[mtp-teoria] text

[dusan]

hi,

english translation of recently discussed text on network culture
coming, thanks a lot to magde with help with translation and
viera and marc levitt and erik smillie for making it fluent
in english :)


------------------------------------

On the culture of networks


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 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 ingores 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
practises 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 a 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 artefacts

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 create new relations or transform existing artefacts. 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, low cost, the media power of the brand, or
omnipresence seem to fail to conceal the origin of a cultural artefact.
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 artefact'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)


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

------------------------------------

any comments welcome of course!


dusan






---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [mtp-teoria] text
From:    "dusan" <dusan at idealnypartner.sk>
Date:    Thu, April 5, 2007 4:57 pm
To:      mtp-teoria at 13m3.sk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


ahojte,

(pardon, got to slovak lingo seas, but will open it up with english
translation soon :)


diky za reakcie, poslem sem o par dni este final verziu,
bez ohladu na to si mozeme dalej samozrejme vymienat maily.

ano, text je najma o socio sietach a z toho vyplyvajucich novych
moznostiach pre tvorbu,

prva cast dava par prikladov na online aktivity a fyzicke akcie,
(ratal som aj s castou o netznetz, node.london a mtp, ale k nej
asi az neskor),
druha ich rozvadza dalej.

v ramci socio sieti porovnavam "tyraniu" a vyhody participacie,
obidve maju svoje miesto, takze nemam zamer ich vyvracat, len dat
vedla seba.

nadvazovanie na prosumers, mass customization, push/pull economics, DIY je
urcite k veci, mozno by boli vhodne prehladovo ako uvodny historicky
background, mozno aj michal c. ma k tomuto nieco povedat? :)

web2 bublina si to u kritikov zatial najviac odnasa za korporatizaciu
internetu, paolo virno a maurizio lazzaroto tvrdia, ze "virtuosic
performance" and "the act of being a speaker" je novou imaterialnou
pracou, trebor scholz o socialnom webe hovori ako o "tovarni bez
stien". o com sa moc nekeca je, ze za pozornost stoja aj technologicky
ovplyvnene networkove veci ktore sa deju niekolko rokov aj "offline" - le
placard, share, dorkbot, barcamp, the upgrade atd.


dusan



On Mon, April 2, 2007 3:13 pm, Palo Fabu&#65533; said:
> mne sa ten text páči, aj keď si myslím, že jeho funkcia je, podobne ako
písal SK, namierená hlavne a skoro výhradne dovnútra komunity, a to tak,
že má potenciál vzbudzovať diskusiu, vyjasňovať pojmy,
> evangelizovať dôležité témy apod.
>
> pre mňa osobne je veľmi zaujímavé konfrontovať s ním práve svoju prácu v
tejto oblasti, koncentrovanú hlavne v prednáške, ktorú budem mať v rámci
mtp na FaVU v Brne a v ktorej sa venujem kultúrnej roli amatéra,
sociálným médiam, "dlhému chvostu" a zasadeniu týchto súčasných
> fenoménov do "pevnej" historickej pôdy prispievajúc tak snáď k ich
zakotveniu do širších kultúrnych súvislostí
>
> našiel som si v tvojom texte veci, o ktorých som nevedel, a ktoré si
budem musieť do budúcna dohľadať, ale ak by som mal predsa len niečo
tvojmu textu vytknúť, tak je to práve nedostatok v jeho zakotvení do
procesov, ktoré prebiehajú už desiatky rokov (prosumers, mass
> customization, push/pull economics, DIY...)
>
> a teraz skôr k obecnej diskusii než k tvojmu textu...
>
> ono sa to môže tváriť ako zjavnosť, ale myslím, že je potrebné
> poukazovať na to, o čom hovorí Olga Goriunova v poslednom Mute (ktorý
si, jak dedukujem podľa textu, čítal), keď si všíma, že ony nové
možnosti Webu 2.0, o ktorých sa dnes nadšene hovorí, sú takpovediac
identické s ideami, ktoré boli podľa Tima Berners-Leeho realizované už
na počiatku www, a že človek s dobrou pamäťou môže namietať, že veď toto
už počul pred desiatimi rokmi, tzn., že pokiaľ otázky i odpovede
vypadajú stále rovnako, rozdiely medzi "Webom 1.0" a Webom 2.0 je treba
hľadať niekde inde... napr. v tom, ako je konštruovaná nami vnímaná
realita, ako sa mení naše trávenie času a obecne akej povahy je dnes
spoločnosť, ktorá bola už pred nástupom www považovaná za mediálne
saturovanú
>
> --
> Palo Fabuš
> palofabus.net
>
> On 4/2/07, dusan <dusan at idealnypartner.sk> wrote:
>>
>> ahojte,
>>
>> spisal som par poznamok pre brozuru multiplace,
>> ocenim akykolvek komentar mne do mailu alebo sem,
>> este kym odidu do tlace o par dni,
>> niekomu z vas som ich uz posielal, diky za doterajsi.
>> text: http://dusan.idealnypartner.sk/o-kulture-sieti.7.rtf
>>
>> dusan
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> mtp-teoria mailing list
>> mtp-teoria at 13m3.sk
>> http://13m3.sk/mailman/listinfo/mtp-teoria
>>
> _______________________________________________
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