Andreas Broeckmann on Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:44:12 +0100 |
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Syndicate: Demilitarizing Technology - initiative at MIT |
http://web.mit.edu/mit-cavs/www/DemilTech.html Demilitarizing Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been engaged for many years in national defense research projects involving the most advanced scientific and technological experiments. The present post-Cold War period, demanding the reorientation of defense technologies, resembles the period after the World War II, which gave birth to many new applications of advanced technologies in civilian industries. the creative role of artists and designers in this process was exemplified by works of Buckminster Fuller, Henry Dreyfuss and Gyorgy Kepes. In this post-ColdWar era, MIT's renewed interests in transferring military research to civilian use must be critically supported by contemporary artists and designers, not only as an economic and political process but also as a challenging and complex cultural project of the post-Cold War era. this work must be developed in dialogue and collaboration with contemporary cultural criticism and informed by multicultural, feminist and post-colonial theory in the context of new social and technological initiatives of the United States government - in public health, education, housing and information access -while battling urban armed violence, the HIV epidemic and drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies believes these programs must be complemented by cultural and aesthetic research projects. CAVS, located at MIT, and in the intellectual environment of Cambridge, with all of its history of technological and scientific research born of the cold War, is an ideal institution to undertake this new research and to continue its own historical, interdisciplinary role for those working in the fields of art, design, advanced technology and social and cultural theory and practice. The exploration of unknown and often kept-in-secret potentials crossing disciplinary boundaries can provide a vision for the future. Today, the intellectual community, with the assistance of CAVS, must address how contemporary defense technologies can be transferred toward the empowerment of the most vulnerable sections of our civilian population - children, the elderly, the sick, unemployed, women, immigrants, minority populations, the homeless and those who live with HIV. One of the most urgent issues is uneven access to high technologies of communication when there is a devastating lack of communication between and among displaced and alienated groups and individuals. Communicative rights and consequently the rights to public visibility and media representation are guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States constitution. Emerging, displaced and alienated populations have a right to those constitutional rights. In the light of this fact, we must first examine the most advanced communications potentials, which have until recently been harbored for military development. At a time of unprecedented conflagration and dissolution of communities and a crisis in traditional notions of identity, an unprecedented development of communication technologies is taking place. Today's processes of mental and social displacement and alienation must be examined together by artists, designers,scientists and those working in the psycho-social and techno-cultural fields. All will be asked to explore the unknown technological military heritage. Designers and artists can become catalysts, opening a dialogue between the human and technical sciences in directing the transfer of defense technologies into critical/cultural projects. Contemporary media culture and the built environment of monuments commemorating and perpetuating the ideology of war are an important symbolic heritage. We must demilitarize not only our economy, but our minds. The combined artistic, scientific and technological project is needed to reexamine critically our subjectivities and our ideologies before we can transfer ourselves to the post-military era. The built environment is often a continuation of war by other means, from war memorials and former military bases to rapid real estate development and environmental pollution. architectural and industrial design and public art research is necessary to respond to the simultaneous processes of demilitarization and the militarization of the built environment. While military bases are being closed and opened to new civilian use, the children in our cities are forced to arm themselves for urban warfare, while war memorials, films, and advertising continue to perpetuate the "ethics" and aesthetics of violence. One of the tasks of design research must be the exploration of history, memory and patterns of thinking perpetuated through such a symbolic environment - the landscape in which we live - examining and proposing the modes of cultural and artistic use of this environment by the present and future urban population. The post-military processes contribute to the problems of the post-industrial era. For large sections of the population urban life is urban survival. The basic issue is how to demilitarize civilian life today, and how demobilized military technologies can be used in this process. The new Director of CAVS intends to continue his artistic work and research, examining the use of war memorials and experimental design projects for displaced urban populations. The application of defense technologies to those projects will comprise his contribution to this post-military endeavor. Art and Design as Cultural Disarmament, Cultural Defense, and Demilitarization of Subjectivity The end of the Cold War has delegitimized and unemployed the aggressive rhetorics of popular and media cultures on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The continued presence of an enormous surplus stock of cultural weaponry, accumulated during forty years of imperial ideological warfare, poses real cultural and social hazards. A vast heritage of violent cultural norms and symbols built upon 19th-century pedagoguies and expansionistic phraseology creates aggressive semiological and psychological armaments. These armaments are deeply embedded in national and ethnic cultures and economies. during the Cold War, military rhetoric was legitimized by the threat of Communism. Now this potentially dangerous surplus is awaiting redeployment in the domestic social conflict. If state armies and military research were designed to defend the nation from attack by an authoritarian empire, can their defensive military power be deployed now to defend all of the victims of the break-down of Cold war order, both abroad, on the ground of the former enemy, and at home, where peace means survival? If there is a necessity for a war academy (military academy), perhaps there is as well a necessity today for a peace academy (academy of demilitarization). In the past, the co-Chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Daniel Inouye, proposed a national peace university. We are now at the stage of forming U.N. peace-keeping forces which are at best barely prepared to deal with post cold War international ethnic conflicts. Perhaps it is now time to redeploy cultural forces toward the establishment of cultural structures of peace. The post cold War surplus of aggressive rhetorics must be disarmed in a most careful and de-contstructive way, at the psychical as well as the ideological level. Toward this end, cultural and artistic experimental techniques and research methods must be found. any aesthetic research must explore our subjectivity and the complex theater of ideologies inhabiting our minds as an ammunition to our aggressivty. The real task is to imagine if some kind of post-military cultural force could be formed and sent into the domestic and international theaters of potential conflict years in advance. The objective of such a force would be to dismantle the layers of resentments and hate inhabiting the mind, and perpetuated through language, popular culture, the media, and technological/electronic games. Questioning the traditional socialization of American youth through games of war, we have heard Vietnam veterans appealing through the media for the demilitarization of the toy industry. If this vision is to be realized, artists and designers must play a responsible role. Examples Many artists and designers are already "well-armed" and experienced for such service. The analytical and critical visual study developed during the past decade by feminist artists, for example, and directed at the dominant world of media images, forms an important methodological tradition for future deconstructive cultural disarmament projects. The work of Victor Papanek, who proposed critical design as a cultural defense for a thrid world invaded by the first world's industrial expansion is another methodology appropriate to this task. (Papanek also examined the extent of damage of what he called murder by design on the home front in industrialized nations.) Many artists and designers working in the U.S. today already wrestle with the problematics of the post cold War era and with urban survival - for example, Group 2 AES and the well-known Survival Research Group operating in San Francisco. In New York city, the Storefront for Art and Architecture initiated "Project Atlas", a competition for the cultural transformation of obsolete missile launching stations. Other important projects concern the transfer of military technologies into cultural entertainment, such as Nuclear Heritage Park. The Storefront also organized EcoTECH conferences, which received international support and established links with communities in San Francisco concerned with the fate of closed military bases. Most of the proposals for former military bases are to use them as sites for a variety of real estate developments, erasing in this way the military past from the collective memory of the nation. No attempt to create critical monuments to the past are proposed on those sites. One cannot close one's eyes on both the present and the past, however unacceptable, deplorable, shameful they may be. The writings of William J. Mitchell, Scott Bukatman, and Donna Haraway suggest that electronic networks and bio-cybernetic empowerment may become liberation technologies for the marginalized and oppressed. These and other projects may contribute to the development of an alternative artistic and intellectual public sphere, changing the public imagination and perception of technology and its future, connecting technology with culture, contemporary art, and social and philosophical concerns born of recognition and exploration of the technocultural and social present. Call for Proposals As a first step, CAVS will seek artistic proposals focusing on advanced military technologies and their transfer to non-military social and cultural use. The proposals should be for year-long research projects submitted by artists and designers working as individuals or teams, which might include representatives of other disciplines. These proposals will be selected and reviewed to form a coordinated larger project, for which funding will be sought. authors of proposals will be invited to continue to develop their work on the grounds of MIT. CAVS will offer assistance in creating collaborative links with others at MIT engaged in relevant technological and scientific research. CAVS will provide the map of vital links and connections at MIT, Cambridge and elsewhere to the applicants. If necessary, CAVS will use received funding to invite groups and individuals from outside the MIT community to join in criticism, social theory, media studies, art education and art therapy - fields not yet well represented in the Institute's faculty and programming. Proposals should include an educational component, explaining how research developed at CAVS could be made accessible and visible to both graduate and undergraduate students of the School of Architecture and Planning and to the larger student community of the Institute. This would be a necessary educational contribution on the part of each research group. CAVS will of course provide coordination and working dialogue to help the researchers in organizing their educational component in seminars, conference, workshops and publications. Innovative use of electronic communications media will be a central goal of the Center's educational programming. More generally, CAVS will seek to engage students and faculty and to create an intellectual climate supporting the development of each project. The practical objective is to develop, on the bases of the selected proposals, a consolidated budget for all projects, the associated educational programs, and the necessary human and technical resources. This is preferable to accepting projects that have already received financial support. Thus, proposals should be short, outlining general goals, requirement, and methods, leaving more specific clarifications and plans for a later stage. Proposals should be supported by material illustrating the work that each individual or team had already developed, relevant to the problematics introduced in this letter. William J. Mitchell <wjm@mit.edu> Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT Krzysztof Wodiczko <wodiczko@mit.edu> Director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT