[spectre] a message from inke and andreas, your spectre hosts

[Andreas Broeckmann]

dear friends, dear spectre-subscribers,

greetings from the list's hosts, inke arns and andreas broeckmann, 
based in dortmund and berlin.

the fifth anniversary of the spectre list has quietly passed at the 
end of the summer, and we would like to take the opportunity to 
welcome those who have subscribed in the last months to this deep 
european channel for information and discussions on art and media 
culture.

we established a list in 2001 as a communication channel for people 
involved in the broad field of digital culture, mainly in europe, 
though of course also beyond. we maintain it as a way for this 
disparate community to inform the others about ongoing activities, 
plans, and more general conceptual considerations. despite the fact 
that the list is mostly used for announcements, we welcome responses 
to postings and discussions of related topics.

the list originally emerged from a rather dense community of people 
who met quite regularly at festivals and conferences in europe in the 
later 1990s. these meetings, organised under the name of a precursor 
to this list, the 'Syndicate', wove a dense web of friendly relations 
among the two or three hundred subscribers at that time. it still 
forms an important basis of how we situate our work for the list, but 
with its now more than 1.100 subscribers the spectre-list has of 
course turned much more anonymous.

if you scan through the postings of the past months you get quite a 
good idea of the spread of people and activities that make up this 
rather virtual community. it would be nice if some people took up the 
habit again of sending reports about trips or visits that they make, 
since those kinds of reports are often the best information sources 
you can get for understanding what is going on in a certain city, or 
region.

we hope that you appreciate the contributions to the list and would 
like to encourage subscribers to sharing their own activities in the 
field of art and media culture with the others.

best regards,

inke & andreas