On the Culture of Networks
Dušan Barok (SK/CZ/DE)
Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari identify in the opening chapter of Participation: The New Tyranny? (2001) three types of tyranny of participation: firstly, the enduring dominance of multinational agencies and donors in the decision-making which is concealed behind the rhetorics and practice of participation; secondly, the emphasis on participatory practices obscures their limitations, which affirms local differences in power; and thirdly, the dominance of participatory method pushes aside dialogue about other methods of development.
On the Spartakiad of online creativity
Participation, social networking and openness are having a boom time. The market is flooded with free and open interfaces that provide users with the extatic experience of social networking. Online services have become powerful enough to extract the essence of the user’s being from his online preferences and personal politics of attention in order to adjust their services to the suffocating benefit of the individual. Social capital today is earned by headhunting for new „friends“ on MySpace, by taking part in the events in Second Life that will be digged the following day to the top, or by recommending a band that will hit the Top 10 on Last.fm the following week where recommendations are defined by rotation in one’s personal jukebox. Jason Calcanis from Weblogs Inc has proposed that service providers identify the top 5% users and buy their time. For many people the offline world is out.
Hyped web2 portals are being bought for billions and end up in the portfolios of media corporations. Participation in the web2 adventure is an imperative in the online world today. And it’s not just about white Western men – Ségolene Royal campaigns in Second Life, as does the successful black candidate for the American presidency, Barack Obama. In the meantime, activists create protest art in Second Life by portraying life in Iraq. The social web is for all – scholars, businessmen, activists, sex tourists, artists, and so called minorities. Besides the 3D life in SL we also live flat lives on MySpace, Last.fm, YouTube and Flickr. The theses of Cook and Kothari are relevant today for agencies like Linden Research Inc, News Corp, Google Inc, Yahoo Inc. Their portals limit the participation of a user-creator to the communication with other users and to the uploading/downloading content; the user is excluded from decision-making about the future development of the network. The statistics of other users, content distribution rights, and ownership issues of the service itself remain the strategic trade secret of the providers. The social web revolution ignores the democratic configuration of P2P networks and concentrates power tools in the hands of service providers.
On franchising offline creativity
However, network culture is not about moving to the internet, just like media culture was not about moving into the TV studio or cinema. The network revolution is happening offline, too. Share began as a spontaneous music jam in a bar in New York City where a group of local software musicians decided to use the available sound equipment before an evening‘s events. The idea was basically to move the mixing board from the corner of the room to its centre and place the cables with plugs all around the room so that anyone could plug in and out as they wanted. After four years Share has become a regular weekly event held in NYC; sometimes three, sometimes fifteen people show up. Twice it took place at Transmediale and in March, this year, it was imported to Budapest as a week-long workshop in order to promote the expansion of the format to Central and Eastern Europe. It follows a quasi franchising model of distribution with unified promotion (common web page for all Share „branches“) and a bottom-up organisation of particular events by local musicians. The difference lies in its anti-curatorship – content is always determined by the situation and conceptual boundaries do not exist.
Le Placard – a platform for headphone concerts – has been functioning in a similar way. It began in a flat in Paris. Local sound artists and musicians chose the timeslots for their performances. The headphones were a solution for avoiding possible noise disturbances. An added advantage was that multiple artists could play in different rooms at the same time. Bratislava experienced Le Placard twice.
And, it is not only about sound. Glocal workshop-like event formats used for artistic production and social networking are growing in number. The Dorkbot event with its motto "People doing strage things with electricity" expanded from Columbia University to sixty cities and here we talk about creative meetings of geeks.
Common for these networked events is their hobby nature (positive and constructive mindset). Form and presentation are organised globally, while communities and content stay local. The technological setup is by nature digital, which also influences the characteristics of the output, but is also open to analogue instruments, which bring in an exotic flavour.
Back home
What is going on in the culture in our homelands? We need a market, critique, personalities, investments, better education, mobility, people from abroad, quality. Indeed, all of a sudden we realise that a rising living standard also influence the field of cultural production. The dichotomy of a scattered and protesting underground on one hand and the ideological culture on the other is gone and suddenly we face a wide spectrum of attitudes of artists and cultural producers towards the clash of global, traditional and local art. Populist art sometimes feels like socialist realism after a hangover, corporate art searches for the consumers of humour, the artists in search of themselves, market themselves through avantgarde gestures. Social problems seem to be reserved for massmedia spectacles, personal worlds to family TV shows, experimentation with new technological forms to IT companies. The protest and critique that kept the underground united are gone, the intellectual mass has fun and celebrates. Big dreams are already fulfilled and there is no time for the small: the West is OK, the East is too far. Where are the challenges?
We are already facing the „waiting“ cultures and the ability to open the exchange without profit, or exporting our own values, memory or experiences, will not arrive as a gift. Where should we look for artistic practices upon which today’s collaborative art could build so that it does not start over again? Are there any collectives which were not formed so that one could hide himself behind the other and from which the particular voices can be heard clearly? Collectives which do not need to be imitated?
Both-and, neither-nor
Maybe the networks are too "macro" for today. Doesn't a collective with a large number of participants and a tradition of several years look suspicious? Perhaps a look at the fluctuation of the participants, at the diversity of outputs and at the liquid nature of the group as such is more interesting.
Network and openness can be imperatives just like democracy or freedom. The decision for expansion, or the endevour to "build up" the network (for whatever reason) can prove to be counter-productive, and the same goes for the export of the network into new territories. In increasing the efficiency of wide participation, the point of entering the process of formalisation can be critical in a number of fields: development of membership, member fees, periodicity, representatives and defining the organisation against its environment. The consequences are often very similar: the move from realisation of personal motives to planning the activities of the organisation, degradation of the name into a brand, the shift of focus from the creation of new objectives to the sustainability of the organisation. The legal frameworks in Slovakia, Czech Republic and elsewhere are set in favour of this formalisation. A number of groups striving to receive financial support find themselves in a schizophrenic position – between the formal hierarchy on paper, designed for the needs of the state apparatus and informal activity outside of its control. It is not easy to tell whether it is a constructive dualism. But the attempts to bridge it through compromises are real and often result in the disintegration of such structures into divergent interests, abandoning the common starting points and ultimately splitting into new formations.
From the centres of networks
The weight of a network will maybe always rest on the shoulders of several individuals who are more communicative and have a long-term vision, and therefore represent the centres of initiative for others.
Network is also a belief that this can change. What do the networked relations actually bring us? A network can be mapped in a clerk-like manner; in a political view we can identify the interests behind it; in marketing, we can use it for distribution; we can theorise it across disciplines; find it many times in history; and together multiply its value so that in the end somebody buys it.
Network used to have a centre, a central figure. But who cares about tasking others when one can make up one's own tasks, or together with someone else, because he has time since he doesn’t task others either? This does not necessarilly mean the abandonment of long-term vision. But compare the long-term vision of the survival of a brand (whatever it represents) to the duration resulting from individual ends. It is the algorithm which is today the centre and intermediary. We use the software of mobile operators, mailing lists, e-mail servers and web applications for network communication.
Towards networked artifacts
Network provides artists and cultural producers with new and free tools. The framework of networked art today differs from ten years ago. An artist needs not only to create new relations or transform existing artifacts. She does not have to be satisfied with the role of a defender or a witness of social taboo, normality or trends. She does not need to represent others either.
Packaging, advertising, discounts, the media power of the brand, or omnipresence seem to fail to conceal the origin of a cultural artifact. The process of creation is more explicit, we are more exigent and interested in the background of the products we consume. The stories behind them are more readable. We are bored of the show, surface, results. We want to read the decisions taken during the path of an artifact’s creation, in the final product.
Artists and cultural producers thus have a reason to open the process of creation, and make it more transparent so that the viewer can enjoy decoding the final artefact, and even take part in its formation. The audience comes closer to the form of a collective.
Collaborative art does not need mechanisms for attracting an audience, shocks or quality. What use is it when the critic holds her breath and only reveals her ideas when everything is already over? Critique also has its role in a project's phase of conceptualisation. As a viewer, coming to see a performance I sometimes feel like I have missed something. An active experience?
Dusan Barok, 1 April 2007
(Part I)
Thanks to Magda Kobzova, Slavo Krekovic, Palo Fabus, Oliver Rehak, Viera Levitt and others for comments (also) on the mailing list mtp-teoria, http://okno.all2all.org/pipermail/mtp-teoria/2007-April/
Research:
Network culture, http://kyberia.sk/net-cultures
Report from Share, Budapest, http://okno.all2all.org/pipermail/mtp-teoria/2007-March/000065.html, 22 March 2007 |
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