Speaking of Sheffield and Detroit, look at the concluding paragraph
to this article.... I never thought much of much of this article as
a whole, but it does make some sense in places.
-m
(from) Analogical reasoning, digital imagining /
Author: Kihm, Christophe.; Penwarden, C., tr.
Source: Art Press no260 (Sept. 2000) p. 28-9
ISSN: 0245-5676
It is certainly a very modern activity to conceive, realize and
fantasize forms of post-utopia (in the community, in exchange and
transmission) or post-dystopia (cloning, the disappearance of the
subject, the loss of referents), all predicated on technological
developments. But to argue that what is happening constitutes a real
aesthetico-social revolution is to underestimate both the issue of
access to technology (dominated, of course by the elite, even if this
domination is relative) and the power of the anthropological rules
governing different forms of art and the way in which their
representations are communicated and geographically sited.
UNDERGROUNDThe Web society does not mean the end of frontiers between
men: rather, it redistributes those frontiers, creates new ones and new
forms of exclusion resulting from the impact of the space of flux on
physical space. The fact that in this new situation each culture should
be seeking to redefine the limits of its space, that it should be
providing the "new" with a new "scene," certainly does not mean that it
is pushing back its frontiers.
Sheffield and Detroit, the two related cultural scenes analyzed in the
articles that follow, are of interest to us here because they are
concrete examples of situations in which new social and aesthetic
projects grew out of communities in crisis, projects in which the
collective memory and individual consciousness found a new outlet in
the use of new technologies. Founded as they are on the search for a
lost identity (Detroit), or a shared secret offering access to a
parallel world (Sheffield), these two underground cultures are both
mythic and their sites are temporally ephemeral (hangars, squats,
wastelands, Internet) and culturally malleable (open to multiple
influences, aesthetically porous). Such is their mythology, that of an
empty frame. Historically on the shadowy side of the law in that it
encourages the free circulation of drugs and the contestation of
authority (the state, the law, the work ethic), the underground is
built in and from rejection. Its history has taken a new turn as a
result of two major phenomena. Firstly, the established tendency of its
communities to function as a network, with individuals and groups
connected to one another and their productions circulating like drugs,
has taken on a new importance with the advent of the Internet and
digital technologies. Secondly, with the models furnished by community
"resistance" proving of increasing importance for the construction of
the individual subject, at the expense of the models derived from civil
society, the underground has become the great definer of identities.
Whereas only recently its ritual practices (involving the body, dance,
dress and assembly) were a discreet, minority affair, today they have
become extremely high-profile, to the extent that they are almost
dominant. As a result of network and historical serendipity, Sheffield
and Detroit, which were simply two nodes among many others on the web
of underground connections, have brought about a lasting change in
electronic music around the world.
Added material.
Translation, C. Penwarden.
(Ph. L. Edeline).
(Ph. L. Edeline).
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