as you note, it is also a question of cross-overs between categories, very tactical cross-overs indeed, of translating and smuggling elements from another, foreign realm to for example technological networks. Here "virality" can perhaps be used as a term that flags towards this virulence of trespassing categories, something I wanted to integrate intimately as part of the methodology of Digital Contagions. What is troubling with the metaphoric accounts of cultural reality, for example technology, is that they reintroduce a dualist ontology of things in themselves (which should be left untouched by the cultural analyst) and the representations, the linguistic representations we have of them which is supposed to be the terrain of cultural studies. Naturally, this introduces the age old hylomorphic scheme of matter as passive, waiting for a cultural studies scholar to breath life into it. So in other words, I would characterize Digital Contagions not being interested in language per se, but in how it cuts through, intervenes, frames and engages in the messy assemblages not made purely of material "things", or "processes", but neither purely of symbolic actions, significations, valorizations. Hence, the question of biopolitics of network bodies, the biopolitics of viruses and other software. I try to think this through via the Deleuzian framework of allowing bodies to be of various kinds and scales: from bodies of humans, to bodies of software, networks, etc. Michel Foucault and people drawing from his work, like Jonathan Crary and Giorgio Agamben, have of course paved the way towards understanding the crucial mission of modern politics being not that of human being and their linguistic acts (their social life as rational, communicating beings) but as having to do with the "bare life", the life beyond or in a way "before" human beings as metaphor-using communicators. The birth of modern media culture is one of tapping into the intensive animal reservoirs of the human being: for Foucault this referred to the biological features of the human being (as a species), for Crary, this referred to the new physiological experiments tapping into this human being as a fleshy, animal body. Braidotti has recently wanted to emphasize the animality of this layer by referring instead of "bios" to the concept of "zoe". What I wanted to do was to continue this line of thought to technological systems, and biopolitics of software, where the question was not reducible to what people say or think about software, networks, digital technologies, but how the biopolitics of digital culture is not interested (only) in controlling human minds, but the intensive life of software, for example - taking the material assemblages as its object, in a way. Thus, this calls for an ethology of software, of looking at the objects and processes as affects capable of forging relations, making connections, interactions and exchanges. MF: In writing about the cultural aspects of software there is a real imperative to technical accuracy. Firstly because if this is not achieved it makes the possibility of dialogue with those in the area primarily concerned with technical aspects quite difficult. Secondly, there is a kind of rigour required which is likely to produce new ideas rather than act as a blockage. How have you handled this in Digital Contagions, and how do you see this question developing? JP: This is a question or an agenda that I learned to appreciate through German media theory, first via reading Friedrich Kittler, then Wolfgang Ernst among others. It also relates to what I just wrote about trying to think beyond the metaphorics of media culture and try to understand the more accurate expressions, techniques and ways of articulation that a medium might use beyond the human representations of it. So technical accuracy is a question of ontology (an often banned word in cultural studies) but as you suggest, it has the potential of acting as a vector beyond the confines of disciplinary boundaries. Now I do not consider myself expert concerning the technical characteristics of computer viruses, but related to the biopolitics question I see that a meticulous interest in this field is of crucial significance. What recent years of approaches to networks, software and computer systems have achieved is a growing understanding of the questions of immanence of technology and power. Instead of bracketing the materiality of technology in the cultural studies agenda of ideology, much of the research done has succeeded in demonstrating how technologies in their very materiality channel and refashion power relations. They are not only second order phenomena of "social" struggles in the sense of "social" being something removed from the material. An understanding of the technologies at hand is a key prerequisite for an understanding of what kind of new modulations of reality we are dealing with. But I would not perhaps too swiftly call this as an aid in communication or dialogue, because it supposes that the concepts, or the "understanding of technologies at hand", are transparently stable objects. Instead, also this material level is very much contested and what is crucial to me is not only an approach that takes into account of what kind of technologies we are dealing and tries to find the truth of e.g. software there but an approach which discusses this in terms of materiality that is continuously processual, not pinned down to a certain essence whether technological or social. Instead, we are continuously dealing with processes that are translational, in the process of being defined and across platforms. Not every computer scientist or anti-virus researcher is happy with what I write about viruses, quite the contrary, I've encountered arguments that I do not understand the technical reality of what I am talking about and that taking into account e.g. alternative voices in fiction is just leading my analyses astray. Again, in such statements we find the desire to pindown the truth of computer viruses to a certain technical knowledge, cut off from the translations and processes this weird overdetermined object is articulated in. So in addition to valorising technical accuracy, I would like to insist more widely on the materiality of the phenomenon at hand, a materiality that is irreducible to "agreed on" technical characteristics, a materiality that takes into account the various levels of relations and definitions of networks and software. Rigour is a good word, as it connotates a different thing as "technical accuracy": it takes into account that one can be attuned to the materiality of the networks at hand, but without taking such a stance that "first you have to sort your facts out, then you can make your interpretations of those facts." If we could do that, we would already have a fixed framework for those interpretations. MF: Your period of study of computer viruses ends in 1995. Could you say something about why you choose this period as being significant, and what were the aspects of viruses you'd like to have covered in the subsequent period? JP: Yes, the period my study covers is approximately from the early computer era after the World War II onto approximately the emergence of the "popular Internet." In a way this is of course stupid to stop there when the Internet was becoming an everyday reality instead of just a discursive promise of a networked future that was proposed in various platforms from professional computer journals to popular culture. But it is also because of this seeming paradox that the earlier period is interesting. For example the security discourse around viruses emerged at the end of the 1980s, and much of the techniques, tactics, and framings we use to make sense and control malware were not so evident at first. Focusing on the earlier period gives one access to the actual genealogical emergence of the phenomena and a truly historical take on the forces that gave consistency to the viral and other forms of malware. Here, one sees the recurring tropes emerging, like the curious insistence in computer security discourse to move from technical issues to social ones. So continuously, from 1960s on, you have the idea of "it's the human being that is the problem, not the computer or the program" being articulated, similarly as the idea that "there is no good virus", since the 1980s. Or then the continuous doom laden adverts and discourses warning of "data loss" at least since the early 1980s before viruses; "data loss disasters" to databases and personal computers due to various reasons from natural phenomena like the lightning to malicious intended crime, all of which in a way "paved the way" for viruses to fit into the already stated fear of data loss as a key danger of digital society. Also, in terms of programs, much of the interesting stuff was done already in the 1950s and 1960s like the Darwin program or early rabbit batch jobs in mainframes. One of those, from 1966, included a RUNCOM command script repeating itself continuously which would then constipate the system (as David Ferbrache suggests in his 'A Pathology of Computer Viruses' book). Or how Kevin Driscoll attributed the emergence of viruses not to a specific program but to a short piece instruction, MOVE (Program Counter) --> Program Counter + 1, where the "virus" is less a program entity than an instruction that is continously on the move to the next memory location. Besides being curious examples of an "archaeology of the computer virus", such processes should be taken as compelling issues that force us to think the digital culture in a historically tuned field. This choice to focus on the pre-1995 period is in accordance with my belief that historical and temporal perspectives can bring forth novel rewirings and short-circuitings for present discussions and practices. Hence, Digital Contagions analyzes the media archaeology of this specific computer accident as a symptom of a more abstract cultural diagram. The digital virus is not solely an internal computer problem but a trace of cultural trends connected to consumer capitalism, digitality and networking as the central cultural platforms of late twentieth century as well as the media ecology and the so-called biological diagram of the computer where the biological sciences are actively interfaced with computer science often with a special emphasis on bottom-up emergence. Again, we are moving much beyond the more narrow take on recent years of "actual" viruses, and focusing on the archaeological transcrossings of the phenomena. Despite the often-stated idea of cultural studies, in its broad sense, being an approach that takes historical perspectives at its core, most of this is done in a very vague fashion, neglecting e.g. historical examples or reducing them to curiosities. Another way to consider historical perspectives is to contrast them with the affirmative perspective of becomings, which repeats a certain Deleuzian dualism: history as the regime of the State Archive and becomings as ahistorical creations. Instead of repeating this dualism, I wanted to approach the possibility of media archaeology as a nomadic cultural analysis, where "history" is not a marker of "already beens" but a potential, a potentiality that can be rewired into new assemblages of the future. Historically tuned cultural analysis cannot be reduced to a status of repeating the sources, but can be seen as one of summoning events as Foucault coined it. Of course, this does not mean that focusing on recent years would not provided fresh perspectives. But there are people working already on this, like Tony Sampson from University of East London, finishing a book on cultural theory and viruses. I myself would have definitely refined my take in relation to e.g. botnets, wrote a few more words on net art viruses (which I am doing for the forthcoming Spam Book) and also more carefully would have covered the phenomena of terrorism. MF: With viruses aimed at mobile phones running Symbian such as Cabir and Cardtrp, the latter which also crosses between Windows machines, the platforms for viruses are becoming more diverse. But with events such as the attacks on Estonian networks and the apparent existence of very large scale botnets, the broader category of 'malware' is itself becoming more infrastructural, more built into the internet. How does the figure of the virus work in this wider context? JP: For sure, the notion of the "virus" or "viral" is in danger of becoming a floating signifier, a notion used for anything related to malware or in contrast, anything "cool" and "rebellious". This relates to the earlier question concerning technical specificity which can be seen as one way of getting oneself out of the swamp of metaphoricity and vagueness and looking into how on the material level certain types of software function. My point was in general that malware has from early on been infrastructural to the Internet and network societies, this has been evident from early computer security texts since the 1960s on. The shift from protecting computers from human beings to protecting them from malicious software started around 1970s, and the notion of the incidental nature of the viral with networks feeds nicely into this as well. This is why I used the notion of the "universal viral machine" from Fred Cohen, the computer virus research pioneer: to underline that in the age of networked computers, viruses in Turing machines can be thought of as potentially semi-autonomous processes, a '"Universal Viral Machine" which can evolve any "computable number".' Cohen describes in his early work from 1980s (his PhD thesis came out in 1986) a weird world of computer processes without human interventions, there is not much mention of "intentions" or "social constructions" of computers, but anonymous processes, turing machines, evolutionary sets and also e.g. "Universal Protection Machines" that are aimed to combat the Viral Machines by maintaining subject object matrixes, sequences to be interpreted, the rights of subjects to objects, scheduling of processes etc. But we should not be blinded to think that because of the underlying Turing sequences, the processes are not system specific and material. Botnets are not the same as early 1990s viruses, nor is the 1988 Morris worm the same thing as current network worms that can spread across the globe in a matter of hours. Several of the early viruses got "extinct" because of technological obsolescence, their ways of proliferation via e.g. floppy disks becoming obsolescent. Much of the talk surrounding the new viruses suggests at least implicitly that viruses and their programmers are continuously finding new platforms and almost universal ways of propagation like via the Bluetooth in mobile phones. However, even though not being an expert on this issue, I understand that for example the Cabir worm relies much on the "kindness of the user" than on a system vulnerability, as e.g. the recipient has to accept to receive the particular piece of data package before the worm spreads. With Cardtrap, despite its malicious payload, it does not seem to work even with all Windows machines where the phone memory card might actually be carrying the Trojan but the autorun file did not at least according to F-Secure information work on Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000. Again, much more than demonstrating the universality of the viral in the sense of cross platform spreading (which in a way is true as well) this also refers to the metastability of programs and their environments and how easily "things just don't work" so to speak. This is the reason why Mark Ludwig flagged in the 1990s already that true evolution in software environments - at least the everyday environments like with Windows - is quite a far-fetched dream (or a fear) as the operating systems and software are just too unstable to allow for a random mutation that would work. As for botnets, it's the zombie side to them that is interesting. Eugene Thacker has been digging into the zombie world of contemporary biopolitics, looking at contagion and transmission through this figure of the undead, the life on the border of zoe and bios. Again, I would use the idea of the botnet to illustrate how power operates (also) on the level of ahuman technical, before or between the human social bind. Capturing computers in a zombie network is not reducible to a work of ideology, or as in the case of attacks against the sites of Estonian government and other public bodies to a work of international politics (even if it also was touched as the diplomatic relations between Russia and Estonia were involved), but a whole another layer of politics, working at the level of infections, software and networks. A lot of the analysis surrounding the attacks was seeing this from the viewpoint of international relations of two governmental bodies, but more interesting are the sub-governmental forces in action and also the sub-social forces that were harnessed as part of the international politics. MF: One of the things that is interesting about viruses and other related kinds of software is their approach to computers and networks as a set of experimental zones. Towards the end of your book you mention Stefan Helmreich's call for a 'playful science', showing how Artificial Life can correspond to this. At the same time, Viruses seem to have a slightly different form of playfulness to them. If we can adopt the language of probability for a moment, we could say that because Alife, generally (aside from interesting working done in evolutionary hardware, or in aspects of CrystalPunk work) tends to remain within well-defined boundaries, that of the model for instance. Whilst it has the capacity of offering a 'theoretical' playfulness, its is limited to a particular scale of activity. Viruses on the other hand offer a fully 'experimental' that is, more multi-dimensional, unpredictable way of inhabiting and shaping the networks. It sets in play are sets of conjunctions that are not simply within the domain of the software per se. The focus on malware tends rather to limit this. Your book calls for a more playful approach, where do you see the most useful historical resources for such playfulness? Which unexplored viral domains are most potentially interesting? JP: In a more straightforward vein, one could see my book as Foucauldian mapping of how the notion and powers of viral sets became territorialized and captured under the notion of malware, which acted not only as a repressive mechanism but produced a huge amount of books, advice, security instructions, manoeuvres, software etc. But to track this playfulness works a bit further on the issue. This actually relates to the question earlier you asked about why I stopped my analysis in 1995. It is just because the much more surprising stuff is found earlier, trying to follow the related strands of viral programming and the birth of network paradigms in computer labs. I was fascinated to hear from the early pioneers Like Doug McIllroy, Vic Vyssotsky and Ken Thompson of their early experiences with computer ecologies of self-perpetuating programs. In a way, the obvious connection with early experiments had to do with the Cold War and security discourses, but I would say that much of the work done was not reducible to that functionality but also worked on another level of fascination with the expressions of these programs. For example, the simple game called Darwin that tried to out-populate the game ecology by "killing" other programs and spreading its own code is an interesting example. It was popularized later by A.K. Dewdney in Scientific American and now known as Core Wars. But what for example Mark Ludwig flagged in his "black books of computer viruses" is that alife viruses are more or less dysfunctional. Due to the fundamental instability of most of computer systems, even small changes in code cause most likely only system crashes, no evolution. Hence, one has to deal with very limited scales, as you mention, and more interestingly speculate on the possibilities of for example evolving programs. It is a bit same thing as with artificial life art, where the genetically grown forms are indeed interesting and as an idea it has much to contribute, but besides the certain amount of forms "grown", it starts to get repetitious (without a difference). Another problem in the whole artificial life virus discussion was the rigid way of dealing with the issue: to come up with a minimum qualifying definitions for an entity to be living (definitions adopted from observation of biological entities mostly) and then comparing this to computer viruses. Not a very interesting way to approach the issue - even though alife research has aspired to move away from this model-thinking onto a simulacra-approach, as Claus Emmeche suggested some time ago. In any case, instead of merely following such paths, I wanted to proposed a Spinozian ethological way of approaching "life" not as a substance, not as a form, but as an intensive life of affects, of interactions and relations where the life of technical bits is not to be removed from the life of other scales, or other assemblages. So life is not a metaphor adopted from biology and biology a model used to imitate the intensive code life of programs, but life becomes a movement, interaction and affects. This is the idea of playfulness as well: that the "ecologies" of media are not prefixed, stable natura naturata kind of mechanics in the service of capitalism, but also active virtual ecologies of natura naturans, of creation, probing and experimenting. To put it into Foucauldian vocabulary: let's leave it to the police to decide whether the stuff really is alive. Often the more interesting "living" experiments are the earlier, less researched experiments. What also definitely would need much more research are the wonderful early computer ecologies of for example Nils Barricelli, Oliver Selfridge and Beatrice and Sydney Rome, all developing already in the 1950s systems that are relevant to the topic of experimental sciences of computational life. Even if not touching on viruses per se, they speculated in their work on how to make ecological and evolutionary models work with a computational platform and how to make that kind of computation useful. Now if Cohen tried to figure out the usefulness of viral machines in the 1980s, these persons were speculating on this stuff already 30 years earlier! For example Barricelli did not want his work to be seen under the representational paradigm of computers modelled on life, but underlining that the stuff on symbiogenesis in computers is really there, as simulations. In other words, the simulation did not offer information on biological parasites and ecologies, but was an end in itself in offering a computer system that could work in terms of interdependencies, connectedness, symbiotic relations. As interesting are for example Oliver Selfridge's Pandemonium experiments with semi-autonomous code of demons that "evolve" at least in a restricted way. Computation was understood there as a statistical mesh, a parallel processing based on the connected sum of "shrieks" every data demon of the system communicated to others. This also showed a system of distributed intelligence, as already Manuel DeLanda noted earlier, where such projects were seen as part of the genealogy of passing control from the human to distributed systems. In such a system, ideally, control "floats" from a demon to another which can take up on various functions, enter into flexible changing relations based on the global characteristics of the system that continuously feeds into the local relations of the demons. What is of course funny is how there is a curious correspondance between such computer system characteristics and the post-Fordist notions of e.g. work skills as branded by needed flexibility, adaptation to change, fluid communication... Another theme are the experimental aesthetics of (technological) failure that characterise modernity. There is whole history of things breaking down, of course, and art has of course been one key practice of modernity where the failures of systems of technology, organisation and control have been catalyzed and experimented upon. This is the famous Paul Virilio's notion of technical modernity: that accidents are incidental to their functioning. The accident of any system is a future horizon, a virtuality that might not ever actualize but it is still there in reality - often expressed only in statistics, worst-case scenarios and like, or then in simulated accidents by media artists. How much of the early avantgarde "media art" was based on exactly these impossible machines on the edge of breaking down, a Dadaist notion of technological modernity. One wonderful example would be George Perec's 1960s radio play La Machine where a computer programmed to dissect and recompose in variations Goethe's poem of The Wanderer's Night Song. As Florian Cramer writes in his Words Made Flesh, Perec's imaginary variation computer crashes and the input data turns into a program, working like an self-perpetuating email virus. I do not know whether I would agree with Cramer's conclusion that this testifies with the superiority of semantics resisting syntactical programming, but I agree that this is an interesting experiment of aesthetics of failure, aesthetics of accidents. So perhaps the playfulness, in general, is trying to think beyond the most obvious choices, to think beyond the security discourse (which is a highly interesting topic of course) towards the experimental takes on viruses and accidents. MF: Looking at art viruses, such as Biennale.py or those of Tomasso Tozzi in the 1980s there is clearly a further set of parallel imaginaries going on here. With tens of thousands of viruses in the wild, can you imagine or identify a particular strain working with a particular pattern of art methodologies? JP: The art viruses, especially the Biennale.py project, fits nicely into this geneaology of aesthetics of accidents in its task to create an iconographics of malicious code. I think one of the fundamental successes of the project was to question the ontology of software and the distributed nature of the coded environment. On what level do micropolitics of software function, was an implicit key question of the project, which seemed to refuse a simple answer when distributing the code on t-shirts but also in expensive CD-ROMs etc. - while at the same time insisting on the harmless, invisible nature of the execution of the code. But beyond the way it was framed as part of art (as part of the Venice Biennale), what are the singular points to focus on? I think Jaromil put it very poetically in the I Love You-exhibition catalogue when referring to digital viruses as a form of making (digital) language stutter in the manner Rimbaud and Verlaine made French stutter as part of an earlier challenge to transparent ways of seeing language. There is a threshold where code turns against itself and into a political gesture, or as Jaromil wrote: "In that chaos, viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines "made to work" and in representing the rebellion of our digital serfs." >From existing viruses in the wild, one could perhaps extract certain methodological principles. Much of them relate to finding the threshold just on the border of working and not-working: a virus that destroys completely the system is of relatively small use, instead much more interesting are the ones who are able to infiltrate the system and still keep it working (in a moderated form). That is, to find the threshold, the minimum level of a system before its flipping into a crash. In a way, this could be of course continued to the point of going over the threshold, of letting go of the control structures and seeing what comes up - of exposing oneself to the viral algorithms, as Joseph Nechvatal does with his viral paintings, which demonstrate how the viral noise is not antithetical to the ordered creations of art - virus itself can be turned into an emerging explorations of patterns in painting or in music. Here, variation becomes primacy, and the planned line and sounds are exposed to continuous slight variations of algorithmic kind. The methodological clue in general with viruses being: take any banal repetitious action without an inherent meaning, repeat the action or habit to the point when it starts to change, a point where the pure repetition produces difference from itself. This again can be seen as tracking the smallest differences and thresholds emerging in any systematic action and/or habit. Another interesting theme is how the algorithmic logic of viruses feeds much beyond the computer code realm and takes advantage of the presumed sociability of human relations. Take the I Love You virus, a simple exercize in unfilled desire perhaps, feeding on the wish of getting a confirmation of love from someone. Or in another form, the gambler virus of early 1990s which forced the user play for the contents of the hard drive; answer incorrectly, and you will lose. This played with a certain mythology of a "demon in the machine", of the computer possessed which was a theme of Jodi's early work of course (I think Alessandro Ludovico referred to their projects as insurrecting a certain alien presence in the computer which is a nice way to put it.) The virus examples mark the passing point or interfacing of the human being, but besides just focusing on the idea of the human being as the emotional, fallible creature, more interesting is to see the viruses, for example I Love You and other attachment viruses, as using to their advantage the habits of the user - of tapping into the presumed bodily habits where the meaning of an attachment is to open it etc. Or then, to just track the parasitic movement and logic of the virus itself, as a way of exposing the dynamic logic of the net. Recently, the Google-Will-Eat-Itself took this parasitical logic of the Net to a new level by creating the paranoid-parasitical machine which draws money from Google to be used against itself. In a way perhaps this could be connected to the methodological ideal of "becoming imperceptible" and a move beyond identity politics. As argued by several Deleuzian writers, the becoming imperceptible of art is a much needed contrapunctual movement against the hegemony of representation analysis and identity thought where often only the only already recognized becomes an object of interest. How to come up with an action, experimentation that relies on the very notion of imperceptibility? An issue related to surveillance for sure, but perhaps also to art. In this context, Bertini's Vi-Con is related to the notion of invisibility "Yazna and ++ are two viruses in love. They search for each other on the net, running through connected computers. Apart from other viruses, their passages won't cause any damage to your computer [...]. Theirs is a soft passage, invisible, and extremely fragile." # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org 93.0 <nettime> Interview with Femke Snelting from Open Source Publishing Matthew Fuller nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 24 May 2008 08:44:28 +0100 Open Source Publishing is a recently founded graphic design agency that uses only Free Software tools. Closely affiliated with the Brussels based digital culture foundation Constant VZW, OSP aims to test the possibilities and realities of doing graphic design using an expanding range of Free Software tools. On the way, they produce some great designs, test the aesthetics and conventions of both software and design practice and run a blog at http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/ This interview was carried out by email with Femke Snelting, a member of OSP, between March and May 2008. Matthew Fuller: OSP is a graphic design agency working solely with Open Source software. This surely places you currently as a world first, but what exactly does it mean in practice? Let's start with what software you use? Femke Snelting: There are other groups publishing with Free Software, but design collectives are surprisingly rare. So much publishing is going on around open source and open content... someone must have had the same idea? In discussions about digital tools you begin to find designers expressing concern over the fact that their work might all look the same because they use exactly the same Adobe suite and as a way to differentiate yourself, Free Software could soon become more popular. I think the success of Processing is related to that, though I doubt such a composed project will ever make anyone seriously consider Scribus for page lay-out, even if Processing is open source. OSP usually works between Gimp (image manipulation), Scribus (page lay-out) and Inkscape (vector editing) on Linux distributions and OSX. We are fans of FontForge (font editor), and enjoy using all kinds of command-line tools, 'psnup', 'ps2pdf' and 'uniq' to name a few. MF: How does the use of this software change the way you work, do you see some possibilities for new ways of doing graphic design opening up? FS: For many reasons, software has become much more present in our work; at any moment in the workflow it makes itself heard. As a result we feel a bit less sure of ourselves, and we have certainly become slower. We decided to make the whole process into some kind of design/life experiment and that is one way to keep figuring out how to convert a file, or yet another discussion with a printer about which 'standard' to use, interesting for ourselves. Performing our practice is as much part of the project as the actual books, posters, flyers etc. we produce. One way a shift of tools can open up new ways of doing graphic design, is because it makes you immediately aware of the 'resistance' of digital material. At the point we can't make things work, we start to consider formats, standards and other limitations as ingredients for creative work. We are quite excited for example about exploring dynamic design for print in SVG, a by-product of our battle with converting files from Scalable Vector Format into Portable Document Format. Free Software allows you to engage on many levels with the technologies and processes around graphic design. When you work through it's various interfaces, stringing tools together, circumventing bugs and/or gaps in your own knowledge, you understand there is more to be done than contributing code in c++. It is an invitation to question assumptions of utility, standards and usability. This is exactly the stuff design is made of. MF: Following this, what kind of team have you built up, and what new competencies have you had to develop? FS: The core of OSP is five people (Pierre Huyghebaert, Harrisson, Yi Jiang, Nicolas Malevé and me), and between us we mix amongst others typography, lay-out, cartography, webdesign, software development, drawing, programming, open content licensing and teaching. Around it is a larger group of designers, a mathematician, a computer scientists and several Free Software coders that we regularly exchange ideas with. It feels we often do more unlearning than learning; a necessary and interesting skill to develop is dealing with incompetence - what can it be else than a loss of control? In the mean time we expand our vocabulary so we can fuel conversations (imaginary and real life) with people behind Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus etc.; we learn how to navigate our computers using commandline interfaces as well as KDE, GNOME and others; we find out about file formats and how they sometimes can and often cannot speak to each other; how to write manuals and interact with mailing lists. The real challenge is to invent situations that subvert strict divisions of labour while leaving space for the kind of knowledge that comes with practice and experience. MF: Open Fonts seem to be the beginnings of a big success, how does it fit into the working practices of typographers or the material with which they work? FS: Type design is an extraordinary area where Free Software and design naturally meet. I guess this area of work is what kernel coding is for a Linux developer: only a few people actually make fonts but many people use them all the time. Software companies have been inconsistent in developing proprietary tools for editing fonts, which has made the work of typographers painfully difficult at times. This is why George Williams decided to develop FontForge, and release it under a BSD license: even if he stops being interested, others can take over. FontForge has gathered a small group of fans who through this tool, stay into contact with a more generous approach to software, characters and typefaces. The actual material of a typeface has since long migrated from poisonous lead into sets of ultra light vector drawings, held together in complicated kerning systems. When you take this software-like aspect as a startingpoint, many ways to collaborate (between programmers and typographers; between people speaking different languages) open up, as long as you let go of the uptight licensing policies that apply to most commercial fonts. I guess the image of the solitary master passing on the secret trade to his devoted pupils does not sit very well with the invitation to anyone to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve. How open fonts could turn the patriarchal guild system inside out that has been carefully preserved in the closed world of type design, is obviously of interest as well. Very concretely, computer-users really need larger character sets that allow for communication between let's say Greek, Russian, Slovak and French. These kinds of vast projects are so much easier to develop and maintain in a Free Software way; the DeJaVu font project shows that it is possible to work with many people spread over different countries modifying the same set of files with the help of versioning systems like CVS. But what it all comes down to probably... Donald Knuth is the only person I have seen both Free Software developers and designers wear on their T-shirts. MF: The cultures around each of the pieces of software are quite distinct. People often lump all FLOSS development into one kind of category, whereas even in the larger GNU/Linux distros there is quite a degree of variation, but with the smaller more specialised projects this is perhaps even more the case. How would you characterise the scenes around each of these applications? FS: The kinds of applications we use form a category in themselves. They are indeed small projects so 'scene' fits them better than 'culture'. Graphics tools differ from archetypal UNIX/Linux code and language based projects in that Graphical User Interfaces obviously matter and because they are used in a specialised context outside its own developers circle. This is interesting because it makes FLOSS developer communities connect with other disciplines (or scenes?) such as design, printing and photography. A great pleasure in working with FLOSS is to experience how software can be done in many ways; each of the applications we work with is alive and particular. I'll just portray Scribus and Inkscape here because from the differences between these two I think you can imagine what else is out there. The Scribus Team is rooted in the printing and pre-press world and naturally their first concern is to create an application that produces reliable output. Any problem you might run in to at a print shop will be responded to immediately, even late night if necessary. Members of the Scribus Team are a few years older than average developers and this can be perceived through the correct and friendly atmosphere on their mailinglist and IRC channel, and their long term loyalty to this complex project. Following its more industrial perspective, the imagined design workflow built in to the tool is linear. To us it feels almost pre-digital: tasks and responsibilities between editors, typesetters and designers are clearly defined and lined up. In this view on design, creative decisions are made outside the application, and the canvas is only necessary for emergency corrections. Unfortunately for us, who live off testing and trying, Scribus' GUI is a relatively underdeveloped area of a project that otherwise has matured quickly. Inkscape is a fork of a fork of a small tool initially designed to edit vector files in SVG format. It stayed close to its initial starting point and is in a way a much more straightforward project than Scribus. Main developer Bryce Harrington deScribus Inkscape as “a relatively unstructured coming and going of high energy collective work” much work is done through a larger group of people submitting small patches and it's developers community is not very tightly knit. Centered around a legible XML-format primarily designed for the web, Inkscape users quickly understand the potential of scripting images and you can find a vibrant plug in culture even if the Inkscape code is less clean to work with than you might expect. Related to this interest in networked visuals, is the involvement of Inkscape developers in the Open Clip Art project and ccHost, a repository system wich allows you to upload images, sounds and other files directly from your application. It is also no surprise that Inkscape implemented a proper print dialogue only very late, and still has no way to handle CMYK output. MF: There's a lot of talk about collaboration in FLOSS development, something very impressive, but often when one talks to developers of such software there is a lot to discus about the rather less open ways in which power struggles over the meaning or leadership of software projects are carried out by, for instance, hiding code in development, or by only allowing very narrowly technical approaches to development to be discussed. This is only one tendency, but one which tends to remain publicly under-discussed. How much of this kind of friction have you encountered by acting as a visible part of a new user community for FLOSS? FS: I can't say we feel completely at home in the FLOSS world, but we have not encountered any extraordinary forms of friction yet. We have been allowed the space to try our own strategies at overcoming the user-developer divide: people granted interviews, accepted us when we invited ourselves to speak at conferences and listened to our stories. But it still feels a bit awkward, and I sometimes wonder whether we ever will be able to do enough. Does constructive critique count as a contribution, even when it is not delivered in the form of a bug report? Can we please get rid of the term 'end-user'? Most discussions around software are kept strictly technical, even when there are many non-technical issues at stake. We are FLOSS enthusiasts because it potentially pulls the applications we use into some form of public space where they can be examined, re-done and taken apart if necessary; we are curious about how they are made because of what they (can) make you do. When we asked Andreas Vox, a main Scribus developer whether he saw a relation between the tool he contributed code to, and the things that were produced by it, he answered: "Preferences for work tools and political preference are really orthogonal". This is understandable from a project-management point of view, but it makes you wonder where else such a debate should take place. The fact that compared to proprietary software projects, only a very small number of women is involved in FLOSS makes apparent how openness and freedom are not simple terms to put in practice. When asked whether gender matters, the habitual answer is that opportunities are equal and from that point a constructive discussion is difficult. There are no easy solutions, but the lack of diversity needs to be put on the roadmap somehow, or as a friend asked: "where do I file a meta-bug?" MF: Visually, or in terms of the aesthetic qualities of the designs you have developed would you say you have managed to achieve anything unavailable through the output of the Adobe empire? FS: The members of OSP would never have come up with the idea to combine their aesthetics and skills using Adobe, so that makes it difficult to do a 'before' and 'after' comparison. Or maybe we should call this an achievement of Free Software too? Using FLOSS has made us reconsider the way we work and sometimes this is visible in the design we produce, more often in the commissions we take on or the projects we invest in. Generative work has become part of our creative suite and this certainly looks different than a per-page treatment; also deliberate traces of the production process (including printing and pre-press) add another layer to what we make. Of all smaller and larger discoveries, the Spiro toolkit that Free Software activist, Ghostscript maintainer, typophile and Quaker Raph Levien develops, must be the most wonderful. We had taken Bézier curves for granted, and never imagined how the way it is mathematically defined would matter that much. Instead of working with fixed anchor points and starting from straight lines that you first need to bend, Spiro is spiral-based and vectors suddenly have a sensational flow and 'weight'. From Pierre Bézier writing his specification as an engineer for the Renault car factory to Levien's Spiro, digital drawing has changed radically. MF: You have a major signage project coming up, how does this commission map across to the ethics and technologies of FLOSS? FS: We are right in the middle of it. At this moment 'The Pavilion of Provisionary Happiness' celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Belgian World Exhibition, is being constructed out of 30.000 beer crates right under the Brussels' Atomium. That's a major project done the Belgian way. We have developed a signage system, or actually a typeface, which is defined through the strange material and construction work going on on site. We use holes in the facade that are in fact handles of beer crates as connector points to create a modular font that is somewhere between Pixacao graffiti and Cuneiform script. It is actually a play on our long fascination with engineered typefaces such as DIN 1451; mixing universal application with specific materials, styles and uses - this all links back to our interest in Free Software. Besides producing the signage, OSP will co-edit and distribute a modest publication documenting the whole process; it makes legible how this temporary yellow cathedral came about. And the font will of course be released in the public domain. It is not an easy project but I don't know how much of it has to do with our software politics; our commissioners do not really care and also we have kept the production process quite simple on purpose. But by opening our sources, we can use the platform we are given in a more productive way; it makes us less dependent because the work will have another life long after the deadline has passed. MF: On this project, and in relation to the seeming omnipresence in FLOSS of the idea that this technology is 'universal', how do you see that in relation to fonts, and their longer history of standards? FS: That is indeed a long story, but I'll give it a try. First of all, I think the idea of universal technology appears to be quite omnipresent everywhere; the mix-up between ubiquitousness and 'universality' is quickly made. In Free Software this idea gains force only when it gets (con)fused with Freedom and Openness and when conditions for access are kept out of the discussion. We are interested in early typographic standardization projects because their minimalist modularity brings out the tension between generic systems and specific designs. Ludwig Goller, a Siemens engineer wo headed the Committee for German Industry Standards in the 1920's stated that “For the typefaces of the future neither tools nor fashion will be decisive”. His committee supervised the development of DIN 1451, a standard font that should connect economy of use with legibility, and enhance global communication in service of the German industry. I think it is no surprise that a similar phrasing can be found in W3C documents; the idea to unify the people of the world through a common language re-surfaces and has the same tendency to negate materiality and specificity in favour of seamless translation between media and markets. Type historian Ellen Lupton brought up the possibility of designing typographic systems that are accessible but not finite nor operating within a fixed set of parameters. Although I don't know what she means by using the term 'open universal', I think this is why we are attracted to Free Software: it has the potential to open up both the design of parameters as well as their application. Which leads to your next question. MF: You mentioned the use of generative design just now. How far do you go into this? Within the generative design field there seem to be a couple of tendencies, one that is very pragmatic, simply about exploring a space of possible designs through parametric definition in order to find, select and breed from and tweak a good result that would not be necessarily imaginable otherwise, the other being more about the inefible nature of the generative process itself, something vitalist. These tendencies of not of course exclusive, but how are they inflected or challenged in your use of generative techniques? FS: I feel a bit on thin ice here because we only start to explore the area and we are certainly not deep into algorithmic design. But on a more mundane level... in the move from print to design for the web, 'grids' have been replaced by 'templates' that interact with content and context through filters. Designers have always been busy with designing systems and formats (it really made me laugh to think of Joseph Muller Brockman as vitalist), but stepped in to manipulate singular results if necessary. I referred to 'generative design' as the space opening up when you play with rules and their affordances. The liveliness and specificity of the work results from various parameters interfering with each other, including the ones we can get our hands on. By making our own manipulations explicit, we sometimes manage to make other parameters at play visible too. Because in the end of the day, we are rather bored by mysterious beauty. MF: One of the techniques OSP uses to get people involved with the process and the technologies is the 'Print Party', can you say what that is? FS: Print Parties are irregular public performances we organise when we feel the need to report on what we discovered and where we've been; as anti-heroes of our own adventures we open up our practice in a way that seems infectious. We make a point of presenting a new experiment, of producing something printed and also something edible on site each time; this mix of ingredients seems to work best. Print Parties are how we keep contact with our fellow designers who are interested in our journey but have sometimes difficulty following us into the exotic territory of BoF, Version Control and GPL3. MF: You state in a few texts that OSP is interested in glitches as a productive force in software, how do you explain this to a printer trying to get a file to convert to the kind of thing they expect? FS: Not! Printing has become cheap through digitization and is streamlined to the extreme. Often there is literally no space built in to even have a second look at a differently formatted file, so to state that glitches are productive is easier said than done. Still, those hickups make processes tangible, especially at moments you don't want them to interfere. For a book we are designing at the moment, we might partially work by hand on positive film (a step now also skipped in file-to-plate systems). It makes us literally sit with pre-press professionals for a day and hopefully we can learn better where to intervene and how to involve them into the process. To take the productive force of glitches beyond predictable aesthetics, means most of all a shift of rhythm – to effect other levels than the production process itself. We gradually learn how our ideas about slow cooking design can survive the instant need to meet deadlines. The terminology is a bit painful but to replace 'deadline' by 'milestone', and 'estimate' by 'roadmap' is already a beginning. MF: One of the things that is notable about OSP is that the problems that you encounter are also described, appearing on your blog. This is something unusual for a company attempting to produce the impression of an efficient 'solution'. Obviously the readers of the blog only get a formatted version of this, as a performed work? What's the thinking here? FS: 'Efficient solutions' is probably the last thing we try to impress with, though it is important for us to be grounded in practice and to produce for real under conventional conditions. The blog is a public record of our everyday life with FLOSS; we make an effort to narrate through what we stumble upon because it helps us articulate how we use software, what it does to us and what we want from it; people that want to work with us, are somehow interested in these questions too. Our audience is also not just prospective clients, but includes developers and colleagues. An unformatted account, even if that was possible, would not be very interesting in that respect; we turn software into fairytales if it is what it takes to make our point. MF: In terms of the development of FLOSS approaches in areas outside software, one of the key points of differentiation has been between 'recipes' and 'food', bits and atoms, genotype and phenotype. That is that software moves the kinds of rivalry associated with the ownership and rights to use and enjoy a physical object into another domain, that of speed and quality of information, which network distribution tends to mitigate against. This is also the same for other kinds of data, such as music, texts and so on. (This migration of rivalry is often glossed over in the description of 'goods' being 'non-rivalrous'.) Graphic Design however is an interesting middle ground in a certain way in that it both generates files of many different kinds, and, often but not always, provides the 'recipes' for physical objects, the actual 'voedingstof', such as signage systems, posters, books, labels and so on. Following this, do you circulate your files in any particular way, or by other means attempt to blur the boundary between the recipe and the food? FS: We have just finished the design of a font (NotCourier-sans), a derivative of Nimbus Mono, which is in turn a GPL'ed copy of the well known Courier typeface that IBM introduced in 1955. Writing a proper licence for it, opened up many questions about the nature of 'source code' in design, and not only from a legalist perspective. While this is actually relatively simple to define for a font (the source is the object), it is much less clear what it means for a signage system or a printed book. One way we deal with this, is by publishing final results side by side with ingredients and recipes. The raw files themselves seem pretty useless once the festival is over and the book printed so we write manuals, stories, histories. We also experiment with using versioning systems, but the softwares available are only half interesting to us. Designed to support code development, changes in text files can be tracked up to the minutest detail but unless you are ready to track binary code, images and document lay-outs function as black boxes. I think this is something we need to work on because we need better tools to handle multiple file formats collaboratively, and some form of auto-documentation to support the more narrative work. On the other hand, manuals and licences are surprisingly rich formats if you want to record how an object came into life; we often weave these kinds of texts back into the design itself. In the case of NotCourier-sans we will package the font with a pdf-booklet on the history of the typeface – mixing design geneology with suggestions for use. I think the blurring of boundaries happens through practice. Just like recipes are linked in many ways to food (tasting, trying, writing, cooking), design practice connects objects to conditions. OSP is most of all interested in the back-and-forth between those two states of design; rendering their interdepence visible and testing out ways of working with it rather than against it. Hopefully both the food and the recipe will change in the process. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org 94.0 <nettime> Fun with Software A discussion with Annet Dekker and Olga Goriunova Matthew Fuller nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:37:26 +0100 Fun with Software A discussion with Annet Dekker and Olga Goriunova Olga Goriunova is curator and Annet Dekker is co-producer (as part of aaaan.net) of the multi-venue exhibition 'Fun With Software' (in Bristol) and 'Funware' (in Eindhoven and Dortmund). The exhibition has many aspects to it, being in some ways a retrospective of certain strands in software art, a set of propositions about the nature of digital culture and an argument, made through the conjunction of works, for a fundamental appreciation of fun as an inventive lively force in all forms of life. This discussion was carried out by email in late September and early October 2010. Matthew Fuller: 'Fun' is an interesting term to use, it is somehow, juvenile, gleeful, grinning, something not as 'serious' as humour, or jokes, which have their literature and interpretations, nor does it necessarily correspond to the policy scam of 'creativity', or the industrial dimension of games. But yet, there's a quality of fun which links all these things and you have assembled some exemplary 'cases' of them here. What forms does fun appear in, in the exhibition? Olga Goriunova: 'Fun' for me is a force, an energy, an unfolding of a certain ensemble of curiosity, inappropriateness, going beyond and deviating from what is laid out or logically consequential to the current condition. Such an energy can be easily recognised in science, in art, as something traditionally acknowledged and aspired for, though more recently endangered through neoliberal framing in terms of usefulness if not direct profit. As such, the idea behind the show is to think how freaks run the world. The fun they have when poking at the screens of reality to discover other realities is what I imagine the concept of fun is about. Now, beyond shared qualities, there is a distinctiveness of fun in relation to, broadly speaking, computation and computers. Fun here becomes related to formal logic and repetition, to the question of where software starts and ends, to mental states, to what operations it can carry out on the world, to the cultures and usages of software, to its building upon itself, to its aesthetics. Humour often adjoins fun when software, but also its realm of production and operation, is tested against dominance, boredom, madness, power; the fun I am interested in can also be absurd rather than jolly. Fun lets one see the territories that are in-between computer science and digital folklore, the art and cultures of using conventional software. Probably, the juvenile aspect you are talking about is the unseriousness of fun, which is the bravery generally ascribed to youth to ignore the often self-inflicted order of 'seriousness'. Such seriousness is the effect of power systems, of orders of rationality producing forces that act in a manner that is 'more royal than the king'. And certainly, fun can be and is used then to update such orders to complexify the systems of reinforcement. The exhibition tries to attend to different aspects of fun. David Link reconstructs the 'Love Letter Generator' written in 1952 by Christopher Strachey, with Alan Turing, that predates all early generally known text generating algorithms. It produced beautifully absurd love letters on a Ferranti Mark 1 - one of the first electronic computers. . On production, the poems were hung around the walls of Manchester University, mystifying the students who came there to do something very serious. The work presents the complete working memory and processor of 'Love Letter Generator' which can be seen on 12 cathode ray tubes which the Ferranti used for memory, storing bits in phosphor. This work will be shown in the Arnolfini, Bristol, and for Eindhoven, David is working on 'Draughts'. Here is how David describes it: ' In 1947, the electrical engineers Frederic Williams and Tom Kilburn succeeded at the University of Manchester to construct the first reliable means for the volatile storage of information -- the Williams tube. Two years later, the device had evolved into the Manchester Mark I, arguably the first computer worldwide. The earliest major program for this machine was written in 1951 by an outsider, the school teacher Christopher Strachey, who had obtained the technical manual from a former fellow student, Alan Turing. The task of this software was not to calculate the trajectory of missiles, but to play the game of draughts (checkers).' In these various versions of the exhibition and with the overall concept, I try to present different time periods, problems through which fun manifests, be they visual aesthetic or functional, subjects or objects that have agency, cultures of producing fun and moments at which it can emerge. MF: Given these different time periods, how might you perhaps characterize them, how does the possibility of fun proliferate or diminish at different times in relation to specific kinds of computing culture? OG: This is a question to a broadminded historian. However, one could certainly say that there is a different sensibility to every time period, however hard it can be to give the exact dating. Here, David Link's work comments of the 1950s and challenges the view that computing was always heavily dominated by the military interests. Strachey and Turing, as demonstrated in the show, were also implied in the kinds of making sense of the world through the funny, peculiar and the absurd. Computing of the 1950s and 1960s still remained quite closed for wider tinkering. The 1970s and 1980s brought around home computers and 'script kiddies' avant la lettre, and a new era of fun begun, less like the absurdist fun of, say, the writer Daniil Kharms, but more homebrew and hands-on, with a distinctive materiality and aesthetic that is alive up to this moment. The 1990s were the years of the explosion of digital avant-gardes, very similar to the Soviet 1920s, where similar drives of inventing and establishing new orders could be sensed in unrelated domains and artists, computer labs of Universities, companies made up the languages of today. But again, if one changes the viewpoint and looks at the history of computer science, a different timeline could be developed, with brilliant humanist and humourous programmers, such as Dijkstra coming to the fore, whose acts and breakthroughs stand as milestones. MF: The first stage of the show, which has just opened at the Arnolfini in Bristol, proposes perhaps a more 'Geeky' aspect of fun, that suggests an interest in code, devices, unexpected solutions to newly imagined problems. Is there a particular relation to fun in geek cultures you are interested in here? OG: Certainly, there is a particular relation to fun in geek cultures. There is professional humour, the insider jokes, the obsession and dedication, cultures of enquiry and leisure, of building and maintaining the structures. I guess what interests me in this respect is the artistic nature of geekiness, for instance, the way in which objects and processes, projects that are thrilling artistic works are produced within systems of coordinates which are not interested in art at all. The proximity of ways of working and imagining, of letting things to be seen and experienced that are offered in certain 'geeky' work and art work makes sensible certain kinds of forces that traverse unrelated areas in making the world up. Take 'Tempest for Eliza' by Eric Thiele. This project is done by a programmer 'for fun'. It is there to explore the reality of TEMPEST - a secret service code word coined in the late 60-s - early 70-s for the using of and defending against 'compromising emissions'. Electronic devices emit electromagnetic waves, which can be caught in order for the original data to be reconstructed. Tempest for Eliza demonstrates this in a very precise manner: the software produces images ('one for each note in the song'), which are displayed by the computer monitor, which sends electromagnetic waves of very high frequencies, which are then caught by short wave AM radio. Here, the thoughtfulness and irony of the project are supported by the formalist coherency of the images produced; and the seemingly non-purposeful usage of a computer reveals the multi-layeredness and complexity of its materiality. The best examples of fun in geek cultures offer exactly that elegant complexity at the level of formalist qualities, meanings, frameworks, mixed with non-pretentiousness. As statements and ways of seeing, they are laborious, laconic and exact, like haiku. MF: As we've said, the show includes work from several time periods, things that operate as art, but also under other rubrics outside of art. Elsewhere, the idea of 'Digital Folk' is one way in which you have spoken about certain computing cultures, the sensibilities active here cross in and out of art, particular kinds of technicity. The show feels refreshingly unconstrained in this way... OG: As related to the question above, digital folk is a phenomenon that draws heavily on geek cultures. At the same time, there is a sense in which digital folk - a variety of cultures that use, adapt, produce software that makes and 'changes' sense in relation to labour conditions, states of work, certain aesthetic normalities, software operations and allowances, always stay minor. Digital folklore still awaits its dedicated scholar while certain times and kinds of it are becoming lost. At the same time, a part of it, along with software art, made its way into the world of iPhone applications where it is often detached from its operationality, of the ways in which it had a relation to the modes in which an OS works or hangs, to the joint subject formed in-between a desktop computer and its tense user. MF: The Runme.org site also appears in the exhibition. As a busy place for software art, what does it exemplify in relation to the theme of the show? OG: Runme developed most rapidly during early and mid naughties when software art was in the period of bloom. In my view, which other people of Runme might not share, it is included for the purposes of remembering. Such remembering is about a somewhat missing round of understanding of the 1990-s and early 2000-s which produced systems of coordinates and languages inhabited by, transformed, used and re-used, often rather violently, in the current sleek digital world. Here it probably makes sense to provide a short description of Runme for the purposes of reminding: "Runme.org is a software art repository created by all the people who used and contributed to it since late 2002. It offers an interesting and slightly ironic perspective on software art, and one that is rich in drawing upon programmers' cultures alongside the more self-consciously 'artistic' enquiries. Software art is a set of practices which focus on software as material as well as a machine for making sense of the world we are all implied in, and it works on destabilising some of its normalities. Hosting and linking to over 400 projects, along with features and texts, Runme.org is a project of self-organisation of an art current through the 'fun' of exploration that tries to be open, and its position of relative success is due, among other, to the perspectival humour and inclusive drive of its structure." MF: Is fun with software the only way to stop it driving you mad? OG: If you consider software to be the backbone of most management theory based processes that have an ambition to govern all aspects of life in most developed countries (that's in fact the topic of your and Andy Goffey's Evil Media Studies book, right?) then fun with software is not only a way to stop losing sanity but also a way to sneak out, which is maybe one and the same thing as one needs to get out in order to remain in. OG: I would like to say that this exhibition would never be possible without two people which decided on producing it: Annet Dekker and Annette Wolfsberger. Why did you decide to take it on? Annet Dekker: Software art is often still regarded as belonging to creative industries or nerds and not to experimentation, art or fun. We very much believe in Olga's approach to software art and wanted to emphasise its importance for art as well as its relation to the structure of society and show this to as many people as we could take on. We also share your view on the lack of historical recognition or understanding and certainly visibility of these kinds of works. We think it is important to present these works and we are especially attracted by the way Olga has framed the exhibition, not looking at it from a deterministic technological point of view or a merely aesthetic one but looking outside these almost traditional frameworks practiced in art and start with fun. It shows perfectly that art has a wider scope than is often addressed within the field. The focus on fun opens up the exhibition as well as the field of software art which for many, is a very closed territory consisting of and belonging to nerds, trained specialists or large business corporations. Similarly the concept of fun is not very much talked about and in relation to software often only seen as being about play, gaming and interactivity. This narrow view totally misses the depth or the implications software art and fun have. By presenting works that show different sides of software brings in new relations that hopefully people will recognize as being closer to their own experience and at best something they can actually influence if they wish to. OG: Annet, is there a relation between the theme and structure of the exhibition and the current layout of artistic, political, social interest in Holland and EU? Does the exhibitions' thematic fit a certain strategy or a missing discussion? Is there a way in which MU and Baltan laboratories saw themselves implied in such problematic? AD: I think it goes too far to connect the theme and structure to the current political situation in the EU or the Netherlands - although the issue of fun would in a way be a perfect vehicle to divert current issues. It would certainly be a welcoming addition in todays political climate as it may show things in a different perspective. As for the venues that were approached to show Funware we tried to find different environments to connect with and relate to in a manner that will open up the discussion of the influence of software. Arnofini with its history in performance and theatre was an interesting point of departure to think of or invest with software. MU on the other hand has an interest in visual culture of the here and now but it is foremost the quirky and approachable multidisciplinary approach of MU that made it a perfect place to connect to. At the same time Eindhoven as a city has a long history of innovation and research, where Phillips has its roots, and local organisations are keen to work together. Together with MU and Baltan Laboratories we ended up organizing an exhibition, an artist in residence (together with NIMk in Amsterdam and Piksel in Bergen, Norway), an extended educational programme and a symposium at one of the largest art&technology festivals taking place in Eindhoven, STRP. It's quite amazing that so many connections could be made in one city. In a way it reflects the diverse character of software art. In the end HardwareMedienKunstVerein brings these different perspectives together. HMKV has a long-term international reputation for display of new developments in both art and technology By choosing a thematic approach whereby technical art is seen as a means not as an end. It is their topical and conceptual discussion of our contemporary world based increasingly on media and technological structures which is also reflected in Funware. MF: Bringing together pieces of work from different times implies some kind of preservation or reconstitution of some works. I wonder, is there some kind of fun to this process itself? AD: Yes absolutely and in many different ways. It is the absurdism of trying to find a working plug, cable or network configuration just in order to see the authentic working. This of course relates to the practice of conservation in art where 'the authentic' is the most valued. And especially with software art it has become a bigger challenge to get to such an authentic experience. Rebuilding software is not only about assembling the objects and maybe slightly restoring them, but also about reconstructing the code by doing. The work by David Link is again a perfect example here. But there are of course also other methods, which aim at representing the work through documentation. Trying to reconstruct the context of the work and doing the interviews reliving the experience can certainly be fun. It brings up aspects that were long forgotten but which when recounted, shed a totally new light on the work, also sometimes for the makers. At times, one could argue that the documentation of a work might be better than the actual work. For Funware we try all these different methods, just to see what it brings; and in case when things don't work anymore we asked the artists to think of revisioning their work (as is the case with JODI's JET SET WILLY the making off). Making a new version by building on the past is a way to accept loss and at the same time an attempt to prolong the work. But it all can be very serious so it is important to keep a sense of humour as a means to prevent you from becoming too frantic. In the end we are presenting a new work by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk: Naked on Pluto - a game in Facebook, I'm already looking forward to seeing that being preserved! MF: One of the things that is the sheer variety of the formats involved. Some projects entail custom hardware, of several different sorts, that either 'quote' existing objects or invent new ones, others use conventional computing platforms. Some work exists fleetingly on networks of different kinds, one exists on paper only, others work with cracked or manipulated games or use computers primarily aimed at children. How do you see this diversity? AD: To me this is the whole point of the show, to present the sheer diversity of software art. It is not just the 'world of nerds', it's all around you, much closer than you think, and it can be accessed in many different ways and levels. OG: It is interesting that at a point in time, there was a discussion about the problems of presenting new media art in a gallery space, as a lot of such presentation took the form of a computer sitting on the desk. It was somewhat surprising to see now, how easily a very wide range of methodologies and conceptual structures could be gathered together. Probably, an easy answer is that with such a largely retrospective show as Funware is, the body of great work accumulated naturally exhibits a richness and diversity that only proves how interesting those years and explorations were. MF: Many mainstream accounts of computing propose that it becomes increasingly calm, intuitive, fitting into the 'flow' of everyday life and enhancing it. Others propose that it is not simply functionalist, but becomes a kind of event in itself, full of lots of bijoux treats, as for instance with some smartphones as mentioned already, animating daily routines with pleasure-design and things to fill time. Such figurations are perhaps most evident in HCI and user experience design or other forms of human factors. The work in this show however tends to step aside from these two poles in order to propose different kinds of thoughtfulness and experience in relation to software, each piece of work having its own characteristics of excitement, awkwardness, time-requirements, involvement and so on. Some of them are exuberant, but others, melancholy. You show us that, in places, software culture is, by several means, inexplicably richer than that which it is designed for. What might be the stakes in such explication? OG: I would not like to end up the interview by a pessimistic rant on the 'brave new world' that is speedily coming towards us, though everyone holds their breathe here in Britain, waiting for the cuts, new immigration rules, university tuition fees changes, and other kinds of governmental announcements. Now, it becomes crystal clear that a sheer possibility to play around, to do something useless that may become brilliant, to be obscure and absurd is fundamental to the production of culture we inhabit and the parts of it we admire, can disappear. This is a question of education, imagination, environment, ideology, time, idea of usefulness and of value, aesthetics and many other spectra. Software culture is not different, in this sense, from other domains. However, what is also possible is a new renaissance through the very renewing of the 'oppressed', as hard times are often very interesting And here, software is different, in terms of the kinds of control possible and implemented, by the types of network platforms or hardware popular and desired and also by the depth of its appropriation by the pure ideological management system of society. What can be done here now, remains an open question. Details: The Arnolfini edition of the show includes, 'Love Letter Generator' by David Link, Jodi's film 'All Wrongs Reversed (c) 1982', 'WIMP' by Laskin/Shulgin, 'Tempest for Eliza' by Eric Thiele, 'London.pl' by Harwood, 'Open Circuit' by Christoph Haag, Martin Rumori, Franziska Windisch & Ludwig Zeller and 'Runme.org'. Eindhoven's version of the show, produced by MU and Baltan laboratories, will be much larger and includes 'Auto Illustrator' by Adrian Ward, 'SVEN' by Amy Alexander, 'eRiceCooker' by Annina Ruest, 'Al Jazari 'by Dave Griffiths, 'Naked on Pluto' by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux, and Marloes de Valk, 'wowPod' by Electroboutique, 'LOCUSOLUS' by Gazira Babeli, 'RETROYOU R/C STORY' by Joan Leandre, 'JET SET WILLY the making of' by JODI, 'Satromiser' by Jon Satrom and Ben Syverson, 'I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker' by I/O/D, 'Hardware Orchestra' by Carmen Weisskopf, Domagoj Smoljo and Roger Wigger, 'SimCopter' by RTMark, the above mentioned 'Open Circuit', 'Runme.org' and 'Textmode Quake'. The exhibition will then go to Hartware MedienKunstVerein in 2011. 'Fun with Software' Arnolfini, Bristol, UK 25 September - 21 November 2010 http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/ 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol 'Funware' 12 November 2010 - 16 January 2011 MU, Eindhoven (NL) www.mu.nl MU Emmasingel 20 5611 AZ Eindhoven The Netherlands 'Funware Symposium' during STRP Festival 27 November 2010 at BALTAN Laboratories in Eindhoven www.strp.nl www.baltanlaboratories.org www.mu.nl 'Funware' Spring 2011 HMKV, Dortmund (DE) www.hmkv.de HMKV at Dortmunder U Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse (formerly Brinkhoffst. 4) D-44137 Dortmund # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org 95.0 <nettime> Pits to Bits, Interview with Graham Harwood Matthew Fuller nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 31 Jul 2010 22:15:35 +0100 Pits to Bits, Interview with Graham Harwood This interview follows on from a project called âCoal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs)â carried out in Newcastle in spring 2010 for the AV Festival. The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram between components in production as they undergo transformations across different kinds of time, politics, matter, knowledge, and vitality. The project found a way of working with such things that was particularly powerful. The interview begins with a discussion of CFC but also moves off into databases and a certain understanding of their material force. One thing we donât cover in the interview is the detail of the Coal Fired Computers projectâs work with miner activists, including the inspirational Dave Douglass. (See information on his memoirs here ). More of this can be found in a booklet about the project here, including links to all the groups involved. The interview was carried out by email in May and June 2010. Matthew Fuller: If we are to list the visible components of the project it would go something like this: pile of coal -> fair ground steam engine -> power transformer -> computer / software -> air compressor -> blackened lungs. But there are a lot of things missing from that set of components that are integral to the project, what are they and how do you see them? Graham Harwood: This list should really start with Jean Demars who set up the collaboration with the miners, being French and youngish gave him little knowledge of the UK class struggle of the miners strike in the 1980âs. He use his political enthusiasm, critical analysis to re-examine the strike in the context of globalisation with the people who struggles against it back then. If they had not been defeated they would have picketed every port to stop the everyday atrocity that powers our world. Matsuko on the other hand is always the leader of all things organised, productive, efficient. Iâm much too lost in my own space to ever accomplish much on my own. Matsuko takes this raw material of todays obsession and forms it into graphics, budgets and how the exhibition will look and act. She does not like to talk in public she just likes getting on with things. MF: So perhaps you have some considerations about how the kinds of work we are speaking about involve collaboration, within this âlist of componentsâ, about yourself, about Jean and Matsuko and the kinds of collaboration you have been developing with them and others, with Richard Wright and earlier, as part of the group Mongrel GH: Collaboration is a necessary minefield, if youâre interested in the place where media systems and the social clash, unfold and get really dirty then they are mandatory. It would be far too easy to claim everything under my own authorship but anyone with an ounce of nous would see that all imaginings are dependent on the context in which they arise or are seen, Iâm just a bit more explicit about that. MF: So to return back to the list of componentsâ GH: Then the place, Newcastle Upon Tyne a former mining and industrial district in Englandâs North East with a geographical propensity for coal, then - people maybe â firstly the miners who displayed their literature and spoke about their lungs, then the Discovery Museum, with itâs cleaners who were also Miners, itâs exhibits, Charles Parsonâs 1884 steam turbines the descendants of which produce the worlds electricity. Then there is the 3000 visitors who had some familial relationship with Coal mines, lung disease. It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them, displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap and apparently clean goods we consume. Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81% of the energy used in a computerâs life cycle is expended in the manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons of coal dust into unknown lungs. Then thereâs the recent histories of media and my preoccupation with itâs interrelation to death. But more about that later. MF: Part of the interest of the work it seems to me is that in a context in which âthe world is too complicated to describe or to understandâ, it provides something like a diagram, or a formula which shows how a series of things are joined together, how certain kinds of momentary connections are made, but does not renounce the difficulty of such work of abstraction, and really gets into the very different kinds of qualities, materialities, knowledges, histories and powers of the things that are nevertheless joined. The work doesnât make itâs argument through affirming a set of categories but by drawing out these formulae in uncannily clear ways through this process of conjunction. What kind of process of searching and sifting goes into making this diagram of formula? GH: Itâs probably best if it starts as a joke, a completely unrealisable funny fantasy that will not go away. Yet every time you tell someone new, you can see it connects and they recount stories or expressions that affix to the initial idea. Next you formulate a contraption whoâs structural operations can leak out into the domains you want to contest, play with and the areas people have spoken to you about. I leave as much work undone as possible, so as it unfolds it can contest the space in which itâs showing and the space/geography can contest the contraption. As the physical/code machine begins to take shape it creates complex negotiations, apprehensions and upsets as the speculation grows. Then there is fear, violence and the dead. I need to be scared of what I make, It needs to put me in embarrassing, difficult, hurtful and potentially violent situations or itâs just not interesting. MF: A number of projects you have been involved in over recent years work with âprimaryâ raw materials, stuff dug out of the ground and refined, such as the metals aluminium â in the film âAluminiumâ presented at Manifesta7 - and coltan â which is explored in the various iterations of the Tantalum Memorial and Phone Wars projects. What are the stakes in this coupling of elementary or primal materials with computational systems? GH: What interests me is the materialâs ability to recursively unfold possibilities, transforming the flesh, the social, political and economic. Essentially what a material makes possible and what it shuts down when itâs ripped from the earth and itâs context and contaminates human ecologies. Simultaneous with the material properties, they are contagious concepts that move around technical cultures growing on the jelly of science embedded with itâs own philosophical speculations about the nature of the world. The materials also come into to existence as a force when the political, geographical and economic situations are right for them to do so. Aluminium âneedsâ Italian Fascism to âneedâ a national metal, It âneedsâ Italy to lack coal, iron and have bauxite instead. Coal for a long time in the UK was dug from deep cast mines and the shafts required pumping out which creates the steam engine which in turn requires more coal and more labour. Tantalum ârequiresâ political unrest in the Congo, kids playing Sony games. Then there is the flesh and death, the material bends the flesh to suit itself, miners lungs, bones shattering, light, fast munitions ripping into countless bodies, rapes and murders. MF: And the place of mines in our clean modern world? GH: Mines are everywhere in everything once you start looking, you cannot have humans without them, we seem to be preprogrammed to burrowing blindly underground like worms. The main difference from us and worms is that we have a compulsion to burn or explode whatever we find. For the CFC project I wanted to look at the steam engine as a physical and conceptual machine simultaneously in a popular setting like the Discovery Museum. In the 19th century the great engines of change at that time were built around coal-fed steam. This was a society that rested on its mines; its products dominated life and determined its inventions and transport infrastructure and its politics. In this way, the coal mines of England recursively transformed the bodies of those who touched them and redirected large parts of its society to feed its machines. This is still the case, but the mines and production are displaced to India and China. Itâs like contemporary media tries to obscure itâs origins. When we use an Ethernet cable we rarely think of the poor bastard who had to mine the copper or think about the effect of early copper mines on our cultural, social evolution. I like to imagine the matter of contemporary media crawling out from the satanic pits of the early 19th Century, struggling to evolve in the winding towers. Then laying rails for itself to feed, spreading out creating denser and denser webs of interconnection for itself. One you suspend seeing transport and communication in contemporary terms and think about them as the same thing, as they once were, then different histories of media emerge. Like in the 1840âs, physical machines, steam engines force the compression of landscapes into manageable chunks of aligned time-tables, co-ordinating the bodies on to trains and into mass labour. Submarine telegraph cables start to criss-cross the Atlantic, re-compressing the oceanâs trade routes into global markets realigning it into the rows and columns of the ledger, birthing scientific management and unifying markets. The mines transformed the body as the body transformed the mine, feeding lungs into the hungry boilers of empires. MF: Coal Fired Computers doesnât attempt to resolve the problem of energy, but using a wonderful but rather inefficient engine turns coal into heat, into movement, into electricity, this in turn transmuted into a machine that handles data, and drives a compressed air machine feeding a pair of blackened lungs. The machine is a diagram, but also composed of an enormous different kinds of things, timescales and eras, of sorts of stuff, and of different kinds of expertise and âstates of natureâ things that are worked and transformed in various ways. The project is also, as you say, very much about transformation, of matter, time, knowledge, media systems, communities, flesh. GH: Yes itâs a dark futurist contraption â a strange, unnecessarily intricate, improvised machine, dreamed up to bring power, media, histories and flesh into proximity with each other. When I plugged the electricity from a hundred year old steam engine into the computer, I was elated to feel the symbolic power of that, I did not care what anyone else thought â I needed that fix. Then bringing the miners who dug the coal that was shovelled into the boiler to watch the diseased lungs inflate with every database record made it orgasmic. The miners have a fantastic vision of class power that I recall from when I was a child and they bought down two Governments in the 1970âs. The melancholy of all those lungs, death, disease, power, electricity - we just donât have a vision of power like that anymore. I deliberately wanted to burn as much coal as possible, pollute a massive area for no purpose other then to feed my contraption, I needed to see what it felt like to be completely wasteful. Originally we wanted to gather the coal from child labour in India but this proved too difficult, but it led ultimately to our discovery of the nameless labourâ the lack of datasets that fuel our wealth and power. MF: And the connections run on? GH: I suppose the other fix was the lack of separation between flesh and the machine. The lungs hanging on the front of the steam engine with wires poking out and pulsating. For me, this reflects my own reality of having big bits of steal screwed into my body with nylon screws that I have carried for the last 35 years, and having endless cameras and other bits of medical technology inserted into my flesh, or conversations with kidney dialysis patients about where their life ends and the machine begins, and the simple reality of those bodies that feed the machine of our power. MF: You have also worked with databases that provide statistics on the conditions of work, (such as the Lungs: Slave Labour project of 2005). Work records, health records, the registrations of populations in figures becomes something that you see both as means to tell some kind of truth or story about the conditions of life, but also to make them physically palpable, through breaths, but also tender, bodily and ephemeral. These are two different means of registering peoplesâ lives, two ways of knowing the world but here they are brought together in a way that is both very sad, mournful, but also somehow irrefutable. What are your thoughts on the relation between statistics, record keeping, the infrastructural cruelty of the systems you record, and the kinds of expression that they yield in the systems you assemble at a tangent to them? GH: Death and media excite me, itâs one of my kinks. In what might be an unhelpful nutshell, Memorial is where the database combined with death changes conduct. MF: Could you explain that a little more? GH: Record keeping is still seen by many as being separate from lived experience, a model, a trace, residue if you like. But we are transformed by the use of indirection, modeling, creation and implementation of our record keeping or by not keeping records at all. Simply putâ the database, the need to create a conceptual-view for our records, necessitates the implementation of sets of formal rules that are contained within the database. These theoretical machines are used to dissect an enterprise into sets of discrete normalised fields from which comparisons can be made which, in turn influences the conduct of the records input. You can see the raw power of the database at The Tower Hill Memorial, Trinity Square to the Merchant Navyâs 28,000 War dead in Londonâs East End. The ordering of names, ships, dates forces you to iterate over the data in specific physical ways. The enlistment system records its victims by inserting a date in the death column. The collection of the data, to include commonwealth dead, but not those of the USA, echoes empire and the order of international relations at the time. MF: Yes, this is a neo-classical monument that conflates masses of dead with architectural masses, columns covered in metal plates bearing the names and details of dead sailors, which in turn support a roof structure. The allegory is there for the turning. GH: Or to put it another way, the normalisation and categorisation of the experience of an enterprise distilled into the conceptual-view creates an encoded expertise of the enterprise which reproduces its power in new and unexpected ways. In Coal Fired Computers we tried to unpack this materialist view of software, its histories and engines. Open it up to a live experiment, see with others how the conceptual machines of the 19th Century have unfolded in to the everyday conditions that are now defined by perpetual crisis management, in the economy, ecology, security and financial systems. MF: How important then has the key requirement in statistics and database design for data normalization to be maintained had an effect on other kinds of normative process, such as social normalization? GH: There is almost no separation. If we think again about the Tower Hill Memorial as a physical manifestation of a database laid out in space. The body of the visitor is moved to access information, by ship, name, date. We order ourselves to read the fields as the ships, crews were ordered by the records kept on them. The space between data and the management systems that processes the data points to a history of conceptual machines at least going back as far as Samuel Pepysâ days at the admiralty where he introduced examinations rather then class privilege as a means of evaluating officers, standardising ship types across the country, the provision for officersâ pensions and payments for sailorsâ widows; amongst other things. His great innovation in all this was a distinct separation of information from the methods of its own representationâ scrupulous, absolute record keeping as a machine to produce Empire. In contemporary terms we would see this as a form of standardisation. In turn building the ability to reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself. MF: One aspect of a number of the projects you have produced in recent years is that of the incorporation of pseudo-code, bringing instructional sequences, written in an idiom that is close to Perl, sometimes with a degree of functionality, sometimes not: what are the stakes in working with this material? GH: Hmm, there is no great difference between pseudo-code and functional code. There is just one level of abstraction or another. Maybe Iâm too old but all my early experience of coding was with algorithms written in pseudo-code to get over the problems of language specificity. I have produced pseudo-code that has done much more processing then the more functional stuff. Maybe another way to see this is that I build software contraptions that enable me or whoever Iâm working with to speculate about the world. Iâm completely uninterested in software thatâs useful or works too well. I have no desire for a seamless integration in to my desktop and the systems it implies. MF: To return to CFC then, the question of seamlessness is one that often occurs in the rational discourse on sustainable energy, in terms of creating energy systems that donât loose power, that donât leak. You are saying that in computational terms, another kind of consideration arises, that leakiness creates the possibility for excrescences, for imagination, the expressivity of data in relation to slightly mismatched algorithms or visualization schemes? GH: Code leaks all the time, thatâs whatâs worrying, hopeful about it when itâs received uncritically. You create it with intention, a technical fix, but in implementation it leaks into the social enabling, disabling as it iterates over the social, cultural, economic and political conditions that formed it. In my own work I exploit this by creating assemblages of code, hardware, histories, people and materials. Particular datasets have particular resonance in certain geographical, social and political situations. In CFC we used a UK database of over 164,000 records containing the details of coal mining accidents and deaths in the UK from 1600 to the present day. This was created and/or paid for by Raleys Solicitors - specialists in workplace accident and disease compensation - a way of accruing knowledge. During 2003 and 2005 when the scheme was at its peak, Raleysâ annual profit rose from Â2.5 million to Â15.7million. During this period two Raleys partners, Ian Firth and David Barber, made personal profits of Â9.9 million and Â7.2 million respectively. To reuse this dataset in other ways allowed us to play with Raleys as part of our contraption. With the Lungs project in ZKM, the original dataset of records of slave workers was conceived within a Hollerith/IBM paradigm of punch cards, a mechanism of census taking that unfolded into racial hygiene. To take a Nazi dataset of the number of slaves used in the armaments factory in the building that now houses ZKM, to calculate the air that was in each set of lungs at the point of death, and re-breathe it into that factory was a way of unleashing new knowledge from fascist systems. MF: One of the underlying arguments I think in CFC, but also in Lungs: Slave Labour is about the power that vast accruals of data can have. Databases are no longer called Data Banks, but there is something about the agglomeration of large amounts of data that gives it an affinity, if not quite to capital, to something common in a power of amassment to create distortions of power and understanding around it. In which ways might we need to reshape our understandings of data? GH: Yes, I have never quite got to the bottom of the name change from data banks to databases â Codd who produced the first relational database still refers to data-banks in the late 1960âs. I suppose itâs something like there was no separation between the data and the code that produced it in the data-bank, leading to a repository of information and the methods of accessing that data. After Coddâs idea of relational database management systems, data sets and the code that process them are separate. So, the DBMS becomes an engine for the production of knowledge and power, changing conduct from processing the sets of information. Iâm working on health records at the moment in Liverpool and trying to think about the aggregation of 60,000,000 health records in the UKâ forget about the privacy issues for a moment. The aggregation and structure of this information will produce new knowledge with a measurable power to change conduct as I described earlier. This will disrupt older forms of health authority like the British Medical Association, based upon professional knowledge, with a new kind of power formed from a software-mediated return of the masses in the form of health records. This is where the leaks get interesting, potentially on the road to new tyrannies. An example from Liverpool, is the âJoint Strategic Needs Assessmentâ document developed by the Liverpool NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) dated 2008. The PCT had found that it had a strong indication that 10,000 people were out there somewhere with Hypertension. They had no direct knowledge of this, but it was indicated by comparing their records with other records around the country. If those people could be found, then morbidity rates throughout the city could be reduced. The argument for this interpretation was created by comparative analyses involving many datasets. These datasets coalesced as new forms of authority that in turn could direct PCT priorities. A further convolution in the reading of the data was that Public Health advisors also thought that if you put the same money as it would cost to take the measures against hypertension into promoting the health of 16-25 year olds, this would have greater long term benefits â unfortunately however the evidence for this would take longer to gather then the lifetime of a parliament and so had to be discounted. MF: This sounds like a story with many possible turning points in it, many moments when decisions were made, resources were joined, work was done, in one way or another. What kinds of connection and combination can you imagine for such datasets to yield new figures of truth and potentially a new politics of this new kind of mass? GH: I remain hopeful that vast datasets will ooze new forms of power from the aggregation of mass records which have the potential to dislodge established forms of professional knowledge before they unfold into new modes of tyranny further down the road. The problem with this optimistic model of transformation is that it depends on datasets being ârationallyâ built by people who understand the flows of information. Recently when I was working with a Health Trust I noticed that the fields within the five competing datasets were politicly driven and the system was undesigned to protect the competing political/financial interests of the Hospitals, Health Trusts, Government and General Practitioners. The system was not live in that records were at least two months old, had to be requested over night and arrived in a flat file with one table of more then a 1000 fields in a table. This would be shocking to any elementary computer science undergraduate. I find myself becoming a data puritan, well designed, ruthless information, using open systems will allow for much better regulation of data privacy then any sloppy, propriety and politically determined system. MF: I like this term âcontraptionâ that you have started using recently. It seems to couple a kind of intentionality with a bit of the looseness required to keep things going. What is a contraption? GH: In French, Jean says, contraption is pronounced âMachin, truc, biduleâ: something that one cannot or refuses to name. Its quality as âpasse-partoutâ (passe-partout is a device that opens all doors) is to be unqualified, thus connecting elements and revealing sets of relations that are not evident or sometimes hidden. Its in-between states allows for a practical exploration and/or understanding of power and media ecologies that surround it. A contraption in English is were the domain of the technical overlaps the imaginary, an experiment with nothing to prove. Usually strange, unnecessarily intricate, unfinished, inherently unstable, improvised machine. âStrangenessâ enables it to become a place of experimentation and fun. âInherently unstableâ refuses easy utility, normalisation and emphasis the forces at play in the machine that break it. âUnfinishedâ is about provoking thought, emotion rather than wanting to show it how it is/should be. âImprovised machineâ implies a playful assemblage of pre-exiting parts. âUnnecessarily intricateâ allows for a geeky self-expression or the elegance, aesthetics we find in complex code. I suppose what Iâm hinting at is the unstable state of invention before the âmachinâ becomes normalised. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org