[spectre] ICC and for the media art center of 21C

Sat Aug 27 19:19:51 CEST 2005

Hi Andreas/all,

i guess many of us are intrigued by this discussion, and by the 
implications of the cultural changes which can be observed but 
somehow not fully understood. so many questions have been asked in 
the messages of this thread! compared to the size of what is going on 
(after all, one of the three 'global players' of the 1990s media art 
field is threatened with closure), the discussion is quite muted.

/ Yes - funny ... I think it's such a huge debate, taking in
art/commerce/society/technology/'digital culture' and much more, that
it's difficult to make a focused concise observation or contribution.
the threads are hard to untangle :)

  (is 
it because nobody wants to stick their head out and celebrate the 
demise of a dinosaur?)

+
It's certainly an attractive proposition! But as some have pointed out
already we need these institutions don't we? Personally I think that
buildings based org's tend to move slowly in response to the shifting
concerns and territories of media arts, and most of them have pretty
much missed the last ten years, or paid limited attention - even the
'specialist' institutions often appear to put the really challenging
work on the periphery. It might be a little simplistic to suggest that
the 'material' has to some extent gone, and data has emrged as the new
material, but from the more museum/collections based perspective I'm
sure that's important. Networked media is often _so_ ephemeral that it
does not suprise that many heads have been buried in the sand! Of course
I'm not really talking about the media arts/culture base organisations
here, but more the mainstream. Essentially though they're all founded on
similar funding and management structures, including the corporate
partners offering differing levels of sponsorship. These kinds of models
are archaic, but so much of our culture is - and I mean that in the
broadest sense of the word - society, economy, industry and politics,
but we have to live with that don't we? Build new models over the top
[or underneat, between].
+

   (or is it because for some years there was 
this clear sense of being a utopian avantgarde, and that somehow we 
had a chance to make the world a little better, and now we [that is 
some of those people who have been involved in network and media 
cultures for over ten years] have turned from pioneers - into 
veterans, watching resignedly as one of the evil battleships is 
sinking?)

+
It could be seen like that but for the sake of optimism I'll venture
that perhaps the cycle of change has accelerated at an unexpected rate?
New opportunities for shaping things could transpire ... or is that
thought too naive? 

The increasing visibility of Open Source Software and the impact of
[particularly] the Linux community, not because of the global success of
the excellent software etc. we know the story! There's been an inspiring
buzz of interest around FOSS as a model - hive behaviour and so on. A
recent paper produced by the New Labour thinktank, Demos [Written by
Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation and former Head of Policy
in the Prime Minister's Office, and Tom Steinberg, Director of
mySociety, Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential
argues that many of the principles of the open source model could have
radical implications for governments, citizens and businesses. You can
D/L it free here: http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/wideopen/ - watch out
- it's long] explores new approaches to and forms of collaboration
across a huge range of fields from product design to pharmaceuticals.
Not so new of course, we've been surviving mostly because of our ability
to work like this. What's interesting and this is where the potential
lies is the apparent shift in values at different political and
strategic levels. It could lead nowhere but set against the problems we
face in terms of global economics, cultural conflicts and fear of
ecological disaster it's about time - hopefully. From here maybe we can
find a more collective/shared way of modelling serious support
structures for media arts, and the diverse concerns of that community
[those communities].
+

there is an interesting tendency in what shu lea, sally, eric and 
yukiko have been writing, suggesting that there is a cultural change 
going on which repositions media culture, or digital culture, in a 
substantial way - eric has described how De Balie is trying to 
respond to that change.

i see a paradox (1/2) in the fact that (1) we are still talking about 
'exlaining what we are doing to a broader audience', countering a 
prevalent ignorance about the impact of new technologies on 
contemporary society with a more critical understanding and media 
competence - i agree with the analysis; yet (2) we also see a massive 
expansion of the field of digital culture, agrowing number of mainly 
young people who inhabit that space, who are 'of that tribe', who 
'live digital culture' - often even without a strong critical 
reflection, but more as a quasi-natural, techno-social environment in 
which they grow up - and swim like fish that don't see the water 
because they don't need to.

+
That's right - there is a paradox, there are many aren't there? In a
sense any contemporary arts practitioner has to deal with the
difficulties of 'explaining' what an artist is or does, and by
implication the value of art to society. In the main artists get [sort
of] paid to be artists through the taxation of citizens and society
requires us to answer for that support somehow. That can be panful [and
maybe risky to write :)].

Digital technolgy pervades our culture in such a way that it's now
difficult to talk about it as something 'else' - it's everywhere, and
all the kids use it, and they couldn't care too much about what they
experience is 'art' or not in my experience, though that is somewhat
limited to 'art' projects. When we think about convergence we mostly
mean technological convergence but what's just above the water line
[ouch!] feels more like a mush of interactive art game locative things.
If the media vehicle for this experince is going to be the mobile
phone/pda type product held in hands on the street surely it's not 'art'
in the conventional sense is it? What is it then? Tricky - those
practitioners who design code build the work are themselves discomfitted
by the terms 'art' and 'artist'

This is pretty anecdotal, and maybe off track, but the issue of
symantics is quite informative - a recent change from using the term
'experimental' to 'innovation' coupled with changing 'artist' to
'creative practitioner' [yes, it could mean anything!] had a very
positive outcome when dealing with some funders. Amusing, but it goes
back to the dynamics of fundraising to get the work done. Sleight of
hand.
+

could it be that the power lines that run through the 'digital 
divisions' (there is not one digital divide, but many filiations of 
difference, differentiation, slopes and breaks) are shifting? and 
could it be that the way in which institutions like the ICC or the 
ZKM were set up was still very much following an 'old-style' cultural 
logic?

+ sorry, some of my comments should maybe have been here ...

sally, eric and tom have all argued the need to connect to the wider 
audience - what if this was not the core task? i'm just thinking 
aloud, but i have a feeling that the didactical side of media 
cultural work is important, it must be pursued, workshops for kids, 
designing and hacking and linkering and all - very important, 
outreach programmes during media art exhibitions, tactical media 
workshops for migrants, you name it. while we are doing this, there 
is a wave of commercially driven (though not always commercially 
inspired) developments in the field of digital culture, for which 
file-sharing, blogging, gaming, texting, etc., are mere meagre 
descriptions.

i'm not trying to contradict anything that has been said here, i'm 
just trying to see whether we can move this train of thought a bit 
further, closer to where we are already, at least that's what it 
feels like. as shu lea said, we are already on the move...

yukiko writes:
>...now is a hard situation.. but i believe the problem we face would
>be a good chance for us to head for the media art center of 21C.

what would this place look like? personally, i don't believe that we 
can all be 'roaming residents', i believe in the creation of 
temporary sites where people can meet, talk, work and celebrate 
together - we are social animals, we need that. and if you go 
nomadic, someone will have to caary the tent, and someone will have 
to make sure that WLAN access will be open at our next camp site.

what would a place look like, that is a little bit slower than the 
technical and cultural development, that keeps open for change and is 
also open for taking in and digesting, meshing, all the different 
energies that people who identify with this digital culture, and want 
to share in shaping it, bring with them?

places like this have been talked about before. politics, funding 
structures, and the cultural ignorance of decision makers may be 
against them. but they may be a way out of what looks like the demise 
of 90s media culture.

+
There's always a ay out, an alternative route. It's desireable [surely?]
to change things. They've never been perfect, maybe never even right. A
more collaborative culture is growing all around us and texting blogging
etc. are all part of that.

There's a huge movement within academia towards protecting ideas and
knowledge with IP, that's mirrored in the commercial sector [especially
so-called 'creative industries'] and in many parts of the cultural
sector. From a historical POV of that's the antithesis of why
Universities exist [or maybe that's just personal]. University
colleagues struggle against this a s a matter of principle but the
sharing of knowledge feeds growth, and that's true sometimes for
indistrial growth too. If media arts exists in the gaps between these
sectors, in some way it does ... perhaps there's a role right there for
a 'new' model - positioned between research, art, and industry and able
to enter into dialogue with all yet retain crtitil distance? A bit
garbled - apologies ... might be an idea tho'

best regards,

tom

greetings,
-a

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