Re: [-empyre-] staged spaces

[jan hendrik brueggemeier <jan@pingfm.org>]

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004, Felix Sattler wrote:

> this leads me to a question to all but especially pingfm: Do you think
> it is necessary for your work to experience the space of the other
> participants in a collaborative webcast? And how do you include space
> (i.e. the studio but also public space like bordercamps) into the webcasts?

its depends on ones defintion of net-art or what is your understanding of
so called interactivity and the question how can more to than just being a
link clicking test-dummy.
i always like to quote the german media-artists antje eske and kurd  alsleben
referring to their wiki-entry "netart is not being produced"
[ http://www.serverfestival.net/mt/archives/2002_08_28.php ] (only in
german):"usally art is understood as a work or a project, bernhard taureck defines
a project as a serie composed of planning, accomplishment and evaluation
by others. but a sentence like, "i am planning a symmetrical relationship
and finally acting my plans out" does not really sound sensefull because
symmetrical relationships are based on a general indefiniteness of
decision of ones counterpart and therefore hardly predictable".
(translated by myself)
a little side note regarding kurd alsleben, who is -i guess- something
like 75 years old, and is coming from an artistic background approaching
cybernetics long time before internet started. he used to be friend
with cybernetics like max bense.
it is also interesting to see that radio-art pioneer max neuhaus tended to
call him an architect of communicational structures than an artist.

regarding space, to me it is interesting to see how the understanding of
public and private is transforming and kind of inaning.
people tend rather to personalize and de-politicise no matter if its
cyberspace or physical space. the 'flaneur' walter benjamin wrote about
has vanished more or less from the streets.
the connotation-shift of the understanding of 'guest' is quite illustrative.
in former days 'guest' used to describe a stranger nowadays it is commonly
associated with a personal friend.

today we have a situation that my mobile-phone turns the former
public/impersonal space into a super-personal realm. a computer connected
to the internet can turn my living-room rather into a public sphere. this
shows that the concepts of what traditionally has belonged to the private
and what have belonged to public are shifting. its 'stage' is getting
rather conceptually than physically apparent.
at some point regarding telematic media and f.ex. adds one could state
that such media create an impression of public, which is from an
economic point of view are not common at all .

what could be possible public stages today?
to my opinion it is certainly some kind of shadowy 'stage'.
we come more and more to a point where one can say that physical space as the
traditional public space is dieing off. question would be which role media
could play? i am not talking about substitution but rather of combination of
physically/bodily with media or socio-cybernetical spaces.
the internet and therefore streaming (especially of its already discussed
"broad"casting probs) used to be such shadowy place. we all know that it
is changing. therefore geert lovink recently coinded the term 'dark fiber'
(definition on http://www.webopedia.internet.com) to describe the juridical
and economic state of art and educational projects on the net.
what are spaces where public can flourish freely and what kind of
procedures does it evoke and how do they relate to a global scale, thats
are for me really interesting questions and lead to my recent project callesd
' n e t u r e ', which deals with an archtectural and media intervention in
the post-industrial 'shrinking' city ... (more about n e t u r e at http://pingfm.org/leipzig)

to conclude i think a classical and very inspiring example for us (and
radioqualia as well) has been the micro-radio-movement of japan in the
eighties, through certain circumstances tetsuo kogawa found out that weak
radio-transmitters with a transmitting-power comparable to tv remote-controls
are left out from the japanese radio regulation, because otherways every
manufacturing company would need to licensing their products. the
interesting point was that the service-area of a 'remote-control' layered
a real sociological unit in a city like tokyo. its small scale assured f.ex.
that every listener could easily walk to the place of tranmission and
created meeting-points of communities, which have not been know before
because they have not communicated before.

that might offer also an interesting feedback to the discussion on global
aethetics, which are global but also micro or as tetsuo kogawa puts it:
internet proves micro-radio its mirco-ness.

all the best,
roger&out

jan