The Network of Waves
Public Agency in Hybrid Space
Lead-essay for the theme issue "Hybrid Space" of OPEN, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, #11, (Amsterdam / Rotterdam, 2006).
Public Agency in Hybrid Space
Lead-essay for the theme issue "Hybrid Space" of OPEN, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, #11, (Amsterdam / Rotterdam, 2006).
gruesse von ELEKTRO
From: Pit Schultz
Status: RO
Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult
We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.[1]
ReadBORDER="Ø" LOCATION="YES"
Amsterdam & Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 12-14 March, 1999
The third Next 5 Minutes, an Amsterdam based conference on tactical communications culture, featuring do-it-yourself media, dissident art and electronic media activists from around the world, took place on the 12th, 13th and 14th of March 1999.
N5M3 archived festival website
ReadOne of the biggest promises of the Internet was the transformation of political activism. No longer would change come about solely through the actions of large organizations, claimed the Web's early enthusiasts. Now, they claimed, individuals could rouse the concern of their fellow citizens for a particular cause through Web sites, e-mail, and online petitions. Those who normally shunned demonstrations and limited their participation in the public sphere could be contacted personally in their e-mail box, and all that would be necessary for them to do to show their support would be to click a button or fill in a field. Soon, pundits predicted, there would be a revolution in grassroots participation in the political process.
Read
Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.
by ZKP
TRANSLATED MESSAGE:
The global data-network is on everyone's lips. Initiatives that plan
and promote the further extension of the nets in the big style
originate in politics and economy. Goal of this engangement is an
efficiency-oriented and economy- centered utilization of the new
structures of communication. The capacity of these projects is already
proven within a wide range of areas and especially curious people are
working with it yet. However, one can also judge this development
skeptically.
(C) Mark Dery 1996; all rights reserved; reproduction in any medium without author's written permission forbidden.
The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently oneof the most pressing problems confronting political and militarystrategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and thegeosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above spaceand surface is a ~fait accompli~ and has inaugural value (ushers a newepoch). Something nicely conjured up in a (French) advertisementpraising cellular phones with the words: "Planet Earth has never beenthis small". This is a very dramatic moment in our relation with theworld and for our vision of the world.
ReadWritten for Interstanding - Understanding INteractivity conference, Tallinn, Estonia November 23-25, 1995 - RFC Draft 1.1
Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".
ReadSince American Vice-President Al Gore made his famous speech in
California a couple of years ago, it has become impossible to scan any
news medium without finding at least one reference to the "Information
Superhighway". The Information Superhighway metaphor - specially
tailored for Mr. Gore's California audience - is so brilliantly
simplistic it seems to have blown the mind of every media editor in the
Western Hemisphere. With an Information Superhighway you just plug in
your modem and roll your data out onto the ramp and into the dataflow
where it zips along the freeway until it hits the appropriate off-ramp.
Finding data is the same - it's all nice straight data-lanes with on
and off ramps and well-banked curves.
It wasn't exactly the right place nor really the right time to launch a political campaign which publicly called for a series of offenses against the law, yet when the call "No one is illegal" went out exactly five years ago at documentaX, the usual reservations counted little. In the Orangerie which had been temporarily arranged as a media laboratory, at the end of the visitors' course of the well-known Kassler art exhibition, a dozen political and media activists from all Germany's bigger cities met up at the end of June 1997 in order to publish an appeal.
ReadThe Negative Dialectics of the Net
In his essay, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", Jean-François Lyotard observes that capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avant-garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.
This interview was conducted between subRosa and Ryan Griffis via email correspondence during the first half of 2003.
To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100
The Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001, destroying the life-line of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky situation for a while, due - we believe - to the destabilisation of the problematic balance between personal contacts of list members, lurking and filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers, and a growing number of self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and disregarded the social rules of the online community.
The need for net criticism certainly is a matter of overwhelming urgency. While a number of critics have approached the new world of computerized communications with a healthy amount of skepticism, their message has been lost in the noise and spectacle of corporate hype-the unstoppable tidal wave of seduction has enveloped so many in its dynamic utopian beauty that little time for careful reflection is left. Indeed, a glimpse of a possibility for a better future may be contained in the new techno-apparatus, and perhaps it is best to acknowledge these possibilities here in the beginning, since Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) has no desire to take the position of the neoluddites who believe that the techno-apparatus should be rejected outright, if not destroyed. To be sure, computerized communications offer the possibility for the enhanced storage, retrieval, and exchange of information for those who have access to the necessary hardware, software, and technical skills. In turn, this increases the possibility for greater access to vital information, faster exchange of information, enhanced distribution of information, and cross cultural artistic and critical collaborations. The potential humanitarian benefits of electronic systems are undeniable; however, CAE questions whether the electronic apparatus is being used for these purposes in the representative case, much as we question the political policies which guide the net's development and accessibility.
ReadThe World Social Forum, organized twice in Porto Alegre 2001 and 2002, not only prompted a flurry of autonomous self-organization, crossborder organization, and creative media interventions. It also initiated an intense process of analysis and reflection on the tricky question of a 'global' dynamic of self-organization.
Read