Andreas Broeckmann on Wed, 18 Dec 1996 23:11:11 +0100 |
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Odysseus, not Ariane Report about a new European space programme Andreas Broeckmann In November 1996, the Council of Europe staged a large international conference whose multiple titles and subtitles point to the complex and possibly too broad thematic range which the event was supposed to cover: "Culture, Communication and New Technologies: The Impact of New Technologies on European Culture. Conference on a New Space for Culture and Society (New Ideas in Science and Art)". The conference was, on the one hand, meant to initiate a renewed discussion of the relationship between art and science and to encourage co-operation between the two fields. On the other hand, it sought to explore the 'new social and cultural space' that has been opened up by new technologies, and to discuss the socio-political and cultural implications of the changes effected by these technologies. The idea behind this combination of topics was the hypothesis that there is a conceptual convergence between the three domains represented here, and that it makes sense to discuss them in conjunction: first, the new scientific paradigms as they have come out of quantum physics, chaos theory and systems theory; second, the effects of recent technological change, esp. related to digitisation and the emergence of 'global' electronic networks; and third, the practice of artists, mostly, though not exclusively, working with electronic media. The practical agenda, then, was to discuss the transformations and explore the assumed convergence between the different domains, to raise current issues and ideas in order to determine the state of the theoretical discussion regarding the social implications of the new situation, and finally to propose cultural policy directions to the Council of Europe. Organised by the Cultural Policy and Action Division of the Council of Europe, the conference brought together more than 150 people: artists, media researchers, cultural and social theorists, art historians, TV producers, film makers, journalists, sociologists, philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, as well as representatives of the Culture Committee of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. There were around 20 speakers and chairpersons who gave presentations or led the discussions during this four-day event, and another 80 invited guests who were there to contribute by taking part in the open discussions. Half of the invited guests (though none of the prominent speakers) were from Eastern Europe. (It would go too far to list the participants here. Most of them are represented on the WWW site that was prepared for the event, pconf.terminal.cz, including biographies and short statements about the topics of the conference. Further documentation of the presentations and discussions will also be made available there.) It is always difficult to say after the event, which people were absent and who should have been there, especially when looking at a forum that was packed with some of the most influential European artists, thinkers and researchers in the field of new media. A group, however, that was blatantly absent were the young people - artists, media activists, hackers - who are, to a large degree, shaping the new emergent spaces of the Internet at the moment, and whose work is far more relevant to the understanding of the 'new space' than some of the theoretical deliberations and assumptions formulated during the conference. Innovation in the creative sphere is emerging from a generation whose affiliations are not formed within academia or huge media institutions, but in so-called 'grass-roots' initiatives that stand outside of and challenge the sovereignty of the cultural establishment. Instead, the conference was dominated by people who view the the issue of culture and technology from a perspective that was shaped in the sixties and seventies when electronic art, and the relationship between art, science and technology, were approached much more strongly within traditional artistic paradigms. The lack of practical experience with the current network culture, coupled with the rather telling mix of political and corporate affiliations exhibited in the biographical notes of many an older conference participant, pointed to the fact that, more than anything, the policy makers who initiated this event have a generational problem: they themselves, and those people they tend to ask for advice, often hardly understand, let alone 'live' the new cultural paradigms that the conference was addressing. The combination of the three agendas of the conference - the relationship between art and science, the 'new space', and the invitation to make suggestions towards the European media policies - implied that there was an increasing awareness of the political impact that certain statements would have. This impression was intensified by the increasing visibility and presence of the members of the CoE Culture Committee at the head of the table. At times, the conference turned into a staged discussion, a performance aimed at eliciting certain reactions or attitudes from the CoE audience, with carefully pitched, self-conscious, even self-censoring remarks. A political necessity from which this text will also not be free. Thus, the things that were not said in Prague were probably as important as those that were. The role of television, and of US American TV productions in particular; the role of European culture in a global cultural and political economy; the extreme regional differentiation of access to and usage of new technologies - such rather contentious issues were hardly touched upon. Similarly, the as yet unresolved question of copyright for digital cultural productions was only mentioned in passing. The range of issues raised during the conference was partly determined by the illusion of an inherent contiguity of all things new and digital - an illusion that might prove most fatal for in the development of cultural policies for the 'electronic age'. In a small intervention, Muntadas pointed to this notion when he said - in Spanish, so that what he said would not be translated via the intercom: 'We believe that we live in a world that is completely translatable, but there are things that cannot be translated. Very often, this realm of the untranslatable is the substance of what artists deal with.' The setting of the conference was the Games Hall in Prague Castle, a richly decorated hall which had a long, U-shaped table for the invited guests, and chairs along the walls for the further participants. Lunches were offered by the Castle administration in two near-by restaurants, coffee breaks gave ample opportunity for lobbying and networking. There was a string of official receptions and visits to exhibitions, and in the evenings the crowd would disperse into smaller groups for the Prague bars and restaurants, for the usual trading activities in news, gossip and future project proposals. The actual conference was less dominated by an open discussion, but by the often lengthy presentations and the question-and-answer times that honed in on the specified areas of the speakers, rather than opening up towards the more general topics raised by the individual talks. But then it is questionable whether a meeting of 100 experts can be more than a general teach-in for those listening, and whether such a meeting has ever achieved more than what the participants already knew before they came. It was most certainly worthwhile as a social gathering for those present, some of the pressing problems could be raised at least in the form of unanswered questions, and it will have to be seen what the long-term impact of the event may be. Rather than offering a full report of the conference proceedings, the following will give a short and partial summary of some of the key areas of the discussion. A basic problem was the lack of terminological precision as regards the main 'operational categories' used, not only with regard to the almost redundant broadness of the use of such words as culture, art, science, but also to the indecision regarding the sense in which people were talking about science, technology, media technology, or the Internet, and which of these was the actual motor of the social and cultural changes that were being diagnosed. Art () Science The first 'victim' of this imprecision was the intended discourse between art and science. The presentations on the first day of the conference offered a broad range of new ideas about fundamental, paradigmatic shifts in science theory, from the spiritual essentiality of the quantum vacuum (Ervin Laszlo) to the neurogenesis represented by the activities on the WWW (Ralph Abraham), from the birth of the universe out of instability and irreversibility rather than the eternal return of the big bang (Eduard Gunzig, replacing Ilya Prigogine), to the significance of both words and images for the understanding of abstract problems (Benoit Mandelbrot). However, the understanding of 'art' displayed by these scientists differed considerably from what contemporary art practitioners and theorists are engaged with and was mostly based on a notion of art being a decorative elaboration or enhancement of scientific ideas. It was therefore no wonder that the ensuing discussion and the string of comments made later in the course of the conference, was more often critical than enthusiastic about the possibility of a fruitful merger of art and science. As Don Foresta put it: art and science have two different languages, two modes of knowledge, and artists will not become scientists, nor vice versa. Siegfried Zielinski put it even more radically when he said that we should not even attempt to build a dialogue between artists and scientists, because their languages and their interests have nothing to do with each other. There can certainly be an interesting resonance from particular inter- or transdisciplinary projects, as was argued by Tor Norretranders with regard to a series of workshops which were organised in Copenhagen this year. The constructive dialogue across the differences between the disciplines, the creative potential of translations between the fields are proof of the usefulness of public and industry-sponsored artistic projects. However, the assumption of a 'natural bond' between artists and scientists is a flawed assumption that serves neither of the two practices. In his contribution to the conference's preparatory document, Dieter Daniels stated that the 'inferiority complex of the arts in relation to the innovative power of technology and natural science' is still 'the central issue of the topic "art and new technologies".' In a curious trick of fate, artists and cultural critics present in Prague displayed a much more materialist attitude towards the cultural, political and economic impact of the recent technological developments, and, one must say, a much more thorough understanding of their wider implications. Some of the scientists, on the other hand, deployed clearly religious or esoteric linguistic registers, defending a new universalism and calling upon the artists to embrace a more holistic notion of human agency and, by implication, of their artistic practice. Rather than worry about a renewal of an 'inferiority complex', cultural theorists might, in this context, consider the influence that the scientifically inspired, spiritualist and holistic ideas of the 'eco-fundamentalists of the universe' could have on political decision makers. Art Practice () New Technologies The second day of the conference was dominated by a series of presentations by artists who have been working with electronic technologies since the 1960s and who offered their own practice as examples for the fruitful conjunction of artistic and technological research (Otto Piene, Steina Vasulka, Jeffrey Shaw). Don Foresta, the conceptual father of the conference, set the stage with his programmatic introductory statement: 'For over a century art and science have been defining a new space for western society, a space which will provide the schema of how we organise our universe. [...] Art, being the densest form of communication, is often the supreme test of any means of communication. Each work of art contains the entire world view of the artist and, as such, demands of any means of expression the dimension necessary to fulfil that need. Art is the means by which we test a communication system, and by doing so, the reality that it defines.' The successful partnership of art and science, the defence of the authorial artist, the conviction of the key role that art can play as an experimental and exploratory tool for understanding our current reality and the future - these were the crucial messages that the conference was meant to communicate to the policy makers. Independence of art practice, i.e. the artists' freedom from the necessity to sell their creativity to industrial developers, and a call to artists to be critical and 'non-believers' (Muntadas), were put forward as prerequisites for art to be able to perform its social and cultural functions. With regard to new aesthetic categories, overcoming the Euclidean space-time continuum and interactivity were the two honoured catch-phrases. There is still little understanding of the cultural and social effects of interactivity, and it will as yet have to be seen how 'interactive' the communication channels and services are going to be that will affect European culture on a mass-scale in the future. Michael Century's claim that the main aesthetic feature of the new networked environments is the users' experience of simultaneity, and that this experience will eventually lead to a new form of subjectivity, may be true on the level of enthusiastic Internet users today, but he also reminded us that the introduction of 'interactive television' might neutralise the creative potentials of the networks and might turn them into just another mass medium. It is at this level of securing the development of the new communication infrastructure as a heterogeneous and open cultural space, that the Council of Europe must see one of its primary roles. The diversity of European culture is dependent on political freedom as much as on open communication channels, whether they are print media, exhibition spaces, radio or the Internet. New Space () Identity A more pressing question than the future of artistic practice is that of the formation of subjective and social identities. If the technological development does indeed lead to a reconstitution of public spaces and the social geography, then this will also have its effects on the way in which individuals and groups relate to themselves and to the socius. In one of the key speeches of the conference, Pierre Levy put forward the thesis that the extending communication networks create a new cultural space in which general participation and interconnection can bring forth a new form of universality, a global cultural plane that is universal in both its openness and its continuous internal transformation, and that is not totalising as regards the contents or ideologies it carries. In its tendency to be 'universal without totalisation', cyberculture 'embodies the horizontal, simultaneous trajectory of cultural change.' Levy is one of the most influential thinkers about the cultural impact of new technologies at the moment, and his ideas are certain to leave their mark on the future policies of the Council of Europe. In a recent 'Report about Cyberculture', entitled 'The Second Deluge' and written for the Council (Oct. 1996), Levy gives a broad overview over the different areas of cultural and social change that will have to be considered with regard to the ongoing changes. (It would be interesting to compare his analysis to that, for example, of the American cultural critic Mark Dery who, earlier this year, published an account of cyberculture [Escape Velocity, New York 1996] that is closer to its subcultural and 'grainy' aspects, and that therefore has far less illusions about the preservation of existing cultural forms of expression and ideals which looms large in Levy's report. Levy's is an attempt to free the notion of cyberculture from its subcultural, 'cyberpunk' connotation, and to draw it into the realm of European state cultural policies.) Levy's notion of cyberspace as a 'universality without totality' describes an ideal which needs to be approached in a practical, constructive manner. Strategies and policies for the recognition of individual capabilities, of individual uniqueness and ones that allow for the growth of local difference should not, as Levy tends to do, rely too much on the 'essential' openness of the architecture of the networks. They have to address the determining and potentially stifling recent developments concerning the build-up of the cable and satellite infrastructure (web-TV, commercial intranet services, monopolisation of access, service and content provision) and break through the totalising and homogenising tendencies which is not as alien to the 'new space' as it may seem. The parameters of these problems are technical, political and economic as much as juridical and cultural, and only insofar as the policies manage to tackle the multiple layers of this complex, will they be able to succeed in keeping the new cultural field open and diverse. While Levy insisted that cyberspace is an additional social reality which we have to learn to deal with and act within, Siegfried Zielinski reiterated his thesis that Cyberspace 'is not a possible locality, in the Kantian sense of a space that is actively appropriated and thus individualised. [...] It is not a suitable place for subjects to stay, not even temporarily. And as such it has neither territory nor definable borders. In it, it is not possible to develop an identity, not even for the interim.' This theme was further commented on by Raymond Rehnicer who posed the pertinent question of how it will at all be possible to build individual and group identities in a cultural space that is to a large extent deindividualised, let alone that it has effective conventions for communicating on a group level. What is at stake here is the problem of an identity that is not necessarily tied to a physical locality, to a nation or an inbred culture, but one that is in a dynamic relation with its transforming cultural environment and that takes difference and tolerance as its main starting points. In terms of a cultural policy, this means that the question is not so much how we can maintain or defend what we are, but how we can learn to, and create a culture of, becoming different, of heterogenesis, as Guattari has called it. Kirill Razlogov pointed in the same direction when he remarked that the potential social danger associated with the new technologies was the fear of the new way of life associated with them, and the fear of losing one's established way of life. Embracing instability as a cultural value will be highly problematic on a continent that, more than anything, prides itself of its cultural history, and that yet has to accept that, rather than of stability, civilisation and progress, it has a history of change, migration and instability. An important underlying factor of the transformation of identities is the use of language. The fact that English is the main lingua franca of contemporary science and technology discourses and of Internet communication, was seen by some as a threat to cultural diversity, while others claimed that it was a mere temporary phenomenon and that the degree too which non-English speaking communities would come on-line, the balance would shift to a greater mix of languages used. The current technical impossibility of using different languages (accents, special letters, etc.) in the same HTML document was pinpointed as an important impediment for the presentation of the diversity of European languages on the WWW. It was suggested that the Council of Europe should take the initiative to create a European Web browser that supports the many different linguistic conventions, and if only to counter what Siegfried Schmidt indicated as the signs of 'a broad dedifferentiation of differentiated social systems'. Technology () Politics Towards the end of the conference it became increasingly clear that the cultural and philosophical considerations of the cultural impacts of new technologies have practical, technological and political dimensions which are now frequently left in a cultural vacuum and which politicians and administrators have an urgent responsibility to deal with. It is, I believe, questionable whether Levy's attempt 'to imagine a universality that unites humanity without making it uniform', whether the very notion of universality is actually a useful guiding principle for the task of maintaining cultural diversity and respecting all sorts of marginal social groups. A definite short-coming of the conference was the fact that, while theorizing about the future of the 'new space', it failed to recognise and present the diverse and lively culture that already exists in the 'new space', and that needs attention and support in order to be able to continue to flourish. The policy proposals that were suggested to the CoE in the final round and that were meant to point in the desired direction of political action, included: a European Charter of Cultural Rights, including the right to access; the creation of a 'Virtual Academy' where the ideas raised during the conference could be further developed; an initiative for the wide-spread translation and publication of the literature that deals with media theory and the relationship between culture and technology; and a research project for the multi-lingual browser mentioned earlier. An area that was not addressed appropriately and that was dramatically watered down in the philosophical discussion on the final day of the conference, was the political economy of media technology, i.e. the problem of the ownership of the telecommunications infrastructure, of licensing rules, of the availability (and artificial scarcity) of bandwidth, etc. John Wyver raised this point and said: 'The development of the Internet into the differentiated, complex and vibrant cultural environment that it is, was possible because it was not regulated. This diversity is now threatened by the private ownership of the wires and by the desire of governments to control and restrict this cultural space on a content as well as on the infrastructural level. The Council of Europe should see its responsibility in keeping this space as open and diverse and unregulated as possible.' It is one of the lessons that social scientists have learned from 20th-century science theory, that these kinds of dynamic structures are self-organising and much more successful when they are allowed to develop 'bottom-up', rather than 'top-down'. Rethinking the questions of democratic participation, of social responsibility and of artistic creativity on this level necessitates a critical evaluation of the material, economic and technological foundations of the 'new space'. This is also where the Council should direct its active attention. Its wish to maintain the diversity of European culture is constantly in danger of being jeopardised by the size of the machinery and projects which it tends to support, i.e. mainly large and homogenising projects. At the same time, there is an urgent need for continued public sponsorship of independent cultural projects and initiatives and if the Council, or any other public funding body, wants to maintain cultural diversity, it should support this diversity at the level where it actually occurs. The great challenge for European cultural politics is therefore the absolute necessity to develop funding and support strategies aimed at heterogenesis and singularisation, at the continuous becoming different of individuals and groups. Berlin/Rotterdam, December 17, 1996