neural.it
from http://www.neural.it/nnews/databrowser01economisingculturee.htm
The devastating social consequences of the post-fordist economical models had led to the flooding of work time in our private spaces, and this is one of the fundamental themes of come cultural resistance practices, including the ones that relates to the IT technologies. One of the most interesting branches in this field is the creation of micro economical models, that go against the mainstream. These models can experiment the (material and immaterial) good's exchange feasibility on small communities, founding on an direct involvement. These critic methods, that span from tactical media to the marketing deconstruction's models, are actively confronted with the dissolution and de-territorialization of the work, obtained through the same computer networks and terminals (mobile phones and laptops) and in most of the cases this lead to devastating consequences. This model's critic way of thinking is expressed in this text through a wide spectrum of alternatives, founded on the same networks and its endless possibilities of creating temporary information infrastructures.
neural.it
from http://www.neural.it/nnews/databrowser02engineeringculturee.htm
The immaterial production does not only have exquisitely political (precariousness, mobility, real time...), or aesthetic (manipulability, coding, de-location...) implications. It contains the conflict generated by the capitalism, that struggles for applying to immaterial goods the old, consolidated production schemes for physical goods. The opposition to this process it's not only a question of refusing it, but it is especially achieved intervening in the capital dynamics, identifying the many weak points that are still attackable. The projects that reverse engineering the sweating processes, building freeing tools, or tools that conflicts with the capital logics are generating a quick outcry in the network nodes. The social consequences are proportional to these tool's engineering, and how they are able to fit in the usual workings, causing different results in the whole production chain. Here 'engineering' means production awareness and direct intervention in the project logic. This approach's effects in determining reality can be read between the lines in this book's essays. They describe the propulsory thrust that mutates a passive user in an active and thinking node in his own system.
Rhizome Net Art News July 2005 (Marina Vishmidt)
Towards a Networked Modernism
from http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz?×tamp=20050701
The Data Browser series, published by Autonomedia under a Creative Commons license, has so far emerged as two text compilations. The first volume, Economising Culture: On The (Digital) Culture Industry, came out in late 2004 and Engineering Culture: On the Author as (Digital) Producer has just hit a distribution system near you. Edited by Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa and (only vol. 1) Anya Lewin, the series intends to situate recent changes in art and activism in historical contexts as well as relate them to contemporary trends and agendas. Reflections from agents in the field like the Yes Men, Cummings & Lewandowska, Armin Medosch and Matthew Fuller have been marshaled to constitute the first 'browser,' conceived as a tool of engaged wandering rather than bored consumption. Data Browser 02 addresses Walter Benjamin's trope of author as producer to see if and how its premise of cultural activism through teaching and parti! cipation holds up in an age of networked systems, and the upcoming 03 will address the de-materialisation of the curator within her landscape of shifting new media curatorial roles and styles.
Trebor Scholz
The Truth About Networks: Between the total hell of networked, salaried labor and the promises of the commons
from http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/idc/2005/10/the_truth_about.html
In short succession the first two in a series of publications called "DATA browser" were just released. Both start out with historical texts to search for effective contemporary models of cultural production that merge socio-technological with artistic critique. "DATA browser 01" takes Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's notion of the culture industry (1944) as a departing point. "DATA browser 02" links to Walter Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer" (1934). Let's start with Brian Holmes' essay "The Flexible Personality," which contributes a rare meditation on today's network society and sketches out an intellectual history of anti-systemic movements that becomes the critical backdrop for both volumes of "DATA browser." Here, the Paris-based art critic, activist, and translator Holmes leads us into a social landscape of total network hell. Together with the social theorist Maurizio Lazzarato, Holmes is not on board when it comes to the techno-utopian celebration of the networked life style. Lazzarato thinks that new networked techniques are even more totalitarian than the assembly line. Brian Holmes includes a reference to Adorno's notion of the authoritarian personality (1950), which is defined by its rigid conventionalism, submission to authority, opposition to everything subjective, stereotypy, an emphasis on power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, and an exaggerated concern with sexual scandal. Holmes criticism of networked labor is sharp - he argues that distributed, casualized labor is based on the ruthless pleasure of exploitation and soft coercion that the laptop as portable instrument of control affords. The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno places questions about idleness, leisure and the refusal to work at the center of the discussion about contemporary production.
Brian Holmes points to the "de-localized" production of the "networker" or "connectivist" that helps today's firms to eradicate social programs. In "flexible capitalism" networked, salaried labor can be easily monitored and leads to ever more surplus that can be extracted from the laborer to the rhythm of the mouse click. Holmes uses the term "prosumer" for a consumer who becomes an amateur producer within the networked enterprise. According to Holmes the networker as satisfied individualist and hyperactive single is always ready to jump and take advantage of every opportunity and is left unmoved by all the data mining and acceleration of consumption. In his essay "The Producer as Power User" Pit Schultz, who describes himself as "social media architect" also talks about the marketing term of the prosumer and introduces the "power user" (neither amateur nor professional). Dependent on the participation in the global communication apparatus everyone is a power user. According to Schultz, the workplace becomes a state of mind for the power user aiming for total productivity. The power user comes in different degrees of machine addiction and is an advanced user with administration and customization skills. Her unpaid labor mainly pays off through the social reputation economy created from social capital gained from contributions to the gift economy of the public domain. The power user follows the "I post therefore I am" so that more links go to and from her name and URL. And when she publishes in books and journals, she references her ephemeral online materials. The power user produces ever more redundant work that inevitably leads to radical mediocrity and "panic publishing." Power users love free content and are passionate about the growing open archives.
Other "DATA browser" essays add a variety of examples that shed light on the hopeful potentials of network culture and open environments. The texts in these two volumes respond to the civic disengagement and decline of social connectedness and look for ways to re-connect us with the anti-systemic oppositional culture of the sixties. How can new forms of solidarity emerge and help us to create a better society based on the desire for equality? How can collective projects, and communicative activism serve to foster distributed creativity, peer relations, openness and collaboration? Which case studies can be presented that dismount criticism of blind idealism when it comes to the commons? Today's culture-activists from Delhi and Pittsburgh to London operate through technology and networks that have the ability to reconfigure power relations through the creation of knowledge pools, free wireless networks, and sharing of information in open archives. Browsing through the texts in Db 01/02 theoretical threads lead from Paolo Virno's "A Grammar of the Multitude," and Manuel Castells' "Rise of the Network Society," to Michael Hardt, Richard Barbrook, Cornelius Castoriadis, Tiziana Terranova, and Naomi Klein. It is clear from these examples that theory here is not groomed in the academic observatory but conceived of as tool that is linked to practice. In fact, reading these texts I felt like going through a transcript of a round table discussion in the sense that the authors have much common theoretical ground.
In these two volumes theory, art and political action inform each other rather than being conflated with one another. While Holmes and Schultz demonstrate new typologies of the networked laborer, the Delhi-based group of media practioners "Raqs Media Collective" points to an alternative reality. In their essay "X Notes on Practice" the group points to Argentinean workers, who faced with a failed money economy, developed their own exchange system based on self-regulation and free interchange outside of the circuit desired by capital.
Within the cooperation commons people create and distribute content. This overwhelms traditional companies that cannot match the massive amount of free content created by a multitude of user communities. These cultural reservoirs and much of cooperation-enhancing technologies allow the like-minded to connect and share knowledge. This has the potential to undermine the content hegemonies of universities, museums, companies, and the military.
Knowledge pools put in place unorthodox knowledge economies. They are communal, exchange spaces that allow anyone to re-use/share and edit content. Users move away from systems of production and distribution that are based on market relations. The London-based writer, artist and curator Armin Medosch emphasizes that the most important property of the internet is its capacity to promote the creation of social communities. He reminds us of the slogan "Under the cobblestones, the beach!" which was used during the imaginative student protests in 1968. As example for the formation of groups in the internet Medosch describes the ad hoc mode with which the democratic globalization movement approaches spontaneous organization and mobilization. Medosch makes us also aware of the opportunities afforded by ubiquitous, unwired networks such as the free wireless network groups Consume.net in London, Freifunk.net in Berlin and Funkfeuer.at in Vienna, that all follow a decentralized, self-organizing network model. In a similar search of new modes of cultural production The Institute for Applied Autonomy and The Bureau for Inverse Technology both infiltrate and critique the culture of engineering from the inside.
This series of "DATA browser" books is published by Autonomedia in New York. Its overall goal is to link emerging cultural practices to the socio-historical context out of which they evolved. Data that are sent through the physical networks of the internet are mostly interfaced through a screen and interpreted by a browser. Browsers such as Firefox display these data packages that they receive from hosting servers. In a similar manner, this series of publications frames and interprets cultural practices that bring together social, technological, and artistic critique. In a third volume that will come out in the fall of 2005, the editors will follow the conference "Curating, Immateriality, Systems" at TATE Modern (London, June/July 2005). This event investigated a range of positions currently occupied by curators in the context of digital media and immaterial production. This upcoming volume "Curating Immateriality" will examine ways in which new media artworks are curated taking into account their ephemeral and collaborative nature. Theory in all volumes of "DATA browser" is not seen as a final word on the topics that it engages - with most essays adding to a collaborative flow of ideas about networking, and current modes of cultural production.
Le Monde Diplomatique (Nordic edition) - April 2005 - Bøker (Jacob Lillemose)
Economising Culture
Med netværks- og informationsteknologiers gennemtrængning af nutidens kulturelle produktion accelereres den forsatte nedbrydning af barriererne mellem kunst og massekultur. Resultatet er dog ikke en homogen sammensmeltning, selvom det ofte kan virke sådan. Tværtimod, er den enorme udveksling mellem kunst og massekultur årsag til nye modsætningsforhold. Ikke mindst af økonomisk karakter, hvilket også er hvad titlen på den første udgivelse i serien «DATA browser» refererer til: Samtidskulturen er blevet økonomiseret i en så omfattende grad at det økonomiske i såvel direkte kommerciel forstand som i overført politisk betydning synes at udgøre den mest afgørende strukturelle og tematiske faktor for den brede kulturelle produktion (herunder både kunst og massekultur). Og dermed er relationen mellem kulturel produktion og kapital kommet på dagsordnen med en hidtil ukendt vigtighed. Samtidig med, at en digital opdateret version af den kulturindustri, som Adorno og Horkheimer beskrev i 40erne, vokser sig stadigt større, skaber selv samme teknologi grobund for, at flere og flere alternative kulturelle økonomier vokser frem. Økonomier, som kritiserer, undergraver og modarbejder kulturindustrien med det sigte at generere «alternativ kapital», der kan bidrage til en mere mangfoldig og innovativ digital kultur. De 15 essays i Economising Culture spænder over såvel mere generelle beskrivelser af den digitale kulturindustri og modstandens muligheder (Brian Holmes, Armin Medosch, Marina Griznic, Jordan Crandall blandt andre) som beretninger om konkrete kunstneriske aktioner (eksempelvis The Yes Men og Raqs Media Collection). I sig selv er essayene kompetente, oplysende og tankeprovokerende, men det at de af redaktørerne præsenteres i en kontekst, hvor de indirekte kommenterer på forestillingen om en digital kulturindustri giver dem et ekstra, særdeles relevant historisk perspektiv.
Udgivelsen udmærker sig desuden ved, at alle tekster er udgivet under Creative Commons licenser, hvilket er et vægtigt kulturøkonomisk statement i sig selv.
Leonardo Online (Jonathan Zilberg)
Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems
from http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2006/curating_zilberg.html
Curating Immateriality will prove interesting for museum professionals concerned with curatorial processes in an expanded digital field in which the art museum no longer has any walls, never mind material objects. In short, the digital environment presents qualitatively new challenges for curators - especially for those who would prefer to reduce the traditional role of the curator to a network manager.
Through investigating the immaterial nexus of culture and technology, the contributors to this volume take up on the standard questions in curatorial studies about the nature of power relations and control, in short - on curatorial politics. The key assumption here is that distributed network systems (DNS’), and software, require new forms of curatorship. The following types of questions are posed: Are we witnessing the emergence of qualitatively new democratic potentialities or new forms of totalitarian control? What are the implications raised for curating immateriality in future cybernetic environments? And finally, how open are these so-called "open systems"?
Though Joasia Krysa’s introduction is a utopian expression of anti- authoritarianism, many of the contributors express a pronounced ambivalence about the democratic potential of DNS curatorship in which curatorial power is imagined as radically curtailed. Deeply inspired by a political agenda and the cybernetic transformation of cultural production, Curating Immateriality explores the centripetal tendencies of elitist control versus participatory freedom that exist in this rapidly expanding art world.
The central issue here is this: If the traditional curator operates as a gatekeeper in a centralized network, how should curators operate in a distributed network? Accordingly, the contributors examine how curators have experimented with exhibiting art in this context and how such new media can be theorized. Using diverse populist neo-Gramscian and post-Fordist positions, and bringing together a useful compendium of experience, they examine the new curatorial models which have emerged and consider how these new systems have been integrated into curatorial practices. Of all the contributions, Christiane Paul’s "open source" model, in her chapter "Flexible Contexts, Democratic Filtering and Computer-Aided Curating: Models for Online Curatorial Practice" will be especially useful for museum professionals looking for practical guidance in tackling the gatekeeper versus network manager dilemma.
Beyond such practical issues, this is a surprisingly fertile book intellectually speaking, that is for those aestheticians with a Marxist bent. For example, Tiziana Terranova’s chapter, "Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in an Open System," is particularly interesting in its treatment of the notion of "general intellects" and how value has been reassigned from the product to the process and from the material to the symbolic. In terms of art and democracy, per se, Terranova’s chapter is fundamentally important as a problematic rejoinder as she so eloquently reviews how subjectivity is always plural and never determined by a universal instance. In addition, she reiterates how diverse psychic investments are continually being rethought in a world that is not reducible to a dualist clash of production oscillating between freedom and control. Furthering a fascinating collection of discussions on power and technology, on digital as opposed to mechanical reproduction, Terranova provides a sobering assessment of idealist democratic potentiality by arguing that these new cybernetic systems are relentlessly controlled and compressed. This notion that a new form of totalitarianism has emerged, contrary to the introduction’s liberation aesthetic, is decisively advanced by Mateo Pasquinelli in the Orwellian concluding chapter "Cultural Labour and Immaterial Machines".
In assessing how such digital collectives have sought to promote social change through creating communicative environments which de-center the curator and destabilize hierarchy, Trebor Sholz’s chapter on the nature and dynamics of extreme sharing in networks is, especially, interesting as are the other chapters which theorize notions of dematerialization and immateriality.
In all this, there is, in my view, a problem about the assumed democratic nature of this new networked method for curating the immaterial. Can a democratic, read collaborative community, effectively curate through partly automated self- generative digital filter-feeding? Is it not inherently problematic to argue that these largely amateur curators are democratic information managers while professional curators are authoritarian gate-keepers? Is the issue of curatorship really ultimately reducible to control versus freedom?
Few museum professionals today would argue against the idea that curatorship should be open to creative collaboration and contestation. Yet at the end of the day, a curator must curate. Their task is to make informed decisions and today, whatever they do, controversy is inevitable. In fact, this dissent is the true measure of the 20th Century democratization of art.
In the final analysis, despite the books apparently emancipatory aim, it is debatable whether democratically minded digital filter-feeders differ fundamentally from their traditional predecessors working in formal institutions. Why? All curators have to describe, classify and re-contextualize artistic object (and processes) whether they are material or immaterial. All curators remain managers of symbolic information. Worse still, in these networked systems, in performing "filtering" functions and "highlighting" "best works", are not these small teams of like-minded curators not merely recapitulating the much maligned role of the traditional curator? Moreover, though "open" communicative platforms surely promote greater participation and information sharing, especially in terms of blogging and reduced curatorial control, contrary to the ideals expressed here, they remain unable to affect real social and institutional change - never mind over-ride the curatorial conceit that they are less guilty of authoritarian judgment by having somehow arrived at a collective democratic decision as to what constitutes the "best work".
Curators are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They must operate according to the St Peter Principle, making informed though ultimately subjective decisions. Should such professional curators be replaced by filter feeding protocols and democratically managed machines? I think not. To parasitize one creative idea in this book, that is, the semantic linkages between the words curate, cure and curare, curating like curare, if modified and applied in the right dose and distributive contexts, can either educate or irritate. But someone is going to have to make the unpleasant decision as to what is "good" and who is in and what is "bad" and who is out - unless the new digital democrats throw out the filter.