[-empyre-] re: staged spaces - a gathering of tribes

[felix@querformarte.de]

dear -empyreans-,

after a hopefully relaxing easter weekend intermezzo
we are now into the second half of the month with
pingfm & r a d i o q u a l i a

jan's post about staged spaces already mentions his new project
n e t u r e  (http://pingfm.org/leipzig) which is still developing.
The remapping of private and public spaces is indeed a very interesting
experimental playground for artistic research in terms of networked,
broadcasting and streaming media.
Jan mentions the micro-radio communities started in Japan by
Tetsuo Kogawa. I think these really emphasized on the idea of community
as something limited both locally and temporally. Hakim Bey's idea of the
TAZ (http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html) seems to be really very
present in there. I wonder what happens then, with the net and the
formats
using its infrastructure becoming more and more permanently resident in
our daily lives as flat-rates and broadband replace the good-old dial up
(temporary) connection? A feeling for a gathering of tribes is hard to
imagine
if everybody is always there though never present. Micro-media on the
other
hand really force physical presence and create intensities by their very
transient
characteristic. Presence in terms of static in a micro-radio broadcast
will be much
more evident than switching between states in an instant messaging system
(as nobody is really "offline" anymore but always just "busy", "back soon"
-
anyway you cannot feel them moving anymore?)
In my point of view it's symptomatic that IRC is dying out in favour of
instant
messaging. IRC still retained a sense for the gathering while the IM will
come up
when you start your system.

The "shrinking city" therefore seems rather to become a permanent nexus
of
private and public space being indistinguishable from one another. Seems
to
me it is not exactly the net exploding but our public and private spaces
imploding.
The question regarding streaming media consists for me of it's ability to
regain
the_temptation_ for_a_gathering_of_tribes? Be that in the virtual or
physical space
the major quality of such a gathering will be its short-livedness and
hence intensity.
This might sound a bit sentimental but I remember back then when we were
happy to
see a couple of frames of the other guys or hear a single sentence before
the connection
crashed again. I do not exactly long for this but I guess ubiquity may not
be far from
indifference.

Felix