Editorial notice:
This text was written for the upcoming issue in the Acoustic Space series
(No.8), co-published by RIXC centre for new media culture in Riga and the Art
Research Lab of Liepaja University: Following the theme of ENERGY this issue
will look at different social and cultural aspects of energy in the
contemporary human society. It will also investigate the notion of
'sustainability' from various perspectives - artistic, scientific,
technological, architectural, environmental.
(More info soon at the RIXC on-line store: http://rixc.lv/kiosks/ )
The text is an extended version of a talk given at Impakt Festival 2010 Matrix
City, in Utrecht as part of the Superstructural Dependencies Conference,
October 15, 2010.
( www.impakt.nl/index.php/festival/Conferentie_superstructuraldependen )
The on-line release of this new essay coincides with the official launch of the
documentation resources resulting from the ElectroSmog Festival for Sustainable
Immobility, including all full-length webcasts, brought together in an overview
page at:
www.electrosmogfestival.net/documentation
The ElectroSmog festival was organised in March 2010 and organised distributed
over 8 main locations and a host of other connected sites, interconnected via
internet.
The festival was co-ordinated from De Balie, centre for culture and politics in
Amsterdam, and execiuted with the following partners: ADA – Aotearoa Digital
Arts Network, New Zealand / Banff New Media Institute, Banff / Chelsea College
of Art and Design, London / Cool Mediators Foundation, Amsterdam / Engage!
Tactical Media, Utrecht / Eyebeam – Art + Technology Center, New York / Floss
Manuals – Free Manuals for Free Software, (international network) / The Green
Bench, Whanganui, New Zealand / Hivos – Humanist Institute for development
Cooperation, The Netherlands / Medialab Prado, Madrid / m-cult- centre for new
media culture, Helsinki / Muffatwerk – International Center for Arts and
Culture, Munich / REFRAMES, Munich / RIXC – Centre for New Media Culture, Riga.
The radical premise of the festival was to create a truly international event
without anybody travelling or moving around. We found out, however, that our
reliance on telepresence technologies proved a hard bargain for an
international audience event (festival). This essay reflects on the outcomes of
the festival and its implications for the telepresence ideology.
Enjoy!
Eric
Distance versus Desire
Clearing the ElectroSmog
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of
media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for
a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of
telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of
the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical
mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style.
As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy
crisis and collide with severe ecological limits - most prominently in the
intense debate on global warming - citizens and organisations in advanced and
emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring
projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility
is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies.
ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility
The ElectroSmog festival for ‘sustainable immobility’, staged in March 2010
[1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of telepresence and a
radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in
real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging
international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules:
No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join
in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be
organised in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional
functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance,
physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by
mediated encounters.
The festival was organised at a moment when internet-based techniques of
tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live
streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available
for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of
futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be
developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of
real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public
assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that
had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
