[spectre] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

Thu Aug 18 17:01:26 CEST 2005

Hi all,

It's probably naive to attempt a generalisation about the closing or scaling down  of 'media labs' across the world. There has been a huge scaling back of the 'first wave' - or is it the second or third?

The first one I personally came across was Backspace in London - now gone, but while it thrived it served a purpose - access to computers and Internet which was difficult in those days. Now that's quite easy for most of us - in the 'West'. There have been some suprises and shocks along the way: Walker Art Gallery those listed below by Rob van Kranenburg and now IVREA of course. I should also mention the ICA's disastrous New Media Centre which was sponsored by Sun Microsystems. I was one of a series of curators/producers who tried to direct this resource.

They might seem similar from the outside but most of them are/were quite different in constitution, ambition, funding/revenue sources and in output. We've seen formally constituted organisations, co-ops, collectives, activist groups, bizarre collaborations and everything in between.

In the end most of them suffer/end because of a failure in the funding models. With the Sun deal at the ICA the organisation accrued a lot of cash, probably saving it from closure, but at the same time the provision of Sun machines that hardly anybody knew how to use alienated the community. Locked doors created a ridiculous sense of exclusion for most, which is at odds with any sense of openness and skill/knowledge exchange which underpins what I'll venture to call Network Media [Culture]. With the [allegedly] millions of £s value of the sponsorship deal the ICA got it's IT infrastructure in place, plus servers and a Sys Admin guy. When the deal ended a few years on Sun pulled support and it's been dead in the water for years now.

MIT ML in Dublin was a high profile but opportunistic attempt by MIT to create a european research and development studio, which included a few artists [Jonah Brucker Cohen for example] but mostly designers of pervasive and ubiquitous computing productst and services. The initial pot of money came from European Regional Development Funds via the Irish government to MIT - an 'incentive' to locate in Dublin at a time when the Irish economy was described as the 'Celtic Tiger', fuelled in part by tax incentives form government for mostly US companies to locate their europen operations there, but that economic high has passed. It appears that the MIT enterprise also had a flawed financial model - funded by large corporations whose return was the 'privilege' of access to ideas and innovations in products. It appears from the outside that ML didn't fit into the european academic research community very well. Neither did they opt to take any of their products to market. When institutions such as the BBC decided there was little value in the relationship the money began to drip away, and the writing was on the wall - it was writ large!

Global economics or bad management? Probably both. In these models the issue was clearly about revenue streams running out because they were based on an idea that the new and emerging technologies would create vast new markets and experimentation [innovation could be used here too - depends who you're talking to] was the key to creating the products to service them. Some have [iPod?], but I like this quote form Joe Kraus:

"The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people"

It's niche in other words.

in terms of 'art' and 'culture', of course the landscape is profoundly different now than ten years ago, but mainstream institutions like Tate Modern struggle to keep up, preferring to go for the archival route referred to - it's what they're supposed to do isn't it? Funny though that so much 'Network Media' art practice _is_ ephemeral in every way. Let them do it - the contemporary action is elsewhere. I have never felt comfortable programming this work on a few computers in traditional exhibition spaces, although I have done it - a lot. We've tried so many permutations to create a platform for this culture yet they all seem to fall away - the good the bad and the ugly :/. Recycling the models is maybe healthy, although admittedly painful for those workers and artists who toil there.

Flexibility in operation must be a fundamental to sustainability, but more importantly we collectively need to reinforce the value of this field to wider society by increasing access and understanding of the work.

+ Why is it that lists like these buzz with permanent noise of cultural and artistic activity, more frequently stemming from ad hoc groups than larger institutions which don't (have to) employ the same advertising circuits?

They do don't they but perhaps it's about our perception of the scale of this community and activity? It seems like a buzz from here but in the front rooms of the nation[s] there's no sound. It's niche isn't it?

I think the Linux development community is only about 3,500 globally and someone recently told me that the global users of the FOSS tool Blender are about 1,000. Tiny!

[http://www.blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html]

+ I'm interested in looking at where we go from here.

Me too!

;)

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: Norman [mailto:norman at wanadoo.fr] 
Sent: 18 August 2005 13:59
To: spectre at mikrolisten.de
Subject: [spectre] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

Hi Andreas and friends

"A pattern that reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and media art?"
Possibly, and if so, to whose benefit? What were institutions hoping to gain from this expansion in the first place, and did they?  Might they have become unwilfully blinkered, self-perpetuating autarkies?  Would it be blasphemous to imagine that institutions run by and for humans are endowed with life-spans, and that one generation of institutions/ organisations for e.g. media art might quite inevitably and fortunately be succeeded by another? And if that were so, what kernels of art and culture and the critical reflection that is an integral part of art and culture might one hope to see passed on from one generation of institutions to the next?

At the risk of sounding like a Philistine (not a good idea given today's politics! - is humour still allowed on this list??), my questions are what, where, why, for whom is art?  How and why do pilgrimages to media art institutions differ from those to "traditional" art institutions (the Louvre still tops the charts)?  Are there links and should there be? 

Is there any connection between these currently decried down-scalings and restructurings and closures of media culture and media art institutions, and massive interests being mobilised around a powerful new breed of cultural archives to store and access the cadavers of ephemeral art commissioned and/ or show-cased by the places being threatened? (this question bounces back to the previous one...).  When does an art archive, a cultural memory engine, become a morgue, a DNA repository for bygone human expression?

Why is it that lists like these buzz with permanent noise of cultural and artistic activity, more frequently stemming from ad hoc groups than larger institutions which don't (have to) employ the same advertising circuits? I'm not saying it isn't sometimes annoying. But it occasionally grates with something unexpected, with a lurch into unforeseen ways of thinking that is perhaps not so obvious in closed discussions where everybody knows everybody. Like those who make the same annual pilgrimages.

Gibson in Count Zero: "How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook?"
I'm lucky enough to encounter work that fishhooks my snaggable soul. Yet I take the bait in increasingly non-territorial waters. Weird eddies on the net or in strange physical spaces - like Lascaux. That's an eye-opener. Or Florian Kramer's recent text on this list. Or other such indices of energy levels that hint at new patterns of cultural and artistic territorialisation.

With all due respect and solidarity for those whose livelihoods and commitment to others are at stake in these "restructurings" - something most of us can sympathise with all the more strongly in that we've been through it in one form or another - I'm interested in looking at where we go from here. What we need to carry over from past institutions and why. Because that question determines what it is we're trying to preserve and foster. Rightly or wrongly (and that question is one we don't have the answer to - but one that probably doesn't have an answer so I shouldn't have asked it in the first place). 

Blind faith. The need to act. To ex-press. To risk the hook.

Kia ora
>From squirming fish on line

> Message du 16/08/05 15:12
> De : "Andreas Broeckmann" 
> A : nettime-l at bbs.thing.net
> Copie à : 
> Objet : [Ecb-list] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?
> 
> [on 13 june 05, Rob van Kranenburg asked on this list: 'what's 
> next?', quoting the 'restructuring' of IVREA and the closure of the 
> MIT Media Lab in Dublin; we have also recently seen the termination 
> of the Radiator Festival, Kopenhagen/DK, of CICV, Montbeliard/FR, of 
> the World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam/NL, as well as the scaling 
> down of Electrohype, Malmoe/SE, Public Netbase, Vienna/AT, and of 
> HTBA Hull Time Based Arts, Hull/UK; while each of these cases has its 
> particular local, national or even personal reasons, it is difficult 
> not to think that there is some sort of a pattern which, at least in 
> part, reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and 
> media art; and what do we make of these rumours from Tokyo? abroeck]
> 
> posted by permission of the author, Mr. OZAKI Tetsuya, of ART iT and 
> REALTOKYO - http://www.artit.jp/ - http://www.realtokyo.co.jp/ )
> 
> a PDF version in Japanese and English is at
> http://www.realtokyo.co.jp/japanese/column/102-103_Behind_the_Scenes.pdf
> 
> 
>

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