________________________________________________________________________________ From: pit@nettime.khm.de To: druckrey@interport.net CC: sebastian@rolux.org, geert@xs4all.nl hi tim, and others who might have watched the livestream here from Linz. thanks for your commentary, but i wasn't very satisfied how the "free speech" panel went. not that the debate only focused on the funding cuts but in general the context of this side event was more of a prolongation "political disclaimer", part of a legitimstic tactical manoevre rather then a open debate. ok, that was expectable, and i could have boycoted it easily, but the situation is more complex to distance *now* from ars directorium. it is important to distinguish personal envolements in specific issues which are not covered here, and the general political position of this institution. and it is just too easy to bite the hand which used to feed you, or be angry to be not represented as "the hip netcritic" any more. this is not the place for dogmatic fights, nor is it a place to downplay the risks of the current culturalpolitical climate shift, which makes it for me more and more difficult to feel comfortable enough to try to say things in a differentiated way in a larger public, including the nettime mailinglist. Let's look back: Since the last 12 years, i can't name one ars electronica which was dedicated to social or political issues to be the main topic. "ars e." always represented the contemporary media culture, the current cultural fashions, including it's firework of vanities and ambigious statements of temporary value. in this baroque play of virtual light and electronica shadow, the political statement was only one possible 'figure' of expression within a larger gesamtdatenkunstwerk. and admit it or not, most who came here, certainly enjoyed themselves. The symposia exercised a classic humanistic aproach of generalism (now transdisiplinarity), and the continous focus on 'bio' topics just highlighten this aspect, reintegrating techno sciences in the chorus of human sciences. especially in the local context of the urban policies in the sim city of Linz, of reacting to the challenges of modernisation, from industrial production to "knowledge" management, the element of radicality is fully identified with the forces of technological change. an techno-avant-garde in the sense of ars electronica therefore has to be at first enthustiastically opportunistic to these changes. this has been the case in the "King Weibel era" as well as during the golden years of netcriticism or its mellowing out into the bio-tryptichon under Gerfried Stocker. Always has the ars electronica been a stage for current developments, and even if its bad news you shouldn't blame the messenger. As an event the ars still manages to be maintain itself as an internationally relevant olympic games of media cultures. There is no way to easyly distance yourself from it if you are involved into this field. Nevertheless, the engamenent of ars e. was serious enough to build up a coherent archive of contemporary media culture, including all the commissions which never received a price, a whole body of material which materialize in the absurd concept of a "museum of the future", a constant hunger for the latest techno- gadgedtry, but also a history of social gatherings which in their continuity were able to bridge the quickly appearing generation gaps and create somewhat like a 'conservative tradition' within the electronic arts. this happens in a specifically austrian cultural history, of a specific friendlyness towards the arts, the dinners and multisensorial performances, the glamourous, blinking trompe-d'euille-VR- worlds, the sound architectures in the gardens, the large techno-installation in the public space, the transgressive moments of fear and desire, are all directly attached to a tradition of the baroque representation of royal grandeur, a its continuation in bourgoise cultural elite blended into the aristoratic court and including the administrative apperatus of empiric state. so calling ars electronica reactionary is precisly right, but is everything else but a critical statement. within the history of the ars there appeared several singular projects or subjects which took a more political standpoint like this year The Institute for Applied Autonomy, or years before Criticial Art Ensemble (who layed the groundwork for the bio science series) or once our all beloved Richard Barbrook. These peaks represented just a nuiance within a broader spectrum, to add a colourful character to the ongoing choreography of a bigger media opera. It also works within the understanding of a ballanced content within the national television channel ORF, one of the main sponsors. The same reactionary progressivenes counts for the representation of seasonal peaks on the scale of affirmation vs. criticism, like net.art or net.crit. in ars we all become subjects of a longer european history of representation of power where media technology has the metaphysical role to praise the full-ness of the body of the king, the richness of god's creation and the wonders of modernisation. this is at least my interepretiation, when i tried to understand the undercurrents of SGI-Art years ago, a time where Knowbotic research for example was not including political-economic content into their work yet, and many others were mainly focusing on metaphysical, metaphorical, machinic and mimetic Mirrorworlds (sorry for such silly poesy) which involved the spectator into a play of pre- defined "dance" of interaction. This is just ONE aspect of electronic art according to this institution, and it should still leave place to the admiration of a particular crafmenship and artistic quality of specific works and of course other possible general interpretations. The main element of such a media culture, nevertheless, is ambiguity towards the powers of and behind technolgical change, and 'we' at nettime are not far from this indifference, as netcriticism is a tactical construct to attack a system by first accepting it. it is a strategy within a liberal setting offering "critical" positions which are somewhat pre-configured and economically functional in a liberal media environment. therefore i was invited to formulate the critical prototypical 'schizo' - voice, find words for the crisis and join the party. (the music was very much of my taste this year) there is this situation, where the unfortunate and on the other hand existentially nessesary fight for the continuation of cultural funding blends over into a acceptance of the larger economic factors which in many ways lead to the political situation we are in. the focus of the austrian administration towards "cultural heritage" is just part of a general trend in cultural funding policies in europe. national culture as a countermeasure against the disintegrating forces of globalisation. that electronic culture is not seen in a similar way, that community building projects have integrative effects in the knowledge society are just yet-unknown hints in the scientific handbooks of our new left sim-society planners. it is a complex fight for 'mental' survival indeed, and it happens very much within the media. a situation with a certain sense of perplexity, a massive lack of speach or a complete banalisation and pragmatisation of public discourse. How can we (new media users) use free speech, when there seems nothing left to say? or much more, when most what is beeing said is completly boring in the way it is as a predictable product of its contextual framework? How can we be autonomous when we are in the same time complices of the same development we try to distance ourselves? Old questions, inded.. It seems that the situation in Austria particulary triggers a break thru of the media realm , people taking their representation in their own hands, go onto the streets, and absurdically creating a happy moment of collectivity in the face of anti-democratic danger. Even if these carnavalesque celebrations only exist temporarily they radiate a rush of hope and exitement. if they do not lead into a long-term culture backing itself up with creating new/remixed languages and theories they just remain exotic objects in the museum of movements. (an alternative can always be to focus on a local framework in the geographic and physical sense, the small public, and operate from there to prepare for a future *loose* connection of those cells of critical activity, but carefully handle the own representation in mass media. by now it is been seen as a success to be mentioned in the press, i am very much not sure about the use of media coverage, besides a darwinistic pragmatism within an economy of attemtion. if post therefore i exist. ) there is a very strange idea which came to my mind while i was very much in contrary, sitting in the train, next to a guy in a suit appearently coming from India, and we were both hammering in our Laptops, lucky to share one of the few power plugs in the train.. what if the externalisation of internal conflicts, the creation of a pathogenic climate which applies to the families with schizophrenic members, also applies to the macro-psychological climate of national states within the european house? what raphael lozano hemmer called "identiarian" policies, is more of a scary tendency or climate change then something which has to be fight against in its late states of extreme manifestation. this doesn't mean that action is useless, but the cure of symptoms needs to be combined with the question of the factors which might lead to such a "sick" climate of reaction. (it is in this tradition that Max Weber for example developed his critique of capitalism, protestantism, authority and bureaucracy...) the particularisation of the "we" against "them", is what we (as the collective participants of the ongoing media orgy) do not only have to face in the balkans, but also for the last years on the nettime list itself. the creation of a we/them line which leads to a inherently authoritarian or at least stupefying situation, where the representative voice of the we-ness, the master-singers, create a follow-the-leader phenomenon. This happens usually in an external environment which seems overly complex, intimidating, and indifferent. the discoursive trauma of kosovo, the mail-bombing and implosion of information spread an element of unexpressed disillusion in many online-comunities. since then the news-ticker is the abstract machine which governs "our" discourses, and those who play that piano with the most virtuosity, govern the borders within which someting can be said. our own (nettimer's) campaigns of "political activism" can lead to a canonical discoursive framework in which only certain thoughts are ought to be expressed (journalistically) and a kind of redundancy is created which gives you the feeling of "Home". a home which includes aspects of "family", which is very common in underground structures such as labels, clubs and small media labs but nevertheless recreate "family values". the idea of critique: a proposed we-ness, a voice of unification, is in the same way reactionary as the model of otherness we try to distance from. in works also perfectly within the opaque idiology of the middle class, an ideology of balancing-out the differences towards the "middle". as a member of the middle class you are under constant fear to "fail and fall" and become a member of the "losers", the lower strata. therefore the extremist has to be painted in extreme pictures, no matter if left or right the "legality" of extreme political statements has to be constantly put in question. it is a constant appelation to the weakness of the human individual, combined with the promise of full personal freedom, self- realisation, maximum performance and hedonism. individualisation and identitarianism are two sides of the same coin (call it yen, euro or dollar). you cannot promote one by preventing the other. is it a surprise that right wing extremism happens to appear in "structurally weak" areas of east-germany, or the banlieuxs of large metropoles - these zones of low intensity civil war? the no-go-zones of global capital as the locatisation of an existential abyss in the post-protestantic psychogeography of the middle classes, the gated communities, the individualized members of an enlighted hyper-rationalized citizen. "Next Sex" as far as it was in detail very interesting, is such a promise: "edit your own sex". "realize your personal phantasies" (and pay for it like all the others which happen to have identical phantasies). the economical changes which leads to the intimidation of historically weak members of the society which we have to face today have similarities to the situation in the beginning of this century when electrification was feeding a explosion in productivty and transnational capital investments while the national/royal societies where not ready everywhere for the consequences, so instead in the most pathological center of industrylisation indentified the enemy of global capitalism with "the jews". On the other hand: The crazy serb, the rural skinhead, the fascist gang, is the exact product of an urban civil sim-society which manages to export not only its poisonous trash, but also its political conflicts to the test-fields of social conflict, where the extremism can do no "serious" harm to the system. the stages of scandalisation, and media campaign, the screens in the save suburbs, are where the very pity spectacles of murder, burning houses, and man hunt multiply after they actually happened. and as the skin head idiot develops a hate onto the foreigner, the middle class member develops a disgust for the skin head. both is happening on the screen of identity politics, the psycho-economic engineering of subjectivation. it is not enough that protest is beginning to express itself, as long as it doesn't reflect its own complicity in the wide realms of reactionary liberalism. i very much hope that the next ars electronica will more aim at the good old topic of "poltical digital economy" and non- european media cultures. all best /pit ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive