Re: <nettime> who's rhizoming who digest [porculus, byfield, bowman]
"Brice Bowman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Re: <nettime> who's rhizoming who digest
"geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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From: "Brice Bowman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: <nettime> who's rhizoming who digest [porculus, byfield, bowman]
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 16:55:25 -0800
Kanarinka,
If $5 is not too much for you to pay to granted to be a member of the
Rhizome, I wonder at cost you would no longer agree to exchange your money
for the permission to access Rhizome. Costs never go backwards. They always
go up. Today Rhizome is five bucks. Tomorrow will be more. This is the
problem, as well as the concept of charging admission. And this it not just
relevant to Rhizome. Museums used to be free to the public. Then they began
to collect a buck or two to gain access to the collection. Now the cost is,
in my view, so extreme that it wont take long, if we're not already there,
that only the well-to-do will be able to go to museums. Museums, magazine,
materials, ISP fees, Web hosting fees, and on, and on,.... It is my
concern that fees prevent artists from accessing ideas that they should be
fully considering in their effort to make meaningful and era relevant work.
Before, too long, that which is charged to gain access to has no relevancy,
because its "product" is completely lacking poignant contact with the vital
substance all "essential stuff" has its feet in.
I feel sorry for Rhizome too, but not for the current thoughtful critique (I
don't see it as an attack) it chose to subject itself to, but because I
believe it has lost sight of the "essential stuff".
Brice Bowman
----- Original Message -----
from: "Kanarinka" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 10:34 AM
subject: RE: <nettime> who's rhizoming who digest [porculus, byfield, bowman]
> A note on rhizome support:
<...>
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From: "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: <nettime> who's rhizoming who digest
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 12:40:07 +1100
Dear all,
I would also like to respond to the Rhizome debate. This is a discussion
that reappears every now and then, but that doesn't matter. The issue
remains a pressing: the (absent) economy of critical Internet culture.
Luckily the dotcommania period is long gone. However, the question if and
how critical Internet culture should build up relationships with the
ordinary world of money, jobs and non-profit business remains by large
unresolved. Hardly any progress has been made over the past five years in
that respect.
I am not sure if the subscription model is the right one. Ted Byfield is
right when he notices that Rhizome is jumping from one model to the next.
However, nettime itself provides no answer at all. The nettime project in my
view has come to halt a long time ago and has transgressed into an ordinary
majordomo mailinglist only model which is indeed free of cost. To critisize
Rhizome from that position is a bit too easy. I do not agree with Mark
Tribe's financial strategies but at least he trying to figure out what is
and what is not working. Nettime and other 'free' projects have never even
tried to employ people or think of legal structures with which grants could
be applied, partnerships created, books published (apart from Readme!) and
.pdfs sold, t-shirts or coffee cups, whatever commodity you can imagine. The
'free' position, adapted from the hackers culture, easily creates a position
of superiority because it is very hard to question or critisize the
voluntary hard work people like Ted put into the project. In that sense I
like Rhizome because it makes its hand dirty. I didn't pay the five bucks,
by the way, perhaps because 'net art' is not my main interest, not because I
am against paying for content. I recently paid for Doug Henwood's Left
Business Observer, a newsletter which comes as a .pdf.
Rhizome has decided to follow another path, which of course brings its own
problems. This is mainly related to web-related work and costs. Things would
look different if Rhizome would only be email-based. In the case of nettime
the Waag Society in Amsterdam is paying for the machine and the traffic and
a bit of maintainance but that's a modest sum and not all that much work. On
top of that there is the account at The Thing. That's it.
Nettime's default volunteerism and the overall refusal to institutionalize
has led to a relative stagnation of subscribers which for years now slowly
moves from 2000 to 3000. I am not praising hyper growth, nor do I think
small is beautiful. The shadow site of not doing any promotion, no
publications or events in which nettime is explicitly present has resulted
in a culture of insiders. You have to be an insider within global new media
culture because otherwise you will never find out about the existence of
nettime. Often we see the same people posting, few women, few new and
surprising content from newcomers etc. This is a result of a project that
more or less runs on its automatic pilot.There are few efforts made to bring
in new contexts. It's already an enormous amout of work for Ted, Felix and
Andrea to maintain nettime as it is. Nettime has reached a hard border of
list culture and can therefore not transform into something else. At least,
not under the current circumstances.
Ciao, Geert
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