Re: <nettime> Franz Feigl is dead

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Thanks, Menno.

Franz will be buried today, Friday 28 September.

12:00 last chance to look at his face
13:00 funeral ceremony
14:00 informal reception

Begraafplaats St. Barbara, Spaarndammerdijk 312, Amsterdam.

Menno wrote me that a few video's of Franz's performances will be projected
on a screen during the ceremony.

Toek (DFM) wrote: "2 weeks ago we were still on the roof, scanning the
skyline with his computer. Next to that he was a funny & nice guy, he
organized lots of really great events in/as the NL Centrum (80s -
Rozengracht, Amsterdam). He definitely influenced a massive scene, including
me, and in that influence he will live on, as we take these things further
into the future."

I met Franz in 1981. Briefly after Franz and I (together with Jojo and Kees
and Caroline and many others) got involved in the founding of the Dutch
squatters weekly bluf! In the early eighties he and Ine lived in a tiny
squat (Lindenstraat 84) and there I witnessed how he got involved with Mike
Hentz, Minus Delta T, Code Public and a few other very heavy, very
conceptual, radical art wing of punk. Even though the, at times, dark
borders of madness were tested Franz did not seem to suffer much from all
the real life experiments. Instead he developed a tremendous energy to set
up NL-Centrum, a unique place in Europe where (post) industrial theatre and
music could freely push all boundaries, in search for covered, repressed and
yet unknown forms of intensity. In that sense Franz was and always remained
a non-fascist (in the tradition of Theweleit and Foucault), frantically
interested in the machinic, bodily and political forms of fascism from his
home country, Austria.

This is his first homepage: http://feigl.com/OOIT/WWW/. It must have been
made in the turbulent Internet years of 1995/1996 when Franz could be found,
day and night, in the workspace of desk.nl, the content provider for the
arts which Walter van der Cruijssen and I had started in the Fall of 1994
and which immediately became a magnet for a whole bunch of interesting
people who wanted to be as close as possible to Internet bandwidth,
passionately sharing ideas about the emerging network. Franz was one of
them.

Even though he was obsessed about computers Franz wasn't that much
interested in clean virtuality. As always he wanted to test the boundaries
and out of this drive the Netband initiative came into being, one of the
early Internet projects in the Netherlands (Menno already mentioned its aim
to remotely control the growth of an egg). The clash between the heavy 80s
post-industrial culture (as described in Mark Dery's Escape Velocity) and
much more spiritual mindset of the Internet and its geek engineering did -
and did not fit together. One day the history of Netband will be written.
The group fell apart before it had really taken off and it is my impression
that it took a long time for Franz to recover from the explosive Internet
years.

Franz got suddenly very ill last December. Doctors found out he had a severe
form of lunge cancer. Franz nearly died but miraculously managed to recover.
When I was in Amsterdam last time, mid March, I visited Franz in the
recovery home where he was staying and spend a few hours together, sitting
outside along the canal, watching the boats passing by. His health was
fragile but his mood was good and, as always, he turned out to be very well
informed what was going on in for instance Vienna, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Zoro, the son of Franz (and Ine Poppe), a brilliant Linux programmer, will
be putting a memorial website together.
In the meanwhile, there is still www.feigl.com, a website Franz himself put
together. There you can also find the auto portrait project:
http://feigl.com/OOIT/AUTOPORTRAIT1/.

Farewell to Franz.

Geert

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