Dear All,
I know that many of you were very involved in the Electrosomg
festival, either as watchers, or performers, or curious onlookers from
afar. Below is a final critical reflection by the director of the
festival Eric Kluitenberg.
It is a fascinating read as it addresses the potential or accidental
failure of the dream of telepresence, and ends with some serious
considerations for art practices that engage distance, performance,
labour and the eternal presence of the (spotless) screen.
We hope to be able to continue these discussions of social and
environmental energies very soon at the Whanganui symposium...
so if you haven't registered yet, now is the hour:
http://symposium10.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/register
see you soon
Su.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Eric Kluitenberg <[email protected]>
Date: 29 November 2010 10:20:45 AM
To: ep k <[email protected]>
Subject: / Distance versus Desire - Clearing the ElectroSmog
---------------------
Editorial notice:
This text was written for the upcoming issue in the Acoustic Space
series (No.8), co-published by RIXC centre for new media culture in
Riga and the Art Research Lab of Liepaja University: "Following the
theme of ENERGY this issue will look at different social and
cultural aspects of energy in the contemporary human society. It
will also investigate the notion of 'sustainability' from various
perspectives - artistic, scientific, technological, architectural,
environmental."
(More info soon at the RIXC on-line store: http://rixc.lv/kiosks/ )
The text is an extended version of a talk given at Impakt Festival
2010 "Matrix City", in Utrecht as part of the Superstructural
Dependencies Conference, October 15, 2010.
( www.impakt.nl/index.php/festival/
Conferentie_superstructuraldependen )
The on-line release of this new essay coincides with the official
launch of the documentation resources resulting from the ElectroSmog
Festival for Sustainable Immobility, including all full-length
webcasts, brought together in an overview page at:
www.electrosmogfestival.net/documentation
The ElectroSmog festival was organised in March 2010 and organised
distributed over 8 main locations and a host of other connected
sites, interconnected via internet.
The festival was co-ordinated from De Balie, centre for culture and
politics in Amsterdam, and execiuted with the following partners:
ADA – Aotearoa Digital Arts Network, New Zealand / Banff New Media
Institute, Banff / Chelsea College of Art and Design, London / Cool
Mediators Foundation, Amsterdam / Engage! Tactical Media, Utrecht /
Eyebeam – Art + Technology Center, New York / Floss Manuals – Free
Manuals for Free Software, (international network) / The Green
Bench, Whanganui, New Zealand / Hivos – Humanist Institute for
development Cooperation, The Netherlands / Medialab Prado, Madrid /
m-cult- centre for new media culture, Helsinki / Muffatwerk –
International Center for Arts and Culture, Munich / REFRAMES,
Munich / RIXC – Centre for New Media Culture, Riga.
The radical premise of the festival was to create a truly
international event without anybody travelling or moving around. We
found out, however, that our reliance on telepresence technologies
proved a hard bargain for an international audience event
(festival). This essay reflects on the outcomes of the festival and
its implications for the telepresence ideology.
Enjoy!
Eric
------------
Distance versus Desire
Clearing the ElectroSmog
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the
history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to
realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced
beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity,
the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of the oikos, and
certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in
favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As
current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding
energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits - most
prominently in the intense debate on global warming - citizens and
organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to
reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age:
that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through
the use of advanced telepresence technologies.
ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility
The ElectroSmog festival for ‘sustainable immobility’, staged in
March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of
telepresence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public
meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break
with traditional conventions of staging international public
festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No
presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries
to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each
event should always be organised in two or more locations at the
same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival,
conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across
geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated
encounters.
The festival was organised at a moment when internet-based
techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-
line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text
interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually
around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog
tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed
with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of
real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of
public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time
configurations that had been the object of heated debates already
for so many years?
There was a sense of unease when looking back at the bold promises
of remoter life and work in the ‘electronic cottage’ that
futurologists such as Alvin Toffler spelled out for us in the early
1980s, in books such as “The Third Wave” (the ‘coming information
age’ as the third wave, after agricultural and industrial society)
[2]. As part of his near-future explorations conducted well before
the rise of widespread internet use, Toffler enthusiastically
embraced the suggestion that a radical reduction of (physical)
mobility would become possible by the rise of ever more
sophisticated communication and information technologies and the
integration of home and workplace in the electronic cottage. Not
only would this transformation, in Toffler’s vision, reap great
ecological benefits, it would also initiate a grand revitalisation
of the ‘oikos’, the household and the family unit.
The electronic cottage should ideally be a real-time connected
living and working space, allowing a new kind of digital artisan /
entrepreneur to emerge who would be absolved from rush hour-traffic
while being ultimately flexible in making his or her own work and
private arrangements. The main advantage of the new work/life unit
was its inherent efficiency, where meetings would be arranged solely
when strictly necessary and flexible according to need and
availability of everyone involved in the process. The main element
won back from the congested systems of collective work and travel
was time. Time that could instead be invested in the ‘oikos‘, the
home, family life, and local social relations, that could help to
restore the psychic fabric of society, which had become unravelled
through the brutal forces of ‘second wave’ grand scale industrial
modernisation. Work and life at home could now be brought into
unison again.
Today, however, more than 25 years after these all bold claims, we
can observe exactly the reverse trend: Never before have wo/men
travelled more and farther. Not least because of their improved
capabilities to keep in touch with the ‘home base’ from afar. With
advanced communication techniques work has entered the sphere of
private life and mostly diminished the space and time for the oikos.
The simultaneous exponential innovation of transport technologies
and logistics, in particular in the automobile and aviation
industry, have had a cataclysmic effect on this ‘fatal’ trajectory.
The system of hyper-mobility has quite literally overheated itself,
and seems unstoppably heading for a crash. Even more so, it seems to
exhaust itself at an exponential rate.
While most people do enjoy living in a global village, few
appreciate a forced life in the local village. Rather than moving
towards a sustainable immobility, we seem to be heading towards a
global ecological disaster scenario. The crucial question for
ElectroSmog was whether a critical reconsideration of this idea of a
sustainable immobility was possible, both in theoretical and
practical terms.
Necessity and failure
The urgency of the search for alternatives for the current crisis of
hyper-mobility was illustrated graphically by the opening
conversation of the festival “Global perspectives on the crisis of
mobility”. In our first video chat with the crew of Sasahivi media
in Nairobi we talked about the daily commute in Kenya’s capital. The
city has seen a sharp increase in motorised travel in recent years,
leading to over-congested roads and unbearably intense rush hour
traffic. To avoid the worst the people at Sasaivi traditionally
would leave their homes early in the morning, before rush hour, and
return only late, often very late at night. During the day roads
were simply too busy.
So, how long would a daily commute take? - “about two to three
hours”, and what distance would they have to cover? - “about 2,5 to
3 kilometres” (!).
Next we connected with Dutch architect Daan Roggeveen who is
conducting the research project Go West together with journalist
Michiel Hulshof about the development of new metropolises in Central
and Western China [3]. They had just come back from a field trip in
Wuhan, and Roggeveen explained that they had found that about 500
new cars were entering the streets of Wuhan every day. We then asked
him how many cities of similar size were currently present in China,
and he replied about 30, not counting Shanghai and Beijing. In
short, by a (very) moderate count some 15.000 new cars were entering
Chinese roads daily as we spoke.
We then listened to a short video message by Partha Pratim Sarker
from Dhaka, Bangladesh relating similar experiences and being
hopeful that new communication technologies could do something to
alleviate the stress of the streets. Next up film maker Aarti Sethi
from Delhi told us that by her estimate some 1000 new cars entered
Delhi roads every day, especially intensified by the introduction of
the Tata, the low cost automobile that obviously replaces many
polluting motor-ricksha’s, but still.
In a nutshell we received a chilling summary of a global exponential
rise of motorised mobility through these first hand reports. With
car use, air travel and motorised transportation not diminishing in
the developed economies this system of hyper-mobility out of control
seems to approach its limits rather sooner than later, and virtually
all counter-strategies so far seem entirely ineffective.
The Spectre of Imaginary Media
Imaginary Media are machines that mediate impossible desires.
Imaginary media typically emerge in situations where the living
environment imposes inherent limitations that one cannot transcend.
The desire to exceed these limitations produces beautiful
phantasies, and in the case of imaginary media they are projected
onto technological systems - both existent and inexistent - that are
supposed to realise what an ordinary human existence is unable to
deliver. Imaginary media are the techno-imaginary constructs that
populate the domain of impossibility.
One manifestation of this desire to transcend the limitations of
living experience is the longing for immediate contact across any
distance or divide. And it is this desire for a ubiquitous
telepresence, replacing the actual presence here and now, more than
anything else, that has fuelled the development of new media and
communication technologies. This desire is in fact so strong that
even in lowest bandwidth environments tremendous investments of
mental and emotional energy can be observed, across different
technological and historical settings (recent examples are for
instance the IRC text chat or SMS text messaging). ‘Signal’ in these
case is interpreted as ‘contact’, and a phantasmatic projection of
connection and interaction is projected onto the faintest of
signals, aided further by the curious emergence of synaesthetic
perceptions where minute changes in tone, rhythm or even wording can
produce intense bodily sensations and responses.
This intermingling of imaginary and actual qualities of connection-
media has obscured the discussions about the benefits and limits of
telepresence technologies thoroughly. Regardless if one is talking
about mobile phone use, deep technological experimentation in
telepresence labs, on-line virtual environments of the Second Life
type, high powered tele-work centres, or more regular real-time web
applications and video chat systems, it seems very difficult to
escape this aspect of the phantasmatic. Critical scrutiny, however,
needs to cleanse itself from these phantasmatic distortions if it is
to get anywhere with its task of establishing clear boundaries and
areas of possibility.
For ElectroSmog the central question was, can we convene a public
event, a festival, with everything you might expect from it, where
audiences and presenters from a host of different countries and
regions of the earth can meet, interact, encounter, exchange without
having to travel outside of their locale? Or in even more mundane
terms, can an international festival be staged without anybody
travelling and still be a viable public event? And while the
technologies used worked fine most of the time, the answer to this
central question was clearly “No”. However, this ‘failure’ became
clear in a rather surprising way.
What the festival showed through its radical approach to this
question is that remote connection works excellent in an active
network. In situations where connections were established between
active contributors to a discussion or project, exchange was often
very productive and the experience rewarding for all participants.
But when attempts were made to integrate a public of relatively
passive observers, the traditional ‘audience’, the experience broke
down.
Remote connection also did not bring people together locally. The
overwhelming sense of all festival events was that in the (remote)
communicative process all nodes of the network must be active
‘throughout’. No real sense of co-presence between local audiences
in different sites (even though they were often visible and audible
to each other) came about, while locally audiences seemed little
inspired to physically show up at the networks nodes to witness a
process they could also follow from the comfort of their home via
the webcast.
The interesting question here is why?
Could playful interfaces, allowing audiences to interact across
different localities have helped to create this sense of co-
presence? Certainly it would have helped to create this sense in
situations where audiences were actually present in different
connected spaces. However, curiously, exactly those programs were
generally well visited that showed strong local participation and a
minimum (the ‘at least one’ rule) of connected localities. Much can
be done to improve the experience, but even in the deliriously
transmediated environment of the ElectroSmog central connection
node, the theatre space of De Balie in Amsterdam, the energy never
entirely seemed to materialise.
The rather inevitable conclusion that must be drawn from this is
that the idea of a replacement of physical encounters by mediated
encounters is simply an illusion. First of all, this mediated
encounter denies the unspoken subtle bodily cues that shape actual
conversation.The experience of co-presence in the same space is
determined by so many perceptible and sub-liminal incentives that
digital electronic media do not capture, that the idea of an
immersive experience relies more on the phantasmatic cover of these
absent cues and the curious human capacity for synaesthetic
perception, than on the performative capabilities of the medium. A
digital video-link certainly does not replace these subliminal cues.
Still, more important for the ultimate failure of the telepresence
ideology is that it denies the libidinal drive for encounter,
belonging, and identification that is so important for a successful
staging of a public event such as an arts and culture festival.There
is also a sobering lesson for curators that excellent content and
contributors as such do not translate into public success. The
desire for sharing the space with others and with the influential in
a particular social circle or figuration, is a much stronger motor
it seems for public appeal. Remoteness, one of the themes in the
festival, cannot be so easily transcended in the telepresence
scenario as hoped for.
It is this libidinal drive for connection, identification and
belonging that propels the development of new media and
communication technologies. These technologies are greeted with
great enthusiasm as long as they are able to conjure up a
phantasmatic image of connectedness that is able to cover ip the
lack of actual presence and (physical) contact. However, this
phantasmatic projection is never able to displace the feeling of a
lack entirely, and thus a surplus desire remains that needs to be
satisfied by other means. The consequence is that an intensified use
of communication technology does not lead to less, but instead to an
increased desire for physical encounter.
This observation is also remarkably concurrent with what mobility
researchers have concluded about the actual behaviour of people in
environments deeply saturated with advanced communication
technologies. While some effects can be observed that can lead to a
moderation of certain forms of travel and transport (tele work, on-
line and phone conferences and so on), the indirect generative
effects of these communication media tend to create intensified
mobility patterns in these same regions (i.e. not necessarily work
of profession related).
Communication media serve all kinds of practical purposes,
obviously, and also those that can replace the necessity of physical
encounter, movement, travel and its associated hassles. There is,
however, a point at which the lack presence and contact brings the
phantasmatic projection of the technologically enabled communication
process to a point of crisis. And this is the moment when people
start up the engine of their cars - the moment when the imaginary
medium and the libidinal drive meet in a frontal crash.
Dilemmas after the crash of media and before the crash of hyper-
mobility
In all this the urgency of our quest for a sustainable immobility is
not lessened. The apparent failure of telepresence technologies
leaves us stranded with a huge dilemma. Not to act is really not an
option given the intensified pressures of a mobility system out of
control. But are there any solutions?
Unfortunately there are as yet not too many reasons to be hopeful.
The first step forward towards a new more sustainable regime of
mobility and connectivity, and a new balance between mobility and
immobility, would be not to believe in linear narratives, neither
positivistic nor fatalistic. More communication technology does not
automatically lead to less physical mobility. But equally, the
current systems of hyper-mobility cannot grow at an exponential rate
indefinitely. They will encounter new energetic, ecological, and
with that also increasingly economic limits. The other observation
that mobility researchers generally point to (next to the failure of
communication technology) is that price is about the only mechanism
that does seem to have a discernible effect on actual (mobility)
behaviour.
As currently widely used energy systems (fossil fuels) become
increasingly scarce, their price will inevitably go up. This will
transform mobility from a right (or a perceived right) into a
privilege, constructed along the traditional lines of socio-economic
segregation (income, profession, class). The struggle over the
privileges of mobility and movement will create a new consciousness
about their spatial deployment (who is allowed to travel where and
by which means?). This new consciousness of segregation will
undoubtedly spark conflict and critical debate.
The second step would be to accept the need for hybrid and therefore
‘messy’ solutions. The economics of mobility will undoubtedly play
an important role in shaping future mobility regimes. The
exploration of alternative sources of energy and alternative
transportation systems and technologies provide another avenue to
look for viable escape routes. The on-going refinement of
communication tools, media environments, tele-work arrangements and
21st century electronic cottages and other models of sustainable
immobility will also play a role in those situations where practical
advantages take priority over the libidinal drive for encounter.
(Tele-)Presence researcher Caroline Nevejan emphasises that the new
communication technologies do not offer us ideal solutions at all,
but they will in the future become increasingly indispensable. [4]
The least desirable scenario is that of the crash, the ‘accident-
catastrophe’ preprogrammed in current systems of hyper-nobility.
Given the tidings from a confused planet rushing at high-speed into
a global traffic jam, reported at ElectroSmog, this scenario cannot
be excluded from our considerations for now.
Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, November 2010
Notes:
1 - An overview of documentation resources from the festival can be
found at:
www.electrosmogfestival.net/documentation
2 - Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, Bantam Books, New York, 1980.
3 - www.gowestproject.com
4 - See for Nevejan’s research on Witnessed Presence:
www.systemsdesign.tbm.tudelft.nl/witness
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