media geographies

Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy | Video on TED.com

2011-04-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy | Video on TED.com

Aesthetic Journalism How to Inform Without Informing

2011-04-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

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ISBN 9781841502687
Paperback 112 pages
230x174mm
Published September 2009
Imprint: Intellect

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Books by Alfredo Cramerotti
Books in Cultural & Media Studies

Addressing a growing area of focus in contemporary art, Aesthetic Journalism investigates why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries, and reportage. Art theorist and critic Alfredo Cramerotti traces the shift in the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism – a change that questions the very foundations of journalism and the nature of art. This volume challenges the way we understand art and journalism in contemporary culture and suggests future developments of this new relationship.

Reviews

' “An inspiring and well written overview of reportage and information practices in art... groundbreaking!”' – Hito Steyerl, Visiting Professor for Experimental Media Creation at the University of Arts, Berlin

'"I have read your book 'aesthetic journalism' with great interest. [...] I understand that your analysis of the applied methods in both journalism and in contemporary art is extremely precise and based on extensive research which makes it a very rich lecture. To me your book unfolds an enormous panorama which I appreciate a lot to find it in such compact."' – Peter Sandbichler, artist and consultant, Vienna, Austria

'"I think you've touched on a rich vein which will not only be of huge interest to the arts worlds but more significantly in the evolving debate of journalism and doc - the world I know very well having previously worked for Channel 4 News, ABC News and Newsnight - to name a few."' – David Dunkley Gyimah, Senior Lecturer Digital Journalism, University of Westminster London, UK

'"Well-organized and thoroughly researched, Aesthetic Journalism is a good book for anyone who has ever wondered about the proliferation in contemporary art exhibitions of works resembling news reports, documentary cinema, or informative publications. Alfredo Cramerotti takes on this group of seemingly unrelated works, focusing on a number of themes pertinent to contemporary culture and society. This book investigates the bleeding over into one another of the fields of art and journalism, who share superficial similarities but differ radically on such notions as "reality," "fact," and "objectivity" as well as on professional aims and ethical standards. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in recent contemporary art practices and discourse."' – Geoffrey Garrison, artist and editor, Berlin, Germany

'"I just took contact with your book 'Aesthetic Journalism' (bought in Berlin), which I found really interesting and symptomatic of many issues that I also share (regarding the contemporary regimes of visibility/invisibility and the possibilities to act and [re]exist in public spheres related to those regimes...). I [...] express my admiration and recognition to this interesting work you produced."' – Jose Roberto Shwafaty, artist, Campinas/Sp, Brasil and Berlin, Germany

'"I appreciate very much the clarity with which [Aesthetic Journalism] is written, and I think that the journalistic devices that you appropriately employ in the main body of the book are great! Above all, the book provides a relatively concise, empirical commentary about a phenomenon that until now lacked such a referent."' – David Briers, critic, writer and curator based in West Yorkshire, UK

'I am enjoying your [Aesthetic Journalism] writing: fiction as a subversive but effective agent of reality, journalism as a body guarantor of public assets, a reporter as being in one place and witnessing something changing into being in many places at the same time and commenting on what happens elsewhere. ' – Alissa Firth-Eagland, curator and writer, Grenoble, France and Vancouver, Canada

'I have just finished reading Aesthetic Journalism... I thoroughly enjoyed it. Very interesting.' – Mark Neville, artist, Glasgow, UK

'Interesting and refreshing (congratulations for it).' – Irene Montero Sabín / BRUMARIA, Madrid, Spain and London, UK

'I was reading your book. Congratulations, very interesting, and very useful for me as teacher of new media... next academic year my students will learn about your concept.' – Pablo España / DEMOCRACIA, artist, curator and editor, Madrid, Spain

'I find it illuminating! Thank you so much for this!' – Julia Draganovic, curator and writer, New York, U.S. and Modena, Italy

'In the pursuit of explaining the interaction between artistic and journalistic practices this book succeeds with honors. It is thoroughly researched and it is transparent and generous in sharing its (re)sources. A decisive contribution is the analysis of paradigmatic works of aesthetic journalism, a term notably well articulated, like for example those of Renzo Martens and Alfredo Jaar' – Alanna Lockwood, www.artecontexto.com

'Drawing together references and critical models from philosophy, sociology, media theory, as well as art history, Cramerotti's arguments for Aesthetic Journalism are persuasive from a number of disciplinary perspectives. It is not a book that claims academic territory in the strictest sense, and it stays clear of questions of definition that could have easily waylaid its urgency. Rather, Aesthetic Journalism is more about recognizing, developing, and inciting a set of relationships that could radically alter the conduct of information in the public sphere. ' – Matt Packer, curator of exhibitions and projects at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork and Photography & Culture Journal reviewer, UK

'I recently completed my Masters in Contemporary Art at the Sotheby's Institute of Art in London and have used your book as a large source of inspiration for my dissertation. I admire the acknowledgement of the problematic aspects of representations of crises at present, articulated by thinkers such as yourself. ' – Lauren Mele, Masters candidate, Contemporary Art Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, UK

FORMAT 11: Video seminar on Photography and the Internet by OPEN-i

2011-04-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

by OPEN-i (Open Photojournalism Edu Platform), thanks to Paul Lowe

http://vimeo.com/20744177

FORMAT 11: Video on Street Photography 2.0 with Sophie Howarth and Sara T‟Rula by OPEN-i

2011-04-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

by OPEN-i (Open Photojournalism Edu Platform), thanks to Paul Lowe

http://vimeo.com/20745326

Blogging about Photography is a Political Act

2011-04-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

From Pete Brook's Prison Photography -
http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/blogging-about-photography-is-a-political-act/

March 29, 2011

I was recently asked to propose a blogging workshop for photography students. It pushed me to think why blogs should be written and why they should be read.
Blogging tools have developed concurrently with the social media platforms that have permitted our shared glut of imagery. Writers in general have provided context to images for a long time, but I reason bloggers are a new front line in the expanded process.
Here are my thoughts.

VISUAL OVERLOAD

The flow of images through our daily lives increases at exponential speeds. Social media, photo-sharing sites with essentially unlimited storage and mobile hardware have created this sprawling (and it could be said, suffocating) visual superstructure.
At 60 billion photos, Facebook has a larger photo collection than any other site on the web. By comparison, Photobucket hosts 8 billion, Picasa 7 billion and Flickr 5 billion. Facebook’s photo data as an infographic.

VIEWING PHOTOGRAPHY IN A POLITICALLY MINDFUL ΜΑΝΝΕΡ

What to make of this slew of imagery is something both Fred Ritchin and Joerg Colberg have addressed in the evergreen debate about ‘What’s Next? (for photography)’ now being pressed by FOAM Magazine. Colberg asks us to think about the meaning of our own digital archives and impress upon them a meaning, perhaps even a strategy. Ritchin urges us to think about making sense of the world through all the images available to us. Both are concerned with us being actors in the real world, and knowing that the photograph plays a part in social/political action and decision.

Ritchin:
Will all this media help us understand what we have done to our planet and what we should do about it? Will we want to help? Or will we remain increasingly oblivious, as if we don’t live here but in some virtual spaces? (This is the new immortality – avoiding not only who but where we are.)

So photographs are less useful for evidence, and as a result we are less sure of what is going on in the world. This can be a welcome change – without the photograph’s certainties we are invited to interrogate issues and events, to understand for ourselves.

Photographs, which used to sometimes prod us into action, even revelation, are now the domain of spaces like Facebook for which we repetitively (obsessively?) photograph ourselves so that we look as ‘good’ as we can possibly make ourselves look. The world and we are one, refracted together in a self-portrait.

But the problem is that few are engaged in such reflection, so the world is allowed to evolve without much effective oversight (moral as well as practical). By killing the messenger – the photograph – we no longer have to worry very much about what it has to say to us. In the information age, we are allowed to – even encouraged to – know very little, because knowing without ever doing anything about what one knows is hardly worth the effort.

Instead of becoming a photographer, figure out what to do with the enormous numbers of images – how to find the relevant ones, present them, contextualize them, link them, meld them with other media, use them effectively. This too is ‘writing with light.’

Colberg:
Interestingly enough, these questions tie in with the way the photograph has come under intense pressure, especially in a news-related context, where news organisations, in particular newspapers, have managed to blame photographs and photographers for the loss of credibility brought on by shoddy and superficial reporting. Photographs are not to be manipulated, we are told. Meanwhile the images we see on a daily basis are becoming ever more artificial.

Beyond our status as subjects within – and/or impulsive producers and passive consumers of – imagery, we are also to a very modest extent curators and distributors. In these last two roles, we can add most meaning and most weight. And it can be done through thoughtful and engaged blogging.

I have gone on record as saying the best bloggers writing about photography are those who can be relied upon to filter content meaningfully.

A good blog has a clearly stated goal and delivers accordingly. That’s how I judge success. Some blogs may cast a wide net, others focus on a niche, but in either case a consistent voice will secure the interest of readers. One hundred committed readers are more valuable than hundreds of thousands of browsers and “stumble-upons.” People need to be told why they should look at a picture just as much as they should be told in a lede why they should read a story past the first paragraph.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEXT

The iconic photograph – that is to say the stand alone image which communicates and resonates – is a rare and, for most photographers, an unattainable thing.

Understood within this context, writing about photography can be of paramount importance. And it can be an act of conscience.

Fine art photographers may argue explanatory text demeans a photograph; Robert Adam insisted that auxiliary captioning proved the image had failed in describing all it need to. But Adam’s is an out-dated philosophy. In current times, when photographs have diminished reliability, they require justification for looking.

During their role as World Press Photo jurors, Broomberg and Chanarin considered a photo of drawing of a battle plan from Darfur sketched into the sand on the floor of a hut, and noted:

Without a caption it is a meaningless squiggle. But together with the explanation the image is suddenly transformed into something truly menacing; a real insight into the low-tech horror of the genocide.
Blog posts can be considered extended captions, highlighting the meaning and purpose of photographs. As such, bloggers’ choices on their subject matter are significant. And political.

Brouhaha in Sweden following Award to Paul Hansen for his Image of Fabienne Cherisma

2011-03-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

From Pete Brook's Prison Photography -
http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/brouhaha-in-sweden-following-award-to-paul-hansen-for-his-image-of-fabienne-cherisma/

I knew something was going on when my blog stats spiked over the weekend. Prison Photography interviews with those who photographed Fabienne Cherisma’s body in Haiti were drawing readers … and they came from Sweden.

PAUL HANSEN’S SPoY WIN

At the Swedish Picture of the Year Awards, photojournalist Paul Hansen was recognised as International News Photographer and won the International News Image for his image of Fabienne (below).

Fifteen year-old Fabienne Cherisma was shot dead by police at approximately 4pm, January 19th, 2010. Photo: Paul Hansen
In March 2010, Hansen answered some of my questions about the circumstances of Fabienne’s death, “For me, Fabienne’s death and her story is a poignant reminder of the need for a society to have basic security – with or without a disaster.”
Paul Hansen was one of eight journalists I quizzed about that fateful day in an inquiry that revealed that 14 photographers were present immediately after Fabienne’s death.
At the time, I noted how the Swedish media and public discussed the ethics of the image and that, by comparison, similar debates were absent elsewhere.
The debate has continued following Hansen’s award, focusing on Nathan Weber’s image (below) that was first published along with my interview with Weber.

Photo: Nathan Weber
Weber’s image has unsettled many it seems. Judging by garbled Google translations here, here, and here it seems there are a few issues:
- General surprise that Weber’s image – and the revelations it brings – was not widely known before the SPoY award.
- Rhetorical questions about whether – given the scores of photographs made – Hansen’s image was “the best.”
- The expected accusations of exploitation and vulture behaviour by photographers.
- Fruitless thoughts on “truth” within this particular image.
Before they awarded Hansen, I wonder if SPoY were aware that so many photographers were present? Would it have altered the final decision? The image of Fabienne limp on the collapsed roof (whoever made a version) is the summary of innocent death, a society’s desperation and the man-made tragedies that compound natural disasters. It’s is a striking vision.
The circulation of Weber’s image has fueled skepticism toward photojournalism.
The problem with these types of brouhaha is that never are they able to measure if or what effect images – in this case Hansen’s – have. Did Hansen’s image secure a dollar amount of donations for the Haitian relief effort? Did it mobilise professionals and resources that would have otherwise not have moved?
If we are to talk about the “power of photography” then shouldn’t we expect and/or propose criteria for measuring and defining that “power”?

MICHAEL WINIARSKI, REPORTER AND HANSEN’S PARTNER

It should also be noted that Michael Winairski won the the award for News Storyteller from Dagens Nyheter, the national news outlet he and Hansen work for. When I contacted Winiarski last year about coverage of Fabienne’s death, I was particularly impressed with his transparency and commitment to the story. He and Hansen followed up two months after the killing and met with Fabienne’s family.
On receipt of the award, Winiarksi said, “”I’m glad we did not let go of Haiti. I and the photographer Paul Hansen have been back twice. And Paul is down there now with another reporter, Ole Roth Borg.”

ACCOLADES AFTER RECORDING DEATH

Paul Hansen is not the first photographer to be awarded for coverage of Fabienne’s death.
James Oatway won an Award of Excellence at POYi in the Impact 2010 – Multimedia category for Everything is Broken. Fabienne’s corpse open the piece and appears again in images 25 to 33. Olivier Laban-Mattei won the Grand Prix Paris Match 2010 for his coverage of Haiti, including the aftermath of Fabienne’s death. Fredric Sautereau was nominated for Visa d’Or News at Perpignan for his coverage of Haiti, which include seven images about Fabienne’s death.
There may be others.

Journalism in the Age of Data: A Video Report on Data Visualization by Geoff McGhee

2011-03-23T16:41:00.000-07:00

Journalism in the Age of Data: A Video Report on Data Visualization by Geoff McGhee

A new online photo school uses blogs to connect masters with students across Russia and beyond

2011-01-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

A new online photo school uses blogs to connect masters with students across Russia and beyond

Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness

2011-01-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

Now Available
Price £14.95, $25
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ISBN 9781841503165
Paperback 128 pages
230x230mm
Published January 2011
Imprint: Intellect

Books by Alfredo Cramerotti
Books in Visual Arts
Other books in this series

Edited by Alfredo Cramerotti

Unmapping the City, the first title in the new Intellect series ‘Critical Photography’, features photographs shot between 2004 and 2008 in fourteen different cities around the world. The images are linked by their shared attempts to define a two-dimensional approach to a three-dimensional built reality, and to address spatial representation and urbanity through art. In representing the cityscape through a flat texture of lines and minimal colour tones, they draw the reader into a conversation about the interplay between reality and its representation. This volume, by significantly challenging and expanding the discourse on photography and text and instigating a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between photography, perception and the city, will be of interest to artists, curators, photographers, architects, and critical theorists.

Introduction
Images by Alfredo Cramerotti and text by Jonathan Willett
Middleword by Inês Moreira

Part of the Critical Photography series

Reviews

'Cramerotti's new book is aptly committed to serial progression, minimal aesthetics and critical eye on our physical environment, in the same vein as artists such as Ed Rusha and Lewis Baltz. An important contribution for the next generation of artists engaged with Neo Topographics, embracing a graphic sublime while exploring the aesthetics of urban landscape.' – Louise Clements, Director Format International Photography Festival

RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

2010-08-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

Hughie: [iDC] FWD: Re: Craig Bellamy: Political Communication

2006-06-27T04:50:00.000-07:00

Fwd: from "Hughie"

Hi all. First-time poster and chronic, freeloading lurker here.

To be honest, I find this stuff unrealistic and techno-utopian. 11 years ago it would possibly have been ground-breaking :-). I don't have time to critique it fully here, (my interests have moved away from politics specifically) but a couple of points:

Craig wrote:
"1) What are the Internet's political features?
The main characteristics of the Internet that makes it important for politics is that it could be described as an electronic 'agora' or 'global commons'. An agora, is one of the foundation principles of democracy from the Greek, in that is a place where people come together to share and discuss ideas about the broader political society in which they live."

[Yawn] An inaccurate and outdated metaphor. Useful for introducing High Schoolers to the idea but that's about it. There are many significant differences between the fora that have yet to be precisely defined but are too manifest to be ignored.

"In terms of the Internet's unique political features; each node is privately owned but 'donated' to the network; anyone can join for a modest fee replaces one-to many communication of mass media with a new model of many-to-many communication; each consumer can also be a publisher (low entry levels).
Communication with groups is as easy as communication with individuals (easy dissemination). It is as easy to send one email to one person as it is to send one email to a million people."

Well, actually, no. *Sending a message* to one person is (almost!) as easy as sending it to a million, but that's not the same thing as communication.... too many practitioners have been too slow to figure this essential difference out, and it's keeping us in the communication dark ages. Uncle Rupert (among others) should shut up and listen at this point.

"greatly extends international communications on a person to person basis can bypass the 'gate keeping' mechanisms of older media."

Well, sort of. If we're being honest, we'd probably revise that to *really* emphasise the "Can" and add an "often doesn't". The figures are showing that, even on the Internet, most people are sticking with the trusted "brands" for most of their information and entertainment. They don't explore much beyond what's thrust into their faces - except in areas of particular interest, and even then they tend to get stuck in "silos", particularly when it comes to reinforcing pre-existing political bias. There certainly appears to have been a flattening of the distribution curve for political information but this seems to have mainly affected political afficionados and not the wider voting public much.

"2) Why is the Internet Important for politics?
The Internet, in particular, has altered many spheres of political life; principally through giving a voice to numerous groups and individuals that other wise wouldn't have access to any media at all (and this can be good or bad as it is not just empowering for progressive groups). Arguably this has altered democratic relationships between government and citizens and between citizens themselves."

Only arguably. See the above point about sending messages verses communication. Add to that the point about information silos and you get organisations finding it easier to preach to the converted, so to speak. "Governments" seem to be far more interested in "e-governance" than "e-democracy". That is, they see it as a better investment to make it easier for constituents to get a licence or bus timetable online than for them to have any input into policy. That hasn't "altered the relationship" as much as "greased the wheels" of the existing mills. (I apologise for the hoplessly mixed metaphor).

"3) How does it impact upon the public sphere? What sort of politics? (case studies)
The Internet fits within an overarching historical change that has occurred since the early 1970s when we first witnessed the marriage between politics and all sorts of media. Politics has increasing become a media-manipulation game [AMEN!!] Our 'political information systems' are vital in a representative democracy as it is where people 'deliberate' to make decisions about who they are going to vote for and why. The public sphere is meant to contain a variety of views and opinions about issues that concern us all.
In so me ways, newer communication mediums (such as the Internet) may be revitalising citizen participation in political discourse (or at least assisting our participation in many components of it)."

But here's the rub: research shows that most people DON'T deliberate. They vote based on instinct, prejudice and gut feeling - not information. Of course, the effects mentioned above have a greater impact in countries where voting is not compulsory, because it's the "converted" who do most of the voting. The apathetic remain ... well ... apathetic. In this sense, the Political Internet and the Agora have a lot in common: they're elitist and populated by a priviledged and interested few. The difference is that now, unlike in Ancient Greece, nearly all of the population have the right to vote whether they attend the Agora or not. Remember, too, that membership of the original "public sphere" was narrow and exclusive ...

What I noticed in e-democracy activities over the past few years is that a lot of it allows people who were already politically active but media-quiet (like mens groups and the home-schooling lobby) to make more noise in fora already populated by people who are politically aware and active. That has been OK, but if the noise is not carefully abated it can also have the effect of alienating the kind of swing voters who would make a difference. That produces a distinctly anti-democratic result and/or creates a new set of gatekeepers rather than bypassing them. What the Internet *hasn't* done is drag vast numbers of potential swing voters into a state of active participation and awareness.

The other aspect that's overlooked is harnessing the Internet's features to *agregate* opinion to help policy development. That means many-to-one communication, not the other possibilities. Not enough political figures are consulting the community (however constituted) via New Media - and this is one area where "e-governance" and "e-democracy" overlap. Apart from a few petitions and the like (and acceptance of e-mail submission to inquiries), deliberative democracy of this kind has not been tried as widely as it potentially could be ...

I tend to think that, on balance, the Internet has had a positive effect on modern public politics and it's made it easier for activists to organise and mobilise, but a lot of the literature is unrealistic and techno-utopian. There's a lot more work to be done understanding the intricacies of the human attention span before we will make much more progress down this road. Disinterest and ignorance are not going to be defeated by providing more "information" or "debate" in a crowed, noisy space, nor by making more spaces. Democracy activists need to Get Out The Vote more, earlier and with greater effect before any of this makes much difference.

Apologies for the overly-long post.

Cheers,
Hughie

Brian Holmes: [iDC] The Internet and control

2006-06-06T03:18:00.000-07:00

David Golumbia wrote:

The rise of many recent sophisticated quasi-authoritarian regimes is coterminous with the rise of the Internet and mass computerization. From a historical perspective, then, a plausible thesis is that /computerization walks hand-in-hand with a kind of state fascism, which sees owning the means of production and the means of interpretation as primary means of social control/.

This is a bit of a simplification, no? Since when have we not been living under regimes of social control?

According to the historian Hobsbawm, after the Cuban Missile Crisis there was no more danger of nuclear conflagration, the two superpowers having established failsafe communications allowing them to resolve any dispute before it escalated. However, the US, unlike the USSR, continued to terrorize its population with bomb shelters, drills, anti-communist propaganda and the like, why? Because it was an electoral expedient to justify continued expansion of the US army around the world, via military adventures like Vietnam. Nuclear terror was a form of social control for the democratic West, but a non-issue in the East where there were no elections to manipulate. So are we more brainwashed now than then? Or maybe about the same, but differently?

As awful and power-mongering as Cheney is, as closely connected to the military-industrial complex as he is, I am not sure he is any more grotesque than McNamara (successively CEO of Ford Motors, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, then President of the World Bank). The US has been compromised as a democracy ever since it became a powerful force in the world; since WWII it has been deeply compromised. Yet it remains a capitalist democracy, and not a totalitarian regime where the state is the single, all-powerful actor.

The Internet is an ambiguous phenomenon within state capitalism, and it is very interesting because of its ambiguities. On the control side it is the latest in a long series of information technologies which have accompanied corporate industrial expansion, allowing for logistical coordination, for the establishment of markets, and for the delivery of advertising. On the state side of the state-capitalism equation, you can add the spread of propaganda and the effectuation of surveillance. Together these functions form a regime of control, or if you prefer, of social programming. Like the printing press, mail systems, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, radio and television, the net has been used to program economic and social processes, using the word "program" in the sense of James Beniger (in an impressive book called "The Control Revolution").

To program, in this sense, means to set up and then exploit the complex conditions under which the reciprocal flow of information between individuals and organizations accomplishes the overarching goal of facilitating economic circulation, in such a way that industrial expansion (and therefore capital expansion) can continue. These conditions are established mainly through a process of trial and error (albeit an increasingly sophisticated one) by capitalist firms, whose production and marketing innovations are then stabilized by state regulation and support. Socio-economic planning is attempted through coordination between the state and the biggest industrial and financial players; but the "steering" or governance of industrial expansion and commodity circulation is delivishly complex. In the US, the main programming instruments under governemnt control are monetary policy, military research budgets, and commercial law (including IP law, which recently has become one of the crucial legal instruments of our time). The Internet as a technology grows mainly out of steering through military budgets (DARPA); but IP law represents an attempt to steer its uses.

The point of all this is that the Internet is not essentially about authoritarianism. Rather, it is a classically liberal extension of communicational freedoms, in the strong sense of liberalism as a political-economic philosophy dating back to the seventeenth century, a philosophy that organizes "freedom" to serve the values and aims of free markets. Liberal societies have always been rather tumultuous, because in them, the principle goal (capitalist growth) can only be realized by the maintenance of freedoms that allow all kinds of debate and bottom-up organization in pursuit of other goals. The Internet has been an amazing episode in this sense. Since its massification in the 90s, it has made the world infinitely more interesting, and also, more unpredictable.

However, that doesn't mean that a Bush-style regime cannot follow in Mussolini's footsteps and decide to inject capitalist society with high doses of nationalist propaganda as a strategy to regain control amidst a crisis, like the one we are living through now. (But do these control crises ever end? or do they just mutate into others?). Authoritarian regimes can also add high levels of surveillance to balance out the liberal freedoms, which they did in the thirties and are doing again today. This happens particularly when capitalism starts to produce its own opposition, through unemployment crises, ecological disasters or cultural clashes. For capitalism, authoritarian regimes are a worst-case scenario.

On a deeper level, liberal societies can seek to standardize cultural values, slowly eliminating conflict by making different values and goals unimaginable. The current version of this long-term, large-scale strategy is what we call "globalization." In short, Mickey for everyone. Or more precisely, Mickey with broadband.

The Internet, despite its quite amazing openness, can be used for all these control strategies. Thus it is fundamentally ambiguous, just like the other communications technologies deployed in the name of economic liberalism. But even more so, because it has been developed for a wider variety of functions than previous technologies: it supports multimedia; send as well as receive; one-to-one and one-to-many communication; all in the same technology. Most importantly, the Internet works through reprogrammable computers: it introduces the possibility of counter-programming into the information society. For these reasons, the Internet is a democratic joker in the works of social control. At the same time as it fits into a pattern of information use to control industrial processing, structure markets and encourage consumption, it also feeds conflicts about whether industrial growth and economic circulation are really the only values around which society should be structured. The Internet is not a fascist or totalitarian plot, but it is a result of highly complex socio-economic planning which typically contains (and in some cases founders on) its own contradictions.

That said, those who want to explain how the world works only in terms of the Internet, or the television, or advertising, or whatever single phenomenon, are really wasting their time. Social relations, economic developments and power struggles involve much more than a single technology!

best, Brian

Ryan Griffis: [iDC] Re: Against Web 2.0

2006-06-06T03:15:00.000-07:00

Reply on Franz Nahrada's post on IDC list

On May 31, 2006, at 11:01 AM, Franz wrote:

Still I do not buy into your thesis, because you forget to add the fact that for the first time in history complex self-organisation of large social bodies on a voluntary base is not only possible, but also a reality. So far, crowds and social classes were organized by submission and force. This time, for the first time in history, a reassembling of fragmented social atoms on the base of voluntary choice seems to be at the bottomline of social organisation. Technology provides a channell for complex self-organisation beyond any comparison in history.

i don't know that i totally buy David's argument, but i think his cautionary principle stance is well founded... When Franz points to "self organization of large social bodies on a voluntary base," i see some really problematic presuppositions. first of all, "self organization" and "voluntary," while not necessarily competing concepts, certainly have a difficult relationship. Usually, self organization is used to discuss a "bottom up," non self-conscious form of organization... usually not "communities" of multiple self identification. That's why ants, bees and neural networks are such beloved analogies. the natural is a really good justification when the social is slippery. to call something voluntary self organization is to overlook sub rational desire as a primary factor, imho. why would we assume that self-organization is necessarily liberatory when there are plenty of good reasons (with historical examples) to assume that some of the most oppressive/violent tendencies/desires are equally as likely to manifest themselves in the current situation? democracy is inherently unstable, and to assume stability in the form of depoliticized organization seems a bit dangerous. white led race riots in Chicago and elsewhere mid century were "self organized" events with no central leadership. So were the 92 "riots" in LA.
Some people may point to the "self-organization" of the resistance to "free trade" as exemplified in Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, etc, but that overlooks the highly coordinated efforts of small groups of people who work really hard to coordinate physical spaces for gatherings, teach-ins, legal aid reps, first aid response, etc. it may not be as vertical as the state's response to such gatherings, but it's not as if they materialize as a colony of ants following pheromone trails. (well, probably a few of us were doing that actually...)
what choices are we assuming people are making with their vote for social networking?
Facebook and other examples that Matt brought up are examples of horizontal networks of sorts, but ultimately, what values are they re-inscribing through action? Yes, we can learn from each other (and make FOAF hook ups, which could be argued as liberatory)... but if we all want to learn how to be better managers, more successful oppressors, more competitive for capital... the technology is hardly going to change that. it just makes us better self managers. that's why a movie like "V for Vendetta" is really frustrating... it portrays the problem as some highly aestheticized, in-your-face fascism, ala Hitler interpreted through Roger Waters. But we're becoming members, customizing our fascism, ordering it online, having it shipped next day. it comes sealed in bubble wrap, packaged to avoid damage from bumpy rides. It doesn't look like some crazy ideologue spitting manifestos into a microphone wearing some stormtrooper costume. it doesn't have big bronze statues. it's a flag on a shopping bag/banner ad saying "open for business."
As someone else mentioned, more people vote via SMS on american idol than use SMS to organize in the streets.
all of this discussion reminds me of the bio art discussions that surrounded the Paradise Now show a few years ago...
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~nhj2/investnow/index.html
i realize a lot of what i just wrote could sound like Huffington or Bernay's liberal justifications for "limiting democracy" via the robust political PR system we have now, which is not what i intend. but the naturalism of "self-organization" seems a really dangerous set of assumptions to take i think, as it contains the idea of a conflict free, "smooth space" of natural relations. i tried to take something similar up in my own deeply flawed critique of new media gift economics here (Barbrook quickly called me on a few points)
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/griffis_new_media.html
and the "social construction of blogspace"
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/griffis_blogspace.html
sorry for the muddled/longish contribution into the thread...
best,

ryan

Franz Nahrada/Rick Maxwell: Re: [iDC] Against Web 2.0

2006-06-06T03:11:00.000-07:00

Replies to David Golumbia's post on IDC list

Dear all

I'm itching to get in on this one, but the speed of daily life is fragmenting that desire. For now, let me add this: look at the post wwII history of US imperial aspirations, foreign policy, and rise of transnationals; link in communications needs; re-read Mattelart, Herbert I Schiller, et al. Now come up to the present and look at Dan Schiller's book Digital Capitalism, Vincent Mosco's Digital Sublime, etc; throw in some recent critical media policy studies and reform movement for highlights; and don't forget the history of anti-imperialist movements, which involved both organized and large voluntary mobilizations using whatever means of communication were available. so, yeah, it's not technologically determined. This is a telegraph, not an email.

rick

On May 31, 2006, at 8:46 AM, Franz Nahrada wrote:

David,

your disturbing and provoquative thesis has one shortcoming: it does not really explain why the new absolutism in power should be caused of facilitated by the Internet. Of course I could imagine some interpretations: the internet as fragmentation of the public at large is one possible explanation. Instead of having one "oeffentlichkeit" to deal with, politics is confronted with a "multitude" of neo-biedermaierish communities each one way below the critical mass to inflict substantial social change. Even if, by chance, some of the waves converge, like the mass demonstration on war with 10 million participants around the world, it is an amorphous and powerless crowd, prone to disperse after the gathering and lacking substantial organisation or means of power.

Still I do not buy into your thesis, because you forget to add the fact that for the first time in history complex self-organisation of large social bodies on a voluntary base is not only possible, but also a reality. So far, crowds and social classes were organized by submission and force. This time, for the first time in history, a reassembling of fragmented social atoms on the base of voluntary choice seems to be at the bottomline of social organisation. Technology provides a channell for complex self-organisation beyond any comparison in history.

And there is more ressemblance: dont forget, that a cycle of revolution - counterrevolution and revolution is exactly what happened between 1789 and 1948. The public withdrew from the political arena into a seemingly private world, just to come back to the stage of history reassured and reflected, aware of the depth of the task, cleared of some illusions.

The effect of media needs not to be a momentary one. Some effects can show up in the long run.

Franz Nahrada
GIVE - Globally Integrated Village Environment
The Research Lab on Global Villages
Vienna Austria
www.globalvillages.info

David Golumbia: Re: [iDC] Against Web 2.0

2006-06-06T03:07:00.000-07:00

[Reply to a post of Trebor Scholz on IDC list]

Trebor et al,

I'm a little surprised by Trebor's latest post. It seems to me to shift the terms that you introduced in the first place.

The crucial moment in your email is the one where you quote Mattelart. That strikes me as especially unfortunate, because following on Innis and McLuhan, and in many ways improving on them very much, Mattelart is among the sharpest critics of the ideology that I thought we were starting to get in our sights: that mass communications systems largely serve the interests of power and track the spread of centralized power very precisely, even when they happen to provide benefits to distributed power. Those distributive effects are often secondary, and sometimes even take a strongly ideological form, in which centralized powers sell the masses on new media as the solution to social problems. Rock music, TV, magazines, films: so many media/communication forms that serve power especially well appear to be offering "power to the people." I had more faith in "Street Fighting Man" or "Ohio" than I do in Amazon.com as a force for social change, and with hindsight I'm not so sure about the work "Street Fighting Man" was doing (or can do). "Impeach the President" is cool though. Maybe it's having an effect. But I also think it's arguable that "American Idol" and The Killers is where rock music was heading all along, that they are having an effect, and it's not one that aims toward better democracy.

What I find most disturbing about what I think of as the "computers will save us" view is that it focuses so narrowly on computers themselves, following a pattern that many prior media and their advocates have followed. When you step back and look at the world in which those media are embedded, the supposedly beneficial effects can often be observed getting totally swamped by the work of centralized power.

And this is so easy to see in our present moment, and so rarely commented on. For 20, 30, 40 years, we've had the advent of what is supposedly the most democratic, open, social media form ever introduced: the Internet (it might even be those things). Now, look at the societies that use the Internet: the US, Europe, China, Japan, Korea (and many others). Is it even plausible to argue that these societies have become more democratic, more open, less authoritarian during the Internet decades? You'd have real trouble convincing me of that. With rock music, you at least have a couple examples where you can argue some connection with democratic change! (Czechoslovakia, US, UK, a few other examples).

What we've had in the US with the advent of the Internet is Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Maybe one of the worst strings of political leadership we have ever had, including Clinton's repeated conciliations to the right. And accomplished in no small part by incredibly sophisicated and adroit manipulation of popular opinion and even "fact" ( e.g., with regard to global warming). If the Internet is so democratizing, & makes "the facts" so available to "everyone," why hasn't the US changed for the better? Why don't we see radical democracy breaking out all over? Is it because del.icio.us isn't quite primed with enough tag clouds? Because not enough sites have created machine-readable metadata and split their content into XML and style sheets? There are so many strong examples of societies and social groups becoming MORE controlled with computerization (have you been inside any corporations lately?), not less, that it is incumbent on Internet advocates to show why, with empirical/historical arguments, we should believe that these technologies lead the way to more freedom, better democracy. You can't make these arguments by focusing on technologies: you have to show the societies where change has happened. If anything, democratic dissent in the US has become much less effective recently than it was before: so now we need to argue that this effect has nothing to do with the Internet, and the Internet just hasn't had its real effects yet. Bah.

Let's instead float a thesis that I hope some readers find disturbing, in no small part because Mattelart, Innis, McLuhan, Virilio, Derrida, and many others would agree with it and in many cases have helped to articulate it. The rise of many recent sophisticated quasi-authoritarian regimes is coterminous with the rise of the Internet and mass computerization. From a historical perspective, then, a plausible thesis is that computerization walks hand-in-hand with a kind of state fascism, which sees owning the means of production and the means of interpretation as primary means of social control. (That comparison is one reason it's vital to remember the difference between Mussolini and Hitler: because it is Mussolini, nearly reincarnated in GWB and his friends like Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch, whose political program has turned out to be so effective.) Indeed, it was precisely to retain centralized power that DARPA designed the internet to be so distributed. (see Alex Galloway, Paul Edwards, etc., as well as my own writings on the subject) The point of the distribution, despite the way it sounds, was to increase centralization. You can very easily work out just as many conceptual connections for this thesis, and it has the advantage of comporting very closly with a wide range of historical facts.

I'm all for more social technologies on the web; but I really want people to think more seriously about the relationship of ANY social technology with realpolitik. I think it is vital that exactly the people who subscribe to this list and others like it try harder to situate the technologies in the politics and histories from which they emerge--you know what happens if we don't. We make the same exact mistakes over and over again.

I will state it as clearly as I can: computers aren't the answer to our world's social problems. If that makes anyone's hackles rise, maybe it's worth asking how those hackles got there in the first place.

David

Trebor Scholz: [iDC] Net autonomy

2006-03-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

Well, isn't this 'problem' simply a result of too many people using the products of these large corporations -- we do, after all, have a choice.

Yes, but Del.icio.us, Writely, Odeo, or BubbleShare were unknown little web places when I started using them. The takeover came much later and you may not even notice until the ads start to show up.

http://www.writely.com
http://www.bubbleshare.com/upload
http://del.icio.us
http://odeo.com/tags/activism/

Somehow the call to "buy local" becomes a bit revolutionary -- and applies the same for the net (without the implied geographic limitation) -- what about using small ISP's, setting up private servers for mail, lists, irc? Of course, one then has to deal with renting local network lines and such, but...

The next small (local) thing is often tomorrow¹s big business. It¹ll be tempting for your neighbor who built a good web tool to not hand it over in exchange for life in the sun. Local does not mean alternative or autonomous. The blogosphere still has pockets that are not flooded with advertisement. But how much longer will how much of
that prevail? Indymedia is a suitable example.

Dorothy Kidd in her hopeful essay ³Indymedia.org- A Communication Commons² points out that the first IMC site was set up in Seattle in 1999 at the occasion of the meeting of the World Trade Organization with a massive presence of social movements. Groups had called for an "end-run around the information gatekeepers" to produce autonomous
media. Very few papers had discussed the WTO meeting beforehand. In only three month and $30.000 from donations the IMC organizers in Seattle created a "multimedia people's newsroom." The IMC is non-hierarchical and based on networked distributed decision making. Journalists were able to use print, radio, video, and photos from the perspective of the perspective of the democratic globalization protesters. Ex-Microsoft employee Rob Glaser donated technical expertise and equipment to make
this happen. IMC had the latest streaming technology to distribute video, audio, text, and images. [1]

However, some questions come up once reality sinks in. How does the IMC sustain its resources? Also beyond the IMC these questions resurface:

Who can afford to share their time? Dependence on volunteers is hard to sustain. How can you sustain long-term collaborations without secured financing? Maintaining participation requires enormous amounts of resources, energy, and time to motivate and encourage people.

Also, I rarely go to Indymedia for alternative news. And I don¹t write there either. What holds many others and me back from participating regularly in such spaces? By now, social web media have largely caught up with the open publishing technology that Indymedia offered in 2000, a few years before blogs started to blossom in 2004. I don¹t have statistics on Indymedia sites but my guess would be that the numbers of
participators are on the decline.

'information'? How many are net consumers of digital information? Somehow it seems contradictory for net consumers to be arguing for free consumption -- except from the position of consuming...

I agree with John. Learn to love a wide variety of possibly slower and less convenient, less immediate tools. Learn how to install and customize wikis yourself. Find alternatives to iTunes. Don¹t become too dependent on high bandwidth.

But apart from these loosely related issues-- What kind of future do you all see for autonomous spaces online (and off)? What is left?

Also the vocabulary is critical: the terms ³alternative² and ³autonomous² are often played out against each other.

Autonomous practices are self-governing practices. They ³bypass the mainstream media through experimentation with new forms of democratic communication that are relatively independent from corporate and government power.² and ³ Alternative media strategies are those that focus primarily on challenging the mainstream media to become more accountable to the publics they claim to serve...² writes Scott Uzelman
in his essay ³Hard at Work in the Bamboo Garden.²

But the concept of autonomy is hard to adhere to online. True independence is hardly possible. The cables of the Internet are owned privately. We pay an upstream service provider. The corporate enclosures online grow by the day.

What are examples of alternative group formation online that lasted over long periods of time? I¹m not talking about initiatives like Adbusters or Paper Tiger TV that use the web in line with their goals. I¹m curious about social networking around those agendas. Just a few obvious examples:

Guerilla News Network
http://www.guerrillanews.com/

Interactivist InfoExchange
http://slash.autonomedia.org/

Community Activist Technology (this initiative led to the IMC)
http://www.cat.org.au/

Which other spaces constitute online group formation?
What about weblogs? Collaborative blogs can certainly constitute community, foster online group formation.

Mefeedia
http://mefeedia.com/tags/activism/

Iraq Blog Count
http://iraqblogcount.blogspot.com/

StreamTime
http://www.streamtime.org/

Blogs by Indymedia Activists
http://indyblogs.protest.net/

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

Many2Many
http://many.corante.com/

We discussed independence here earlier in relation to institutional involvement. We are always already complicit. There is no spotless, pure white innocence.

Scott Uzelman continues: ³Autonomous media strategies often involve establishing more democratic and participatory forms of television, radio, print, and internet-based media.² He argues that it is not enough to open the channels of mainstream media, we also need to radicalize the means of communication.

³...alternative media, autonomous media strategies seek to foster new forms of communication that exist outside of the point-to-mass, consumptive communicative relationships that privilege representation over participation, monologue over dialogue. This is to say, these strategies seek to create communication that is autonomous from logics of accumulation and centralized control. Autonomous media
strategies are instead based on principles of openness, dialogue and participation in communication and in the process of creating media products.² [2]

The word ³autonomous² (having its own laws) is not the most fitting term. It has connotations of a certain self-sufficiency and isolation. I question the long-term sustainability of these initiatives. Which term would be more inclusive of the parallel techno-cultural practices that we do witness? What¹s in your tag cloud?

Trebor Scholz

[1] Kidd, D. (2003) Indymedia.org- A Communication Commons. In: Mccaughey M., Ayers, A. eds. (2003) Cyberactivism. Online Activism in Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. p47-69.

[2] http://www.global.indymedia.org.au/local/webcast/uploads/thesis-complete_pdf_.pdf

http://collectivate.net/

John Hopkins: Re: [iDC] Autonomous spaces online?

2006-03-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

Good morning...

"To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents."

...snip...

A few days ago YouTube was bought by MTV.
MySpace is now in Rupert Murdoch's hands.
ICQ was obtained by AOL.
Google acquired Writely as part of their online vision.
Blogger is of course in Google's pocket for a long time.
Del.icio.us and Flickr are now owned by Yahoo.

Perhaps our alternative economies and social web media need to be hybrid? Perhaps autonomous zones are really an illusion (in the long run).

Well, isn't this 'problem' simply a result of too many people using the products of these large corporations -- we do, after all, have a choice.

It's exactly like the 'problem' of the US losing middle-class manufacturing employment. The same people who are losing the jobs are the ones, until their unemployment benefits run out, shopping for cheap goods at Kmart, Walmart, and Costco. Companies who base their production in China and elsewhere.

Ask a typical American what the provenance is for 90% of the consumer goods in their homes. It's not the USA, but the connection to a crumbling local economy and infrastructure is obscured by the spectacle of consuming.

Somehow the call to "buy local" becomes a bit revolutionary -- and applies the same for the net (without the implied geographic limitation) -- what about using small ISP's, setting up private servers for mail, lists, irc? Of course, one then has to deal with renting local network lines and such, but...

If one takes the model of K-12 education in the US on the "buy local" issue, though, where the primary source of school budgets come from local land taxes, you end up with a huge divide -- poor neighborhoods, poor schools and the converse -- the same would happen to the net...

And, of course, the Google problem remains, the lack of non.com search engines. But aren't we guilty of a consumate and unlimited desire to CONSUME data via the net? What about that omnivorous desire? As though it is a right (for those with access). There should be no limits 24/7. I've seen in Europe during the last 25 years, the inexorable march towards the 24/7 shopping experience (that Amurikans have 'enjoyed' for a couple decades now). Full-filling the desire to consume. More, when where & how we want it NOW!

And, it has always disturbed me, one aspectg of the general discussion on digital rights and such -- how many people on the liberal side of that argument are overall producers of digital 'information'? How many are net consumers of digital information? Somehow it seems contradictory for net consumers to be arguing for free consumption -- except from the position of consuming...

hmmmm...

cheers
John

Trebor Scholz / John Hopkins / John Sobol: [iDC] Downtime & Play

2005-11-20T14:09:00.000-08:00

Posted on iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)

Downtime & Play

On my way to Zurich I just met a colleague at the airport. We both fly routinely. "I can't do it anymore." he said. "All this air travel is just too much downtime for me." I moved onward passing through airport lobbies in New York City, London, and finally my Swiss destination. In these inbetween spaces I was persistently confronted with big, fat back-lid ads. And they were all about time. T-Mobile's slogan is "Upgrade your downtime." The airline Jetblue draws attention to their wireless hotspots at John F. Kennedy with the commanding "downtime-download." The mantra of the British Vodaphone is "The power of now!" BT shows a jolly business man fly-jumping through what looks like a landscape of Powerpoint charts: "The digital network economy. Where business is done." In JFK, Sprint, the American cell phone tycoon, set up yellow placards in the size of a house that say "yes to making just about any place a work place." It made me stop. I was buffled. How dare they be so in my face about what I perceive as the agony of immaterial labor?

Before moving to San Francisco I never heard terms like "quality time" or "downtime." In East Germany, for me, time was just time indiscriminately. For a wide variety of reasons there are many that pledge allegiance to everything not-networked, offline, and non-digital. Who can blame them? Post-Fordist work conditions turn the super-mobile manager into a networked lap dog. At six in the morning those waiting in the airport gate area pull out their laptops. Sneaking over their shoulders I see spread sheets. The networked early morning work day starts with coffee and a cheese-and-egg-pizzas. Downtime now is download time. Life is work. There is not enough time to rest, cook, reflect, or walk in the woods. The insidious penetration of the Internet into our every grain is hard to deny. Workers become part-of-the-solution-nodes rather than full-time employees. Health insurance can be done away with. Wages in the immaterial networked realm don't have to bear resemblance to the work that was done. And, who ever mentioned pensions? Also Unions get whacked when the work force is geographically pieced together. Then there is all that sense of place stuff that Lucy Lippard was so adament about. But the uprooted lifestyle seems like peanuts compared to what is happening now, -- the horror, the horror. Passing through these airports, the net started to feel like an itch that we
can't scratch.

Much of the discussion about networking is focused entirely on business. Howard Rheingold's essay "Technologies of Cooperation" is magnificent and inspired, imho, but it is written in large part to help out the amazon-dot-coms of this world. Doug Rushkoff comments on his blog that he hopes for the ideas in his latest book to help businesses (and well, also a few others). Fair enough. What's wrong with that you may ask? Well, let's just say that there is an utilitarian impetus that rarifies play and experiment at least if they don't link up with business interests sooner rather than later. Let's just say that I hope for people with insight into network technologies and their human uses to also take on projects that do not support those who already have plenty. Why help eBay to make even more money? Who really needs our help?

Some cultural workers have much in common with managerial networked types. Brian Holmes points to that. It's not just the rock stars of what Richard Florida calls the creative class who sit on planes next to the smiley jet set manager. Artists become entrepreneur of themselves. Self-worth is quantified in frequent flyer miles and numbers of invitations. But the opportunistic, ego-tripping art enterpriser is not all there is. Cultural practioners travel and perform their ideas all over the world. They are gift-givers with all the problematic hierarchies that this creates. On good days they enact their ideas with passion, inspiration and substance. The Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler documented her more than frequent passing through airports in many series of photographs and critical writing. She describes her motivation for these works related to her occupation. And in new media as much as in photography, the international scenes are closely knit. Travel is a substantial part of the lives of cultural producers. I can't point to the travelling managerial networkers "over there." They are so distant and conveniently different from me. I don't have all the ethical and political rightenousness on my side. I am part of the picture. The network beast lives also inside me.

We move through space. "We" are all those cultural producers who fly thousands of miles to talk to different audiences or present their artwork. We are quite the experts when it comes to travel. We know it all. Airport, home, gallery, and lecture hall are equally familiar venues for us. We have it down. We know how to block off obnoxiously loud fellow travelers. We recognize how to remain friendly (most of the time)- with borderline-abusive security personnel. We inhale every magazine article about tricks of air travel. Our bodies are transported through the air. We are just resting. Covered with masks, our eyes are closed. We enter a think space. We know what to do about the lack of humidity on planes. The increased elevation at take-off jazzes us up. We know when to stretch and which way to rotate our ankles. We developed a continuity of purpose that makes it secondary where our bodies are located. The scenarios through we move don't distract us so much anymore.

We repurpose trains, and airport lobbies into offices. The person next to us becomes unwillingly involved. We pull ourselves out of the public into the private networked space. We shift through the walkways of airports, drive in taxis and trains. Networked devices keep us always anchored, always in touch, consistently connected to myriads of social networks. But the flickering screens to which we are hooked is not just the bluetooth lifeline to the boss. We have all those with whom we share our lives in reach nearly at all times. We cannot feel the warmth of their face, we cannot touch. But in our "downtime" we can talk or exchange text messages. And doing so may prevent us from talking to the stranger right next to us.

We "grow" network tentacles (like air roots) that allow us to be always on. There is the perpetual, invisible link between our body and the nearest cell phone tower. We are always plugged in, interlinked at all times. In the city, at the moment when the subway train comes out of a tunnel to go over a bridge dozens of people who endured at least 15 minutes of out-of-reach time pull out their devices to feel reassured that they did not miss something. The technology is not plated into us. It is miniaturized. The only piece of hardware that Lev Manovich mentions on his blog, for example, is the "I-Go," a universal connecting plug for all kinds of devices. It allows him to leave the cable clutter at home. Our nano-sized multi purpose-devices are not what counts. What matters is the linkage that they establish. The wireless Internet signals casually picked up by our laptops facilitate exploitation. We have to look hard to see the emancipatory nature of socio-technical networks. But it's on the edges of network culture where the sun sparkles. It's not in the center of pesky business culture.

But network technologies cannot be reduced to instruments of oppression and casualized labor that squeeze every last drop of genuine energy and creativity out of the worker. Cooperation-enhancing technologies are not by default networked assembly lines. The Treo is not the beast. Laptops are not merely locative Wall Street furniture. Cell phones are not the pervasive enemy. Groups of protesters at the Republican convention used them to escape police tactics. But at the same token networked technologies are also not inherently linked to a deviant life style or oppositional cultural practice. Technologies define us. We are conditioned to relate to them in predefined ways. Using technologies changes what we know and how we know it. But we do have a say in this. We can shape the technologies that we are using. Networked technologies do not have to stand for servitude. We can imagine human uses. We can support emerging alternative socio-technical networks by reflecting on technologies without utopia-glazed eyes. Critiquing the vicious nature of networked, neoliberal managers is vitally important. But don't stop there. Don't leave the discourse about human uses of cooperation-enhancing tools and networking to them (or to them inside of us.)

Trebor

-----

Much to comment on, having done the hard-core nomadic thing for more than a decade of no home base... the null space of airports, ach!

but I wanted to make a specific Saturday morning comments on the last paragraph:

Yes, WE DO HAVE TO SAY THIS, but more than that, we have to understand it, and be able to decode the affect of the attenuative force that any technology applies to human relation. After decoding it, we need to articulate it in a conscious praxis which, at the same time it acknowledges the affect, pushes through the affect to reach out to a human Other. And, if the attenuation applied by the technology destroys our perceived abilities to humanely connect with the Other, we need to drop the technology. period. If we persist in modifying our own idiosyncratic needs and expressions indefinitely to be able to fit into the technological landscape, we inevitably suffer a very real alienation. It is an individual who must make this appraisal (first knowing deeply their own expressive and impressive needs. This in itself is not a simple task, as we grow up being literally 'impressed' (and deeply re-formed) by the affects of the technology that is part of the social structure.

Technology is a social determinant which maps its structure and attenuations onto the life of individuals irrespective to their needs for expression...

How to be aware of the alienation inherent in the use of a mobile phone? How to be aware of what has already been lost in the technologies that we have no conscious memory of it NOT being part of our social system? Not so easy. But, by identifying the principles by which this process of social determination takes place, and by which we each are changed, it is possible to tease out the mechanism and move to a more powerful position of a (radically?) modified lived praxis to reflect the knowledge of these principles.

A critique is a weak response -- an altered life-praxis, based on principles, is much more powerful!

Cheers
John

-----

Yours was a great response to a great post. Further thoughts below...

I think that one way to do this is to invest in practices that specifically address cross-cultural dynamics, because it is in the technologically-induced dislocation between user cultures that both the frictions/dangers and opportunities are made manifest. WE may have forgotten what it was like before email, but 5/6 of the world has yet to discover what it means to live with it. To learn what we have forgotten we need merely speak with someone who has yet to connect to the web. Too often we forget that this simple solution is available to us (not meaning to preach here, but it's true).

In designing technologically-mediated social environments for communities that have yet to embrace the disempowering eConsumer paradigm, human issues inevitably come to the fore. In such contexts, when alternate models of engagement are introduced at theoutset of an encounter with a new technology, alienation becomes just one option among many, including others that may clearly offer far more rewarding and transformative delights. And in addition to the usefulness of such projects in the particular, they also enable "identifying the principles by which this process of social determination takes place, and by which we each are changed", in the general.

For example, a while back I spent several years connecting street kids to their own creativity and knowledge via digital media. The critical understanding I gleaned form my (and their) cross-cultural explorations has valuably informed many completely unrelated media projects since. It enabled the articulation of what has proven to be a potent methodology based not on what technologically-savvy people thought would work but on the fusion of the principles of experiential education, collaborative creative improvisation and cross-cultural mediation. The technology came into play as a set of enabling tools only when our human goals were clear. "Why?" is a question that must be answered convincingly to engage people who have not been indoctrinated.

Anyway, right on Trebor and John for your inspiring insights...
John Sobol

-----

Lev Manovich: Remix and Remixability

2005-11-18T03:39:00.000-08:00

From: nettime
Subject: Lev Manovich: Remix and Remixability

The dramatic increase in quantity of information greatly speeded up by Internet has been accompanied by another fundamental development. Imagine water running down a mountain. If the quantity of water keeps continuously increasing, it will find numerous new paths and these paths will keep getting wider. Something similar is happening as the amount of information keeps growing - except these paths are also all connected to each other and they go in all directions; up, down, sideways. Here are some of these new paths which facilitate movement of information between people, listed in no particular order: SMS, forward and redirect function in email clients, mailing lists, Web links, RSS, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, publishing (as in publishing one=B9s playlist on a web site), peer-to-peer networks, Web services, Firewire, Bluetooth. These paths stimulate people to draw information from all kinds of sources into their own space, remix and make it available to others, as well as to collaborate or at least play on a common information platform (Wikipedia, Flickr). Barb Dybwad introduces a nice term "collaborative remixability=B9" to talk about this process: "I think the most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are new tools that explore the continuum between the personal and the social, and tools that are endowed with a certain flexibility and modularity which enables collaborative remixability =8B a transformative process in which the information and media we=B9ve organized and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services." [1]

If a traditional twentieth century model of cultural communication described movement of information in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the reception point is just a temporary station on information=B9s path. If we compare information or media object with a train, then each receiver can be compared to a train station. Information arrives, gets remixed with other information, and then the new package travels to other destination where the process is repeated.

We can find precedents for this "remixability" -- for instance in modern electronic music where remix has become the key method since the 1980s. More generally, most human cultures developed by borrowing and reworking forms and styles from other cultures; the resulting "remixes" were to be incorporated into other cultures. Ancient Rome remixed Ancient Greece; Renaissance remixed antiquity; nineteenth century European architecture remixed many historical periods including the Renaissance; and today graphic and fashion designers remix together numerous historical and local cultural forms, from Japanese Manga to traditional Indian clothing. At first glance it may seem that this traditional cultural remixability is quite different from "vernacular" remixability made possible by the computer-based techniques described above. Clearly, a professional designer working on a poster or a professional musician working on a new mix is different from somebody who is writing a blog entry or publishing her bookmarks.

But this is a wrong view. The two kinds of remixability are part of the same continuum. For the designer and musician (to continue with the sample example) are equally affected by the same computer technologies. Design software and music composition software make the technical operation of remixing very easy; the Internet greatly increases the ease of locating and reusing material from other periods, artists, designers, and so on. Even more importantly, since every company and freelance professionals in all cultural fields, from motion graphics to architecture to fine art, publish documentation of their projects on their Web sites, everybody can keep up with what everybody else is doing. Therefore, although the speed with which a new original architectural solution starts showing up in projects of other architects and architectural students is much slower than the speed with which an interesting blog entry gets referenced in other blogs, the difference is quantitative than qualitative. Similarly, when H&M or Gap can "reverse engineer" the latest fashion collection by a high-end design label in only a few weeks, this is part of the same new logic of speeded up cultural remixability enabled by computers. In short, a person simply copying parts of a message into the new email she is writing, and the largest media and consumer company recycling designs of other companies are doing the same thing -- they practice remixability.

The remixability does not require modularity - but it greatly benefits from it. Although precedents of remixing in music can be found earlier, it was the introduction of multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With each element of a song -- vocals, drums, etc. -- available for separate manipulation, it became possible to =8Cre-mix=B9 the song: change the volume of some tracks or substitute new tracks for the old ounces. According to the book DJ Culture by Ulf Poscardt, first disco remixes were made in 1972 by DJ Tom Moulton. As Poscard points out, they "Moulton sought above all a different weighting of the various soundtracks, and worked the rhythmic elements of the disco songs even more clearly and powerfully=8AMoulton used the various elements of the sixteen or twenty-four track master tapes and remixed them."[2]

In most cultural fields today we have a clear-cut separation between libraries of elements designed to be sampled -- stock photos, graphic backgrounds, music, software libraries -- and the cultural objects that incorporate these elements. For instance, a graphic design may use photographs that the designer bought from a photo stock house. But this fact is not advertised; similarly, the fact that this design (if it is successful) will be inevitably copied and sampled by other designers is not openly acknowledged by the design field. The only fields where sampling and remixing are done openly are music and computer programming, where developers rely on software libraries in writing new software.

Will the separation between libraries of samples and "authentic" cultural works blur in the future? Will the future cultural forms be deliberately made from discrete samples designed to be copied and incorporated into other projects? It is interesting to imagine a cultural ecology where all kinds of cultural objects regardless of the medium or material are made from Lego-like building blocks. The blocks come with complete information necessary to easily copy and paste them in a new object -- either by a human or machine. A block knows how to couple with other blocks -- and it even can modify itself to enable such coupling. The block can also tell the designer and the user about its cultural history -- the sequence of historical borrowings which led to the present form. And if original Lego (or a typical twentieth century housing project) contains only a few kinds of blocks that make all objects one can design with Lego rather similar in appearance, computers can keep track of unlimited number of different blocks. At least, they can already keep track of all the possible samples we can pick from all cultural objects available today.

The standard twentieth century notion of cultural modularity involved artists, designers or architects making finished works from the small vocabulary of elemental shapes, or other modules. The scenario I am entertaining proposes a very different kind of modularity that may appear like a contradiction in terms. It is modularity without a priori defined vocabulary. In this scenario, any well-defined part of any finished cultural object can automatically become a building block for new objects in the same medium. Parts can even =8Cpublish=B9 themselves and other cultural objects can "subscribe" to them the way you subscribe now to RSS feeds or podcasts.

When we think of modularity today, we assume that a number of objects that can be created in a modular system is limited. Indeed, if we are building these objects from a very small set of blocks, there are a limited number of ways in which these blocks can go together. (Although as the relative physical size of the blocks in relation to the finished object get smaller, the number of different objects which can be built
increases: think IKEA modular bookcase versus a Lego set.) However, in my scenario modularity does not involve any reduction in the number of forms that can be created. On the contrary, if the blocks themselves are created using one of many already
developed computer designed methods (such as parametric design), every time they are used again they can modify themselves automatically to assure that they look different. In other words, if pre-computer modularity leads to repetition and reduction, post-computer modularity can produce unlimited diversity.

I think that such "real-time" or "on-demand" modularity can only be imagined today after online stores such as Amazon, blog indexing services such as Technorati, and architectural projects such as Yokohama International Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Frank Gehry visibly demonstrated that we can develop hardware and software to coordinate massive numbers of cultural objects and their building blocks: books, bog entries, construction parts. But whether we will ever have such a cultural ecology is not important. We often look at the present by placing it within long historical trajectories. But I believe that we can also productively use a different, complementary method. We can imagine what will happen if the contemporary techno-cultural conditions which are already firmly established are pushed to their logical limit. In other words, rather than placing the present in the context of the past, we can look at it in the context of a logically possible future. This "look from the future" approach may illuminate the present in a way not possible if we only "look from the past." The sketch of logically possible cultural ecology I just made is a little experiment in this method: futurology or science fiction as a method of contemporary cultural analysis.

So what else can we see today if we will look at it from this logically possible future of complete remixability and universal modularity? If my scenario sketched above looks like a "cultural science fiction," consider the process that is already happening on the one end of remixability continuum. Although strictly speaking it does not involve increasing modularity to help remixability, ultimately its logic is the same: helping cultural bits move around more easily. I am talking about a move in Internet culture today from intricately packaged and highly designed "information objects" which are hard to take apart -- such as web sites made in Flash -- to "strait" information: ASCII text files, feeds of RSS feeds, blog entries, SMS messages. As Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter put it, "Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into "microcontent" units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we=B9re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways."[3] And it is much easier to "aggregate and remix microcontent" if it is not locked by a design. Strait ASCII file, a JPEG, a map, a sound or video file can move around the Web and enter into user-defined remixes such as a set of RSS feeds; cultural objects where the parts are locked together (such as Flash interface) cant. In short, in the era of Web 2.0, "information wants to be ASCII."[4]

If we approach the present from the perspective of a potential future of "ultimate modularity / remixability," we can see other incremental steps towards this future which are already occurring. For instance, Orange (an animation studio n Amsterdam) has setup a team of artists and developers around the world to collaborate on an animated short film; the studio plans to release all of their production files, 3D models, textures, and animation as Creative Commons open content on a extended edition DVD.

Creative Commons offers a special set of Sampling Licenses which "let artists and authors invite other people to use a part of their work and make it new."[5] Flickr offers multiple tools to combine multiple photos (not broken into parts -- at least so far) together: tags, sets, groups, Organizr. Flickr interface thus position each photo within multiple "mixes." Flickr also offers "notes" which allows the users to
assign short notes to individual parts of a photograph. To add a note to a photo posted on Flickr, you draw a rectangle on any part of the phone and then attach some text to it. A number of notes can be attached to the same photo. I read this feature as another a sign of modularity/remixability mentality, as it encourages users to mentally break a photo into separate parts. In other words, "notes" break a single media object -- a photograph -- into blocks.

In a similar fashion, the common interface of DVDs breaks a film into chapters. Media players such as iPod and online media stores such as iTunes break music CDs into separate tracks -- making a track into a new basic unit of musical culture. In all these examples, what was previously a single coherent cultural object is broken into separate blocks that can be accessed individually. In other words, if "information wants to be ASCII," "contents wants to be granular." And culture as a whole? Culture has always been about remixability -- but now this remixability s available to all participants of Internet culture.

Since the introduction of first Kodak camera, "users" had tools to create massive amounts of vernacular media. Later they were given amateur film cameras, tape recorders, video recorders...But the fact that people had access to "tools of media production" for as long as the professional media creators until recently did not seem to play a big role: the amateur=B9 and professional=B9 media pools did not mix. Professional photographs traveled between photographer=B9s darkroom and newspaper editor; private pictures of a wedding traveled between members of the family. But the emergence of multiple and interlinked paths which encourage media objects to easily travel between web sites, recording and display devices, hard drives, and people changes things. Remixability becomes practically a built-in feature of digital networked media universe. In a nutshell, what maybe more important than the introduction of a video iPod, a consumer HD camera, Flickr, or yet another exiting new device or service is how easy it is for media objects to travel between all these devices and services - which now all become just temporary stations in media=B9s Brownian motion.

October 2005

NOTES

[1] Approaching a definition of Web 2.0," The Social Software Weblog , accessed October 28, 2005.

[2] Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Quartet Books Ltd, 1998), 123.

[3] "Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web," Digital Web Magazine <>, accessed October 28, 2005.

[4] Modern information environment is characterized by a constant tension between the
desires to "package" information (Flash design for instance) an= d strip it from all packaging so it can travel easier between different media and sites.

[5] http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling, accessed October 31, 2005.

Paul D. Miller: UN World Summit on ICANN Victoria Shannon: Tug of war over Net at Tunis summit

2005-11-15T23:20:00.002-08:00

From "Paul D. Miller" on nettime: United Nations World Summit on ICANN + Root Domain Issues

As I get ready for my speech at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, one of the things that strikes me as kind of eerie, is the weird paradox of how much the U.S. still controls the internet's root domain. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers sets the tone for how countries, corporations, and NGO's receive their status on the internet. It reminds me of the way the European powers carved up various nations arbitrarily with the Treaty of Berlin or the
later Treaty of Versailles - geography and power were basic colonial foundations of the world order of the day, and what strikes me as really resonant is how the European powers of that era are now colonized by the U.S. information economy.

.uk (england)
.fr (france)
.de (germany)
.es (spain)
.cn (china)
.jp (japan)

etc.

you name it. The U.S. owns it. You get a lease on your country's name, and that's about it. Anyway, just a thought about historical parallels.

I'll be discussing these issues at the UN World Summit coming up in Tunisia Nov 15th through the 20th from the point of view of: essentially, how does this affect creativity and artistic production - after all, it's just a metaphor, eh?

The URL for the Summit is
http://www.smsitunis2005.org/plateforme/index.php?lang=3Den

Paul

---

From "Victoria Shannon" on International Herald Tribune: Tug of war over Net at Tunis summit

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/13/business/net.php
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2005

PARIS. When Libya lost the use of its Internet domain ".ly" for five days last year, it had no choice but to plead for help from a California agency that reports to the U.S. Commerce Department.

Anyone looking to do business with a .ly Web site or to e-mail a .ly address was likely to encounter a "file not found" or "no such person" message. For anyone on the Internet, Libya was just not there.

In a time when Internet access is critical to world commerce - let alone to casual communication - even a five-day lapse is a hardship. And when one government has to beg another to let its citizens be visible again on that net, it can be a damaging blow to its own sovereignty, as well as perhaps a matter of national security, even if the cause was a glitch, as in the Libyan case.

What if, by historical chance, it was France or Britain that controlled country domain names on the Internet? Would the United States settle for asking another government to fix its own addresses?

That kind of power to hinder or foster freedom of the Internet, centralized in a single government, is the key issue for many of the 12,000 people expected in Tunisia this week for the United Nations summit on the information age.

Managing operators of country-level domain names like .ly, .de and .co.uk is one way that the United States, through the California-based nonprofit agency Icann, controls the Internet. This organization is a consequence of the network's development from research in U.S. universities, laboratories and government agencies in the 1970s.

Icann, which is short for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,
serves as a central authority in what is an essentially decentralized, neutral and ungoverned global network of computer networks. So that one computer can easily find another, Icann runs the addressing system, giving out blocs of unique identifiers to countries and private registries.

It was the Icann board, for instance, that approved a new suffix of .xxx for Internet
addresses to indicate adult-rated content this summer, but it postponed implementing the address after objections from the Commerce Department.

46our years of high-level talks on Internet governance conclude with the Tunis summit, and on its eve, a figurative ocean separates the U.S. position - that the Internet works fine as it is - from most of the rest of the world, including the European Union, which says that the Internet has become an international resource whose center of gravity must move away from Washington.

Whether these final debates break the deadlock and produce any agreement to give other governments more sway over Internet policy was in some doubt last week. Even a recent discussion of Internet governance between President George W. Bush and Jos=E9 Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, had not brought the sides any closer.

"Our strong preference is to have a document that everyone can be proud of," said David Gross, deputy assistant secretary of state, who is leading the U.S. delegation, along with Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary of commerce.

"We would be sorely disappointed not to have a document at all, but that would be better than to have a bad document," Gross said from Tunisia, where the negotiations resumed Sunday before the official start of the summit meeting Wednesday.

A delegate from the European Union insisted that the EU's call for a new intergovernmental body to set the principles for running the Internet still stands and that the solitary U.S. relationship with Icann "is not sustainable" in the long term.

The official, who did not wish to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the delegation, conceded that the EU statement, which took earlier talks in September by surprise and led to the current stalemate, said there was "a need for clarification," which the EU delegation was preparing over the weekend.

But he maintained that the 25-member European contingent was unanimous in its stance, which he called "a middle ground between two extremes, those who are for a complete overhaul and those who are for the status quo."

Gross and other Americans dismiss the EU view as "top-down" control of the Internet, as opposed to the private-sector-led, "bottom-up" approach of Icann.

The debate is likely to bog down before the summit meeting ends Friday, over the use and meaning of words like "forum," "intergovernmental," "governance" and "policy," many participants say.

But however "multistakeholder" or other diplomatic argot is interpreted in Tunis, the
essential problem is that "the United States holds most of the cards, and if it isn't willing to give any up, it can't be forced to," said Milton Mueller, a partner in the nonprofit group the Internet Project.

When the first part of the summit meeting took place in Geneva two years ago, many participants feared that the United Nations itself, through the International Telecommunication Union, wanted to govern Internet issues. "Today," Mueller said, "the ITU is off the table."

But Mueller, a participant in the meeting and a longtime Icann observer, said the Americans had handled their position poorly in the face of global opposition since then.

"Americans are so parochial when it comes to these things," he said. "They have no idea how it sounds to 200 other countries when they say, 'The Internet really is nongovernmental - except for us.' Why were they so surprised? In the U.S., that contradiction becomes invisible to you."

Although Mueller expects the U.S. delegation to "make as few concessions as possible" this week, he does see some longer-term movement on the American position.

Two weeks ago, at a conference that Mueller attended, a Commerce Department official said the government was planning to put up for public bidding contracts for managing the Internet addressing system now held by Icann through its Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

If that happened, a group like the Brussels-based Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries, called Centr, probably would be interested in bidding for the contract, which has no monetary value, as would other non-U.S. interests.

In addition, the agreement by which Icann operates under Commerce Department oversight expires next September. Although the U.S. government indicated in June that it would not let its oversight of the master file that decodes Internet addresses lapse despite that agreement, Mueller says the summit fireworks might lead the Bush administration to consider other options that are not so unilateral.

Yet small, longer-term steps may not be soon enough in coming for some developments. Two separate trends are heralding a massive demand for unique Internet addresses of the kind that Icann manages, and global participants are eager that the policy and political questions be settled quickly.

One trend is the move by media businesses to make their products available online. Each song, video clip, book or other digital content requires its own unique identifier to locate it on the Internet, even if the file is not a Web site.

The other is the desire of manufacturers and wholesalers to embed their physical products with radio tags for inventory and other supply-chain management. To be tracked over the Internet, each tag needs its own Internet "address" as well, leading to what the ITU is calling an "Internet of things."

Victoria Shannon

Richard Barbrook: Book review of "Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace" by Pierre Levy

2005-11-15T04:59:00.000-08:00

Posted by Trebot Scholz on iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org )

Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
by Pierre Levy
Book review by Richard Barbrook

http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-collectiveintelligence.html

The Net has become our symbol for the future. Like clocks, steam engines and nuclear power for earlier generations, we use this icon of technology to imagine what will result from our current period of rapid social change. In Collective Intelligence, Pierre Levy provides a French vision of what will happen when everyone can participate within cyberspace.

Up until now, because the Net was mainly developed in California, it is not surprising that our view of the digital future has long been dominated by gurus from this state. So far, the Californians have proved to be better at making virtual machines than social analyses. Some of their cyber-theories promise not just the invention of synthetic life, but even immortality through uploading our brains into cyberspace.

But lurking behind this techno-mysticism is something much more sinister. In Wired magazine, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly and other Californian ideologues assert that the Net is the sort of unregulated marketplace up to now found only in economics textbooks. Instead of supporting a caring society, they hope that technological progress into the 21st century will inevitably lead back to 19th-century tooth-and-claw capitalism. Their utopia looks like most other people's dystopia.

Levy's book is important because it advocates an alternative future for the Net. As a French intellectual, he doesn't accept free market dogmas. This approach is not simply morally preferable. It is also a precondition for any coherent analysis of what's really happening in the Net. Contrary to the predictions of Wired, it has proved difficult to create a profitable digital economy. While existing products can be promoted or sold online, most Net users are reluctant to pay for visiting Web sites - or even to click on the advertising links placed on them. So why can't the cybercapitalists easily turn the Net into another form of commercial media?

This is because the entrepreneurs were the last people to arrive in cyberspace. Originally invented for military purposes, the Net was quickly hijacked by academics and amateurs as a cheap--even free--method of distributing information and communicating with colleagues. Within cyberspace, most users participate in discussions or publish their work for the pleasure of others recognising their efforts. When Net enthusiasts proclaim that "information wants to be free", they mean it literally.

Rather than being just a business opportunity, Levy claims instead that the Net is a qualitatively new way of living. In the tradition of French philosophy, he explains this insight with a grand abstraction. Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Levy describes how four types of social spaces have emerged that allow us to live in different ways. Back in the distant past, we wandered the open space of the Earth as nomads. With the emergence of agriculture, we then built the fixed space of the Territory. For the past couple of centuries, increasing numbers of us have survived within the industrialised space of the Commodity. Now we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth way of living: the space of Knowledge formed by cyberspace. Within this virtual world, individuals can think and discuss with each other freely. Once everyone is wired up, we will come together as the "collective intelligence": an inclusive society borne out of the Net. Cyberutopia is imminent.

Levy's visionary anthropology is therefore diametrically opposed to that of the Californian ideologues. Instead of forming a perfect market, the Net opens the space of Knowledge. Crucially, this new space is completely distinct from the space of the Commodity. When we are on-line, we want to learn, play and communicate with one another rather than to make money. Above all, we want to participate within the "collective intelligence" because we suffer from individual alienation caused by capitalism. Like many of the West Coast gurus with whom he takes issue, Levy can become mystical about his vision of cyberspace.

Inspired by Islamic theology, he says in one chapter that the "collective intelligence" is rather similar to God. This New Age rhetoric disguises, however, a specific form of politics. Nearly thirty years on, Levy still champions the most radical demands of the New Left of the Sixties. Back then, these revolutionaries believed that replacing governments or nationalising industries would change very little. Instead, they thought that the ills of modern society could be cured only by everyone directly controlling their own lives. In the industrialised countries, this was prevented by the professionalisation of politics and the passivity of watching television. The New Left therefore demanded the simultaneous creation of direct democracy and interactive media. Once people were no longer represented by others, everyone would be able to participate in the running of society. According to Levy, the Net is about to realise this 1960s revolutionary dream. What proved to be impractical in the past is now possible with new digital technologies. Once we all have access to cyberspace, we will be able to determine our own destiny through a real-time direct democracy: the "virtual agora". According to Levy, cyberspace therefore is the online version of a hippie commune.

While emphasising the Net's noncommercial aspects is preferable to Californian freemarket platitudes, this New Left cybertheory has its own problems. Above all, the formalist method of French philosophy obscures as much as it illuminates. By abstracting too far into theory, Levy avoids examining the messy nature of human activity. For instance, there is in reality no clear separation between the Net and the rest of industrial society. Over the past few centuries, the development of both the market and the state has only been possible through constant improvements in the
technologies of physical and symbolic communications. The Net itself is created out of the convergence of already existing industries: telephony, media and computing. What is happening in cyberspace is the intensification of previous trends rather than something completely new. If the Californian ideologues think that the Net can only be a market, then Levy makes exactly the opposite error.

Despite its noncommercial aspects, the Net isn't a world completely separated from money-making. Big corporations contribute to the Net from building PCs to laying networks. Small companies help from writing software to making Web sites. Because the Net has to be a total break with the past, Levy can never admit that one of its major uses is for business communications.

By ignoring the world of work, Levy crucially cannot explain why the Net was developed as a hi-tech gift economy in the first place. Invented by scientists, this technology was originally designed to facilitate a specific way of working. In their specialist fields, the direct application of markets hampers research. Instead of trading with each other, scientists "give" articles to journals and "present" papers at conferences.

Now scientists are no more moral than anyone else. In their professions, the gift economy is adopted because it is a more effective way of working. When the Net expanded beyond its founders, its new users have unconsciously adopted this scientific behaviour. Although commercial interests are using the Net, many others have discovered the benefits of working within the hi-tech gift economy. Rather than forming a "collective intelligence", cyberspace is facilitating new types of collective labour.

Despite these faults, Levy's book is still a useful corrective to the free-market orthodoxy coming out of the West Coast. It is preferable to overemphasise the role of the gift economy within cyberspace than to ignore it altogether. However, both the Californian and French visions of the digital future do share a common vice: the desire to impose a rigid model on an evolving social phenomenon. Yet, the Net precisely encourages the hybridisation and intermixing of different ways of behaving. If we really want to comprehend the digital future, we will have to move beyond the abstractions of both California and France.

The book review first appeared in the New Scientist, 13th December 1997.

Thierry Bardini: France Is Burning

2005-11-10T04:17:00.000-08:00

From CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE --- http://www.ctheory.net --- 09/11/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

France Is Burning

How does it feel to see the country of your birth burning on television? Today it makes me feel like a migrant worker, watching the kids of other migrant workers rioting in the streets of cities you've probably have never heard of -- but that they have been cleaning for two generations. Today I am reminded of the same scenes I once witnessed first-hand in the streets of Caracas and Los Angeles. Today I am reminded by all these comparisons I read in the papers, Paris-Baghdad, Ile-de-France-Tchetchnia, that bring back images and feelings to my mind. Flashes of light, Carnival, riot. My neighbor, this insignificant dog-walking-little-man, breaking a window, shoplifting. Black uniforms on motorcycles with very long sticks and machine guns. Fires. Dionysian parties, tomorrow tears. ~Hepa chamo~ why did you burn our car, and your school? Flashes of Curfew (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1988, Caracas, Venezuela, 1989). ~Toque de queda~, my poor Thomas. What to do but keep on partying when I can't get back home in time? Avoid the crowd, stay in well lit areas, talk to the cops only if you have to, only if they ask you a question or if you fear something worse. Be ready to run. Don't stay too close to the windows. Watch the same General over and over again on TV, lying through his teeth, back to order. That was then, in the Third World, homeland of the migrant workers before migration. There riot rhymes with coup, as in "coup d'Etat" or "coup sur la gueule." There the troops take three days to deploy in streets on fire, and the troops are eighteen years old, wearing helmets too big and carrying ten ammos apiece. Needless to say, they are scared shitless. And so are you and so it seems is everybody -- past this third day. A week later, the streets are cleaned, a thousand people are dead. Order is restored, until the next coup. There, in Caracas, the poor and the desperate came down to the heart of the city and burned it. Their targets of choice were the ~abastos~, the dammed little capitalists on each street corner who were shelving coffee, rice and pampers, waiting for the prices to come up, or the ~caritos~, the damned little capitalists who doubled the price of the ride, just a few days before they burned. Just a step above them on the starvation ladder, barely out of the ~barrios~. In Los Angeles (1992) I was working for the University of Spoiled Children, thanks to a Japanese endowment at the famous Annenberg School. The building was rumored to have been a Republican think tank, unless it was an intelligence think tank I don't remember; a massive eagle was covering the entrance hall. The first strange thing that I noticed that day was a guy armed at the gates of the University. He was not yet eighteen years old and wore no helmet. I bet that he had plenty of rounds on his belt. I jumped into my car and saw the rest on TV -- from my rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica. Downtown and Watts seemed very far away, until I noticed the smoky skies from the window. It felt like I was watching images of Caracas on CNN -- It can't be here. Sounds concrete suddenly, pockets of the Third World in the First World. They too, started in a party-like atmosphere, burning their own neighborhood. Starting with the liquor stores. I bet I could have seen my neighbor from Caracas, Residence Sans Soucis, Avenida Libertador, Chacaito, stepping out of the broken window of this ~licoreria~, carrying a full case of Red Bull. The troops, the National Guard that is, took two days to deploy, and prevented any damage from reaching North Hollywood. In the meantime, the small-business owners from little Seoul made use of their own NRA licensed machine guns. There, in a so-called civilized country, they only burned their own neighborhood. A week later, one house out of two was left to ashes on Normandy Street, but order was back in the city (or so they said on CNN). Who knows how many died, in a democratic country and land of hope we do not keep stats like this. Some of them did not officially exist anyway; they were just some migrant Chicano workers. I thought about my own ~abuelo~, Nicolas from Pontremoli, who migrated in 1921 from his native Tuscany because of too many black shirts and no jobs. I thought about him, the ~rital~, reconstructing the war destroyed north-east of France, near ~Le Chemin des Dames~, quite a charming name for one of the worst WWI battlegrounds. Hell if you're a poor bastard out of fascist Italy in 1921, you'd better be a mason. Back to the street ~compadre~, wait for the next job pickup. Today I am a ~emigre~ in well-kept Canada, a legal alien, still a French National; aside from my name, I am French to the bone, as my fellow compatriots often remind me here. I am no more the grandson of a ~rital~ but quite simply put a ~maudit francais~ (and so might my son, if the trend goes on). There, there are no Muslims (as they said on Fox) nor blacks (as they wrote in the Teheran Times), but quite simply second generation African descent born in France -- and being French I know of at least ten derogatory words to call them, my fellow compatriots, ~fils de l'emigration~. Sons and grandsons of migrant workers for whom the law of the State of Emergency was first designed, back in 1955. Before ruling the projects of even the smallest towns of the country, it was used thrice, twice in Algeria (1955, 1961) and once in New Caledonia (in 1984). Bringing the colonies back to order before it brings the ~metropole,~ back to the same order. Before bringing the colonies into the Metropole. Pockets of colonies in the metropole, patches of periphery in the old center. There the troops did not deploy yet. They would have no crowd to face, only pockets of sons and grandsons practicing urban guerrilla, patches of little gangs striking at random, hidden behind the hoods of their latest fashion terrorist jacket, you know your basic hoody, but with a zipper at the front and just two holes for your eyes. You know, like in Baghdad, or better yet, like in Jerusalem or Beyrouth. You know, young people of their time, mobile and networked, flash mobs if you will. Kids of the viral marketing age, junkware. Except this time their rap shoots at firemen and nurses, and kills a poor guy in charge of the street lights -- they say he was taking pictures in Epinay. What a Sunday for a family trip, for this only casualty of a riot with no crowds, no protest, and no end. A bus burns... It feels like I am watching pictures of Caracas on CNN, back in Santa Monica, but I am watching Paris on CBC, unless it is Watts on France 2. How does it feel, to see the country of your birth burning on TV? Estranged. At home, if you call yourself a migrant worker.

Montreal, November 9, 2005.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Thierry Bardini, a sociologist, is an associate professor in the
Department of Communication at the Universite de Montreal, Canada,
where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (with Brian
Massumi). In 2000, he published _Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart,
Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing_, at Stanford
University Press. He is currently finishing his second manuscript,
entitled _Junkware: The Subject without Affect_.

Jelena Vesic: De Appel:Amnesia or Arrogance? - In response to Tjebe van Tijen's post about radiodays project

2005-11-09T01:00:00.000-08:00

On the occasion of preparation of radiodays book

When I think about radiodays today [and this is the project that demands a lot of re-thinking, as it was so big and challenging in the terms of organization, with its 150 participants and wide range of topics and approaches] I often turn back to the very sharp and emotionally charged critique that we - the curators of the project - received from the radio activist and media artist Tjebbe van Tijen... Perhaps this is so because we never responded to it. In the meantime I also analyzed our silence, but the only explanation I could find for this was the amount of work we were exposed to as curators at the time, as participants in the program and organizers simultaneously [the text in question was posted to nettime at the very beginning of the project, which was continuing over April and ended beginning of May]. Nevertheless, although this engagement was overwhelming and engaged all of our capacities, in the more discursive perspective it might look trivial and perfectly epitomize the title of van Tijen's text - "Radiodays in De Appel = Artistic Amnesia or Arrogance?".

Van Tijen's dispute refers to the rich history of pirate radio stations in Amsterdam, their experimenting with radio space free from the burden of broadcast tradition and commercial interest, and finally, their persecution by local or state authorities, or different ways of assimilation into more controlled structures. Radiodays curators were accused of "dancing on the grave of free radio history" [because they failed to refer to the history of Amsterdam community radio in their curatorial statement and announced radio program].

I see it as a bit difficult to find my placement within this text. Being one of the radiodays curators, I am no doubt one of the accused macabre dancers, but on the other hand I share Van Tijen's views of assessment the ill fate of free radio stations in Holland. There is a similar history of very sophisticated and smart mechanism of assimilation of critique into institutional sphere within the arts world as well, but, then again, hardly any results would be achieved by this public melancholia about the "previous" or "before". Instead, I find much more reasons to contemplate and discuss this historical experience in order to think, in as constructive and effective way as possible, in relation to the cultural [or media] industry of today.

What bothers me in Tjebbe van Tijen's text is the fact that as the object of critique, following van Tijen's description and comments, I can hardly recognize radiodays - the project I did together with 5 other curators: Rael Artel, Kathrin Jentjens, Claire Staebler, Huib van der Werf, and Veronica Wiman. In a way, this situation appears to me as Don Quijote's war against windmills, not a neutral act , but rather strong political metaphor. But radiodays was not a windmill, that is, a metaphor, it was a real project that grew up in and out of real circumstances, founded on concrete framework, and its development was complex and transgressive in many ways. I think that Tjebbe van Tijen hasn't paid attention to the idea of context (and to the real framework of radiodays) we the curators were referring to. So, I'll
say something about that.

A starting point of radiodays was blind-dating the curators of different views, perspectives, ideological orientations, experiences and backgrounds, who were supposed to realize a project together, in a short period of time. That was a conceptual and structural framework which was part of Curatorial Training Program at De Appel. The usual result of this annual program was an art exhibition. At the very
beginning we faced all the problems of collective authorship, as we were not a collective (group of people gathered around the common ideas and dedicated to those ideas) but rather a team of people who were set to manage the project. We didn't want to accept this passively and as a given fact, and that was one of the reasons we changed the conventional and static gallery format for the radio format The radio is time based and consequently more open for a fusion of different contents and contexts [we expanded the space and made it more democratic and negotiable, in a way], and finally more discursive and confronting. A lot of programs were constructed as live
events, and through this attempt we generated different aspects of sociability. Discussing the exhibitions such as Moscow Art Biennial or Collective creativity by WHW curatorial group from Zagreb [where the former was a good example of curatorial blind - dating that resulted in miscommunication of international curators with local intellectuals and local context, and the later was exploring collectives and groups
in relation to the notion of individual authorship] we also examined and reflected upon our own position [not in order to be self referential, but to refer to the set of problems induced by certain politics of art]. And we brought out a number of different topics related to radio, art and public sphere: sound/radiophonic/radiobased art; authorship/copyright/distribution; modernity-socialism-utopia-sovereignty; public sphere/demonstrations/collective performances/ usage of body; citywalk-psychogeography, and others. Every day was bringing a different thematic [we played artworks, music, and introduced new topics for discussion every day], and that's what the title radiodays is referring to, the proposal for the day [not to the Woodie Allen's movie]. We used radio as a communication tool in a very utopian way - in a way that radio can create a link between here and elsewhere, to establish a communication responsive in both directions. The idea to create a temporary radio project and to mediate and maintain such an intense, diverse communication and dialogue was based on certain naivety and enthusiasm. I believe it had produced effects in some people's minds and that we didn't create only the utopian dreamworld or our own playground.

We were also analyzing the constellation of public and experimenting with the classic participant-observer relationship imposed by existing systems of observation in a gallery space. In collaboration with the artists Laurent and Pascal Grasso, as well as with association Apsolutno, we transformed the gallery space of De Appel into radio studio and listening room [space for collective listening, performing the program and observing the program in the process of making with possibility to comment on it] and a radio archive, a place where users could search, sit and read. Both spaces were not arranged as architecturally ergonomic, utilitarian for the purpose and comfortable, but were accentuating moments of observation, of listening and using the information. Program was broadcasted on FM 107.4, Amsterdam city area, and webcasted on radiodays.org, and we dubbed this activity "exhibition on air".

But, [and here I speak on the grounds of my personal impression of the results of radiodays] the project was not very successful as an attempt to play with the backdrops located between the sphere of participation and the sphere of observation. Although we had an open studio and situation of collective listening in the actual space where the program was performed, and also a webstream with a possibility to post comments on our website, nobody really responded in a subversive (creative, unexpectable) way, the public was just too passive and too gallery-obedient. It made me think about "empty offers", because it can be that staging of the studio and archive spaces and filling the program by already scheduled and attractive contributions maybe produced spaces of difference and feelings of non-equality among the audience ... or maybe it induced the "reality show" effect. But, on the other hand, the situation was pretty much transparent and clear concerning this openness, and different from classic commercial radio strategy of open space where, for example, public is supposed to call and give their opinions in conversation with presenters [of course, in that case power relations are unambiguous]. Radiodays project has many participatory aspects. As one of examples I'll mention a nice piece
that we realized for the opening day, which was fully performed by the audience. It was 5 hours long performance of One million years by On Kawara, where public was invited to sit for a moment in a studio cabin and read the numbers with a full concentration. This, collectively realized, amateur performance was directly broadcasted and webcasted. At the same time, the performance we started our radio program with was functioning as a statement of how we spend the time in relation to the value of one minute in commercial radio stations. We also had one unexpected statement of AGF - poetess and musician from Berlin - who's act closed the opening day, that I latter on liked to interpret as the two possible perceptions of radio: background noise, or foreground presence that requires certain attention and voluntary participation. While the public was a bit lost in the mix of opening celebration and performative atmosphere in one moment during her performance and as a
part of it, AGF said that those who don't want to listen to the music can now leave the space and continue to chat outside. I think this statement was not imposing the rules of behavior, but rather referring to the specific nature of the work, which was not designed to be entertaining in the classic sense ... and for us it functioned well as a statement very close to our own usage of radio ...which today [as Ligna radio group from Hamburg mentioned in one text] is not more than a background noise.

SO, Radiodays was our "modest proposal" to the both curatorial and radio practice, and to the practice of mediation between artists, theorists, radiomakers, musicians, amateurs and professionals, and it was an attempt to open relatively closed art space a bit, to negotiate with arrogance and to fight with amnesia. The two works I mentioned were just a few percent of the very diverse content we broadcasted for over a month. I don't have an urge to defend the project, and there are probably many possibilities to approach it in a very critical way. But there are no reasons to observe radiodays appearance exclusively through the history of free community radio. Considering radio and community relations, radiodays could be seen as a community, or a neighborhood radio in the broader perspective. Our working space [which turned to be more or less a living space for some months during and around the project] was one floor above, and a lot of people used to hang around and later collaborate with us in making the program and bringing more people. Radiodays was community-based in the same way the international blogs are community-based, because it was an international project and it's community aspect was based on sharing the same obsessions rather then same location. Therefore, I think that the series of dichotomies such as community-non/community, pirate-official, local/international, are very broad and general, and relate to radiodays in a very broad and general way. Radiodays was not a militant political radio, and its political effects are limited by the possibilities of art itself . With or without some or all the elements of a free community local radio in Amsterdam, of which most of us knew very little before entering the project, there are many aspects of radiodays (some of which I mention in this text) on which the evaluation and critique ought to be based.

At the end, and referring to Tjebbe van Tijen' objection that radiodayss was safely positioned within institution that failed to recognize media talents in the past I would say that we should not necessarily observe an institution as an ivory tower, because it is built as a public sphere, which is never static and homogeneous. I think that radiodays project produced interesting model of positioning within the frame of institution and established a creative and debating platform.

For anybody interested to explore what was happening in Amsterdam during April, there is an overview of the whole program and audio archive of all the broadcasts available as MP3 streams/downloads at radiodays.org. The program is Creative Commons licensed.

Mark Dery: Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere (Notes on Netporn)

2005-10-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

From: Mark Dery
Subject: Notes on Netporn
From http://www.markdery.com/archives/news/index.html#000048#more

Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere

You should have been there.

Billed by its organizers, Geert Lovink and the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli, as "the first major international conference on netporn criticism," the Art and Politics of Netporn (September 30-October 1, Amsterdam) made happy bedfellows of Tod Browning and Kraft-Ebbing, Larry Flynt and Foucault.

The always thought-provoking Mikita Brottman talked about Christian fundamentalist conjurations of the Net as a Devil's Triangle waiting to suck unsuspecting kids into the murky depths of porn addiction or, worse yet, the slimy embrace of pedophiles. The film critic David Sterritt talked about the visual grammar of porn films. Ayah Bdeir, a research assistant in MIT's computing culture group, talked about spam, porn and otherwise, as a core sample of the mass unconscious97a culture's free-associated thoughts about what it wants most. Matteo Pasquinelli talked about warporn, and the almost unbearably hilarious Sergio Messina, a hip-hop musician, journalist, and Outsider theorist from Italy, riffed on what he calls "realcore," the up-close-and-in-your-face images swingers post of themselves in Yahoo groups. And Rogerio Lira talked about his experiments in "social nudity" on Flickr, and how the posting of naked self-portraits there97his way of chipping away at normative notions of the body beautiful97ran afoul of Flickr's prudishness. And the irrepressible, unapologetically demented Adam Zaretsky presented "Why I Want to Fuck E.O. Wilson," a performance-cum-lecture that reimagined various paraphilic practices from a sociobiological perspective (with tongue very much in cheek) as evolutionary necessities for the species.

I opened the conference with a keynote lecture titled (with apologies to Burroughs) "'Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere': The Sublime and the Grotesque in Web Porn." Among other things, I talked about the kulturkampf between the neo-puritan right, whose abstinence-based curriculum threatens to do for sex ed in America's public schools what creationism has done for scientific literacy among the million. Noting what I call the "Newtonian physics of contemporary society," in which every repressive action from the dominant culture is countervailed by an equally emphatic (if not always equally effective) reaction from transgressive subcultures, I argued that despite the right's unflagging efforts to turn back the clock to the days when people put pantalets on piano legs, we're living in the Golden Age of the Golden Shower, a heyday of unabashed depravity (at least, in terms of online scopophilia and virtual sex) that makes De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom look like VeggieTales. The Divine Marquis never imagined aquaphiliacs, a catchall category that includes guys whose hearts leap up when they behold babes in bathing caps, fanciers of underwater catfights, connoisseurs of submarine blowjobs, breath-holding fetishists, fans of simulated drowning, and, weirdest of all, people who get off on swimming and showering fully clothed, like Rein, the guy in Amsterdam who likes to take a dip now and then, in "business suits, dress shirts, and suit jackets, especially the one with two vents," he informs, on his site.

Nor did De Sade even dream of amputee worship, armpit fetishism, clown porn, or sneeze freaks, who rejoice at the thought of a nice, juicy honk, with plenty of spritz. Lactating transsexuals? Been there. Scrotal inflation? Done that. Wet dreams of Japanese schoolgirls in traction? Check. Breast-expansion fantasies of mammaries that balloon up to Goodyear blimp proportions, suffocating their smiling owners, or slither and puddle like some B-movie Blob, or clone themselves? Check.

Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as exophilia, the "abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth" that is the subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, are starting to sound downright plausible. Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment on the "demise of feeling" would open the door to "all our most real and tender pleasures in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena...for...our...perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game."

Of course, the loosening of a society's moral corset can ensure that practitioners of loves that dare not speak their names breathe a little easier to remember, it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but it can also open the door to real-world Videodromes, where one man's psychopathic games are another man's theater of pain.

As this is written, for example, the Web is abuzz with stories about U.S. soldiers taking trophy snapshots and making homemade music videos, set to kickass rock, of themselves booting a wounded prisoner in the face or puppeteering the arm of a corpse to make it wave or mugging for the camera around the charred corpse of what a caption gloatingly calls a "cooked Iraqi." Thomas Doherty, a film-studies professor quoted in an L.A. Times story about the scandal, gave one homemade video the Roger Ebert thumbs-up for its "contrapuntal editing97the beat of the tune and the flash of the images," judging it "a very slick piece of work." He quipped, "The MTV generation goes to war. They should enter it at Sundance." A star is born: the David Fincher of atrocity porn.

Images like the nauseating close-up of the dead Iraqi who refused to stop at a U.S. checkpoint, a mess of bloody pulp where his head used to be, are porn, albeit porn of the most atavistic sort. They're porn because the young, male viewers who look at them do so with a voyeuristic, high-fiving glee familiar to anyone who has ever watched hardcore videos with a drunken gang of guys at a bachelor party. (The L.A. Times story describes the fiancee of one soldier walking into a room where her hubby-to-be "was showing [his war] videos to friends, who were 'whooping and hollering.'") They're porn because the carrion-feeders who might otherwise be peddling hardcore are now hawking video gore to the chickenhawks back home. They're porn because they poke a stiff little finger into the killer-ape part of our brains, right where the desire to fuck gets confused with the urge to fuck shit up. Exhibit A: ThatsFuckedUp.com, a site that offers one-stop shopping for war-core and amateur porn, sometimes in a single, sick-making image. One photo shows a prone woman, presumably an Iraqi, whose leg is a bloody stump, blown off by a land mine. Under the hem of her skirt, we can see her vagina. "Nice puss---bad foot," reads the wisecracking caption. Pardon my Wilhelm Reich, but could our queasy tendency to express our bloodlust in the metaphoric language of porn be (at least partly) the pathological cost of our repressed sexuality?

Irit Rogoff: Engendering Terror

2005-08-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

Engendering Terror

Logics of Enmity

This uneasy moment, this moment of The War Against Terrorism, hardly seems an auspicious one to wade into the attempt at an imaginative discussion of the theoretical potentiality that counters the polarity of the state vs. terror. Even less so for an argument which would like to base its practice on an alternative reading strategy of terror and would like to try and think it as an alternative geography, as a counter cartography of subversion. One can just see heads shaking, murmurs of concern about the need to condemn these terrible acts, one remembers the incredulous responses to KarlHeinz Stockhausen’s somewhat frivolous remarks about acts of terrorism functioning as great avant garde works and one also remembers with discomfort the sight of jubilant responses from those who thought the attacks justified. This uneasy moment it seems, calls only for condemnation, for moral judgement, for the repudiation of possible justification. The languages of this moment are those of negation, of security, of closure, of enmity. That other moment of possibility in which we might rethink the relations of global power, the moment that seemed so necessary in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 seems to have been passed by without return, has hardened into the current mournful topography of unavoidable enmity with all those so easily homogenised under the aegis of ‘terrorists’.
I would like to have this uneasy moment produce other engagements, to have it look back and see complex antecedents in wars of national liberation and anti-colonial wars and urban guerrilla movements, of fantasmatic geographies of relational circulation, of instances of unforeseen liberation and the unframing of women from various post-war patriarchal strictures. I would like to hear other voices such as that of Melek Ulagay, one of the heroines of Kutlug Ataman’s 1999 multi screen video piece “Women Who Wear Wigs”. Ulugay, an activist on the run in the 1970s and 80s, became mistakenly taken for some half fictitious persona called “Hostess Leyla” who was supposed to have been implicated in the hijacking of a Turkish Airlines plane. She tells radiant tales of her years on the run, often disguised by an atrocious blonde wig and various weird costumes, years in which she came across and was helped by the kinds of people that she, as an urban politicised intellectual, had never interacted with. Her tone is rueful, sad, comic and proud and while she mentions the totalising politics that motivated her and assures her listeners that the poor peasants who hid her and her friends were aware that they were committed to making a better world, she also recognises that she was shaped by these events rather than shaping them. While it is clear that 30 years on the run between Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Europe, until the eventual amnesty for Turkish political outlaws, inflicted much suffering on her and the loss and arrests of many others, much of the narrative is also very funny; the ridiculous disguises, the conversations with prostitutes in flea pit hotel bathrooms, the outlandish plots and signals arranged between conspirators, the unexpected kindness of strangers, the ever deteriorating awful blonde wig. Even the brutalities of the Turkish police of those days are described with a semblance of irony. An obviously committed political activist, a so-called terrorist on the run, Ulagay’s speech is not a discourse of enmity - in Ataman’s video, and guided by his desire to have the personal turn the political into high melodrama, as she tries on wigs and describes her adventures, she fleshes out an exceptionally important piece of history in which not only political but also social and cultural gains were made. These historical moments, in Europe and elsewhere have been re-written as failed instances of revolutionary nihilism and the current manifestations of urban terror have been divorced from them. Instead they are being produced as the horrific face of the so called “clash of cultures”, a prospect so dangerous that nothing short of global warfare will do to secure the West from its enmity.

While I would wish for a change of voices its not actually possible to bypass all of the polarities of enmity without understanding how they have come to so dominate the discourse of ‘terrorism’.
Before I can try and find other languages I need to try and understand exactly how this moral consensus around enmity, otherness and atavism has consolidated and why it has created a climate in which we have been so overtaken by notions of defence and security.
As Angelia Means says “After September 11, a moral consensus has “emerged” (in the US) that cuts across the boundaries of cultural and political diversity: terrorists are the enemy. Like pirates in the Nineteenth century, terrorists are hostes humani generis. In this context the torn flag of the United States, has become a polyvalent symbol, signifying both a particular nation and a universal idea. Not just amongst us, but amongst all “civilised” people, the practice of political violence against private persons is denounced as an atavistic remnant. Unfortunately the consensus that terrorists are hostes fails to grapple with the true nature of “atavistic remainders” invoked by the image of the terrorist”

For Angelia Means , a US political theorists, there are 3 main questions that must be posed to the overarching homogenising of ‘terrorism’. The first has to do with interrogating the culpability of the object of terrorist violence “If a democratic public is complicitous in terrorism against those who are excluded from its public, does the fact that it is a democracy make it a legitimate object of the Other’s terrorism? In the history of modern democracy, a history that includes racial and colonial terrorism, was the use of terrorism by others, never justified?”

The second question has to do with Jurgen Habermas’ admission that political violence can take the form of a more diffuse cultural violence that relies upon and reproduces self/other dichotomies. Therefore what Habermas calls the democratic project of ‘including Others’ expands the political domain to resist cultural and symbolic violence that impedes extending equal rights to all.
And following the logic of this argument , she poses a third question of whether political violence is unjustifiable in all cases “ And if we do assume that the terrorist is the enemy who “takes humanity back to prehistoric times” we still need to ask whether the normative project of “including the other” ultimately includes “including the enemy”.

However, given our critical commitment to the notion of ‘difference’ we have some obligation to do just that, to wade in and break up the monolithic dimension of terror by both introducing the logics of difference into it and by unhinging it from being morally yoked in singular opposition to the state.
From its beginnings, this discussion of terror has been posited around issues of justification, security and enmity. The United Nations commission on terror and terrorism published its conclusions linked to the following definition “ Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, by a group of persons or particular persons for political reasons are in any circumstances unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature that may be used to justify them”

Here we have an argument that links terror to the ‘general public’ not to the state and yet over the past year and within hours of each violent occurrence the object of attack has been shifted from the suffering public to their affiliation with that which seemingly overrides their specificity, namely the state. This has been done, as Giorgio Agamben has recently argued persuasively, by means of countering acts of violence with discourses of security. “Security as a leading principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. Security being a leading principle of state politics, …politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies which can instantly be countered by an ever growing ambition for and dependence on, security. Today, says Agamben, Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.

To the ‘security’ that is privileged by state discourses, Agamben opposes the notion of discipline. Discipline he argues , is the opposite of security in that it wants to produce order while security wants to regulate disorder. It is at this point, at the moment of the regulation of disorder that the work of culture finds it imperative to intervene and examine all of the potential significances of disorder. Difference as we well know, is one of the main hallmarks of a social and cultural atemisation which is often perceived as a form of ‘disorder’ in which there is no totalising set of beliefs or shared values which serves to produce a semblance of cohesion. Difference; epistemological, racial and sexual is the agent of fragmentation and thus has been outlawed from a discussion that requires the coherence and consensus that Angelia Means and Giorgio Agamben have invoked in criticism.
In this essay I am trying to think ‘terror’ through another set of parameters. I am trying to think it in relation to contemporary art and visual culture but not in a descriptive manner, neither through art works and images that reference or illustrate terror nor through ones that try to get to the heart of its political or cultural truths. Instead I wish to address a series of questions to something called ‘terror’ and the ways in which it brushes up against visual culture, the ways it weaves in and out of its narratives, the ways in which I have seen it momentarily light up the field with a glimmer of some alternative possibility of knowing that has intrigued me for a while now. For that is I believe the contemporary relation between art practices and critical theory. In this contemporary relationship we no longer think of art as applying existing knowledge through other means, no longer illustrating or analysing or translating. Rather we think that it is both a research mode and a means of knowledge production in and of itself. Therefore art and visual culture are able to produce both new knowledge as well as new modes of knowing which have the potential to unframe some serious issue, such as ‘terror’ in this instance, away from the moralising discourses that imprison it at a level that requires response. This level maintains that there is ‘terror’ out there and we need to produce a whole set of responses to it; we need to learn to read it and foresee it and protect against it and avenge and punish it. What I am wondering instead, is whether we can learn something about ourselves and our culture in the encounter with ‘terror’, whether it produces another structure of knowing the world we inhabit? I also wonder if visual culture is not perhaps the arena in which such a transformation in the status of ‘terror’ might take place. In a Deleuzian vein then this is a shift from the specific to the singular; the specific to a logic of its contexts anchors ‘terror’ in an antagonistic geo-politics and in various cultural clashes while the singular to a logic of its own self organisation recognises that it might be producing something new in the world outside of those materially specific conditions.
In this vein I would like to ask such questions as whether we might be able to think of ‘terror’ as a form of geography, an emergent and alternative geography. Equally is this alternative geography a form of knowledge production rather than the epistemological reproduction and mirroring of colonial and imperial world positions? Might it perhaps produce something which may be described as relational geography, in the ways in which so much of contemporary visual culture is producing for us forms of relational aesthetics ? Finally I want to try and set up an interruption of ‘terrorism’ through the logics of gender and sexual difference and see to what extent this might break up both its supposedly monolithic homogeneity as well as its reportedly internal ideological coherences.

Logics of Relationality

Geography has long been for me a locus of contradictory knowledges.
Initially I worked to develop an inquiry that tried to rethink the relations between subjects and places traditionally known as 'geography', away from the dominant powers and practices that have the authority to name us, locate us, determine our collectivities and identifications and establish the rights and privileges we do or do not have. What seemed then at the outset of the project —and still does quite a bit later — so problematic was that I wanted an analysis in which no disciplinary or empirical mode prevailed so that I would not end up examining the ways in which historical, economic or cultural conditions are reflected in art works, or read contemporary, critical Geographies through art works. The danger of that was obviously that the work I was attempting would be high jacked by some academic paradigm, which would dictate a relation between theories, contexts and objects. As someone who had her initial training in the field of Art History, I knew that this form of knowledge territorialization needed to be avoided in favour of some new object of knowledge in which a semblance of parity and reciprocity might take place between the constitutive components of the study and through which a form of cultural politics could emerge from the work rather than be imposed on its materials.2
When I speak of geography I do not mean the materials we all studied at school about land masses and cloud formations and climactic zones and flora and fauna. Nor am I speaking about demographics and national formations and geo-political resources. Instead I am contemplating the possibility of rethinking the relations between subjects and places way from the organising principles of the law; the law of the state that controls privileged inclusions and desperate exclusions, or the cultural law of naturalised and essentialised heritages that assume that a place called France for example , is inhabited by French people who share a language, a historical culture, a shared set of assumptions and attitudes. What if a large part of the population is Francophone by coercion, if its lives out its life in France, in French but also in resistance and in resentment, if its complex allegiances are elsewhere and its presence in France is a legacy of colonial histories and of contemporary economic imperatives. - Could the map of that internally split entity still be called by the overly simple term of 'France', still be coloured a uniform pink or yellow of whatever colour it is the atlas, a colour that would over-ride all of the contradictory internal differences of which it is made up?

To speak of Geography in relation to issues of cultural difference, is to steer clear of identity politics, to navigate away from the internal coherence of groups with an already established identity 'in common'. In this form of politics known as identity politics the preoccupation is to populate existing models of knowledge with a broader range of subjects. It is to bring difference, whether sexual or cultural, into the existing paradigms and expand their populations. For me, a far more important project is to try and actually think difference; different modes of knowing rather than different subjects within known modes. Geography thus is a way of speaking cultural difference, a way of acknowledging that all difference is always epistemologically embedded and subject to regimes rather than simply subjugated to dominant powers. It is made manifest in the world through sign systems that include cartography, border marking, landscape stereotypes, national cultures and many others. The intersections between 'geographies' as articulated through sign systems and arts practices circulating as visual culture who might just have some chance of rewriting these systems, is the heart of the subject I am trying to produce here.

Geography is at one and the same time a concept, a sign system and an order of knowledge established at the centres of power. By introducing questions of critical epistemology, subjectivity and spectatorship into the arena of geography we shift the interrogation from the centres of power and knowledge and naming to the margins, to the site at which new and multi dimensional knowledge and identities are constantly in the process of being formed.
A possibility of thinking an alternative geographical structure emerged from the exhibition entitled "The Short Century - African Liberation Movements 1945-1989" which began in Germany (2001-2, Vila Stuck, Munich and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, and has continued to Chicago and New York (MCA Chicago, PS1 New York) . The opening historical moment of the exhibition is mid-century and the independence movements and wars of national liberation, which were taking, place throughout the colonised continent of Africa. The informing notion of Africa here is very wide and it includes North Africa and parts of the Sub Saharan Middle East. This means that beyond a named place - a continent called Africa - we have a world of mutual histories and linked narratives - instead of a colonised entity, a sphere of global exchange and circulation that challenges both the hegemonic supremacy of the coloniser's culture and acknowledges the complex internal network of inter-African migrations and circulations and influences and exchanges. In my reading of the exhibition, it operates through staging a series of losses to various fundamental assumptions that the West has about itself and to which it has traditionally constituted a place named ‘Africa’ as its quintessential ‘other’. Thus in the first instance one of the fundamental Western assumptions that has been lost through the staging of this exhibition is one of the prevailing modes of European/ African interlocution, namely the constitution of Africa in resistance to Western colonisation.
Secondly we encounter a complex network of mutually informative ideological articulations and political struggles that extends beyond the continent, and of links with African American and African Latin American political and intellectual work. As in Chinue Achebe’s remarkable text, ”Tribute to James Baldwin” in which an African writer brought up under the cultural prejudices of British colonialism, set to travel the world under the provisions of the International Agencies that had invented the concept of ‘Development’ in which they located him, finally encounters the U.S. through his pursuit of and meeting with James Baldwin who himself was shortly to flee it for what he hoped would be the more welcoming host culture of Paris. Similarly in this exhibition, complex networks of travel and exchange, mutualities enacted largely through the back doors of culture, point to the fact that the West is part of a route and a process but hardly the destination and that the divisions of colonialism and more recently of the Cold War, which the West believes actually map out the globe, do not actually do so.

Thirdly we begin to see how these struggles for liberation and independence pierced the fabric of European and American political culture and ruptured the 20th century in the middle (the exhibition's title). How events taking place in Africa, did not follow those taking place in the West but preceded them and made them possible. How a mid-century radicality which came out of joint efforts at both liberation and social reform across Africa - actually paved the way for the explosion of student movements, anti Viet Nam war movements and social resistance movements which took place in the West almost a decade later. Thus for example, revisiting accounts of the lives of radical European thinkers of the mid century after visiting this exhibition several times, I was astonished to register how many of them single out the Algerian Independence struggle, to mark their own political awakening and radicalisation. .If the archives of Western radicality might also be located outside of itself does this mean the opportunity to actually rethink the very concept of radicality and its relation to the primary as well as to cease perceiving of its location as an index of its significance? “The Short Century” project in relegating Europe per se to a hinterland of African radicality, rewrites the dynamic described above and allows for the enactment of a European loss through the recognition of the legitimacy of another entity and its claims to a competing heritage.

For myself, because I had long been preoccupied with conjunctions of geographical counter cartographies and contemporary arts practices - this project of thinking about the possibilities of museums’ and exhibitions’ potential encounters with cultural difference, opened a great vista of alternative mappings. Namely what if we took the privilege of mapping away from the nation state, where entwined with epistemic structures it had produced one of our most unshakable authorities, and handed it over to the resistance initiatives that the state terms 'terror'. Those groups which had been the impetus of national liberation movements and insurgencies of anti-colonial resistance. If we attempted to decouple the exclusive relations between each so called ‘terrorist’ group and the immediate and specific state strictures it was struggling against and instead traced its numerous links with other groups and their shared theoretical precepts and mutual engagements. What would we see if RAF and Brigada Rossa, PLO and IRA, ETA and extreme breakaway groups of Green Peace eco warriors were to be linked with slightly older histories of FLP Alegria, Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Movement National Congolaise, ANC politics in South Africa and Black Panthers in the USA, to mention only a very few of the struggles that emerged in mid century . One of the most interesting points to emerge is a recognition that with hindsight, European radicalism has once again written itself as a form of diffusionism, its sources and impetuses exclusive unto to itself. In the numerous books on the ‘the Sixties’ only conjunctions of very old and very European histories are acknowledged; of state fascisms, of proletarian struggles, of engaged intellectuals and mobilised rebellious students – as linking the numerous protest movements and radical resistance actions of the moment. Even the circulation of the Viet Nam war - the site of horrific histories of atrocious colonialism from the Indochine of the French colonial empire to the divided nation of post war super power struggle between the US and the USSR- as a catalyst of much local Western and non Western protest, has been divested of its colonial and race politics and become the floating signifier of unruly, rebellious and anti-authoritarian youth. But even a very superficial historical investigation reveals that everything was linked, though the popular imagination that encountered these links – everyone with a television in 1977, viewers of what Jean Baudrillard was to call “Our Theatre of cruelty”, saw the German tourists cowering in the Lufthansa plane, jointly patrolled by German RAF activists and Palestinian PLO guerrillas on the soil of Mogadishu, Somalia which is of course in Africa , or the Japanese members of radical armed resistance in support of Palestine gunning down Europe bound travellers in Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. Everyone saw the traces of RAF actions against politicians and financiers in Germany and those of Brigada Rossa actions in Italy, but to speak of the connections between them is to recognise the duality of unresolved fascist pasts in both countries. Everyone in 1979 was party to the veiled nuances and to the cultural shock of the purported collective suicides at Stammheim Prison, but to question them would have meant to breach the carefully constructed boundary between the legal ‘state’ and outlawed ‘terror’ viewed from within a n exclusively European model. The problem was that not many people at that moment had the tools and reading strategies to link manifestations taking place in Western Europe, the Middle east and Africa and Japan and locate them within a mutually imbricated politics that extended beyond the hollow and melodramatic jargon of the revolutionary romance of the moment or the equally hollow authoritarian discourse of politicians who saw their societies as at the edge of an abyss.
The actions and protagonists of ‘terror’ have always been positioned by the state as marginal resistances to itself, as murderers and destroyers of the civil order that the state upholds through its institutions and its laws and their constant and vigilant policing. But what if we, for a moment, tried to read them as a set of geographical ambivalences, as a set of Third Spaces, in which the nation state is unframed, the histories of colonialism are allowed to break out of their imprisoning legacies of oppression, thought flows in numerous directions and named spaces are occupied with numerous and contradictory subjectivities.
Perhaps what we might find here then is a form of relational geography. The relationality of this model of geography lies in two important transitions. The first is that it is no longer anchored in the cohering imperative of the nation state. It is not the state with its illusions of being seamlessly bound from the outside and solidly coherent from the inside, that makes up the single unit components of the geographical map. At the same time, there is no parallel illusion that this conjunction of ‘terror’ movements and their links with earlier movements, have a unified and mutual ideological core, a shared revolutionary agenda. Instead we have a map that is composed of aggregates of intensities, of insurgencies that link and empathize and spark off each other, of generational loyalties that cross boundaries, histories and languages. This relational geography does not operate, as does classical geography, out of a single principle that maps everything in an outward bound motion with itself at the centre. Instead it is cumulative, it lurches sideways, it is constructed out of chance meetings in cafes, of shared reading groups at universities, of childhood deprivations that could speak to one another, of snatches of music on transistor radios, of intense rages, of glimmers of hope offered by ideas that enabled imagining a better world. A work made by Benin artist Georges A’deagbo for the Lyon Biennale of 2000 and entitled “Death and Ressurection” operated in the mode of such a geographical circulation . It took up the moment of the artist’s sojourn as a student in Paris in the 1960s and his abrupt return to Benin in the middle in the middle of those studies, to help out his family. The work uses his archive of accumulated materials and images of the period as its visual/textual resources. Momentary encounters while in Paris, odd mirrorings of his own foreignness, an unexpected sympathy and identification with Maria Callas whose photographs and tragedies were in every illustrated journals of the day – all these accumulate to an oddly Benjaminian set of interactions with a Paris that is produced out of inexplicit distances and differences and dissonances . The work does not reflect the excited discovery of a longed for and valorised world, it does not rehearse that well worn ground of the colonial pre-disposed to fall in love with the city that had so long inhabited in his imagination through literary and visual images. Nor does it follow that other familiar trope in which the visiting African sees a migrant population from formerly colonised nations re-writing the former colonial centre with its imported habits and languages and forms of expression. Instead he himself is reflected from seemingly inappropriate surfaces; marble steps and operatic divas, worn dress shoes, record sleeves and police reports of petty crimes in local newspapers. This is a topography viewed neither from Paris nor from Benin, but a relational space stretching out between them which could (and does in future works by A’deagbo) be swayed by some chance encounter to spread to some very different locality, not necessarily bound to its axes by any specific world histories. And yet, for all its seeming haphazardness, it is intensely critical in a way that we do not yet know how to read theoretically or ideologically, perhaps simply turning an idiosyncratic anthropological counter gaze on those usually privileged with looking and documenting. Or perhaps it is the look of difference rather than the imaging of the different which gives the work its frisson of having made the familiar, strange.

Not being mapped out of any centre nor out of a periphery ,this relational geography I am speaking of has no particular direction, but instead establishes connection in the manner of the fold, its boundaries touching / not touching its inner recesses.

Logics of Difference

One of those lurching flows of relational geography can also be seen in the specific ways in which images of women terrorists have circulated in visual and political culture. The visual markers of terrorism and its aftermath are familiar iconic tropes. Chè Guevara in a black beret has graced political posters and T-shirts and record covers across the globe for decades now, with little relation to either Cuba and its revolution nor the connections it established with rural insurgencies in Peru and Bolivia where Guevara found his death in 1967. His beautiful features and jet black locks, the conjunctions of Latin America and the Caribbean, the beret imbued with a gold star resonating of an earlier communist revolution, all merged to produce an alluring apparition for the romance and dashed hopes of revolutionary political fervour. Equally the airplane sitting isolated at the margins of the runways in a slightly unfamiliar landscape, viewed through a telephoto lens from great distance and free of the paraphernalia of fuel trucks and catering vans and other civilian ministrations, the fate of its human cargo sealed inside unknown – has become an uneasy media trope. Johan Grimonprez’s inventive and impressive film “Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” made for the 1997 Documenta X which produces a late 20th century history out of skyjackings, was the first inkling I had that it might be possible to think subterfuge and dissonance, mixed together with popular culture, into a political counter-history. This historical narrative pieced together seemingly disparate and often obscurely incomprehensible acts, into a coherent history of disruption of what became increasingly clear, was a civil aviation counterpart of the ‘military-industrial-complex’ to take up 60’s speak. The film’s deep understanding of just how revolutionary accessible travel had been in the 1960s and of the easy democratic glamour of the pilots and stewardesses which accompanied it, snatches the image of those stationary hijacked planes away from the alarmism and fear mongering of government bulletins and media reporting, and turns it into another relational geography, a meeting ground for tourists and revolutionaries and terrorists and cranks and business men and officials from everywhere. A meeting ground of fantasies of exotic travel and adventurous escape, of markets to be discovered and conquered, of influence to be peddled and information exchanged and of course of an incredible opportunity to capitalise on all these excitable hopes and make one’s political case heard at a previously unimagined prominence. This combined realm of pleasure and terror would work to terrorise not only those on the plane and those who have political and commercial responsibility to protect them, but also all those at home entertaining the same fantasies that propelled the travellers onto their planes in the first place, an attack on both political and fantasmatic terrains.
At a certain level, the seemingly endless fascination with women terrorists, such as Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin of the RAF and Leila Khaled of the PLFP, some of the early heroines of the urban insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s could be said to be operating at a similar level. Everyone remembers their names, certain images of them; Kahled wrapped in a kefiye and toting a sub machine gun, Meinhof in the courtyard of Stammheim prison, hair spiked and arms above her head, Ensslin dead on the floor of her cell, have circulated far beyond the discussions of the particular events and moments to which they serve as testimony. These images circulate as both the ultimate transgression and the ultimate tragedy. It is as such that Gudrun Ensslin became the main figure in Gerhard Richter’s melancholy series of paintings of the final RAF suicides at Stammheim prison. Painted nearly 10 years after the events themselves, executed in sober monochrome greys that mimic newsprint photos, melding the figures into the concrete surroundings of their imprisonment, they serve Richter as a leave taking and a distancing from an impossible impasse.
Traditional understandings of femininity and of terrorism it could be said, would make both inconceivable to think of as inhabiting the same subject. Thus terrorism became not just a political abject but also one of the natural order of nurturing women and the domestic regulation of the family, a double abhorrence. In the same vein this unimaginable duality would be used to make them, the women, monstrous and unthinkable. Woman, the over determined and over invested sign of femininity becomes in the instance of this popular reception of numerous political movements, both the marker of its ultimate rebellion and of its greatest tragic loss ; the submission to a patriarchal order of both state and family. Equally it is the marker of the most extreme form of liberation, a literal smashing of those constraints.

The literature on the famous women who took part in terrorist activities is unhelpful in trying to puzzle out this continuing fascination with them, it does little more than rehearse the incomprehension of the duality of ‘woman’ and ‘terrorist’ or it tries to humanise their stories with sagas of unhappy childhoods and adolescences constrained by authority. On the one hand an over dramatic predetermination haunts this writing, reflecting the incommensurability of ‘woman’ and ‘terrorist’ and on the other, recent contemporary arts practices that reference these figures and recent developments in the map of terror such as women suicide bombers in Palestine, keep drawing us back to re-examine just this conjunction. In recent months Palestinians Wafa Idris and Dareen Abu Aesha both exploded themselves as suicide bombers in Israel and the radical Al Aqusa Martyrs Brigade announced that they were establishing a special unit of women suicide bombers and naming it after Wafa Idris . Culturally , we remember the female protagonist of the 2001 Tamil film “The Terrorist” and the Algerian women in Pontecorvo’s film “Battle of Algiers” smuggling guns through the checkpoints of French soldiers. Reading endless newspaper reports of the recent suicide bombers and speculation over their actions seems to vet nothing but the writer’s puzzlement of ‘how could they?’ and questions of whether this is an advance or a regression for feminism. Missing from both is the bumbling arbitrariness and unexpected stumbling so evident in Melek Ulagay’s monologue in Women Who Wear Wigs - the unimagined consequences of disguising yourself in an airline stewardess’ uniform and blonde wig might be that you inadvertently become ‘Hostess Leyla’ who is wanted by the police as a highjacker, even though she never existed. If you hide out in a hotel that is in fact a brothel you might get taken up by prostitutes who are far more concerned with how to get your male comrade to marry you, then with the fact that you stick out like a sore thumb in that environment and obviously are on the run. A femininity that is positioned less as a tragically moralised entity propelled towards a tragic end, then as one who can produce contingent negotiations from unexpected situations.

Unyoked from a moralising discourse on femininity however, these endlessly recurrent images become another form of circulation, another set of unexpected connections and legitimations. In the recent work of several young Basque artists such as Jon Mikel Uban and Txomin Badiola we find odd, buried references to German radicals of the 1970s. These works play with various signs and markers of ‘terrorism’ in quite sly ways; men sit in cars waiting for we know not what, bodies are pulled out of cars either dead or asleep, here on the wall a small photograph of Ulrike Meinhof, there a series of frames of Fassbinder in the film Deutschland im Herbst. Uban is more involved in appropriating and evacuating the forms of supposed ‘terrorist’ behaviour of all meaning, staging deliberately ambiguous set pieces and exposing the paranoid suspiciousness bred by the dominance of enmity. Txomin is more involved in remixing set scenes from identifiable avant garde films and staging his own in a pastiche in which he combines the images of terror with those of sexual , particularly queer sexual, fantasies which he has christened “Bad Forms” . Both produce sly, ambiguous, ‘bad’ forms which have obviously more to do with the reaction to and reception of ETA in Spain, with the fears and suspicions generated and the atmosphere of a watchfulness verging on hysteria, as they do with their own need to be provocative in a political climate in which it is difficult to produce a thoughtful response. However it is the references to a past and to a kind of ‘terrorist’ pedigree that I find so interesting here. To some extent in Uban’s work this is an obvious ploy, combining an image of fairly innocuous activity with an image from the 1970s German RAF photo album, gives these seemingly innocent actions a frisson of dangerous possibility, a deliberate obfuscation aimed at complicating what has become a far too simple discussion. But beyond working and unsettling his audience, there is a set of claims here to a pedigree and a lineage and to a European radicality that had an acute sense of its own imbrication in colonial histories. Why Ulrike Meinhof ? I had been asking myself ever since I first saw these images, what is it specifically about her, that produces a good provenance for someone insisting on the right for extreme resistance as a political option?
A recent discussion by Thomas Elsaesser of two films: Schloendorf’s 1978 Deutschland im Herbst an omnibus film of responses to the recent deaths of the remainder of the Baader-Meinhof group in Stammheim prison with contributions by Schloendorf, Fassbinder and Kluge among others and Todesspiel made for television in 1997 by one of Germany’s most prominent directors Heinrich Breloer covering much the same historical moment, provided some possible insight into this question . Elsaesser’s brilliantly complex argument uses this comparison to set up two very different moments of political reception.
The one in 1978 is characterised by “attention on ‘sympathasizers’ : students, young unemployed, writers and intellectuals who before condemning the RAF outright wanted to know more about their motives. Suspecting the available information to be suspect, these sympathasizers asked themselves with anguish where they stood in the ensuing debates about violence that split families and estranged life long friends” Germany in Autumn was made from the perspective of the RAF and their sympathisers while Death Game focused on one of their victims Hans Martin Schleyer and on the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Thus as Elsaesser says it shifts the focus from the insurgencies to the state and its mechanism for re-imposing order.
I have been wondering whether ‘Ulrike Meinhof’’ connotes a cultural climate in which such sympathies are possible or might be recouperable. Meinhof was after all not just one of the main actors in the daring actions of the RAF, she was also a writer, editor, interviewer, film maker of prodigious energies and great visibility. She provided a bridge between those taking actions and those with sympathies for them. She was the proof that extreme actions were grounded in an elaborate set of political beliefs, historical knowledge, widely informed allegiances and a profound sense of injustice. That one could align oneself with the aims if not with the means.
I wonder if the constant circulation of the images of women terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof is not in part about an attempt at recovering an ethical and political complexity in which it is possible to entertain sympathy, rather than echo the binary opposites of terrorism vs. the state. Perhaps their constant presence among us as image referents, is precisely not to do with the impossibility of ‘woman’ and ‘terrorist’ co-existing , but with the possibility of regaining a semblance of the critical ambivalence and scepticism which characterised their political moment , propelled them to action and communicated itself to so large a public. The politics obviously cannot and need not be recovered, they have long been replaced by far greater complexities but the subject positions and the relational locations of being simultaneously within and without do hold some promise at this anxious moment.

Jordan Crandall: war, desire, and the "state of readiness"

2005-06-22T04:30:00.000-07:00

(short summary of presentation for "Cinema, War, and a Society of Spectacle," University of Cambridge, UK, 8-9 June 2005)

My work deals with spectacle in our present-day culture of security and military globalization. I want to contribute to the development of a new media theory, which is able to deal with emerging forms of mobility, attention, and control, and new patterns of locationing.

By "spectacle" I want to build on Debord's theorization -- where the term not only indicates an apparatus of optical stimulation, but a machinery of separation: an apparatus of individuation, immobilization, and disempowerment, bound up in the production of commodity and acquisitory desire. My approach to spectacular culture is through the axis of military history, which generates a complementary perspective to that of market-oriented analyses. For it places defense alongside attraction, conflict alongside commodification.

From this perspective, I want to suggest that what we are witnessing today is the emergence of a new modality of spectacle, characterized by a potent combination of the agonistic and the acquisitory. It is characterized by a shift toward real time engagements and continuous, heightened states of alertness and preparedness, in such a way as to generate a state of extreme readiness for both conflict and libidinous consumption. It blends combat and commodity, and functions as a link between war and consumerism.

At groundlevel, we can everywhere witness such a "state of readiness." It is a kind of proto-active state, operating at the level of both perception and corporeality, which involves ever-smaller intervals of preparedness. A state of heightened attention and arousal, poised at the cusp of action. A condensation of potential motion, in which the sensorial body is restrained, which produces an illusory sense of movement. A micro-accumulation at the threshold of action, which offers, but does not deliver upon, the promise of release.

To sketch this new modality of spectacle, and the structures of knowledge and power that have organized its fields of attention and readiness, we could trace two apparatuses of engagement, emerging out of the mid-century political economy of warfare. These are the real time tracking interface and the distributed interactive simulation. In taking such an archeological approach, it is important to look at these apparatuses not only in terms of technological history, but in terms of assumptions, beliefs, orientations, and "mind-sets" -- to understand them as both symbolic and material, functioning at the level of language, practice, and belief.

These apparatuses have played an important role in the development of new economies of organization, optimization, and vigilance. They are products of the drive to augment and automate human capabilities; to develop new human-machine composites; to shorten time and space intervals; and to eliminate gaps between symbol and event. They have contributed to an ideal of integrated control and panoptic oversight, where reality is seen as "manageable" through the manipulation of data, and where space is produced according to the logics of the database and the organizational supply chain.

It is often thought that these apparatuses have contributed to the evacuation of geographical space, overriding the vagaries of place and distance. However, what I want to suggest is that they have simultaneously contributed to the resurgence of locational specificity: a precision-landscape where communication is tagged with position, movement-flows are quantified, and new location-aware relationships are generated among actors, objects, and spaces. In other words, these apparatuses have not only propelled a one-way delocalization or deterritorialization, as is often suggested, but rather a volatile combination of the diffused and the positioned, or the placeless and the place-coded.

The key words in this journey are: attention, agency, and arousal. For as I mentioned, in this emerging spectacular mechanism of conflict and desire, the production of a "state of readiness" -- whether for conflict or acquisition -- is key. It is a state that operates at the level of both perception and corporeality, where one is not only cognitively but affectively engaged. A form of alertness on the edge of action, where the vigilant and optimized machine-body is roused and poised to act.

In order to articulate this state, we must avoid concentrating solely on signification and linguistic meaning, and instead rely equally on an axis of intensity. We require materialist, rather than idealist, understandings.

LAP TALK 06: Streamtime.org

2005-06-22T02:09:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 21st of June LAP TALK introduced Streamtime.org.

The programme was produced for Chamber of Public Secrets and broadcasted on tv-tv Copenhagen.
Streamtime.org is the first attempt to create a platform for the distribution of information about Iraq and Iraqi people outside the reports of major media corporations.
It started as a Dutch-initiated project in 2004 with the purpose to create an independent radio streaming from Iraq, and it grew quickly into a mix of streaming, blogs, websites and other forms of alternative communication, supported by some institutions and free-software developers around the world.
Streamtime.org doesn't look only at the Iraqi situation, rather it is an attempt to represent a bigger picture of the Middle East area, directly from the locations where things happen and where the people constituting the network live.

Media activities like Streamtime.org play a fundamental role in a society like the Iraqi one, where the process of constitution of a public sphere is in progress, representing a precious opportunity to manifest a plurality of voices.

more about Streamtime www.streamtime.org
more about Chamber of Public Secrets www.cps.1go.dk
more about tv-tv (in Danish) www.tv-tv.dk

Cecile Landman: Blogging with the Iraqi bloggers

2005-06-22T01:50:00.000-07:00

Streamtime - Blogging with the Bloggers
cecile | 15 June, 2005 10:45 (original post at www.streamtime.org)

A year of working with Iraqi bloggers

While in the first months of Streamtimes' existence, from the end of June '04 announcements were posted about our streaming radio-transmissions, starting from Halabja, and subsequently from Baghdad , Streamtime transmissions from Iraq seemed near to impossible after August. For obvious reasons Jo and Salam came back to Europe and Michel also at the end of August '04. Training interested Iraqis in Iraq in the use of the streaming software needed more time than had been possible while present in Iraq. Transmissions from Iraq stopped after two attempts to let the people in Baghdad who had had lessons and worked together with Michel to stream at the hours that we had taken as our regular ones, Wednesday and Sunday afternoon through July and August. We decided to concentrate from Europe on creating networks with Iraqis in Iraq and the Diaspora. Then if possibilities would widen up for being on the ground in Iraq, we would probably have more options for the Streamtime project inside Iraq. First contacts with the bloggers, in Iraq as well as outside were created by linking various bloggers to www.streamtime.org. The linked bloggers were in sync informed about the linking, and mindfully asked about their opinion on Streamtime. The Iraqi bloggers soon proved to be incredibly interesting for Streamtime, since they give their insights, information and stories by own initiative, and by doing so, they are making an indisputable move outward. Although in the beginning with some hesitation, but latterly with growing congruity Streamtime reposted a near daily selection of the blogs. Quite a few bloggers immediately started linking to Streamtime. Blog-wise we existed! Some bloggers asked Streamtime to cooperate with their blogs, in together-postings. Thereafter they were carefully considered as near friends/correspondents of Streamtime that tries to stay in contact with the bloggers as much as possible. And as an unanswered e-mail can lead to frustration and feelings of loneliness for people in the 'connected' world, what can an unanswered mail mean inside Iraq? It can't be different: the -emotional- involvement with a project like Streamtime increases day by day. It is not possible to not worry about the safety of the people you have a growing communication with. Like many other 'projects' focusing on Iraq it is not so easy to measure success or failure, and a year under these circumstances and the given developments is to be considered a short period. It can be said that Streamtime has met sympathy and has indeed played a role in broadening platforms and networking, by blogs connecting and relating to people and projects who concentrate on understanding and improving the often complicated lives and viewpoints from Iraq. In a continuous -albeit a bit bumpy- 'streaming' movement further contacting and networking progressed, with some attempts to stimulate exchanges between Iraqis, as was the case with Raed Jarrar, Iranian Niki and Iraqi 'Liminal Symbol'. They knew each other through the web, but met face-to-face by way of Streamtime. During the International Documentary Filmfestival of Amsterdam 2004 some effort was made to let Iraqi filmers/poets Sinan Antoon and Bassam Haddad meet with Liminal. (They made the
documentary 'About Baghdad' in the summer of 2003, in Iraq.) Making contact with the bloggers is sometimes difficult; for understandable reasons distrust sets a heavy tone. Only a few blog under real names; most keep secret identities. Certainly not in the last place this has to do with the direct dangers in -relation to- Iraq itself. Most blog in English, the fact that only about 5% of the Iraqi population speaks English is significant. The choice to blog in English is two-sided, the dangers of being discovered while blogging in Arabic can be bigger. And the Internet is until now mainly an English world. But more Arabic blogs are coming to exist. Reading 'comment section' under the blogs 'teaches' a lot about the Iraqi bloggosphere, which suffers the handicap of quick, rough and banal aggression. When the least trace of criticism is made regarding the American policy, or army, the returning question is if the specific blogger rather would have Saddam in his old nasty power. Comments often come from quite right-wing Americans, although not exclusively, and these bitter, violent 'verbal' discussions could often be read. It is a serious 'handicap', since too often it becomes nearly impossible to have constructive and creative discussions in those -narrowing- digital spaces. However: blogging does prove to be an ideal way of taking possession of the freedom of communication whereas at the same time it provides for security and anonymity. The Iraqi bloggosphere is very diverse, opinions can strongly differ, or be a 100% contrasting. Seen Iraq's recent history in which diversity was forbidden and hidden, this is the challenge: develop differences into force. (This sounds too nice to be easy). The contacts that do exist, or well, some of course never replied to e-mails, and some ceased to respond after a while. And others came in again. New blogs started . Different generations of some families even created their 'familyblog' in which information from Mosul and Baghdad comes together. New contacts were and are attempted. Some bloggers are favorites. Because they write so beautifully, or funny about their harsh information that it can make you laugh, loudly. Or they hang tough and stubborn onto a specific subject concerning the Iraqi situation, producing a stream of in depth articles, which can create nice discussions (with here and there the aggressive off-spin). All in all it can be said that the bloggers altogether create a network of interconnected information that enriches the knowledge about people's lives and opinions in a country where Big world-politics simply can't consider people as individuals anymore. War machine mechanisms do eliminate peoples emerging personal and collective hopes. Pleased to meet some of the bloggers: Liminal Symbol came to meet Streamtime after extensive mail exchange. Earlier he had tempted to create the 'Iraqi Agora' , a forum for all Iraqi bloggers with the purpose to stimulate information exchange and discussions between Iraqi bloggers in an open web-stage. He left the project, but later on, after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri he started (has some roots in Lebanon) The Lebanese Blogger Forum , and with success. The Lebanese bloggers after some months of cooperative digitizing kept a meeting in Lebanon, to know each other and discuss various -Lebanese- issues. On indication of Streamtime Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar was invited to The Netherlands by the Dutch Journalist Association. Raed started to blog on an early hour, together and in an exchange with Salam Pax. Seen the fact that Raed lives in Amman, some plans exist to do workshops there with and about the streaming software used and developed by Streamtime's Dyne;bolic people of Dyne.org and Rastasoft . And thanks to the Sicilian Freaknet . In Amman live a lot of Iraqis, and more arrive daily... it could be a good idea to take Streamtime to Amman. Raed has done investigations throughout Iraq and created the counting of Iraqi Civilian Casualties . And who doesn't remember General Tommy Franks, of the US Central Command who had stated: ''We don't do body counts''. Raed and his family (his mother and his two brothers' blog, Khalid from Baghdad and Majid from Canada) organized medicinetransports to Falluja, after the last violent big boost that had gone through the town. Baghdad Dweller comes from Baghdad, and lives in The Netherlands. Visited Streamtime's activities in Amsterdam on more occasions, as on events with Iraqi Poetry or music, streamed by Streamtime. Irregular contacts and house-visits exist. Abu Khaleel lives in Baghdad. Streamtime and Abu enjoy a good friendship. It consists of exchange of a mix of gossip, jokes, serious stuff and not at all serious information. It feels like good friends. When at the end of January '05 Streamtime did a special 'Elections-stream' from Amsterdam, with direct phone calls with Iraqis in Iraq and Diaspora, his telephone did indeed work for the first time since the invasion, but as it turned out, just for a few hours. Streamtime was the first to call him on that new working line: "Welcome to the world, Abu!" Emigre in Australia more or less 'supervises' the Iraq Blog Count. All Iraqi bloggers are being linked to this site; it is the most complete existing overview. Emigre and the active contributors from time to time suffer from real 'attacks' in the comment sector. Serious rough talk and offenses were made, with the names of contributors of IBC being hijacked and used which brought a lot of confusion. It looked as if Emigre and some others had completely freaked out, out of the head so to say. But then it turned out it wasn't her, but some 'troll'. Of course this heavily frustrates any attempt to conversate or discuss. After a blog which criticizes American politics and practices in Iraq is published, rough and banal comments are a certainty. The 'bad-comment-behavior' happens just about everywhere in the bloggosphere, and it does have consequences for the information being -therefore not- published. Some bloggers closed their comment sections, others avoid to ever reading the reactions on their blogs again, and again others get angry or
disappointed and react accordingly. For example the reactions on the pictures of a student graduation party on Hassan's blog Average Iraqi are very telling. One of the pictures is of some installation made by students on a square of a university of Baghdad. It is a representation of the Twin Towers with the planes flying into them. Now you don't have to wrinkle and scratch your brain very much to understand that this attack didn't have so much to do with Iraq in the first place, but it was definitely a catalyst for toppling Saddam. And now Iraq is on the verge of a civil war, and news from 'the zone' consists mainly of bombs, more bombs and death and progressing separation between Sunni and Shia. The Twin Tower disaster as such was a major event with major consequences for the Iraqi people (of course without forgetting the direct victims of the attack, or the never-ending mess in Afghanistan). Hassan is around twenty years. He grew up in the Saddamized Iraq. Probably never knew anything else. The comments on the pictures he published on his blog were, softly said, very rude, and no one who made them seemed to be capable of thinking him- or herself in Hassan's place. After this, he closed the comment section of his blog, and is not blogging that much anymore. Free Writer in Mosul has started to blog not so long ago, in English and Arabic. Soon contacts were created after he first asked us if he could translate a Streamtime interview with Salam Pax into Arabic, after reading about it on IBC. But then immediately he asked us if we could publish stories he would write for Streamtime about Mosul and Iraq, in Arabic and in English. He is in trouble now because the internet connection is too expensive, he has a lot of ideas and wants a lot, but only small things are being realized. One step forward, two steps back. Salam Pax to our surprise had read all our mails, and kept an eye on Streamtimes' whatabouts. He had started blogging in 2002, and became the most famous blogger, not only of Iraq. (Not in Iraq). His writings are like oxygen to many. He was in Rotterdam during the International Film festival, where his film was shown; because in the meantime he had started video-blogging, or 'vlogging', for The Guardian and TV. He was interviewed by Streamtime in February '05. Pax: ''HYPERLINK "http://streamtime.org/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=350&blogId=1"I would never actually say many of the things I say in my weblogs, I say on my video blogs or when I talk to you. I would never go on the street in Baghdad and stand on a box and say: this is what I believe in. I am too afraid! This is bad. Okay, it opened a little door, but it doesn't let me to open it all. We still live within these confines, we still worry about how what we say is going to be taken. And that is why I am worried if I kind of go out of the Salam Pax persona. Because the things I said, the things I say, not many people are going to be happy about it. I don't feel that brave to tell you the truth. And this is sad, this is really, really very sad.'' All the bloggers, obviously inside more than outside, clearly have to deal with excessive problems. Varying from kidnaped family members who have to be bought free (kidnaping in Iraq is mainly business), to problems with the blogging itself (no electricity or connectivity), identity worries, distrust and insecurity, to other daily problems like watersupply, no freedom of movement, violence. And it is frustrating 'to play hide and seek with electricity and then afterwards also to write about it' as writes AnaRki13 Continuing to work on the bloggersnetwork is essential, as pointed out earlier they are the ones that by their own initiative make an indisputable movement towards 'other worlds' by taking possession of modern means of comunication that have become available, since just a such short time. Probably Streamtime can find ways with bloggers in discovering how to transmit journalism, poetry, theaterplays, music, from Iraq, and it's surroundings. Indeed we have just started linking with Bahraini , Kuwaiti , Jordan (http://www.jordanplanet.net/) and Lebanon blogs.

Cecile Landman + Streamtime, Amsterdam, June 15, 2005

(To my pleasure I can add /20-6-05/ that blogger 'Average Iraqi' has started blogging again from Baghdad and he has reopened his commentsector just some days ago).

Eric Kluitenberg: CONNECTION MACHINES

2005-06-12T02:33:00.000-07:00

Editorial Notice

This essay was written for the forthcoming "Book of Imaginary Media", which will be published by Uitgeverij De Balie in the Fall of 2005. The essay builds on a text called "A First Introduction to an Archaeology of Imaginary Media", which was written for the mini-festival organised by De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam in February 2004.

The lectures of the project along with a selection of essays and other materials that formed the context for this event can be found on-line in the Dossier Media Archaeology on the website of De Balie. The dossier includes full length video documentation of the lectures by Siegfried Zielinksi, Erkki Huhtamo, Klaus Theweleit, Bruce Sterling, Zoe Beloff, Edwin Carels, Timothy Druckrey, and John Akomfrah.

http://www.debalie.nl/archaeology

The Book of Imaginary Media is currently scheduled for release in September 2005, and will include a DVD with a.o. a 'son et lumiere' version of Peter Blegvad's stage play "On Imaginary Media", as well as invited works by a selection of distinguished cartoonists on the theme. The book furthermore contains new texts by the participants of the original event.

Connection Machines

By the time the German Catholic mystic Heinrich Suso published his manuscript "Horologium Sapientiae" (Wisdom's Watch upon the Hours), most commonly dated to 1339, mechanical clocks had made their way in civic life throughout Europe's major cities. Late in the thirteenth century the mechanical clock had appeared in monasteries belonging to the Benedictine order and it was used to mark the 7 canonical hours of the day to call for collective prayer. The clock spread to the civic sphere in the fourteenth century featuring as a public timepiece in the tower
of many a European city's town hall. Its function also changed: The clock had become the central medium structuring and ordering the life and communication of late medieval city dwellers.

Suso's thinking was very much informed by the juxtaposition of the erratic temporal nature of earthly human affairs, versus the divine order of Eternal Wisdom of the Christian God he revered. With the spread of the clock in religious and social life the entire world system of earthly life, the passing from day to night and from night to day, and the movements of the heavens, came to be seen as the visible signs of the divine clockwork that ruled and governed earthly existence. Suso structured his book as a series of imaginary dialogues between Eternal Wisdom (his god represented by the virtue Eternal Wisdom) and himself, divided into 24 chapters following the 24 hours of the day [1]. It was Eternal Wisdom that instilled order in this heavenly clockwork, and the mechanical clock was the medium for ordinary man to bring his life into unison with this divine order.

The construction of Suso's imaginary medium is twofold: First he portrays the world-system as clockwork as one giant communication medium set in motion and guided by the invisible hand of Eternal Wisdom, which thus "communicates" divine order to the human subject. The mechanical clock then translates this divine order into perceptible form and becomes a medium for the lesser mortal to establish contact with the divine order, most notably by the call to prayer at regular intervals according to the canonical hours -the original purpose of the mechanical clock.

In Suso's mystical vision, which became highly popular throughout Europe in the 14th century, the clock is a connection machine, a medium to co-ordinate not only the affairs between humans, but also between the human and the divine. In the centuries following Heinrich Suso's mystical imaginations of the divine clockwork, the idea that technology compensates for the deficiencies of human conduct remained vividly
alive. As society became more secular, the emphasis shifted away from its divine orientation towards the mediation of more worldly human affairs, and yet a certain mystical inclination never left the realm of technological invention.

Modern Machines

The great historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford relates the regularity of monastic life and the central role that the mechanical clock came to play in organising it from the thirteenth century onwards, more or less directly to the development of modern capitalism. The regularity of the division of the day into even time segments in the Benedictine monasteries, punctuated by the call to collective prayer prefigured in many ways the organisation of collective labour in the Ford factories. The ticking of the mechanical clock might thus almost be likened to the humming of the modern production line.

In his seminal work Technics and Civilization from 1934 Mumford writes: "(..) The habit of order itself and the earnest regulation of time-sequences had become almost second nature in the monastery. (..) So one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries - at once there were 40,000 under Benedictine rule - helped to give the human enterprise the regular collective beat of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men" [2].

With the spread of the mechanical clock from the monastery to the cities, and its subsequent miniaturisation and massification, worldly and spiritual life in Europe were integrated in a uniform time regime. For centuries to come the clock would become the ultimate connection machine, organising and binding the lives of millions into an integrated social, economic, and religious system.

The high-point and simultaneously the endpoint of the reign of the mechanical clock can be traced to the middle of the 19th century, when the invention of the telegraph allowed the first real-time [3] transmission of a time signal across vast distances, and ultimately around the globe. The demands of an industrialised society and the
expanse of international trade relations made the deployment of the required infrastructure (transatlantic cables) economically viable. This in turn necessitated the adoption of a uniform world-wide time standard.

Through a series of "World Conferences on Time" the Greenwich Mean Time standard (in 1884) [4] became the new global time regime as we know it today. Telecommunications, rather than the mechanical clock, would take over the role of connection machines supporting the new global time regime and its attendant social and economic structures.

Technological Transcendence

It is difficult to escape the economic rationale that favoured the rapid development of telecommunications technology from the mid nineteenth century onwards. The continued expansion of global trade created the social and economic context for this particular breed of technology to flourish. Yet, if we rely exclusively on this all too obvious economic explanation for the rise of contemporary electronic connection machines, deeper layers of motivation that inform the creation and the wider adoption of these technologies will continue to elude us. To grasp these rather hidden motives it is necessary to excavate some of the seemingly irrational undercurrents that accompany much of the visible history of technology, and thus to probe more deeply into the realm of the mythological.

Invention and imagination are relatively closely linked, as concepts and as functional principles of human endeavour. It will come as little surprise then that the dividing line between inventiveness and the imaginary is ambiguous and often porous. In popular culture the inventor is usually portrayed as the semblance of a delirious maniac, rather than a rational man of science. Positive examples of this typology might be the absent minded personalities of Disney's Gyro Gearloose, or Dr. Emmet Brown in the Back to the Future film series. A rather darker shade of character is beautifully exemplified by the corrupted scientist Duran Duran in Roger Vadim's cult-classic movie Barbarella, which he based on the French comic strip by the same name created by Jean-Claude Forest in 1964.

Yet, when considering the extraordinary transformations in daily life brought about by the incessant drive for technological development in the industrialised world, such hard facts are rarely ascribed to the ravings of a lunatic. It is all the more intriguing then to see that some of the most infamous names in the history of technological invention derive their inspiration from deeply irrational, mythological, and even outright mystical sources. Indeed, the history of technology is littered with unfounded claims about the future (and the role of particular technologies in that imaginary future), misconceptions, arbitrary assertions, and inherently mythical beliefs about the immediate and longer-term significance of the machinic contraptions that emerge from the inventor's laboratory. Ironically, in many of these accounts the rhetoric of scientific rationality is emphatically employed
to propagate preposterous, highly opaque, and sometimes deeply mystical ideas.

Since none of these claims made by seminal figures in the recorded history of technology has proven sufficient reason to rewrite that history, nor to discredit the status of these individuals within this specific historical trajectory, it would follow that the resident belief structure that feeds these ideas extends far beyond the immediate surroundings of the historical protagonists of obfuse techno-mysticism.
However, the aim here is not to somehow marginalise the significance of these early visionaries in the course of technological development. Rather, I would like to argue that their prominent place in the history of technological invention came about not so much despite the fact that they subscribed to highly mythological imaginaries, but exactly because of their mystical inclinations.

Such a complex set of relationships between invention and the imaginary, between inventor and consumer of the final product, and between technological inventions and their social and economic context, cannot be written off as the eccentric idiosyncrasies of the "mad inventor" - that emblematic archetype of popular culture. Popular imaginaries require a willing clientele (preferably an eager one...!) to sustain themselves over time. The imaginary product, in other words, has to
fulfil real-world needs to survive, regardless of whether these needs be actual or imagined.

It would require a lengthy study into the history of technology to "excavate" the various lineages and discontinuities in the development of imaginary media and imaginary machines. I would like to concentrate here on two of the most prominent representatives in the history of technological invention, who exemplify emblematically the porous boundaries between inventiveness and the imaginary; Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) and Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931). Their prominent position in recorded history means that their life and activities are well documented. Furthermore, Tesla and Edison shared a predilection for being outspoken public personalities. They were also contemporaries, and they even came head to head in the late 1880s in the so-called "War of Currents" [5] dispute.

What is of particular interest here is the structure of the arguments used by both Tesla and Edison to propose intensely speculative ideas for new communications devices and their application areas. Edison and Tesla worked at a turning point in history when the emphasis in the technological imaginary moved away from the pre-electronic metaphorical connection machines of the Suso-type, towards something much closer to the contemporary electronic cult of wireless connectivity.

Nikola Tesla and the Wardenclyffe Tower

The Serbian / Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) is credited for some of the most important breakthroughs in electrical engineering. Among over 700 patents filed by Tesla were the Tesla coil, an induction coil widely used in radio technology, a telephone repeater, the rotating magnetic field principle, the polyphase alternating-current system, alternating-current power transmission, patents for wireless communication, radio, fluorescent lights, and an electrical induction
motor. In 1884 Tesla had come to the United States to work for the Edison Company. His employment with Edison, however, ended in bitter conflict, and both parties went on to consider the other as a competitor.

Tesla's biography is momentous and begs the question whether such a life is produced by the wild genius he obviously was, or rather that his 'wild genius' resulted from his eventful and at times dramatic life story. Reading the fascinating biographies written about Tesla it becomes increasingly clear that it is very difficult to separate the many practical inventions he produced from his singular and idiosyncratic obsessions in life. He worked feverishly on new energy devices, communication media, information and energy transmission systems, and more generally on what McLuhan would probably call the birth of the electrical age. The practicality of his ideas seemed only a consideration in as far as he was necessitated to create the proper working conditions (space, support, investments) to pursue his singular ideas about the electrified future of mankind.

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, or 'Tesla Tower' might be considered both his most grandiose design, and his most catastrophic failure. Tesla was offered an opportunity to build what most likely was originally conceived as a communications tower, on a piece of land in Shoreham Long Island. The main investor in the site James S. Warden gave the tower and the area his name. He envisioned it as the beginning of a future radio city to be called Wardenclyffe-On-Sound. Tesla started working on the facility in 1900 and construction started in 1901. However, by 1905 Tesla for various reasons ran out of money. Construction was halted and staff were laid off, while the facility still did not function properly.

A long period of unclear ownership conditions followed and in 1917 the tower itself was finally disassembled. Tesla meanwhile, seeing his biggest project ever fall apart, suffered a severe mental breakdown. There are many competing theories how the tower and the facility should have been operated. The most mundane explanation of its designated purpose was to create a worldwide wireless communication system and radio broadcasting facility: A second station would be set up on the southern coast of England to receive and respond to transmissions. However, Tesla envisioned other, more important uses of the system he was building. He was convinced that the facility would be able to transmit wirelessly not only communications and radio signals, but also electrical power. After the failure of the Wardenclyffe project Tesla
continued to work on his ideas and on prototypes that would enable the wireless transmission of electrical power.

Again, there are unclear and competing accounts concerning the results of Tesla's ideas and experiments. According to some of these accounts he was able to light electric bulbs and other devices over longer distances without the use of conducting wires. Tesla's idea was supposedly to distribute electrical energy in a wireless manner through the air in the sparsely inhabited American countryside. People would be able to receive this electrical energy cheaply via antenna's on their roofs. But other claims go further and connect the Wardenclyffe facility to its use as a
weapon that would be able to produce bursts of electrical energy over vast distances, comparable to the effects of ball lightning or electromagnetic fireballs. Consequently, the withdrawal of life-saving funding for Tesla's work and the final decomposition of the tower in 1917 are explained as US government interventions aimed at reserving this possible military technology for classified research and preventing the sensitive technology from falling into the wrong hands (the German empire or the Bolsheviks in Russia - who staged their successful revolution in the same year the tower was taken apart -, were likely candidates).

Tesla himself made a bold proposal for what the tower facility should be able to achieve and demonstrate as a principle. In his vision the earth itself could be used as a giant conductor to transmit electrical energy on a global scale with minimum energy loss. The earth's large cross-sectional area could provide a low resistance path for electrical impulses, which could be electrically resonated at pre-determined
frequencies. The main obstacle was the need to set up the transmission points where the earth's coil could be charged. Once in operation, electrical energy could simply be culled from the earth by drilling a collecting rod into the soil. The planet would thus act as a giant battery, and practically free electrical energy would be available instantly anywhere on the planet!

The most speculative explanation of the Tesla Tower's purpose, however, introduces a distinctively different reading of both the facility itself and Tesla's incessant singular preoccupations. According to this largely undocumented theory the Wardenclyffe tower was not primarily an earthly communications and radio transmission device, nor was it a global provider of free electricity. Rather, the tower would serve as a giant resonating and communications mechanism to reach the spirits of the
deceased, a global transceiver of psychic energy and communication. Both Tesla and Edison expressed at various stages in their life a keen interest in and adherence to psychic phenomena, and both socialised in spiritist' circles. One admittedly highly speculative explanation for Tesla's preoccupation with the occult could be found in his early life, when through a dramatic chain of events he was the cause of his older brother's horse-riding accident, which proved to be fatal. Tesla remained filled with grief and guilt throughout his life, and repeatedly alluded to the insignificance of his own achievements in the light of what he imagined his older brother would have been able to achieve, had he lived. Was Tesla seeking contact with his brother who had passed away too early, was he seeking absolution of his life-long sense of guilt?

In his 1908 essay The Future of Wireless Art, Tesla writes about the Wardenclyffe Tower as a true visionary:

"It is intended to give practical demonstrations of these principles with the plant illustrated. As soon as completed, it will be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer
to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction." [6]

His remarks are uncannily familiar to the early 21st century reader, used as we are to the (fraudulent) promotional narratives employed by the vendors of wired and wireless electronic communications services. Later, once the irreversible demise of the Wardenclyffe project had become clear to him, Tesla's tone turns bitter and disappointed. Interestingly, he attributes the 'grandesse' of his scheme (i.e., wireless global communication, worldwide free electricity, the planetary earth-battery, wireless transmission of electricity through the air, and a wireless electrical cannon) to "a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering", and its demise to the inability of the public (and his investors) to follow the lead of the visionary inventor. His words reveal the compulsive character of the vision he tried to pursue:

"It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive, blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...] Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence, by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed, only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." [7]

Thomas Edison Phones the Dead (1847 - 1931)

Besides being a professed materialist (philosophically speaking) during the early stages of his professional career, Thomas Edison was also a shrewd businessman with a keen sense for the potential practicality of the ideas he was working on. His business skills may equally have helped assure him a prominent place in history, as did his genuine intellectual gifts. In this sense the typology that may be drawn of the young Thomas Edison seems to stand in marked contrast to the wilder imaginations of his contemporary Tesla.

Although Edison's biography reads significantly less momentous than Tesla's, his life also appears to have been characterised by the continuous presence of the occult. His parents were reportedly spiritualists, and Edison, though a professed atheist in his early years, seems to have enjoyed a life-long interest in the occult and the paranormal. These interests included a firm belief in psycho kinesis (the ability to move objects 'merely' by mental powers), Extra-Sensorial Perception (ESP), and in his early thirties he dabbled in the writings of a certain Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a prominent protagonist of theosophy. All these metaphysical liaisons are documented in detail in various biographies of Edison, and a concise summary of Edison's forays
into the supernatural can be found in Martin Gardner's essay "Edison, Paranormalist" for Skeptical Inquirer. [8]

Gardner in fact digs up quite a number of startling quotes by Edison that illustrate the ambiguous nature of his relationship to the paranormal. It seems that Edison moved ever further away from his early radical materialist positions as his life progressed. Finally, when facing death, various reports and public interviews suggest that he was working on a communication device with "the afterlife", or the departed,
though actual designs for such a device, sometimes referred to as the "psychic telephone", were never recovered, nor any experimental devices for that matter. It has, however, made Edison a particularly popular reference for the extensive international Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) movement, a loose association of groups and individuals who are thoroughly convinced that it is possible to receive the murmuring of the dead by means of electronic devices. EVP advocates even go as far as to believe that much of what we hear on off-station frequencies, and which we tend to interpret or discard as static or mere noise, are in fact the voices of the dead, clogged and meshed-together, attempting to reach out to us lesser mortals across the rifts separating life from death. [9]

In October 1920, Edison gave an notorious interview to B.C. Forbes for the American Magazine entitled "Edison Working on How to Communicate with the Next World" (Forbes later went on to establish Forbes Magazine). In this interview Edison claims to be working on an electrical device to communicate with the departed. This is later also confirmed by one of his laboratory assistants, but never corroborated with hard evidence in the form of working notes, sketches or actual physical devices. The question here is, were Tesla and Edison outdoing each other in bold claims to tap into that newly emerging phenomenon, the product of the real-time society of electrical speed, the attention economy? It cannot be ruled out that both, already media-savvy men, put out bogus claims that spurred the public imagination, referencing the supernatural with their costly technological ventures. Even Edison, though less so than Tesla, could not do without broader public support to ensure sufficient financial support for his operations, and although he was less strapped for cash than Tesla, he might have tried pre-emptively to ensure continued public interest in his explorations.

In an article in Scientific American (October 30, 1920) by Austin Lescarboura's entitled "Edison's Views on Life after Death", Edison spells out his otherworldly concerns in more detail:

"If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it's reasonable to conclude that those who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they have left here. (...) I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated ...
by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something."

It sounds convincing enough that Edison was pursuing a genuine interest here. And unlikely as it may seem for someone taking such a strongly anti-metaphysical stance at the outset of his professional career, there are further grounds to suspect that Edison might indeed have 'succumbed' to the illusion that an electronic communication device to establish contact with the dead might truly be feasible. Edison started to believe in the existence or at least possibility of a disembodied soul, something that a radical materialist strictly rejects seeing the soul as nothing more than the product of the proper organisation of the body, and the brain in particular. Through Henry Ford, founder of the Ford automobile factories and spiritual father of modern scientific management, Edison became acquainted with the fake magician Howard Reese, who claimed to possess the power of Extra-Sensorial Perception (ESP). Edison was so deeply convinced that Reese's powers were genuine that he went on to defend him in print even after Reese had been publicly exposed as a fraud.

Gardner notes that it was Edison's self-conception as a rational man of science, who was too intelligent to be fooled by a cheap-trickster, that reinforced his belief in Reese. Similar overtones can be heard in the quote above: "If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this earth". Exactly because his method of observation and analysis is 'strictly logical' and 'scientific' it cannot be wrong or misguided. The afterlife, formerly the strict domain of mystic and religious cults, now becomes a new terrain for scientific analysis and logical deduction. It seems that this mere act of transference to another domain of analysis is enough to convince Edison that the object of his curiosity is no longer fictional.

This is also reflected in another quote from the article in Scientific American:

"Certain of the methods now in use are so crude, so childish, so unscientific, that it is amazing how so many rational human beings can take any stock in them. If we ever do succeed in establishing communication with personalities which have left this present life, it certainly won't be through any of the childish contraptions which seem so silly to the scientist."

What is startling is not that one of the most prominent figures in the history of modern (Western) technological civilisation can make such a dramatic philosophical turn-around and become deeply immersed in mystical obscurities. In fact, it makes Edison suddenly appear all the more human, because he exposes his own fragility. Suddenly he is no longer the shrewd businessman, the brilliant inventor, the ruthless
egocentric. Here we see a man faced with the inevitability of his own life coming to an end, struggling with the insignificance of his own inventions when confronted with the ultimate boundary, and longing desperately for transcendence. And of course he resorts to what he knows best to achieve it, technological invention.

What is starling here is rather the appropriation of the language of scientific rationality to his mystical project. Edison makes a desperate attempt to bring his all too human desire for transcendence over death in line with his lifelong project of 'technoscientific rationality' [10]. By reframing the afterlife as a scientific question, Edison tries to redress his irrational desire as a scientific problem. The myth is not that of the afterlife, but rather the suggestion of science and rationality in the very question he so desperately tries to resolve.

The Long Now Clock

Technological transcendence involves time and measurement as two poles at either end of its ambivalent union. The clock introduces the even measurement of time, yet it does not transcend the scale of a human life. Some clocks, of course, survive their makers and their owners, but most disintegrate within a lifetime or within a few generations. Some time-pieces are kept alive only thanks to the great effort of their
owners. Technological transcendence therefore requires a more profound temporal perspective than traditional clocks can offer.

A group of scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts in the United States has started working on the realisation of such a deliberately profound perspective, the 10,000 Year Clock. The original incentive for the project came from computer scientist Daniel Hillis, the principal architect of the Connection Machine, a ground-breaking design for a parallel computing device pioneered by Hillis and applied widely in the
field of high-performance computing. Hillis noticed in his extensive professional career that the emphasis in technological development and in society at large was shifting towards an infinitely shortened time-span, brought about by the continuously increasing speed of information processing machines. Although this strategic acceleration is crucial to the short-term success of any society in the face of international competition, Hillis and others became increasingly concerned about the possible implications of this preoccupation with ultra-short duration.

They started to think about a project, or a series of projects, that could shift public attention away from the immediate towards the longer term, and embarked on a rather surprising mission. They concluded that it was necessary to construct a technological edifice that would serve from the outset as a mythological object and that would be in stark contrast to the contemporary drive for the real-time. The edifice became the 10.000 Year Clock, a mechanical clock that ticks away 10,000 years, one tick per year, bonging once a century, and displaying a mechanical ballet once every thousand years. Although this clock is not made for eternity it transcends the subjective time frame, and if finally realised it would very likely transcend every conceivable cultural frame of time. In this time-bridging immanence it can be considered a truly transcendental edifice.

The task of preparing the clock project and other similar undertakings has been entrusted to the Long Now Foundation. The necessary funding has apparently been secured, a plot of land to host the clock has been acquired, and a design of the clock is finished. It would seem that nothing now stands in the way of the clock being put into operation. The project's website [March 14, 2004] quotes Hillis describing the starting point of the clock project as follows:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium. Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit,
interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think". [11]

Transcendence here, as in so many other cases in Western technological history, is imagined as a machine. To transcend the timeframe of human life and experience inevitably points towards the eternal, and within that to the divine. The Long Now clock seems to be yet another imaginary medium whose prime intention is to unite daily human affairs with eternal wisdom, regardless of whether this eternal wisdom is given the name "god" or "nature".

Compensation Machines

As noted earlier popular technological imaginaries are sustained by a willing clientele (preferably an eager one). The ideal clientele for the promise of technological novelty is perhaps a desperate one, i.e., one that is not primarily interested in 'objectifying' its relationship to the new technological objects, or making 'sensible' assessments of these technological objects, and the imaginaries that accompany them.

Looking back at the wonders of technological invention and the bright futures they promised in the past, we are often struck by a sense of disbelief that such silly narratives could be taken seriously at all. That the earliest computer games, or pre-GUI computer systems could once be the objects of such intense delight may seem laughable now. Could not the inadequacy of these primitive technological systems only be admired, either through the prism of mental disorder, or under the sway of a
grand narrative according to which today's inventions were but the first stepping stones towards that magnificent future of limitless possibility?

Are the early adopters and trend followers of such technological novelties all befallen by some form of mental disorientation? What constitutes this extraordinary mesmerising quality of the technological sublime?

There is little point in taking a derogative stance here. The sense of an eternal return of the same techno-futuristic meta-narratives is too strong. The scale of involvement and investment (not least in hard cash) is too large. The excessive nature of the techno-imaginary embrace, bordering on the brink of sheer desperation, runs too deep to be discarded as the misguided preoccupations of a few simple minds. From the earliest unfounded expectations about the cultural literacy building capacities of television to the hype of virtual reality technologies in the early 90s, the Dotcom mania in the later 90s (turning Dot Bomb in 2000), and the subsequent 'great telecom crash' [12] - soon to be followed by the demise of 3G [13] - the public and professional investment is simply too large to marginalise the deep-seated belief in the saving grace of contemporary connection machines, and treat it as a social fringe phenomenon.

As with cars, clothes, real estate, or briefcases, new communication devices and technological gadgets are objects of social distinction. Owning the right item, rather than the merely functional one, confers status. Furthermore, certain communication technologies do provide actual economic, and private or social benefits. Also, the revenues made on stock markets in the 1990s with technology funds have been highly beneficiary for some shrewd traders and a very few companies. All these incentives can explain part of the excitement that characterised the later 1990s, and part of the willingness to put up the cash for it. But it can never provide sufficient grounds to explain the degree and the intensity of the excitement, let alone the measure of personal and corporate / institutional investment, and the inevitable but still astonishing destruction of capital that was to follow.

The involvement of such vast numbers of people ready to buy (into) what the market has to offer, and the readiness of venture capitalists and institutional investors to put up the required capital to fuel the dotcom and telecom manias, points far beyond the merely practical, the functional, even the rational. A certain form of existential frenzy appears to be involved in creating the right conditions for this modern day version of Tulipomania [14] to emerge. The term 'technological sublime', which has achieved some currency in recent debates on technological culture, even though it has come to mean several rather incommensurate things, actually points in an interesting direction to analyse these recent forms of popular delusion.

There are a number of different understandings of the philosophical concept of the sublime, from Longinus' literary interpretation to Kant's almost cognitive concept of "Analytik der Erhabenheit", and more recently Lyotard's transformation of Kant's theory of the Sublime as the unrepresentable. Most productive for current purposes, however, is the theory of the 'existential sublime', whose arguments have paradigmatically been laid out by the eighteenth century philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97) in his study on aesthetics "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" of 1757. [15]

Privation, horror, and delight

Burke maintains that there are passions that stir the soul to a far greater degree than those aroused by the experience of beauty. These passions are not of a singularly positive nature. Yet, they bring about intense sensations of pleasure and they seem intimately connected with our innermost existential experience. What's more, these sensations appear to follow on necessarily from one another in a particular order, under specific conditions, and they always seem to involve an ambiguous mixture of pleasure and pain.

The progression of these sensations and the experiences they give rise to, necessarily follows a similar pattern, according to Burke, that of privation, horror, and delight. He introduces the term 'delight' specifically to indicate a distinct sensation of pleasure far more intense than the experience of beauty. His theory can best be explained by considering the existential fear of darkness, which in contemporary terms can be considered a genetically imprinted instinctive reaction to the absence of light, connected with an inborn sense of self-preservation.

Burke observes that the deep-seated fear of darkness results from privation of light, and he points out that this fear is of an existential nature. When light is taken away altogether and for an indefinite period of time, this privation gives rise to the fear that the darkness might prevail without end, and in absolute darkness we are
surely destined, as biological creatures, to perish. Prolonged darkness heightens the fear of the end of life to the threshold of absolute panic, of horror. The confrontation with absolute darkness is the confrontation with an experiential rift, a non-space and a non-time. It is the confrontation with the very principle of death itself, and such a confrontation mobilises the sense of self-preservation more than
anything else in life can.

When light is finally reintroduced, and the existential fear, resulting from the threat of darkness without end, is put at bay, a tremendous sense of relief engulfs the mind. The reintroduction of light confirms the fact that life has not come to an end. The lost connection to the world of the living is restored. The removal of this existential pain, the end to horror, produces a feeling of pleasure much stronger than any possible experience of the beautiful, exactly because of its existential
nature. Such a singular sensation required a new name, and Burke named it 'delight'.

The experience of what we would now call 'the existential sublime' is not restricted to any particular domain. It appears across different forms of experience. What it retains from one domain to another is the adherence to the particular structure of sensation of privation, horror and delight.

Analysing different domains where the experience of the existential sublime may be found, Burke touches upon the theme of "Society and Solitude". He observes that "society (..) gives us no positive pleasure in the enjoyment; but absolute and entire solitude, that is the total and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived. Therefore in the balance between the pleasure of general society, and the pain of absolute solitude, pain is the predominant idea. But the pleasure of any particular social enjoyment outweighs very considerably the uneasiness caused by the want of that particular enjoyment". [16] And this is to him no small matter. The pleasure of general society, of contact with others, is even stronger than the fear induced by the threat of absolute solitude. The threat of an entire life of solitude, Burke concludes at the end of his
observation, "contradicts the purposes of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror" [17].

The basic structure of the experience of the sublime in relation to solitude and human contact follows the structure of the experience of privation of light, fear of darkness, and subsequent delight, discussed above. Privation of contact, if that privation is complete and of indeterminate duration, induces the existential fear of absolute solitude - a fear that is in fact of 'scarcely less terror than that of
death itself!' When this threat of 'absolute' solitude is put at bay, the removal of the privation of contact gives rise to an enormous sense of relief, an almost absolute delight in the pleasures of general society, of contact with fellow human beings, with family, friends, and loved ones, even with colleagues, or simply with other people suis generis.

Here is a practical application of this theory. Most mobile phone conversation begin with the words: "Where are you?". This question is in itself entirely pointless, since the very fact that it is uttered in a telephone [18] conversation means that presence of both parties in the same space is not available, while for the conversation their actual location is irrelevant [19]. It therefore points beyond the immediate situation, maybe towards future action (a meeting), but certainly to a set of implicit existential fears and desires. The question "Where are you?" actually speaks a multitude of other messages, "We are not together", "I want to be with you", "I miss you", "I'm on my way to you, but I can't wait until we actually meet", "Even though we're not together I want to speak to you", "I'm afraid not to find you where I expect you", "I desire you", "Please do not forget about me", "What if we never find each other, what if we never meet again?", "I 'm afraid to be alone", "Please don't leave me (alone)!", "I feel lonely", "I'm afraid of solitude", are just some of the modalities of this existential outcry we hear around us daily as we move through public spaces, on busses and trams, in trains, in corridors and on the street, in meeting places, airports, stations, waiting rooms, sometimes even in the public lavatory.

The phrase "Where are you?" is first and foremost the expression of an existential anxiety, but it also already implies its immediate resolution, not in the future meeting that puts the fear of absolute or relative solitude at bay, but already in the very moment of its utterance. The call being answered, even in the absence of a reply, the confirmation of contact established with the designated addressee, instantaneously infuses the mind with relief. Privation of contact had instilled the fear of solitude, and the removal of this privation of contact through the telephone connection produces an intense and immediate sensation of delight. The threat of the fear of solitude, a fear imbued with scarcely less terror than the idea of death itself, is relinquished at the click of a few buttons, real-time consolation - a highly addictive apparatus!

"Experiences"

In the web campaign "Experiences" [20] SonyEricsson introduces six stories ("experiences"), six imaginary scenario's where their new 3G [21] mobile phone comes into action, exploiting the wireless multimedia capabilities of the new device and the broadband mobile communication networks. The stories present daily situations, which the potential consumer can easily identify with; stories that reflect the "mobile lifestyle" of the potential customers, or attune to a high pitched life in the international business community.

Although many of the narratives used are highly predictable; see the unseen, transmit your images in real-time, connect to people you would otherwise miss, share information and 'experiences', play games together, etcetera..., one story ("Bedtime story") reveals a keen understanding of the psychological insecurities that drive the use of mobile communication technology as a compensatory apparatus.

It is break time in the big city and we follow the musing of a manager, dressed in typical middle-managers attire, working far from home in a business district of functional high-rise buildings. There is no clear indication in which city the story is situated, it could be anywhere on the planet. If we hadn't decoded it yet, there is a text version that accompanies the flash animation, which builds on the story with associative images and sounds. The text explains that this manager is working far from home. Back there, at home, it's his little daughter's time to go to sleep, but he is not there to read her a bedtime story, or sing her a lullaby.

The new multimedia phone comes to the rescue. From the business park he starts to photograph the fluffy clouds in the beautiful blue sky behind the towers of commerce. With the images he constructs a story that is transmitted real-time to his daughter's bedroom, and we see her watching it unfold on the laptop (with wireless internet connection). His wife sends the pictures back to him (with her multimedia phone); the little girl reading the digitised clouds and finally falling asleep

The text is full of mystification and play on the subliminal desires of transcendence of the separation implicit in the scenario. Some quite literal: "you wish you could be there with them", and "you're missing your wife and child", while other suggestions are more sophisticated, planting keywords in the narrative that ascribe values to the story and the device that lead away from its lowly technical function and the commercial purposes of the advertisement (i.e., selling the new phone to
'early adopters' at a much too high introductory price). "With a flash of inspiration and with just a few clicks you capture your vision...", and, "you've written a wonderfully magical story", and then more overt again "It's almost as if you were there with her". And gratification is instant: "Your instant reward is an e-mail back from your wife" - the picture of the sleeping girl that "inspires you for the rest of the day".

The text of the advertisement story is in fact remarkably similar to a dialogue in Peter Blegvad's stage play "On Imaginary Media", between the characters A and B about creation, effort and inspiration:

A - "So, you want media that will make bringing into being effortless?

B - And instant. Inspiration comes so slowly to us mortals, that's why in allegories she is depicted as travelling by turtle.

I want imaginary media that will put skates on Inspiration's turtle. I want media that will remove all obstacles to the immediate gratification of my every whim". [22]

And of course we do not merely share text, images and voice, but 'experiences', implying that what is sold is not a product, but rather that an experience is created for you. The text ends with three more keywords, "Touching from a distance", by sharing images you are supposed to share experience more directly "than words ever can..." and you can share a moment "no matter where in the world you are" - the death of distance. Finally everything can be personalised, you can "be yourself", literally according to the ad, and what is more, you can "share your character". The new medium enables the sharing of that aura of personality that produces mind, spirit and persona, your character, not just empty words, images and text or data. How this metaphysical transformation is achieved is of course not explained, it is merely suggested...

Technology as Myth

Myth, Roland Barthes taught us long ago [23], is a second order semiological system. Second order because mythological meaning is always superimposed over the historical existence of any event, object or person. Thus, beyond mystification myth serves many other purposes and performs other roles. The function of myth is always at least two-fold: to superimpose and to hide.

For myth to work it has to estrange the object, person, or event from its historical existence. The original significance of the mythical object has to erased in order for the myth to be able to take hold of it and use it as clean projection surface for a whole new range of significations. The second order signification ascribed to the object of myth transcends its own existence here and now. Often these mythical
significations are gathered from an extended, suggested, or even a purely imaginary past that can then be projected into the future. Although the new significations superimposed by myth are often mystifying, they are never arbitrary. Myth is entirely strategic in character. It serves an agenda and a purpose. It is never neutral, although in what any particular mythology communicates it will always deny its own strategic character by appearing 'natural'.

The superimposition that informs the mythologies of various forms of connection machines discussed so far is the dream of technological transcendence. This almost archetypical Western mythology can be read as a compensation complex, where technological apparatuses of various kinds are expected, believed or suggested to alleviate a wide spectrum of human, biological, and social deficiencies - as if 'at the flick of a switch': a true Deus-Ex-Machina, a magic spirit that resides inside the machine. This magic, which in itself remains unexplained, is supposed to abolish distance (physical, but also emotional distance), provide knowledge and insight, give inspiration, create a 'new economy', establish new forms of politics, make things free (of cost), reinvigorate community, include the excluded, bridge cultural divides, enhance or rather reduce mobility, create a global consciousness, it should be able to transcend the confines of time, and even cross the divide between the living and the afterlife, or serve as a mediator of the divine. In short the mythology of new technology is the promise of the ultimate compensation machine, realising all that is humanly unachievable.

It is not very difficult to decode the strategic interests behind the eternal return of the mythology of new technology. The rise and fall of the New Economy has been a clear case in point. Today we understand why insignificant start-ups were blown up out of proportion, so much so that the Dutch proverb of "Windhandel" (to trade on the wind) became a highly popular and apt characterisation. From the viewpoint of financial speculation the hype of new technology around the rapid expansion of the internet as a public access medium was the perfect opportunity for a well-established trade game. Hype the start-up company and buy into the stocks before they actually reach the market, wait for the hype to reach culmination point, cash in at the right moment, and take home incredible gains. For the speculator it is completely irrelevant whether the start-up company has any real economic, technological, or innovative potential - the only relevant question is whether it is believed to have that potential on the stock market.

These traders could then rely on the age-old human flaw of greed to do the rest. As the hype grows, more inexperienced and amateur investors hit the market and start buying into the attractive offers of the New Economy's emerging markets and players, looking for a quick profit, oblivious to the risks, or simply blinded by greed. The scheme is astonishingly simple and effective, and can be applied anywhere: biotech, security, tulips - as long as there is an 'emerging market' and new players that can be sold off as the promise of the future, all the necessary ingredients are at hand.

What is more difficult to understand about the impressive series of new technology crashes around the turn of the millennium (the Dotcom, New Economy, and Telecom crashes) is their sheer volume and the breathless eagerness of multitudes to be part of the game. Also very large institutional investors, consultancy firms, politicians, and the wider public were ready to invest in the myth of growth without end ("The Long Boom") and perpetual productivity gains (which actually turned out not
to exist anywhere else than in the high-tech industry itself, and could simply be explained from growing economies of scale resulting exactly from the very willingness of the rest of society to buy into the mythical status of the new technologies). Why did so many people by-pass all sound judgement, and how was this unprecedented destruction of financial and human capital possible in the first place?

It seems that a deeply rooted belief in technology as a compensatory apparatus, a machine that can transcend the limitations of the merely human, has played a crucial role here. Machines have become not only the mediators of the divine, but in their mythological significations the complexity of the new machineries and their extraordinary transformative powers in society and in the private lives of an ever growing portion of the global population, have become the abstract embodiment of the
divine. It is a system of belief that assumes a new 'naturalised' status, in which technology is not seen to be driven by will or interest, but is increasingly regarded as a matter of fact, much like the forces of nature. The enormous popularity of biological metaphors in the speculative writings of new technology protagonists of the mid 1990s [24] testifies to this 'naturalised' status of emerging technologies.
Society itself is no longer seen as the interplay of strategic interests, conflict, and power, but is regarded as an emerging property of the interaction of abstract forces that operate outside of anybody's will or interest. However, the projection of this public image has been largely a deliberate affair, driven by a variety of strategic interests, so much is clear post-WorldCom, post-Enron, post-World On-line. As Barthes noted long before all this, myth is depoliticised speech, and the politics have been effectively washed away by the metaphor of nature. The purpose of the naturalisation of the mythical object is to make it appear neutral, matter-of-fact, indeed "natural", and thus unquestionable.

Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, May 2005

Notes:

1 - The ability to register 24 EVEN hours in the day was an important innovation brought about by the mechanical clock.

2 - Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, New York, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1934 / '63, pp. 13-14.

3 - Immediacy: according to Paul Virilio electronic telecommunication technology introduces a new precedence of time over distance, where in the immediacy of transmissions with the speed of light, distance is dissolved on the level of communication and replaced by the rule of real-time: the immediate.

4 - The International Meridian Conference Washington DC, USA - October 1884

5 - A fairly informative article about the War of Currents can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents

6 - Nikola Tesla: "The Future of the Wireless Art," in: WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY & TELEPHONY, Walter W. Massie & Charles R. Underhill, 1908, pp. 67-71]

7 - Nikola Tesla, Wardenclyffe - A Forfeited Dream.

8 - Martin Gardner: Thomas Edison, paranormalist, in: Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1996 www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_n4_v20/ai_18535410

9 - The image of Lethe clearly does not seem to apply in this imagination of the underworld.

10 - Seeing all, knowing all, realising all - according to Jean-Francois Lyotard.

11 - www.longnow.org

12 - Leading cover story of The Economist, July 18, 2002.

13 - This has yet to happen (March 2005)

14 - A speculative frenzy in 17th-century Holland over the sale of tulip bulbs.

15 - Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, London, 1757, cited here from: ibid, Penguin Classics, edited by David Womersley, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pp. 49 - 200.

16 - Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 1757/1998, p. 90.

17 - ibid. p. 90

18 - tele - from a distance

19 - Presence of the signal is in fact much more important - "Do you have range and credit?", would be a far more relevant question to ask at the outset of a mobile phone conversation.

20 - http://www.sonyericsson.com/experiences

21 - 3G: Third Generation or UMTS wireless network communication technologies

22 - Peter Blegvad, On Imaginary Media, stage play written for the Archaeology of Imaginary Media project of De Balie, Amsterdam, February 2004.

23 - Roland Barthes, Myth Today, in: Mythologies, Vintage Classic Editions, London, 1993 (orig. Paris, 1957), pp.109-159

24 - Kevin Kelly's book Out of Control (New York '94) is one of the most
outspoken examples of this trend - see also: www.kk.org/outofcontrol/.

Soenke Zehle: IWTnews Website Launch on June 15, 2005

2005-06-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

Didn't someone say way back when that television wouldn't be revolutionized? I have been wondering whether 'global' and 'independent' really go together that well, but it looks like the network is going to launch its first network, finally proving Chomsky right and return us to democracy, sz

IWTnews Website Launch: June 15, 2005

Independent World Television is building the world's first global independent news network. Online and on TV, IWTnews will deliver independent news and real debate -- without funding from governments, corporations or commercial advertising. Internet fundraising makes it possible.

The Problem

Serious news and full-spectrum debate on which democracy depends are disappearing from television. Across the globe, news media ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few entertainment conglomerates whose interests determine news coverage. They promote superficial "infotainment" over tough investigation, context and holding authority accountable. Public broadcasters face shrinking budgets and growing political and commercial pressures.

The Solution

We must change the economics of journalism.

We need a news and current affairs network which defends the public interest and the highest standards of journalism. Independent World Television will be such a network -- a non-profit broadcast service financed by its viewers across the globe, independent of corporate or government funding and commercial advertising.

Why Hasn't This Happened Before?

There were no means to directly engage people around the world to raise the funds. Now, the Internet allows millions to band together and raise capital to compete with corporate media outlets. Think of the 15 million people worldwide who demonstrated against war in Iraq on one day in 2003. Think of the Internet fundraising successes of MoveOn.org and the Howard Dean presidential campaign (senior Dean fundraisers are organizing IWTnews' fundraising campaign).

Launch Plan

The network is raising a $7 million start-up budget from individual donors and foundations. MacArthur, Ford and Haas foundations have contributed to a planning study. In its next phase, IWTnews will launch its web site and build the online community necessary for the international mass fundraising campaign launching in early 2006. The campaign will use concerts and media events headlined by socially-conscious celebrities to drive the Internet fundraising. If half a million people in the entire world contribute just $50, IWTnews will secure the $25 million it needs to fund its first year of broadcasting, in 2007.

Programming

To be seen on its own digital television channel and the web, IWTnews is also negotiating alliances with public and nonprofit channels to carry its programming. IWTnews will cover the big issues - war and peace, political campaigns, environment, global economy, civil rights, labor issues and social policy. IWTnews will hire journalists for their experience, political acumen and understanding of history. Complex issues will be addressed with energy, bite and wit. Citizen journalism will bring insight from people around the world. Informed by a commitment to social justice and respecting diversity of opinion, IWTnews will focus on news other media ignore or suppress and on individuals and groups who are transforming the world.

http://www.iwtnews.com/
http://www.rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?x=39747

Jeff Rice: 21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging

2005-06-08T04:03:00.000-07:00

From: ctheory@lists.uvic.ca (CTHEORY - THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE)
CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net

Detroit-Techno

Compuware Headquarters, located at 1 Campus Martius near the base of Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit, marks the site of the new, urban landscape. Compuware, a leading Information Technology corporation, manufactures management, software applications and offers IT services to a number of global businesses. Where Detroit once signified the success and perils of Modernism, specifically those moments denoted by Fordist assembly line methodology, today Detroit emerges as the signifier of techno-salvation. The lure of Compuware to Detroit, solidified in its 2003 opening, begins the final replacement of industrialization with information technology. The sixteen story, $350 million building is now the focal point of what the city itself calls "Digital Detroit," a title embodied in an annual conference of the same name.[1] Wayne State University contributes to this technology-driven enthusiasm with plans for its own downtown technology site, TechTown, a "new multi-million dollar entrepreneurial village" "located along the Digital Drive in the heart of the city of Detroit."[2] Detroiter Iggy Pop's declaration "Look out, honey, cause I'm using technology," in the 1973 song "Search and Destroy," is no longer a threat, but instead a desired reality as Detroit embraces the turn to the digital. This desire is realized in Digital Detroit, which dubs itself "New Ideas, New Culture, New Community." The label updates the Fordist plan of "Americanization" in the early half of the 20th century with a digitized sense of urban identity. Fordism triumphed homogenous identity for the sake of manufacturing; Digital Detroit triumphs "newness" in order to generate new media.

The empty factories which initially gave birth to Ford and Chrysler supremacy throughout the first half of the 20th century have yielded to the McLuhanist vision of information dominance. "In the new electric Age of Information and programmed production," Marshall McLuhan wrote in the 1960s, "commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information."[3] How has Detroit come to represent the new signifier of urban information? How has its commodification placed urbanity at the center of new media logic? The commodification of our cities (through franchises, capital, gentrification) has not yielded "better" places to live. No matter how many Hard Rock Cafes or Borders we attract to downtown environments, life remains the same. Buildings remain unoccupied. Ruins surround the franchises. This paradox, the ~Detroit Free Press~ notes, continues even as the city claims a high profile for attracting IT and other commercial investment. Upon hearing that Detroit placed five companies in the 2005 Inner City 100 rankings of the fastest-growing companies in urban America, ~Free Press~ columnist Tom Walsh comments:

Detroit's emergence as one of the cities with the most companies
on the Inner City 100 list is something of a surprise, given
that an ICIC study last year showed that Detroit was the only
U.S. inner city with job losses of more than 2 percent a year
from 1995 to 2001.[4]

Failure of economic investment (in terms of job growth or quality of life) has been largely ignored by cities, and Detroit, even with its faith in Compuware, is no exception. Since the construction of the $500 million Ford-sponsored Renaissance Center along the Detroit River in 1977, economic investment has served as the pivotal moment always-on-the-verge-of transforming the city's residents' lives. The Renaissance Center did not revive the river area, and there's no reason to believe Compuware will save downtown. Like the Renaissance Center, the current grand scope of corporate IT structure in downtown Detroit, aligned with the city's other grand gestures towards sports entertainment, have had little impact on the almost 800,000 residents' economic futures. Burnt out buildings, abandoned homes, and empty storefronts are still the norm. The anticipated domino effect of development never materializes. Thus, despite his securing of the 2005 Super Bowl and The Final Four -- the 2009 collegiate basketball event -- for the city to host, Detroit's mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is still named by _Time Magazine_ as the country's worst mayor. Sports attractions meant to lure further investment into the city have not generated substantial change. Why don't such efforts revive urban life anymore? The answer can be found in the city's own claim to digital status: the role of information production, and in particular, new media.

Assembly/Assemblage

One cannot discount the image of Compuware at Detroit's center. Its stature is notably visible against the backdrop of the numerous empty storefronts in the adjacent section of Merchant's Row along Lower Woodward. The importance of Compuware is not that it has generated a significant financial payoff; it hasn't. Compuware's importance is that the city now stands to be the site where a new logic of invention emerges, one based on information technology. Detroit gave birth to the U.S. conception of assembly line thinking (equal parts in the system, interchangeability). Now Detroit gives birth to the assemblage apparatus of new media. That Silicon Valley has been more of a force in the rise of information technology in terms of hardware and software makes little difference. Detroit demonstrates not the instrumentality of digital culture, but its logic.

We no longer live in the world of assembly. We live in the age of the assemblage. Assembling a city piece by piece through interchangeable financial investments does not account for the assemblage mentality of the 21st century. As ubiquitous as assemblage has become for popular culture in music, on TV, on the Web, and in the plastic arts, it still has not earned credit for its role in structuring logic. The logic of the assembly line eventually extended outward from the Ford factory in Highland Park and influenced a range of cultural habits throughout the 20th century, from department store setups (everything under one roof) to educational policy (assembly line movement from class to class and generalized testing). How has assemblage begun to reimagine that structuring?

The places we live in have become more than fixed places. "A rough enumeration of some of the basic tenets of this general narrative of the city includes the following," Helen Liggett writes in her book_Urban Encounters_. "The city exists as a place."[5] But narrative, as Jean Francois Lyotard framed the postmodern condition, no longer holds up in the age of databases and techno-mastery. Narratives are too stable. They codify experience in referential ways; they work to legitimize experience. "The best performativity [of narrative] cannot consist in obtaining additional information in this way," Lyotard notes. "It comes rather from arranging the data in a new way, which is what constitutes a 'move' properly speaking. This new arrangement is usually achieved by connecting together series of data that were previously held to be independent."[6] Assemblage works from that basic principle of parataxical arrangement and opposes the ordered assembly of narrative. "Capital will save Detroit" marks one failed narrative circulated among the city's investors, politicians, and real estate companies. Returning to this narrative will do us little good. Instead, we must connect its claim to other data not yet considered relevant or legitimate in urban discourse.

Detroit exists as a place without stability and without legitimization. This lack of stability does not depend on global markets or price fluctuations or even issues of labor. We already recognize narratives of Detroit which pose the city in such terms: urban flight, failure to adapt to new global trade, lost revenue in tax assessment and collection, large-scale unemployment. Detroit's lack of stability comes from elsewhere; it comes from space. From 8 Mile to Jefferson Avenue, lived in and inhabited spaces are encircled by empty spaces. The empty spaces which comprise large parts of the city pose the possibility of assemblage (combining spaces) as opposed to assembling (filling in space with investment). But until now, we've spent too much time lamenting over economic revival in terms of space. Whether framed in the repetitive gesture of urban renewal or the more eclectic appeal of what Richard Florida hails as the creative class, an economic vision of the city demands that we see its return in purely financial terms. Florida's manifesto, _The Rise of the Creative Class_, sets the conditions for how the urban environment will be revitalized by the economic output of young urban professionals (most of whom are artistic and energetic). The presence of such professionals, Florida claims, will lead to urban recovery as these individuals' interests spur and give rise to new development. It's a popular trope adopted by many states and local governments, among them Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, who appropriates Florida's concept as the basis of her "Cool Cities" program of urban renewal. Detroit has been marked as space within the "Cool Cities" plan. The presence of cool people, the plan proclaims, will make the city referentially cool, and thus, in line with Florida's argument, elevate financial growth.

In _Cities: Reimagining the Urban_, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, however, propose an alternative agenda for city planning, one which requests that we view cities in non-economic terms. "Can we see cities as something other than localized economic systems or the forcing houses of (knowledge) capitalism?"[7] It's a question I take seriously for how it moves us outside of narrative. It is no longer possible to theorize all of our problems in terms of capital without also acknowledging that new media plays an equally dominant (or possibly more dominant) role in shaping culture. But what is this "something other" Amin and Thrift hint at? And what is this role I imagine new media having in city revival?

Encounters

Amin and Thrift ask us to consider the encounter. "The sense of a kaleidoscopic urban world," Amin and Thrift write, "crammed full with hybrid networks going about their business, enables us to see, at the same time, the importance of encounter."[8] Networks embrace the logic of encounter. Amin and Thrift note:

So, places, for example, are best thought of not so much as
enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as
"presents"; fixed in space and time, but as variable events;
twists and fluxes of interrelation. Even when the intent is to
hold places stiff and motionless, caught in a cat's cradle of
networks that are out to quell unpredictability, success is
rare, and then only for awhile.[9]

In the network, one moves from place to place, rather than settling in one place. "The insidious thing about electronic networks," Steven Shaviro writes, "is that they are always there, whether you pay attention to them or not."[10] Detroit as network operates from within those moments we pay attention to it, as well as those we don't. The city as network requires a reimagining of how we move and engage information within (i.e. to and from) places instead of focusing solely on our experience in places (the Compuware/TechTown model). The difference is substantial. By imagining the urban environment as one of encounter rather than fixed place, we can begin to conceptualize a city like Detroit as a network (and, in turn, we see other 21st century cities as networks as well). In that conceptualization, we see the ways new media may reshape our understanding of information technology and the urban. In essence, we see a project worthy of digital media.

The problem is that even while the city calls itself Digital Detroit, it does not see itself yet as the embodiment of digital media; i.e. the network. It still sees itself as fixed place. The 20th century marked the great migrations to cities for purposes of work. Detroit, along with Chicago and Cleveland, served as a major destination point for those in search of a fixed place within the American promise of post-War economic recovery. The 21st century fails to continue this distinction, partly because those fixed places no longer exist. The automotive factories which spurred the great migrations have since closed or minimized operations. The factory signifies the place we pay attention to; the time has come to locate the places we don't pay attention to, the places we have yet to encounter, in order to shape Detroit as a network. In the age of information, we don't head towards a place, but rather encounter place, real or imaginary. We enter into place. When Detroit-based DJ Jay Dee poses as a mix the broad declaration "Welcome To Detroit" on his album of the same name, he highlights this encounter as one into the network of information culture. In other words, to be welcomed into Detroit is to be welcomed into the encounter as mix.

In the collection _Stalking Detroit_, Jason Young poses this mix encounter as an update of the Situationist practice of psychogeography. Young's project, "Line Frustration," is a mapping of Detroit whose purpose is to move outside of fixed, economic solutions by mixing physical space with imagination, or the places we wouldn't normally pay attention to. "Line Frustration describes the brokering of Detroit's empty territory by the media and attempts to locate architecture's potential fit within that economy."[11] Young describes his work of mapping out lines across the city as being about writing. "In many ways," he states, "this line of demarcation is rhetorical. It separates this from more of this. The line's intention is to introduce difference where there is none."[12] A mix of real place (where the lines meet) and imaginary place (where I project them) produces encounter. When I project Detroit as a network of encounters, I am focusing on this sense of difference in terms of new media. I am calling for new types of mapping of place, particularly mappings which move within the logic of digital culture by allowing us to encounter new kinds of urban spaces as writing. "The full blown city coincides with the development of writing," McLuhan writes.[13] "New speed and power are never compatible with existing spatial and social arrangements."[14] To reimagine the city as digital media is to reimagine its space as writing, a move which displaces us from current social arrangements whose focus rests mostly with capital investment. Thus, this becomes both an ideological move (a recognition of an apparatus shift in information technology and space which moves us from assembly line to assemblage thinking) as well as a practical move (residents engage with this shift in thinking in order to begin writing the city through encounters). Central to this writing is imagination in terms of materiality, how we imagine the places we live within in regards to technology.

In the Fordist-economy, that imagination occurs as graffiti. Long distained as symbolic of urban blight, graffiti has been viewed as the sign of economic decline; its appearance often found on the remnants of the industrial age: trains, factory walls, abandoned buildings, highway bypasses, and street signs. When one encounters this graffiti, one sees the collapse of urbanity. Graffiti long positioned itself as the re-imagination of failed social space. The industrial city, like Detroit, eventually became covered in the urban phenomenon of graffiti tags. The weblog dETROITfUNK (http://www.detroitfunk.com/dfg/) wonderfully showcases Detroit's urban tags through a series of posted galleries. As the site demonstrates, "Rodeo," Turtl," "Money," and "Rib" sign Detroit's urban landscape as industrial writing. These graffiti tags reference the urban city in familiar ways. They capture our attention through their references to decay and collapse. How to move that familiarity into digital writing or mapping so that we engage encounter as not fixed signings, but as what we haven't yet considered or paid attention to; i.e., assemblages?

Whereas the industrial city was marked by graffiti tags, the information city is marked by the less familiar, XML driven tag. The XML tag is the meta-level mark-up used to categorize information in both referential and non-referential ways. Popularized on websites like the image sharing site Flickr, the social bookmarking system Del.icio.us, and the link hub Metafilter, tags allow writers to designate their own names and attributes to information (as opposed to relying on previous categorical systems in circulation). These kinds of sites often draw attention to encounters (names, categories, places) we wouldn't normally recognize. Systems like Flickr or Del.icio.us are presented as "social" systems because of the levels of social interaction encouraged through user participation and the new kinds of arrangements of information they encourage. By tagging (i.e. categorizing) spaces in flexible manners (the categories are open to change and combinations), these set-ups alter our understanding of social space. In Del.icio.us, these encounters occur through like-minded tags of bookmarked space, which become interlinked (assembled) among users who have chosen the same categories unbeknownst to each other. Flickr, in particular, has generated the notion of the memory map, a tagged satellite map where users fill in their own categories of place through annotated notes.[15] In the memory map, the fixed markers of place (street names, industrial zones, storefronts) become joined with user-oriented definitions, often framed in terms of personal relationships and experiences ("where we first kissed," "I learned to read English here," "when the circus stopped here that year, I knew I had made the wrong career choice"). The memory map is a new kind of urban space, an assemblage of the familiar and unfamiliar through tagging. The memory map begins the process of encountering places we pay attention to and those we don't. It digitally updates Young's project of empty territory and line mapping. The memory map as tagged experience points towards an emerging idea of digital urbanity.

Whereas HTML works with pre-established tags like <> (bold) or <> (italicize), XML's meta-tag is left open as < >. The openness allows a variety of organizational schemes to occur as users complete the tags based on reference, desire, association, lack of reference, or some other means. This process is known as folksonomy (folk + taxonomy). Folksonomy involves a new media organization of space through the meeting of differently arranged, open schemes. Just as the urban city contributed to a sense of public-ness or folk-ness through communal gathering, the cafe, public squares, stadiums, and other places, folksonomy generates a digital sense of connectedness. It does so, however, not through fixed place but through the open encounter of place in terms of digital, social interaction.

Through this openness and interaction, the meta-tag generates assemblages, information connections where such connections were not initially acknowledged as existing. Tagging, David Weinberger writes, allows "us to type in any word we want, rather than forcing us to navigate some hierarchical, controlled vocabulary."[16] Through tagging, the digital allows us to engage in discursive encounter. We discover the encounter among tags, among users who tag, and among user and tag. Various combination schemes emerge out of these encounters, sometimes as maps, sometimes as bookmarking, sometimes in other formations. These schemes prompt questions predetermined naming does not allow: What do I want to name this place? How do I want to identify that naming with another related or unrelated place? How do I allow my naming to connect with other names created throughout the Web? How might I name myself within this place? Tagging leaves these options up to the writer. When writing becomes tagging, associative combinations become rhetorical principles. These associations form digital networks, and thus, digital urban spaces.

Detroit Tagging

How, then, might we "tag" the information technology city like Detroit? Not with spray paint, but with naming structures. In a city awash with empty buildings and abandoned sites, the potential for open tagging <> seems endless. What to name these abandoned spaces? What to rename those filled in spaces whose financial schemes have failed? How might this assemblage-oriented naming reimagine the ways we have relied upon referentiality for urban renewal? Referentiality, of course, is the basis of print culture. But Detroit is no longer a product of that culture, and that is why Richard Florida's graphs and diagrams of equation between specific types of individuals and urban economic potential cannot pan out. "Our theory," Florida argues, "is that a connection exists between a metropolitan area's level of tolerance for a range of people, its ethnic and social diversity, and its success in attracting talented people, including high-technology workers."[17] Digitality places that referentiality under question. TechTown or Compuware, these are plans whose basis as well is in referentiality. This kind of technology driven vision attempts to equate itself (as reference) with financial payoff. Tagging is a different logic altogether.

My argument is that the connections Florida stresses are not found in a causal or referential relationship among individuals, capital, the city or other forces, but rather in the new media logic of assemblage; that is, combination in general. In the assemblage, reference is not a requirement. The social connectivity planners like Florida believe will emerge out of urban renewal may be better actualized through the digital assemblage of tagging. My call is for a plan of information tagging, where residents, working in digital spaces, reimagine the city through their own conceptualization and actualization of tags. In place of tagging the bypass or the stop sign with graffiti, they tag the city itself as an encountered name or moment within a digital, interconnected space. On the Web, these encounters become moments of discursive interaction and combination as others add to the tags with their own tagging attributes. "The history of urbanism," Steven Johnson notes, "is also the story of more muted signs, built by the collective behavior of smaller groups and rarely detected by outsiders."[18] Tagging brings this behavior to the foreground so that social connectivity is generated among those within the recognized urban space and those often deemed "outsiders" (those who bring new naming conventions to the discussion and to the urban space itself). If there, in fact, exists a Digital Detroit as this city claims for itself, than it must be found within the practice of tagging.

Detroit, like the urban experience in general, has become non-referential. Its empty spaces, or "ruins" as the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website declares [19], don't refer to anything anymore. Tagging allows us to transform that non-referentiality into social experience. The lesson of Detroit is a lesson for all urban sites. Digital space becomes social space through assembled meanings, and that assemblage actualizes the popular logic of social software.[20] Tagging, then, marks a place where new media logic informs our understanding of space and the urban, fashioning a sense of the "social" not yet accounted for in urban studies. Imagine, then, the city as a network of tags. Residents, who tag themselves simultaneously as writers or non-writers, mark the city through memory maps, weblogs, del.icio.us tags, and other related tools in order to reconstruct the city's sense of urbanity as a digital experience. The tagging generates a number of assembled taxonomies, some recognizable, many not. Through the assemblages, we find new Detroits to engage. We find new Detroits emerging out of our own discursive constructions. This reworking is social in ways capital investment has failed to generate. By making these cities cyber -- that is, by putting them on the Web -- the tags used to develop these spaces will inevitably be linked to other similarly named tags for other cities, for other, not yet imagined, encounters.

Notes:

[1] See: www.digitaldetroit.org/index.html.

[2] See: www.techtownwsu.org/aboutus.php.

[3] McLuhan, Marshall. _Understanding Media_. New York: Signet, 1964, p. 48.

[4] Walsh, Tom "Detroit Firms Honored." ~Detroit Free Press~. www.freep.com/money/business/walsh21e_20050421.htm

[5] Liggett, Helen. _Urban Encounters_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 7.

[6] Lyotard, Jean Francois. _The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge_. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pgs. 51-52.

[7] Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. _Cities: Reimaging the Urban_. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002, p.63.

[8] Amin and Thrift p. 30.

[9] ibid

[10] Shaviro, Steven. _Connected: Or What It Means to Live in the Networked Society_. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 5.

[11] Young, Jason. "Lines of Frustration." _Stalking Detroit_. Daskalakis, Georgia, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young (Eds) Barcelona: Actar, 2001, p.136.

[12] Young p. 137.

[13] McLuhan p. 99.

[14] ibid

[15] See flickr.com/photos/tags/memorymap/ for examples. Users download Google satellite maps, then use Flickr's tags to generate their own maps of space.

[16] Weinberger, David. "Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves." www.hyperorg.com/blogger/misc/taxonomies_and_tags.html.

[17] Florida, Richard. _Cities and the Creative Class_. New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 130.

[18] Johnson, Steven. _Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software_. New York: Scribner, 2001, p. 41.

[19] See detroityes.com/home.htm.

[20] The technologies I draw attention to here, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Metafilter, are often labeled within the broader rubric of "social software." See also a new blog on tagging, You're It, at tagsonomy.com/.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Jeff Rice is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University where he teaches courses on rhetoric, writing, new media, and Detroit. He is working on a book-length project on Detroit and digital culture.

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casa logic: Telestreet and NGVision

2005-06-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

From: casa logic
Subject: Telestreet and NGVision achieved the "Award of Distinction" at the Prix Ars Electronica 2005

Telestreet, the Italian network of street televisions and NewGlobalVision, online video archive and distribuition project, achieved the "Award of Distinction" at the Linz Prix Ars Electronica 2005.

The Prix Ars Electronica, currently addressed towards its nineteenth edition, is the most accredited international competition concerning arts, technologies, and digital media-based social practices. The "Digital Communities" category rewards the innovative projects concerning e-democracy, digital cities and citizens' participation. "Evaluations will honor visionary and forward-looking projects; those that display consummate social and technological innovativeness and that have been successfully set up and established. Digital Communities projects should enable human beings to enjoy the widest possible access to technology networks, and the 'Digital Commons'" (Prix's call for works).

The international prize represents an acknowledgment for the Telestreet and NewGlobalVision network activity in reclaiming the right of free open access of the means of communications within a country, as Italy, where the right of expression seems loosing value. The movement of "antennas toward people" aims at enabling citizens to freely use the communication channel of television not only to receive
information but especially to produce it. By so doing, it places individuals in the position of closely interacting and sharing as much as of producing information. "Don't watch TV, just do it!" is the slogan of the street televisions.

The first street television, Orfeo TV, has started to broadcast on June 21st 2002 in Bologna. Since 2002, over 150 street-tvs were born all around Italy. They transmit via ether utilizing the so-called "shadow cones" where the signals of commercial terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach because obstructed by natural or manufacture
barriers.

We are dealing here with tiny street or neighbourhood televisions. The very low cost of the equipment gives everyone the opportunity of transmitting information usually not gathered by mainstream networks. Moreover, antenna broadcasting is combined with the Internet allowing the sharing of video works and the management of the circuit of the street-tvs scattered all over Italy.

The international acknowledgment allows in thinking to claim the media free access even within new grounds like digital terrestrial and wireless. Convergence between terrestrial broadcasting and internet streaming dismantles the mediascape as we know it and creates a new one on the principles of decentralization of production, decentralization of resources and decentralization of points of emissions.The theme uphold by Telestreet in Italy is going exactly toward this direction: the acknowledgment of 10% of the ether frequencies for communitarian use.

www.telestreet.it
www.ngvision.org

Orfeo Tv - Telestreet.it
orfeotv@telestreet.it

NGVision.org
ngv@ecn.org

Ian Buchanan: Deleuze and the Contemporary World-I

2005-06-07T01:30:00.000-07:00

This is one of two texts that will appear early next year in a volume Ian Buchanan is editing, called "Deleuze and the Contemporary World". "Treatise on Militarism" is the second and will be sent next week.

Introduction
The Axiomatic, or, The Seven Givens of the Contemporary World

It is the real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze says that you can never know a philosopher properly until to you know what he or she is against. To know them at all, you have to know what puts fire in their soul, what makes them take up the nearly impossible challenge of trying to say anything at all. Too many people are content to say Deleuze, like Nietzsche, was against Hegel without ever asking why. And those who do trouble themselves to ask this question are too often satisfied with a merely philosophical answer. But if Deleuze found Hegel’s philosophy intolerable it was not simply because he thought that the dialectic was a badly made concept, or that he objected to a metaphysics predicated on negation. These are the complaints of a sandbox philosopher and Deleuze was certainly not that. Hegel’s philosophy was intolerable to Deleuze because in his eyes it offers a slave’s view of the world. Worse, it is a model of thought that seems to participate in the legitimation of the very system that enslaves us by installing the master-slave dialectic at the centre our ratiocination, making it seem like this is the only choice we have, effectively denying us in advance the option of asking our own questions and forming our own problematics. But this critique is only meaningful (i.e., authentically critical) to the extent that it is read in terms of their conception of philosophy’s purpose, which is precisely Marxian to the extent that, like Marx, they hold that the point of philosophy is not
simply to understand society, but to change it.

Our answer to the question of what Deleuze and Guattari are against, then, is this: the axiomatic. The axiomatic is the latest form of social organisation, which for Deleuze and Guattari always means the organisation of the flows of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is a kind of cosmic energy that is constantly being deformed into the desire-for-something; but, in their view, its true form is that of
production itself. It is, in other words, a process rather than a thing. Desire is the force in the universe that brings things together, but does so without plan or purpose and the results are always uncertain. It may lead to the formation of new compositions, but it might also lead to decomposition. As such, desire is an ambivalent force - without it, we shrivel up and die, but if it isn’t carefully harnessed it can tear us apart. Deleuze and Guattari’s handling of the concept is similarly ambivalent: on the one hand, they are constantly demanding that desire be
unbound from the various shackles of guilt, repression and shame, but on the other hand they caution that this process needs to be done slowly and with care.

The organisation of desire occurs on all levels of society, from the mundane to the world-historical. Obviously, at the mundane level, desire is subjected to literally countless constraints, most of them quite innocuous. And as the example of the extremely mundane activity of hand-washing will illustrate readily enough, the molar can always be discerned in the molecular. Insofar as we wash our hands because of a
concern for hygiene, or in deference to a religious ritual, that mundane activity is the means by which we express our fidelity to the social matrix we think of ourselves as belonging to. Whether it is because we accept the scientific rationale for washing our hands or because we are obedient to the edicts of faith, our actions signify belonging. By the same token, we don’t hesitate to castigate others for failing to follow the routine; indeed, it provokes feelings of disgust and rage if we learn, for instance, that someone hasn’t washed their hands after using the toilet, especially if they are handling our food. On the macro scale, however, desire has been subjected to relatively few world-historical types of organisation. Throughout history, there have been only three main types of social organisation: (1) the primitive tribe or band, (2) the state, and (3) the axiomatic. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate these
organisations according to the different ways in which they codify the objects and practices of everyday life to channel desire into socially useful activities and corporate entities.

If it is true that are we are not using the word axiomatic as a simple metaphor, we must review what distinguishes an axiomatic from all manner of codes, overcodings and recodings: the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realised in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion.

Axioms are operative statements of a primary type, they do not derive from or depend upon other statements. They function as the component parts of the various assemblages of production, circulation and consumption that comprise the capitalist system in full. Their principal function is to regulate flows - of money, people, raw materials, commodities, etc. Flows can be the subject to several axioms at once, but they can also lack axioms of their own, whereby they are either contained by the consequences of other axioms, or they remain ‘untamed’. Axioms may take the form of laws, but more often they appear as contracts, trade agreements, policy statements, governance protocols, and so on. The Marshall Plan for the post-war reconstruction of Europe is an example of an axiom, as would be Brazil’s import-substitution program and the seemingly perennial Global War on Terror. Axioms are in effect order-words by another name, they are the slogans that underpin and give reason to the heterogeneous raft of laws, policies, regulations that give daily life in the contemporary world
its structure, consistency and its essential nature. In what they refer to as a “summary sketch”, Deleuze and Guattari identify seven “givens” that taken together constitute the universe axiomatique.

1. Addition, subtraction

Axioms can be added and withdrawn at will. The general tendency in capitalism is to add axioms in response to changing circumstances; but in certain cases, particularly in totalitarian regimes, the opposite tendency is the rule. “What makes the axiomatic vary, in relation to States, is the distinction and relation between foreign and domestic markets. There is a multiplication of axioms most notably when an integrated domestic market is being organised to meet the requirements of the foreign market.” These opposing tendencies converge in crisis form in the third world when debt-ridden totalitarian regimes try to reorganise in order to stave off red-lining by first world credit agencies. If totalitarianism is defined by the withdrawal of axioms, or what might also be conceived as the reduction of the state to its bare minimum, then developments in third world suggest that not only are the conditions ripe for a massive proliferation of totalitarian regimes, but in a real sense they are in the grip of a totalitarianism from without. The austerity conditions imposed by the IMF, World Bank, WTO and indeed the White House itself, have the hallmarks of classic totalitarianism.

At the behest of these allegedly benevolent agencies domestic markets are forcibly deregulated, government spending slashed, wages pared to the born, to create structural conditions - disproportionately - favourable to foreign investment (the axiom of ‘access’) from whence salvation is supposed to come. The effect of the loss of these internal structures is that third world nations are denied the very same supports first world nations, such as Japan and Germany, but also the US, a notoriously protectionist market, used to claw their way forward. The first world
effectively uses its financial muscle to kick away the ladder the third world might use to get out of its infamous poverty trap. As Mike Davis notes, the principal cause of the continued downward spiral of pauperisation in the third world is precisely the retreat of government. The domestic economy is sacrificed for the sake of foreign profit-taking. In the twentieth century, it was internal dictators that created these conditions; today it is globalisation. The gap separating totalitarianism and fascism is narrow. The later uses war to rescue its economy. The US policy of giving credit to needy countries so they can buy arms is already pushing a number of countries in this direction.

When not pointing the finger at demography, these agencies, the World Bank and WTO in particular, tend to blame poverty on bad governance, rather than the structural inequalities of globalisation, citing lack of trust and reciprocity as the major impediment to growth. Under these auspices the concept of social capital has known an unparalleled rise in fortune. The fiction underpinning this thinking is that communitarian attitudes, if they are properly fostered, will stem rapacious profit-taking and enable social justice to flourish. What should be obvious, but seems to have escaped notice, is that social capital is effectively a form of social and labour discipline: its precise aim is to create conditions safe for foreign investment. Community development is really a codeword for what financial analysts call risk treatment, that is, it identifies and tries to attenuate the ‘human factor’ as the principal cause of the failure of aid programs. If villagers were more community-minded they would be less likely to embezzle aid funds so this reasoning goes, the irony being that it creates a paradoxical situation in which laissez-faire capitalists find themselves promoting socialism to protect their investment all while
singing the praises of the ‘free market’. The creation of cooperative markets in peasant villages is then taken to be a sign of success rather than yet another instance of micro-exploitation and informalisation of labour rampant in the third world.

As important as the emergence of the various ‘fair trade’ initiatives have been in ameliorating the impoverishing structural inequality between first and third world countries, their very existence stands in the way of a clear-eyed view of the universality of this situation. It effectively amounts to an instance of what Roland Barthes astutely described as rhetorical inoculation, the small concession that immunises against a more systematic criticism. By admitting that in certain circumstances the market system isn’t always fair, those who benefit most from this system try to duck the fact that it is the system itself that is iniquitous. Starbucks agreement to pay slightly over-market for its coffee beans is an attempt to blind us to the reality that this situation - third world as market garden for the first - is the cause of the problem in the first place. The lack of diversity in the domestic sectors of the coffee growing nations places them in a very vulnerable position, their livelihood literally hinging on the whim of first worlders. It also prevents them from expanding their agricultural much less their industrial base because they cannot afford to grow less lucrative, but ultimately more nutritive crops. So countries like Brazil have to import food, despite having an enormous primary industries sector.

2. Saturation

“Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. It would like for us to believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the extreme limit of resources and energy.” But the reality is that the only limits it confronts are of its own making. And even as it confronts these limits it repels them, or displaces them, thus avoiding the moment when the system would actually have to change. The oil industry offers an instructive case in point. In spite of scaremongering, from both the left and the right, there is no shortage of oil. Oil shortages - or at least the threat of oil shortages - are expedient political weapons for both sides: the green-hued left use it as leverage to foster a more eco-friendly outlook and to encourage greater investment in research and development to find a replacement energy source; meanwhile the hawkish-right use it to argue that imperialism is necessary to protect ‘energy security’ and the lifestyle we have. And there are a plethora of positions in-between. Yet, the fact is, even if China and India continue to escalate their rate of oil consumption, oil isn’t going to run out in the short or medium term. Current estimates are that proven reserves are sufficient to last us another 150 to 500 years (one hopes that this will be time enough for a replacement energy source to be standardised).

Some theorists, like Yeomans, have argued, that what there is a shortage of, is cheap oil. Cheap oil is oil that can be extracted and processed at low cost. If one looks at the various potential oil sources in the world, from Canadian shale oil, to North Sea oil and gas, to Texas, and the Middle East, it is Middle East oil that is cheapest by a big margin. Whereas extracting oil from oil sands can cost upwards of $14 a barrel and is environmentally messy, Iraqi oil costs a mere $1.50 a barrel and is relatively clean or at least far enough away not to attract much attention from the NIMBY set. The difference in profit potential is obvious. While this puts the Middle East oil producing countries in a strong position in the marketplace, if they do not keep oil prices down then they make presently uneconomical oil reserves attractive and risk losing market share which is effectively what happened in the years following the ‘oil shock’ of early 1970s. “As Saudi oil minister Sheik Yamani said in 1981, ‘If we force Western countries to invest heavily in funding alternative
sources of energy, they will. This will take them no more than seven to ten years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardise Saudi Arabia’s interests.’” In most of the West this is precisely what happened in the 1970s. Fuel efficiency suddenly become a watchword everywhere, even in the US with its notorious lack of energy thrift. By the same token, the so-called ‘oil shock’ was in fact a boon for producers and retailers alike, so from the point of view of the accumulation of capital it was anything but a disaster. As such, this version of the oil shortage argument is not, finally, persuasive.

The inverse - or, oversupply - argument is more compelling. “The history of oil in the 20th century is not a history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace - for the industry and the oil states - of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut.” In other words, the real oil crisis is not an external crisis or “extreme limit” of vanishing resources; but, an entirely internal crisis of the volatility of prices. On this argument, the Gulf Wars have been fought to stabilise prices and regularise profit-taking. Blood is not being spilled for oil, as such, which at least has a certain materiality, but for the utterly nebulous and by nature completely ephemeral, base points on the stock exchange. In the end, as Retort have argued, it is not even the price of oil that matters, so much as the sustainability of the triangular trade of arms sales, and military base construction, that has grown around the oil industry - fighting over oil concessions, building military bases to
protect oil interests, are ultimately just as profitable as dealing in oil, at least when viewed from the perspective of the domestic US market. With so many new players in the oil and guns business, it has become impossible to regulate the market by the old-fashioned oligarchic means. Hence the necessity of war. War is the last resort of the axiomatic, which usually has much more powerful instruments at its disposal.

3. Models, isomorphy

In principal, insofar as all States are domains for the realisation of capital within a single, integrated world market, they are isomorphic. Although this isomorphy implies a degree of homogeneity between the states, at least on an operational level (“the highway code, the circulation of commodities, production costs, etc.”), this only holds true insofar as there is a general “tendency toward a single integrated domestic market”. At a deeper level, however, there can be a real heterogeneity between states without them ceasing to be isomorphic because the fact of the worldwide market leaves them no option but to conform. “The general rules regarding this are as follows: the consistency, the totality (l’ensemble), or unity of the axiomatic are defined by capital as a ‘right’ or relation of production (for the market); the respective independence of the axioms in no way contradicts this totality but derives from the divisions or sectors of the capitalist mode of production; the isomorphy of the models, with the two poles of addition and subtraction, depends on how the domestic and foreign markets are distributed in each
case.”

Deleuze and Guattari identify three kinds of isomorphy corresponding to three bipolarities that constituting the contemporary world. The first refers to the States in the centre of the capitalism world-system, the US, the member-nations of the EU, Australia, Canada and so on. Although their various models of governance are different when compared in strict detail, they are isomorphic with respect to the capitalist world-system. Obviously, too, organisations like WTO, NAFTA, WEF, etc., have as their precise goal the machining of this isomorphy. The nations in the centre do not become homogeneous via this process, indeed, the opposite is true - in the guise of tourism and niche marketing, the cash-value of difference has long been recognised - but their relations of product do become increasingly well-integrated. The second bipolarity is fading significance in the contemporary world: the grand bureaucracies of what used to be known as the second world, namely the USSR and PRC, have effectively relinquished what Deleuze and Guattari call their heteromorphy in favour of a more streamlined isomorphy. Even so, one can still find countries whose mode of production and relation of production do not conform to the Washington ‘consensus’, but continue to integrate themselves with the world market all the same. One could point to the planned economy of North Korea or the bizarrely feudal economy of Saudi Arabia as instances of this. The third bipolarity is the familiar distinction between centre and periphery (North-South), which Deleuze and Guattari describe as a polymorphy: here capital as acts as the relation of production in noncapitalist or not necessarily capitalist modes of production.

4. Power

Whether the US is the lone or remaining superpower is not the crucial issue - militarism defined as a peace more terrifying than war amounts to a single smooth space of war reigning over the globe and it doesn’t matter whether there are opposing parts or not. It is not whether the US is at loggerheads with North Korea or Syria that is the issue, but rather that diplomacy between states is defined by the presence or absence of a ‘credible threat’. For the US, withdrawing a trade agreement is just as devastating, perhaps more so, than sending in the marines; likewise OPEC
nations can do more damage by driving up oil prices than by blowing up tall buildings in NY. States no longer appropriate the war machine; they are a component of it.

5. The included middle

The very operation of the axiomatic - namely, its restless search for new models of realisation - creates problems it cannot solve. “The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialised agriculture at the periphery, provisionally reserving for the centre the so-called postindustrial activities (automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, overarmament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the centre, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths.” In search of new sources of capital, capital willingly invades the underdeveloped regions of the world so it can build and operate factories unburdened high taxes, labour and environmental restrictions; equally willingly, it consigns to the scrap heap entire industries and the jobs and lives dependent upon them in the First World if the profit and loss statement no longer appeals to the shareholders. Capitalism has never had any interest in enriching all - indeed unequal exchange is indispensable to its functioning. “Even a social democracy adapted to the Third World surely does not undertake to integrate the whole poverty-stricken population into the domestic market; what it does, rather, is to effect the class rupture that will select the
integratable elements.” Today, in the first world, we can witness this strategy at work behind the rhetoric of the so-called ‘deserving poor’. The included middle refers to the rump of citizens of capitalism deems it unnecessary to save.

6. Minorities

What is a minority? It certainly isn’t an affair of numbers - indeed those who number among the minority are frequently in the majority if we take a purely numerical view of things. The world’s poor outnumber the rich by an extremely wide margin, yet theirs is the minor voice. The combined wealth of the 500 richest people in the world exceeds the GDP of the entire continent of Africa, and is greater than the combined incomes of the “poorest half of humanity”. A handful of people whose total wealth has to be measured in the trillions are numerically speaking quite obviously in the minority; they are a very select group indeed. Yet the power they wield in consequence of their tremendous wealth makes it a nonsense to describe them as a minority. In contrast, the three billion people constituting the poorest half of humanity have so little power singly or collectively that it is no error of judgement to describe them as a minority. So why do Deleuze and Guattari speak of the minority as being vested with the power of the nondenumerable?

For Deleuze and Guattari, the nondenumerable refers to the power to ask one’s own questions, to form one’s own problematics, and, more particularly, to define the conditions under which a satisfactory answer or response to these questions and problems might be obtained. Today, after so many centuries of suffering and silence, it is the indigenous peoples of the world who are showing the rest of us how potent this power can be. If the 1960s took inspiration from Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, as Jameson records in his capsular cultural history of the period, then the 1990s took its inspiration from Subcomandante Marcos in the Chiapas. For many, the road to Seattle began in the mountains of southeast Mexico when the Zapatistas launched their movement. The figure of Che as militant and utopian was a potent one for the Left in the 1960s, but as Jameson argues the failures of the guerilla movements in Peru and Venezuela effectively robbed it of its utopian energy. The guerilla lost its appeal and there followed a profound “disinvestment of revolutionary libido and fascination on the part of the First World Left”. The headline-grabbing violence of the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof Gang disillusioned many on the Left and the very idea of militancy was jettisoned. Subsequently, the figure of the guerilla fighter was appropriated by the Right and transformed fatefully into the image of the terrorist, effectively depriving the Left of its ideological claim on the right to bear arms. Thus a new figure was needed and that is how we should understand the Zapatistas. Subcomandante Marcos put it in an interview with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pondo:

A soldier is an absurd person who has to resort to arms in order to convince others, and in that the sense the movement has no movement if its future is military. If the EZLN perpetuates itself as an armed military structure it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it, apart from that, would be to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army. For us it would be a failure.

The Zapatistas’s movement began with 11 demands - work, land, shelter, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace - but eventually expanded this to 15 with the addition of - security, anti-corruption, information and environmental protection. They claimed the right of dissent and rebellion, but chose to practice democracy rather than wage war for it. Using the electronic media to full advantage, the Zapatistas sowed powerful slogans of the password type into the global political subsoil. Among the many rallying slogans the Zapatistas have put into circulation, the one that gotten the most traction in the First World is undoubtedly the one Naomi Klein has made the centrepiece of her recent utopian cry to reclaim the commons: ‘one world with many worlds in it’. This, for Klein, defines the stakes of the present struggle. It means fighting against the logic of centralisation, consolidation and homogenisation dear to what she calls McGovernment, the purveyors of the “happy meal of cutting taxes, privatizing services, liberalizing regulations, busting unions”. It means giving local communities “the right to plan and manage their schools, their services, their natural settings, according to their own lights.”

As charming as this picture of a world freed from the predatory claws of capitalism is, it misses its target inasmuch as it defines capitalism as denying us the right to plan and manage our schools and so on. In fact, the sad truth is most neo-liberal governments would be quite happy to hand over management of schools to local communities, seeing this as one easy way of cutting overheads and appearing to do something good at the same time. The real problem is that the axiomatic is able to treat all forms of organisation as its model of realisation. This is something it has only lately perfected, as Naomi Klein’s book on the rise of the logo documents. We didn’t lose control of our schools so much as give them up in the name of profit, or rather its insidious other: efficiency. Education, health, life, these are the nondenumerable in their very essence, yet we have seen the neo-liberals transform them into denumerables, for which a balance-sheet approach can be taken. If one must frame this discussion in the language of rights, then it is the right to determine what can and cannot be a model of realisation that must first be obtained. The lesson the Zapatistas have passed on to us is that we should start with government itself!

7. Undecidable propositions

The Left’s response to Seattle and Porto Alegre has been mixed, ranging from the fervent enthusing of anarchists like David Graeber to the cooler considerations of Michael Hardt. These two positions, which by no means exhaust the range of responses or even map out its extremes, typify the two dominant kinds of responses Seattle and Porto Alegre have been met with: either their sheer existence is enough, or more organisation is needed to really make things change. How would Deleuze and Guattari respond? One can speculate that Deleuze and Guattari would have approved, perhaps with a few reservations concerning fascist reterritorialisation as they did May 68. The anarchism evident in Seattle would no doubt have pleased them too. As is evident in their remarks on “Saturation”, Deleuze and Guattari do not view the potential development “of a worldwide labour bureaucracy or technocracy” as an improvement on capitalism. Indeed, they list it as a danger to be warded off by focusing on precise and highly localised struggles.

There is no consensus on what to call the flashpoints of dissent we associate metonymically with Seattle and Porto Alegre - the media-applied label ‘anti-globalisation movement’ has stuck, despite being an obvious misnomer (these movements are global in their outlook and in their range of concerns and make use of all the available globalising technology at their disposal). But as Emir Sader puts it, new formations are difficult to recognise in the new contexts they create for themselves (as Borges might have said, revolutionaries like all great artists create their own precursors) and to continue to try to read them against the background of former movements misses the point of their very existence. The overwhelming complaint about Porto Alegre is that it is difficult to see how it will coordinate its efforts. By contrast, following Deleuze and Guattari, we might equally argue that it is their lack of organisation and their spreading of disorganisation that capitalism cannot tolerate - what it wants is for dissent to be organised. Turtles and Teamsters was the catchcry of the ‘Battle in Seattle’. It summarises Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis concerning the revolutionary: connections not conjugations: “Every struggle is a function of all these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic.”

As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in their report on the ‘Battle in Seattle’, it was a triumph despite what latter-day doomsayers said in the months that followed the ‘five days that shook the world’ (November 28, 1999 to December 3) because it placed the protesters’ “issues squarely on the national and indeed global political agenda”. Until then international trade meetings were relatively inconspicuous affairs whose agenda were reported, if it at all, in the dry tones of
economists. After Seattle, this changed. The first casualty was their physical invisibility - following Seattle meetings of WTO, IMF, NAFTA, WEC and so on became extremely high profile. Subsequent meetings in Washington, Prague, Genoa and Melbourne, were similarly disrupted, though none nearly so effectively as in Seattle. The security forces learned from Seattle and spent up big. DC spent $1 million in new riot equipment and $5 million in overtime to secure the city for the April 2000 meeting of the IMF and the World Bank. Unlike Seattle, the protesters weren’t able to
halt the meeting much less shut the city done. Yet in its own way this was a victory for the protesters because the cost of providing security at these meetings escalated so much that it became almost impossible to contemplate staging them. By the same token, the meetings did not continue to go unanswered: the World Social Forum being the most important response. Most importantly, though, the agenda of these trade talks ceased to be reported and indeed thought about in purely economic terms - the economic gained a face and a body. The axiomatic was shown to be the cruel, callous system that it is and though this did not bring it to a halt it created a landscape in which hitherto silenced minorities could begin to pose new problems.

As Cockburn and St Clair acknowledge, the effects of the ‘Battle in Seattle’ can be compared to the long summer of the ‘events of May’. “You can take the state by surprise only once or twice in a generation. May/June, 1968, took the French state by surprise. The French state then took very good care not to have that unpleasant experience repeated. The same reaction by the state’s security apparat happened after Seattle, which represented a terrible humiliation on a global stage for the US government.” The heady optimism of this activist moment which stretched from late November 1999 to September 2001 is difficult to recollect in the present era, and that is perhaps the most damaging effect of the collapse of the Twin Towers. As John Sellers, the director of Ruckus Society, one of the more active organisations present in Seattle, commented: “People all over the world were so inspired by Seattle, partly because it was the most heavily televised protest in history […] but also because most people had no idea that there was real dissent here in the United States. But when they saw tens of thousands of people in the streets, and the facade of democracy peel away to reveal the armed storm troopers with shields, grenades and gas, wielding chemical weapons against unarmed crowds, it really drove home the fact that there are all kinds of different opinions in this country, and that there can be a true, sweeping social movement in the United States.” Since 9/11, however, such molecularising images of political dissent have effectively vanished; to be replaced by the molarity of mourning.

What is most striking about the global mood change is that whereas the images of US brutality towards its own citizens was shocking in 1999, they now seem pallid in the face of its brutality towards the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that isn’t quite right either because it misses the fact that then it was still possible to think in terms of police action as a violation of civil liberties. And although they had already taken a severe belting during the so-called war on drugs which peaked under self-confessed pot-smokers Clinton and Gore, civil liberties are suffering an even greater thrashing under Bush in the name of homeland security. The images of Seattle were also shocking because, as Cockburn and St. Clair point out, it gave the world its first glimpse of America’s highly militarised police force. Visored black helmets, kevlar body-armour and assault rifles replaced the thin blue line as the image of peaceableness, which is as eloquent a testimony to the change in temperature of the times as one could hope for. A Cold War abroad and Hot War at home.

Conclusion

The San Francisco based ‘gathering of antagonists to capital and empire’, Retort, have argued that the invasion of Iraq can only be properly understood in light of the ‘Battle in Seattle’ and, more especially, the troubling display of third world insubordination at Doha and Cancún where “an in-house insurgency of 20 nations refused to endorse the massive US-EU subsidies to North Atlantic agriculture and the WTO rules crafted to prevent the South from protecting itself.” Commentators who have drawn comparisons between the second Gulf War and the Vietnam War generally do
so on the basis of outcomes, real and predicted. The lack of gratitude on the part of the liberated Iraqis and their failure to spontaneously Americanise coupled with uncontrolled insurgency in most parts of the country has led many to mutter the fateful word long associated with Vietnam, namely ‘quagmire’. To put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the US, but by this one really means the entire integrated being of First World capital, has been thrust up against a limit-point. The whole world is holding its breath waiting to see if it is a real or absolute limit …

References
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Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

available at http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalismus

LAP TALK 05: leftbusinessobserver.com

2005-05-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 7th of June 2005 LAP TALK - broadcasted on tv-tv Copenhagen Channel, as part of the "Chamber of Public Secrets" fortnightly hour - presented the website www.leftbusinessobserver.com.

LBO si the project of a journalist and media producer, Doug Henwood, an editor and publisher who run a printed journal with the same title and hosts a weekly radio programme on WBAI in New York.

The journal and the radio programme deal with the American business world, not in terms of their economic profitability, rather questioning and "measuring" them in terms of ethical involvement, political stances, transparency and social consequences of their activities.

In the pages of the journal, as well as during the radio shows (which are stored in a huge audio archive accessible online for free) Doug Henwood interviews and discuss various themes with politician, economists, activists, thinkers and media producers, raising questions concerned with crime, war crisis, geography of wealth and poverty, social issues currently at stakes, distribution of resources and accessibility, worldwide speaking and not confined to the American world.

In short, this one-man-project is worth to be considered as one important alternative voice regarding the political, economical and social commitment to deliver an alternative worldview.

more about LBO www.leftbusinessobserber.com
more about Chamber of Public Secrets www.cps.1go.dk
more about tv-tv (in Danish) www.tv-tv.dk

Helen Varley Jamieson: How re:mote am I?

2005-05-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

From: Helen Varley Jamieson
How remote am I?

What does it mean to be remote in an electronic art world? This was one of the questions posed by re:mote (http://www.remote.org.nz), a gathering of digital artists and theorists in Auckland, Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) on 19 March 2005. Held in a geographically remote country, the event was an opportunity for local
wired artists to meet face-to-face as well as an invitation to ponder the meaning of "remote" in the 21st century.

Re:mote was an event by and for artists, organised by r a d i o q u a l i a (http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au/) and ((ethermap (http://www.ethermap.org/). The first in a series of one-day experimental festivals, it was run "on the smell of an oily rag" (as we say here) and made possible in part by Adam Hyde's residency at
the University of Waikato. Questions posed by the organizers included: are there 'centres' and 'peripheries' within a world increasingly bridged, criss-crossed and mapped by digital technologies? Can technologically mediated communication ever be a
substitute for face-to-face dialogue? Is geographical isolation a factor in contemporary art production? Is remote a relative concept?

Fourteen presentations from new media art practitioners and theorists in Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand were squeezed into eight hours and ranged from a cozy midnight feast in Finland to a glimpse of the expansive Antarctic wilderness, and from musings on information from outer space to the virtual escape of a death row
prisoner. Various methods were employed to connect remote (as opposed to re:mote) participants with those at the Auckland venue - the Elam School of Fine Arts lecture theatre. A live MP3 audio stream enabled the off-site audience to hear everything from the venue, and they could communicate through a text chat which was also used to convey an impression of what they couldn't see. QuickTime, Skype, IRC, iChatAV, iVisit and the Palace were among the applications used in different presentations.

The international speakers were scheduled first to accommodate their time zones, with Steve Kovats and Graham Smith from Rotterdam kicking things off. Visible via web cam, their presentation nicely illustrated their discussion on how telecommunication transforms the concept of distance from space to time. They were in the dark of Friday night, while we in Auckland were well into a sunny Saturday. Also still in Friday night and dressed in her best pyjamas, Sophea Lerner (an Australian new media theorist and artist currently studying in Helsinki) tucked into a midnight feast while elaborating on the promises and assumptions of remote communication. She proposed that the most interesting thing about a remote location is not the remoteness, but the location. This contrasted with the previous presentation's focus on time as the distancing element rather than space or location. Any location, whether it's the heart of a teeming metropolis or an empty beach in southern Aotearoa, can be remote when you're outside it, rendering it exotic, intriguing and desirable. It's the differences, rather than distances, that make a "remote" location interesting - and the unexpected similarities.

Lerner also addressed the concept of peripherality and how one can experience being peripheral in many different places, depending on one's perspective of the "centre". Finland may appear peripheral to Europe, but from the New Zealand perspective it's almost in the middle of that centre. Contemporary politics place Europe and North
America in the centre, but as the power balance shifts that centre may relocate to Asia or even cyberspace. Today's technologies release us from the geographical definition of centre, creating globally dispersed "peripheral centres" and "central peripheries". Technology has penetrated even the periphery of Antarctica, as shown by Phil Dadson's presentation about his recent artist's residency there. A looping video of his shadow crunching across the endless white landscape, broken only by the bones of some unfortunate beast, removed not only all sense of place but also time. The simple act of filming his shadow on the ice placed Dadson at the centre of a peripheral environment.

Japanese radio pioneer and artist Tetsuo Kogawa spoke about technology and the body and gave a history of Mini FM, a project which aimed to tactically deregulate the Japanese airwaves by teaching people how to create and broadcast from their own free radio stations. During the 1970s and 80s, Kogawa held radio parties in Tokyo apartments where he taught people to build transmitters, broadcasting from the domestic periphery to the centre of the airwaves. Footage from these events reveal the political act of taking ones own space on the airwaves as also entertaining and
community-building. His goal was to use radio technology not as a substitute for face-to-face communication but as a means to bring people together and to propose political and social alternatives. During re:mote, Kogawa also gave an audio performance and the following day led a mini FM transmitter building workshop.

Pre-recorded appearances were made by New Zealander Sally Jane Norman, who has lived in Europe since the 1970s, and Zina Kaye from Australia, who discussed her project "The Line Ahead", which gathers data from airports to create LED signs in a gallery. Sally Jane Norman began with pre-internet architectures of performance, asking
how physical gesture can invest digital space, and described the remote manipulation of space probes as "advanced puppeteering". Achieving physicality within digital spaces alters the concept of remoteness; how remote am I if, from Aotearoa/New Zealand, I can physically move an object on the moon? Both air and space travel
create bridges between centres and peripheries, destroying the relative remoteness of New Zealand in the space of a few hours and offering instead the greater remoteness of outer space.

The trials and tribulations of remote collaboration were addressed by a number of presenters including myself, Zina Kaye and Trudy Lane. Zina had encountered some difficulties in working with technicians located elsewhere, while Trudy's ongoing collaboration with mi2 in Zagreb (on the online magazine ART-e-FACT) works smoothly. Physically meeting your remote collaborators may make some things easier, but it's also possible to work successfully without meeting, as demonstrated by Avatar Body Collision. This work was presented by Leena Saarinen (in Finland), Vicki Smith (in NZ's South Island) and myself at the venue. Our greatest difficulty is in finding times when the four of us can be online together for rehearsals, but the advantages are many. We taste each others' geographical and social locations and are telematically transported from our peripheral homes to the centres of arts festivals and conferences. Returning to one of the questions posed by re:mote - Can technologically mediated communication ever be a substitute for face-to-face dialogue? - during four years of artistic collaboration, Leena Saarinen and I have never met, so technologically mediated communication is an excellent and necessary substitute for face-to-face. Our "remote" relationship is as real and valuable as if we had met, so how remote are we?

The variety of local presentations given during the afternoon illustrated the diversity of concepts of "remote": a web site about a fictional nation state; universal nomadism and the generic city; "glocalisation"; and a multi-locational artistic picnic were among the projects discussed (for more information on all presentations see www.remote.org.nz). While these presenters were all New Zealanders living in New Zealand, their presentations had connections all over the globe - Lithuania, Croatia, Amsterdam, the USA. As an artist in the electronic world, living in an isolated location doesn't mean
that your work must be of that location. There will always be some degree of local perspective, but sources and context are often global; this combination of local and global is "glocalisation".

Live improvised audio performances were given by Tennis (London) in the morning, and at the end of the day by Tetsuo Kogawa, Adam Hyde and Adam Willetts. Tennis (Ben Edwards and Doug Benford) performed with a web cam showing them seated at their computers. As our off-site audience could only hear the audio stream, I provided them
with a commentary of what we could see on the screen in the IRC chat. This created another level to the performance, and an extrapolation of remoteness: I was interpreting and relaying my visual observation of an audio performance back to a twice-removed audience, some of whom were in the same country as the performers and on the other side of the world from me. For the Auckland audience in the same room as
me, I and my commentary became a part of the performance as well - yet the performers themselves were not aware of this. Thus at least three different performances were taking place: the audio performance given by Tennis; the sound, text and images experienced in the venue in Auckland; and the online version, consisting of sound and text. Reading the chat log several weeks after the event, the remoteness doubles again - comments on now unheard sounds and descriptions of vanished images are like shadows cast by an invisible body. This fascinating unplanned metamorphosis was a result of the event and our various layers of remoteness. A briefer but related "performance" had occurred earlier in the day when Adam Hyde and James Stevens were
speaking over Skype, but James had left his computer speakers on, generating an echo loop that took on an unstoppable life of its own.

My personal experience of re:mote was bound up with the technologies, both in my presentation (using the Palace and iVisit) and in my role at the keyboard as a "chat wrangler", delivering commentary to the off-site audience. The off-site audience's responses to my descriptions of the visuals and the audio stream they were hearing
are preserved in the chat log and offer a surreal perspective on the day. Once again, re:mote was answering its own questions, as the chat substituted face-to-face communication reasonably effectively and rolled our individual peripheries into the centre.

As someone who communicates and collaborates remotely on a daily basis, I always value the opportunity to work and collaborate in the same physical space with others. Creating such gatherings in far off places like Aotearoa/New Zealand is especially important, as sometimes we're so busy worrying about what's going on in the rest of
the world that we overlook the wealth of activity happening locally. How remote are we when we know what our colleagues in New York, Amsterdam or Belgrade are doing but we don't know what's going on in Dunedin or Wanganui? Our perceived remoteness is embedded in the identity of the people of this small, distant and relatively
insignificant country, and fuels a need to be a part of the wider world to counter this feeling of isolation. Yet one of the ideas that came through strongly during re:mote was the possibility to feel peripheral in any situation, and the individual relativity of a myriad of centres and peripheries which are now becoming bridged,
mapped and interconnected by digital technologies.

Congratulations and thanks to Adam Hyde, Honor Harger, Adam Willetts and Zita Joyce for making re:mote happen; it was an intense, enjoyable and thought-provoking day. The second re:mote has just taken place, in Regina, Canada - unfortunately I was "remote" in the sense of being offline while on holiday so I was unable to attend,
but I'm told it went well. Documentation of both events should soon be online at www.remote.org.nz, and I'm looking forward to re:mote 3.

www.remote.org.nz
http://www.soilmedia.org/remote/
http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au/
http://www.ethermap.org/

LAP TALK 04: nettime.org

2005-05-16T04:57:00.000-07:00

New appointment with LAP TALK, part of the "Chamber of Public Secrets" programme on tv-tv Copenhagen Channel.

Tuesday 10th of May 2005 we introduced nettime.org, a valuable source of discussion and critical reviews on politics, cultural issues, net and street activism, telecommunication and media policies, and social and political issues like copyright/copyleft, education, cyberfeminism.

Nettime is a vast network of people posting and hosting web space from different parts of the world, mainly in connection with media labs, educational departments, and artist' run spaces. It comprises 8 different mailing lists, the first and main one initiated some 10 years ago, and then expanded to "sister" online forums published in different languages (Dutch, French, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian).

The network of people gathered around nettime.org are also editing and publishing different books and publications, available online to download for free, on the same issues: they are a digest and compilation of the more valuable interventions and discussions.

nettime.org is a sort of alternative platform of communication which requires a bit of time, first to "get used" to the language that critics and opinionists are using, and secondly as it takes some commitment to materially read the information sent by email, though after a while one refines the skills of "scanning" and "prioritizing" the articles, according to her/his own interests. Any subscriber can reply and post comments or write her/his own thoughts that will be slightly moderated by a changing group of people, and become so part and expand a notion of public sphere through debate. Which is the most valuable aspect of a project like nettime.org

more about nettime www.nettime.org
more about Chamber of Public Secrets www.cps.1go.dk
more about tv-tv (in Danish) www.tv-tv.dk

Marisa S. Olson: Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural Analysis

2005-05-16T04:15:00.000-07:00

Conference Report:
Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural Analysis
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit von Amsterdam
by Marisa S. Olson

The Sonic Interventions Conference was described by its organizers, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, as an interdisciplinary conference "dedicated to exploring the cultural practices, aesthetics, technologies, and ways of conceptualizing sound, noise, and silence".

One might imagine that this is an enormous topic, just as enormous as attempting to categorize something as pervasive as light, with which sound is frequently lumped. Taking the example of a panel discussion on the radio, consider the differences between discussing the radio in domestic life in the 1920s and the entire cultural history of the police radio. Interesting connections emerged and, yet, there was not enough time to address them in a single panel. And, of course, these are just fractional aspects of radio history, and of sound, writ large.

The conference was driven by a large number of such concurrent panel sessions, which tended to foreclose the possibility of any two conference-goers having a "common experience", or of a consistent discourse emerging. The organizers also asked speakers to limit their presentations to ten minutes, rather than the standard twenty, in order to be more conducive to conversation among the thinly-spread audience.

Despite the structural obstacles and the broad topic, Sonic Interventions managed to play host to a number of interesting presentations. Though a wide net was cast in the call for proposals, inviting artists and engineers to contribute, in addition to the typical range of academic papers, the program ultimately skewed in the direction of the academy. Sonic Interventions, then, became an opportunity to survey some of the more interesting contemporary humanities research related to sound.

Keynote speaker Douglas Kahn was among the better-known sound theorists present and his opening talk provided an art historical backdrop for the next four days of discussion. In lieu of discussing sound art, Kahn actually discussed artistic research into states of soundlessness. In a reprise of his catalogue essay for the Son et Lumiere show at the Pompidou, Kahn discussed John Cage's and James Turrell's notions of "silence", and perception in general. Discussing the former's visit to an anechoic chamber and the latter¹s emulation of such a space, Kahn began to outline a phenomenology of corporeal sound; one concerned with the difference between perceiving the sounds of the body (of the blood flow, or even of thought) as interior or exterior events that is, whether the sounds of the body¹s systems or the retinal changes experienced in a transition to darkness, would be read as coming from the self or as environmentally specific to the anechoic chamber.

Kahn's arguments find extension into the realms of site-specificity and composition, of course, but also 1960s military research and counter-cultural resistance, or the ever-slippery relationship between light and sound, as manifest through shades of withdrawal and hallucination. This approach roach echoed the ethos of the overall conference, made evident in ASCA's CFP, which stated, "Sound is a mental impression, a penetrating sensation, a transmitted disturbance that may be structured or chaotic, narrative or non-narrative, organic or technologically produced, communicative, and even politically charged".

Despite the vagaries of the call (which were, admittedly, posited in a gesture towards inclusion and diversity), Kahn's specific approach became an apt backdrop for the ensuing days of Sonic Interventions. The overall intent of the conference was to not only define what constitutes sound or silence, but what historic discourses and ideological models of value have been associated with those definitions.

A glance at the conference program reveals that all of the following stood as specimens in the study of sound: music (of many genres, era, and areas), the spoken word (also of many genres, era, and areas), radio, noise (political, mental, static, dynamic), the sound of writing, silence (as in "the silent arts", anechoism, "queer silence", and beyond), orality, the voice, what the dead would say if they could, what the subaltern would say if they could, the soundscape, instruments, recording and playback technology, the broadcast and its political economy, field recordings, sound memories, sound trauma, and the ecology of sonic waste, among others.

Punctuated by performances by Mary Flanagan and Jay Needham were presentations under the heading of four continuous themes: Sound and the Moving Image & Sound Technologies and Cultural Change; The Sonic in the Silent/ Arts and Bring in the Noise; Silences/Orality; and Soundscapes: Sound, Space, and the Body & Sound Practices and Events. In the interest of time and space, I will present the best or most interesting panels from each heading.

Under the first category, which considered sound in relationship to the moving image, technology, and cultural change, there was an interesting meeting of Cageian theory and pop aestheticism, brought about by Seda Ergul, Jaël Kraut, and Luke Stickels. Kraut's approach to reading Cage's notion of silence, and the means of "defeating" it, sounded almost staid in comparison with Ergul's paper on "Cageian Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or Stickels¹s, on "Violence versus Silence: exploding binaries in Hana Bi". The three bounced nicely off each other, while proving that a flimsy definition of silence could be profitable in its potential for widespread application.

The second category, "The Sonic in the Silent/ Arts and Bring in the Noise" seemed to yield some of the most interesting, if diverse presentations. The title of the category sounds like a collision between ancient philosophy and a contemporary Broadway musical. Nonetheless, conference attendees with an openness to such "accidents" could find themselves presently surprised, as I was in attending a panel of a literary bent. Hannah Bosma, Alix Mazuet, and John M. Picker did an excellent job in excavating the polyvalent "sounds" with which literature is infused, ranging from rattling in one's head space to the scratchy scrawling of ecriture, to the narrative representation of aurality. Where Bosma opened with an elucidation on "Different Noises", Mazuet and Picker looked at Victorian-era instanciations of them. Picker compared the latter to contemporary urban noise problems.

Pulling at a similarly literary thread, under the heading of "Silences/Orality", Greg Esplin, Maria Boletsi, David Copenhafer, and_Zachary Sifuentes plunged into canonical texts by Melville, Conrad, Kafka, and Eliot. Each presented studies of characters and contexts in which the cacophony of an encroaching modernity is "heard". The panel was
interesting in that each presenter took a very specifically-angled approach to looking at issues with which many media theorists are currently concerned. These include the notions of private/public, or privacy/publicity; the relationship of the part to the whole (be it a character in a book, and individual in a society, or a cog in a wheel); and modes of distribution and broadcast. Discourses of power, be it individual agency or the apprehensively aligned electrical power, were understatedly
present, and the entire conversation was "enlightening".

Finally, under the fourth broad category, "Soundscapes: Sound, Space, and the Body & Sound Practices and Events", Ros Bandt, Ching Fang Chiang, and Pieter Verstraete comprised the panel most oriented toward contemporary art. This very international group looked at variations on installation art ranging from large museum works to smaller-scale immersive works, to Janet Cardiff's "audio walks". The panelists performed close-readings of sonic aspects of the works, which could also have been inspected under the lens of the previous topics. In particular, the thread of modernity (surprisingly more so than postmodernity) permeated the majority of the conference presentations and the aforementioned tenets of this discourse particularly
the distinction between the personal and the public were uniquely embodied by the art works discussed here.

Elsewhere under the "Soundscape" category, Julian Henriques presented a paper, entitled "The Reggae Sound System: Music, Culture and Technology," which in a certain sense represented the best synthesis of all of the conference themes: comparing sensorial and political notions of sound and silence, tracing diasporic and ideological roots and metaphorically equating them with root objects in an evolving musicology, and tracing the simultaneous evolution of recording technology and its relationships to the sound it plays and the people who hear it.

In the end, were one to draw any one conclusion about the Sonic Interventions conference, it might be that "sound theory" is currently finding room to "intervene" in other humanistic studies. For better or for worse, this all-encompassing conference worked less to establish sound as a category in its own right (as one will recall was once done for film studies and new media, in the conferences of yore) than to posit is as a useful, if intricate, gloss upon other areas of enquiry.

http://www.hum.uva.nl/asca/object.cfm/objectID=63151C88-6DD8-4960-A6BC779404
1A49D5

LAP TALK 03: memefest.org

2005-05-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

Third appointment with Lap Talk on tv-tv: Tuesday 12 April 2005, introducing memefest 05.

What is memefest?
It is an annual festival of radical communications that is now four years old. It happens totally online. The idea behind is that "positive" ideas - memes - can and should spread just as easily as "negative" and commercial ones. But this can't happen out of nowhere; and so, every year, the organizers ask students, artists, graphic designers, activists, and anyone with an interest in counter-culture to put their talents to good use. They can choose to submit works to one of our four categories: communication studies, sociology, visual arts, and Beyond..., open to students and non-students alike.

The text for the communication and sociology category is an excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff's "Nowhere to Hide", which deals with the subversive attempts of advertisers to stay "one step ahead" of even the most conscious (and cynical) consumer. The text for visual arts and Beyond... is "The People's Communication Charter", an insistent proclamation for an utopian society where all citizens have equal access to communication.

The jury for all four categories comprises world-renowned scholars, artists, and devoted activists. Beside traditional Jury members like art critic, activist and translator Brian Holmes and Adbusters' producer and art director Paul Shoebridge, new additions this year include Chris Habib, photographer and designer, co-founder of Protest Records, Claire Pentecost, who runs the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund and new media artist and multimedia essayist Giselle Beiguelman.

The contest is run completely online and all the required texts and registration can be found on the memefest website.

Why is it so interesting?
Because it offers a) a counter-use of marketing strategies, not devoted to sell or build desires, rather to put those skills to inform, spread ideas, and communicate; and b) for the practical advises one can find online on how to use free software to build a website, how to design a poster to get your idea out in very simple steps, how to create and disseminate a stickers-campaign, etc.

It offers a platform not only to reflect on certain processes and logics of our society, but also it make realizable counter-measures.

more about memefest
more about Chamber of Public Secrets
more about tv-tv (in Danish)

Smriti Vohra: In Bagdadh, Dreaming of Cairo

2005-04-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

Essay Review of 'Reimagining the Public Domain' by David Lange

This article is also available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/66LCPLange

The author is Professor of Law, Duke University. A preliminary footnote to the article declares: "Copyright in this work is hereby disclaimed and abandoned."

Paolo Coelho's bestselling book /The Alchemist/ presents the (ironic) notion that one can wander in delusion all over the world in search of whatever one is looking for, or the fulfillment of a need, when in actuality everything one requires is right where one is, within easy reach, in one's own life and thinking. The core idea of Coelho's narrative, which continues to be cited as a modern masterpiece of inspirational literature, is strikingly similar to a long Sufi parable in Jalaluddin Rumi's /Masnavi, /titled 'In Baghdad, dreaming of Cairo: in Cairo, dreaming of Baghdad'. It presents the idea of a man who goes on a journey seeking the buried treasure he saw in a dream.

Such a linking of texts in the mind of the reader may be purely hypothetical, but it proves how conditioned we are to established notions of authorship and "transformative appropriations", to borrow a term from the essay reviewed here. David Lange seeks to redefine the public domain and examine its relations with creativity, imagination and rights. He categorically states that he wants the public domain, however it may be defined, to secure the "elemental aspirations" that are innate
to human beings: 'to think and to imagine, to remember and to appropriate, to play and to create'. He acknowledges that the term 'public domain' is elastic and inexact, and can be perhaps most usefully seen as a commons, set off against fences that "delimit the interests of individual rights holders"; this definition is invaluable for the purposes of imagining a politics of the commons that structures the operations of cyberspace.

Thus, the public domain contests the "expansionism" of intellectual property regimes, which are "boundary-fixing" encroachments upon the imagination, and a means of extracting payment for creativity and creative expression.

Lange demands a radical re-conceptualisation and reconfiguration of the public domain itself. It has to be envisioned as autonomous, having an affirmative existence of its own, and strengthened accordingly. "Reform" of the public domain is not enough: there should be "revolution". We are urged to envision the public domain "as if it were a status like citizenship, but a citizenship arising from the exercise of creative
imagination rather than as a concomitant of birth". This citizenship confers protection, not merely recognition or definition. The public domain should be understood as an affirmative source of entitlements capable of "deployment" as, when and where required, against encroachments upon the creative imagination by intellectual property regimes.

According to Lange, imagination and its parameters form the central focus, reach and scope of the public domain. He asks whether "imagination" is distinct from "action", quoting from an article by Jed Rubenfeld in the /Yale Law Journal/: "The freedom of imagination demands that people be free to exercise their imagination. It is not a freedom to do what one imagines." Violence, intentional misrepresentation, misinformation, do not qualify. Additionally, when copyright law bars simple piracy, it does not punish infringers for exercising their imagination. It punishes them for failing to exercise their imagination--for failing to add any imaginative content to the copied material. By Rubenfeld's standard, peer-to-peer filesharing in the Napster mode does not qualify as an exercise of imagination, but Lange feels that it does indeed, and moreover, does so in a "substantial" manner.

He also says that creativity and appropriation are "as inseparable as creativity and memory"; in his opinion, "they should remain so, at whatever cost may follow to whatever other belief systems (including copyright) may thus be obliged to stand aside".Copyright is omnipresent, and is also correspondingly over-extended. It is "fundamentally wrong" to insist that children internalise the proprietary and moral values of the copyright system, as proprietary values inevitably encroach upon the
formation and growth of creativity in young minds. He cites the example of Helen Keller, whose early efforts at creative self-expression were damaged "irreparably" by accusations of plagiarism (regarding a story she had composed) leveled against her by her mentor Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, that Keller attended.

Lange discusses copyright and the doctrine of fair use in terms of what he calls "transformative" or "creative" appropriations, reminding us that there may always be some level of functional and aesthetic "equivalency" between two works. Creative appropriations require affirmative protections. He defines piracy as "an appropriation unmotivated by any creative exercise, including an exercise of the
creative imagination".

Somewhat ambiguously, he defines appropriation as "creative" (and thereby qualifying as an exercise of the creative imagination) "when we see in it the qualities or attributes we recognise in conceptual art of any kind".

Lange concludes his essay by citing the example of a poem by Anne Frank, written in Amsterdam to her friend Henny on the occasion of the latter's birthday party in 1940: "Dear Henny / Pluck roses on earth / and forget me not." It was later discovered that this poem appeared to have been "appropriated" verbatim from an anthology of poetry widely available in the Netherlands at that time. Lange asks if, by the standards of
contemporary copyright doctrines, Anne Frank could be classified as a creator, an author, a plagiarist, a pirate, a thief. He declares that it is wrong for copyright to intrude into private lives, wrong to measure creativity by the standards of copyright. He states unequivocally that it is wrong to lay impediments (moral, intellectual, legal) before exercises of the imagination, "whether great or small". We have to ensure that proprietary modes do not "rob us of this vital aspect of our
citizenship: the right to think as we please and to speak as we think".

Maya Khankhoje, Vinita Ramani, Julian Samuel: "Save and Burn"

2005-04-20T03:26:00.000-07:00

"Save and Burn" 80:34, NTSC, 2004. A documentary by Julian Samuel.

Introduction by Maya Khankhoje:

"Save and Burn" is a compelling commentary on the world of libraries as well as a compressed history of their importance from the days of the ancient Sumerians -credited with inventing writing to save administrative records- to current day Iraq, where people, along with libraries, are the victims of massive burning and destruction. It is also a dispassionate analysis of the role of libraries as repositories of historical notions of the self and a passionate cri de coeur against the systematic annihilation of such notions, such as the gradual strangulation of Palestinian identity. If the juxtaposition of placid images of libraries where silence reigns with images of armed conflict in Israel/Palestine and Iraq strikes the viewer as jarring at first, upon reflection, one realizes that it is not the images that jar, but reality itself. Why burn books? Alongside countless human beings? If not to reduce the truth to ashes? Moreover, such contrasting imagery speaks to the need for librarians to take to the streets to defend their privilege to
continue to house the patrimony of humanity.

Vinita Ramani and Julian Samuel discuss "Save and Burn"

VR: Broadly-speaking, 'The Library in Crisis' dealt with bibliocide (a term used by Ian McLachlan) and the increasing digitization of texts - in a sense, the "crises" referred to in the title. 'Save and Burn' has honed in on a more specific issue: the systematic preservation and destruction of knowledge/texts. What do you see as the trajectory from the first documentary to the second?

JS: I didn't plan a trajectory, but there is a trajectory which I'll tell you about a few lines down...I write a documentary treatment after reading many books on a particular subject and then approach funders. After a few rejections I get a tiny budget on which to live and produce.

VR: So then do you at see documentary films having some effect on our understanding of history and politics?

JS: Documentaries, on their own, accomplish nothing politically; they record symptoms. If they could change an understanding of reality, and how to act, then why haven't they had any large-scale progressive effect on society? Despite the making of many critical documentaries, the economic right and the religious right are hitting us in coercive ways. Rent control and the Magna Carta all down the drain, and it's all Michael Moore's fault.

VR: There's an intellectual density in both your documentaries that is quite different or lacking in the new wave of "activist" films that have emerged off-late (since 2000 and the WTO protests, in particular).

JS: Someone has to make dense documentaries - otherwise we'd all be making documentaries like The Corporation, Bowling for Columbine et al ad naseum which are visually fun, easy and comic, but analytically as deep as a fried Mars Bar. The directors offers no criticism of Caterpillar Corp and its support of Israel, for instance.

VR: While you hint at the great intellectual traditions of Asia and Africa, the
documentary is very much focused on libraries in Europe, or the "west".

JS: Sadly, much is missing from Save and Burn (2004). My excuse is that they didn't give me much money. It would have been useful to have included in-depth discussions from other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia, libraries in the Arctic and Antarctica. This would have filled in all the geo-bibliographic holes. And, it would have been great to shoot all the pretty books in grain-less 35mm. A visual exploration (in IMAX) of the 13th century wood printing blocks at the The Temple of Haeinsa would have been enriching.

However, I think that with Save and Burn I have provided classical linkages between the master races and the others: England and Ireland; Palestine and America; America and Iraq. I have not explored the role between libraries in the Mediterranean region and their impact on the development of this one-sided democracy in Europe. The documentary makes the links between empire and knowledge institutions apparent. The trajectory from Save and Burn is now a documentary on Atheism. Will George Soras please help me? I only want a millionth of his wealth.

VR: Alistair Black (Leeds Metropolitan University) and John Feather identify the specific relationship between libraries and the advent of modernity, in how the growth of the individual or "self" was integral to the Enlightenment project. But Black identifies the controlling aspects of libraries as well: they are bureaucracies par excellence. This is a tension present throughout the film (freedom and control in relation to knowledge). Is this a specifically western experience?

JS: Modernity? What's that? Save and Burn's slowly leads us to the following kinds of question: Is western democracy falling apart in the eyes of everyone else? Western democracy - with its legal trade rules and legally sanctioned moral values in place - is transparently terrorizing resources out of vast areas of the world.

Lefty documentary film-makers try to get answers from experts in order to produce an abridged yet wide version of history and politics. And, unfortunately, documentaries produce culturalists who know the world's problems but can only vote in a certain way; go to demonstrations; have political discussions at supper time, and buy samosas on solidarity nights. I won't put you in a cultural studies coma by doing a Chomskian repetition of what's wrong with the world, don't worry.

VR: Save and Burn also touches upon contrasts/tensions in relation to perceptions of class and access to knowledge. Alistair Black is skeptical of the claim that the working classes benefited from libraries: he says they were rarely the constituency that used libraries. You juxtapose this with Irish author Declan Kiberd's resoundingly positive perception that libraries for the Irish, were and are almost utopian spaces, following the 19th century reading room tradition, where issues in the community can be debated, read about, shared. What is the intention of these juxtapositions?

JS: It would appear that I have a sociological reflex - inducted during schooling.

VR: Nevertheless, the humor aside, you are suggesting something with these recurring discussions on freedom, democracy and access to knowledge.

JS: What's the conclusion? Libraries actually produce a knowledge of how to practice democracy at home and export terror abroad; this is one obvious, preliminary conclusion. The current-day British labour party members all have a knowledge of social democracy because of the libraries they used - packed to the gills with English Marxism and even more flashy Euro-Marxism. Many of them were arrested for protesting during the last century.

The center of the documentary are the comments on the catalogue. The library catalogue controls access to sections of knowledge. The techno-culturalist and historical discussion in the beginning of Save and Burn takes us to the destruction of the library catalogue in Palestine. Here, western democracy falls to bits. The, Palestinians, as people everywhere, see through western democracy's terror-laden values.

VR: Save and Burn also reveals a strong relationship between history and libraries. Alarmingly, we can no longer speak of historiography if, as Tom Twiss (Govt. Information Librarian, Pittsburgh), Isam al Khafaji (ex-advisor to US forces in Iraq) and Erling Bergan collectively identify how Iraqi libraries/museums are being systematically burnt and destroyed, books are not reaching Palestinian libraries. History is being altered by what is saved and what is burnt. What is the future then, from your perspective? How does one respond to these "cultural war crimes" as Ross Shimmon points out?

JS: The future? Most documentary film-makers are non-experts who are in one way or another looking for answers to advance a general knowledge which will lead to criticism, action, Eden. Viewers should understand that film-makers put viewers in the precarious position of trusting the film-maker who usually are non-experts in the areas they are documenting. The questions encompassed by Save and Burn are posed by a non-expert. I have tried to offer in-depth knowledge of libraries across many voices.

The conclusion of the documentary asks: Western democracies are encouraging Israel and other places (via innocent tax payers in Austin, Warlingham, and Canberra) to do one illegal thing after the next. The mad search for weapons of mass hypnosis is like the search for God itself. Many people at the other end of American foreign policy see nothing "western" nor "democratic" but see hypocrisy personified in various heads of states. You should have heard the analysis the shoe-shine man in Cairo gave me about 911.

So what political models can 'they' out there look for? Can they make an economically competitive state via an investment in Islamic or non-western values? More questions for an expert. The idea of investing in western democratic values is exhausted, not simply because western democracy is so easy to see through but because democracy, give or take a Patriot Act or two, is structured fundamentally to supply a bit of democracy at home while fully financing dictators and their armies the world over.

Tjebbe van Tijen: Radiodays in De Appel = Artistic Amnesia or Arrogance?

2005-04-19T06:21:00.000-07:00

... I decided to post this text also on Nettime (the original posting
was on the Dutch sister Nettime-nl). As I can read from the reaction of Jill Magid to the message of J. Kreutzfeldt...... the argumentation is now narrowed down to the issue of doing radio with official permission (or not)...

I myself do not see this as the most problematic part... just a side issue... it is the total neglect of blooming alternative media in Amsterdam (both radio and television, in all kind of grading from militant pirates to long years of tolerated free radio and television, and to the commercial salami tactics of authorities, media businesses
and political parties that ended in the cleansed media landscape of nowadays Amsterdam...

I need not repeat... better read the original text first ...

==========================================================
For three decades this town - Amsterdam - has developed and sustained a free radio practice, starting with the Vrije Maagd (free virgin) from the occupied headquarters of the university in 1969 and the Radio Sirene and Radio Mokum a few years later related to the neighbourhood actions in the Nieuwmarktbuurt, evolving from radio as a mobilizing and coordinating tool in political action to a diverse mix of cultural and
political content. Just from the top of my head station names come to my mind like WHS Radio, Papatoe, Rabotnik, RVZ Radio, Radio Twist, Vrouwenradio, Vrije Keizer, Radio GOT, Radio Kankantri, Staatsradio and one of the most prolific and enduring stations: Radio 100. Some of these initiatives also took part in the relative short period of free television...

Many of these stations were experimenting with what radio could be when freed from the burden of broadcast tradition and commercial interest. Most of these initiatives stayed on the air for many years by the daily creative and supportive input of hundreds of volunteers and listeners, thus creating a creative realm where the distinction between radio producer and radio consumer often faded...

Official radio and television soon discovered these free ranging media laboratories and started to pick fresh talents from their core groups to inject new energy in their sclerosised structures.

Instead of being supported, most of these initiatives have been chased, persecuted and criminalized by local and state authorities. Freedom of expression for broadcast media have been curtailed from the very beginning, constitutional rights do hardly go beyond the culprit and the printing press. For a decade or so some halfhearted 'open channel' options were given under the tutelage of a non-elected foundation (SALTO), but it all ended in a debacle when frequencies were auctioned and sold and slowly most of these free initiatives were pushed out of the aether while some manage to survive as streaming radio on the Internet.

Now when I read the announcement of "radiodays in De Apple" as posted on the nettime-nl list by Geert Lovink, the only - unintended - trace of this rich history with a sad ending is the email address of the moderator of this list Menno Grootveld: rabotnik@xs4all.nl --- RABOTNIK being once one of the pioneers of "Dutch "Radio Art" .

On the impressive name list of persons, groups and organizations I hardly recognize anything that links back to the aforementioned local history. Have all those people involved died the moment they have been pushed out of free radio space? Could their pioneering work at least not be mentioned in a few words, some kind of homage to their courage and endurance? Why is it not mentioned as a necessary part of such a
manifestation?

What makes the curators of De Appel dance on 'the grave of free radio history' as if nothing creative in the field of radio ever happened in this town called Amsterdam? Was all of it below their standards of what can be classified by the word "Art"? Or, do they simply not know?

Did they never check? (say just google "free radio" + Amsterdam to get 11.600 hits or "pirate radio" + Amsterdam good for 12.200 hits)? Did they never search some libraries (30 books of secondary literature on pirate radio at the University Library Amsterdam) ... or did they not think about the option to search the collection of the International Institute of Social History... just the simplest possible search with
the word "radio" from the search option at their home page gives 1896 matches in 664 files ( http://www.iisg.nl ) with hits like "Vrije Keyser Radio archief; or "Etters in de ether" (mischiefs in the aether, a sublime documentary overview by Cor Gout of 20 years Dutch free radio made in 1992); or the Staatsradio, Radio X and Papatoe audio archive deposited in 1993; the archive of the magazine "de Zender" (the emitter) of the eighties donated by Eef Vermij; a dossier with leaflets from the period 1989-1991 when Radio 100 was taken "from the air" and went back again; several cassettes from the early radio work of Willem de Ridder; the archives of the Next 5 Minutes conferences on tactical media in Amsterdam in the nineties, other archives of Europe Against the Current manifestation in 1989 with many free radio initiatives....

When I understand it well the manifestation is a kind of 'school work' or more nicely said "curatorial training program"... but as the student curators maybe do not know those things (they might not even have been born when free radio was raging in this town, or too young, or from another part of the planet) there must be someone around who is from this town, who knows something about its fuzzy and convivial history to
put the students on the right track... how else can these curators 'in-spe' learn something. Nothing of that all seems to have happened!

Is this blotting out of the local context historical amnesia or professional arrogance?

When will the well established cultural institutions that support this manifestation recognize their failure in the past in supporting local media talents?

When will the authorities that cleansed free radio space apologize for the injustice they have done?

Tjebbe van Tijen 23/3/2005
====================================

Marc Tuters: Rushkoff on collaborative cartography

2005-03-29T05:29:00.000-08:00

from: http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101490&ref=6373524

How collaborative cartography could enable us to map our shared worlds -- and why the wireless industry probably won't go for it.
Douglas Rushkoff Wed Mar 23 08:45:00 GMT 2005

"Everything that people do has a geospatial component. We do everything somewhere. Even thinking," says Rich Gibson, self-taught computer geek and co-author, along with Schuyler Erle and Jo Walsh, of O'Reilly's forthcoming book Mapping Hacks, who believes that allowing normal people to manage, present and create media with a geospatial component will revolutionize and democratize the process and practice
of cartography. Although, historically, cartography was a highly political, read-only medium for all but a select few, now, thanks to our new tools, we all have the potential to make our own maps. Cartography has become a read/write medium.

Indeed, the shift of what a map even is has shifted along with the authority of our encyclopedias. The 1910 Britannica considered maps in purely terrestrial terms: "a representation, on a plane and reduced scale, of part or the whole of the earth's surface." Today's Wikipedia, on the other hand, entertains a broader, more encompassing, collaboratively constructed definition of a map as "a simplified depiction of a space, a navigational aid which highlights relations between objects within that space." The Wiki version of reality has the modern map pegged.

Thanks to the power of software and microchips, computers can now represent pretty much any set of data points as graphics. As a result, the "space" that modern maps can signify has expanded. We don't just map places; we can map everything from the weather to population density, the concrete and abstract relationships between things, intellectual neighborhoods of science or even fantasy. We can now truly
see the way so many different things are -- or have been, or will be.

Modern maps have been made of crenellations of the brain, chromosomes, atomic structures, fractal landscapes, linguistics, global warming, shadows of thoughts, political belligerence, transportation systems, the real estate distributions of celebrity and many landscapes that deied visualization. (Check out Simon Pattersen's work, in which he juxtaposes celebrities on a UK tube map, this dynamic mapping of human cortical development or this National Institutes of Health representation of chromosomes.)

Although modern mapping systems depend heavily on computers, some of the most fundamental maps we use daily are drawn and redrawn on an ongoing basis by our own wetware. From the moment we become aware of spatial relations, we begin a complex process of constructing personal thematic maps. Maps of our mommies, daddies, bottles, favorite albums, movies, books, food, friends, pets, conversations and experiences -- anything to which we can attach associations, meaning and relationships. But these maps live on an almost subconscious level. My map of, say, the best shopping in Stockholm or the spiritually resonant zones of cyberspace, may look very different than yours.

That's why the people involved in open-source mapping and locative media are so committed to helping us make our associative maps more explicit and geospatially representative. If we could only collaborate on our mapmaking, these visual aids may just help us communicate better, and start to see some of our collective challenges from a shared frame of reference.

Right now, the locative media community is a loose collective of hackers, writers, developers and wild thinkers. And, naturally, some wireless enthusiasts. Many of them gathered at the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network Conference held earlier this year, organized by Ben Russell, author of the "locative manifesto." And what immediately becomes clear on reviewing the work of the hopeful collaborative cartographers is that none of this would have been possible -- or even conceivable -- without the advent of wireless technology.

Whether it's wearable computing that tracks our locations no matter what we happen to be doing, cell phones that let us enter our locations, moods or other data, or even all the wireless nodes, satellites and grid networks capable of finding, resolving and comparing all this information, we're talking about an entirely wireless phenomenon. We're also talking about what might prove to the be ultimate legacy of all our hard work here in the wireless trenches: locative media.

The phrase itself was originally coined by Karlis Kalnins, of gpster.net, who applies the precise logic of linguistics to an otherwise seemingly vague field. "Locative is a case, not a place," Kalnins says, meaning it stands for a final location of an action or the time of the action. In other words, it doesn't just happen in space, like a map, but also in time.

Some of the artists working in this, er, space include Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow and Julian Bleecker of PDPal, a PDA program that allows users to build and share their own unconventionally conceived maps, or the folks at the GPS Drawing project, who use GPS receivers to record their movements so that they can run around with their wireless devices as if they were "cartographic crayons."

Although media artists are desperately in love with the possibilities afforded by locative media, sadly, the mobile phone industry outside of Japan and South Korea hasn't exactly warmed to the nascent field. The Mapping Hacks trio's list of demands from operators and manufacturers includes low-cost location lookups, user access (through the phone) to everything that his phone knows and open hardware and software
platforms for experimentation and innovation. All of these comprise a fairly reasonable wish list, but considering the conflicting interests of the many links in the mobile value chain, the operative word is still "wish."

Although to a wireless enthusiast like me, the possibility of locative media feels positively revolutionary, there are still too few tangible benefits to be gained from having locative media in the daily lives of most people. "What is the competitive advantage in having your vacation photos geocoded?" asks Gibson. "Will all the other mom's at the playground be impressed as you show your snaps, overlaid on maps, on your Treo?"

Probably not. And until locative media applications offer wireless providers or phone manufacturers a genuine competitive advantage in the way that, say, driving maps do, a future of collaborative cartography may have to wait until kids raised on GPS crayons are running the world.

comments
collaborative conversations

There are also a few projects that approach this from a slightly different perspective, derived from observing (and practising, we've all got one after all) how and where people have used ordinary 2G mobile phones.

There is a spontaneously occurring spatial element to how we use our phones at a bus stop is a mobile phone hotspot (built by human behaviour and day-to-day cycles rather than network access), a hospital operating theatre less so. What phone users do in these hotspots is converse, by text as much as voice, rather than tag or annotate. These conversations are ephemeral, but they cluster round locations: there will always be mobile phone conversations at a busy bus stop.

Up till now these conversations have been private, but what these alternative, phone based projects have tried to do is ask if there are public phone conversations that can be had in these places, but only with those who have also been there (in the hope that civic value in some form might emerge from some of these conversations with people we share our everyday physical world with).

They've designed systems to enable these public conversations, the first generation using very lo-fi physical markers signs and stickers but now moving on to a kind of del.icio.us for places concept that an audience member in one of the PLAN discussions neatly named consensus based location (which is a lovely sly subversion of Location Based Services).

These systems sit on top of the phone networks, meaning they don't need to ask for permission from the operators, and why would the networks care anyway, since they'll be the ones making the money.

LAP TALK 02: sarai.net

2005-03-29T04:31:00.000-08:00



The second appointment with Lap Talk on tv-tv was Tuesday 29 March 2005, and introduced the media project sarai.

sarai (translatable as shelter) is a New Media Initiative - a space for research, practice and conversation about contemporary media and urban constellations based in Delhi, India.

It started as a research group composed by students, teaching staff, researcher and various collaborators a the New Media Department of the University of Delhi, and throughout a decade or so it became a sort of established communication and research platform for new media.

sarai has a public-accessible space in Delhi, where they organize debates, film screenings, symposiums, exhibitions and talks open to the public.

Among all the activities of sarai, which you can find on the web platform sarai.net, the following are particularly relevant as a non-mainstream forms of communication:

- Compositions, a web-based project allowing the public to research, browse, upload and download cultural projects related to social and urban space;

- Community, collaborations with different art collectives, small and big institutions and groups all around the word, around the production of socially-engaged projects;

- Lists, several online discussion forums open to the public;

- Readers, a series of publication gathering in textual and visual form projects, writings and feedbacks by many authors; so far 4 readers have been published on themes like public domain, city, technology and media/crisis;

Sarai.net host an extensive archive of projects documentation dedicated to media practice and urban activities.

more about sarai www.sarai.net
more about Chamber of Public Secrets www.cps.1go.dk
more about tv-tv (in Danish) www.tv-tv.dk

LAP TALK: 5 minutes to exchange a few words

2005-03-24T00:28:00.000-08:00

Here a few notes about LAP TALK, a new series of presentations on various non-mainstream forms of communication through web platforms, starting on tv-tv in Copenahgen, Denmark.

LAP TALK is a 5 minutes of introduction about one specific communication project, and it is part of Chamber Of Public Secrets, a TV programme broadcasted every 15 days on TV-TV, an independent television platform based in Copenhagen.

LAP TALK 01: gnn.tv

The first LAP TALK was broadcasted Tuesday 15th of March 2005, and presented GNN.TV - Guerrilla News Networks, an independent news organization with headquarters in New York City and production facilities in Berkeley, California.
GNN mission is to expose people to important global issues through cross-platform guerrilla programming.

GNN.tv is the group's web site. They accept no ads and charge no subscription fees for their users. GNN was founded in 2000, when Stephen Marshall and Josh Shore realized that the mainstream networks would never allow their hi-impact brand of television content and design to reach prime-time. GNN's inaugural project was a NewsVideo called The Diamond Life, produced in conjunction with Peter Gabriel's non-profit organization, WITNESS. Shortly after, GNN rounded out the core partnership with reporter Anthony Lappé; and investment banker-turned-producer Ian Inaba.

GNN has grown from its critical mass audience from approximately an initial 300 unique visitors/day to an average of 25,000. They produce TV news, books, different forms of publication, video features, music videos, and film.

Among them is the Sundance-award winning short, Crack The CIA and the 2003 Media That Matters Film Festival Media Activism Award winner, Copwatch. In 2003, they produced AfterMath, a 30-min. documentary investigating the unanswered questions surrounding 9/11.

more about GNN www.gnn.tv
more about Chamber of Public Secrets www.cps.1go.dk
more about tv-tv (in Danish) www.tv-tv.dk