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310/311
“If you have enough rice, even
if there are heavy rains and
thunderstorms, you can eat
without going out to work.
Those who have only money can
only get hold of things for
daily life by buying them.”
--Abaw Buseu, from the film
Virtual Borders (Manu
Luksch, 1999)
8/OPEN PROCESSES
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---
---
MAKE IT SNOW! MAKE IT SNOW! MAKE IT SNOW!
Manu Luksch
2008
Europe’s mountainous regions currently feel the effects
One-minute video
of clim ate c h a n g e m o re d ra m atica lly th a n th e lowla n d s .
commissioned by
Temperatures are rising proportionally higher, glaciers are
Animate Projects and
receding, biodiversity is threatened, snowfall is lower, and
RSA Arts & Ecology as
avalanches and mud slides are more frequent.
part of Stop.Watch in
association with Arts
In order to maintain winter tourism – the primary business in
Council England and
most of Europe’s mountainous areas including the Alps and the
Channel 4
Pyrenees – the first few snow cannons were introduced about
25 years ago. Today 80% of Italian Alpine resorts, and 65% of
the Austrian and French ski slopes make use of artificial snow
to provide the white landscape advertised in travel magazines.
Artificially-produced snow costs €2/m2 every season (much of
which comes from EU funds), and importantly, consumes huge
amounts of energy and water. The snow cannon epitomizes how
humans cover up and even exacerbate ecological problems in
order to fulfill frivolous desires.
Make it snow! make it snow! make it snow! is a (very) short
meditation on the manipulation of winter landscapes for
tourism that points to their fragility and recalls the need for
a holistic perspective.
---
312/313
---
---
Siraj Izhar
PARALLEL PROCESSES AND CULTURAL ECOSYSTEMS
2008
Processes are the vehicles of change; equally processes are
instruments for preventing change. Whilst the image and talk
today may be that of a fast changing world, at the structural
level, reality is much as it has been: that is, the members of
the G8 nations and the Security Council are still the same,
the demographics of financial power and the balance of trade
between rich and poor nations barely shifts, greenhouse
gas emissions continue to rise along with the rate of global
deforestation, and so forth. At the structural level, change
remains the hardest currency and it could be argued that the
only forms of change possible are those that augment the
present structures.
The reality of grid-locked structures at a time of heralded
c h a n g e m e d iate d by c o m m u n ic atio n s te c h n o l o gy wa s
encapsulated in the 1990s by the acronym TINA: ‘There Is No
Alternative’ (to change). In truth, ‘There Is No Alternative’
stood for the paradox of the epoch: the change that is the
obverse of change. What is further intriguing is that TINA
as a concept began life in a previous generation at the Shell
Centre at London’s South Bank, the headquarters of Royal
Dutch Shell. Here in the 1970s, the French executive Pierre
[1] Pierre Wack Scenarios:
Wack instituted a practice of ‘scenarios thinking’ as a means
Uncharted Waters Ahead
of generating scenarios of change in the global marketplace.
(Cambridge: Harvard
The art of scenarios thinking drew heavily on Wack’s interest
Business Review, 1985).
in the mystic traditions of India and Japan, above all in the
Publications by Pierre Wack
writings of Gurdjieff. To ‘contexts of accelerated change,
are largely out of print
greater complexity and genuine uncertainty’[1], Wack employed
though there are numerous
a methodology drawn from the historian Fernand Braudel’s
references online.
concept of ‘conjunctural history’ that mapped combinations
Shell’s website
of movements in history, with short-term rhythms and long
www.shell.com
durations spanning centuries. Within the long durations,
devotes several pages to
Braudel had identified the forces he saw as being unstoppable
scenarios thinking.
or undeniable, what he called the ‘tendances lourdes’[2].
[2] Fernand Braudel The
Pierre Wack’s practice of scenarios thinking (nicknamed ‘the
Perspective of the World:
yoga of perception’ in corporate culture) conceived a future
Civilization and Capitalism
built around the ‘tendances lourdes’ to shape the corporate
15th–18th Century Vol. 3
strategies of Royal Dutch Shell at the projected end of one of
(New York: Harper and Row,
Braudel’s long durations. Historically this coincided, through
1982)
chance or by calculation, with the explosion in the price of
8/OPEN PROCESSES
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crude oil in 1972, a decade of ensuing recession and the dawn of
the informational age. Through chance or through calculation,
Wack’s methodology reaped dividends for Shell. With the years
the ‘tendances lourdes’ translated itself into the marketplace
as the three inseparables ‘Globalisation, Liberalisation,
Technology’, and went on to become an ideological instrument
for restructuring society in its wake: TINA.
The logic of TINA applied to the arts has in its turn produced
the space of the globalised art market. Through the 90s,
contemporary art ‘re-valorised’ itself in alignment with the
market through a conflation of private and public institutions,
along with a retrenchment into orthodoxies of authorship and
commodity. Art as a market became instrumental to the Culture
Industry, incorporating or recuperating a wide spectrum of
social processes. In this conflation, subculture, activism and
art provide content through the same globalised process of a
supply-and-demand chain in a buoyant ‘representation’ market,
which ironically de-valorises the very thing that engendered
the supply-line for marketable content: the social autonomy
of civil processes. The term ‘valorisation’ extrapolates Marx’s
theory of the process of value production to describe the
causal relationship between the new social dynamics and
methods of creating market value in the information age. De-,
re-, and over-valorisation, as used by globalisation theorist
Saskia Sassen, show how the new realities of globalisation are
umbilically tied to immense concentrations of wealth in a few
key global centres[3]. The dependency on epi-centres applies as
[3] Saskia Sassen
much to a representation market as to a labour market. With
Globalization and Its
the accelerating movement of people, new patterns of social
Discontents: Essays on the
segmentation form in deregulated economies of informal zones
New Mobility of People and
and flexible labour.
Money (New York: The New
Press, 1998)
This creates a new politics of diversity summarised by a fresh
dialectic between a valorised representational market, a
de-valorised informal labour market, and an over-valorised
art market driven by ‘super-profits’ – a phrase used by
Sassen to describe the speculative yet spectacular nature
of globalised business driven by its financial sector. The art
market symbolises this with its rising phenomenon of supercurators and blockbuster museums ringed by a supporting
circuit of increasingly uniform global platforms, biennales
and art fairs. In this value production spiral, alternative art
practices have been faced with their own TINA, either shortcircuited or recuperated by the growing market demand for
representational content. The global Culture Industry now
314/315
harvests ‘oppositional’ culture with far greater efficiency for
the representation market, with curated orders of ‘marketable
Others’ in the new politics of diversity and informal processes.
At the same time a parallel shadow industry burgeons in
‘p rolife rating illegitimacies’, in the social p rocesses of
everyday life that lie outside the managerial consciousness of
the valorisation circuits. The illegitimacy of a parallel industry
grows at the level of lived process, whereby, as Michel De
Certeau would describe it, ‘there is a rejection of everything
that is not capable of being dealt with [...] and so constitutes
[4] Michel De Certeau The
the waste products of functionalist administration’[4].
Practice of Everyday Life
(Berkeley: University of
Amidst this culturally mediated creation of ‘value’ and ‘waste’,
California Press, 1984).
the dimension of ecology applies more critically than ever
The quotations here are
to cultural theatres, and not just the natural environment.
liberally interpreted from
The publication of Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies in 2000
the chapter on ‘Walking in
provided an integrating template for the three interacting and
the City’.
interdependent ecologies of mind, society, and environment[5].
By defining the aesthetic paradigm as an ecological imperative,
[5] Felix Guattari The
Guattari intimated a methodology for an art process amidst
Three Ecologies (London:
an industrial circuit-production of contemporariness. What
Continuum, 2000)
he termed ‘ecosophy’ was presented not as an imaginary, but
a necessary imperative, in other words an alternative ‘There
Is No Alternative’, now evolving through an entirely different
prism of reality.
[6] Gilles Deleuze and
Praxis as Process
Felix Guattari A Thousand
Plateaus (London:
To apply an eco-logic to a cultural or representational
Continuum, 1988). In the
p ro ce ss, e nt ails th e d e p loym e nt of strate gie s wo rki n g
context of this essay it
across fields of different disciplines and contexts, perhaps
should be noted that the
describable in terms of a transversal space. Since its use in
title A Thousand Plateaus
A Thousand Plateaus , the transversal has always conjured up
itself drew from Gregory
futuristic images of virtual spaces, Temporary Autonomous
Bateson’s ‘plateau of
Zones, instantaneous global networks; but applied to the
intensity’ as a means of
here and now, the transversal is a messy complicitous process
resolving a double bind
embedded in the real-politics of situated practice. This
impasse. Deleuze and
messiness is true to its roots, the transversal deriving from
Guattari described it
the exchanges in the mental space of a psychoanalytic process
as ‘a continuous, self-
involving unavoidable contagion or transference.[6]
vibrating region [...]
whose development avoids
Applied to the theatre of public space, the transversal
any orientation toward
suggests the construction of processes that operate across
a culmination point or
conflicting terrain with uncertain outcomes: process as
external end’.
emergent process, process as an end in itself. Such processes
8/OPEN PROCESSES
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constitutes ‘praxis as process’. The aesthetics of praxis as
process, that is the poiesis of praxis[7], lies in a methodology
[7] Humberto Maturana
that involves simultaneous, parallel threads of engagement:
and Francisco Varela
threads of cultural process, economic process, legal process,
Autopoiesis and Cognition.
environmental process. These threads connect through a
the realization of the
praxis as process. The logistics of such praxis necessarily
living (Boston: D. Reidel,
involves three operational factors: sustainability, continuity,
1973/1980) condensed the
autonomy. The three are interlinked, have no particular order,
conflict between praxis
and may give rise to contradictions. But their acting together
(as action) and poiesis (as
implies the self-creation of resources of some form to enable
creation and production)
a process to reproduce itself; if this is not addressed the
through their hydrid
process would either reach a dead-end or surrender its
term autopoiesis which
autonomy. Within a praxis, the means of production and the
Varela described as the
means of representation are interwoven in a single process –
‘autonomy proper to living
that is, a praxis represents itself through its own autonomous
systems’. Quoted from Felix
sustainability and the way it navigates itself. This distinguishes
Guattari by Gary Genosko
a praxis of process from the modes of artistic practice whereby
in The Three Ecologies.
a prerequisite is a form of representation in another space.
In such instance, production and representation constitute
se p a rate ci rc u it s t h at c o rre late to w h at t h e c u rato r
Nicholas Bourriaud has described in Postproduction whereby
the art-work serves as a temporary terminal for a network of
interconnected elements [8]. However, the telos of such work,
[8] Nicholas Bourriaud
its projected mode of production and consumption in reality
Postproduction (New York:
fuels a contemporary game, a methodology of recuperation
Lukas & Sternberg, 2002)
a n d c o u nte r-re c u p e ratio n , re c u p e ratio n a n d c o u nte rrecuperation… played out between artist and institution.
Each step of a mutually valorising exchange progressively
filters the work, as Art, as the ‘absolute merchandise’ – Marx’s
phrase for commodity value pushed to its logical extreme. This
value-creation process has only the one market and reinforces
the curating institution as the validating terminus.
An autonomous emergent process is something else. It is
usually self-initiated, and whilst there is some affiliation to
genres of public art or community art, it has to define its
own theatres of operation. Constructing an emergent process
as an end in itself requires its sustaining over several years
so that it evolves through phases of production, (means of)
reproduction and (strategies and tactics) of representation.
These feed and grow out of each other; an emergent process
need not leave a product. To illustrate such process in terms
of a personal practice, three scenarios follow as examples:
1. In 1999, as a member of the ICC (The Intercontinental
Caravan), I organised a march of the 40 Indian peasant farmers
316/317
[9] One account of
we brought to the UK as part of the caravan. The caravan
the activities of the
was a mobile protest against the WTO, Monsanto, and the
farmer’s caravan whilst
corporatisation of agriculture through increasing dependency
in the UK is provided by
on the global seed market. The farmers’ march from Brick Lane,
Katherine Ainger, ‘Life
in Spitalfields, East London to the Bank of England, in the
is Not Business: the
Corporation of London, the heart of global financial power, was
intercontinental caravan’
a small part of a pan-European project. The march itself did not
in We Are Everywhere: The
provide the interpretive frames for its perception, other than
Irresistible Rise of Global
the reality or spectacle of 40 peasant farmers, shouting ‘WTO
Anti-Capitalism (London:
murtabad’ (‘Death to the WTO’) surrounded by twice as many
Verso, 2003)
policemen on horseback or motorbikes. The farmers carried real
estate placards – culled from the neighbourhood, advertising
[10] David Bohm Wholeness
property around Spitalfields, now requisitioned for new use
and the Implicate Order
vilifying the WTO. There was no strategy to pre-represent
(London: Routledge and
the march for any market, either for artists or activists.
Kegan Paul, 1980)
The march itself was part of a continuity for farmers who had
not been to the West before; its transversal properties as a
medium lay in the self-framing potential of an alien environment
by subjects at different ends of the geopolitical landscape[9].
2. Fashion Street was a 600 m2 space set up in the mid 1990s.
The space was divided into private, semi-private and public
zones shared by artists (working mainly with digital media)
and environmental and political activists. The thinking behind
Fashion Street coincided with a long association with the
physicist David Peat and his understanding of David Bohm’s
rheomode [10]. Bohm’s rheomode is an examination of the nounbased structure of our language and cultural consciousness
which in turn structures the way we perceive and act; a nounbased language structure contrasts with the verb-based
structure of indigenous cultures like the Inuit, which defines
their ways of interaction. Fashion Street was a highly active
---
space, and whilst the work of both the activists and artists
Flyer for post-Expo
was of high profile, neither eclipsing the other, the crossovers
Destructo event at Strike,
and intersections between artists and activists remained
Fashion Street
discernibly separate [11] . Like the farmers’ march where the
activity had to be pre-framed for possible reification as art
[11] The Fashion Street
or activism, with the spectrum of activities at Fashion Street,
experiment ended
the verbs stayed firmly in-between the nouns so to speak.
in 2000, in sync with
the regeneration of
3. In 2000 the derelict public lavatory by Nicholas Hawksmoor’s
Spitalfields which saw
Christchurch Spitalfields was converted into a public space
the disappearance of a
called Public Life. Public Life had a bar that provided the
complex network of artist-
money flow to underwrite the building works. Through the
led spaces and a thriving
1990s, the derelict lavatory had been the base for a chain of
micro-entrepreneurial
sequential art projects lasting several years. This sequence
8/OPEN PROCESSES
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was built around the artist as an author-subject operating in
scene; inevitably this
a situationist urban space. By the late 1990s, Spitalfields was
was paralleled by the
subject to intense property speculation in line with what David
redevelopment or
Harvey identified as cycles of capitalist engagement with the
emergence of large
built environment[12]. In the wake of 9/11 and the opening gambit
institutional spaces
of the ‘War on Terror’, an underlying struggle intensified within
and new strategies of
multicultural urban space for possession of strategic turf
engagement through
through distinct agents: the Corporate City’s New Spitalfields
community out-reach
Market, the Bangladeshi community’s Banglatown, and the neo-
projects.
conservative Middle Class ‘Georgian Heritage Spitalfields’. In
that sense, the lavatory site occupied a pivotal position in
[12] David Harvey, ‘The
market force terms, underwritten by cultural polarities.
Urban Process Under
Capitalism: A framework for
Through the public lavatory’s conversion, the intention was
analysis’ (1978) from Gary
not to capitalise the development as real estate but to
Bridge and Sophie Watson,
intervene in a contested context as a cultural process, one
eds. The Blackwell City
that amalgamated de-valorised and over-valorised forms of
Reader (Malden: Blackwell
work publicly. Thus all Public Life activity, self-generated
Publishing, 2002)
and unprogrammed, in mainstream or arcane genres, critically
depended on the self-making of an internal labour pool through
its cultural operations. Meshing service sector work (which
underwrites the art market without visibility) internalised
within a community (artists) brought up critical fault lines that
were internal to Public Life as a process, whilst opposed to
the external conflicts posed by speculative market forces[13].
T h i s e s s ay i s n ot t h e p l a c e t o a n a ly s e t h e s e p roj e c t s
individually but to distinguish the three in terms of distinct
spaces of cultural engagement within a praxis as process:
the public march was a single process that converged multiple
social forces through a single action, but also a key temporary
bridge to ongoing external processes; Fashion Street served
as a host space for two distinct processes, arguably self-
---
segregating, threaded through at the same time; Public Life as
Public Life under
a public utility condensed conflicting threads of valorisation
construction
into a tiny capsule on a street pavement. Common to these
autonomous processes was the construction of scenarios with
conflicts internal to each.
[13] Further information
on Public Life, including
An emergent process in its course generates such new spaces
press-cuttings and essays,
both internal and external; these have to be resolved solely
may be found at
through the means and imperatives of the praxis itself, by the
www.publiclife.org
way it propels, sustains and reproduces itself. An autonomous
process has recourse to no other frames or appeal; its
aesthetic sensibility is linked to its own trajectory, its
autonomy and thereby its transversal potential. A useful
318/319
concept in the consideration of this autonomy is Guattari’s
‘c o ef f ic ie nt of t ra n sve r s a lity ’ w h ic h h e il l u st rate d by
imagining a field full of horses wearing adjustable blinkers
that circumscribe vision. The coefficient of transversality is
[14] Gary Genosko Life and
precisely controlled by adjusting the blinkers[14]. To sustain the
Work of Guattari, From
continuity of an autonomous process over a length of time,
Transversality to Ecosophy
the coefficient of transversality has to be weighed against
(London: Continuum, 2000)
the coefficient of (consume-able) visibility. The two things –
transversal-perception and spectator-visibility – are entirely
different entities and tools. How a process navigates between
them in a live public theatre over time defines how it shapes
itself in time and so intensifies or, otherwise, how it channels
into given frames of representation (for example as art) or
circuits of contestation (as activism). To further extrapolate:
if a process dispenses with the need for its representation,
this does not mean that it dissipates into nothingness, but
that it is only recoverable in terms of the visualisation of
a (cultural) ecosystem: an ecosophic totality that requires
a different aesthetic undertaking, and a different notion of
cultural circulation, exchange, and causality.
Circulation Modules and Cultural Quanta
In Energy and Equity Ivan Illich describes how high levels
of energy (consumption) degrade social relations just as
inevitably as they destroy the physical environment; to quote
‘if a society opts for high energy consumption, its social
relations must be dictated by a technocracy and huge public
expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize
[15] Ivan Illich Energy and
the emergence of a computerized Leviathan’.[15]
Equity, Ideas in Progress
(London: Marion Boyars,
For equity to have correspondence or representational
1974)
value, Illich uses concepts of ‘per capita quanta’ and ‘socially
optimal energy quanta’. As our everyday lives are increasingly
defined by capital-intensive forms of representation and
communication, the concept of quanta is useful for the
visualisation of an ecological dimension to culture. Illich uses
the concept as a tool to figurate a balancing equivalence
process bridging fundamentally different entities within
one ecologic frame. Quanta are equally a means of adding
new dimensional possibilities to the theatre of cultural
production and transposing them onto existing structures
of social reality. Deleuze and Guattari, in ‘Micropolitics and
[16] In Deleuze and
Segmentarity’ [16] , use the notion of quantum flow as a means
Guattari (1988)
of overcoming the binary opposition that existing structures
8/OPEN PROCESSES
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of ‘segmented’ reality derive from. Quantum flows ‘reshuffle
and stir up’ rigid instituted segments through connection and
conjugation across the extremes of scales, time and space,
cycles of macro-history and micro-history, the macropolitical
and micropolitical. In such terms, a quantum flow fathoms new
circuits and circulation but without a prescribed form. The
form derives from the specific application within a particular
context, a defined theatre of operation. The potential
challenge is to visualise such theatres in living social contexts.
Giving material form to the idea of cultural quanta leads to
the production of new dimensions of social circulation, with
use-value and exchange value, which operate in spaces parallel
---
to that of normative consumer space. The appliance of ‘per
Bicycle Tree, designed for
capita quanta’ implies its own theatres of cultural operation
left-over urban spaces
through multiple means, collective and individual, virtual and
material, that initiate circulation threads in living contexts.
http://xyzlondon.com
(Siraj Izhar, 2003)
To suggest possibilities: my proposal for the Living Memorial to
Ken Saro Wiwa in 2005 began with corresponding the circulation
of self-generated bicycle-powered energy with a visual output
using LEDs (light-emitting diodes) and a communication network
(using SMS). The three working together would be the start of
a self-organising cycle for a living memorial that would evolve
with time. The memorial would work as a ‘scenarios engine’ in
public space, in the service not of corporate strategists but
of civil processes. The ‘scenarios engine’ as a communications
network would progressively be appropriated by the public.
As the proposal developed, the LED modules scaled up into 6 m
spherical structures of carbon C60 molecules, to float over the
---
skyline on carbon fibre cables (through discussions with the
Bicycle Tree model with
structural engineer Mark Whitby).
yellow (Circle Line) bicycles
Based on a rate of energy transfer of only one kilowatt, the
(Design release by Siraj
Izhar with Masa Miyamoto,
October 2003)
memorial proposed a self-reproducing energy and communication
loop. The circulation of ‘quanta’ in this loop and its scale of
economies depended on the potential space created by public
appropriation of the loop; that is, the loop could theoretically
up-scale, down-scale or multiply in correspondence with its
[17] Scheduled for
use in the networked nature of globalised public space and the
construction in London
new dynamics of dispersal and centralisation [17].
at various sites in 2008
in association with the
Another process using the circulation of mass rather than
Remember Saro-Wiwa
information and light was initiated in 2003 and involved twenty 7 m3
coalition
waste containers (or skips, as they are called in England). The
www.remembersarowiwa.com
skips collected waste around North-East London, mainly in the
www.stalk.net/
borough of Newham, the most multicultural corner of London.
LivingMemorial
320/321
The process outlined a map, with both physical and cultural
reach, whose territory was bound by economies of scale on
two fronts: by the logistics of the tonnage mass of waste –
dead weight – moving around a territory, and the mobility of
the labour involved in the recycling of this mass – an informal
sector. Whilst the environment today is increasingly valorised
in the marketing of a green economy, the labour it depends on
is predictably de-valorised. In an ongoing project dealing with
metaphoric cultural debris, several parallel forms of social and
material quanta intersect in circulation routines that silently
produce the new formations of London’s civil society.
--un skip project
In both of these instances, a circulation process as a praxis is
200 Marlborough Road,
constructed over time, and by its everyday working continuity,
Romford, Essex
31 October 2004
penetrates and propels itself to create its working landscape.
Through the practical imperatives of its continuity, the
circulation inter-relates segregated strands in the landscape,
strands that Guattari referred to as the segregated ecologies
of environmental, mental and social worlds. In Steps to an
Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson describes the mental state
he called the double bind as a state of conflicting demands that
incapacitate the subject, disabling a possibility of resolution
through action. The double bind arises through a failure to
intuitively correspond different strands of reality and
communication – distinguished by Bateson in terms of ‘language
and meta-language’ to differentiate between text, speech,
gesture, affectation and the multiple ways in which exchanges
---
of meaning take place. Through its failure to correspond and
s_i skips
correlate, the double bind sustains a sense of understanding
Waste collection and
and perception riven with gaps, a containing structure of
recycling, London.
(Siraj Izhar, 2004–07)
reality trapped within the production of communication[18].
In an analogous way, the double bind describes the social
[18] Gregory Bateson Steps
function of the injunction ‘There is No Alternative’, TINA.
to an Ecology of Mind
Both disable the connective link between perception and
(Chicago: University of
commensurate action. Both create a ‘stop’, an unbridgeable
Chicago Press, 1972)
space between seeing and acting. It is this space that a praxis
as process entangles with as a means of contesting the status
quo in the here and now through its distinct characteristics
of sustainability, continuity and autonomy. As stated before,
this is a messy, complicitous undertaking embedded in the
real-politics of situated practice, and often distant from the
managed spaces sanctioned for art.
---
8/OPEN PROCESSES
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--SQUARING THE CIRCLE, CIRCLING THE SQUARE
--Bill McAlister, Manu Luksch,
Mukul Patel
2007
Misfits, miscreants, square pegs in round holes ... or round pegs
Lomographic panels
in square holes? Bill, Manu, and Mukul cast distorting eyes over
(using multi-lens, fisheye,
London, presenting twisted geometries on the Lomowall in
swing-lens panoramic and
Trafalgar Square and running workshops for visiting lomographers.
medium format cameras)
Mukul’s A man, a plan, a canal – London! walk took congress
and workshops for the
participants 7 km along Regent’s Canal towpath from the Angel
Lomography World Congress,
to Docklands, past houseboats and lofts, under willow trees and
September 2007, London
over locks, dodging commuters on bikes and cops in choppers,
www.lomography.com
where the water reflects Victorian warehouses, Hitchcock’s
studios, and postmodern skyscrapers. Manu’s Big Brother City
(1. smile ... 2. shoot back!) began with a guide to surveillance in
London and ended in a cam-spotting urban tour, for which she
--Indigo indicates the 12
added an 11th rule to the 10 ‘golden rules’ of lomography –
panels of the Lomowall made
every image must contain a CCTV camera in the frame.
by Bill, Manu and Mukul
---
322/323
---
---
Naseem Khan
ARNOLD CIRCUS GHOSTS
2007
The Friends of Arnold
Who can ever claim to fully own anything? Bits of land and chunks
Circus came about as a
of masonry may be given the official accolade of ‘heritage’.
spontaneous reaction of a
But really, ‘heritage’ is not a static and finite thing. It needs
small core of local people
to be re-owned, re-invented, re-modelled, re-defined and re-
distressed by the run-down
adopted, over and over again.
and disreputable state of
a beautiful and historic
Arnold Circus in Shoreditch – with its Grade II listed bandstand
site. A rare bit of green
– may look solid. It stands there proudly at the epicentre of
open space in a deprived
seven incoming roads, giving seven different views of it. But
part of Shoreditch, it
really there are innumerable ways of looking at it.
was shunned by most
people in the vicinity.
When the brand-new London County Council took the decision
The organisation rapidly
to demolish the notorious slums of the East End in the 1880s,
acquired 500 members and
they had the vision not to simply throw the debris out. Instead
charitable status.
they had it fashioned into a small hill with gardens on two tiers,
www.friendsofarnoldcircus.
a capacious plateau on top and a delicate little bandstand
wordpress.com
right plumb in its middle.
The Friends’ activities have
It was a rare place, right then – a place for socialising,
brought Arnold Circus back
sitting in deckchairs in ones best clothes, mar velling at
into the life and awareness
the ferocious moustaches of the uniformed band leader
of local people. An annual
and listening to regular oompah sounds of the plummy and
Carrom championship, the
comforting brass band.
Picnic where dishes are
shared and cyclists
---
challenged to complete 100
revolutions of the Circus,
‘What lies underneath Arnold Circus?’ children of the nearby
and music (from brass bands
Virginia Primary School were asked in the course of a recent
to Bengali vocals) - not to
writing exercise. ‘Dead bodies,’ they said.
mention the fabulous Circus
on the Circus in spring 2007
---
- now bring in hundreds. The
Friend’s outreach program
It was u n respectable an d they we re n’t allowed up onto
involves schoolchildren who
it, said a couple of young Bengali women who had grown up
come to garden; women who
on the Boundary Estate that surrounds Arnold Circus. Gangs
are embroidering a wall-
were held to inhabit it. (Or were they simply groups of youths
hanging that embodies
bored out of their minds who’d taken over the bandstand
their responses to the
as their private domain?)
natural life of the Circus;
and the elderly, whose
---
memories are being recorded.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
Make your way around the circular walkway and you can see
other signs of fleeting ownership. Tendrils of pumpkins secretly
planted in the night by Bengali guerrilla grannies twine up the
iron arches at the foot of the steps. Another invisible hand
has buried a pet rat in one of the flower beds and occasionally
you can find a joss stick burning over the grave. In the bushes,
mobiles made by children in one of the events run by the Friends
of Arnold Circus twirl in the wind.
Look again.
There’s detritus left by clubbers after a heavy night out.
Congealing chicken tikka, pallid chips scattered like an obscure
cast of the I Ching.
Vomit, and – one morning – a large human turd planted fair and
square in the centre of the bandstand.
Dogs, little and large.
Dog walkers (little and large).
Lone lunch takers.
--There is a tenuous feel to Arnold Circus. It feels like a ship of
history that is only lightly tethered to the ground and that
shudders slightly as the unsightly 78 bus rumbles its crass
and needless way around the Circus. It almost seems to float
ghostlike at the end of its seven feeder roads, with its six tall
plane trees and its sleeping-beauty bushes. And whether or not
you give any credence to the powers of ley lines, discovering
that Arnold Circus itself sits firmly at the end of one ley line
has a peculiar kind of rightness about it.
---
--Lomographs of Arnold Circus
by Bill McAlister, 2007
324/325
--esc (EmptySpaceChiangmai)
is a complex of five
traditional teak Thai farm
houses situated in Northern
Thailand near Chiangmai.
Built on the edge of rice
fields and overlooking the
mountains of Burma, the
independent space is run by
Noi and Manuel Lutgenhorst
and includes an open air
stage, ceramic studio, and
video edit suite. esc hosts
theatre camps, workshops,
performances, artists in
residence, and (from 2008),
regular masterclasses
in Asian Puppetry.
International collaborations
are encouraged, and esc is
rapidly developing into a
destination for artists in
the Mekong Region.
www.emptyspacechiangmai.
info
326/327
---
---
As translated from a
EXTRACT FROM THE JOURNAL OF NEWBIUS JOACHIM
VINCENT PRAKASH RIPPERTON, 3RD EARL OF UTTAR
ATAXIA
long-perished cant by
the Last Mango in Paris
Photos by Chris Helgren
On approaching the coast of that green and pleasant land,
and Manu Luksch
we were unexpectedly beset by pirates. Despite a queenly
struggle, I was manhandled by two gargantuan brutes with
forearms the size of my mother ’s infamous pumpernickel
loaves. The experience was not altogether unpleasant. They
hauled me below deck, where I was shocked to see an arboretum
- on a ship, no less! What was this strange world I had been
sucked into?
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
328/329
All manner of strange and exotic shrubs bloomed around me –
seas of crotons, aloes, sassafras, and an unimaginable variety
of purple-flowered cacti. The floor veritably writhed with
unusual creatures that I had not encountered before: ancient
wrinkly beasts with shells on their backs, into which they
retreated when sleeping. Before me towered a wiry skeleton
of a man with a shock of white hair, astride a machine that
resembled a horse. He asked me to remove my outer garments
(it was my pleasure to oblige) and passed me a piece of card no
bigger than the tiniest pinch of snuff.
The card bore a picture of an Oriental goddess, wearing
a garland of skulls around her blackened neck. The skeleton
man asked me to place the card under my tongue, which I
did, albeit reluctantly. It was obvious that I was being
prepared for some primitive ritual. A hatch in the floor
swung open, and the air was filled with dense smoke and
a heady aroma not unlike that of frankincense. Out of the
smoke emerged a vision.
Half man, half cat, he wore a kimono fashioned by legendary
woodcutter of yore, Missey Iyake. His right eye was covered
with an indigo eyepatch. On his left paw rested a parrot whose
jaws had been bound together with wire that cruelly cut
into its beak, and over his shoulder was a bag which vacillated
from side to side. Though the creature’s lips did not move,
I heard him say, ‘It is full of amoeba, my friend. Amoeba.’ He
smiled at me - and this smile penetrated to my core. It was in
that moment that I knew we shared a commonality rooted in
humanity’s hidden desires.
The shock-haired general straddling the mechanical horse
cleared the phlegm from his throat and growled, ‘Endtroducing
his sexcellency, the Grand Turq Loukoum!’
The sartorially splendid beast smiled once more, lit a cheroot
and took me by the hand down rickety wooden stairs into
a chamber filled with thousands of black, shiny discs. I could
have sworn I saw a huge dragon scuttle into the darkest
recesses of the chamber’s ceiling, but on further scrutiny
I co uld d etect n othin g . I fe lt my ca pto r ’s eyes bu rn a
hole through the back of my neck, and again I heard his voice in
my head: ‘Everything is true. Nothing is sacred.’
I turned to the Grand Turq. He smiled, and mouthed, ‘Nothing is
true. Everything is sacred.’
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
I gasped incredulously. Had this kingly creature also come
across Hassan i Sabbah’s garden of earthly delights, upon
whose gates was inscribed this unholy aphorism?
The Turq Loukoum prepared by his own paw a dish of piquant
peas, and after we dined he poured a thick black medicine into
a thimble. I should have known better than to drink it, but I
was disarmed (nay, dismembered) by his feline charm. Instantly
I fell into an inebriated stupor, accompanied by dreams of a
giant black incubus, hair matted into rope-like strands, who
sat on my face and tutted disapprovingly ...
--I woke on the roof of a palace in a strange city. Black birds
circled and squawked incessantly, as if warning me to the
strange scenarios that were to unfold before my eyes. Ebony
males in dresses stood on their hands balancing trays bearing
champagnes and canapés, which were devoured by a Bohemian
crowd of salubrious characters who danced the fandango
and spoke in tongues. In each corner sat groups of coolies,
punching away at what I assumed were counting machines.
Later I learned that these click-clacking devices were called
mouseapples; which can be no coincidence, for on a throne in
the centre of this maelstrom of sin sat a flame-haired woman,
the spitting image of the fabled temptress Lilith.
A chocolate-skinned pagan in drag wailed, ‘Hail Una’amlux! Queen
of the Crucible!’
The impressive matriarch conducted the throngs of gyrating
heathens. Slowly, as my eyes became accustomed to the
blackened night, I began to establish the identities of other
orchestrators of this veritable orgy of gluttony and perdition.
A tiny damn-Asian devil span like a whirling dervish and uttered
spurious, strangely exhilarating incantations. His bald pate was
graced by a feathered mask. A clandestinely camp custodian
carved copious cuts of casu marzu, ably assisted by a small
mountain of a woman I recognised from pornographic etchings
of the Victorian era; it was none other than Koko De Mari,
infamous for her exploits with raw fish!
Turq Loukoum was obviously complicit in e nginee ring the
com plaisance of this seething mass of godless h oofe rs,
hypnotising them with a horrific myriorama of a paranoid king
330/331
bedevilled by his own shadow. Like a puppeteer, the Turq
stood with his paws up the backsides of two small brown boys
who governed a tower of mechanical devices before them.
A strangely sweet sound emerged from vibrating surfaces
encapsulated in a series of large wooden boxes. Amidst the
waves of tintinnabulation, I deciphered a reversed message
repeated ad infinitum: ‘706090 0499 code’. I scribbled down
the digits furiously (in the hope that they might beckon to me
a time-travelling Hackney Carriage to bear me to my beloved)
but on doing so, felt a paw on my shoulder, and that voice ,
redolent of silk, cinnamon and scientific malpractice, bouncing
across the rooftops like a Shakespearean sonnet on heat:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, charge your glasses and polish your
asses; we are never going home ... ’
---
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
---
---
SIDELONG GLANCES
Mukul Patel
2007
5. Closing the loop
5voltcore’s Shockbot Corejulio is a computer-robot-screen
assemblage that shorts its own circuits, generating random
images until it destroys itself – a relatively closed system
running a relatively open process. Its one conceit is that it
presents itself as spectacle.
Tighten the noose: populate the deserts and oceans with
thousands of these automatons, drawing their power from sun
and wind and waves, rasterising in the wild. Artifical life’s but
a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
---
332/333
---
---
Armin Medosch
AMBIENTTV.NET:
OPEN DOORS, OPEN PROCESSES
2007
Get Fresh in 1997
1997 was a good year for underground dancefloors in London.
[1] Tina Moore ‘Never Gonna
Tina Moore’s ‘Never Gonna Let You Go’ [1] sweetened even the
Let You Go’, written by Tina
greasiest breakfast at Tony’s cafe on Broadway Market. The
Moore and Tommie Ford.
Blue Note club in Hoxton Square hosted groundbreaking nights
12” vinyl single (London:
including Metalheadz (which took drum and bass overground),
Delirious)
Ninja Tune’s Stealth, and the genre-breaking Anokha (literally,
‘unique’). The sound of the city heralded an eclectic future,
optimistically global. Developments in neighbouring Shoreditch
were nearing the tipping point of hip. Artists had moved into
Hoxton’s abandoned warehouses in the 1980s; by the early
[2] Simon Pope summarised
1990s, the area had become identified with the YBAs (Young
the mood in his piece ‘After
British Artists). And now word had spread. Once lacking even a
the revolution, the after
decent convenience store, the square was packed with bars,
party’ in The Futile Style
galleries, design studios, and web professionals, and the ShoHo
of London, available at:
(Shoreditch-Hoxton) effect was being felt in Brick Lane and
http://bak.spc.org/iod/
the City borders[2].
cuba.html
New Labour had been voted into power with a huge majority,
[3] ‘Cool Britannia’ was the
ending 18 years of Tory rule. The previous year, Newsweek
name of a dessert made
magazine had pronounced London ‘the coolest city on Earth’, and
with vanilla ice cream,
Labour’s Culture Secretary Chris Smith was quick to capitalise
strawberry, and choloate-
on the new optimism by branding Britain ‘Cool Britannia’[3]. She
covered shortbread
no longer ruled the waves, and had willingly destroyed her
confection launched by
industrial backbone – but she was sexy, talented, and confident.
the Ben & Jerry’s ice
Hopes ran particularly high in East London. Trendies in sharp
cream company in 1996, and
finned haircuts sprang down Curtain Road, speed-talking into
since discontinued. The
their mobile phones, DJ bags slung around their shoulders,
dessert was developed by
baggy trousers hanging low over unreleased trainers. People
an American lawyer living
who would have been – or actually were – squatting in the 1980s
in London for a recipe
were now starting up dot-coms. The Internet industry was
competition. Editor’s note;
hyped: young designers knocked together multimedia animations
hereafter: [Ed]
for corporate clients buying into ‘web guerrilladom’, and blew
the surplus on art projects and lengthy research trips to
[4] ‘Flexible friends’, The
exotic locations (holidays). The Guardian trumpeted the advent
Guardian, 4 February 1999.
of the ‘flexicutives’ – young entrepreneurs with a bohemian
www.guardian.co.uk/flex-
touch who embodied the new value system that merged urban
exec/Story/0,,208727,00.
cool with making lots of money[4]. One friend later said, ‘it was
html
all crap but I liked the leather sofas.’
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
CREATIVELY TASKED
It was also in 1997 that th e n ewly c reate d De pa r tme nt
of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) launched the Creative
Industries Task Force, which published its first Mapping
Document the next year [5] . This document summarized the
[5] Available from
contributions of what it defined as the cultural sector to the
www.culture.gov.uk/
nation’s GDP. A very broad range of activities fell under the
Reference_library/
definition, including advertising, leisure software (games),
The DCMS is responsible for
music, fashion, and arts and antiques (a single category). There
the government policies on
was no doubt about the strength of some of these industries;
'alcohol and entertainment',
even so, the Document inflated the overall economic impact by
tourism, and gambling,
including many peripheral activities, such as catering in theatres.
among others. Before 1997,
the DCMS was known as the
Th e 20 ye a rs p re ce d i n g t h e p u b lic atio n of t h e Ma p p i n g
Department of National
Document had witnessed fundamental changes in arts funding
Heritage.
policies. Subtle shifts in language masked profound political
transitions. The term ‘culture industry’ had been introduced
by Theodor Adorno in the 1940s to point out the fundamental
incommensurability between the arts and capitalism, which made
the art work subservient to economic rationality. European
cultural policy in the 1970s reflected this critique to some
extent; the market-driven cultural products of the US were
seen to pose a cultural threat to both popular/folk forms and
‘high’ art. But the threat was also perceived to be an economic
one. Both Left and Right formulated protectionist policies,
with the Right, under the sway of romanticism and idealism,
tending to support ‘high’ art such as opera. Meanwhile, the
younger generations turned their backs on ‘high’ culture,
instead expressing their energy through trends such as pop
and punk, both suffused with a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach.
These move me nts became n ot only fashionable, but also
academically validated through the burgeoning field of Cultural
Studies and the advent of the postmodern stance, which
collapsed the traditional dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’.
In the early 1980s, the left-leaning Greater London Council
(GLC), led by ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, developed the idea of the
‘cultural industries’. GLC policymakers came to regard popular
youth culture as containing legitimate, grassroots movements
that could articulate a radical politics of ethnic and sexual
diversity. The GLC highlighted sectors such as rock music that
were significant creators of cultural and economic wealth,
and outside the scope of public funding, but nonetheless
v u l n e ra b l e to m a r ket va g a rie s . T h e p ro p o sitio n wa s to
intervene in the market to support such industries, thereby
promoting a social democratic idea of cultural production and
336/337
[6] ‘I think we’ve been
distribution that would also generate employment, rather than
through a period where too
offering the traditional subsidies to the establishment ‘high
many people have been given
culture’. But the central government under Margaret Thatcher
to understand that if they
had a profound distaste for disbursing grants[6], and saw little
have a problem, it’s the
reason to fund artists who were loudly oppositional. By 1986,
government’s job to cope
the GLC and the six other Labour-controlled Metropolitan
with it. “I have a problem,
County Councils had become too much of an annoyance to the
I’ll get a grant.” “I’m
centre, and they were simply abolished.
homeless, the government
must house me.” They’re
For the next 14 years, London survived despite a lack of a
casting their problem on
central planning authority. By the turn of the 1990s, it had
society. And, you know,
become evident that some groups of ‘cultural producers’,
there is no such thing as
including pop musicians, fashion designers, and occasionally
society. There are individual
even filmmakers, contributed very significantly to the economy.
men and women, and there
Fortuitously, these groups had little (socialist) revolutionary
are families.’ Margaret
fervour left after nursing hangovers from the Second Summer
Thatcher, Women’s Own
of Love (1988–89)[7]. What they needed was a way to shift more
magazine, 31 Oct 1987 [Ed]
product. With the release of the NCSA Mosaic web browser
in 1993, the Internet awoke from its academic slumber and
[7] In the UK, the summers
became populated[8]. The conjunction of distributed information
of 1988 and 1989 witnessed
services and the exploding pop mainstream laid the foundations
the explosion of the acid
for an entirely new cultural-economic model.
house/free party scene,
fuelled by various flavours
In the 1960s, prophets of the new society had claimed that
of electronic music, LSD and
‘the rapid convergence of media, telecommunications and
ecstasy; there are parallels
computing was sweeping away the economic, political and
with the Summer of Love
cultural certainties of the industrial age’ [9] . What made the
(1967, San Francisco) [Ed]
difference in the 1990s was the paradigm shift to digital
n etw o r ke d s p a c e , t h e m o st p ot e nt e x p re s s i o n of t h e
[8] A network of academic
promised post-industrial society where the privileged trade
and government networks
only information. Marshall McLuhan provided a theoretical
(internetwork) grew from
framework for the understanding of social change at the close
the 1960s (initially in the
of the 20th century. The advent of information society would
US, later linking to Europe
inevitably lead to the hegemony of creators of information:
in the 1970s) and developed
the immaterial labourers, the ‘digerati’, the virtual class.
into what has become
In the 1990s, ruling bureaucrats, politicians and think tanks
known as the Internet in
eagerly bought into the concept of a new class. And when the
the 1980s. Until the late
DCMS introduced the term ‘creative industries’[10], it was the
1980s, it was a strictly
‘digerati’, the new class of cultural entrepreneurs on the Net,
commerce-free zone.
that was to be the vanguard for its policy[11]. In East London
in 1997, a particular instantiation of the new class could be
[9] Daniel Bell, quoted by
studied in a small biotope. The web impresarios, club-night
Richard Barbrook in The New
organisers and art people rubbing shoulders in the ‘creative
Class (London: Creative
cluster’ around Shoreditch and Hoxton transformed it into
Workers in a World City/
ShoHo, hipper and younger than the old centre of the media
Openmute, 2006)
industry, Soho.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
Whilst bearing a resemblance to the old GLC idea of the ‘cultural
[10] ‘Those activities
industries’, the new ‘creative industries’ concept dispensed
which have their origin in
with the hope of social redemption through cultural practice;
individual creativity, skill
instead, it revolved around the exploitation of intellectual
and talent and which have
property (IP) for profit. As Britain was one of the few net export
a potential for wealth
earners of licence fees related to IP, creativity and cultural
and job creation through
entrepreneurship were seen as significant contributors to
the generation and
future economic development of the nation. In subsequent
exploitation of intellectual
reports and analysis the growth rate of the creative industries
property.’ (DCMS, 1998)
was usually given as double that of the ‘normal’ economy[12].
[11] Ideas about a technoPeculiar to many of the products of the creative industries,
cultural elite have a deep
as defined by the DCMS, is that they are positional goods –
historical context, as
they serve to distinguish the cognoscenti. Moreover, they
Richard Barbrook has
tend to be goods for which tastes are suggested through
pointed out (op. cit.). The
marketing and finally acquired through consumption. Thus the
popularisation of the idea
creative industries exemplify a sophisticated late capitalism.
of the ‘knowledge economy’
But for many artists, the calculus was not performed in
dates back to at least the
monetary terms. Indisputably, the UK was buzzing – despite
early 1960s, when Austrian-
the policymakers proclamation of ‘Cool Britannia’ – and it
American economist
was a relatively innocent enthusiasm that prompted multi-
Fritz Machlup published
instrumentalist Talvin Singh to describe the Anokha club nights
The Production and
as ‘tastemaker sessions’. (Entry was a modest £3).
Distribution of Knowledge
in the United States.
‘Cool Britannia’ as an exercise in nation-branding was a shortlived failure, whose demise was hastened by the growing crisis in
[12] Creative Industries
UK agriculture. The Right ridiculed the idea that the label ‘cool’
Economic Estimates,
might be sufficient in attracting major foreign investment.
Statistical Bulletin,
Nevertheless, an eager Tony Blair, playing on his relative youth,
October 2005 – Revised
continued to invite a stream of (not quite cool) rock stars to
Version (DCMS, 2005)
official receptions. Soon, however, most of the artists realised
they were in danger of becoming quasi-official ambassadors
for a government that was quickly losing its shine. Cold-nosed
Britannia notwithstanding, the strategy to promote and
[13] ‘By hanging out in
exploit the creative industries remained in place.
these urban villages, the
Cybertariat can help each
THE FALL OF SHOHO
other to find new jobs,
The hype around the new creative class had a massive impact
learn new skills and discover
on the property market in inner cities, particularly in East
new ideas. Alongside the
London. The industrial decline of the 1970s and early 1980s
traditional duo of the
had left many urban areas derelict. From the 1980s to the
market and the factory, the
mid-1990s, artists had taken over some quite spectacular
network has become the
factories, warehouses and canal fronts. The media declared
third - and most modern
the locale hip, and investment poured in. In the midst of the
- method for organising
1990s new economy boom, as Shoreditch became web-designer
collective labour.’
central, property developers followed hot on the heels [13] .
(Barbrook op. cit., p. 38)
338/339
Then, the people who had turned Notting Hill (in West London)
[14] John Barker, ‘Reader
into a millionaires’ ghetto began to move east [14] . The area
Flatteries - Ian Sinclair
underwent continuous, rapid, and dramatic change, reaching
and the Colonisation of
its logical conclusion within a few years – the boom killed off
East London’ [online]. Mute
its own reasons for being[15]. The Blue Note was forced to shut
magazine, 7 July 2006.
down because of complaints from new neighbours, while around
Available from:
the corner, independent bars and restaurants that were only
www.metamute.org/?q=en/
two or three years old were taken over by better-heeled
reader-flattery
proprietors. By summer 2007, once-YBA haunt The Bricklayers
Arms had shut its doors, and exclusive private members’
[15] ‘One day we looked out
club Soho House had opened its East End branch (annual fee:
of the window and saw lots
£700). A commercial consumer culture took over, and almost
of people with mullets. The
everything that had made the area interesting in the first
next day the landlord came
place disappeared.
round and doubled the
rent and we had to move
The fall of ShoHo was substantially a result of astonishing
[...] Before, the area was
price rises caused by property speculation, and a foreseeable
driven by people’s work.
effect of government policy. Just as the GLC’s ‘cultural
Now it’s driven by people
industries’ policy was revisited in a transformed manner
going out in the evening.’
by the DCMS, so government for the city itself returned in
Fashion designer Alexander
2000 in the form of the Greater London Authority (GLA), led
McQueen interviewed in
once again by Ken Livingstone [16]. The new Mayor’s agency for
The Guardian, 21 November
strategic planning was called the London Development Agency
2003: ‘Where have all the
(LDA). What had happened in Shoreditch in an organic manner
cool people gone?’
became the blueprint for future inner city regeneration under
http://arts.guardian.
the LDA’s Creative London scheme. The LDA claimed to cherish
co.uk/features/
‘the city’s New Independents and Free Agents’[17], the digital
story/0,,1090073,00.html
artisans concentrated in Shoreditch. The hope was that an
[Ed]
open, cosmopolitan environment would foster a culture of
creative risk taking and lucrative innovation, as it had in other
[16] Despite being not quite
urban villages such as San Francisco’s SoMA (South of Market
so Red, Ken Livingstone had
Street). By the late 1990s, it had become standard policy to
another battle with a Prime
deploy new cultural spaces as vanguards for regeneration. But
Minister – this time, from
without adequate controls on developers, it was a policy that
the Labour Party – as Blair
could not benefit the existing inhabitants. By the time the
attempted to block his
White Cube 2 gallery opened in Hoxton Square in 2000, many of
standing for the post of
the artists who had put the square on the map had moved on.
Mayor. [Ed]
Behind the Square, to this date (2008), social housing blocks
that accommodate hundreds remain conspicuously unimproved.
[17] Barbrook op. cit., p. 38
quoting GLA Economics,
In the 1990s, the phantasm of a particularly profitable class of
Creativity: London’s Core
‘creatives’ started to become every European government’s
Business, p. 33 (London:
wet dream. A decade later, the ‘creative industries’ became a
Greater London Authority,
focus for the British Council’s overseas ‘cultural diplomacy’.
2002)
Beguiled by the promises of the Internet, and mesmerised by
creativity unleashed from the (digitally) hip, administrators in
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
the arts sector have begun to rewrite funding policies. The
erosion of historically important values has taken on various
forms, from the instrumentalisation and commodification of
the arts at all levels, to the implementation of media industry
restrictions on copying. But the full picture is much more
complex than this abbreviated history suggests. The Net
has not only brought back entrepreneurship into business,
but also encouraged strong movements that do not obey the
commercial maxims implied by the term ‘creative industries’.
Far from being bent on collectively safeguarding the future
economic success of the nation state, artists and activists
are proposing alternative value systems. Whether through
socially engaged practice with art and technology, or through
[18] Elaine Brass and
technical solutions for an always-on, networked society,
Sophoe Poklewski Koziell
models of sharing and collaboration in the digital commons are
Gathering Force: DIY
‘selling’ themselves without ad companies creating desire. The
Culture – Radical Action
practice of East London-based ambientTV.NET exemplifies a
for Those Tired of Waiting
possible approach to the construction of an aesthetic and
(London: The Big Issue
ethical community in the present.
Writers, 1997)
[19] During the filming,
The Emergence of ambientTV.NET
fires broke out twice
in the square. It later
Early in 1997, Manu Luksch arrived in London. The Vienna-born
transpired that insurance
artist settled in Hackney Road, a 10-minute walk from Hoxton
company Wiener Städtische
Square and equidistant to Broadway Market, where she would
had made a deal with the
later establish the ambient.space studio. Almost immediately,
district authorities to
she encountered two individuals who would greatly influence the
redevelop the square. No
direction of her work. Sophie Poklewski Koziell, with whom Luksch
charges of arson were
shared an apartment, was writing a book on DIY and direct action
brought. [Ed]
movements in the UK[18], while in South London, James Stevens was
applying the DIY ethic to digital networking. While she had been
[20] The tactical media
studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Luksch had made
festival Next 5 Minutes has
a 16 mm short (So Oder Anders, 1994) about the regeneration
been held every few years
of a market square [19] . She was already working outside the
in Amsterdam since 1993,
frame, though, having assisted the production of Peter
when the theme was the
Greenaway’s exhibition 100 Objects to Represent the World ,
‘camcorder revolution’.
and compiling a CD-ROM (to be continued) of students’ work. In
Discussing the N5M 2
1995, she was invited to manage the online presence of Hamburg
festival in 1996, Luksch
Expo 2000 by the Media Lab Munich, of which she subsequently
had already proclaimed the
became Artistic Director. A year later, she visited the Next 5
high-tech media installation
Minutes (N5M) 2 festival in Amsterdam [20]. N5M 2 emphasised the
format moribund, ‘killed by
tactical qualities of media – its social and political potential,
flirtations such as art-
media as a tool, and many-to-many broadcasting. As such, it
activism, art-science, and
bore a stark and refreshing contrast to the long-established
art-social sculpture’.
Ars Electronica, which Luksch described as a temple for the
www.next5minutes.org
340/341
worship of high-tech ‘high art’. N5M 2 could be seen as part of a
historically opposed tendency to such fantasising by the elite
– a tendency that admitted the possibility of radical change
from below. For Luksch, N5M 2 was a revelation – it instigated
her thinking about the convergence of older media, such as
experimental film and documentary, with the Internet. Later,
in London, she would come to a more robust formulation of
her ideas as she recognised the transformative possibilities
of hybrid media.
DIRECT ACTION IN THE UK
[21] The direct action
In the Hackney apartment shared with Poklewski Koziell,
movement in the UK has a
Luksch very quickly learned of the breadth and depth of the
long history. One immediate
direct action movement in the UK [21] . Driven by a grassroots
precursor to the 90s
environmentalism, diverse protest campaigns fought for land
environmental protests
rights and civil liberties and against roadbuilding, airport
was the Greenham Common
expansion, genetically modified crops, and the export of live
Women’s Camp that began in
animals for slaughter. On one occasion, the two women visited
1981, against the siting of
the iconic Swampy who was part of an occupation of Manchester
US nuclear cruise missiles
airport. Dissatisfied with the failure of traditional politics to
at RAF Greenham Common.
respond to their concerns, infuriated by encroachments upon
But the roots stretch back
civil liberties designed to quell protests, and despairing of
to the first anti-enclosure
the mainstream media’s usual fare, ordinary people were acting,
movements. Enclosure,
and ensuring that their actions were reported. Protesters
the privatisation of once
built villages of treehouses, dug elaborate tunnels, chained
common land, gathered
themselves to the sites, and coordinated their strategies
pace in the 15th and
and disseminated tactics through vibrant publications such
16th centuries in Britain.
as SchNEWS and Squall . Impressed by the scale, ingenuity and
It was denounced by
media-awareness of these movements for a more habitable
the Church and initially
future, Luksch would next encounter an exemplary open space
even by government. The
where visions of the digital future were being nurtured.
anti-enclosure movement
was conservative and
BACKSPACE TO THE FUTURE
conservationist, rather
In 1996, James Stevens was part of an early, small web design
than politically radical. [Ed]
and hosting company called Obsolete, located in Winchester
Wharf on Clink Street near London Bridge. (The building was
[22] Amidst the turbulence
also home to record label Ninja Tune and interactive audio
of a Latvia newly-
collective Audiorom, among others). Stevens’ interest in
independent of Soviet
commercial web work was limited, but he took advantage of the
rule, Ilze Black began to
available ground floor space below Obsolete, and of the high
organise events in Riga
speed bandwidth, to set up Backspace. Occasionally described
together with Kaspars
as an Internet café, Backspace didn’t sell coffee, though
Vanags under the label
there was a donation box in the kitchen. Online access was
Open. A young generation
through a monthly subscription model, and minimal rules and
of artists who emerged
costs gave the space a spirit of independence and openness.
from the Soviet past
Uniquely, Backspace brought together a very diverse group
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
of people to inquire into the potential of the Net for art and
leaped straight ahead
social innovation. It was there that Luksch first encountered
into artistic practices
many fellow travellers and future collaborators, including Gio
that would be regarded as
d’Angelo, Rachel Baker, Ilze Black[22], Alexei Blinov, Heath Bunting,
avant-garde further West,
Pete Gomes, Lisa Haskel, Siraj Izhar, and Kass Schmitt. Everyone
too. But how could they
learned through doing, and through swapping skills. In a climate
know that? As the first
of open exchange, programmers, artists, and activists crossed
wave of enthusiasm faded
disciplines and forged alliances that would power significant
and a feeling of business
initiatives for at least the next decade.
as normal was setting in,
Black moved to London,
Backspace was hangout, lab, classroom, production studio,
where she met and, for a
conference venue, and anything else it could be to its users.
period, worked with Luksch.
It would provide web services to interested and interesting
parties, for example to artist Franko B and the Torture
[23] ‘Anti-globalisation’
Garden club. The high speed connection, a rarity in those days,
is a problematic term,
enabled experimentation with live audiovisual content on the
since the collection of
Net. Backspace Internet radio participated in the net.audio
movements that it is
community of Xchange (founded by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and
typically applied to are at
Janis Garancs of Riga-based E-LAB). In 1998, Backspace was
least partially in favour of
the main venue for Art Servers Unlimited (ASU), a conference
globalisation (in the sense
organised by Luksch and myself. ASU has had lasting significance
of lifting restrictions
because it was the first conference to bring together people
on movement of people);
from all over Europe who were running servers dedicated to the
what they are against is
artistic, social, cultural, and political use of the Internet.
the neoliberal project
and the undermining of
BEFORE INDYMEDIA, BEFORE SEATTLE
local markets and the
Backspace also played a significant role in the June 18 Carnival
ecosystem by transational
against Capitalism in 1999 (J18). An international day of protest
corporations. Tellingly,
timed to coincide with the 25th G8 Summit in Köln, J18 was the
the slogan for J18 was
first large international ‘anti-globalisation’ protest (more
‘Our Resistance is as
accurately described as a protest against neoliberalism)[23].
Transnational as Capital.’
It was also the first large protest to harness the power of
[Ed]
streaming media, which it did with such effectiveness that a
global independent media network, Indymedia, sprang up in its
[24] The mainstream media
wake[24].
did not anticipate the
scale of the protest and
In the months leading up to J18, an Internet mailing list
had no dedicated crews on
had been set up and used to plan media action. The protest
the ground. The TV news
star ted in Australia, an d new cities joined in eve r y one
broadcasts had to resort
or two hours. In London, camcorder-wielding protestors
to using footage from the
passed tapes to couriers who biked them to Backspace.
webcasts to illustrate the
At Clink Street, Coldcut mixed sound to the footage as the
story. It is now of course
(not-quite-live) webcast proceeded.
commonplace for the
mainstream media to use
Wh i l e p rote ste r s c h a l l e n g e d t h e n e o l i b e ra l s , p ro p e r ty
and even solicit ‘amateur’
d eve l o p e r s swa r m e d a ro u n d Lo n d o n , t a k i n g i nt e re st i n
media files. [Ed]
342/343
[25] See my text ‘On Free
Winchester Wharf among other places. Backspace had been
Wavelengths’ in this volume.
under threat for a while, and finally folded in December 1999.
James’ next idea – DIY network building – mirrored the new
[26] An area stretching over
desire to put your own place online (versus the past need of
the borders of Thailand,
finding a place from where to get online). With the launch of
Burma, Laos, Vietnam and
Consume, this became a campaigning initiative to bring free
China; infamous for opium
(libre), open wireless networking to anyone who wanted it[25].
growing and smuggling, but
also for some of the worst
MARKING DOMAINS, CROSSING BORDERS
excesses of American high-
For Luksch, the attraction of hybrid media lay in the possibility
tech warfare. [Ed]
of bringing the qualities of the Internet out of virtual
space, of breaking the frame of the computer monitor. In the
[27] Sadly, Dr. Alting von
late 1990s, the space between old and new media was still
Geusau (1925–2002) did not
uncharted territory. Backspace made possible some of the
live to see Luksch complete
first tentative forays into this space. In collaboration
the project. [Ed]
with Backspace, Luksch streamed video interviews at Expo
[28] In 1997, Luksch had
activists from direct action movements and net culture. Until
been to Laos with Dr. Alting
streaming became feasible, Luksch had been ‘floating between
von Geusau, carrying a
chairs in film festivals and in media art festivals’. But as
script for a film called
the space of convergence became populated, so her place
Secret Recipes, Secret
within it became more discernible. And with Virtual Borders ,
Wars. During the Second
her first major hybrid media project, she would expose the
Indochina War (late
richness and potential of this space.
Destructo, Matthew Fuller’s 1999 event that brought together
1950s–1975), Laos became
the most heavily bombed
FROM CHIANG MAI TO HACKNEY (AND BACK AGAIN)
place on the planet,
In the early 1990s, while studying at Chiang Mai and Chulalongkorn
despite having never been
(Bangkok) Universities in Thailand, Luksch had come to know the
subject to a declaration
Hani-Akha people, one of several mountain peoples living in the
of war. The Akha in Laos
borderlands of the Mekong Quadrangle [26]. The initial idea for
supported neither the
an extended documentary about the Akha occurred to her
communists nor capitalists;
in 1994, when she assisted a media workshop at MPCD–SEAMP, a
nevertheless, the war
Chiang Mai-based NGO headed by Dr. Leo Alting von Geusau[27]. A
carried on over their
response to forcible dispossessions by logging companies, the
heads. The US used Laos as
workshop trained indigenous peoples to use video cameras for
a wartime proving ground:
mapping their terrain to support their claims to the land.
Agent Orange, napalm and
high explosives rained down
In 1999, Dr. Alting von Geusau alerted Luksch to a forthcoming
on the forests. In the film,
conference on Hani-Akha culture, to be held in China. The Akha
wartime recollections of
share a common oral culture, but their dissimilar statuses in
elderly Akha were to be
the different nation states they inhabit, and the divergent
intercut with revelations
influences of the majority languages therein, are changing it
about the culinary culture.
rapidly, for better and for worse. The conference was intended
Sadly, the project had to
to be a forum for celebrating common heritage, discussing
be abandoned when the
concerns about changes, and proposing strategies for uniting
team fell seriously ill. [Ed]
the Akha across borders.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
Luksch returned to the region with a small crew (Dara Khera
and Tarik Thami) [28] . The context of the conference, and her
experience with streaming at Backspace, suggested a form for
[29] The project was
the project, and a title: Virtual Borders. The team followed an
intended for close viewing
Akha elder from his village near Chiang Mai to the conference in
by individuals or small
Jinghong. At the conference, they recorded the speakers and
groups. For mass viewing
interviewed many participants, then streamed audio files back
in a cinema, an alternative
to Thailand. In Chiang Mai, the Mountain Peoples’ Radio Station
approach would have
(originally a wartime broadcaster of US propaganda) relayed
to be developed – for
the streamed conference proceedings and interviews by AM
example, at any particular
radio to surrounding Akha villages. This broadcast gave the
screening, the navigation
Thai Akha an opportunity to hear a debate involving Akha from
could be preprogrammed,
other nation states. The team also helped the community build
or conducted randomly, or
the first Akha language website.
chosen in some way by the
audience. But the first two
A FILM ALWAYS HAS AN END, WHILE REALITY CONTINUES
approaches compromise
The major manifestation of Virtual Borders was to have been
the hypermedia, while the
a database-driven film[29]. The beginning would be a traditional
third presents technical
authored documentary, introducing issues and themes while
challenges and is also
following the protagonist to the conference. At this point, the
perhaps more appropriate
film would branch into a nonlinear section – hypermedia. Viewers
for a thriller or action
would navigate thematically through footage from conference
movie. [Ed]
events, speeches and interviews. There would be numerous
clips, totalling several hours, arranged according to themes
[30] The DVD Video
such as ‘religion’, ‘language’, ‘song’, and ‘citizenship’. These
specification supports
cross-linked branches would then converge into a common,
random access to clips
authored concluding portion[30]. The final frame of this section
arranged in a cross-linked
would be identical with the homepage of the Akha website, and
branching structure. [Ed]
so the film would continue online. A hyperfilm is an ambitious
undertaking, in this case even more so given that there was
[31] Even this was no
virtually zero external funding. Basic equipment, travel costs,
mean undertaking – the
shooting expenses – all were provided by in-kind support of the
film, eventually cut to 90
producers, or paid for from Luksch’s (rather limited) personal
minutes, features dialogue
funds. Throughout the production, the project was dependent
in five languages (Akha,
on goodwill and borrowed equipment and expertise.
Thai, Chinese, Burmese,
and English), subtitles in
In 2000, Luksch presented the concept at the Amsterdam
English, French, Italian,
Documentary Film Festival that year, speaking at the first-
Japanese, Slovak, and Thai,
ever panel on documentary and the Internet (Docs Online), and
and voiceovers in Akha and
generating a huge amount of interest. However, the project
Hindi. The DVD of the film
dealt with a minority topic, and so was not attractive to
carries all these alternate
many funders. The translation of hours of material from Akha
languages, and the Akha-
language posed an additional burden. Determined to complete
dubbed version also exists
the project, but unable to commence on the database model
as a VCD (video CD) for
without external support, Luksch decided to simplify the film
ease of distribution in
and make a linear edit[31].
mountain villages. [Ed]
344/345
Taken as a documentary film alone, the work is extraordinary –
a polyglot anthropological road movie that navigates by jungle
paths and satellite links, it is committed to the Real in a unique
manner. Virtual Borders does not attempt to disinterestedly
present a reality, nor does it pose the problem of reality. It
is instead a document of engagement, where the international
film crew train and collaborate with the Akha to enable them
to exploit the new reality of digital networks as producers.
What results is something like an ethno-anthropology, more
self-documentation (by the Akha, by the crew) than otherobservation.
Despite the abandonment of the database film, in 2004 Virtual
Borders did finally achieve a deeply reflexive hypermedia
quality when Luksch returned to the Akha village where the
story began and presented the film on a network of TV sets
arranged around the village square. Grasping the larger
project – its hybrid and interdisciplinary quality (involving
establishing communication links, training people in their use
and documenting the process); its breaking of the fourth
wall (not into the theatre, but into cyberspace), and of the
ceiling too; and its existence as a social interstice (in Nicolas
Bourriaud’s sense) – is key to understanding the evolution of
ambientTV.NET.
EMERGENCE OF A TOOLBOX
It was in this environment of new social and technical networks,
streaming media, and hyperfilms that ambientTV.NET emerged.
Designed to be a toolbox, the new formation comprised an
Internet domain, a physical space, and a company. A domain
wa s n e e d e d to h o st Vi r tu a l B o rd e r s a n d fut u re hy b ri d
m e d i a p roj e c t s . T h e n a m e c h o s e n c o n n ot e s t h at w h i c h
envelops us all (particularly, information systems); using the
obligatory punctuation of the ‘dot’, it couples television
(‘re mote seeing ’) to the ‘NET’, the de miurge that makes
everything possible.
Although the Net had led to a revaluation of physical space,
the complexity of Virtual Borders necessitated a permanent
workplace. Documentary distribution company Mondial, which
had been founded by Alan Fountain and Sylvia Stevens as an
online platform for filmmakers and an alternative to network
TV, offered Luksch a giant desk in a warehouse in Shacklewell
Lane, East London. Other occupants included documentary
makers Faction Films and Keith Shiri of Africa at the Pictures.
Thus, ambientTV.NET found a home in the East End.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
The third item in the toolbox, the limited company Ambient
Information Systems (AIS), enabled the raising of funds and the
proper management of risks and contracts with other bodies.
In the romantic spirit of the autonomy of art, running a limited
company as an artist might seem like a Faustian pact. However, for
ambientTV.NET, the company structure of AIS acts as a buffer,
allowing the artistic activity to float freely above the material
base. Clearly distanced from the overwhelming drive towards
commercialisation associated with the ‘creative industries’,
ambientTV.NET’s projects are not determined by the legal
structure that carries them. While not officially a non-profit
venture (as of 2008), profit maximisation is not an operating
principle of AIS – rather the opposite may be inferred from
ambientTV.NET’s allegiance to a philosophical perfectionism.
The ideas shared and bonds forged at Backspace survived the
displacement to East London to inform early projects such
as Telejam and ambient.wireless . But the constellation that
ambientTV.NET developed into ventured much further into the
distant reaches of mediaspace to forge a distinctive, if rather
variegated and complex, identity.
Taken for a Ride: The New Economy
ambientTV.NET emerged just as the ‘dot-com bubble’ that
began in the late 1990s peaked; by mid-March 2000, the NASDAQ
Composite Index was on its way down as the gross overvaluation
of companies in the Internet sector became apparent. In
retrospect, the dot-com bubble bears some of the hallmarks
of the classical boom-bust cycle identified by Marx, and there
are significant parallels with earlier technology booms, such as
the 1920s boom driven by electricity, radio, aviation and the
automobile. On the other hand, the bubble’s unprecedented scale
and vertiginous rise were made possible by the ‘acceleration of
just about everything’ that pedal-to-the-metal technological
progress had delivered through digital networking.
The first signal that a major bubble was building was the
Netscape IPO (initial public offering) in 1995. The company,
which then led the browser market, gave away its best product
for free, while earning hardly any revenue – yet the market
valued it at US$2 billion. Soon afterwards, it became obvious
that the relatively youthful World Wide Web could be more than
just a tool for ancillary publishing and communication. It was
the dawn of e-commerce. Low interest rates, the novelty of
346/347
the dot-com, an openness to idiosyncratic business models,
predictions of astonishing growth, unbounded optimism – all
fed the bubble.
Excess ruled, most dramatically in the networking hardware
sector. The need for more bandwidth was indisputable. New
satellites were launched and new undersea cables laid. Cities
were dug up repeatedly and thick bundles of optical fibre
placed next to mains water lines and gas pipes. These hugely
cash-intensive investments triggered waves of mergers and
acquisitions. New players, notably WorldCom, arrived on the
scene to buy up older rivals, growing phenomenally quickly as
a result. The expansion in data carrying capacity was by no
means instantaneous, however; nor was it evenly distributed.
Th e gig a bit s of n ew ba n d width reac h e d o n ly b u sin e sse s
for quite some time. The home truth in 1999 was that most
domestic connections still relied on dial-up modems with realworld speeds of a few kilobits per second. While London’s City
got wired up, the consumer paid a fortune for anything more
than narrowband.
The predicted consumer bonanza on the Net did not gain the
expected momentum. With numerous dot-coms competing on
the basis of business plans that relied on the monopolisation
of a market sector through network effects, there could
only ever be a few winners. The gap between expectations and
reality, between the promise of unlimited connectivity and
the materiality of scarce bandwidth was too large. The market
collapse began in late 1999, and continued through 2000. By
2001, a majority of the dot-coms had ceased trading, ancillary
industries such as advertising and shipping had made cuts, and
technology experts had been laid off.
Many of the new bandwidth empires vanished into the ether,
leaving behind a trail of fraudulent accounts. After conducting
the largest-ever US merger (with MCI in 1997), WorldCom was
caught in an $11 billion accounting scandal, and in July 2002 it
[32] A year later the
filed the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history, laying
reformed company would be
off over 15,000 workers [32] . The demand for bandwidth never
awarded a US Department
materialized, and some industry analysts claim that it will be
of Defense contract to
decades before significant amounts of the fibre under the
build a cellphone network
pavements is ‘lit up’.
in Iraq, while payments
withheld from former
Ironically, if only a fraction of the bandwidth created had
employees remained
been deployed with greater equity, the ‘digital divide’ would
outstanding. [Ed]
be a far less significant issue today. Through the dot-com
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
years, the idea of the Internet was radically perverted – the
original vision of peer-to-peer symmetric networking has given
way to an increasingly hierarchical structure encumbered with
[33] Most home – or
access restrictions, speed limits to manufacture scarcity, and
‘consumer’ – Internet
a systemic bias in favour of downloading for consumption and
connections are
against uploading [33]. The smallest Internet Service Providers
asymmetric, with much
(ISPs) are bu rde ned with absu rd de man ds to log data in
greater bandwidth
compliance with ‘anti-terror’ legislation, while at the same
allocated for downloading,
time governments fail to shield them from the anticompetitive
and lack static IP
practices that keep access costs inflated. It should therefore
addresses that are
come as no surprise that the Net – the subject and medium for
necessary to run a server
a growing number of artists from the mid-1990s – became the
to the Net.
focus of several highly critical, reflexive works, a prime example
of which is ambientTV.NET’s Broadbandit Highway (2001-06).
[34] A term often
attributed to Al Gore; the
MILLENNIAL MEDIA ARTS: THE PRECARIOUS YEARS
non-arrival of which had
Almost exactly a year afte r the dot-com bubble burst,
rendered it a joke by the
ambientTV.NET premiered Broadbandit Highway at the Please
mid-1990s [Ed]
Disturb Me show in the recently refurbished Great Eastern
Hotel in London. The hotel offered exhibition space, intending
[35] ‘[A] lot of people [...]
the rooms and lobby; characteristically, Luksch, working with
think, “oh, tv means a
Ilze Black, chose instead to use one of the hotel’s TV channels.
sitcom, tv means an hour
long drama, tv means the
Broadbandit Highway probed the extent of online surveillance
evening news”. If the web
systems, proposed a paradigm of banditry on the information
is becoming like tv it is
superhighway[34], and anticipated the Net’s assimilation by the
not becoming like that
‘cathode ray nipple’ of TV[35]. Images from 100 traffic webcams
kind of tv. It´s becoming
around the world were hijacked and diverted onto the hotel
like the CCTV, or the
TV channel to make a continuous, live road movie. A genuinely
Home Shopping channel
ambient piece of television, without conventional dramaturgy,
or Cops or something like
Broadbandit Highway extended the private space of the hotel
that.’ Gary Wolf of Wired
bedroom, allowing a ‘return of the real’ through the opening of
Digital interviewed by the
a hundred live-view windows onto the world. The ongoing road
author: ‘Ambient Media or
movie ended five years later, when the last hijacked camera
the Social Spaces of the
went offline.
Future’. Available at:
www.heise.de/tp/r4/
The conceptual and critical content of Broadbandit Highway,
artikel/3/3107/1.html
refracted through the anodyne delivery medium of TV, was
‘Cathode ray nipple’ is a
p a c k a g e d a s a s u g a r- c o a t e d t i m e - r e l e a s e c a p s u l e of
phrase from ‘Television,
discomposure. The superficially benign nature of the piece
the drug of the nation’ by
was reinforced at the opening of Please Disturb Me , when
The Disposable Heroes of
Supermodem (Kate Rich and Sneha Solanki) performed a live
Hiphoprisy.
electronic soundtrack punctuated by reassuring BART[36] train
announcements and bingo calls. Meanwhile, the broadbandits
[36] Bay Area Rapid Transit,
(Luksch and Black) held up the lobby with their powder-blue
the metro rail system of
stetsons, fur jackets, and cowgirl boots. It was in this
the San Francisco Bay.
348/349
[37] ‘Flexibility was an
performance that the metaphorical structure of Broadbandit
extremely positive idea
Hig hway was fu lly reveale d – fo r th e tec h n olo gies that
in California in the 1970s
surround us do appear to be mostly harmless, often enticing,
when the culture of
even downright seductive. As it becomes slowly incorporated
microelectronics was
by the viewer, however, the work broadcasts a haunting call to
invented. It was the polar
alertness and reflection.
opposite of the rigid 1950s
[...] These were the utopian
Broadbandit Highway highlighted themes and established
days of Bucky Fuller,
trajectories that would be prominent in later projects. Issues
Gregory Bateson and the
of widespread surveillance, the obsolescence of the classical
Whole Earth Catalog: no-
liberal concept of privacy, and the vulnerability of data
one would have dreamt that
would be radically unveiled in Faceless (2007). Works including
An Ecology of Mind could
Telejam , AV Dinners and Myriorama would deploy approaches
become a management
that featured at least some of: the conscious mapping of the
tool. But the looser, more
medium and the space of work, site-specificity, the precedence
creative lifestyle did not
of process and performance over object, breaking of the
just mean the emergence
frame, and understated critique (sometimes hidden behind
of a whole new range of
scintillating manifestation).
products, useful for
stimulating consumption. In
THE CYBERPRECARIAT
California, and ultimately
Despite millennial dreams of a ‘creative class’, times were tough
in much of the developed
for many artists. Luksch only just managed to find a studio
world, the new culture
space through Mondial, and although technically a company
seemed to promise a way
owner, she and her friends were financially much closer to the
out of the social conflicts
precariat. ‘Precarity’ has become one of the key-words of a
that had stalled the
certain leftist discourse on the development of contemporary
Fordist industrial regimes.’
capitalism. Used narrowly, the notion refers to new labour
Brian Holmes ‘Unleashing
a rra n g e m e nt s in c rea sin g ly a d o pte d by big bu sin e ss a n d
the Collective Phantoms:
government, including reduced unionisation, exposure to hire-
Flexible Personality,
and-fire practices, and general depoliticisation. Whilst giving
Networked Resistance’,
some workers a sense of freedom and operational independence,
Mute magazine, 2002.
such flexible labour organisation[37] does not remedy the power
www.cceba.org.ar/evento/
imbalance within capitalism, and conditions for most workers
taller007.pl
worsen. More broadly, ‘precarity’ encompasses the increasing
p reca riousn ess of citize n ship a n d co m mu nication rig ht s
[38] ‘[T]he precarization of
(brought about by state encroachment on civil liberties, and
existence is reflected in
media conglomeration, respectively). While first applied to
the permanent instability of
phenomena in wealthier economies, precarity describes best
the most essential aspects
the situation of billions across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[38]
of living that alter, in a
profound manner, the very
It is sometimes claimed that, by choosing flexible working
notion of a project of life,
arrangements outside the traditional labour market, artists,
above all for young people.
designers, technology developers and other members of the
[...] Re-inventing the notion
creative class become (perhaps unwillingly) the vanguard of
of living is a job that is
a new type of labour organisation. Occasionally, the digital
directly connected with
artisans who produce ‘cool stuff’ for corporate clients are
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
blamed for the losses of the ‘68 generation and capitalism’s
the work of reinventing
ability to co-opt opposition:
spaces for collective
[. . .T] o d e sc ri b e th e i m m ate ria l la b o u re r, ‘p ros u m e r ’, o r
organization that would
networker as a flexible personality is to describe a new form
allow us to realize these
of alienation, not alienation from the vital energy and roving
projects.’ - from Martín
desire that were exalted in the 1960s, but instead, alienation
Bergel & Julia Risler’s
from political society, which in the democratic sense is not a
defining text for the
profitable affair and cannot be endlessly recycled into the
conference Precarity,
production of images and emotions. The configuration of the
Social Movements and
flexible personality is a new form of social control, in which
Political Communication,
culture has an important part to play. It is a distorted
CCEBA, Buenos Aires, May
form of the artistic revolt against authoritarianism and
2006. Translation: Brian
standardisation: a set of practices and techniques for
Whitener [Ed]
‘constituting, defining, organizing and instrumentalizing’
the revolutionary energies which emerged in the Western
[39] Brian Holmes
societies in the 1960s, and which for a time seemed capable of
Hieroglyphs of the Future
transforming social relations. [39]
(Zagreb: Arkzin/WHW, 2003)
Indeed, 1990s London allowed many of these digital artisans
[40] Art Servers Unlimited
to capitalise on the Net hype, and some ‘flexibly ’ moved
(ASU) (Backspace/ICA,
between commercial projects and their own artwork. However,
1998) highlighted this
others were more uncompromising and did not allow themselves
development and reflected
to be co-opted into ‘flexible’ forms of control; they found
on better collaboration
themselves in the classically precarious situation of the artist.
and resource sharing. In
In both cases, the scarcity of skills and equipment encouraged
his keynote speech at the
collectivisation. Groups such as Audiorom, AntiRom, Soda and
conference, Janos Sugar
Lateral balanced artistic excellence, creative independence,
borrowed Joseph Beuys’
and commercial allure, often cultivating corporate clients
terminology to describe ASU
with great success. Collectives of the second type, including
as ‘global social sculpture’.
ambientTV.NET, were less formal groupings of individuals
http://asu.sil.at
with (usually) convergent artistic and political goals, that
typically came together around an ‘arts server’ [40] . Many of
[41] ‘dot-org boom’ (parallel
these collectives were attempting to mirror the new network
to dot-com but in the heart
architecture in the social realm. Holmes’ critique essentially
of the alt.net) is a term
only applies to groups of the first type.
coined by Juha Huuskonen.
[42] hacktivist = hacker +
Open Source Culture: Hackers, DIY, Free Media,
Art and Networks
activist. The mainstream
media use ‘hacker’ to mean
‘cyber-criminal’, where
DIY MEDIA: COMING UP AGAINST THE CRASH
instead they should use
The bursting of the New Economy bubble in 2000 coincided with
‘cracker’. A hacker develops
the rise of the ‘dot-org boom’[41], as participatory movements
or modifies hardware or
and free media hacktivists [42] emerged into the mainstream.
software in the interests
Consume (James Steven’s post-Backspace project) proposed a
of efficiency, aesthetics,
non-commercial model for wireless community networking, wikis
or security. [Ed]
350/351
and weblogs began to garner huge audiences of reader-writers,
and the Creative Commons initiative developed copyright
licences consonant with digital creation and distribution. Such
initiatives championed the user as both producer and consumer.
For those who had observed Net culture in the 1990s, however,
little was new. Alternative or ‘copyleft’ models of dealing with
intellectual property, such as GNU GPL, predated Creative
Commons by years, and artists and hacktivists had been running
Internet radio and TV stations in the 1990s. Importantly,
t h e e a rly h i sto r y of t h e Inte r n et – setti n g a si d e t h e
military imperatives – was one of an academic culture of free
exchange and discussion and freewheeling technologists (the
hackers), against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement,
anti-Vietnam protests, and grassroots media initiatives. The
grassroots initiatives persisted even as political unrest was
put down, but the DIY culture of the Net only gathered critical
mass at the turn of the millennium.
What is sold now as Web 2.0 or social software was prepared
in the labs of free and open source software developers and
net culture practitioners in the 1990s. At the core of these
developments is a paradigm shift from a culture of consumption
to a culture of co-production – Lawrence Lessig speaks of a
read-and-write culture as opposed to a read-only culture. The
new paradigm may also be described as ‘open source culture’,
to highlight its origins in the early hacker culture of the Net.
OPEN SOURCE CULTURE
What I term open source culture is based on the ethics of the
first and second generations of computer hackers. Hackers of
the first generation developed the Unix operating system and
wrote the software for the early Internet. Against hierarchical
styles of management and the subordination of their art to
Taylorist organisation, they put technical descriptions of the
Net in the public domain. The Internet is still based on these
open standards, which means that anybody who has the skills
to read those documents and write software can innovate.
Early hacker communities also realized the first public online
community in Berkeley, and designed the machines that would
eventually develop into the ‘home’ or personal computer.
Later, as liberty and innovation were threatened by the
growth of proprietary systems from corporations such as
Microsoft, Apple and AT&T, a second generation of hackers
created free space by releasing an easily-licensable version
of Unix, BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) in the late 1970s.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
BSD was the first distribution of Unix to include code that
supported the Internet Protocol; it also contained UUCP, a
technology which enabled remote computers to connect and
exchange documents. UUCP was used by academic hackers to
create newsgroups – electronic message boards for remote
communication. Then in 1983, Richard Stallman founded the
GNU[43] Project, whose goal was to establish an operating system
[43] GNU = GNU’s Not Unix.
entirely free of proprietary code. Stallman later wrote the
GNU GPL was a revision of
GPL (General Public Licence) for software, which popularised
Emacs GPL. [Ed]
copyleft – the use of copyright law to allow unrestricted
modification and distribution, while preserving a similar right
for other users. When the young hacker Linus Torvalds created
Linux, his version of Unix kernel, he used the GPL to protect it.
In summary, open source culture nurtured the development
of operating systems, the Internet, and tools for creative
expansion, including licences that encouraged the development
of software in the public domain. Later, the idea of copyleft
was picked up by lawyers who created the Creative Commons
licences, which extend the principle from software to other
forms of expression, including music, text, still image and video.
In the fertile 1990s, hackers, activists, and digital artists met
at new type of hybrid institution then emerging. Exemplified by
London’s Backspace, Amsterdam’s desk.nl, New York’s The Thing,
Lubljana’s Ljudmila, and Vienna’s Public Netbase, these sites
began as informal, self-organising networks of collaboration,
and grew to offer shared resources and the possibility of
project development, eventually forming the backbone of an
open lab culture that popularised and helped shape digital
and social innovation. Such labs maintained their independence
through a range of survival strategies including the cultivation
of non-monetarian, or ‘gift’, economies. Through contact with
artists and activists, hacking gained a broader social base;
by the turn of the millennium, open source culture was fast
approaching the mainstream.
CASSANDRA CALLS FROM THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
For decades, hacker groups such as the Chaos Computer Club
(CCC) and 2600 magazine have sounded warnings about the
creation of the ‘glass citizen’ – the individual exposed in
electronic space, fully transparent to governmentality and
corporate control. The massive growth of networked digital
systems has increased the volume and precision of data
held about people. Despite data protection laws, firewalls
betwe e n diffe re nt dat a base s h ave be e n s h own to be
increasingly porous. Under the aegis of the ‘war on terror’,
352/353
states have granted themselves ever-greater rights to
gather information on individuals and sift through databases
in sea rc h of ‘su spicio u s’ co rre latio n s (whic h mig ht have
no associated causality). Liberal democracies (and the UK
and US in particular) are tending towards mass surveillance
[44] ‘Today it is impossible
states.
to talk about the
development of the
The growing pool of data legally held by financial, medical,
audiovisual without
and social security institutions is being augmented with
talking also about the
records of individuals’ shopping habits (store loyalty cards),
development of virtual
communications (cellphone, email) and movements (by car,
imagery and its influence
public transport or foot). Datamining techniques enable
on human behaviour, or
niche marketing (the targeting of individual consumers) and
without pointing to the
the invidious (and often invisible) practice of social sorting.
new industrialisation of
Increasingly, biometric data (fingerprints and retinal scans)
vision, to the growth
and genetic data are being collected, and surveillance is
of a veritable market in
becoming automated. The recording of some of this data is
synthetic perception and
now demanded by the state under questionable laws – in the
all the ethical questions
UK, DNA records obtained at arrest are retained by the police
it entails. [...] Once we are
even if no charges are brought – or even illegally – as in the US
definitely removed from
National Security Agency’s post-9/11 domestic wiretaps.
the realm of direct or
indirect observation of
According to philosopher Paul Virilio, we are creating a ‘mechanized
synthetic images created
imaginary’[44], a mental world which is no longer human and which
by the machine for the
exists in something like a parallel universe. But this parallel
machine, instrumental
world begins to exercise real power over the world in which
virtual images will be for
we live. Digital access codes increasingly affect the ability to
us what the foreigner’s
move through this world, to take the Tube or cross a border,
mental pictures already
or to obtain a service from a corporation or the state. What
present: an enigma. Having
used to be citizen rights have become subsumed under a new
no graphic or videographic
regime of access management in a world full of digital borders.
outputs, the automatic
We have surpassed the surveillance society imagined in George
perception-prothesis will
Orwell’s 1984 and are approaching a ‘society of control’[45].
function like a mechanized
imaginary from which, this
In its infancy, hacking was about freedom of movement within
time, we would be totally
electronic networks. As this freedom became available through
excluded.’
the opening of the Internet, those who had been hackers
Paul Virilio The Vision
became something closer to information environmentalists.
Machine (London: BFI, 1994),
Hackers were the first to experience encroachments on
pp. 59-60
rights and freedoms in the digital sphere, and highlighted key
issues of surveillance and privacy, intellectual property and
[45] Gilles Deleuze
copyright, and freedom of speech. As artists, lawyers and
‘Postscript on the
academics joined in the battles, and new media labs bloomed,
Societies of Control’ in
open source culture started to gain wider recognition. Today,
October 59, Winter 1992
once-classic hacker concerns have become issues that affect
(Cambridge: MIT Press)
and interest everyone.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
Coalescence in the crucible
INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATIONS
Mukul Patel had lived in London since 1993, but rode out the
dot-com crash in Berkeley, during a spell at the University
of California. He returned from the Bay Area to take refuge
in an Arcadian Victorian schoolhouse off Brick Lane, home to
a remarkable population of tree frogs, desert plants, dozens
of tortoises, and old-school artists David Spurring and John
Ashworth. One decisive night, old friend Shane Solanki invited
him to DJ at the after party for the Please Disturb Me show.
[46] The Institute of
Hosted by Luksch and Black, the party cascaded down three
Dubology (at the Vox,
storeys of a canalside house in Hackney while films by Shu Lea
Brixton) showcased
Cheang and the Chapman Brothers played on the walls, enigmatic
reggae, dub, and poetry
and darkly enticing. But it was the screening of Broadbandit
from artists including
Highway that captured Patel’s attention.
Linton Kwesi Johnson,
Benjamin Zephaniah and
Over the previous decade, Patel had found himself repeatedly
African Headcharge. The
moving between disciplines – having studied Natural Sciences
Institute of Goa was an
and Social & Political Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, his
uncompromisingly hardcore,
subsequent life in London involved being editor and writer by
ostensibly acid-techno
day, sonic explorer by night. Within music, he was drawn to the
night, where nevertheless
immense variety that the city offered in the early 1990s –
tracks by Pink Floyd,
from the Institute of Dubology to the Institute of Goa and
Hector Zazou or Fun-Da-
the free/squat party scene, from Charles Hayward and Tenko
Mental would be woven in
at Conway Hall to the Gundecha Brothers at the Kufa Gallery[46].
the mix by innovative DJs
These explorations brought him into unique spaces and scenes,
(Quark, Whirling Dervish).
including CoolTan Arts in Brixton and the Exploding Cinema.
Drummer Charles Hayward
was part of the seminal
Through the 1990s, Patel honed the DJ craft first exercised
art-improv band This
in the Cellars of King’s College, using the mixing desk to bridge
Heat, which also featured
disparate forms, cultures and times. But it was not until he
the late Gareth Williams.
encountered Talvin Singh and Sweety Kapoor’s Anokha [47] night
The Gundecha Brothers
in 1996 (then at the Blue Note, Hoxton) that he found a channel
are Indian singers of the
for his approach to ‘music production-reproduction’ [48]. The
ancient Dhrupad form. [Ed]
club ran on Mondays nights, for those listeners dedicated
enough to sacrifice some mid-week sleep. It was a microcosm
[47] See
of sound: one memorable night, Patel served breakbeats to
http://ethnotechno.
punctuate an impromptu vocal duet between Björk and the
com/_content/ints/int_
Indian ghazal singer Hariharan, with the frenetic Squarepusher
mukul_5.20.06.php
on bass. Every week, there seemed to be an irruption in the
musical world, the faultline spreading out from Hoxton Square.
[48] In the 1920s, Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy characterised
After the closure of the Blue Note in 1997 – a victim of the
the phonograph as having
suicidal ShoHo effect – Anokha moved to a number of larger
‘productive-reproductive
venues. What Patel regarded as a curatorial role behind
potentialities’. [Ed]
354/355
[49] Herbert is significant
the decks spilled over as he began to programme the ‘ambient’
for his manifesto-driven,
room in Anokha, and also the Sunday afternoon deep / slow /
politically-charged musique
quiet listening offshoot in Brick Lane, Calcutta Cyber Café .
concrète, produced under
There, he brought in artists ranging from sample wrangler
aliases including Dr. Rockit.
Matthew Herbert and the late, prolific Muslimgauze [49] to
Muslimgauze (Bryn Jones,
electroacoustic minimalists zoviet*france, and classical Indian
1961–99) released over 100
sarode player Sohan Nilkanth. By 1999, however, the combination
albums that brooded over
of a stagnating electronic music scene and a burgeoning
the plight of Palestine. [Ed]
commercial culture had severely narrowed the scope of the
club as forum, and Patel began to explore other avenues –
[50] Ouvroir de littérature
most fruitfully, through collaborations with choreographers
potentielle (‘workshop
of contemporary dance.
of potential literature’),
a group of writers
The academic sojourn in Berkeley (2000-01) gave Patel the
intrigued by maths and
space from which to reconsider his trajectory. Serendipitously,
mathematicians intrigued
Steve Reich was then a visiting lecturer at the Department
by literature. Founded
of Music and discussed and performed several of his seminal
in 1960, members include
works. Patel also encountered the Max/MSP programming
Raymond Queneau, Marcel
environment at CNMAT (the Centre for New Music and Audio
Duchamp, Georges Perec
Technologies), and attended classes at the Ali Akbar College
and Italo Calvino. [Ed]
of Music in Marin County, which reinforced his passion for North
Indian art music.
[51] ‘Defamiliarisation,
defacilitation, retardation
At Berkeley, Reich pointed Patel towards Alvin Lucier, in whose
[... Push] the raga to the
approach he found resonances with the work of Oulipo[50]. This
edge where, if you are less
redoubled an association between processes in literature and
than expert, it ceases
music across cultures, first triggered by a lecture by Pandit
to be that raga. Push it
Rajeev Taranath entitled ‘The State of the Art’[51]. Taranath, a
till the familiar becomes
leading sarode player and disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, had
unfamiliar, then bring it
elaborated a concept of creativity within rule bound forms
back to an enriched type
(specifically with reference to Indian art music) by drawing on
of familiarity, to a re-
Eliot and Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky[52].
cognition of the raga.’
– Rajeev Taranath at the
For Patel, the decade up to 2001 had been a time of voracious
School of Architecture,
input; the spell at Berkeley triggered a synthesis and the
Ahmedabad, India, 1990.
beginning of a period of practice. In late 2000, he compiled
[52] In Indian art music
diversely-textured, filmic collage that brought together the
and in Reich’s ‘music as a
material that had influenced him over the previous decade.
gradual process’, authority
This was to serve as a guide for composition – a reminder of
is shared among composer,
possible modes of organisation of sound and word. But it was
performer and listener. [Ed]
not until his participation with Luksch in the acoustic.space.lab
an audio sketchbook, If on a winter’s night a traveller, a
symposium (at Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre
[53] Irbene and Riga, August
in Latvia)[53] that Patel encountered a setting in which he could
2001.
develop his practice equally unencumbered by disciplinary
boundaries and commercial imperative.
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
A NEST FOR NETWORKING
In 2001, ambientTV.NET moved to a new home on the seventh
(top) floor of an industrial building in South Hackney, where
they established ambient .space as a studio/workshop/
salon. Originally occupied by sweatshops, a few artists had
established studios in the building in the late 1990s. By 2007,
there were four galleries, and the majority of the occupants
were engaged with either the creative industries or art.
ambie nt .space was ideally located for exploring the
possibilities for building wireless network infrastructures [54].
[54] See my text ‘On Free
The expansive view from the southern aspect of the building
Wavelengths’ in this volume.
included the antenna mast of free2air, the open wireless
access point run by Vortex in Hackney Road. Over the winter
of 2001–02, ambient.space hosted a series of free networking
workshops involving free2air, consume.net, Mute magazine’s
YouAreHere initiative and various free floating networking
wizards. Obsolete computers donated by the London School
of Economics, Reuters, the National AIDS Trust and others
were reconfigured as routers. Antenna designs were tested
and manufactured. Within a few weeks, the free network
community had established ambient.space as a significant node
in the growing East End Net. Many studios in the building were
networked via ambient.space, and free2air provided the pipe to
the Internet. In this early missionary phase of free networks
in London, people were encouraged to join the community not
only to get cheap or free broadband, but primarily to share:
share responsibility of managing the network, share equipment,
share content, share space, share the kitchen, share minds.
The early days were an intense time of networking, both in
technical and social terms. There was a constant flow of people
through the doors of ambient.space – to borrow cables,
exchange software patches, have a cup of tea. A fortuitous
conversation might extend into dinner and beyond; guests
would find themselves ensconced in cushions and tapestries
on the large central podium, enveloped in sound from numerous
loudspeakers. Then at sunrise: stretching out in the morning
sun, flying carpets over racing clouds, only to wake fully to
the slam of the heavy door as the day’s first visitors arrive.
(The open-door policy, unusual for London, led one Time
Out journalist to think that the space must also serve as a
‘community centre’.)
At the Calcutta Cyber Café in 1997, Patel had invited artists and
audience to kick off their shoes and recline on giant carpets.
356/357
There the tone was set by Newcastle electroacoustic duo
zoviet*france, who elaborated a single pluck on a lap steel
g u it a r i nt o a 40 m i n ut e p e r fo r m a n c e . Five ye a r s l at e r,
ambie nt .space provided an eve n more accommodating
environment, and it continues to do so. The central podium
can be configured as observation deck, stage, sofa, or bed as
required. It has even been incorporated into an instrument,
a c t i n g a s o n e b r i d g e of R o l f G e h l h a a r ’s S O U N D = S PACE ,
an ultrasonic/laser musical system that extends invisible
keyboards up to the ceiling. More commonly, it serves as
seating or reclining area for participants or audience.
But there can be no music without food, and the kitchen at
ambient.space conjures up exceptional platters to challenge
the sonic feasts. The arrival of one-time sushi chef Mariko
Montpetit as resident raised the bar impossibly high – never had
hacktivists been so well fed. This gastronomic seduction was
complemented and complicated by bespoke cocktails developed
by Vitamin AA (Anthony Auerbach). ambient.space continues
to host informal, often impromptu concerts, screenings,
meetings, and performances. Ambient in its fullest sense, it is
an environment to facilitate artistic and intellectual exchange
and stimulate the senses. The creation of such a space is an
artwork in its own right, though at the time Luksch, Black,
Patel, Montpetit and their collaborators did not see it as
[55] ‘New media art’ is a
that. They just did it, rather intuitively.
thoroughly problematic
term – ahistorical and
suggestive of a naïve
Net art after the Net
romance with technology.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a
Recognizing its social situatedness is at least as important
far more thoroughgoing
for understanding ambientTV.NET’s work as appreciating formal
‘new media artist’ than the
aspects. Since some of the work interrogates new communication
majority of those so-called
technologies, it would seem to require positioning in relation
today (consider his claim to
to Net- and media art. But these categories are contentious[55]
have made paintings over
– indeed, this very categorisation is now regarded by many
the telephone in 1922).
practitioners as leading to a ghettoisation. I will instead
‘Media art’ is a potentially
try to implicitly characterise the type of art ambientTV.NET
richer category – free
creates by discussing some key features, and pointing to some
from the imperative to be
artistic ‘neighbours’ and related practices.
new, divorced from the
darling of the creative
In the early stages of Net art, the Internet, or more precisely
industries, and usually
the Web, was the subject of inquiry, and most works were self-
directed in a critical
referential, in and about the medium. Some of the most well
interrogation of ‘the
recognized proponents of this movement publicly ‘retired’
media’. [Ed]
in 1999. Since then, there has been a second phase of what
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
I call Net art ‘after the Net’ (a phrase borrowed from Mute
[56] ‘Culture and Politics
magazine’s new slogan [56]), which continues to use the Net as a
after the Net’. In the mid
medium, but is less hermetic in its content. (The demarcation
1990s, Net artists had
lines are not always as clear as the language suggests.)
come into being, for the
most part rejecting gallery
After participating in the early phase of Net art, Luksch began
and museum (who hadn’t
to break the frame of the computer monitor (and the cinema
heard of the artists, and
screen) through the early ambientTV.NET projects. What has
whom the artists didn’t
since emerged is a distinctive, coherent and critically committed
need – or want). ‘You can
body of work that stretches across genres and media. Works
be a Museum, or you can
are bound by a common concept of ‘cross-reality’ – a reality
be Modern, but you can’t
crossed through by proliferating devices of mediation, but
be both’, said Gertrude
reality nonetheless: there is no dissolution into a virtual heaven.
Stein. Rejecting museums
Digital networks and more tangible spaces are combined in
meant rejecting their
complex and nuanced ways: by facilitating independent media
framing function, seen as
infrastructure and platforms (in ambient.wireless and Virtual
elitist and conservative (it
Borders), by using virtual space to extend and bridge carnal
also entailed a rejection
performance (AV Dinners), by critiquing networked systems of
of Duchamp). While the
surveillance through dance (Myriorama), by hacking the control
cyberpunk roots of Net
systems of corporate-governmentality ( Faceless ), or by
art were growing out in
creating a physical hub to accommodate and connect visiting
the late 1990s, the format
artists (ambient.space).
of the high-tech media
installation continued to
The concern for the real is encapsulated in the ‘ambient’
be fashionably collectable.
of ambientTV.NET, which indicates a consideration of the
Process-based Net art
material and informational economies that surround us. This
appeared strange and
consideration prompts critical questioning in reflective cycles.
intangible, while the high-
The need for reflexivity emerges from a recognition that
tech media installation was
everyday life is increasingly influenced and to some degree
relatively unproblematic –
determined by social-technological systems[57] – a recognition
a short step away from
accelerated, in the case of ambientTV.NET, through the use
video art, works were often
of digital networks. Reflexivity is further honed through the
presented as sculpture,
struggle to remain independent, which ambientTV.NET has
and authorship assigned in
pursued by cultivating manifold skills, relationships, networks,
the tradition of fine art.
spaces, and gift (non-monetarian) economies.
But while Net art was largely
highly critical, high-tech
Together with its peers (discussed below), ambientTV.NET has
installations tended to a
passed through the digital looking class to emerge on the
blind optimism, advertising
other side of the mirror. Rather than fetishising technologies,
the cultural value of
Net art after the Net interrogates their relationship with
technology as such. [Ed]
society, and sometimes throws a bit of sand into the machine.
[57] This is an elaboration
CREATIVE RESISTANCE
of ‘second-wave’
The best exemplar of such critical work in ambientTV.NET’s
cybernetics thinking; see
oeuvre is the project Faceless , which uses the law to obtain
below for more on the
CCTV surveillance camera recordings that are then edited into
cybernetic approach. [Ed]
358/359
a fictive film. Faceless is like an ‘exploit’ in hacker language –
an act of practical critique, an inspired circumvention or
subversion of norms or barriers. The use of hacks and other
forms of ‘creative resistance’ is a technique that ambientTV.NET
shares with other ‘after the Net’ artists and groups, including
Jaromil, Ubermorgen, Heath Bunting, and Mongrel. Creative
re si st a n ce c a n a l s o i nvo lve e n a b li n g ot h e r s to b e c o m e
[58] Empowered by
producers: the artist, instead of expressing subjectivity or
contemporary information
a universal, becomes facilitator and platform builder[58]. While
technologies and drawing
the artists mentioned have distinct practices and do not
on the rise of the
associate as a named movement or tendency, they are bound by
participatory paradigm
a common approach, of using creative resistance to illuminate
through the 20th century,
issues of intellectual property and knowledge sharing.
the artist can now fully
blossom in this role. See
Jaromil[59] creates software art and tools for expression and
Walter Benjamin’s 1934
media activism. One of his exploits as hacker is an extremely
essay ‘The Author as
terse and elegant fork bomb script – software that will make
Producer’ in Selected
any Unix system crash – which consists only of the following 13
Writings Volume 2, Part 2,
characters (including spaces):
1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA:
:(){ :|:& };:
The Belknap Press, 2005)
The other side of Jaromil’s work – facilitating and platform-
[59] http://rastasoft.org
is an open source ‘live CD’ – one that can be used to boot a
building – is exemplified by his dyne:bolic project. dyne:bolic
computer. The CD includes the Linux operating system together
[60] I have written about
with tools for multimedia production and distribution, optimised
the work of Jaromil more
to run on old, slow computers for those with few resources[60].
extensively in ‘Root/s
Culture’, first published
Ubermorgen’s[61] exploits attack corporate and governmental
in M. Narula, S. Sengupta,
systems with electrifying effect. [V]ote Auction 2000 was a
J. Bagchi & G. Lovink, eds.
website that allowed US voters to sell their presidential votes
Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
online (‘Bringing capitalism and democracy closer together’)
(New Delhi: Sarai Media Lab,
and, unsurprisingly, caught the attention of the FBI. Google
2005). ‘Root/s Culture’
Will Eat Itself (conceptually) turns the Google corporation into
was originally written for
an autocannibalistic machine by using the income derived from
Marleen Wynants and Jan
serving banner ads for Google to buy Google shares. Amazon
Cornelis, eds. How Open
Noir unlocked the ‘Search Inside’ function on Amazon.com’s site
is the Future? Economic,
to obtain entire texts.
Social & Cultural Scenarios
inspired by Free and Open
Variously self-described as ‘net.art pioneer’, ‘professional
Source Software (Brussels:
revolutionary’ and ‘retired net.artist’, Heath Bunting’s [62]
Crosstalks, VUB Brussels
hacks straddle digital and material worlds. His BorderXing Guide
University Press, 2005).
consists of online documentation of walks that cross national
boundaries without needing to negotiate border formalities,
[61] www.ubermorgen.com
but the website may only be viewed from designated locations.
[62] www.irational.org
official identity through corporate and government databases.
The recent Status Project examines the construction of
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
Mongrel [63] began discussing social software long before the
[63] See
term was taken over by the Web 2.0 industry, and its meaning
www.mongrel.org.uk
completely twisted. With Linked , 9Nine and Skint Stream ,
and
Mongrel created participatory platforms for workshops and
www.mongrelx.org
projects spanning the world, from council flats in London to
the suburbs of Amsterdam, from Johannesburg to Jamaica. An
ongoing project is MediaShed, a space dedicated to free media
in Southend-on-Sea.
Despite obvious differences in practice, there is much common
conceptual ground between ambientTV.NET and the other artists
cited. Although not fundamentalist about free software, the
work of ambientTV.NET is allied with the free media thinking
championed by both Mongrel and Jaromil: Stealth Waltz[64], made
[64] In this fictional
for the 2002 Kingdom of Piracy exhibition, illustrates the point.
scenario, all folk music
Luksch and Patel also follow a clear open content strategy:
has been removed from
most ambientTV.NET works that are offered for sale as objects
the public realm, but a
may also be freely downloaded from the website. Like Heath
renegade corporation
Bunting, ambientTV.NET strives to demarcate an arena for free
continues to freely
action. This is not constructed primarily as a space for personal
distribute music in
gratification, but rather to maintain a sustainable living and
the proscribed time
working environment while avoiding alienated labour or co-
signatures by embedding it
optation by commercial interests. Such conditions need to be
steganographically in ‘legal’
maintained constantly, and this task becomes part of every new
music.
work (there is a reflexivity here). And while many of Ubermorgen’s
works are online hacks, ambientTV.NET uses a range of different
media including film, dance, and sound art. But underlying these
various manifestations is a similar critique of extant social and
technical infrastructures. Just as in the ‘systems’, ‘process’ and
‘participatory’ art of the 1960s-70s, in the critical art of the
early 21st century – Net art after the Net – the social and
political aspects of practice do not overshadow the experimental
and creative engagement with new forms; indeed, out of this
orientation emerges a radical vision that fuses the aesthetic
and the ethical - an art for producers, not spectators[65].
[65] The critical artists
of the early 21st century
Before proceeding to a theoretical sketch to help frame
could be described as
what has been discussed so far, I will summarize the important
taking the epistemological
aspects of ambientTV.NET’s work as I have characterised it:
excursion of minimalism (Hal
1. While much of the work deals with communication technologies,
Foster’s characterisation)
this is not a privileged point from which engagement with the
and, reprising another
world proceeds; instead, ambientTV.NET applies a cross-reality
theme of 1960s-70s art,
concept, exemplifying what I term ‘Net art after the Net’.
directing it towards
2. There is a critical interrogation of technology, which comes
social-technological
from a systemic reflexivity about ambientTV.NET’s own role and
systems. [Ed]
sustainability.
360/361
3. This critical stance leads to acts of creative resistance
– finding systemic exploits or hacks, or building alternative
platforms and infrastructure.
4. Teaching, sharing and facilitating are important parts of
the practice, enabling others to appropriate technology for
liberating purposes rather than becoming ever more dominated
by it.
5. There is a rejection of the intellectual property dogma that
the ‘content provision’ industry clings to, in favour of free
(libre) media and free software culture.
THE THINGNESS OF THINGS
The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents
itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit
being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a
[66] Karl Marx Critique of
twofold aspect – use-value and exchange-value. [66]
Political Economy. Part I The
Commodity (1859) online at
There is at work in contemporary capitalism a very powerful
www.marxists.org/archive/
ideology, which combines commodity fetishism and technological
marx/works/1859/
determinism to construct a vision of continuous progress
critique-pol-economy/
through technical innovation. The icons of commodity fetishism
ch01.htm
are cars and consumer electronics. TV advertisements for
these products are the most self-revealing in this regard: in
the ads, humans are mere bystanders, while the gadgets do
all the singing and dancing. Consumer fetishes are seen as
agents of historic progress, but this same agency is denied
to humans. From the transistor radio to the Sony Walkman
and Apple’s iPod, gadgets have captured not only the market
but also imaginations. Corporations and marketing agencies
have succeeded in manufacturing products that are keys
to personal identities. The medium as the message and the
massage – in a continually recycled and trivialised McLuhanism
– has become a privileged factor in determining human history.
McLuhan posited that all technologies were extensions of the
nervous system, electronic prostheses, and that different
media impacted directly on our ways of perceiving and acting in
the world. The proportionate relationship between our senses
would determine the ways societies developed. McLuhan saw
the ‘visual’ age of the book in decline while new electronic
media – TV, radio and, imagined in an iconic rather than any
real form, the Net – would shift the balance towards a more
immersive media-scape that favoured the ear and would bring
about a new age of instant connectedness between all people.
McLuhan’s thesis is sweepingly general; however, what he wrote
between 1958 and 1964 has had a profound impact on the active
making and doing of people in the world and continues to shape
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
the discourse around new media. The main bug in McLuhan’s media
theory is its totalitarian tendency – he sees media as the
only important factor which shapes history, thereby denying
the role of human agency. This way of thinking is called media
determinism or, more generally, technological determinism[67].
[67] Armin Medosch,
‘Technological Determinism
In Das Kapital Volume 1, Marx explains how it comes about that
in Media Art’ (MA
the ‘thingness’ of products is so deceiving. Since the value of a
dissertation, 2005) online at
thing is expressed through its price only, the labour that went
http://ung.at/cgi-bin/
into producing it is hidden from sight. Where consumer electronics
twiki/view/Main/
are concerned, this process bears the signs of sustained
accumulation over a long period of time. Not only does the
gadget hide the labour of the people who manufactured it, but
also centuries of scientific research and development. From
the discovery of electricity and radio waves, to the invention
of batteries and communication protocols, to the production
process and the machines necessary to carry it out, thousands
of years of dead labour went into the latest cellphone.
Behind the trendy, cooked-up McLuhanism reinvented as the
ideology of the Net lurk hundreds of years of Cartesianism
and scientific positivism. At its foundation lies the subjectobject dichotomy inherited from Greek philosophy. The world
of things is considered to be ‘objective’, whereas the human
world, the social, is ‘subjective’ and the studies that deal with
it, correspondingly less scientific. With our subjectivity we can
grasp an understanding of the objective laws of nature only
through the scientific method. Technologies use the forces
of nature in an intelligent way to transform matter. Conventional
thinking positions technology in the world of things, categorically
separated from the social. Thus, the scientific world-view
and commodity capitalism conspire to fetishise new media
technologies as ‘things’ which belong to an objective reality
and exert a determining influence on human life.
The uncritical acceptance and celebration of new technologies
by many new media artists only continues this fetishisation.
The path of the artists discussed above is different – they
scrutinise the intersection of the technical and social, and
intervene to reveal the assumptions about or directives
towards human behaviour contained there. Technologies are far
from being neutral, but have been developed through specific
forms of the forces and relations of production. They tend
to be deployed in order to sustain these relationships in a
historically contingent system of alienation. A specific task of
critical art is to lay bare the mystification of the ‘thingness
362/363
of things’ through creative resistance, by subverting the
established order or by proposing altogether different
strategies for techno-social development.
T h i s ret h i n k i n g of t h e t e c h n i c a l a n d t h e s o c i a l a s n ot
categorically separated but intimately linked is backed up by
[68] See the work of Bruno
recent work in science studies [68] . Science studies analyses
Latour, Donna Haraway
scientific research activity and the make-up of the techno-
and others; for a good
scientific global laboratory. Contemporary theories in science
summary: Jutta Weber
studies suggest that we need to aban don the su bject-
Umkämpfte Bedeutungen
object dichotomy in favour of a networked model of mutual
(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag,
relationships between things – objects, people, animals, and
2003)
machines. There are strong parallels between these theories
and the work of the critical artists of the artists mentioned
above. The artists approach is typically practical and situated,
and not at the level of abstract critique – they expose the
social content of technology in a way which can be literally
grasped, for example by playing the strings of ambientTV.NET’s
razor-wire harp (an instrument of the Orchestra of Anxiety).
Through experimentation and practical action, these artists
are doing science studies’ dirty work. Through creative
resistance, critical artists are (re-)socialising technologies,
and importantly, democratising access to digital realms
where, increasingly, desire, agency, and identity – or the nonfulfilment or lack of these – are located.
THE SYSTEMS APPROACH
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artist, curator and theorist
Jack Burnham wrote about a shift in art practice from the
making of objects to the establishment of systems, from
[69] Jack Burnham, ‘Systems
product to process – the rise of ‘systems aesthetics’ [69] .
Esthetics’, Artforum
Burnham’s systems aesthetics speaks about art that engages
September 1968, reprinted
in an open-ended manner with its environment (so that the
in Donna De Salvo, ed.
context of the work affects it over its duration); it signals
Open Systems: Rethinking
a move away from formalism, representation and simulation
Art c. 1970 (London: Tate
towards emulation and parasitic siting. Writing then about
Publishing, 2005)
artists such as Hans Haecke, Burnham’s formulation of systems
aesthetics finds renewed application in the interpretation
of today’s Net artists ‘after the Net’. The digital network is
the host for 21st century critical-parasitical works such as
Broadbandit Highway and Amazon Noir.
Burnham reflected more generally on the changing conditions
for artists – and, accordingly, their changing role – in the
highly industrialised societies of the 1960s. Referring to
the economist J. K. Galbraith, who posited that ‘an incipient
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
technocracy shaped by the evolving technostructure’ (whether
that of Californian think tanks or Soviet futurologists) was
‘smoothly implementing social change’, Burnham remarked that
‘power resides less in the control of the traditional symbols of
wealth than in information.’[70]
[70] ibid., p. 166
This statement is an early example of what has evolved into
current day ‘informationalism’. The assertion that we live
in an ‘information society ’ is so familiar that we may be
seduced into believing that it is simply a statement of fact.
However, it is no less ideological a doctrine than Marxism
or neoliberalism. Endorsing Galbraith’s ‘technocracy ’ and
a d o pt i n g a w o r l d -v i e w h e a v i ly i n fo r m e d by t h i r d - w a ve
cybernetics [71] or ‘systems thinking’, Burnham sees a special
[71] Cybernetics (as
role for the artist. He postulates that we are moving from
defined by Norbert Wiener,
an ‘object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture’[72]. Under
who established it as a
such conditions, the artist should ‘liquidate [their] position as
discipline) is the study of
artist vis-a-vis society’, and instead start making aesthetic
control and communication
enquiries about the future of technology – in other words,
processes in living or
join the technocracy:
non-living systems. A key
Gradually this strategy transforms artistic and technological
feature of such processes
decision-making into a single activity – at least it presents
is feedback. [Ed]
the alternative in inescapable terms. [...] Progressively the
need to make ultrasensitive judgements as to the uses of
[72] Burnham, op. cit., p.165
technology and scientific information becomes ‘art’ in the
most literal sense. [73]
[73] ibid., p.166
The elitism of this statement and its relationship to McLuhanism
are clear. But it also anticipates (in a manner that Burnham
may not have expected) contemporary critical art practices.
ambie ntTV.NET an d its pee rs make judge me nts about, or
suggest interpretations of, technologies, but outside the
official context of scientific research and technocratic rule.
German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, similarly influenced by
cybernetics, was the first to render a systems approach in
the terms of social theory. Luhman understands systems as
generalised symbolic orders that are self-organising, and
significantly, autopoietic (self-generating). Within his theory,
Luhmann also explains the autonomy of art. He places the
trajectory of art alongside the development of bourgeois
society in modernity. Differentiation enabled art to become
a system whose values are defined from within, guaranteeing
its autonomy. In the past, the art system’s competency and
distinctiveness lay in its unique ability to make aesthetic
judgements (beautiful/ugly) – the second most important
opposition being that between truth and falsity (from the old
364/365
[74] Hal Foster describes
Hegelian philosophy of art). Luhmann goes on to identify other
this phenomenon as a shift
value pairs that play increasingly important roles in the 20th
from the criterion of
century, as artists subscribe to an anti-aesthetics and make
quality to one of interest.
social change their main objective. Thus, for many movements
[Ed]
in a r t , th e main valu e pair is n ow socially p ro g ressive/
[75] Niklas Luhmann,
art loses what makes it unique. If society as a whole becomes
‘Ist Kunst codierbar’
the canvas on which an artist wishes to paint, the artwork
in Aufsätze und Reden
might become indistinguishable from everyday life[75].
regressive[74]. Luhmann’s fear is that by abandoning aesthetics,
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004),
pp. 159–197. First published
ambientTV.NET’s works interrogate both the value pairs,
in Luhmann Soziologische
progressive/regressive and beautiful/ugly; they have not
Aufklärung 3: Soziales
abandoned aesthetic sensibility, but rather deployed it as
System Gesellschaft,
part of a holistic practice based in social critique. While they
Organisation, pp. 245–266
do not directly reference Burnham, Luhmann, or cybernetics,
(Opladen: Westdeutcher
their oeuvre signals a return to and a going beyond of 1960s-
Verlag, 1981)
70s radicalism. Traces of Hans Haecke and Martha Rosler, and
the revisitation of cornerstone issues such as free media and
[76] Benedict Seymour and
self-organisation, are evident. But this is not a simple return.
David Panos have explored
Despite everything cybernetic being terribly intellectually
the territory as The
fashionable these days, and no page of the Macy Conferences
London Particular:
transcripts remaining unturned, the locus of critical art
‘As [Western cities]
practice has shifted from ‘system’ to ‘Net’ – in anticipation
lose their remaining
of (and in response to) a parallel shift in the socioeconomic
manufacturing base and
realm.
more and more middle class
service jobs migrate to
Asia many have been forced
Reality Check
to re-brand as ‘Cities of
Ideas’. [...] Seen in this
The core of ambientTV.NET has stabilized around Luksch and
context Creative London is
Patel, with the artists continuing their practice from ambient.
far from being a manifesto
space, while maintaining the website as a publishing portal,
for dynamism. Rather it
and ‘Ambient Information Systems’ as production company. As
is a defensive strategy
pressure on land increases in the city, they continue to explore
that seems unlikely to
ways of weaving the studio into the fabric of their envisioned
deliver much apart from
social and technical infrastructure. In 2008, ambient.space –
increased precariousness
always something of a caravanserai for digital nomads – hosted
for the majority of working
a series of artists-in-residence. Extending an idea of Wolfgang
Londoners.’
Staehle’s (one of the participating artists), the guests were
- From David Panos
invited to address the view from the studio out over a city
‘Creative Clusters’,
undergoing rapid redevelopment for the 2012 Olympics.
available from
http:/thelondonparticular.
South Hackney continues to attract artists, ahead of and
org/items/
behind whom scurry the developers. And just as in ShoHo, the
creativeclusters.html
development of a creative hub has further marginalised old
[Ed]
inhabitants. Against a background of spiralling property prices,
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS
local authorities have colluded with (often offshore) investors,
offering them premises at below auction value while turning
a blind eye to evictions of long-standing tenants[76]. Broadway
Market is one of the front lines – a street of betting shops
and lifestyle vendors, greasy spoons and delis, cheap corner
stores and extortionate real estate agents, and since 2004,
home to a vibrant weekly farmers’ market. The produce may
be local and organic, but the landlords are absentees (in the
Bahamas, in Moscow), and the development, cynically planned.
Two established businesses, Francesca’s Cafe (run by Tony
P l at i a fo r ove r 30 ye a r s) a n d S p i r it ’s N u t r it i o u s Fo o d
Gallery, became cause célèbres, with novelist Hari Kunzru
writing of attempts to evict them in The Guardian [77]. While
[77] ‘Market Forces’, The
Spirit has managed to eke out his tenancy into late 2008
Guardian, 7 December 2005
(despite a possibly illegal rejection of his offer to buy,
www.guardian.co.uk/g2/
and massive rent increases), Tony was evicted in 2005 and
story/0,,1660371,00.html
the cafe demolished, despite a spirited occupation of the
and
building. Three years later, Spirit lost his premises too.
‘A dispatch from Tony’s
The gentrification of Broadway Market, and the explosion
cafe’, The Guardian, 6
of (New York) Chelsea-style galleries along neighbouring
January 2005
Vyner street – points to a future like that of ShoHo.
www.guardian.co.uk/
society/2006/jan/05/
This intensification of life on the street is also reflected in
regeneration.g2
the corridors of power. The subsumption of all artistic activity
under the term ‘creative industries’ continues, despite
evidence that they have not delivered the market miracle
hoped for by government. The effects of the new economy
bust hit the creative industries in 2002 when, against the
predicted annual increase in employment of 6% (a valid figure
for 1997–2000), some sectors (including broadcast) actually
contracted. In 2005, The European Institute for Progressive
Cultural Policies published a report (European Cultural Policies
[78] Maria Lind &Raimund
2015)[78] that reveals what the phantasm of the creative class
Minichbauer, eds. European
has done to politicians and art administrator’s minds. Not
Cultural Policies 2015: A
only does the ‘clear trend of instrumentalisation of art on
Report with Scenarios
part of the state’[79] continue, but also ‘the classic humanist-
on the Future of Public
bourgeois tradition of supporting “non-mainstream” work and
Funding for Contemporary
art with a narrow public has now been replaced by economic
Art in Europe (London,
and functionalist attitudes and actions.’ [80] Author Gerald
Stockholm, Vienna: eipcp,
Raunig expects that ‘there will be an even closer interweaving
2005)
of these three lines of identity culturalism, governmentality
control, and renewed authoritarian intervention on the part of
[79] ibid., p 8
a nation-state otherwise staging its retreat.’[81] In the same
publication, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt hedges the suspicion that
[80] ibid., p 9
‘the Arts Council England is preemptively exempting itself from
support’ before it is shut down for good.
[81] ibid., p 29
366/367
[82] Theodor Adorno
Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well,
‘Culture and Administration’
whether that is his intention or not. [82]
in The Culture Industry:
– The necessity for uncompromising political art continues to
Selected Letters on Mass
grow with late capitalism’s increasing capacity to absorb and
Culture, p. 93 (London:
commodify critique. But this critique must be folded in ever
Routledge, 1991)
more, to expose minimal surface to capital’s corrosiveness[83].
Too commonly today, artists’ autonomy trumps social and
[83] McLuhan usefully
political engagement (or lack of it). The slogan ‘you call it art/
described art as a
we call it independence’ indicates that ambientTV.NET has
counter-environment
attempted to set itself up as a counter-environment to ‘reclaim
that renders visible what
the world’ (as Thomas Hirschhorn demands contemporary art
is normally hidden. But
must do)[84]. Luksch and Patel declare autonomy to be a necessary
the cultural logic of late
precursor to engagement – not an alternative to it. Their
capitalism is such that
engagement involves playing with and critiquing existing social-
it devours everything,
technical infrastructures and envisioning tenable alternatives.
including its critiques, and
This maturing practice suggests a strategy for critical art that
refashions and commodifies
may spawn further islands of freedom in the Net.
---
them. [Ed]
[84] Hirschhorn interviewed
by Okwui Enwezor in James
Rondeau & Suzanne Ghez,
eds. Jumbo Spoons and
Big Cake (Chicago: Art
Institute of Chicago, 2000)
--D’où venons-nous?
Que sommes-nous? Où
allons-nous?
(Peter Grech, 2007)
8/OPEN PROCESSES
OPEN DOORS