Locked Down / Charged Up - Trapped in the Somatic Deficit

[Eric Kluitenberg]

es not imply that ‘language’, consciousness, cognition, semantics, 
meaning, are no longer important or relevant. The somatic turn simply redirects 
our attention back to the biological body, to the physical environment, to the 
networks of material associations, to reach a more complete picture (may we 
hope understanding?) of our connection to the world around and inside of us. It 
opens up the way also for the highly productive new forms of ecological 
thinking that have blossomed in recent years. It is certainly no coincidence 
that this turn towards the somatic happens exactly concurrent with the 
expansion of electronic mediation - it is a shift that was long overdue in any 
case.

References

1 - Tufekci refers to this Twitter post on June 1, 2013, 1.17 pm:
  https://twitter.com/aaronstein1/status/340789304806739969

2 - Zeynep Tufekci, “Is there a Social-Media-fuelled Protest Style? An Analysis 
From #jan25 to #geziparki”, posted June 1, 2013, at: 
https://technosociology.org/ 
https://technosociology.org/?p=1255  [accessed: February 7, 2022]

-

Eric Kluitenberg
December 2021

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Beyond the tactical in media - new temporal scales for the war in Ukraine

[Eric Kluitenberg]

dear nettimers,

Like the conflict in Ukraine, the recent flood of commentaries and analyses on 
nettime (and elsewhere) has been overwhelming, and given this it seemed so far 
difficult to add anything more astute and articulate than what has passed here 
so far. Speaking as I assume for many, first of all my gratitude for seeing a 
discussion here, which seems to lack sufficient depth elsewhere. Obviously I 
have very little to add to these analyses.

One thing that very much annoyed me in the early stages of the invasion, 
though, was a superficial resurgence of the notion of ‘tactical media’ in 
various online and offline exclamations. Predictable in a situation of 
immediate crisis, and understandable as an innate impulse, but it felt out of 
place. My own feeling about that at the time (having dealt with the notion of 
tactical media quite a bit over the years, although I did not coin the term nor 
named the associated practices as such) tactical media seemed to have failed or 
missed its place and time of action at the very moment the rockets started to 
hit targets and tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border - or rather when an 8 
year regional war escalated into a full scale military invasion and nation-wide 
war in the country.

Intuitively it felt tactical media had a role to play exactly to prevent such 
armed conflict, prevent the legitimisation of large scale (military) violence 
as a means of politics, and enhance the kind of checks and balances, 
distribution of powers, establish counter-hegemonial mechanisms, support open 
governance structures all aimed at avoiding (the possibility of) these forms of 
armed conflict. Thus, when this violent conflict then nonetheless erupted it 
seemed to me that tactical media had failed (along with all other 
counter-hegemonial practices), and that it had little if no role to play in the 
immediacy of the conflict.

In private conversation David Garcia, however, reminded me of the fact that my 
idea of tactical media here was too narrow in this take on current events. Too 
narrow in the sense of being too narrowly aligned with an emancipatory ideal of 
progressive politics  - one could phrase it more Latourian as too narrowly 
focussed on the ‘progressive composition of the good common world’ (his 
political ideal from The Politics of Nature onwards, which includes of course 
non-human politics, but is certainly contradicted by this regressive conduct of 
war). Instead we would need to acknowledge that tactical media has been very 
much alive and productive, but in the service of reactionary and to some extent 
hyper-violent politics and regressive forms of popular mobilisation. In which 
we also include the strategic operationalisation of the tactical in media by 
the well-known Russian troll-farms and other strategic initiatives, as much as 
populist political movements in Europe, the US and elsewhere - that whole story 
is well known.

So then what has failed is a ‘progressive’ counter-hegemonial understanding of 
tactical media. The qualities of the nomadic, the temporary interventions, the 
tactical operations on the terrains of strategic power, the ephemeral character 
of tactical media, hit and run tactics, quick and dirty interventions and 
aesthetics – all this seems powerless and utterly impotent vis-a-vis the 
violent brutality of this unleashed military machine.

Thinking this through a bit further, it seemed that the temporal scale or 
scales of tactical media is where one of its main problems lie and where the 
‘classic’ notion of tactical media seems to fail current conditions. A better 
way to think this is first to assume that it is both too late and too early for 
tactical media to play any significant role in the Ukraine conflict. Of course 
the witness reports keep flowing from countless citizen’s camera’s, and this is 
highly significant. But as Felix Stalder already concluded many years ago  - a 
huge number of people have become involved in something which could be labeled 
as tactical media, but those people would overwhelmingly not think of tactical 
media as they are doing it. The vast majority will simply never have heard the 
term and thus be unaware of any of its previous experiences and the critical 
discussions they evoked.

It is, however, not besides the point to think this through and try to connect 
our current experiences to those made earlier. Not just to understand the 
current conditions and dynamics (which the discussions on nettime f.i. do 
brilliantly) but especially to consider how to engage these conditions and 
dynamics – right now. The temporality of tactical media, its focus on the 
immediacy of the event, its inextricable origins within the event in question 
(’tactical media never report, they always participate’ - Lovink & Garcia - The 
ABC of Tactical Media, 1997), is simultaneously its greatest strength and its 
greatest limitation. What a conscious and critical articulation of this problem 
can do is he

Captured Alive - On living memory and digital archives

[Eric Kluitenberg]

hat the San Francisco Main Library and the New 
York Public Library hold videos of the first fifty interviews, while complete 
transcripts of all interviews can be downloaded from the project website. Five 
minute video excerpts of the interviews are also available at the website.

Schulman’s book offers a new layer of interpretation over the extremely 
controversial and sensitive histories (herstories) of AIDS activism and the HIV 
pandemic. Most importantly the video interviews and their full transcripts 
offer us a first hand access to personal testimonies and living memories of 
those directly affected by the pandemic and the various ways in which affected 
communities and individuals were silenced out in the wider public culture. It 
is hard to overestimate this contribution to social her/history.

Engaging living memory in (digital) archives

The models referred here, De Balie and its dense debating and live streaming 
environment, the Tactical Media Files resource and the contextual layers 
created around it, as well as the experiences of tactical media practitioners 
worldwide, the open and collaborative editorial policies of Wikipedia, and the 
ACTUP Oral History project all hint towards the potential of digital archives 
in various forms to capture living memory in a sensitive and respectful manner.

They also highlight the importance of proceeding with caution and modesty 
towards their subject matter. Particularly the delicateness and urgency of 
activist practices bring out these qualities most pertinently, but the 
experiences gained in doing so apply across the whole cultural and 
socio-political spectrum. The dynamic and open ended character of digital and 
online media offers important capabilities for engaging with living memory of 
both individuals and communities. First of all by creating spaces for 
interpretation and re-interpretation, within which the personal voice and the 
first person account can be given centre stage.

With this, however, the politics of the archive, most prominently of course the 
question of inclusion and exclusion, do not disappear. This is why the open 
ended character of digital archives and the continuous openness for 
reinterpretation is so important. Not just to amend the unavoidable distortion 
of these voices, but to connect these resources to living cultural and 
political practices and make them available to practitioners (makers, 
designers, artists, activists, researchers, students) to inform their own 
contemporary practices.

Public access, availability, and participation are a prerequisite for these 
digital  / living archives to function. This extends far beyond the 
technological issues raised here and includes the question of how to create 
sufficient engagement with a resource to be able to truly call it a ‘living 
archive’. Hybrid strategies, combining online media and offline repositories, 
digital and analogue media (print!) provide the best guarantees for their 
longer term sustainability. In this sense living archives do not stand in 
contradiction to ‘conventional’ archiving practices. They can much rather act 
as complementary forces, combining dynamism and longer term preservation.

Eric Kluitenberg,
September 2021.

References:

1 - The web dossier created around the project at the Balie website is no 
longer available. The final report of the trajectory is available here (only in 
Dutch): https://coolmin.stackstorage.com/s/KOjyCqMsQ5Wm9cJh 
2 - http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/ 
3 - Stalder, Felix (2008): 30 Years of Tactical Media, in: Public Netbase: Non 
Stop Future. New  Practices in Art and Media, World Information Institute / 
KUDA.org, Vienna / Novi Sad, 190-195.
4 -  http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/chew
5 - 
https://www.paradiso.nl/en/program/the-seropositive-ball-how-aids-changes-our-lives-een-69-uur-durende-gebeurtenis-voor-mensen-met-en-zonder-hiv/33177/
 
6 - http://www.actuporalhistory.org

––––

Eric Kluitenberg is an independent cultural and media theorist, writer, curator 
and educator. He teaches currently at the ArtScience Interfaculty and the 
Interactive Media Design program of the Royal Academy of the Arts, University 
of the Arts The Hague. He is also the editor in chief of the Tactical Media 
Files online documentation resource.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-kluitenberg-6166782b/ 

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Re: International anti slavery BLM

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Molly, all,

Just to chime in briefly from NL. It’s great to see the Dutch national museum 
for mostly pre-modern visual arts take up this gauntlet and producing a show 
that extends the rather meagre presentation of NL’s colonial past (and present! 
– don’t forget, there are still “overseas territories” in Latin America…) in 
the regular collection display, where only one room and limited number of 
artefacts is devoted to that colonial past and slave trade.

Still, it feels as not enough and too late. Before I was cleared out of 
Amsterdam by the forces of gentrification (about two years ago), I was living 
in the ‘Indische Buurt” (named after the former colonies in SE Asia, roughly 
what is now called Indonesia), a highly multi-cultural, immigrant 
neighbourhood, which used to be a disaster zone (the district with the lowest 
average income in Amsterdam and the only one eligible at the time for EU 
structure funds). Then, as usual the arts people and ‘experimentals’ moved in 
(like us), followed by a wave of renovations and expats renting these renovated 
places at ridiculous prices (4 to 5 times the rent that was collected before). 
The rest was sold off on the free market, but a lot of housing remained social 
housing / controlled rent, and typically you find a large immigrant population 
there, as well as a large contingent of people of Surinam descent.

When in a nearby park the ’Slavery Monument’ (Oosterpark) was revealed the then 
queen showed up with dignitaries and few token ‘former slaves’ (by family 
origin), while the police barred off the local Surinam and other population of 
slavery descent from entering the park and attending the ceremony. The monument 
itself, meanwhile, was carefully hidden from view  by dense bushes around it, 
so it would not disturb anyone entering the (English landscape style) park 
looking for pasture, or a quiet walk (with or without dog).

Emphatically, this was NOT a scandal in NL, no further media reports about it. 
Only much later was this shameful episode revealed when locals spoke out on 
local TV channels, after which this was mostly ignored in the wider mainstream. 
That was only a few years ago. So it is fair to say, there is a long 
way to go…

I mentioned before here, that the turnout was massive for #BLM following the 
‘intra-institutional’ killing of George Floyd (sadly among many others) and the 
large scale protest in the US. So yes, I agree with you, that this might be a 
bridge between our continents, but we must acknowledge that this is only the 
very beginning.

There’s so much more to say about this, and yes David is right, Framer Framed 
has lead a wave of new discourse and practice that tries to address this within 
the cultural  / arts community, and there’s other initiatives, already for many 
years. The breach here is that a mainstream institution has taken this on. It 
is an encouraging step, but only the first of many that are needed.

all my bests,
Eric


> On 20 May 2021, at 04:51, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> hi
> I am frequently cranky about US and Europe and have Europe envy but that 
> might be nostalgic, but today I find this article below on this big show 
> opening in the Netherlands about artifacts stolen from colonial people and 
> the whole thing about giving them back...and I’m following this story with 
> great interest. I had read about the Dutch govt giving back stuff they’d 
> pillaged. Just as assists are becoming so invisible, right?   
>  
> 
> I teach in Art History and the post-colonial discourse has only just begun to 
> heat up after last summer and the civil rights movement. Kathy High had sent 
> me a document called Decentering Whiteness and  I’ve shared it to my 
> colleagues. Its’s focused upon design. But, wondering what other strategies 
> are being used in your worlds to counteract Western imperialist history? 
> 
> Maybe there are more bridges between our continents...all this scholarship 
> about the slave trade links us undisputedly, and now to think that BLM would 
> be influential Holland. I’m sorry if that is no longer the name. I have often 
> been jealous that European countries are able to change their names. 
> 
> Molly
> 
> 
> https://apnews.com/article/europe-race-and-ethnicity-slavery-global-trade-health-bc419a8e4b3c5abed828378ced37fca8
>  
> 
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Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Brian, Sean,

> On 25 Nov 2020, at 01:19, Sean Cubitt  wrote:
> 
> Eco-socialism yes - but only if the 'social' is rethought - and re-practiced 
> - no longer exclusively as human: The Commons is a better phrase, common 
> land, general intellect (including those forms it takes when congealed into 
> machines and infrastructures). We could start with that absurd contradiction 
> 'intellectual property' - commons as peer-to-peer ecology/economy may start 
> from undoing at least property as core concept of western Enlightenment. That 
> this implies undoing the 'proper' as the principle of individualism is one 
> way to recognise where anarchism belongs to capital and when it doesn’t

I agree with Sean that the discourse and practices of the commons is one of the 
few truly hopeful political tendencies of recent times. My guide into the 
domain of the commons has for a long time been David Bollier and his excellent 
work on the subject (http://www.bollier.org/ ).

However, I also agree with Brian that we (desperately) need a state, or some 
more stable form of collective governance in this equation. One of the most 
interesting things about the commons is that it operates beyond both state and 
market, but it operates not so much in contradiction to these two as that it 
operates complementary or in parallel to them.

From the extended debates on the commons it has become gradually clear that 
while community-governed solutions can work well locally and translocally (more 
or less in the vein of Elinor Ostrom's work on governance of the commons) the 
most beneficial situation is where an accountable state can guarantee and 
facilitate the commons to thrive.

In good old Europe meanwhile the green deal is at the heart of political 
debates here, and bitterly opposed by predictable political agents (i.e. 
Brexiteers in the UK, nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland, and so 
called ‘populists’ across the board). In The Netherlands the worst political 
agent in this regard cynically named the Forum for Democracy (Forum for 
Demagogy would be a much better name for them) just went into complete meltdown 
over a scandal involving their youth organisation spreading antisemitic and 
nazi-adoration materials. Mind you they won the most recent provincial election 
and are holding now most seats in the senate (First Chamber), but nowhere near 
a majority – the Dutch political landscape is thankfully totally fragmented. It 
is of crucial importance to use this momentum here to avoid another right wing 
outgrowth to take over again. They are complete climate change denialists, etc. 
needless to say.

Replacing the social with the collective of humans and non-humans is another 
good starting point for a new kind of political discourse and new political 
practices. I think this is already beyond the unthinkable. Some local examples 
come to mind, such as the most obvious one the Animal Party which has a steady 
representation in Dutch Parliament now for about 10 years. There are also 
interesting trajectories launched from the cultural sphere, such as the Embassy 
of the North Sea, which treats the sea and all its stakeholders / constituents 
(human / non-human / biological / material) as political actors with interests 
and rights - see: https://www.embassyofthenorthsea.com/ 


Also the extensive Neuhaus project organised last year by Het Nieuwe Instituut 
in Rotterdam is a relevant example to start thinking these new relations and 
how they can be implemented in the political body - 
https://neuhaus.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en 
 

Also in 2019 I developed a course called The Four Ecologies, drawing on 
Guattari’s still highly relevant Three Ecologies text (referencing the material 
/ social / subjective ecological registers) and extending this with a fourth 
register, that of non-human experience (building on Latour, Morton, Haraway 
etc.).

There’s more examples, in many places - Open Humanities Press has been 
publishing a lot of relevant material in this direction as well, etc etc..

So, all this is certainly not unthinkable. The point is to start applying these 
insights. For that we need strong collective actors (the green state and 
manifold communities sustaining and growing the commons). 

So we need commons AND states.

grtngs,
Eric

p.s.  - and yes, ‘intellectual property = cultural theft’

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Re: nettime-l Digest, Vol 158, Issue 20

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Lucia, 

Yes that was exactly my point - change the system.

bests,
-e.


> On 16 Nov 2020, at 19:20, Lucia Sommer  wrote:
> 
> Hi Eric, re: "Where the f. is the Green Party or something like that in the 
> US???" the short answer is that the system is structured so as to make a 
> third party effectively impossible. We would need to adopt a different 
> electoral system for it to be feasible. 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 6:00 AM  <mailto:nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org>> wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>1. Re: why is it so quiet (in the US) (Eric Kluitenberg)
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 10:50:25 +0100
> From: Eric Kluitenberg mailto:e...@xs4all.nl>>
> To: nettime-l mailto:nettim...@mx.kein.org>>
> Subject: Re:  why is it so quiet (in the US)
> Message-ID: <34dbcc00-702a-4e31-803b-89ec4876e...@xs4all.nl 
> <mailto:34dbcc00-702a-4e31-803b-89ec4876e...@xs4all.nl>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> HI Ted, all,
> 
> Fascinating discussion in ominous times..
> 
> > On 16 Nov 2020, at 04:02, tbyfield  > <mailto:tbyfi...@panix.com>> wrote:
> > 
> > The US is breaking down, so it's not at all surprising that some of its 
> > language for describing the world would as well.
> 
> From a continental European perspective I?m watching this spectacle (don?t 
> know what else to call it, without immediately invoking Debord and beyond), 
> and I?m not well enough informed to have any definite reading, but my 
> impression is not that the US is ?breaking down?. Much rather it seems that 
> the US is embroiled in a profound political crisis that plays out on many 
> different levels.
> 
> For non-UK Europeans this whole electoral system tied to voting districts and 
> the ?first-past-the post? principle does not make much sense, nor does the 
> two party (Republicrat) party system, where none of the other political 
> parties that do exist across the US get represented in the legislature.
> 
> Despite the important consideration that much of ?democracy? happens outside 
> the formal legislative institutions (i.e. issue-based displacement of 
> politics, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, referenda, and more 
> spontaneous and/or affect driven forms of assembly), implying that we should 
> not get trapped in a hyper-focus on the formal institutions, still at the 
> moment when these formal institutions enter into a state of crisis, as is 
> apparent now in the US, this warrants attention. At the very least these 
> formal institutions  should be able to guarantee these other ?democratic? or 
> civil rights to be exercised extra-institutionally.
> 
> What this signals to me, from my limited Eurocentric (male / straight, etc.) 
> perspective is an urgent need for institutional reform. At the very least 
> some form of proportional representation in the voting system and a much 
> lower threshold for different collective political actors to enter the 
> legislature. Just to ask the most obvious question: ?Where the f. is the 
> Green Party or something like that in the US???
> 
> It would also allow the so-called ?populists? to enter on their own terms, 
> which is a good thing because then they can be confronted head on. Europe has 
> its own severe problems with those kinds of political movements and it forces 
> the mainstream to acknowledge that and do something with it before they 
> become a MEGA* type of movement. In NL we have seen a persistent presence for 
> the last 20 or so years of political actors (the biological and political 
> bodies changing and morphing all the time) of about 20% of the vote of people 
> who simply want nothing (they don?t want immigrants, they don?t want 
> environmental protective policies, they don?t want taxes, the don't want 
> lefties, they don?t want the EU, they don?t want globalisation, the

Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

HI Ted, all,

Fascinating discussion in ominous times..

> On 16 Nov 2020, at 04:02, tbyfield  wrote:
> 
> The US is breaking down, so it's not at all surprising that some of its 
> language for describing the world would as well.

From a continental European perspective I’m watching this spectacle (don’t know 
what else to call it, without immediately invoking Debord and beyond), and I’m 
not well enough informed to have any definite reading, but my impression is not 
that the US is ‘breaking down’. Much rather it seems that the US is embroiled 
in a profound political crisis that plays out on many different levels.

For non-UK Europeans this whole electoral system tied to voting districts and 
the ‘first-past-the post’ principle does not make much sense, nor does the two 
party (Republicrat) party system, where none of the other political parties 
that do exist across the US get represented in the legislature.

Despite the important consideration that much of ‘democracy’ happens outside 
the formal legislative institutions (i.e. issue-based displacement of politics, 
freedom of assembly, the right to strike, referenda, and more spontaneous 
and/or affect driven forms of assembly), implying that we should not get 
trapped in a hyper-focus on the formal institutions, still at the moment when 
these formal institutions enter into a state of crisis, as is apparent now in 
the US, this warrants attention. At the very least these formal institutions  
should be able to guarantee these other ‘democratic’ or civil rights to be 
exercised extra-institutionally.

What this signals to me, from my limited Eurocentric (male / straight, etc.) 
perspective is an urgent need for institutional reform. At the very least some 
form of proportional representation in the voting system and a much lower 
threshold for different collective political actors to enter the legislature. 
Just to ask the most obvious question: ‘Where the f. is the Green Party or 
something like that in the US???

It would also allow the so-called ‘populists’ to enter on their own terms, 
which is a good thing because then they can be confronted head on. Europe has 
its own severe problems with those kinds of political movements and it forces 
the mainstream to acknowledge that and do something with it before they become 
a MEGA* type of movement. In NL we have seen a persistent presence for the last 
20 or so years of political actors (the biological and political bodies 
changing and morphing all the time) of about 20% of the vote of people who 
simply want nothing (they don’t want immigrants, they don’t want environmental 
protective policies, they don’t want taxes, the don't want lefties, they don’t 
want the EU, they don’t want globalisation, they don’t want other people 
parking in the parking lot in front of their house, etc etc..).

Maybe Germany can serve as a model for the US? It also has a federal structure 
and a 5% threshold for parties to enter parliament. That all seems to work 
reasonably well (at least for the last 70 years).

The other thing is this presidential system. That just does not make any sense 
to me at all anymore - what is this some 21st century Leviathan? Get rid of 
that, appoint some symbolical nobody and let the country be run by a coalition 
of differential political groupings who can work out the best way forward 
together (harmonically if possible, contestationally if necessary). 

Please people across the great pond, get your act together!

all bests,
Eric

p.s. - * MEGA - Make Europe Great Again


 



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Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Felix, all,

The post-election situation in the US is very worrying in many respects.

The darkest scenario, a slow coup d’etat against a clear election result has 
been suggested to me by several friends over the past few days.

I can’t read the local situation that well, so it would be great to hear some 
US subscribers on the list weigh in.

However, when adopting a ‘realist’ perspective on politics it seems that 
Republicans are keeping all options on the table, mostly to secure future 
positions, when a.o. more senate seats are up for election (in 2 years?).

What is significant about the election outcome is not just that the Biden / 
Harris ticket has won, but that the landslide victory of Democrats did not 
happen, that their majority in the House declined, and that it seems likely 
they will not gain 50 seats in the Senate (to be decided by the Georgia run-off 
in January).

It seems that voters have voted against Trump, but not for the Democrats, and 
that the electorate remains as bitterly divided as it has been for the past 
twenty years. That is not a good thing for the country and the stability of the 
political system in the world’s most militarised state, holding the largest 
nuclear arsenal. 

So it is justified to be worried right now, let’s hope it is a ‘realist’ game 
for the post-Trump constellation.

bests,
Eric


> On 13 Nov 2020, at 10:10, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I must admit, amidst post-terror assault on civil liberties and covid
> cases spiraling out of control here in Austria, the US election drama
> has moved a bit lower in my attention, but not that much.
> 
>> From what I understand, the numbers show that Trump lost. Period. No
> recount will change that.
> 
> But, the game of the Republicans is to create so much doubt about the
> fairness of the elections (without any evidence) to make it impossible
> to certify them in time. Frivolous lawsuits are great at gumming things
> up. This would then allow the Republican dominated legislatures in swing
> states to appoint their own electors which would bring Trump the
> majority. In the mean time, the minister of defense, who previously
> refused to send in troops against mostly peaceful protestors, has been
> fired and replaced with a loyalist. Apparently, similar moves are in the
> wings for the FBI and CIA.
> 
> I know, Trump is often portrayed as an incompetent child, and the
> strategy is totally outlandish, but the Republican party has shown to be
> a pretty ruthless and successful power machine playing both a short and
> a long game, and it's exactly the outlandishness of the strategy that is
> its strongest point.
> 
> In the mean time, the democrats pretend all of this to be irrelevant (an
> 'embarrassment' at worst) and happily appoint a transition team full of
> corporate insiders like it's 1992.
> 
> Am I totally misreading the situation?
> 
> Felix
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> | || http://felix.openflows.com |
> | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
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Re: The Zombie Public – Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hello Michael,

Let me try then to clarify my position a bit further.

First about the lockdowns. I have conceded already that the lockdowns were 
probably necessary / inevitable because of the care system being totally 
overburdened. So in the first phase of this pandemic (I consider where we are 
now still in the early phase of the pandemic) this was an immediate response. 
This should have been used mostly to prepare for what woud come next.

Already very early on science journalists writing for a wider non-expert 
audience (such as myself) were warning that the lockdown might only be a 
temporary solution to fend off the worst, and that most likely the moment they 
would be suspended infection rates would go up. A good source for me on 
research on the pandemic was Science News - their overview page of coverage of 
the crisis is here (but there are of course many more):
https://www.sciencenews.org/editors-picks/2019-novel-coronavirus-outbreak 


And it was I think this early assessment that made me think about how effective 
/ ineffective lockdowns might be:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-when-will-coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing-end
 


I did not state anywhere, nor do I hold to the position that "there is no 
possible protection against it, such as that provided by lowering the 
transmission rate through SIP and masking, etc..”  - quite the contrary, I have 
adhered quite strictly myself to social distancing, I think that a reliable 
vaccine is badly needed and should be made available in the public domain to be 
able to make it accessible to as wide a share of the global population as 
somehow possible and not be locked behind Intellectual Property walls.

Next to that I think much more needs to be done to find and distribute better 
treatment measures. We already see a global shortage now of Remdesivir, partly 
because the US bought up large stockpiles of the drug. I hear in reports that 
it is apparently helpful in the treatment of covid-19. 

But much more needs to be done to protect vulnerable sections of the 
population, also and even in a well-off country like The Netherlands, but think 
about less fortunate places in the global south  / the majority world, and what 
is needed there. All relevant medicinal drugs in the public domain would be a 
gigantic step forward there. We can pay the developers for their efforts and 
then make the results freely available to everyone - much like the system of 
open access publishing.

Now all that said, I was originally asked about my position towards the 
lockdown and I gave a concise answer to that question, despite the unpleasant 
tone of the message - only to be derided for using too many words… sorry, but I 
like nuance in the discussion so I’m now responding with as many words as I 
need.

This is not a ‘scientific’ treatise, I clearly marked it as a private opinion. 
So I’m asking to think through how we can get to a responsible end of the 
lockdowns and shift to strengthening our care system.

The point that the vaccine is not the ’silver bullet’ (several so called 
experts have already stated that broadly in various media reports) is not a 
made up fact, but a very real worry. Anti-bodies in former covid-19 patients 
have been shown to decline rapidly, which calls into question the possibility 
of developing a lasting immunity. At the same time we see there are already 
many mutations of the virus (as one would expect), but not all of them affect 
the effectiveness of the vaccines currently under development. However, it is 
likely that this will be the case in the (near) future. That would suggest that 
the vaccines need be tweaked regularly to deal with those mutations and 
possible changes in the virus’s behaviour - much like the annual flu vaccine. 
But we already know now that the virus keeps spreading also in the warmer 
season and therefore the urgency of this question is greater than with the flu.

I’m not inventing ‘facts’, but looking very real problems in the eye. Disagree 
with me, fine. Don’t say I’m inventing or fabricating. I’m trying to have an 
open and critical debate, so I welcome the critiques, but want to keep the 
discussion clear.

—— 

Then on the question of the ‘freedom of assembly’ – total freedom of assembly 
never existed and never will. That’s just not how power works. Also not in the 
most ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’ societies around right now. As a ‘civil right’ 
(for lack of a better word) the right to a relative freedom of assembly has 
been severely curtailed because of the measures in response to the covid-19 
outbreak. Taking The Netherlands as a case, as I live here, there is still an 
allowance of demonstrations, but they need to ask permission to appear and must 
adhere to strict social distancing rules (1,5 meters dis

Re: The Zombie Public – Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

 the virus 
>> starts circulating like before again, which is what we now see.
>> 
>> Hoping that a vaccine is the silver bullet is to me exactly that: hope and 
>> as a Russian saying says so beautifully: Hope dies last.
>> 
>>> 4. what specifically doch deem privacy infringing with corona apps as most 
>>> either collect a lotta less data than Facebook or don’t collect any data on 
>>> a central server? Which app r u referring to?
>> 
>> That is the misconception I’m trying to address with this text. The app 
>> seems not so bad in comparison to all the other data draining techniques 
>> from the social media swamp, or simply from mobile / ‘smart’ phone users 
>> (i.e. more or less all of us, you replied from an iphone and I use that 
>> thing as well - though not for mailing lists..).
>> 
>> It is the correlation of data from all these apps, the integration into the 
>> operating systems as a default, in combination with the radical expansion of 
>> somatic sensing technologies built into these mobile / wearable devices that 
>> creates an unprecedented level of scrutiny wherever we take these devices, 
>> i.e. that thing formerly designated as ‘public space’, but this condition is 
>> exactly what renders the necessary conditions for publicness null and void. 
>> I find that a troubling situation and I think it needs to be reversed. 
>> 
>>> 5. again, what parts of the world r u thinking of when u wrote this text?
>> 
>> I answered that question already.
>> 
>> Enjoy the evening! 
>> (though weather here in NL is terrible at the moment, maybe it is better 
>> wherever you are..?)
>> 
>> -Eric
>> 
>> 
>>> CHEERS! LIZ! Vote!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
>>>> On 06.10.2020, at 13:31, Eric Kluitenberg >>> <mailto:e...@xs4all.nl>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> dear nettimers, please note:
>>>> 
>>>> This for me rather unusually opinionated text has just been published on 
>>>> the Open! platform. The essay explores the insistent somatic turn in 
>>>> technologically enabled scrutiny of public spaces and its acceleration in 
>>>> response to the COVID-19 crisis. It argues that the very core of public 
>>>> space and the public domain is under threat as it is anonymity that allows 
>>>> a collection of individuals to transform into 'a public', One of the most 
>>>> vital corner stones of open and democratic civic governance is thus under 
>>>> imminent threat. 
>>>> 
>>>> An edited and slightly shortened version of this text has been published 
>>>> on the Open! platform for art, culture and the public domain (September 
>>>> 18, 2020), and can be found here: 
>>>> https://www.onlineopen.org/the-zombie-public 
>>>> <https://www.onlineopen.org/the-zombie-public> 
>>>> 
>>>> ––
>>>> 
>>>> The Zombie Public
>>>> 
>>>> Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.
>>>> 
>>>> Our media channels have been flooded with projections about possible 
>>>> futures, with or without ‘the virus’. [1] Not surprising given the 
>>>> unprecedented 2020 lockdown across large parts of the planet. In both 
>>>> dystopian and utopian accounts, as well as more level-headed attempts at 
>>>> taking stock and extrapolating future scenarios, a recurrent motive is the 
>>>> attempt to describe a possible future in definite terms based on a set of 
>>>> extreme contingencies that essentially preclude a clear judgement – given 
>>>> the tide of uncertainties such predictions are up against. Rather than 
>>>> simply writing these accounts off as nonsensical they should be understood 
>>>> as what they are, ideological projections that attempt to shape rather 
>>>> than predict possible futures. As such traditional questions can then be 
>>>> asked: Who is ‘shaping’? Under what prerogative? In service of which 
>>>> ideological a-priori? Serving which material (political / economic) 
>>>> interests?
>>>> 
>>>> Any critical reader can fill in this ‘questionnaire’ for themselves, and 
>>>> answers will undoubtedly overlap and to some extent be predictable. It 
>>>> may, however, yet be more productive to shift away from these predicted 
>>>> (contingent) futures altogether and focus instead

Re: The Zombie Public – Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

ctive passions of reciprocal 
> aggression? Is there any dark side to individual freedom on the Old 
> Continent? Can European democracies withstand the surging pressures of Affect 
> Space?
> 
> As an old friend I am sure you will understand that what I offer is not a 
> polemic. It's an extended question about a very carefully constituted body of 
> work.
> 
> thoughtfully yours, Brian
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 6:31 AM Eric Kluitenberg  <mailto:e...@xs4all.nl>> wrote:
> dear nettimers, please note:
> 
> This for me rather unusually opinionated text has just been published on the 
> Open! platform. The essay explores the insistent somatic turn in 
> technologically enabled scrutiny of public spaces and its acceleration in 
> response to the COVID-19 crisis. It argues that the very core of public space 
> and the public domain is under threat as it is anonymity that allows a 
> collection of individuals to transform into 'a public', One of the most vital 
> corner stones of open and democratic civic governance is thus under imminent 
> threat. 
> 
> An edited and slightly shortened version of this text has been published on 
> the Open! platform for art, culture and the public domain (September 18, 
> 2020), and can be found here: https://www.onlineopen.org/the-zombie-public 
> <https://www.onlineopen.org/the-zombie-public> 
> 
> ––
> 
> The Zombie Public
> 
> Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.
> 
> Our media channels have been flooded with projections about possible futures, 
> with or without ‘the virus’. [1] Not surprising given the unprecedented 2020 
> lockdown across large parts of the planet. In both dystopian and utopian 
> accounts, as well as more level-headed attempts at taking stock and 
> extrapolating future scenarios, a recurrent motive is the attempt to describe 
> a possible future in definite terms based on a set of extreme contingencies 
> that essentially preclude a clear judgement – given the tide of uncertainties 
> such predictions are up against. Rather than simply writing these accounts 
> off as nonsensical they should be understood as what they are, ideological 
> projections that attempt to shape rather than predict possible futures. As 
> such traditional questions can then be asked: Who is ‘shaping’? Under what 
> prerogative? In service of which ideological a-priori? Serving which material 
> (political / economic) interests?
> 
> Any critical reader can fill in this ‘questionnaire’ for themselves, and 
> answers will undoubtedly overlap and to some extent be predictable. It may, 
> however, yet be more productive to shift away from these predicted 
> (contingent) futures altogether and focus instead on that what has already 
> happened. We can then ask ourselves the question what can be done right now 
> to thwart the ‘shapers’ endeavours? How can we open up this contingent future 
> to the public interest, that is to say to that which concerns us all and 
> which should be subject of an open, critical, and truly public debate, rather 
> than the object of flawed and illegitimate attempts at social engineering.  
> Another way of stating the same would be to say, let’s trace the associations 
> of all the agents involved in determining these contingent futures (human and 
> non-human), and try to establish the most beneficial forms of living together 
> in a continuous feedback loop of ‘composing the good common world’ (Latour, 
> 2004). [2]
> 
> Given the complexity of this question it is clear that such an undertaking 
> needs to be a collective effort, comprised of an infinite assemblage of 
> individual actions, not necessarily at all points coherent, nor even 
> commensurable. Rather, it involves an explication of an unending succession 
> of ‘matters of concern’ that bring us together exactly because they divide us 
> (Latour, 2005). As such this essay is not an attempt at (another) 
> comprehensive analysis. I will focus here on an interrogation of the shifting 
> spatial dynamics and regimes of urban space, as they pertain in particular to 
> a specific ‘matter of concern’; the demise of public space and the 
> zombie-status of ‘the public’ that still tries to inhabit this ‘disassembled’ 
> space. The shifting spatial dynamics I am referring to have been underway for 
> a long time, but have been greatly intensified and accelerated by the spread 
> of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the (state and corporate) policy responses 
> towards the ‘global pandemic’.
> 
> The shifting spatial dynamics and the potentially lethal effects they have, 
> amplifying the demise of public space, result from the increasing 
> entanglement of physical (urban) space, digital n

Re: The Zombie Public – Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hello ‘lizvix’ - don’t know who this is - the ‘Hans’ of Übermorgen?

Anyway a few answers  / corrections on your questions:

> On 6 Oct 2020, at 16:47, lizvlx  wrote:
> 
> Hi there 
> 
> A few questions- I don’t want to misunderstand yr text
> 
> 1. what do u mean by (mass) gatherings have been suspended? 

I wrote “The freedom of assembly has been suspended.” - under corona rules 
virtually anywhere now only limited amounts of people are allowed to assemble, 
which in effect means that this basic freedom is suspended. Mass gatherings 
still happen, as I explained in some length in the piece, but they are then in 
violation of these rules.

> 2. What countries r u referring to?

Not any country in particular, but the countries that have or pretend to have 
some form of basic ‘democratic’ or civic governance (neoliberal phantasy or 
not). Probably we must assume that ‘democratic rights’ are always under threat 
/ pressure, but with the covid-19 crisis I feel there is a qualitatively 
different situation. 

> 3. do u have an issue with a lockdown per se or is this coz u don’t think the 
> pandemic necessitates such a thing?

I am writing in the essay about the question of ‘public space’ and the erosion 
of ‘publicness’ and ’the public’ not about the politics of the lockdowns.

My private opinion, which is outside the scope of this essay, is that in some 
initial stage of the pandemic the lockdowns were maybe necessary, given the 
overburdened care system, but in essence they are counter-productive. The virus 
will not go away, it will stay around like the flu and mutate regularly. Thus 
any vaccine will need to be updated regularly and we will have to get it like 
the flu shot, or even in a cocktail, probably annually.

It is necessary to build up a certain measure of biological resistance in the 
general population, but this can only be done in a responsible way by radically 
extending the care system to protect vulnerable sections of the population - 
and the main argument against that is staggering costs - so the lockdown has 
been the preferred option. Problem is once you end it the virus starts 
circulating like before again, which is what we now see.

Hoping that a vaccine is the silver bullet is to me exactly that: hope and as a 
Russian saying says so beautifully: Hope dies last.

> 4. what specifically doch deem privacy infringing with corona apps as most 
> either collect a lotta less data than Facebook or don’t collect any data on a 
> central server? Which app r u referring to?

That is the misconception I’m trying to address with this text. The app seems 
not so bad in comparison to all the other data draining techniques from the 
social media swamp, or simply from mobile / ‘smart’ phone users (i.e. more or 
less all of us, you replied from an iphone and I use that thing as well - 
though not for mailing lists..).

It is the correlation of data from all these apps, the integration into the 
operating systems as a default, in combination with the radical expansion of 
somatic sensing technologies built into these mobile / wearable devices that 
creates an unprecedented level of scrutiny wherever we take these devices, i.e. 
that thing formerly designated as ‘public space’, but this condition is exactly 
what renders the necessary conditions for publicness null and void. I find that 
a troubling situation and I think it needs to be reversed. 

> 5. again, what parts of the world r u thinking of when u wrote this text?

I answered that question already.

Enjoy the evening! 
(though weather here in NL is terrible at the moment, maybe it is better 
wherever you are..?)

-Eric


> CHEERS! LIZ! Vote!
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On 06.10.2020, at 13:31, Eric Kluitenberg  wrote:
>> 
>> dear nettimers, please note:
>> 
>> This for me rather unusually opinionated text has just been published on the 
>> Open! platform. The essay explores the insistent somatic turn in 
>> technologically enabled scrutiny of public spaces and its acceleration in 
>> response to the COVID-19 crisis. It argues that the very core of public 
>> space and the public domain is under threat as it is anonymity that allows a 
>> collection of individuals to transform into 'a public', One of the most 
>> vital corner stones of open and democratic civic governance is thus under 
>> imminent threat. 
>> 
>> An edited and slightly shortened version of this text has been published on 
>> the Open! platform for art, culture and the public domain (September 18, 
>> 2020), and can be found here: https://www.onlineopen.org/the-zombie-public 
>> 
>> ––
>> 
>> The Zombie Public
>> 
>> Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.
>> 
>> Our media channels have been flooded with projectio

The Zombie Public – Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

re Apple’s HealthKit, 
ResearchKit, and CareKit.
 See: https://developer.apple.com/health-fitness/
7 - The Guardian, April 13, 2020: “NHS coronavirus app: memo discussed giving 
ministers power to 'de-anonymise' users “ -
 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/nhs-coronavirus-app-memo-discussed-giving-ministers-power-to-de-anonymise-users
 
8 - Press release, April 10,2020: Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact 
tracing technology
 
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-partner-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology/
9 - See also: Howard Rheingold & Eric Kluitenberg (2006): Mindful 
Disconnection- Counter powering the Panopticon from the Inside.
 https://www.onlineopen.org/mindful-disconnection 


REFERENCES:

Kluitenberg, Eric (2015): Affect Space - Witnessing the ‘Movement(s) of the 
Squares’, published March 10, 2015 by Open! Platform for Art, Culture, and the 
Public Domain:
http://www.onlineopen.org/affect-space 

Kluitenberg, Eric (2017): (Re-) Designing Affect Space, published September 19, 
2017 by Open! Platform for Art, Culture, and the Public Domain:
http://www.onlineopen.org/re-designing-affect-space 

Latour, Bruno (2004): The Politics of Nature, Harvard University Press, 
Cambridge, MA.

Latour Bruno (2005): From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things 
Public, in: Latour, Bruno & Weibel, Peter eds. (2005): Making Things Public, 
Atmosphere of Democracy, ZKM / MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Latour, Bruno (2008): A Cautious Prometheus ? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy 
of Design: (With Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), lecture, in: In Fiona 
Hackne, Jonathn Glynne and Viv Minto (editors) Proceedings of the 2008 Annual 
International Conference of the Design History Society – Falmouth, 3-6 
September 2009, e-books, Universal Publishers, pp. 2-10.  
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/69 

Mackenzie, Adrian (2010): Wirelessness - Radical Empiricism in Network 
Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.).

Marres, Noortje (2006): Public (Im)potence, in: Kluitenberg, Eric & Seijdel, 
Jorinde (eds.) Hybrid Space, Open!, Amsterdam, 2006.
https://onlineopen.org/public-im-potence 

Massumi, Brian (2015): Politics of Affect, Polity, Cambridge (UK) / Maiden 
(Mass.). 

Rheingold, Howard & Kluitenberg, Eric (2006): Mindful Disconnection – Counter 
powering the Panopticon from the Inside, in: in: Kluitenberg, Eric & Seijdel, 
Jorinde (eds.) Hybrid Space, Open!, Amsterdam, 2006.
https://onlineopen.org/mindful-disconnection

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Re: Lev on the embarressment of digital art

[Eric Kluitenberg]

hi all,

I just visited the superb exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Mokum of Nam 
June Paik, and while some of the work feels a bit dated - most of it felt 
vibrant, topical, fun, over the top (in a good way), relevant, at times 
endearing, then again poetic even outrageous, nostalgic in other moments – 
never sublime (a good thing!), very ‘human’ also, maybe not enough non-humans 
in their own voice - was the work ‘inclusive’ enough? - how did Paik relate to 
women? – we can question all that - he’s not a saint, just a strong, vigorous 
artist of his time..

Since Lev lumped 'media art’ in his 99% of anti-human art I think Paik should 
be in his 99% (or is his’ part of the 1%??). Actually, if 'digital media art’ 
(whatever that nay be, I never use such terms) would frame itself as decidedly 
anti-human art I would welcome it! As long as it is facing Gaia in the right 
way…

In general, I can make lists of great artists who worked ‘in the digital’, what 
about George Legrady f.i. if anyone’s work is ‘human’ and at the same time 
acutely aware of the ’non-human’, or Paul Garrin, or David Rokeby, or Lynn 
Hershman and what about distinguished artists who operate in the realm of 
contemporary (fine) arts but utilise almost exclusively digital media - dare I 
name Trevor Paglen - he’s  widely exhibited, collected curated, written about.

And hey since we’re at it, our own Jordan Crandall… – should I really go on? I 
just jotted this down off the cuff. Upon deliberation the list would grow and 
grow..

Media art and even digital works are now actively collected - fairs are 
organised centred on media/digital arts. Works are included in collections 
around the planet and ’the digital’ has become vernacular and in this ‘hidden 
existence’ now permeates contemporary art production.

Ask yourself how many people graduate each year from fine arts departments, how 
many painters, sculptors, draughts-persons - and what percentage ends up being 
sold, collected, written about, curated, etc…  0,001% or maybe that’s even too 
optimistic.

The art world is the most darwinian space that ever existed on the planet, no 
jungle matches it.

In short we get nowhere with such monolithic claims - I understand the 
exasperation from which Lev writes his comments (dreadful anaemic ‘digital 
art’), but such comprehensive claims are nonetheless hopelessly inaccurate.

I would actually welcome an anti-digital art movement - that would be great! 
Get over this mono-technical (Mumford - Technics and Civilization) 
preoccupation, embrace the multiplicity of the analogue (‘polytechnics’).  

My two eurocents…
-eric


> On 17 Sep 2020, at 12:06, olia lialina  wrote:
> 
> "Sad by Manovich" or "Sad by Ars Electronica" ;)
> 
> Six false statements in four sentences is a lot!
> 
> "New media art never deals with human life, and this is why it does not enter 
> museums. It's our fault. Don't blame curators or the "art world." Digital art 
> is "anti-human art," and this is why it does not stay in history. //"
> 
> 
>  Geert Lovink wrote 
> 
> URL or not but this is too good, and too important for nettimers, not to read 
> and discuss. These very personal and relevant observations come from a public 
> Facebook page and have been written by Lev Manovich (who is “feeling 
> thoughtful” as the page indicates).
> 
> —
> 
> https://m.facebook.com/668367315/posts/10159683846717316/?extid=fWYl63KjbcA3uqqm&d=n
>  
> 
> 
> My anti-digital art manifesto / What do we feel when we look at the previous 
> generations of electronic and computer technologies? 1940s TV sets, 1960s 
> mainframes, 1980s PCs, 1990s versions of Windows, or 2000s mobile phones? I 
> feel "embarrassed. "Awkward." Almost "shameful." "Sad." And this is exactly 
> the same feelings I have looking at 99% of digital art/computer art / new 
> media art/media art created in previous decades. And I will feel the same 
> when looking at the most cutting-edge art done today ("AI art," etc.) 5 years 
> from now.
> If consumer products have "planned obsolescence," digital art created with 
> the "latest" technology has its own "built-in obsolescence." //
> 
> These feelings of sadness, disappointment, remorse, and embarrassment have 
> been provoked especially this week as I am watching Ars Electronica programs 
> every day. I start wondering - did I waste my whole life in the wrong field? 
> It is very exciting to be at the "cutting edge", but the price you pay is 
> heavy. After 30 years in this field, there are very few artworks I can show 
> to my students without feeling embarrassed. While I remember why there were 
> so important to us at the moment they were made, their low-resolution visuals 
> and broken links can't inspire students. //
> 
> The same is often true for the "content" of digital art. It's about "issues," 
> "impact of X on Y", "critique of A", "a parody of B", "community of

Re: Might Rupert Murdoch be Art Basel's next big investor?

[Eric Kluitenberg]

…and let’s not forget (alpha / suprematist) male…

Dismantle and collectivise the whole lot!
grrr… >:-((

-e.

> On 30 Jun 2020, at 11:05, Cornelia Sollfrank  wrote:
> 
> this is how the invisible hand of the market becomes very visible…
> and it's white and old and wrinkled
> 



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Re: coronavirus questions

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Sebastian, all,

Good questions - though I have not much to say about the (‘radical’?) left. But 
the schizo-analysis question is interesting: 

> On 12 Mar 2020, at 09:21, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:
> 
> - What is the perspective on coronavirus from the vantage point of
>  Schizoanalysis?

Probably a lot of points could be made, a.o. about the way in which existential 
territories are compromised by the mental distortions of (over-)reactions to 
the viral spread. However, for me the most interesting issue that has emerged 
is to think this through transversally across the ecological registers that 
Guattari has identified all the way back in 1989, i.e. the material 
environment, the social relations, and the individual universes of reference 
(subjective experience). What is missing in the model that Guattari proposed in 
The Three Ecologies, in general, but even more pressing right now, is the 
fourth register of nonhuman experience.

So we might ask, what does the COVID-19 emergence look and feel like from the 
perspective of the virus itself? How does it experience the hostility with 
which it was met upon its emanation into the existent? 

Some people have observed that maybe we should be humbled, as humans, to 
finally take the presence, the tendencies and the capacities of the nonhumans 
(including the viral nonhumans) seriously into account. Another fascinating 
suggestion was that with the virus spreading and human logistics disrupted the 
virus is able to do what the collective agency of the political elites and 
structures of governance have so far been totally unable to deliver: CO2 
emissions have been cut dramatically and continue to fall - to such an extent 
that we may, collectively, on a planetary level, still be able to deliver on 
the promises of CO2 reduction pledged in the Paris Climate Agreement.

If I wasn’t to sceptical by default I would almost be lead to wonder if this is 
Gaia responding to the human-induced planetary disequilibrium?

all bests,
Eric



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Re: Supreme Court Rulling consequeces

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Ted,

I appreciate that nettime should retain a focus on network-dynamics (in 
culture, politics, media, communication, art, etc.).

However, I must say that I quite enjoy the ‘nettime-take’ on global political 
events (such as the impeachment enquiry in the US, the climate crisis, or 
Brexit). I stopped using facebook actively years ago, never used twitter, and 
use some networks such as linkedin, academia and so on for a professional 
online presence.

So next to browsing around like we all do, nettime is still a good pointer to 
relevant debates.

I do welcome if we can revert a bit more to discussing what the list was 
originally set up for (net.criticism in the broadest sense).

What i miss here most is a critical discussion of how 'the network’ is weaving 
in the fine textures of the physical world (mobile, wireless, iot, biometrics 
and so on), which I have written about, organised events, workshops, whatever - 
most recent around the affect space concept - but it would be good to hear 
other takes on that and discuss this.To me still seems a blind spot in network 
theory..

anyway - keep the list going I’d say.

bests,
Eric
 
> On 25 Sep 2019, at 16:20, tbyfield  wrote:
> 
> Felix and I have been thinking about shutting down nettime-l because (as I'd 
> put it, he may well differ) the list should preserve its historical 
> specificity and energy rather than devolve into yet another forum for debates 
> that are easily available in other venues.

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Official EU Agencies Falsely Report More Than 550 Archive.org URLs as Terrorist Content | Internet Archive Blogs

[Eric Kluitenberg]

meanwhile around the corner...
(not related to Brexit or Assange…)

"Official EU Agencies Falsely Report More Than 550 Archive.org URLs as 
Terrorist Content"
https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-falsely-report-more-than-550-archive-org-urls-as-terrorist-content/
 


how much worse can it get…?
-e.

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Re: Christophe Guilluy: France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom (Guardian)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Thank you Brian for this statement, more clear than ever - I think you are 
getting to the root of the problem ‘signalled’ by the gillets jaunes protests.

I have one simple question: What kinds of new institutional forms are required? 
Or phrased differently, what types of new political design are required for a 
new political ecology along the lines you describe?

bests,
Eric

> On 9 Dec 2018, at 20:57, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Thanks for these texts, Patrice. Cohn-Bendit's fears of authoritarianism 
> notwithstanding, it's clear that until the left proposes forms of collective 
> investment that can respond simultaneously to climate change and to the 
> predicament of the squeezed lower classes that Guilly describes, all the 
> front-page news will come from the extreme right -- whether it's their 
> would-be politicians or their future electors out swinging clubs. I read the 
> article in The Observer you suggested, but it has nothing to say, it draws no 
> fresh conclusions from what's happening, it just replumbs the current nadir 
> of public discourse. That's the international head-in-the-sand standard when 
> it comes to actually facing this new phase of an ongoing, decade-long crisis.
> 
> That's also true in the US, where amid all the necessary protests against 
> fascism and racism, there have only been the earliest steps, carried out by 
> the youngest of protagonists, toward a Green New Deal. The situation in 
> France shows how urgent this is. No response to climate change is possible 
> without collective investment, by which I mean big money spent by the 
> government to employ people while transforming infrastructure. That requires 
> seriously changing the rules of the neoliberal political economy. Trump has 
> tried to make such a change with his tariffs, under the mistaken belief that 
> the private sector can come up with transformative investment. Listen to 
> that: Trump to his credit has tried, but it's a triple failure. First because 
> China can just reorient its production away from the US, second because the 
> MAGA rhetoric is geared ONLY to the declining industrial classes and 
> therefore causes damaging polarization, and third because it does nothing to 
> change the obscene accumulation of wealth among the urban upper classes, 
> which has caused so much of the resentment misdirected at other urban 
> populations. So Trump and all the neo-authoritarians lining up behind him are 
> ready to move on failed solutions whose most likely endgame is a state of 
> even more heightened and nationalisitically enflamed desperation leading to 
> war. Meanwhile in the face of that, what do the Democrats offer as ideas for 
> combating inequality and responding to climate change? Strictly nothing, 
> until the recent proposal of the Green New Deal which is still just a dream 
> of a few brilliant young representatives, plus the oldest socialist of them 
> all, Bernie Sanders. Let's take them seriously and start living in the 
> present.
> 
> Macron became popular as a bulwark against fascism, but he's very clearly 
> from the entrepreneurial right, he's a 90s neoliberal. One of the first 
> things he did on coming to power was to abolish the wealth tax ("impot de 
> solidarite sur la fortune" or ISF). This was levied every year on people with 
> assets of over 1,300,000 euros. Suppressing it was a flagrant gift to the 
> rich that took away 6 billion euros of revenue for the state. At the same 
> time he put a flat tax on capital gains. This and many other of his policies 
> are simply continuations of financially led globalization, which used 
> flexible management strategies to ratchet down popular incomes, while 
> repurposing government as a vehicle for wealth accumulation. There is no way 
> to wring more out of these income categories in order to finance vague 
> measures against climate change. The scam is too obvious, the arrogance is 
> too blatant. Thomas Piketty made some important comments about it in Le Monde 
> today, which you can read in French here: https://tinyurl.com/yellowvests 
> . I'm gonna translate the end of his article:
> 
> ".. Since the 2008 crisis, and above all since Trump, Brexit and the 
> explosion of xenophobic parties throughout Europe, the dangers of rising 
> inequality and the feeling of abandonment among the lower classes have become 
> a lot more obvious, and many people understand the need for a new social 
> regulation of capitalism. Under such conditions, serving up another slice for 
> the richest in 2018 was not so clever. If Macron wants to be the president of 
> the 2020s and not of the 1990s, he'd better start evolving quick.
> 
> "The worst of it is the terrible fiasco on the climate front. For a carbon 
> tax to succeed, you have to put all the revenue into social measures 
> alleviating the ecological transition. The government did exactly the 
> opposite: of the 4 billion-euro fuel-tax hike in 2018, wit

Dr. Shahidul Alam Detained - Appeal for his Release #FreeShahidulAlam

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

Very disturbing news has just come in about the arrest of our friend, 
media-activist, curator, photographer, long time colleague Shahidul Alam in 
Dhaka, Bangladesh.

We demand the immediate release of Shahidul Alam and condemn the 
disproportionate violence apparently exercised during his arrest.

Concerned,
Eric

——— 

Dr. Shahidul Alam Detained - Appeal for his Release #FreeShahidulAlam

Dr. Shahidul Alam, internationally renowned photographer, activist, founder and 
Managing Director of the Bangladesh multimedia company, Drik, founder of Chobi 
Mela International Photography Festival and Pathshala South Asian Media 
Institute, was forcibly abducted from his home on the night of 5 August. 

The next day he appeared in court, apparently so badly beaten that he was 
unable to walk on his own. Sources say Shahidul is being charged under 
Bangladesh’s ICT law for his reports on Facebook of ongoing student protests 
and for an interview he gave to Al Jazeera about the protests. 

Shahidul has been a close friend and inspiring partner of the Prince Claus Fund 
for many years. He is a tireless advocate of values that we share:  that all 
people should have the right to freedom of cultural expression. Through his 
reporting and photography he has discovered and shared hidden human stories not 
only in Bangladesh but of the many other cultures encountered on his travels.  

The Prince Claus Fund and its Network Partners deplore the extreme violence and 
intimidation exercised in Shahidul’s arrest, 

We call for his immediate and unconditional release. #FreeShahidulAlam

On behalf of the Prince Claus Fund, Joumana El Zein Khoury, Director 

Network Partners of the Prince Claus Fund: 

Alliance des Editeurs Independants – IAIP, international

Alta Tecnologia Andina, Peru

Arab Image Foundation, Lebanon

Archi Africa, Ghana + Africa

Associación Pro Arte y Cultura (APAC), Bolivia

BizArt Art Center, China

Caribbean Contemporary Art (CCA)

Cinematheque de Tanger, Marocco

Compagnie Falinga, Burkina Faso

Creating Independent and Artistic Networks, Argentina (CRIA)

Despina Non-Profit Cultural Association, Brazil

Dokufest – International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kosovo

Dox Box, Syria

Drik Picture Library Ltd., Bangladesh

Hri Institute, Nepal

Jant-Bi, Senegal

Kibii Foundation, Surinam

Land Art Mongolia

Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), Kenya

Museo d Antioquia, Colombia

Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art (T.I.C.A.), Albania

Redsea Cultural Foundation, Somaliland

Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture, Cambodia

San Art, Vietnam

Studios Kabako, Democratic Republic of Congo

Supersudaca, Latin America

Triangle Arts Trust (TAT), UK

University Centre for Arts and Drama, Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda

Utan Kayu Network, Indonesia

VideoBrazil, Brazil

Visual Culture Research Centre – VCRC, Ukraine

Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIF), Tanzania


Sources:

https://princeclausfund.org/news/shahidul-alam-detained-appeal-for-his-release

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/bangladesh-renowned-photographer-detained-media-comments-180806065359943.html

http://shahidulnews.com 

http://drik.net 


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Re: Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Gary,

> On 14 Dec 2017, at 17:06, Gary Hall  wrote:
> The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such subjectivity would 
> not assume that the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are drawn 
> arbitrarily. Nor that they are largely meaningless. Rather, the drawing of 
> such boundaries would be where the political comes into play.
> 
That is a good / important point. So, while these boundaries might in 
themselves be rather arbitrary, the act of drawing them and the choice how and 
where to draw is deeply political.   
> One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on Chantal 
> Mouffe's definition of the political as a decision taken precisely in an 
> arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the concept of the 'cut' to 
> those of diffraction and intra-action that Annie pointed us toward in the 
> work of Karen Barad.
> 
Ah, interesting to link back to Mouffe’s work, will re-read some of her work 
with this in mind!

And yes, the ‘cut’ belongs to this exploration, as well as other figures, such 
as ‘rupture’, ‘negation’, ‘erasure’ - for someone who comes from the field of 
the arts such figures feel familiar - the only thing to be careful about is not 
to think exclusively in ‘negative’ categories since we are also looking for 
more ‘generative’ approaches.

Many thanks for your feedback!

bests,
Eric

—— 
> Thanks, too, for the kind words about Reinventing the Humanities and 
> Posthumanities etc. Actually, a nicely packaged version of that material 
> (with pictures and everything) has just been published in the Techne: 
> Art+Research series as The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play. If you're 
> interested, you can download it for free here:
> 
> http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf 
> <http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf>
> 
> Best, Gary
> 
> On 11/12/2017 01:44, Eric Kluitenberg wrote:
>> Dear Gary,
>> 
>> Thank you for your highly articulate and critical questions, which deserve a 
>> far more thorough answer than I can provide here with limited time 
>> available. Still I want to respond in brief to some of the issues  / 
>> problems you raised.
>> 
>>> On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall >> <mailto:m...@garyhall.info>> wrote:
>>>  
>>> The mention of Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its 
>>> undermining of the human’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the nonhuman brings to 
>>> mind Graham Harman’s presentation of his work in Prince of Networks. Here 
>>> Latour is portrayed as having given us ‘the first object-oriented 
>>> philosophy’, on the grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human 
>>> subject’ in his thought. We cannot split ‘actants into zones of animate and 
>>> inanimate, human and nonhuman, or subject and object. Every entity is 
>>> something in its own right…. This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus, 
>>> blue whales and Hezbullah militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman 
>>> writes, ‘a total democracy of objects replaces the long tyranny of human 
>>> beings in philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from Latour’s The 
>>> Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the galloping freedom of the 
>>> zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the 
>>> zebras will not be sorry you were not there... Things in themselves lack 
>>> nothing.’
>>>  
>>> Yet, for all this, the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through with 
>>> humanism, the consequences of which they do not think through rigorously. 
>>> After all, the zebras don’t care whether Latour writes about them or not. 
>>> In themselves they lack nothing - including books by Bruno Latour 
>>> presumably. So what - or rather who - is Latour writing these books for, 
>>> containing as they do original philosophical ideas and ontologies that are 
>>> attributed to him as unique, individual, named, human author or 
>>> personality, to the exclusion of all other human and nonhuman actors, and 
>>> published (in the case of Facing Gaia [Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all 
>>> rights reserved’ basis with a for-profit press?
>> 
>> Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of Latour’s publishing 
>> politics, quite obviously part of the global reputation machine. Nor do I 
>> have to or feel the need to defend him on this point, and for that matter 
>> also have my own disagreements with some of his arguments proper (aside from 
>> the issue of collusion with copyright / for profit publishing - in the past 
>> I have attempted to reach a s

Re: Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Gary,

Thank you for your highly articulate and critical questions, which deserve a 
far more thorough answer than I can provide here with limited time available. 
Still I want to respond in brief to some of the issues  / problems you raised.

> On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall  wrote:
>  
> The mention of Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its undermining 
> of the human’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the nonhuman brings to mind Graham 
> Harman’s presentation of his work in Prince of Networks. Here Latour is 
> portrayed as having given us ‘the first object-oriented philosophy’, on the 
> grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human subject’ in his thought. We 
> cannot split ‘actants into zones of animate and inanimate, human and 
> nonhuman, or subject and object. Every entity is something in its own right…. 
> This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus, blue whales and Hezbullah 
> militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of 
> objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’. He proceeds 
> to quote from Latour’s The Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the 
> galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much 
> the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry you were not there... Things 
> in themselves lack nothing.’
>  
> Yet, for all this, the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through with 
> humanism, the consequences of which they do not think through rigorously. 
> After all, the zebras don’t care whether Latour writes about them or not. In 
> themselves they lack nothing - including books by Bruno Latour presumably. So 
> what - or rather who - is Latour writing these books for, containing as they 
> do original philosophical ideas and ontologies that are attributed to him as 
> unique, individual, named, human author or personality, to the exclusion of 
> all other human and nonhuman actors, and published (in the case of Facing 
> Gaia [Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all rights reserved’ basis with a 
> for-profit press?

Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of Latour’s publishing 
politics, quite obviously part of the global reputation machine. Nor do I have 
to or feel the need to defend him on this point, and for that matter also have 
my own disagreements with some of his arguments proper (aside from the issue of 
collusion with copyright / for profit publishing - in the past I have attempted 
to reach a subtle, balanced, reasonable public position on copyright by 
uttering the phrase: “Copyright? Fuck it!”).
  
I wanted to get a better sense of your position as I am not (yet) overly 
familiar with your work, and I think on your website the last part of the 
biography does a good job at summarising what is obviously a thoroughly 
developed position. I’m thinking here particularly of the section Reinventing 
the Humanities and Posthumanities” Let me quote you from there:

"To decenter the human according to an understanding of subjectivity that 
perceives the latter as produced by complex meshworks of other humans, 
nonhumans, non-objects and non-anthropomorphic elements and energies (some of 
which may be beyond our knowledge), requires us to act differently as theorists 
from the way in which the majority of those associated with the posthuman, the 
nonhuman and the Anthropocene, act. We need to displace the humanist concepts 
that underpin our ideas of the author, the book and copyright, together with 
their accompanying practices of reading, writing, analysis and critique.”
http://www.garyhall.info  (biography - bottom of the 
page)

So, in this view then we cannot continue copyrighted publishing practices 
exactly because they reinstate a human subjectivity that is detached from the 
material and immaterial networks that we are all immersed in and composed of. 
And this in turn implies that if we want to reach a non-anthorpocentric 
understanding of ‘ecology’ (and work with that practically) then we need to 
renounce such confining and detaching practices and instead really embrace the 
notion of 'the collective’ (in Latours' terms the collective of humans and 
nonhumans), which collapses not so much the boundaries between man and nature 
as between ‘society’ and nature.

By and large I think I agree with you on that. However, I still find this idea 
of Latour to start thinking in terms of ‘the collective’ a very useful one to 
get rid of the redundant dichotomy of society and nature, and start thinking 
about larger interconnected networks that produce what we used to call ‘the 
social’. This is a set of ideas introduced in his Politics of Nature, back in 
2004, as a response to the stagnation of ecological (‘green’) politics.

My feeling is that Latour takes a very pragmatic position when it comes to his 
engagement with politics (one might argue overly pragmatic - he would call it 
‘realist'), in that he tacitly accepts that politics 

Re: Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

ritical ecological 
> discourse and engagement that you propose. Factually, that discourse does not 
> only require the intersection of art and science (again, in the 
> Anglo-American meaning of science vs. humanities), but one of art, science, 
> humanities and politics. It would require to rid itself from those 
> techno-positivists in the larger ArtScience community seen who literally 
> advocate that art practice should become lab work and creative technology R&D 
> in institutes of technology because the relevant stuff (such as robotics, 
> artificial intelligence and sensor technology) is being developed there. (I 
> could drop many names, also from the Netherlands, but leave them out for the 
> sake of politeness.) 
> 
> Along with colleagues, I've found the concept and discourse of Critical 
> Making much clearer as an attempt of fusing the arts, design, technological 
> hacking with critical humanities and social engagement. (On this topic, an 
> interview with Garnet Hertz has just been published: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD43kCvI1wY 
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD43kCvI1wY>) One of the questions for us is 
> to which extent Critical Making can be extended into a larger discourse 
> including the contemporary art field. Other proposals are on the table, such 
> as "environmental humanities" (whose name unfortunately doesn't include the 
> arts) and "creative ecologies". Within the environmental humanities, T.J. 
> Demos' book "Against the Anthropocene" conversely points out how the original 
> notion of the anthropocene itself is contaminated with techno positivism. I 
> would agree that the crises we're facing are insufficiently addressed by the 
> mere combination of the two discourses of art and science, and that we need 
> concepts that are both more specific and more inclusive.
> 
> Just my 10 cents.
> 
> Florian
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 1:36 AM, Eric Kluitenberg  <mailto:e...@xs4all.nl>> wrote:
> Thanks so much Brian,
> 
> Very relevant critique. Without wanting to get stuck on a term, I was using 
> the word ‘field’ partly because there is a field of practice that refers to 
> itself as ArtScience (with a growing number of initiatives, organisations, 
> museums even), towards which I wanted to take a position / open it up for 
> scrutiny and discussion. Also, this text is written from within the program 
> in The Hague to stimulate critical debate there, and is possibly a bit too 
> much written from an ‘internal’ perspective, which is why it is good to post 
> it here and get responses from outside that inner-circle.
> 
> More important is your call for a triad of art, science, and politics. I 
> fully agree that this would be much stronger and it would really be something 
> to develop a strong research and practice context where these three come 
> together - as you write so articulately: "Science makes the invisible 
> visible. Art makes the visible meaningful. Politics makes the meaningful 
> actionable.” That’s exceptionally well put.
> 
> The political is, of course, there throughout the text, though mostly 
> implicit. Most overtly in the link up with Latour’s politics of nature and 
> his more recent reflections on the Anthropocene (a by now somewhat over-used 
> term, but still) - facing Gaia. There’s also an overabundance of 
> ‘institutional critique’ implicit within the text (towards both the arts and 
> the sciences). Still, it would make a lot of sense to be able to bring this 
> out much more explicitly and indeed turn the political here into a fully 
> fledged third constitutive element of a new intersectional practice.
> 
> The urgency of taking on such a ‘three-field formation’ is abundantly clear, 
> and it would be a super challenging thing to do. Such an initiative should 
> consist of both research (theory) and practice. The question would be where 
> you would find support (institutional or otherwise) to develop a viable 
> structure for that?
> 
> Not an institution, but rather a ‘program’ of sorts, more directly geared 
> towards actionable interventions, combining research, theory, and artistic / 
> design practices - nothing ephemeral, but something much more ‘grounded’. 
> This is something I want to seriously think about - it was somehow already 
> there when I was writing this text, but you pushed it just a step further - 
> very inspiring!
> 
> Last comment, more from my personal perspective: In the 12 years I was 
> developing projects at De Balie in Amsterdam, our main purpose was to link 
> culture and politics - at least that is what I always saw as the main raison 
> d’être of the place. At the time the evolving practices of new m

Re: Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Thanks so much Brian,

Very relevant critique. Without wanting to get stuck on a term, I was using the 
word ‘field’ partly because there is a field of practice that refers to itself 
as ArtScience (with a growing number of initiatives, organisations, museums 
even), towards which I wanted to take a position / open it up for scrutiny and 
discussion. Also, this text is written from within the program in The Hague to 
stimulate critical debate there, and is possibly a bit too much written from an 
‘internal’ perspective, which is why it is good to post it here and get 
responses from outside that inner-circle.

More important is your call for a triad of art, science, and politics. I fully 
agree that this would be much stronger and it would really be something to 
develop a strong research and practice context where these three come together 
- as you write so articulately: "Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes 
the visible meaningful. Politics makes the meaningful actionable.” That’s 
exceptionally well put.

The political is, of course, there throughout the text, though mostly implicit. 
Most overtly in the link up with Latour’s politics of nature and his more 
recent reflections on the Anthropocene (a by now somewhat over-used term, but 
still) - facing Gaia. There’s also an overabundance of ‘institutional critique’ 
implicit within the text (towards both the arts and the sciences). Still, it 
would make a lot of sense to be able to bring this out much more explicitly and 
indeed turn the political here into a fully fledged third constitutive element 
of a new intersectional practice.

The urgency of taking on such a ‘three-field formation’ is abundantly clear, 
and it would be a super challenging thing to do. Such an initiative should 
consist of both research (theory) and practice. The question would be where you 
would find support (institutional or otherwise) to develop a viable structure 
for that?

Not an institution, but rather a ‘program’ of sorts, more directly geared 
towards actionable interventions, combining research, theory, and artistic / 
design practices - nothing ephemeral, but something much more ‘grounded’. This 
is something I want to seriously think about - it was somehow already there 
when I was writing this text, but you pushed it just a step further - very 
inspiring!

Last comment, more from my personal perspective: In the 12 years I was 
developing projects at De Balie in Amsterdam, our main purpose was to link 
culture and politics - at least that is what I always saw as the main raison 
d’être of the place. At the time the evolving practices of new media culture, 
network culture, digital culture, whatever you call it, provided a vibrant 
context to make such linkages (thinking of tactical media, the new 
internet-driven transnational arts and culture networks, the (still) on-going 
info-politics debates, net.criticism and so on). Currently, at the ArtScience 
Interfaculty, the program is exploring intersections of art and science as 
emergent supra-disciplinary practices.

Now, what if we can fuse these two approaches? - an forever emergent set of 
intersectional practices that cut through the arts, the sciences, and politics, 
where these practices constitute themselves anew every time they create a 
specific intersection between these ‘fields’. That’s what I mean with ‘forever 
in becoming’ - such an intersectional (transversal?) practice can never fix 
itself in static definitions or rigid structures, but it does require a viable 
structure, a strong basis from which to act, to avoid complete marginalisation 
- how to do this?

Now there’s something to think about!

All my bests for now,
Eric

> On 8 Dec 2017, at 18:57, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Eric, I totally appreciate and admire your interest in all this, but with due 
> respect I think making ArtScience into a "field" is an archaic 
> twentieth-century delaying tactic, from the days when liberal society could 
> believe itself eternal. Reading this morning about California's winter fires, 
> it seems that much greater things than an academic field could "overheat" and 
> "melt down."
> 
> And California is just an anecdote: housing troubles of the excessively rich. 
> The Syrian drought, the Russian wildfires of 2010, the South Asian floods of 
> 2017 spring vividly to mind. These are something radically new: harbingers of 
> the present.
> 
> Why can't deal with what's all around us?
> 
> Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes the visible meaningful. 
> Politics makes the meaningful actionable. Each of these activities is 
> separate, resting on its own base, delivering what it can. Under present 
> circumstances, each "field" (if you want to call it that) needs the other. 
> Alone or even in pairs, they can make no difference.
> 
> Similarly, the notion of "fundamental research," outside applications and 
> consequences, has become fallacious. For example, I believe fundamental 
> research into t

Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

For a few years I’ve been teaching and coaching at the ArtScience Interfaculty 
in The Hague, a very nice small scale experimental program located between the 
academy of visual arts and the school of music, with some modest links to local 
universities, and since one and half years as part of their faculty. It struck 
me in this time that there are many different understanding of what this 
emerging field of ArtScience might be, tons of expectations but very little in 
terms of a more precise articulation of what defines and demarcates the field. 
To stimulate debate on this matter internally I wrote a short essay / position 
paper called “Locating ArtScience’. The second draft of that essay is appended 
below as this could be of interest here I think, given previous discussions 
about the Earth Sciences, why some of us did not want to ‘March for Science’ 
and more..

I understand that some of this is susceptible to various forms of criticism and 
contention (maybe all of it?) - that’s fine and part of the debate. Aso, it is 
important to note that this is my personal take on what I still see as a field 
‘in becoming’ (despite having some extended lineages), and one that I see 
mostly in danger of overheating as a result of which some particularly valuable 
potentialities might be lost or obscured. Most of all I have become more aware 
of the great potential for methodological innovation that could and sometimes 
already does emerge out of this hybrid set of practices, but it needs to be 
shaped / refined / re-articulated - probably an endless process.

I appreciate any comments / criticism this might evoke - hope this is of 
interest to some of you.

all bests,
Eric

— 

Locating ArtScience
Eric Kluitenberg, Second draft, December 2017

ArtScience as an emergent field of practice

We should start from the premise that ArtScience at the moment is a field of 
practice in becoming. There is enormous interest in this renewed convergence of 
Art and Science around the globe, with new institutions founded, public 
initiatives functioning increasingly professionally, a plethora of projects, 
events, and a considerable number of publications. The picture is thus one not 
of crisis or stagnation, but rather a booming field that if anything might be 
in danger of overheating.

At the same time there does not as yet seem to be anything of a consensus about 
what exactly defines this field, what its specificity might be, and where its 
boundaries, its demarcations lie. This is the first and most serious problem 
that ArtScience has run into, and one that needs to be urgently addressed to 
avoid a melt-down of its inner core.

The problem can be summarised as follows: ArtScience as a field of emergent 
practice is simultaneously oversignified and underdefined.

This rather curious condition invites a surplus of speculation and 
unfulfillable expectations, which once these expectations have been revealed as 
unfulfillable might generate an equally exponential loss of interest in the 
field. However, something truly valuable might be lost if such an implosion of 
interest, and subsequent de-investment from the field (in people, institutions, 
activity, knowledge production, financial flows) were to happen.

To pre-empt this scenario of overheating and subsequently deflating and 
collapsing the field, it is useful to identify some of the most defining 
characteristics of this emerging field, and figure out what might be important 
and valuable about them.

This short essay stops short of providing a comprehensive definition of the 
field, nor does it provide a ‘complete’ mapping of a field that is currently 
and perhaps by definition in an emergent state. Rather it tries to identify 
some key characteristics as well as some key-misunderstandings, to question 
what might be the special significance of ArtScience, and what could be 
particularly important and valuable about it.

ArtScience: not an ‘interdisciplinary’ but ‘intersectional field of practice

The first important distinction to make is that ArtScience is not an 
interdisciplinary, or cross-disciplinary field of practice. The seemingly 
endless series of ‘collaborations of Art and Science’ type of events miss the 
most crucial point of this emerging field: We should understand ArtScience as 
an intersectional field that intersects a range of different established 
disciplines and domains, but ultimately establishes a new practice building on 
and moving beyond these established disciplines and domains.

The problem with the notion ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘cross-disciplinary’ is that 
it leaves the existing disciplines in tact. So, in this image, on one side we 
find the Arts, on the other side the Sciences, both understood in the broadest 
sense. Then some project is defined where representatives from both sides 
collaborate and produce joint results, which can be more, or less, fruitful. 
Regardless the outcome though, both domains are

Re: Constitutioanl radicalism

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hello Johnatan,

Maybe I should not have included that phrase on the infinity of art / 
techno-science / advanced capitalism, as it distracts from the main point about 
the necessity of  a deep engagement in deliberate acts of political design, and 
a shift from ‘revolutionary’ tactics to methodologies to tailor cultural and 
political interventions to specific situations.

Then again, the realisation that we are no longer looking at infinite horizons 
but at limited perimeters seems quite crucial.

The phrase is actually an implicit reference to an observation that Jean 
François Lyotard made in an essay titled “Presenting the Unpresentable: The 
Sublime” (1982). His observation there is that the avant-garde arts, 
techno-science, and advanced capitalism share an 'affinity with infinity’ (all 
Lyotard’s terms). The avant-garde arts testify to the infinity of possible ways 
of seeing, the techno-sciences to the infinity of possible ways of knowing, and 
advanced capitalism to the infinite capacity to realise (seeing all, knowing 
all, realising all).

This idea is over now - there is a clear and final boundary that we are 
approaching rapidly: the depletion of the earth’s resources. Gaia may 
reconfigure if we were to pass that boundary and tend towards a new semi-stable 
equilibrium, but that will be most likely without humans able to survive there. 
So, this introduces the finality that puts an end to this ‘affinity with 
infinity’ that Lyotard was talking about.

As for the specificity of these three terms: Lyotard uses them quite broadly, 
but with the avant-garde arts he refers primarily to the historical avantgardes 
in the arts (i.e. before WWII) and its post-war inheritors. The techno-sciences 
refers to the domain of the application of instrumental forms of knowledge 
production and technological methods that he had previously written extensively 
about in The postmodern Condition (1979), his report on the state of knowledge 
production. And finally with ‘advanced’ capitalism he refers to everything that 
comes after Ford and Frederick Taylor (scientific management).

You might be right that these categories are too broad to make them stick 
locally - still I think it is noteworthy that this idea of infinity that 
Lyotard suggested is over and done with - there is no such thing as infinity 
when it comes to human affairs, we must find ways to live within strict 
limitations or risk to become extinct as a species.

It is against this backdrop that the nitty gritty work of political design, 
applied to analysis, critique, mobilisation, new forms of organisation, 
concrete political intervention, civic networking, new forms of artistic 
enquiry and aesthetic experience, unfolds. And ‘laboratory Spain’ is one of the 
first places that I look for to find inspiration and practical models of 
cultural and political practice.

btw - Simona Levi keeps us up to date with much of that on this list every now 
and then, but the actual ground work is very extensive indeed, not just in 
Barcelona, so let’s take some cues from that!

Hope this elaboration helps somewhat to address your non-understanding…

all bests,
Eric

> On 14 Oct 2017, at 15:49, Johnatan Petterson  
> wrote:
> 
> hello Eric.
> why not to call 'design' subversive input and outright denying of anything, 
> or rather B.Latour would say, 'visualize' them. by design or by 
> art-techno-science and advanced capitalism? i ask because these last three 
> categories
> do not make sense, they are not detailed to a symbolic meaning in my scope. 
> they have a too broad range of signification, and so i cannot re-copy-paste 
> them in the current understanding of this list' conversation. could you 
> fragment these three words and stabilize around new categories, should you 
> what would you advance. (to help you to better understand my 
> non-understanding: i don't know at what point an artwork ceases to pertain to 
> 'infinite horizon' (if the latter concept meant -any-thing) and becomes some 
> designing, past a finite boundary? give some examples please! same with 
> techno-science,, and 'advanced capitalism': how do you distinguish phases of 
> capitalism, according to what schemes? (historical, paradigmatics, 
> geographical, cultural, biological?? etc.) thanks)-
> 
> john.
> 
> 2017-10-14 13:50 GMT+02:00 Eric Kluitenberg  <mailto:e...@xs4all.nl>>:
> ]-]-]...[-[-[
> 
> In Latour’s terms - though I would not insist on them in any way - this would 
> be part of the process of composing the good common world (of humans and 
> nonhumans - the ‘collective’), and yes Gaia does provide us with a perimeter 
> for that, which includes all political factions (even those in outright 
> denial) - this is a perimeter, which is to say a final boundary to which we 
> are drawing ever closer, and not an infi

Re: Constitutioanl radicalism

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear felix, Brian, Keith,

Just a few notes here as comments on this discussion and the question of how to 
translate into "a political, social and cultural practice” that felix raised.

Though I have critiqued Latour’s Thing politics in the “reDesigning Affect 
Space” essay also posted here a week or so ago, the title nonetheless derives 
directly, though implicitly, from Latour’s thinking and public interventions. 
Like Brian I am deeply moved by his recent work summarised under the heading 
“Facing Gaia”, but the reference in the title is mostly towards Latour singing 
praise to the virtues of ‘design’ - all the way back in 2008 actually, see my 
excerpt and source reference below.

At the time Latour was speaking out against the notion of ‘revolution’, 
assuming that such a gesture would only end up strengthening the existing 
power-structures. Instead he advocated the idea of specific political 
formations as always being ‘designed’, in a particular way, favouring certain 
interests, etc. Building on that idea he suggested to think about ‘redesign’ 
instead of revolution - in Latourian speak 'reconfiguring the network of 
associations' (of humans and non-humans).

In terms of political and cultural practices then, the idea is to unravel how 
existing practices are ‘designed’ and then to reconfigure them by ‘redesigning’ 
them, where the five advantages of design he addresses in this particular 
lecture can help to guide the process of redesigning (though this is by no 
means exhaustive and itself up for critique I would say..).

What I take from this, personally, is to think about the notion of ‘political 
design’, as opposed to insurrection, revolution, rupture, negation, subversion, 
etc.. And having followed the amazing lifecycle of the so-called ‘movement(s) 
of the squares’ from 2011 till roughly 2016 (Nuit Debout), and importantly 
their politically ineffectual demise, it has become clear that the nitty gritty 
groundwork of political redesign is desperately necessary here.

The place where I look for this most is ‘Laboratory Spain’ (even despite the 
recent affect-fuelled regionalist insurgency in Catalonia) where substantive 
political groundwork has created a unique political and cultural biotope that 
offers clues how a shared political / cultural practice’ might be constructed / 
designed.

This does raise the question, however, how to understand this notion of 
‘design’ itself, and how it relates to established political / cultural 
practices, such as activism, art, theory, critique, public administration, 
electoral politics? Certainly all these cannot be equated to each other.

The proposition here is to redefine design as ‘any type of deliberate 
intervention’, which clearly puts it in opposition to the affect-fuelled 
politics of both the ‘movement(s) of the squares’, as well as the alt.right and 
associated reactionary political practices.

Now, obviously, this does not provide a concrete answer to Felix’s question, 
and that is precisely the point. I think we need to shift from thinking in 
terms of solutions to thinking in terms of methodologies to finding solutions 
for each and every specific situation, and we can draw on all the critical 
registers we have to find them; theory, critique, art, environmental practices, 
political organising, activist tactics and strategies, etc.

In Latour’s terms - though I would not insist on them in any way - this would 
be part of the process of composing the good common world (of humans and 
nonhumans - the ‘collective’), and yes Gaia does provide us with a perimeter 
for that, which includes all political factions (even those in outright denial) 
- this is a perimeter, which is to say a final boundary to which we are drawing 
ever closer, and not an infinite horizon which recedes as we move forward. The 
end of infinity (of art, techno-science, and advanced capitalism) is a new 
condition to which all of these factions have to answer in one way or another. 

bests,
Eric

— 

Paste:

Latour - Five advantages of the concept of “design”:

1) As a concept, design implies a humility that seems absent from the word 
“construction” or “building”.

2) An attentiveness to details that is completely lacking in the heroic, 
Promethean, hubristic dream of action.

3) In the design of some artefact the task is unquestionably about meaning - be 
it symbolic, commercial, or otherwise.

4) Design is never a process that begins from scratch: to design is always to 
redesign. There is always something that exists first as a given, as an issue, 
as a problem.

5) The fifth and decisive advantage of the concept of design is that it 
necessarily involves an ethical dimension which is tied into the obvious 
question of good versus bad design.

Source: A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design, 
Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting, Design History Society 
Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3 2008.


> On 14 Oct 2017, at 12:1

(Re-)Designing Affect Space - Preliminary elements for a conceptual model of Affect Space

[Eric Kluitenberg]

dear nettimers,

A slightly edited and hyperlinked version of this text has recently appeared on 
the excellent Open! online platform for art, culture, and the public domain. 
You can access and freely download the edited text here: 
http://www.onlineopen.org/re-designing-affect-space 
 

The text is part of a series of commissioned essays for Open! that result from 
the public research trajectory Technology / Affect / Space, which we undertook 
mostly in 2016. The entry point to that essay series can be found here: 
http://www.onlineopen.org/technology-affect-space 
 

This is a medium long-read (± 7000 words) and follows up on the long-read essay 
“Affect Space: Witnessing the Movement(s) of the Squares” (11.243 words), 
published by Open! in 2015, which can be found here: 
http://www.onlineopen.org/affect-space  

The main aim of this new text is to develop the conceptual model of Affect 
Space further, beyond the massive protest gatherings post-2011 that revealed 
this emergent ‘techno-sensuous spatial order’, as I call it, so clearly. Be 
aware though that while the model is still partly speculative, the emerging 
order of Affect Space is already in full operation and constitutes an intensely 
contentious political space.

best wishes,
Eric

———

(re-)Designing Affect Space
Preliminary elements for a conceptual model of Affect Space 

This text draws together a set of characteristics that can be used as building 
blocks for a conceptual model of Affect Space. I have previously described 
Affect Space as an emerging techno-sensuous spatial order. Here I build upon 
these earlier investigations and the outcomes of the Technology / Affect / 
Space (T / A / S) public research trajectory conducted in 2016, which included 
public seminars in Amsterdam, Cambridge, MA and Rotterdam. The investigations 
continue in a series of commissioned essays on Open! [1], of which this text is 
one. These essays can help to articulate new design strategies for this quickly 
evolving context, where the spatial design disciplines are curiously absent 
from the debate. 

Re: The ‘Movement(s) of the Squares’

It is not that the so-called ‘movement(s) of the squares’ [2] invented a new 
dynamic of mobilisation of crowds and activation of public space. Much rather 
they revealed an emerging spatial order, which had implicitly been building 
with the advent of distributed electronic communication networks and the 
proliferation of wireless and mobile media in extremely ‘densified’ urban 
spaces. This emerging spatial order produced paradoxical spectacles that seemed 
at once strangely familiar and curiously novel, massive as well as evanescent.

Since 2011 we all (as a global predominantly online media audience) have been 
witness to the recurrent spectacle of these massive gatherings in dissent in 
public space. Originating in networked exchanges, spilling over into the 
streets and squares, effortlessly switching between geographic, cultural and 
socio-political contexts. Only this time, we witnessed not via mainstream 
mass-media channels, but near real-time through live streams, social media 
feeds, blogs and activist sites, and buzzing smart phones.

While revolving around a variety of heterogeneous issues (things), these 
gatherings remained remarkably constant in their pattern of mobilisation / 
activation: Not just that of online mobilisation followed by embodied 
gatherings in public space, but crucially using these public spaces themselves 
as connective platforms creating synchronous and asynchronous feedback loops 
into the electronic networks, drawing ever more subjects into an ‘attractive 
field’, iteratively generating further feedback loops between networked and 
embodied presences that dissolve and fade out as easily as they expand 
exponentially.

Beyond the non-linear and highly unpredictable dynamics at work here, these 
events seemed particularly impenetrable when the pattern started to replicate 
itself in self-similar manifestations where any substantive political, 
ideological, or material issue / thing was explicitly absent. [3] No longer was 
the issue the ‘thing that brings us together because it divides us most’ 
(Latour, 2005), but in the absence of an issue the gatherings seemed almost 
‘blind’, autonomous, self-organising, pertaining only to some inscrutable 
internal logic as yet to be unveiled. And crucially: void of any particular 
content. Thus leaving wide open the question how to account for them?

The Constitution of Affect Space

The concept of Affect Space was first proposed in a long-read essay for the 
Open! platform written and published in 2015 (Kluitenberg, 2015). In this essay 
the contours of a model were suggested that builds on three constitutive 
elements: 

A technological component: Internet, but in particular the massive use of 
mo

Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Fascinating discussion - this point of Bian seems crucial:

> On 25 Apr 2017, at 05:38, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Times change and those who cling to outdated critiques become irrelevant 
> if not reactionary. One of the most urgent agendas of the present is the 
> transformation of the scientific ethos and its institutions.

This call for the transformation of the scientific ethos and institutions is 
something I full-heartedly support and could imagine marching for: Let’s make 
science political! Let’s bring the sciences into the heart if democracy! Yes 
please!

I do object, however, to the suggestion that is implicit in what Peter wrote, 
which somehow reflects this logic of “if you are not with us you are against 
us”. If one does not want to engage in a march ‘for science’ (curiously generic 
phrase, which I really don’t understand what that means, or even if it means 
anything at all), one is with the Trump faction. But Trump and what the current 
US administration represents is entirely abject to me, but it doesn’t translate 
for me into a march for a generic defence of ‘science’, without a proper 
political engagement with the ethos, institutions and procedures of science.

More specifically I was reacting to one sentence in Florian’s posting: "1) The 
central demand of the 'March for Science', "evidence-based policies and 
regulations", is toxic and dangerous.” Because this claim seems to propagate 
the idea that only the institutions of science and its willing servants have a 
legitimate claim to “truth”, while the rest of us are ignorant, ill-informed, 
misguided, etc. I.e. non-expert political (and scientific) debate cannot make 
legitimate claims about the state of our planet.

This comes in the midsts of the proliferation of automated citation indexes, 
research and performance metrics, persisting science publishing oligopolies, a 
general war on non-quantiative approaches, a general distrust towards the 
Humanities and even the social sciences (among beta-oriented scientists) and 
‘theory’  - what do you need concepts for when you can measure / quantify 
everything?

Brian has a good point that there are hopeful developments in the earth-systems 
sciences, and the Trump administration is a disaster for that field. This needs 
to be engaged politically. It is also most blatantly clear in this particular 
field that science is indeed deeply political, so to claim that the march is 
somehow beyond ‘politics’ seems entirely strange to me.

Then there is the rather obvious, yet implicit point here that I am looking at 
this from a continental European point of view, and from here the Trump 
administration is mostly bizarre, but the previous administration, nor the 
Clinton ticket for that matter, provided a compelling alternative for us - all 
part of the same global deregulation agenda, with some minor cosmetic changes. 
(i.e. the Trump disaster is mostly a domestic problem - with global 
repercussions of course).

Meanwhile, here on the continent nobody is seriously contesting the problems of 
climate change. The new NL government under formation will most likely put a 
more far reaching set of environmental policies in place because it needs to 
keep the Green Party on board. The last NL election showed the same 15% vote 
for extreme right that has been there since it was revealed by Pim Fortuyn in 
the early 2000s. In France Le Pen will not claim the presidency as feared. In 
Germany the right-wingers are disintegrating even before they entered any 
political system after a disastrous party convention last weekend…

I.e. the perspective here is totally different, and therefore going on a 
generic march for ‘science’ (which science, whose science, under what political 
imperatives, and yes funded by whom for what?) just did not seem to make sense 
to me at this point. The US is an important country and a faltering political 
system there affects us globally, but the US is not the world.

So yes, let’s continue this debate that Latour started with his Politics of 
Nature - how to bring the sciences into democracy? That is the crucial debate 
right now in the unfolding climate change  / demographic disaster. Let’s march 
for the politicisation of science!

bests,
Eric


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Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Similar sentiment - in fact I am all for ‘alternative facts’, just different 
alternatives than the ones the Trump posse is proposing…
-e.

> On 23 Apr 2017, at 18:54, Florian Cramer  wrote:
> 
> Why I won't support the 'March for Science':*
> 
> 
> 1) The central demand of the 'March for Science', "evidence-based
> policies and regulations", is toxic and dangerous.




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Re: England leaves Europe

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Brian, all,

Slowly recovering from the immediate shock of the turmoil across the Canal 
(writing from Mokum, Holland), the sense of bewilderment by the string of 
events unfolding is hard to put into words - nettime helps a bit to find, and 
come to, terms to begin dealing with the situation - something that the 
plethora of news messages from the main-streamers barely helps with…

I was struck in particular by this early remark of Brian in the discussion - 
essentially the question bow to reinvent a truly progressive politics and 
effect it:

> On 24 Jun 2016, at 18:54, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> We on the Left have our identity too - the multirace, multigender solidarity 
> of experimentalists. Can we use it to create an ecological developmentalism 
> for divided and desperately inegalitarian societies? We need to look outside 
> the network of urban centralities and see how entire territories could be 
> recreated in a new image. That image cannot simply be the old wild dream of 
> the post-68 era, which was forged in universities and urban cores. Remain was 
> lost by the City. Leaving the narrow pathways of financially directed 
> development is what we must do.
> 
> It's about time, Brian

There’s one thing that almost escapes attention in the preoccupation with 
Brexit fallout, and that is the results of the elections held in Spain today. 
It would seem on the basis of what is known so far that the election will 
produce a nearly identical result to the previous one half a year ago, which 
was unable to produce a viable (coalition) government for Spain - It would seem 
then that with an identical result the problem also remains the same, and most 
likely will result in the formation of a non-viable government coalition that 
will then fail quite soon and in the meantime be primarily dysfunctional - 
leading to new (snap) elections, etc…

One might begin to wonder if it is not the failure and slow break-down of 
electoral politics and representational democracy that we are witnessing (at an 
now accelerated pace), rather than a reaction to a specific set of political 
issues? 
(migration, EU bureaucracy, rising national-chauvinism, globalisation blues, 
austerity, etc..)

The question of how to reimagine and then reconstitute progressive politics, 
something which I would describe as an act of ‘political design’, might then 
start to mean that this must be reimagined and reconstituted outside of the 
arena of representational democracy / electoral politics. That would be a very 
risky move, as we need to be able to organise collectively to build enough of a 
countervailing force to global markets that are increasingly organised as 
oligopolies, and sometimes dominated by monopolistic players flat out.

The British referendum has lead to a complete political meltdown, not just of 
the governing party (“Where is Boris?”), but also the opposition (open revolt 
against ‘Gandalf the Grey’), and most likely will lead to the break-up of the 
kingdom, while at the same time the European project of the formal union is 
fundamentally called into question, even by its main protagonists (see the 
initiatives of Germany and France over the weekend), but on top of that Podemos 
and the alliance with civic networks across the country in Spain is failing to 
break through on the national level (after previously taking Madrid, Barcelona, 
Valencia and more…).

It is remarkable then, how the Guardian newspaper (admittedly by and large a 
mouth piece of Labour, a kind of British version of the good old Pravda) is 
still discussing the ‘future of left politics’ 

 exclusively in terms of how to move forwards with and within the Labour party 
- nothing else even seems possible to imagine, or is seen to exist, in this 
‘guarded’ universe… To me that is truly amazing!

Brian’s call to 'create an ecological developmentalism for divided and 
desperately inegalitarian societies’ needs to be imagined and constituted then 
outside of these accustomed political systems, also outside and beyond 
political edifices such as Podemos and Syriza, who had their part to play but 
already seem redundant or past their sell-by date right now. I’m not advocating 
accelerationism here, far from it, but I am calling for a kind of 
‘post-governmental’ form of political design.

It seems we cannot expect to get out of the mess within the crumbling walls of 
our cherished democracies, for all of the reasons highlighted in the discussion 
so far. I somehow hope this view is wrong, but I fear…

bests,
Eric

p.s. - there are of course a whole set of building blocks that can be used to 
start creating Brian’s ecological developmentalism, but that’s the big 
discussion that’s on non-stop and unending, right now we need to make sense of 
the current situation and dynamics - we don’t know yet where this is going to 
end

The Zombie of the author - In memoriam Remko Scha (September 15, 1945 - November 9, 2015)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

 generative grammars  - so systems of rules that 
would generate other systems of rules (visual and auditory grammars) that in 
turn would generate outputs - to bring further unpredictability into the game. 
However, also this procedure would not meet our requirements as it would simply 
constitute a ‘second order deferred authorship’, nothing more, and so the 
author would still persist, even if not immediately perceptible / intelligible 
(which would count as progress in this account).

We continued for a few months writing scenarios (using stock images as 
industrial digital ready-mades modified by second order generative grammars for 
instance), sending them back and forth, discussing them in face to face 
meetings - in his university office, in bars, at cultural events, whenever we 
had a chance to connect. But we never were able to come up with a procedure, as 
scenario, a formal system, that would once and for all eliminate the author, 
not even with a lower-case ‘a’. The author would always come back to haunt us a 
zombie of intention, preconception, bias, and interest - a continuous threat to 
unfettered aesthetic reflection. 

Until finally we gave up...

We concluded that within the digital the author could not be eliminated and 
thus our endeavour had proven to be senseless. We felt that it would be a 
facile and empty gesture to then write a text for the journal that would draw 
this conclusion, as our set aim was to achieve the opposite. And so, we ended 
the exploration, thanked the editor for his generous interest and invitation, 
and never wrote or published the paper (despite having extensive notes).

Remko did continue his quest for an aesthetic ideal, which we now knew was 
unattainable, with the Institute for Artificial Art. producing a variety of 
wondrous artistic interventions in years to come. In this he was inching ever 
closer to a ‘universal’ aesthetic language freed from subjective debasement, 
culturation and the abominations of taste. And exactly with this singular quest 
he became a unique idiosyncratic voice, somewhere in this shadowy land between 
the arts and the sciences.

He will be deeply missed, by many, certainly by me.

Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, November 20, 2015


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Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime

[Eric Kluitenberg]

   Dear nettimers,

   It feels a bit awkward to respond in this thread as the co-editor of
   the anthology this text is going to be part of, where I think the text
   is going to be a great contribution, a fascinating account of twenty
   years of  from a first-hand perspective. However, I am deeply
   intrigued by the remarks Brian made about a `third-order cybernetics'
   and his call to start figuring this new order out (a 'third age of
   net-critique' as he calls it). This is what I want to respond to here.

   The anthology we are putting together is part of a larger project,
   on-going under a mundane working title 'tactical media connections',
   with the aim of connecting different generations of activists, artists,
   theorists, discourses and practices between the classic era of tactical
   media and current practices and conditions, with the hope of developing
   a more informed perspective to move into the future. The project has
   been introduced on the list so will not dwell on this further.

   One of the things which is on my mind with this project is to raise the
   question: "What kind of interventions are required right now?",
   assuming that we are in the post-#occupy and post-prism era. For a
   variety of reasons we have seen that the various `occupy'
   quasi-movements (formations) have failed, unable to transform
   themselves into somehow coherent and potent political forces (in part
   because of their over-reliance on the play on affective registers),
   with the possible exception of Spain as also indicated in the thread
   started by Alex Foti ("What if we were all right but all wrong?"),
   which runs interestingly parallel to this one. And the post-prism
   condition need not really be explained - the confirmation of our worst
   nightmares about the extent of the electronic surveillance apparatus
   that dwarfs all sci-fi phantasies that may have preceded the Snowden
   Files disclosures.

   So, what does `intervention' mean in this context? Does it still make
   sense to think and talk about this at all? How could intervention be
   conceived of as somehow meaningful, viable, efficacious (able to
   produce desired results)?

   What strikes me, but comes as no real surprise, is the clear presence
   of the recent work that science and political philosopher Bruno Latour
   has been doing on what he calls "Facing Gaia", and what Brian refers to
   as `Earth-system' (see: [1]http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/487 ). This
   comes as no surprise because Brian and I discussed this in private
   conversations, and also because his recent work with the Compass group
   in the Mid-West region (around Chicago) takes up the challenge of
   thinking through the meaning of this notion of `general ecology' - see:
   [2]http://midwestcompass.org/.

   The crucial point here, in my view, is the boundedness of these global
   transformations Brian is referencing by our existence on Earth, the
   planet as a system of interdependent parts, and the finiteness of
   resources available to and within this system. As Latour also observes
   in one of his recent lectures, the prospect of the human species (or a
   future Ark of Noah carrying the biological diversity of the planet)
   embarking on an exodus into space to new `Earth-like' worlds has been
   emphatically referred to the realm of fiction by calculations of the
   amount of energy and resources required to ship even a tiny segment of
   the Earth's current population to the nearest inhabitable worlds, which
   makes the entire exercise an entirely laughable fiction. It equally
   reduces the chance of us ever being visited by some remote superior
   extraterrestrial civilisation (that can solve our problems) to zero. In
   short: We are Earth-bound.

   Philosopher and aesthetician Jean-Francois Lyotard once observed that
   the avant-garde arts share with the techno-sciences and advanced
   capitalism an `affinity with infinity': the infinite ability to see,
   the infinite ability to know, and the infinite ability to realise /
   make / produce. This dictum no longer holds true. We are coming up to
   final limits, material and ecological. They are drawing ever closer and
   given the rapid material developments in the so-called emerging
   economies with exponential speed. The horizon is no longer that of the
   infinity of the avant-gardes, techno-sciences, and advanced capitalism,
   but instead the finiteness of the Earth's material and ecological
   resources.

   This imposes clear limits on the scope and extension of third-order
   cybernetics and the new modes of global governance (or non-governance)
   that accompany this new order. Latour develops his thinking along a
   simple line: he considers these systems as being designed by someone,
   some groups, some agencies, and that to attune them with boundedness
   imposed by the Earth-system we need to re-design these systems. The
   discipline of `design' (in a broad

Re: nottime: the end of nettime

[Eric Kluitenberg]

   dear nettimers,

   So, nettime is not, for the moment going to disappear, and I'm for one
   quite happy about that. I feel ambivalent though about the way in which
   the issue of 'taking stock' of the current substance (or lack thereof)
   of the list and its extended constituency (to avoid the overused term
   `community') has been raised.

   For me the greatest quality of nettime is its continuity and continued
   presence, with all its defects and shortcomings, but still. And this is
   in no small part due to the continued efforts of Ted and Felix keeping
   this edifice alive and dragging it through extended periods of
   sluggishness. I used the word `monumental' in a private mail to Ted the
   other day (off-list) and saw that he already integrated it in his
   recent negation of all the shoulder patting rumbling through the ascii
   flows...

   Well OK let's move on then.

   I think there are a number of issues that need to be unpicked from this
   `intervention' that require some reflexion and possibly also some
   actions to follow up on.

   First an uneasy one that so far only Ted dared address (yesterday):
   ownership of the list and what extends from it - Ted and Felix don't
   know if they could, or have the `right', to close this list down even
   if they wanted to - despite their extremely extended `stewardship' of
   the whole affair. And Ted's right - I don't think that this list and
   what it extends into is or should be / can be `owned' by anyone, and
   therefore nobody in particular has the right to shut it down. Still,
   things need to be maintained, both technically, editorially and as a
   living social entity - all that doesn't happen by itself and if the
   extended constituency would not find somehow a solution for it the
   thing would in effect disappear if Ted and Felix stopped taking care of
   things.

   That's an unresolved dilemma that afflicts many of such invaluable not
   for profit / not for glory enterprises - a bit of `crowd funding' will
   not solve this. David Garcia is talking about `resilience' instead of
   that other overused term 'sustainability', but we don't know exactly
   how to organise this beyond personal sacrifice (sacrificial labour is a
   more apt term here than `affective'). That's an important one for our
   list - how to solve this (not just for nettime)?

   But then there are a whole bunch of specific issues lumped together in
   the original posting that should in fact be taken separately, I think,
   before we make a judgement about the larger whole. I've copied the
   paragraph again at the bottom of this message.

   So let's unpick:

   - the summer of the internet is over: that is in itself already a
   question whether or not this moment and its momentum is over? I
   actually don't really think so, but it has become a much more
   complicated space of activity to get to grips with - the walled gardens
   of (anti-) `social' networking platforms (that everybody nonetheless
   seems to flock to, so where are the alternatives that are so unlike the
   corporate mainstream?). The revelation that the control society was
   every bit as bad as we had imagined it in our worst nightmares... The
   sad fact that the massive participation in online media and
   self-mediation has not by itself and of itself lead to a more open,
   democratic, equitable society (or should we say `collective'?).

   - the former `East' for the most part does not exist anymore - it is
   now rather a vanguard for political experiments that set a tone for
   much of Europe to follow. What was still termed `enduring
   post-communism' during Next 5 Minutes 4, back in 2003, now really seems
   to have come to an end. The rise of chauvinist authoritarianism voted
   into power in Hungary is not so much a regression to the past as it is
   a prefiguration of a future we must desperately try to avoid.

   - that we have so little reports and discussions about what is
   happening on Russia's borders is actually hardly a surprise. The only
   ones who could offer us a genuinely interesting perspective on what is
   going on are the ones inside Russia, who live that situation. But they
   will not speak out in public - it's too dangerous. Do it and not only
   will you put your own life at risk (think of Oleg Kyreev's so-called
   'suicide' after openly supporting the idea of an orange revolution in
   Russia - we will never forget that!), but also the livelihood of your
   friends and family (losing jobs, benefits, housing, opportunities) -
   this is all very real and the last thing you will do when in such a
   situation is speak out in public (archived for eternity). No wonder
   there's no voices on this list that could enlighten us. We are very
   much back to the good old days of `Kremlin-watchers' who attempt to
   interpret spurious signs of tightly controlled (media-)enactments that
   could mean anything or nothing at all - really..

   - China, M

Just out at Online Open: Affect Space - Witnessing the 'movement(s) of the square'

[Eric Kluitenberg]

   Dear nettimers,

   My latest essay just came out at the excellent open! online platform
   for art and the public domain. It's called Affect Space - Witnessing
   the `movement(s) of the squares'.

   Here is the link:

   
http://www.onlineopen.org/essays/affect-space-witnessing-the-movements-of-the-squares

   The `print-friendly format' will allow you to read the entire text on
   one page - this is a long read of apr. 12.000 words.

   This essay is part of an on-going investigation into the affect driven
   dynamics behind the massive outpourings of popular dissent we have been
   seeing around the planet since 2011, and the curious

   pattern of simultaneous online mobilisation and public space
   occupations. The simultaneous massive presence of self-produced media
   forms, the context of (occupied) urban public spaces, and the deep
   permeation of affective intensity in these emergent protest formations
   results in a specific and paradoxical techno-sensuous spatial order,
   which I refer to in this essay as Affect Space.

   Below the frist three paragraphs:

   Hope this is of interest.

   Eric

   Affect Space - Witnessing the "movement(s) of the squares"
   Ever since early 2011, we, as a global media audience, have been
   witnesses to an unabating and strangely recurring yet unpredictable
   urban spectacle - sudden massive forms of popular protest staged in
   public squares and streets, disrupting the spatial, legal and political
   order, curiously drenched in the massive presence of "the camera" and
   near real-time, media reports. Markedly different from previous
   revolutionary moments, however, these stagings are no longer
   predominantly mediated by the classic global mass media spectacle
   machines (corporate and state TV, newspapers and magazines), but by an
   unending avalanche of self-produced media expressions - the inevitable
   Tweets and Facebook posts, online videos, digital photographs on a
   variety of image-sharing platforms (open source, corporate,
   sub-cultural and mainstream alike), activist blogs and discussion fora,
   and a host of other homegrown media outlets. Virtually none of the
   producers of this media avalanche can be characterised as "media
   professionals".
   Meanwhile, the former "news" media are playing a catch-up game with the
   next unanticipated eruption of real-time, globally mediated, popular
   dissent. The spectacle is not characterised primarily by monumental
   heroism but by volatility and a paradoxical air of ephemerality. Though
   consequences of the actions unfolding can be dramatic and severe, these
   public gatherings themselves seem to dissipate as suddenly as they
   burst into existence. Subterranean tensions can be identified, and
   (professional) media commentators rush to point to "underlying issues"
   (in Egypt: Mubarak, in Spain and Greece: youth unemployment, in the US:
   income inequality, in Ukraine: Yanukovych, in Brazil: failing or absent
   social policies, in Syria: Assad, in Hong Kong: electoral reform, in
   the UK: tuition fees, in Haren: "You Only Live Once", in Ferguson, MO:
   racialised police violence). However, as the list grows the "issue at
   stake" appears to become increasingly arbitrary.
   Rather than focussing on the "issue at stake", it seems necessary to
   begin analysing the pattern of these events unfolding before our eyes.
   For all the emphasis that has been put on the technological component
   of this evolving pattern, the internet, "social" media, wireless and
   mobile media by a variety of commentators (including myself), and,
   despite the crucial and constitutive role that the massive presence of
   such media technologies has played in these intense public gatherings,
   the events we have witnessed and the pattern that has emerged cannot be
   reduced to this technological presence alone.
   (..)
   Continued here:
   http://www.onlineopen.org/essays/affect-space-witnessing-the-movemen
   ts-of-the-squares


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Re: Crisis 2.0 - the political turn

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Thanks Brian and Sebastian for a timely and well considered text and
response.

I think the problem with people like Joschka is that they have become so
embroiled in the existing political systems that they cannot think
outside them anymore.

What is needed here is a ???rupture???, one that can open up a space for
alternatives / alternative political designs. How to bend this towards
what could broadly speaking be described as a ???progressive political
agenda??? is a big and difficult question, but it is one that we must
start to answer given the severity of what we are facing.  (by ???we???
I mean collectively as inhabitants of planet earth / 'subjects of
Gaia???(?) )

I still think Spain is the most interesting country right now to watch
in terms of radical experiments in political design.

Draw out your sketch-books!

bests,
Eric

> On 11 Jan 2015, at 17:55, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:
> 
> Needless to say that the same Joschka Fischer, on December 29 in a column
> for the Austrian "Standard" titled "Greek Fever, European Disease" [1]
> (which may be a rehashed version of the text you're quoting from), wrote
> the following:
 <...>


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Re: More Crisis in the Information Society.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Mark,

I was not suggesting that 'society' can be designed - a rather absurd
idea indeed, but that we can 'design' democratic politics, which in my
understanding means things like decision making procedures, oversight
and control structures, protocols, both social and technological
ones, forms and modes of assembly, deliberation spaces, communication
modalities (alternative social media platforms for instance) and much
much more.

All these kinds of 'interventions' can certainly be designed, just as
current institutional structures have been designed, and if they do
not function properly they should be re-designed.

But there is a much more serious flaw in your argument - it is overly
techno-deterministic. Your claims imply that democracy would be a
by-product of television and other mass-media. Maybe McLuhan and
Kittler would like that idea, but it is way too crude. Democratic
forms of governance evolved out of much deeper lineages, over much
longer periods of time, mostly connected to the rise of new dominant
groups in society (merchants / industrialists / workers / post-urban
middle class, etc.)

It is much more productive to think about the interaction of social
processes and technological infrastructures in terms of 'assimilation'
as Lewis Mumford proposed in his seminal two volume work The Myth of
the Machine in the late 60s. The one cannot be thought without the
other, but as many STS (Science and Technology Studies) scholars would
say 'impact is dead' - i.e. the existence of the internet is not the
cause of deeper changes in society but rather evolves along with them
and they continuously interact and influence each other.

Thus, the technological is not some condition that is just inflicted
upon us, as some bad fate outside of human influence, but rather a
force to be reckoned with and a force that can bend in different ways.
No one is all powerful here, I agree with you on that, but we can all
intervene at some level (micro/macro).

So, I resolutely stand by by assertion that we need political design
and not just critique, and what's more I think that it would be an
absolute disaster to give up on our democratic ideals and aspirations
- they will change, transform, mutate, but that's no reason to write
them off because we are living in 'net-times'.

Btw - I think that the operators of the control state would be very
happy with such a fatalistic discourse.

Bests,
Eric




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Re: More Crisis in the Information Society

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Michael, nettimers,

I can understand your exasperation about how an urgent and critically vital 
real-life political discussion reverts to an apparently 'academic' one, but in 
this case I think this is not entirely correct. You are right, however, in 
pointing out hat the discussion requires a bit more real-life, and what Germans 
so beautifully call 'real-poltischer', context. 
Let me try to provide that to complement the argument.

So fist the core argument again:

Felix sketches the emergence of a 'Deep-State' outside of democratic / 
electoral accountability, revealed by the Snowden / NSA disclosures, and 
rightfully observes that this is primarily a political problem, not a primarily 
technological problem.

>From this I conclude the problem is political, and therefore the solution also 
>has to be political. My suggestion is to engage in 'political design' and not 
>content ourselves with 'mere' critique.

Now, political design needs to operate simultaneously on the macro and the 
micro level, and in between and across.

The micro-political level is crucial because focussing only on the 
macro-political level quickly leaves one overwhelmed. We can make a quick 
analysis of the problem, but to engage it practically means taking on vested 
powers with huge interests and exactly that, power... The micro-political 
intervention circumvents that and creates opportunities for immediate action. 
Still, without macro-political changes, the micro-political remains, well.., 
powerless.

Hence the need for 'political design' on both levels.

The example of the 'Ecological Design' course was simply an example of a 
micro-political intervention, nothing more. I would not suggest that it is 
anything else in and of itself. Still, I would agree fully with Florian here 
that one should not underestimate the generative power of the arts / artists / 
designers - the power to bring something into being, where before there was 
none. This is a highly particular aspect of these practices and we should not 
underestimate its evocative / generative power, in particular with regards to 
political / ecological design.

Question is, why is this all important for the question at hand (the reality of 
the 'Deep State' revealed by Snowden, WikiLeaks, etc.)?

Here is where I need to bring in the 'real-politischer' context. In this case I 
can best reflect on my extended tenure at De Balie, the centre for culture and 
politics in Amsterdam (from late 1998 till early 2011). From the start we 
addressed questions of surveillance, security and privacy in the new media 
public programs, debates, and public events we organised. These debates / 
events would be staged with politicians, business reps, civil society / NGO 
types, artists, designers, technologists, hackers, theorists, academics, 
activists and so on in various wondrous mixes.

I remember how in the early years we were simply waved away - nonsense, what do 
we have to hide?, fighting windmills, etc etc. Strangely though most support 
was coming from the business community. Still, in 2003, in the preparation of 
the 'Completely Safe Environments' / No Escape event at Paradiso, part of Next 
5 Minutes 4, Rop Gongrijp (co-founder of xs4all, Dutch celebrity hacker and one 
of three people pursued by the US government over aiding the release of the 
Collateral Murder video with WikiLeaks) mourned how he had been trying to get 
the issue of privacy on the public agenda for over 15 years and it just didn't 
work.
The event made it to the evening news and created a big stir - an indication of 
things to come.

Ar the instigation of Maurice Wessling of xs4all and Bits of Freedom (the Dutch 
privacy organisation) we then started the NL series of the Big Brother Awards, 
and while it started small these events grew year by year. The last time it was 
still held in the De Balie it had become such a big thing that the national 
news featured it prominently, debates were staged in newspapers, the NL version 
of NewsNight (NOVA) devoted almost an entire show the same evening to it, and 
the privacy discussion moved mainstream, way before WikiLeaks rose to 
prominence. The next BBA had to be organised in a bigger venue, and the issue 
remained in the core of public debate in NL ever since.

Then WikiLeaks broke, then the Snowden NSA Files disclosures - the issues moved 
into the public mainstream virtually around the globe, world media haven't 
stopped debating it since.

Another remarkable detail here is that one of the people we worked together 
with in this series of so called 'info-politics' programs was a law scholar who 
had done a PHD on privacy issues and worked for the Institute of Information 
Law, University of Amsterdam - one of the regular 'academic' sites we worked 
with. He is now the vice prime minister of The Netherlands. Still, throughout 
the NSA Files disclosures he has remained conspicuously silent. The formal 
reason: not his department, he is minister of socia

Re: More Crisis in the Information Society

[Eric Kluitenberg]

It seems to me that Felix is right in pointing out that the issues discussed 
here are primarily political. I consider in particular the emergence of a 'Deep 
State' largely outside of democratic (electoral) accountability and existing 
rights frameworks that Felix sketches here a deeply problematic and 
fundamentally important tendency. However, we should right from the start not 
limit ourselves to modes of critique: The problem is political, which 
necessarily implies that the solution is also political - it is not just a 
matter of critique (of incapable political structures, of the distortions of 
global and local capital, of unaccountable surveillance systems, etc.), but 
much more a question of political design.

An interesting question here would be, what does 'political design' mean 
exactly? How can it be 'enacted'? What would be required in terms of material 
and popular investments, in terms of institutional (re-)design? What types of 
political and design expertise would be required here?

In order for what? 

To progress towards a progressive composition of the good common world?

The successive waves of popular protest that we have all been witnessing since 
2011, that some refer to as the 'movement(s) of the squares' (a term I use only 
in brackets because of its inherent ambiguities), have not effected the kind of 
political changes as yet that seemed to be demanded there, neither in terms of 
'giving democracy back to the people' (one of the recurrent slogans / demands), 
nor in terms of fundamentally redressing gross inequalities in income, material 
means of survival and possibilities for self-realisation.

The activists involved have largely understood and accepted this lack of 
efficacy of the protests in and of themselves and are now actively engaging in 
acts of 'political design'. Important to question here, though, is exactly what 
'design' in this context means. In my view it operates on different levels at 
the same time - on a macro level as in redesigning political institutions 
(evidenced a.o. in new political 'designs' such as Partido X and Podemos in 
Spain, the redrafting of the Iceland constitution earlier, the After arty in 
post-occupy US, and many other initiatives aimed at reconfiguring main-stream 
politics). 

However, 'political design' should and does operate simultaneously on a 
micro-level, small acts, localised and trans-local, by ordinary citizens aimed 
at changing particular aspects of local environments, establishing new shared 
resources, new modes of exchange (alternative currency systems that typically 
function trans-locally), small-scale environmental monitoring and restoration 
projects, open education, and many many more. 'Design' here is no longer 
concerned simply with giving shape to something that has already been 
conceived, but is more properly understood as a concrete and tangible 
intervention to reshape a configuration of things.

I'm now developing a new short course for the Art Science Interfaculty in The 
Hague which is called 'Ecological Design'. The basic premise here is that the 
title perfectly expresses what the course is about, if only that it requires us 
to fundamentally redefine two terms: 'ecology' and 'design'. 
'Ecology', first of all is reconfigured (as a concept) along the lines of the 
classic Guattari text on the three ecologies; the material environment / the 
social relations / human subjectivity; and this ie extended with the presence 
and role of the non-humans. The point here is to think and act transversally 
between and across these different ecological registers.
'Design' is reconfigured to mean essentially any type of tangible 
'intervention', which transgresses the disciplinary boundaries of professional 
design, to include interventions coming from the domain of the arts, civic 
initiatives, social movements, and even politics itself.

An important consideration here is that it is too easy to forget that the 
different crises we are talking about (financial, economic, political, 
democratic, military and environmental) do not only affect humans badly, but 
also the non-humans. The question is, how to bring the non-humans into 
democracy, as evidently they cannot 'speak' for themselves there, at the heart 
of democratic deliberation. This obviously introduces another layer of 
complexity and complicates things further, yet in thinking and doing political 
design I nonetheless find the presence of the non-humans indispensable.

The task for the students following this course will be to come up with a 
'design' for an intervention of their own (and possibly execute it).

To give these endeavours direction I hold to the Latourian formula of the 
'progressive composition of the good common world', which aims to sustain and 
strengthen the plurality of external relations  - it becomes thus an exercise 
in (re-)designing political ecology.

At this point I'm very curious to see what is going to come out of this new 
co

Tactical Media Connections - A public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its connections to the present.

[Eric Kluitenberg]

dear nettimers,


In the first weekend of July we intend to begin a new public research
trajectory that attempts to connect the knowledge and experience
gained through the past twenty years of Tactical Media and its progeny
to current forms of critical practice at the intersection of art,
media, political activism and technological experimentation.

The first public activity as part of this will be the public debate
"Art and Political Conflict" at the new cultural centre Tolhuistuin
in Amsterdam on Sunday July 6, 14.00 - 17.00 hrs - join us if you
can or follow our blogs to keep track of this 'public research'. The
trajectory will continue till the end of 2015.

More info on the public debate can be found here:
http://blog.tacticalmediafiles.net/?p=380

This trajectory is developed in relation to the on-going documentation
activity (since 2008) via the Tactical Media Files online platform,
which will also receive a thorough upgrade. www.tacticalmediafiles.net

More details below.

Best wishes,

David Garcia & Eric Kluitenberg

-

Tactical Media Connections

A public research trajectory tracing the legacies of Tactical Media and its 
connections to the present

Under the working title 'Tactical Media Connections' the editors of
the Tactical Media Files, David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg have
begun an extensive public research project that seeks to trace and
develop the connections between the phenomenon of Tactical Media as
it was identified in the early 1990s, not least through the renowned
series of Next 5 Minutes festivals and conferences on Tactical Media (
www.n5m.org - organised four times between 1993 and 2003), and current
critical practices operating at the intersection of art, media,
activism, technological experimentation and political contestation.

Context:

As initiators and organisers of the Next 5 Minutes in the 1990s, we
never felt entirely comfortable with the naming of 'Tactical Media'
as a 'movement'. Nonetheless this designator did allow for a certain
mutual recognition. It had become clear that a specific constellation
of art, experimental media, and political activism was being practiced
by large numbers of groups and individuals around the world to
such an extent as to suggest that a relatively stable cultural
compound had emerged which required a distinctive category. Some of us
preferred to regard Tactical Media as an evolving cluster of practices
developed out of the desire and need to insert ourselves into the
cracks appearing in the edifices of broadcast media, (information)
technology, and mainstream culture. In the process important new
spaces emerged for dissenting views and dissident life styles,
politics, and aesthetics.

The need for another 'global' edition of the Next 5 Minutes seemed to
dissipate in the early 2000s with the arrival of 'mass self-mediation'
through the proliferation of mobile devices that put 'the camera'
(as a metaphor for appropriated media and technological tools) not
just in the hands of a select group of artists, community organisers
and political activists, but literally in the hands of anyone who
cared enough to make a statement in the media sphere. However, we
continued to follow the destinies of these artist-activist desires
through the changing media sphere. Our principal platform for this
process of gathering and documentation was the Tactical Media Files
(www.tacticalmediafiles.net), an online resource started in 2008.
We have subsequently held intermittent public gatherings connected
to this resource such as the Media Squares symposium at De Balie in
Amsterdam, September 30, 2011.

Pressure to revisit these issues in a more substantial and
comprehensive way began to build with the onset of a series of 'global
events' which started to take shape in the course of 2010, quite
independent of the people and organisations originally involved in the
Next 5 Minutes or identifying with the notion of Tactical Media. These
events significantly shifted its context, giving it both new urgency
as well complicating the political, cultural and wider public context
in which the concept of Tactical Media operates.

Arguably this started with the release of the Collateral Murder
video by WikiLeaks (April 2010), which suddenly seemed to renew the
potency of media as a tactical tool, enabling apparently powerless
actors to turn the tables on the powerful, cutting right across all
the distinctions between mainstream, alternative, professional and
self-produced media, mitigating the usual chasm between internet-based
media and mass media such as print, broadcast, satellite television,
and beyond. Though its origins were deeply rooted in internet and
hacker cultures this intervention was certainly not limited to them.
The ability of WikiLeaks to cut across these highly differentiated
domains made it not only very effective in terms of public impact, but
also 

Contestation and Sustainability of the Digital Commons

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

This text is an expanded version of talk given at the Art of Resilience 
conference, organised by the RIXC center for new media culture in Riga, Friday 
October 5, 2012. 
http://rixc.lv/12/en/conference.info.html
https://vimeo.com/53746426
The text will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Acoustic Space 
Journal: 
Smite Rasa, Smits Raitis, Medosch, Armin (editors), (MAH) Techno-Ecologies II, 
Acoustic Space Vol. 12, RIXC: Riga / Liepaja: LiepU MPLab, 2014
The new issue will come out at the occasion of the opening of the Fields 
exhibition and the Art+Communication Festival 2014.
http://fields.rixc.lv/


Contestation and Sustainability of the Digital Commons
by Eric Kluitenberg, Amsterdam, May 2014.

There is a growing body of research and literature on shared resources of 
knowledge and cultural production as a commons [1]. Unsurprisingly much of this 
research focusses on the role that digital media and the internet in particular 
play in constituting these new forms of the commons. The availability of 
digital cultural and knowledge resources online has fundamentally changed the 
nature of these resources, making them at the same time more accessible, but 
also easier to capture and lock down. The educational, emancipatory, and 
empowering potential of a blossoming digital commons is undeniable and clear 
for every person that has used the internet for more than a single afternoon, 
but the dilemma’s involved in establishing and maintaining such digital and 
online common resource pools are far from settled and deeply contested. I want 
to devote specific attention here to the dilemma’s involved in the longer-term 
sustainability of digital and online cultural resources, which is as much a 
political and economic as it is a cultural question of utmost urgency and 
importance.   

Elinor Ostrom, whose research on the commons was awarded the Nobel prize for 
Economics in 2009, and commons theorist Charlotte Hess describe the ‘Commons’ 
as a general term that refers to a resource shared by a group of people (Hess & 
Ostrom, 2007, 4). Typically these resources are governed by mechanisms that 
operate outside the traditional confines of the market and the state to 
regulate their use and ensure their long-term sustainability. Although a broad 
variety of commons and common-pool resources [2] exist, Ostrom and Hess suggest 
that “the unifying thread in all common resources is that they are jointly 
used, managed by groups of varying sizes and interests” (Hess & Ostrom, 2007, 
5).

In traditional economics the knowledge commons is understood as a pool of ideas 
from which it is hard to exclude anyone once created or discovered (ibid, 8), 
and access to and use of them does not limit others in their acces and use (of 
ideas). However, in a digital context more and more forms of knowledge can be 
captured and made subject to property regimes [3] (think for instance of DNA 
sequencing and patented research data), while the digital infrastructures 
needed to produce these capabilities and make them accessible require massive 
investments and constant maintenance to be sustained. In the classic analogy, 
the ideas found when reading a book (as intangibles) are public goods, while 
the book itself (as a material artefact) is classified as a private good (Hess 
& Ostrom, 2007, 9) In the digital context knowledge is increasingly treated as 
a private good unless it is deliberately made accessible for common use, for 
instance via open access publishing. However, this move to create and maintain 
digital knowledge and culture commons requires extensive operational resources.

This is the fundamental dilemma that all digital knowledge and cultural commons 
resources face: At first glance the digital technologies seem to offer 
unprecedented opportunities to share knowledge and culture on an in principle 
planetary scale, and at lowest costs. Yet, these resources can only be 
sustained through continued investments of capabilities (money, skills, 
technical infrastructure, maintenance, resource management). Traditional 
economics is quick to suggest that only markets or public infrastructures are 
able to sustain such common resources. However, in doing so these actors will 
inevitably limit access to these resources, either by requiring payment for 
access (market), or through regulatory exclusionary measures (state). The real 
promise of the digital commons, however, lies in open and unfeathered access 
for anyone to the shared resources, not presupposing either fees or exclusive 
permissions.

The commons proposes a model where collective ownership and governance of 
shared resources offers an alternative for privatisation by the market or 
regulatory control by the state. And the research of Ostrom and many others has 
shown that under the right conditions this is not only a viable, but also a 
rational and efficient model for creating, managing, and protecting such shared 
re

Re: Post-digital - Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside (with Howard Rheingold)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

While reading another excellent discussion on the post-digital /
disconnectivity on nettime, I was reminded of a piece I co-authored
with Howard Rheingold slightly over seven years ago for the theme
issue Hybrid Space of Open, Journal for Art and the Public Domain.

At the time I was thinking and discussing with various people the
notion of a human rights movement for the right to disconnect.
The ultimate aim would be to enshrine the principal right to be
disconnected from all communication and data flows in the universal
declaration of human rights.

The disclosures after WikiLeaks and the NSA Files have since signified
two possible things: Either we were desperately naive with his and
hopelessly irrelevant, or the urgency of addressing the right to
disconnect is stronger than ever. In any case what we have seen has
simply been the confirmation of our worst suspicions. It is not, I
guess, that privacy advocates and digital civil rights activists and
so on were surprised by this, but rather disappointed or sadly proven
right (and sad to be proven right).

The realistic take has always been and should always be: Whatever
technology and/or social process that can be used to strengthen the
interests of strategic power, will be used to strengthen the interests
of strategic power. In that sense it really all cannot come as any
surprise.

As a personal caveat: At the time (2007) I made the claim at the start
of tis article that I never possessed nor did not possess at that time
a mobile phone, as a micro practice of selective dis/connectivity.
Currently, though I just changed over to my third generation of iPhone
(yes the latest model!). So, the question of whether it is possible to
sustain such micro practices of resistance (even selective ones) might
be answered there already!

I left all the editorial comments in for 'historical accuracy'...
:) 

The issue is still online - here:
http://www.skor.nl/eng/publications/item/open-11-hybrid-space-how-wireless-media-are-mobilizing-public-space?single=1

or alternatively a full issue in one pdf file here:
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=48405
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/mmbase/attachments/48433/Open11_Hybrid_Space.pdf

bests,
Eric

-

Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside

Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg

[intro]

In this article, media experts Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg
ask us to consider if unquestioned connectivity - the drive to connect
everything to everything, and everyone to everyone by means of
electronic media - is necessarily a good thing. To stimulate ideas,
the authors propose a possible alternative: a practice of "mindful
disconnectionÏ, or rather the "art of selective disconnectivity".
[einde intro]


Although I have devoted decades to observing and using participatory
media - from tools for thought to virtual communities to smart mobs -
I want to propose that disconnecting might well be an important right,
philosophy, decision, technology, and political act in the future.
Howard Rheingold

My involvement with new media arts and tactical media initiatives
such as Next 5 Minutes has always insisted on the right of access and
connection. The only practical form of resistance I can personally
claim credit for is that to date I do not own, nor have ever owned a
mobile phone - quite out of key with most fellow organizers in the
cultural social/political field, but an immense absolution from social
coercion . . . Eric Kluitenberg

- - -

Perhaps the act of mindfully disconnecting specific times, spaces
and situations in our lives from technological mediation ought to
be considered as a practical form of resistance - an act of will
on the part of individual humans as a means of exercising control
over the media in their lives. It remains uncertain whether it is
possible or preferable to disrupt the technological augmentation of
human thought and communication that is becoming available to most
of the earth's population. We are not as convinced as others that
technology is only, primarily, or necessarily a dangerous toxin.
There is a danger in locating technologies' malignancies in the tools
themselves rather than the way people use them and mentally distancing
us from responsibility for the way we use our creative products
might diminishes our power to control our tools. We are increasingly
convinced, however, that we need to resist becoming too well adapted
to our media, even as creators. Perhaps tools, methods, motivations,
and opportunities for making the choice to disconnect - and perceiving
the value of disconnecting in ways of our choosing - might be worth
considering as a response to the web of info-tech that both extends
and ensnares us.

The capacity and freedom to disconnect might well be necessary to
prevent the intoxication of technology from tipping into toxicity:
it seems more effective and

Re: #occupyGezi

[Eric Kluitenberg]

hi,

I've just reposted this one on Tactical Media Files (with permission of the 
author Zeyned Tufekci):

http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=62623

http://technosociology.org/?p=1255

Not exactly 'on the ground', but close...

bests,
eric



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Re: crowd-funding on nettime

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear all, Dmytri,

I think that Felix and Dmytri are making the right point here: the absence of a 
sharing culture around kickstarter and similar projects.

On 4 sep. 2012, at 13:53, Dmytri Kleiner  wrote:

> On 31.08.2012 12:28, Felix Stalder wrote:
>> But in practice, as far as I can see, there are relatively few
>> projects on kickstarter that actually release their products under a
>> free license once they have been financed in advance.
> 
> I have no opinion as far as the moderation policy of crowd-funding
> requests on the list. But certainly feel the topic of crowd-funding
> itself is quite important for us to discus here, both for it's
> positive potentials, but also to clarify it's limitations.
> 
> The fact that projects funded by Kickstarter are not released under a
> free license, and the organisations behind them rarely take social/
> co-operative forms, is part of the reasons that the model is limited
> as far as it's overall economic impact. Crowd-funding does not
> replicate itself.

Yes, in that sense Kickstarter and most other crowd funding platforms are not 
part of a commons culture. They replicate a culture of selfishness that simply 
replaces gated and tightly controlled forms of public funding (academic, 
cultural, state and their 'commissions' / evaluation boards etc.) and the 
self-interest driven structures of the market.

To me this is the most strange and counter-productive aspect of these platforms 
and the projects presented there. If the results cannot be shared, reused, 
remixed, copied, replicated in whatever form then what is the point giving them 
my hard earned money? Just to see them end up behind another pay-wall? 
To me that sounds rather non-sensical. 

On the positive side: It could also be a niche for someone to jump into, to 
create a crowd funding platform for the commons, where sharing the results of 
your project is a precondition for including and presenting your project. This 
can set off an autocatalytic process of exponential value creation, not just 
economic and monetary, but also social, and cultural.

It also stops the plethora of senseless 'make some bucks the easy way' type of 
projects - within a commons environment the only things that sell well are 
things that create an identifiable added value. This kind of self-cleansing 
systems would be a blessing, and we wouldn't have to bother anymore about 
discussing 'preferred placement' of the most profitable (read: most effective 
rip-off) projects on Kickstarter et. all.

I.e. 'Crowd-Funding the Commons' - I would be all for that!

bests,
Eric




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Charting Hybridised Realities: Tactical Cartographies for a densified present

[Eric Kluitenberg]

 large these ties and linkages are still extra-institutional, largely 
informal, and because of their radically dispersed make up and their 
'affective' constitution highly unstable. Political institutions have not even 
begun assembling an adequate response to these new emergent political 
constellations (other than traditional repressive instruments of strategic 
power, i.e. evictions, arrests, prohibitions). Given the structural 
inequalities that fuel the different strands of protest the longer term 
effectiveness of these measures remains highly uncertain. The institutional 
linkages at the moment seem mostly limited to anti-institutional contestation 
on the part of protestors and repressive gestures of strategic authority. The 
truly challenging pr
 oposition these new transnational linkages suggest, however, is their movement 
to bypass the nested hierarchies of vertically integrated power structures in a 
horizontal configuration of social organisation. They link up a bewildering 
array of local groups, sites, networks, geographies, and cultural contexts and 
sensitivities, taking seriously for the first time the networked space as a new 
'frontier zone' (Sassen) where the new constellations of lateral transnational 
politics are going to be constructed.

Charting the layered densities of hybrid space

Hybrid Space is discontinuous. It's density is always variable, from place to 
place, from moment to moment. Presence of carrier signals can be interrupted or 
restored at any moment. Coverage is never guaranteed. The economics of the 
wireless network space is a matter of continuous contestation, and transmitters 
are always accompanied by their own forms of electromagnetic pollution 
(electrosmog). Charting and navigating this discontinuous and unstable space, 
certainly for social and political activists, is therefore always a challenge. 
Some prominent elements in this cartography are emerging more clearly, however: 
  

- connectivity: presence or absence of the signal carrier wave is becoming an 
increasingly important factor in staging and mediating protest. Exclusive 
reliance on state and corporate controlled infrastructures thus becomes 
increasingly perilous.

- censorship: censorship these days comes in many guises. Besides the continued 
forms of overt repression (arrests, confiscations, closures) of media outlets, 
new forms are the excessive application of intellectual property rights regimes 
to weed out unwarranted voices from the media landscape, but also highly 
effective forms of  dis-information and information overflow, something that 
has called the political efficacy of a project like WikiLeaks emphatically into 
question.

- circumvention: Great Information Fire Walls and information blockages are 
obvious forms of censorship, widely used during the Arab protests and common 
practice in China, now also spreading throughout the EU (under the guise of 
anti-piracy laws). These necessitate an ever more sophisticated understanding 
and deployment of internet censorship circumvention techniques, an 
understanding that should become common practice for contemporary activists. [9]

- attention economies: attention is a sought after commodity in the 
informational society. It is also fleeting. (Media-) Activists need to become 
masters at seizing and displacing public attention. Agility and mobility are 
indispensable here.

- public imagination management: Strategic operators try to manage public 
opinion. Activists cannot rely on this strategy. They do not have the means to 
keep and maintain public opinion in favour of their temporary goals. Instead 
activists should focus on 'public imagination management' - the continuous 
remembrance that another world is possible. 

Beyond semiotic corruption: A perverse subjectivity

The immersion in extended networks of affect that now permeate both embodied 
and mediated spaces introduces a new and inescapable corruption of 
subjectivity. Critical theory already taught us that we cannot trust 
subjectivity. However, the excessive self-mediation of protestors on the public 
square has shown that a deep desire for subjective articulation drives the 
manifestation in public. The dynamic is underscored further by upload 
statistics of video platforms such as youtube that continue to outpace the 
possibility for the global population to actually see and witness these 
materials. 

Rather than dismissing subjectivity it should be embraced. This requires a new 
attitude 'beyond good and evil', beyond critique and submission. A new perverse 
subjectivity is able to straddle the seemingly impossible divide between 
willing submission to various forms of corporate, state and social coercion, 
and vital social and political critique and contestation. It's maxim here: 
Relish your own commodification, embrace your perverse subjectivity, in order 
to escape the perversion of subjectivity.

Eric Kluiten

Review of Josephine Bosma's, Nettitudes: Let's Talk Net Art (2011)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

Here is a review of the excellent book of Josephine Bosma, Nettitudes: Let's 
Talk Net Art, which came out late in 2011, written for OPEN, Journal on Art and 
the Public Domain. It was a pleasure to write this review as this book finally 
offers a serious consideration of the Net Art phenomenon as an artistic and 
cultural genre, without overly ideological biases towards or against the 
contemporary arts world, nor framing it as a socio/political occurrence. The 
kind of book Net Art deserves and a useful contribution to a serious discussion 
of this artistic genre, in my opinion.

Reproduced here with kind permission of the journal editors.

Best wishes,

Eric

-- 

Review of Josephine Bosma's, Nettitudes: Let's Talk Net Art (2011)

by Eric Kluitenberg


Nettitudes, the new book by Josephine Bosma, is an important contribution to 
the often confusing and unbalanced discussion about the Internet and 
contemporary art. This contribution becomes especially clear from what the book 
does not do. First of all, Bosma does not try to offer a historical overview of 
the phenomenon that she calls 'net art'. She also indicates clearly why it is 
difficult to mark out this area unequivocally, for there are widely differing 
views as to how the interaction between the Internet and contemporary art 
should be interpreted. Indeed, net art must in the first place be seen in a 
broader context than that of contemporary art, because the development of this 
'genre' cannot be seen separately from the various forms of network culture 
with which it sometimes partly converges or by which it is influenced. 

Moreover, Bosma does not wish to call net art a discipline or movement, as the 
entire terrain is too diverse and heterogeneous for that, and also has too much 
of a cross-disciplinary character. Nor is it a good idea to have net art purely 
coincide with the medium of the Internet, which itself can hardly be described. 
When the same problem is approached from an art theoretical point of view, 
limiting net art to a particular medium is also absolutely absurd. Bosma 
herself refers to Rosalind Krauss, the American art theorist, who in her famous 
essay 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' argued that contemporary art has 
wrested itself from the yoke of the medium – it has entered an 'expanded field' 
in which every material or medium can be appropriated, but to which the 'work' 
can never be reduced.

That does not mean that the medium as a category can simply be shoved aside. 
This would lead to a simplistic dichotomy between conceptualism versus 
materialism – a false contradiction, according to Bosma, which would only work 
counter-productively in trying to better understand the phenomenon she 
investigates. What is of primary importance for most of the works that fall 
under the term 'net art' is a good understanding of the network culture from 
which they spring: the interactions that artists have online with one another 
and with the public. Bosma furthermore points out that net art does not only 
refer to art that takes place in one way or another on the Internet and on the 
screen. It can also concern work that is directly inspired by the new realities 
that the Internet and online cultures create, but whose manifestation takes 
place entirely off-line, separately from the Internet.

Therefore, the definition she uses to describe net art reads in its shortest 
form as: art that is rooted in or based on Internet cultures. This way, she 
prevents an arbitrary broadening of the concept, for only works which cannot be 
seen separately from the cultures that have developed around the Internet can 
legitimately be considered net art. With this definition, it is clear that the 
phenomenology, logic and structure of the Internet cannot be bypassed when 
coming up with an adequate description of net art. No more than can net art be 
reduced to a technological genre.

According to Bosma, it is hard to give a good description of this heterogeneous 
and cross-disciplinary field and introduce some structure into the discussion, 
but not impossible. In order to get a grasp of the material, she introduces 
five key concepts by which the vast majority of the works that she calls net 
art can be understood: Code / Flow / Screen / Matter / Context. 

She uses 'Code' to look at work that primarily is aimed at the technical 
infrastructure and software that form the underpinnings of the Internet. This 
is the most abstract category, accounting for the fact that the Internet in 
fact rests upon a series of agreements set down in technical protocols. The 
fact that interesting artistic experiments are being carried out in precisely 
this inaccessible area indicates the depth of the artistic research behind 
those experiments. Bosma unlocks this hermetic area with a clear description of 
the classical project 'Web Stalk

Re: Media Squares: On the new forms of protest and their media, int. seminar, Friday September 30, Amsterdam

[Eric Kluitenberg]

 that 
> communication intensifies as the affective and bodily dimension of thoughts 
> unfolds to make worlds that cannot be perceived on a computer screen, a 
> radio, a TV set. Such communication is not truer nor more authentic than 
> mediated communication. It is simply richer as it contains a kind of 
> information that has not been reduced to a set of probabilities, that 
> mobilizes the five senses, and in which signal and noise have not been 
> separated.

Here is where I somewhat diverge from your point of view. I would emphasise the 
interconnectedness of the mediated and the embodied. That for me is the true 
richness of the current context. One could make an argument that any lived 
space is always hybrid (and always has been) in that different kinds of spatial 
and temporal logics are at work there that create temporary connection points 
between localised points of contact and translocal flows, for instance trade 
flows, travelling salesmen, cities built at the banks of rivers or at the coast 
to enable direct access to transport and trade flows over water, the kinds of 
social and cultural exchange that happen there as a result of this positioning, 
military and other type of interactions that reshape the local context - and 
more.

The thing that has really changed with the radical proliferation of media 
technologies, network technologies and now mobile media is that the density of 
these hybrid spaces has sharply increased, combined with the element of 
electric speed of course. This can be a trap (traceability) as well as a 
possibility (agency), and I have argued quite often that activists need to be 
aware of this new spatial logic to be able to put it to their advantage.

The theme issue Hybrid Space (Open - Journal for Art and the Public Domain) 
that we made in 2006 deals with these questions and is still available free and 
in full for download, a.o. via the Open website:
www.skor.nl/eng/publications/item/open-11-hybrid-space-how-wireless-media-are-mobilizing-public-space?single=1

So for me the question at the Media Squares seminar is very much how activists 
in these different contexts are dealing with this increased density of (hybrid) 
space.


> All of this is to say that if Media Squares are becoming the event of our 
> times, then such an event calls for new modes of reading its emerging 
> properties. Perhaps it even calls for a relocation of our conferences and 
> programs in the very Media Squares we are beginning to approach, as scholars 
> and activists, from many different angles.
> 
> Cheers,
> Snafu

Absolutely, but it's not just us theorists / scholars who are holding their 
debates. There is an enormous amount of debate going on on these squares, 
working groups, committees, singular voices, dissent and agreement, conflict 
and temporary resolutions - in that sense 'they' don't need 'us' - but I have a 
specific interest in questioning the density of media layers that permeates 
these squares, because I believe that the experiences gained from the 
background of tactical media (against which we are holding this gathering) can 
help to better understand some of these dynamics.

Thank you for these important comments, much appreciated and most helpful to 
clarify some of the urgent issues on the table.
Pity we can't 'beam you over' for a day to Amsterdam...

best wishes,
Eric

> On 9/14/11 7:08 PM, Eric Kluitenberg wrote:
>> A  N  N  O  U  N  C  E  M  E  N  T
>>
>> Media Squares
 <...>


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Media Squares: On the new forms of protest and their media, int. seminar, Friday September 30, Amsterdam

[Eric Kluitenberg]

A  N  N  O  U  N  C  E  M  E  N  T

Media Squares

On the new forms of protest and their media


Social protest has become almost inseparably linked to a plethora of media 
images and messages distributed via internet, mobile phones, social media, 
internet video platforms and of course traditional media outlets such as 
newspapers, radio and television. A popular category to have emerged recently 
is the 'twitter-revolution'. In almost all cases (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, London) 
the role of the platform turned out to be less than essential in retrospect. 
Protests mostly manifested on the streets and particularly the public squares 
('Take the Square'). Deeply rooted blogger-networks did however play a mayor 
role, preparing the protests that have now been dubbed the "Arabian Spring'. 
And internet played a crucial role in the organisation and co-ordination of the 
European 'anti-austerity' protests (Spain, Greece, UK, Italy).

This international seminar brings together theorists, artists, designers, 
activists and media specialists to develop a critical analysis of the new forms 
of social protest and their media dimension. The program is divided into two 
blocks. The first block focuses on an in-depth analysis of the evolving 
WikiLeaks-saga, while the second block will examine the remarkable string of 
protests in the Mediterranean region. These discussions will be interrupted at 
times by startling artistic interventions in current social and political 
debates.

Participants in the program are: Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven), Geert 
Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures, INC), Aalam Wassef (Ahmad Sherif), Omar 
Robert Hamilton (Mosireen / Tahrir Cinema, Cairo) Nat Muller (independent 
curator), David Garcia (Chelsea College), Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith 
Colleges / Blog Theory), X.net Democracia Real Ya - Barcelona, Gahlia Elsrakbi 
(Foundland), Nadia Plesner (Darfurnica), Florian Conradi and Michelle 
Christensen (stateless plug-in), Sami Ben Gharbia (Global Voices - tbc).

The seminar is part of an on-going research into Tactical Media, the fusion of 
art, media, politics and cultural activism, centred around the "Tactical Media 
Files", an on-line documentation resource of Tactical Media practices 
world-wide.
[ www.tacticalmediafiles.net ]

Doors open: 10.00
Start Program: 10.30 uur
End Program: 17.00 uur

Program Overview:

10.30 - Opening / Introduction: Eric Kluitenberg (Tactical Media Files / De 
Balie)

Part I - Repositioning WikiLeaks

11.00 - 11.20 - Presentation: Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven)
11.20 - 11.30 - Responses
11.30 - 11.45 - Discussion

11.45 - 12.05 - Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures)
12.05 - 12.15 - Responses
12.15 - 12.30 - Discussion

Respondents: 
Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges / Blog Theory), David Garcia 
(Chelsea College of Art & Design)

12.30 - 12.45 - Artist presentation: Nadia Plesner - Darfurnica

13.00 - 14.00 - Lunch break

Part II - Revolution in the Mediterranean

14.00 - 14.20 - Presentation: Aalam Wassef (Ahmad Sherif)
14.20 - 14.30 - Responses
14.30 - 14.45 - Discussion

14.45 - 15.05 - Presentation: Omar Robert Hamilton (Mosireen / Tahrir Cinema)
15.05 - 15.15 - Responses
15.15 - 15.30 - Discussion

Respondents:
Ghalia Elsrakbi (Foundland), Nat Muller (Independent Curator), Sami Ben Gharbia 
(Global Voices - tbc)

15.30 - 15.45 - Artist Presentation: Florian Conradi and Michelle Christensen 
(stateless plug-in)

15.45 - 16.00 - Coffee break

16.00 - 16.20 - Skype session with X.net Democracia Real Ya, Barcelona
16.10 - 16.10 - Responses

16.25 - 17.00 - Closing Discussion

Location:
De Balie
Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10
Amsterdam

Admission: 5 euro (no reductions)
http://debalie.activetickets.com/ProgrammaDetail.aspx?id=24170

Links:

Tactical Media Files: 
www.tacticalmediafiles.net

Tahrir Cinema:
www.cinerevolutionnow.com/2011/07/tahrir-cinema.html

Mosireen:
http://mosireen.org

Take the Square:
http://takethesquare.net

Democracia real Ya!:
www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/manifesto-english/

stateless plug-in:
http://statelessplugin.net

Nadia Plesner - Darfurnica:
www.nadiaplesner.com/Website/darfurnica.php


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Tracing the Ephemeral: Tactical Media and the Lure of the Archive

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

The following short text was written together with David Garcia at the
occasion of the start of the Tactical Media Files Blog, which was launched
a short while ago. The text repositions some ideas about the Tactical Media
phenomenon and the relevance of the term today, as well as its inherent
contradictions. We focus in particular on the aims of the Tactical Media
Files as a documentation resource for the practices of tactical media, and
the problems this inevitably invites.

The Blog can be found at:
http://blog.tacticalmediafiles.net

The Tactical Media Files website can be found at:
www.tacticalmediafiles.net

Enjoy the read!

bests,
Eric



Tracing the Ephemeral: Tactical Media and the Lure of the Archive

by David Garcia and Eric Kluitenberg


 "Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and
 media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged
 everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political
 struggles.  This "new media" activism was based on the insight that
 the long-held distinction between the 'street' (reality) and the
 'media' (representation) could no longer be upheld.  On the contrary,
 the media had come to infuse all of society. 


 To challenge dominant (strategic) structures in society, it was
 necessary to develop new (tactical) means of producing and
 distributing media. Not a specialised task separate from the social
 movements, but a key activity around which social movements could
 coalesce." [1]

 (From "About the Tactical Media Files", October, 2008)



In 2003 media theorist McKenzie Wark wrote ?Tactical media  has been a
productive rhetoric, stimulating a lot of interesting new work.  But like
all rhetorics, eventually its coherence will blur, its energy will
dissipate. There's a job to do to make sure that it leaves something
behind, in the archive, embedded in institutions, for those who come
after.? [2] 

The Tactical Media Files, operating as a repository of ?traces? of
experience,  knowledge and tactics goes some way to answering this call for
?something to  be left behind in the archive?. But the archival must feed a
living stream of practice. And so McKenzie  Wark?s text requires some
qualification, nearly two decades after its initial  articulation the
rhetorical energy of the tactical has not entirely  ?dissipated or
blurred?. Though full of contradictions Tactical Media has remained
strangely persistent. In part because it is more than a rhetoric it is
above all a practice. In the era of WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring it is
clear that rumours of its passing have been greatly exaggerated. The fusion
of smart encryption, smart phone movies and social networks transmitting
and receiving in real-time has redefined tactical media from ?contingent
and local? to being no less contingent but now, certainly global.

The opening sentence of The ABC of Tactical Media (1997)  remains accurate
"Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media,
made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms
of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by
groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider
culture". Tactical media is literally "what happens", it is factual,
indexical, pragmatic, something that can be observed, an outcome of the way
certain processes in society and culture connect to evolving technological
infrastructures.

Tactical Media activities have the greatest impact when two apparently
contradictory, imperatives are, not so much resolved, as held in dynamic
equilibrium. On the one hand there is the imperative to ?engage the
unbreakable link between representation and politics? (CAE) and on the
other hand the recognition that the politics of representation ?are badly
adapted to an understanding of the increasingly infrastructural nature of
communications in a world of digital media? (Matthew Fuller. Towards an
Evil Media Studies). [3]

As for this Tactical Media Files  - it is a documentation tool for these
ephemeral and fleeting processes - it is not an anthropological
undertaking, because it participates actively in what it documents. It is
not a science, not an institution, but much more of a tool, an
intervention, but one with more long-term aims. More practically we want to
create something of a memory, however incomplete, of the practices of
tactical media, knowing that these practices are always in a hurry to 'move
on'. .

Tactical Media has always existed in an uncomfortable space between a
fluidity of practice that by its nature resisted or outright refused to be
named, and the recognition of constantly being 'saddled with designations'
by those who are uncomfortable with the unnamed (CAE). More than a desire
this fluidity of

Re: The Tactics of Camping / tactical abandonment of the media apparatuses (disconnectivity)

[Eric Kluitenberg]

l phones, wireless data networks, 
rfid and the lot), in other words as the density or thickness of hybrid space 
increases so does the traceability - and disconnectivity becomes increasingly 
difficult, if not completely impossible. This is both a technological and a 
political question.

In 2006 I asked Howard Rheingold to think along about this problem, at a time 
when I was still proud not to have and never to have owned a mobile phone (now 
I have an iphone - it became in a way inescapable to give up my luddite-ish 
wireless stance). Howard was completely surprised about this suggestions (and I 
was surprised about his surprise) - he wrote me back that for over 30 years he 
had thought about questions how to make people and things connect, and never 
really seriously engaged in the question how to make things (and people) 
disconnect. We then wrote an entertaining and I still think relevant essay for 
the theme issue on Hybrid Space I referenced in the blog post, which can be 
found on-line (links bellow). It's called "Mindful Disconnection - 
Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside".

Open 12 Hybrid Space (the whole issue): 
http://www.skor.nl/article-2883-en.html

Direct link to the text (pdf file):
http://www.skor.nl/id.php/RHEINGOLDKLUITENENGELSOPEN11

The Syrian experience (and elsewhere) to me seems a case in point as to why it 
is so important to question (and strengthen) the possibilities for 
disconnectivity.

Thanks again for raising these points, and sorry for my delayed response.

Bests,
Eric


> Also, my first post on nettime. Hi all!
> 
> Helge
> 
> 
> Am 20.06.2011 um 16:09 schrieb Eric Kluitenberg:
> 
>> dear nettimers,
>> 
>> I just posted this short text on the newTactical Media Files blog, a first 
>> attempt to reflect on the remarkable street protests (the 'movement of the 
>> squares') from Tahrir to Puerta del Sol, from Tunis  > to Athens and beyond. 
>> It seems slowly possible to start taking this discussion a bit further than 
>> the necessary mobilisation statements witnessed so far.
> <...> http://blog.tacticalmediafiles.net/?p=106



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The Tactics of Camping

[Eric Kluitenberg]

dear nettimers,

I just posted this short text on the newTactical Media Files blog, a first 
attempt to reflect on the remarkable street protests (the 'movement of the 
squares') from Tahrir to Puerta del Sol, from Tunis to Athens and beyond. It 
seems slowly possible to start taking this discussion a bit further than the 
necessary mobilisation statements witnessed so far.

http://blog.tacticalmediafiles.net/?p=106

bests,

Eric

-

The Tactics of Camping

by Eric Kluitenberg, June 20, 2011.


Yes We Camp!

Michel de Certeau observed that the tactics employed by the 'weak' are always 
on the watch for opportunities, and that these opportunities must be seized "on 
the wing".  Tactics, de Certeau writes, have no base at their disposal from 
where they can capitalise on their advantages, prepare their expansions, or 
secure their independence from circumstances. Instead tactics 'insinuate' 
themselves into the places of others. They operate on the terrain of strategic 
power, 'fragmentarily', without taking it over in its entirety. Whatever these 
tactics win, they cannot keep. [1] 

Hence, tactics are always nomadic.

The Spanish elections of 2011 certainly presented one such opportunity to 
appropriate the moment and a strategic space tactically. The spill-over of 
resentment over youth unemployment, political inaction and incompetence, and 
the continuing spectre of austerity sparked a spontaneous anti-movement;  the 
Indignado, the outraged. The Indignado started massive street protests taking 
the city squares in cities all over Spain by camping on them, repurposing the 
strategic space for civic deliberation and protest.

Perhaps most remarkable about this 'anti-movement' is precisely its refusal to 
be or become a movement. In their manifesto for Real Democracy they write: "We 
are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to 
study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work 
hard every day to provide a better future for those around us." [2] And in the 
call for nothing less than  #Globalrevolution the initiators identify 
themselves as "the the outraged, the anonymous, the voiceless", who no longer 
gaze at vertical power, but instead look sideways, horizontally:  "No political 
party, association or trade union represents us. Nor do we want them to, 
because each and every one of us speaks for her or himself." [3]

When scrutinising the websites and resources that are connected to the central 
anchoring point, http://takethesquare.net/, no final set of principles or 
demands can be found, except for a call to involvement in working towards a 
'better world' that puts 'people and nature' before 'economic interests', and 
>useful documents< that can guide the process of bottom-up, collective decision 
making, avoiding the need for leadership or 'organisation'. "The time has come 
for the woman and man in the street to take back their public spaces to debate 
and build a new future together." [4]

http://takethesquare.wordpress.com/useful-documents/

Camping Blues

An important question is where to locate your camp? The city square is for 
obvious reasons a well chosen site. As Greek activist Christos Gionanopoulos 
maintains, "democracy is born in the square", the classical site for a people's 
assembly. In his view the 'movement of the squares' has initiated a startlingly 
new political culture, one that  its open, participatory, and offers a 
'directly democratic way of organising and functioning'.  "Within a single week 
it has given birth to a political culture of a different type, one that 
literally overcomes all known models of organising and struggle to date", 
Gionanopoulos maintains. [5]

There is a deeper sense of media awareness in this (anti-) 'movement of the 
squares'. Gionanopoulos writes: "..the stance of the movement toward Mass Media 
is also differentiated, with the refusal to engage with them, not even by way 
of issuing press releases. With the screening of what part of its procedures 
and organising is photographed or taped, and most importantly, with the 
creation of the movement's own channels of communication — with its main 
website www.real-democracy.gr, being the only medium-voice of its decisions." 
But obviously, the well-chosen site, the public city square derives much of its 
power from its public visibility. It is certainly impossible, and also highly 
undesirable for this public spectacle not to be picked up by mass and 
mainstream media. In fact the public camps on city squares are one of the most 
mediagenic forms of popular protest to have emerged in recent years, from 
Tahrir to Puerta del Sol, and this status has undeniably facilitated their 
international dispersal

Fwd: Response New Media & Art Institutions to Governmental Cuts

[Eric Kluitenberg]

FYI - joint statement of new media cuklture / arts organisations in The 
Netherlands:

From: V2_ 
Date: June 17, 2011 10:52:01 GMT+02:00

Response New Media & Art Institutions to Governmental Cuts

Source of innovation is eliminated
http://www.v2.nl/news/response-to-governmental-cuts

Netherlands, June 15 2011

Dear Mr Zijlstra
Dear Members of the House of Representatives

One of the many decisions in your arts policy paper “More than quality; a new
vision on arts policy”, is the liquidation of the total infrastructure for new 
media
and art. The media arts & technology sector, which has acquired a place in arts
policy in the past 8 years, has been abolished. The socalled 'development
institutions': STEIM, Waag Society, V2_, Submarine Channel, WORM and
Mediamatic are losing their structural funding. In addition to that the 
Netherlands
Media Art Institute, a visual arts institution which also works in the media 
arts field,
loses its government funding. These structural institutional resources will be
rerouted into a new Fund for the Creative Industry, which's mission is to 
stimulate
the social and economic value of the creative industry as a whole.

New media art is an independent art discipline

The existance of new media as an independent art discipline, including artistic
production, audiences, (inter)national networks, and events, is completely 
denied
in this proposed new arts policy.

New media art is a discipline which questions and researches the technological
developments and challenges of our times, and designs new applications for
these issues. It has its own idiom and art practice. It is an independent 
discipline
sustaining independent thematics, international networks of media labs, 
festivals,
publications and presentations. The Dutch model of these cooperating new media
labs with crossovers into other fields (social, educational, economical) has 
been
an exemplary model since years. The above mentioned 'development institutions'
are internationally renowned, part of vast international networks, and 
contribute
to the position of the Netherlands in the fields of new media and art.

Paradox: punished for success

Like no other arts field, new media art makes connections to other fields. Its 
R&D
functions are relevant towards the total field of culture, as well as heritage 
and
media. Exchange with science is continually growing, it plays a vital role in 
the
innovation of social domains, and has a large impact on the current renewal of
education. The paradox now is that new media art is widely acknowledged and
seen as very relevant, but its source: artistic research including its audience
outreach, autonomous art prodcution and international network, will now be
discontinued.

Project based vs structural

The policy paper indicates a choice for a project based way of working, and for
that reason a total cut in institutional funding for R&D. This is a very 
remarkable
way of reasoning as R&D activities need long term commitment in order to be
able to develop from experiment to result. It also requires excellent networking
and a sustainable infrastructure, including complex relationships to social 
fields,
business and science. The new media institutions like no other have paved the
way for such cooperations, and have shown that arts, sciences, business and
society in general can work together in meaningful coalitions. International
cooperations that have been opened up to Dutch partners also exist thanks to
long term policy. With the abolishment of structural support of these new media 
art
institutions, the basis is washed away and it will be impossible in the future 
to
enter into long term commitments. Like European funding for and participation in
research and projects, and participation in national research programs.
A project based way of working interferes with continuity.

Talent development

The new Fund for the Creative Industry is also supposed to work on talent
development in a project based manner. This is contrary to the needs of the
educational field where there is a demand for structural connections. The new
media and art institutions have acknowledged that and play an important role in
development of talent and skills through the programs they have set up
together with vocational institutions and universities. They also offer 
internships
and work with PHD students. The very same sustainable long term structures are
necessary here in order to be able to structurally work within education.

The way the Fund for the Creative Industry should work!

New media art can only contribute to the mission of enlarging the social and
economic value of the creative industry, in case the Fund is enabled to:

(1) issue longer term institutional subsidies and

(2) means are explicitely made available for artistic research, artistic 
production 
and audience based activities

We sincerely hope that you will involve the new media and art institutions in 
the
set up and creation of the new Fun

Alternative economies and the funding cutbacks + a few words on the situation in NL

[Eric Kluitenberg]

nettimers,

Soory for cross-posting. This comment on a huge discussion currently waging on 
the Spectre listfolows up on the ISEA discussions and the waning of public 
infarstructures for experimental and media arts, etc..

I thought this was relevant enough to also post it here, it's just a sketch, a 
line in flight so to say...

bests,
eric

---

Dear Spectrites,

A fascinating discussion is emerging in (late) response to the funding cutbacks 
in the UK, NL, and now Slovenia. Without wanting to take anything away from 
what has been said so far, I would like to introduce a slightly different angle 
to the discussion. 

Because this is all still in becoming, it necessarily has to be sketchy.

That public funding for arts, especially the experimental arts and media arts / 
networked arts, are under increasing pressure is not really new - the scale and 
acceleration of austerisation is, obviously. Seeing for a long time the 
shifting funding priorities (from an 'arts' or slightly more autonomous 
designation to the 'economistic' notion of 'creative industries - a bit more 
about that in respect to the situation in The Netherlands at the end) it was 
clear that alternative models of sustainability for the kind of practices that 
are at least close to my heart should be probed and developed.

In 2008 we started this discussion around the rapid growth of on-line 
collections of audio visual material and their public accessibility with the 
Economies of the Commons conference series, inspired by the term that Felix 
Stalder had originally suggested to us. The conferences provide a relevant 
constellation of heritage, archive, as well as independent initiatives, 
producers, cultural and arts organisations and representatives of (public) 
broadcasting. This is an on-going discussion and exploration.

The idea in rough terms is to investigate how in view of the unreliability of 
public support structures (as has become abundantly clear now, but remember we 
started this discussion in 2007/8, alternative support structures can be 
constructed for these kind of experimental and public access practices and 
resources that still retain the ideals of accessibility, of publicness, of 
sharing, of free exchange (free as in unfettered - not 'gratis').

Documentation of the first ECommons conference:
www.debalie.nl/dossierpagina.jsp?dossierid=208416

Website of ECommons 2:
www.ecommons.eu

There are different layers to this undertaking. One important step is to 
understand what kind and how value is created in situations where no immediate 
transaction takes place when having access to the resources, productions, 
gatherings, exchanges we are studying. Here the figure of the commons (a highly 
anglosaxonian notion and not 'common' in The Netherlands at all), comes 
squarely into view. It is possible through this notion of shared resources, the 
commons, to tap into a rich experience and body of both practical work and 
excellent (economic) theory that has been developed in the commons movement 
suis generis, by a.o. Ollstrom and Hess and many others.

The figure of the commons identifies a third economic logic, next to that of 
the Market and Public (State) support, that is highly productive in a multitude 
of situations to resolve problems of access to resources, knowledge, skills, 
means of production, reputation building (important for the general art economy 
/ market that is essentially a reputation economy), distribution 
infrastructures and more. The commons is not an ant-thesis to the market, nor 
is it replacement for public support structures, much rather it is 
complementary. Current debates about crowd funding that have suddenly become 
popular (surprise!?) are hopelessly beside the point, they reflect the simple 
logic of established cultural institutions who see their public funding go down 
and want to compensate this monetary loss simply by extracting more money from 
'the crowd' - rather than rethinking the nature of their own practice and ways 
of working. We can see that this will lead nowhere as 'the crowd' will no
 t be willing to supplement dwindling public arts funds, meanwhile not getting 
anything new and not getting a stake or a new kind of involvement in the 
organisations and their cultural output. In other words, this short term 
strategy amounts to the same as simply raising the prices of your ticket sales, 
and we know what the result of this will be, raise them too much and the 
audience will stay away.

After two conferences (2008 and 2010) and extended discussions in the local and 
international environment the main observation that I take from the Economies 
of the Commons debate is that new realities are forcing cultural organisations 
to both rethink how they work and how they raise support for their activities. 
Replacing public funding with a commons based revenue stream will not work, 
while complete commercialisation will de the death trap for what makes this 
cultural activ

Re: ISEA 2011 fees

[Eric Kluitenberg]

dear nettimers,

I've been tempted to enter this discussion, then thought too many people 
already have said everything, but I see that the discussion has continued 
traction. I would like to try and weigh in here from a more practical - 
organiser - perspective, and reflect on issues of scale and economics of an 
event like ISEA. This is an issue that has occupied me for quite some time now, 
and I haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory solution.

First about ISEA itself. I was involved in the first two editions of ISEA (1988 
/ 1990), the first while still a student and working for a university students 
cultural centre where I organised a week long electronic arts festival in 
conjunction with ISEA, and then in 1990 in the organisation committee of SISEA. 
As I understood at the time how Wim van der Plas, the founder of ISEA 
understood ISEA, he saw it as an international platform to connect the 
disparate practices of electronic art as an emerging field of 
cross-disciplinary cultural and artistic practice. I think it served that 
purpose to some degree.

There was not much more of an 'ideology' involved, it was a rather pragmatic 
intervention. For my own part I felt deeply dissatisfied by the lack of 
critical engagement with socio/political realities, but also a lack of critical 
approach to the aesthetics of this emerging field and recognised that ISEA was 
not the right structure to engage these issues and therefore looked for them 
elsewhere.

Over the years I've been involved in many larger scale public events, 
festivals, conferences that dealt with media culture, media arts, and 
information politics. In my experience it has become increasingly difficult to 
find support for these larger scale events. In part because of macro-political 
and economic shifts, various so-called 'crises', partly because the emerging 
field became an established field, diversified and lost its novelty (at the 
very least for funders and the wider audience). 

Thirdly, the shift from electronic arts / media arts / new media culture, 
towards the more corporate inclined 'creative industries'-meme has also meant a 
significant shift of funding priorities and opportunities. With the invention 
of the creative industries meme funding agencies, local and national 
governments were suddenly presented with a clear trajectory to invest in that 
yielded seemingly obvious economic benefits, job creation opportunities, and 
prospects for technological innovation, without the 'noise' associated with 
rather opaque 'electronic arts' events, or worse still the unruly aesthetics 
and politics of tactical media.

The bottom-line, electronic arts would henceforth be redirected back to 
traditional arts and culture funding, and theses funding resources are drying 
up exponentially under pressure of austerity measures. In The Netherlands more 
than half of the public funding for living arts practices will be cut in the 
next two to three years, the UK just had its shake out, not to mention what is 
going in the Mediterranean area.



Given the above I don't think that events on the scale of ISEA or the infamous 
Next 5 Minutes festivals (Brian Holmes referenced it earlier) are still 
feasible today. It is one (not the only) reason why the 2003 Next 5 Minutes 4 
festival was the last one. The essence of what Lanfranco stated earlier is that 
in the absence of any decent public funding for this event the fees are the 
only way he can raise the budget required to stage the event. Yes he can look 
at individual cases, but without that backbone revenue the thing won't happen.

I would agree with others who have suggested that in these circumstances it is 
necessary to look at alternative formats for convening relevant events, 
creating meeting points and opportunities for exchange. I have been actively 
looking into that question, not just in theory, but very much in practice. One 
such an attempt was the ElectroSmog Festival held in March 2010, a festival 
conducted entirely in the remote with partners from a variety of places around 
the world, with multiple interconnected physical hubs (public audience spaces) 
and an extensive on-line dimension. That festival format worked technically 
quite well but failed miserably on the social level - it did not bring the 
encounter about that festivals such as Transmediale, Future Everything and ISEA 
do.
For an in-depth reflection on this outcome see: 
www.electrosmogfestival.net/2010/11/28/distance-versus-desire-clearing-the-electrosmog/

So, a distributed on-line gathering just doesn't seem to work. Anybody who can 
prove me wrong on this one, please go ahead and do it. I would gladly be 
disproved, but I fear that what we found at ESmog is sadly what one can expect 
from any of these larger scale on-line gatherings, a lack of 'connection'.

Therefore my intermediate conclusion is that the issue of scale must be 
addressed much more critically. Part of the vibrancy of the early el