Syndicate: Tunnels beyond surfaces, 1999

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

[Dear friends, this is the text I have written for the "Media*Revolution"
book, edited by Stephen Kovats, which will come out in October 1999 -- the
german version can be found at
<http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/Media/medrev-d.html> -- best wishes, Inke]

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

Inke Arns (Berlin)

Beyond the Surfaces: Media Culture versus Media Art
or How we learned to love tunnel metaphors 


"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the [Cheshire] Cat: "we're all mad here.
I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
 
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, London 1865
 


SELF-INFATUATED REFLECTIONS: "CHEAP COPIES", "A LACK OF EXOTICISM" AND "THE
OTHER WHO IS PURPORTED TO ..."

I got my first insight into the problems arising from Western perceptions
when I joined Stephen Kovats in organising the OSTranenie Festival at the
Bauhaus Dessau in 1993. Looking at the contemporary video works from
various post-socialist, Eastern European countries, one of the visitors
said to me: Aesthetically, they look outdated somehow. We had this sort of
thing ?here? twenty years ago. A similar remark was made to me in Vienna in
1997 during the exhibition "It?s a Better World ? Russischer Aktionismus
und sein Kontext" [1] at the Sezession. A guest who was with me on a theory
panel in the Depot asked me in all seriousness: You?ve seen the Russians
over there in the Sezession. Why are they doing everything over again? Do
they need to catch up? It?s all old hat and boring. It may have been
reactions of this kind which prompted the art historian, Thomas Strauss, in
a comparison he drew in the early 1990s to liken 19th and 20th century
Polish art to a guard sitting behind a mirror. "The mirror is transparent
on one side, which enables the guard to observe everything that is going on
very closely. However, the glass is not transparent for inquisitive people
on the other side. All the occasional observers [...], i.e. all those
living west of the rivers Oder and Neisse in recent years, therefore see
nothing but themselves and their own opinions and prejudices in the false
mirror." [2] One might well ask: "What goes on in the mirror when you don?t
look at it?" (A question the Moscow conceptualist, Ivan Tchuykov, concerned
himself with for years ...). Quite clearly, contemporary Russian Action art
? if we leave aside the confusing term "Russian Actionism" (which is
clearly designed to establish a parallel with Viennese Actionism in the
1970s) ? is neither a misplaced copy nor a belated repetition of something
which already exists. While it may well be the case that threads are being
picked up here, what is of paramount importance is when, where and under
what political and social circumstances this is happening. The
(auto-)aggressive and (self-)destructive tendencies in the works of Brener
and Kulik, for instance, can only be understood by looking at the political
and social situation in Russia [3]. The classification of these works as
superfluous repetitions of western art forms stems partly from the critics?
failure to grasp the significance of their context, partly from the failure
to grasp the significance of the work in itself.

As a result, contemporary Eastern European art still remains largely
invisible even today in what used to be the "West" [4]. This lack of
visibility has a great deal to do with the "western" view of things and
with a special kind of perception. If contemporary Eastern European works
of art deviate from the familiar paradigms they are considered to be
provincial and, therefore, uninteresting [5]. If, on the other hand, they
can be measured against the familiar paradigms and appear to resemble them,
they are deemed to lack originality [6]. In both cases the yardstick
applied ignores the specifics of contemporary Eastern European art. In
Strauss?s opinion, a purely visual comparison between Eastern art and the
established paradigms of Western art is not sufficient for an understanding
of "Europe which remains ?hidden? even to this day". Far more important for
him is an investigation of the aesthetic and sociological roots of art and
culture in Eastern Europe and of the political and cultural contexts in
which they exist [7]. As long as these are not properly understood, it will
be impossible to fully grasp the special features of contemporary art
production in the different cultural spheres of Eastern Europe.

Boris Groys described this recurrent pattern in the logic of perception as
follows. Art in the former communist countries appeared to be "trivial, the
opposite of innovative, not different enough, not exotic enough [...] and
therefore not worthy of a place in the collections hung in art museums
[...]." [8]. This was precisely the reason [9] given by Catherine David,
Artistic Director of documenta X in Kassel (1997), for her exclusion of
virtually the whole of Eastern Europe from her selection (just three
"Eastern European" artists took part: Marko Peljhan [Slovenia], Pawel
Althamer [Poland] and Slaven Tolj [Croatia]).

A different type of self-reflection is apparent in the enthusiasm with
which the general public in the West followed the revolutions of 1989. What
they were fascinated by, however, was not the rediscovery of democracy as
such. People in the West are all too familiar with the inadequacies and
dead ends of existing liberal democracy to succumb to any fascination it
might radiate. What "viewers" in the West were far more intrigued by was,
as the Slovenian theoretician, Rado Riha, put it, "the unqualified
fascination with Western democracy they assumed people in Eastern Europe
had, and the naive, indeed the blind faith they placed in it. People in the
West saw in their Eastern counterparts a confirmation of themselves and of
their own truth. [...] In the fascination with democracy it attributed to
people in the East the West could see itself in its ?pure? democratic form
unspoiled by empirical disillusions and errors and was able to grasp the
unsullied origins of its democratic being." [10].


COMPLEXITY AND HISTORY: NETWORKS, NOT POINTS

Some time ago I was invited to contribute to a publication dealing with
media art in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. I was sent a very compact list
of artists over ten pages long and subsequently experienced a feeling of
latent disgruntlement. After a week I realised why. The publication was to
provide a review of individual artists, individual works, individual
objects and individual projects ? all dutifully catalogued and carefully
framed in their art history context. The panorama unfolding before my eyes
did not tally at all with what I felt I had experienced in the 1980s and
1990s. "My" story included not only the individual artists, works, objects
and products, but also everything which functioned as a "background",
"context" or "base". Such matters have no place, of course, in a
point-determined historiography ? a general problem which applies to all
kinds of historiography. The media culture of the 1980s and 1990s
encompasses much more than "individual objects". It is, after all,
production situations, contexts, networks, strategic alliances, group
amalgamations, platforms, collectives etc. which pave the way for
production facilities, carve out intellectual and creative space, trigger
discussions and provide access, i.e. they establish the context within
which the individual can operate. In short, there is a convergence between
the self-infatuated reflections and selective modes of thinking referred to
above in that they both content themselves with purely superficial aspects.
Redundancies and detached points are all they have to offer. If a
perception of contexts, networks, connections and concentrations is to be
gained which goes beyond these superficial aspects a change of venue is
required ? a descent into subterranean marshalling yards and underground
tunnel systems, which now follows.


.... AND NOW: ENTER THE TUNNEL METAPHORS, THE CANALS, THE RHIZOME AND MEDIA
CULTURE

Ten years ago, post-war Europe underwent a radical change. The Central and
Eastern European revolutions of the 1980s - the "Polish ?interruptus?, the
aborted Russian perestroika, the Hungarian slippage to the capitalist
goulash, the sudden collapse of the East German regime and the brutal
Romanian nativity play" [11] ? brought about the demise of the Soviet
system, to which very little resistance was offered. A young Czech writer,
Jáchym Topol, took the occasion to map out a new form of cosmopolitanism.
Fleeing from the police his heroes make their escape down a Berlin
underground railway shaft: "Suddenly, hands grab us and drag us into a
recess. The cops dash past ... and in front of me stands a little man his
face as black as coal. He has a tusk in his nose which shines out in the
darkness. Hungara, Bulgara, Polisha, Rumana? ... the little man asks me.
He?s almost right. It must be my face. I Czechoslovakia! And you?, I ask
him. Angoler, Congoman, Ugandi ... huh? No, no. I dago! We go up the back.
I can hardly believe my eyes. There?s a shaft or something with masses of
these dagos scurrying about. They?re digging up the earth and carting it
off in wheelbarrows. My dago friend explains: Tullel, tip. Here plenty big
eat. In Dagoland nothing. He shows us the international sign for stealing.
We indicate our approval. A tunnel. To Dagoland! Aha, Kopic thought.
They?re digging their way back home. Globe, I say. Globe, through, dig
through? Yeah, to globe, the dago says beaming. Tin food and chuice from
supermarket Germany to Dagoland for children and women ... Dagos, Kopic
thought. We?re dagos, too... He?s right. We?re all dagos." [12]. And, you
might add, we all speak Euro English.

An underground tunnel system of this kind also crops up in "Underground", a
film made by the Bosnian director working in Serbia, Emir Kusturica [13].
Branching off from a basement under a house in Belgrade - the main location
in the film - are 32 tunnels which link up all Europe?s capital cities with
one another. "I was fascinated by the idea of two parallel worlds, one
above and the other below ground," set designer, Kreka, explains. "It?s a
fantastic idea, but I wanted it all to look like something that could
actually exist." [14]. Taking the themes in Kusturica?s film and Topol?s
book a little further, the tunnel systems which already exist or have yet
to be dug could offer links between two points. It is possible to imagine
tunnel systems existing on various levels, i.e. as connection levels stored
or stacked above one another allowing for different kinds of links,
relations, canals and paths of exchange which are not visible at first
sight on the surface. These potential underground connections are at least
as important as the points above ground. The rhizomatic networks open a
window onto a diverse and heterogeneous reality. They pave the way for
movement and a change of perspective.

Tunnel and canal systems run at right angles to surface phenomena such as
borders: "Borders between nation-states are as two-dimensional as the
treaties and maps they are based on." [15] Borders arise where the
"vertical border areas between sovereign states cut through the earth?s
surface ... As vertical border areas, borders do not extend
horizontally..." [16]. Different rules apply beneath the surface, however.
Here the connections form webs, bulges and concentrations.

It was to describe these "subterranean" connections that Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari introduced the botanical term "rhizome" into post-structural
theory. As an underground shoot, "a rhizome is fundamentally different from
large and small roots. Tubers and nodes are rhizomes. [...] Animals are,
too, when they gather together in packs, like rats do. A burrow is
rhizomorphic in all its functions ? as a home, store room, marshalling
yard, hiding-place and ruin. The rhizome itself can take on a wide variety
of forms. It can branch and spread out in all directions on the surface and
thicken into tubers and nodes." [17] The principles of connection,
heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture and cartography are
characteristic of the rhizome. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to
anything other, and must be [...]. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes
connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and
circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles." [18]
The rhizome is an "essentially heterogeneous reality" [19], as is spoken
language, for instance. For it "forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean
stems and flows, along river valleys and train tracks; it spreads like a
patch of oil." [20] A rhizome is manifold. There are no points or
positions, only alignments, trajectories and vectors. Discontinuations are
insignificant: "A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it
will start up again on one of ist old lines, or on new lines." [21] The
rhizome is a map, not a copy, or ?tracing". ?A map has multiple entryways,
as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ?to the same?. The map
has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged
?competence?."] [22] The rhizome is also a weed; it grows in between; it is
a connecting piece, an intermezzo. It consists of plateaus. A plateau "is
always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end [; it is] a
continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids
any orientation toward a culmination point or external end." [23] The tree
is filiation (genealogy), "but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance."
[24]


ALLIANCES IN DEEP EUROPE

The "V2_East/Syndicate" initiative launched by the V2_ Organisation in
Rotterdam in 1995/96 could be described as such an alliance. It devotes
itself to fostering contacts and co-operation, improvements in
communication and an exchange between institutions and individuals in
Eastern and Western Europe active in the media and media culture. The
Syndicate mailing list allows regular e-mail communication between
participants regarding forthcoming events and collaborative projects. Since
the first meeting in Rotterdam in 1996, which was attended by 30 media
artists and activists, journalists and curators from 12 Eastern and Western
European countries, the Syndicate network has grown steadily. In June 1999,
it links over 400 participants from more than 30 European countries and a
number of non-European countries. The original idea was to establish an
East-West network as well as an East-East network. In the meantime,
however, the Syndicate network has increasingly developed into an
all-European forum for media culture and art. It gives rise to both
short-term collaborative projects as well as long-term co-operation in
changing combinations. Syndicate meetings and workshops have been held
regularly, in most cases as part of festivals and conferences, e.g. during
the DEAF Festival in Rotterdam (September 1996), the Video Positive
Festival in Liverpool (April 1997), the Beauty and the East Conference in
Ljubljana (May 1997), the documenta X in Kassel (August 1997), the ars
electronica in Linz (September 1997), the ostranenie Festival in Dessau
(November 1997) and in Tirana (May 1998), and the Skopje Electronic Arts
Fair in Skopje (October 1998) and Budapest (April 1999). Every autumn, a
selection of texts that have been distributed via the mailing list is
published in the form of a low-cost reader. [25]

As Timothy Druckrey has pointed out with respect to the Internet, a
translocal alliance of this kind refers, on the one hand, to a "
neuro-geography of cognition, a utopos of networks, forms of electronic
reception, and of post-territorial community, [...] whose hold on matter is
ephemeral, whose position in space is tenuous, and whose presence is
measured in acts of participation rather than coincidences of location."
[26] On the other hand, such a "participating present" does not imply
detachment from the local or national context into which every individual
is incorporated ? a space which "is charged with qualities and maybe
populated by phantasms." [27] Overlapping qualities and identities, one
might add. In August 1997, a ten-day workshop was organised by the
Syndicate network under the heading of "Deep Europe" as part of the Hybrid
WorkSpace in the Orangery at the documenta X in Kassel. The Bulgarian
artist, Luchezar Boyadijev, explained the title of the workshop by saying
that "Europe is deepest where there are a lot of overlapping identities".
In using the term "Deep Europe", the working group of the Syndicate network
was referring to a new understanding of Europe, an understanding which
leads away from a horizontal / homogeneous / binary concept of territory
(e.g. East / West) and ? by means of a vertical cut through territorial
entities ? moves towards a new understanding of the different
heterogeneous, deep-level, cultural layers and identities which exist next
to each other in Europe. Lisa Haskel described this concept as follows: "So
perhaps this is what Deep Europe is all about. Not a political position, a
utopia or a manifesto, but rather a digging, excavating, tunnelling process
toward greater understanding and connection, but which fully recognises
different starting points and possible directions: a collaborative process
with a shared desire for making connection. There may be hold-ups and some
frustrations, quite a bit of hard work is required, but we can perhaps be
aided by some machinery. The result is a channel for exchange for use by
both ourselves and others with common aims and interests." [28]


COUNTERING THE ILLUSION OF HOMOGENEITY

Deep Europe, conceived of as the parallel existence of different,
heterogeneous cultures and identities located next to and on top of one
another in Europe, cropped up again recently in a different context. Karl
Schlögel summarised 19th and 20th century European history in an article
entitled " Kosovo Was Everywhere" published in Die Zeit on 29th April 1999.
According to Schlögel, European history is the history of ethnic cleansing,
and the homogeneity it has given rise to was and still is "uniformity,
provincialism in many respects". It represents a war against Deep Europe:
"The existence of transitional zones, scattered locations and the mixed
culture of cities used to be characteristic of Europe. They constituted not
only its vulnerability, but also its astonishing productivity and
elasticity. However, all that has gone. "Unmixing Europe" is a horrible
term which has now found its way into almost every last corner. [...]
Unmixed Europe is not only less exciting, it is also less complex, less
rich in diversity and structure, poorer in almost every respect." [29]
Nevertheless, hope remains. Social homogeneity is just as impossible to
achieve as is a homogeneous linguistic community, for "[a] language is
never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence" ? "there is no
language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng
of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages." [30]

This excursion to a realm beyond surfaces ? Behind the Looking Glass ? in
the direction of underground marshalling yards and canal systems, of
connections, webs and concentrations has been a call for openness, for
recognition of the importance of everything which is not readily apparent
at first glance, for the potential of a heterogeneous reality beyond
visible surfaces. It is an appeal for caution when it comes to
straightforward copies, or tracings, which always feign competence, and a
plea for performance, for the map, which opens up multiple forms of access,
and for alliances formed by tunnel systems, small canals and rhizomatic
structures. For, to close with a final quotation from Deleuze & Guattari:
"Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems
and rhizomes." [31]


Notes:

[1] It?s A Better World ? Russischer Aktionismus und sein Kontext, edited
by J. Backstein / J. Kandl et al., Exhibition Catalogue, Vienna, 1997
[2] Thomas STRAUSS, ?Polnische Kunst: Blick hinter den Spiegel? [1990], in
ditto, Zwischen Ostkunst und Westkunst: Von der Avantgarde zur Postmoderne.
Essays 1970 ? 1995. Munich 1995, pp. 178-186, here p.178
[3] I am certainly not talking here about arrogant westerners who, when it
comes to their "own" art, act as if one could happily forget the context
(after all, "art" "is" "autonomous") and who, when they are talking about
the art of "others", consider that because it is "deficient" it can only be
understood in its specific context. What I am arguing here is that all art
should be seen in its context, as well as in itself.
[4] Thomas STRAUSS comes up with some interesting statistics. The Lexikon
der Gegenwartskunst, which claims to be a competent Dictionary of
Contemporary World Art since 1945, lists 500 artists, only three of whom
come from the eastern part of Europe ? "the ex-Hungarian, Lakner, the
ex-Pole, Opalka, and the ex-Yugoslav, Abramovic, [...] all of whom ? and
this is the crux of the issue ? have lived and worked ?in the West? for
years." (STRAUSS, Thomas (ed.), Westkunst ? Ostkunst. Absonderung oder
Integration?, Munich 1991, p. 3). A similar situation applied at the
exhibition entitled Europa, Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Ost-
und Mitteleuropa, which was held in 1994 at the Art and Exhibition Hall of
the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn. Only artists living in exile were
represented in the contemporary art section (except the video section). In
1999, Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick edited the book Art at the
Turn of the Millenium (Cologne, London et al: Taschen, 576 pages), which
claims to be ?an authoritative overview of art and artists of the 1980s and
1990s." (Preface, p. 006) It features 137 artists coming ?from the West,"
because, as the preface has it, ?it proved impossible to cast a global net,
so [...] other cultural provenances have not been represented." (p. 006).
Curiously, the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is included in the volume.
[5] STRAUSS, Thomas (ed.), 1991, loc. cit., p. 6
[6] STRAUSS, ibid.; Boris GROYS, "Die Musealisierung des Ostens", in ditto,
Logik der Sammlung, Munich 1997, pp. 154-156, here p. 159. For Groys the
difference between so-called western and eastern art resides in functional
and not formally aesthetic aspects. The "originality, different quality and
heterogeneity [of Eastern art] which stem from its function are lost
without trace when it is collected and presented in museums (p. 161),
because "only aesthetic differences" (p. 160) can be made visible in a museum.
[7] I am examining one of these roots, the specific contemporary reading of
the classical avant-gardes (STRAUSS 1991: p. 229) of the 1910s ? 1930s, in
my dissertation project, "Objects in the Mirror may be Closer Than They
Appear": The Avant-Garde in the Rear-View Mirror. On the Contemporary
Artistic Reading of the (Russian) Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe since the
1960s. Retroavantgarde and Post-Utopianism" [since March 1998, Institute of
Slavic Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin].
[8] Boris GROYS, "Sammeln und gesammelt werden", in: ditto, Logik der
Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters, Munich 1997, pp. 46-62, here p. 57.
[9] Remarks made at the press conference before the opening of the
documenta X and during a visit made by Catherine David to the Hybrid
Workspace during the "Deep Europe" workshop on 1st August 1997; cf. Inke
Arns, "Deep Europe ? some personal impressions: From horizontal to vertical
mapping". in: Inke Arns / Andreas Broeckmann (eds.), Deep Europe: The 1996
? 97 edition. Selected texts from the Syndicate mailing list, Berlin,
October 1997 <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr1.html>; Tapio Mäkelä,
?Tales from Deep Europe?, in: siksi. The nordic art review, XII, No. 4,
Winter 1997 (The New Europe Issue), pp. 30-31; and Luchezar Boyadjiev,
?Overlapping Identities?, in: Moscow Art Magazine, N° 22, 1998
<http://services.worldnet.net/~coronado/martmag.htm>. Boyadjiev remarks
that in the editorial text of Documenta X - the book the authors ?make a
badly disguised attempt to blame the existence and the activities of the
Eastern European dissident movement before 1989 for the destruction of the
French Left movement."
[10] Rado RIHA, Reale Geschehnisse der Freiheit. Zur Kritik der
Urteilskraft in Lacanscher Absicht, WO ES WAR 3, Vienna: Turia & Kant,
1993, pp. 14-15
[11] Inke ARNS / Andreas BROECKMANN, " Small Media Normality for the East"
(1997), in: P. Schultz / D. McCarty / V. Cosic / G. Lovink (eds.), ZK
Proceedings 4: Beauty and the East, Ljubljana: Digital Media Lab, 1997, pp.
17-21. Online version in: Rewired. Journal of a Strained Net, 9 to 15 June
1997 <http://www.rewired.com/97/0609.html>.
[12] Jáchym TOPOL, Die Schwester, [1994], translated by Eva Profousová and
Beate Smandek, Berlin 1998
[13] In the film Underground, partisans hide from the Nazis in a Belgrade
basement during the Second World War. They are deceived by a war-profiteer
who, even though the war has ended, leads them to believe for almost 50
years that it is still raging above ground. For a comprehensive evaluation
of this controversial film, see Dina Iordanova, ?Kusturica?s Underground
(1995): historical allegory or propaganda??, in: Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1999, pp. 69-86. A different,
claustrophobic vision of an ?unfinished tunnel" is central to the most
popular film in Serbia in recent years Pretty Village, Pretty Flames
(directed by Srðan Dragojeviæ, FRY 1996) ? for a psychoanalytic reading of
this film, see Branislava Anðelkoviæ, ?Pretty Village, Pretty Flames:
Popular Discourses of War? [text translated by Srðan Vujica], in: Pop
Vision -- Zbornik textova sa simpozijuma ?Visuelnost popularnog i
popularnost vizuelnog? [Collection of texts of the symposium ?Visuality of
the popular and popularity of the visual?], Second Biennial of Young
Artists, Vr?ac, July 1996, pp. 118-138
[14] <http://www.komuna.com/underground/film.html>
[15] Volker GRASSMUCK, Geschlossene Gesellschaft. Mediale und diskursive
Aspekte der "drei Ã?ffnungen" Japans, doctoral dissertation, Free University
of Berlin 1998, unpublished manuscript. To be published shortly by ludicium
Verlag, Munich.
[16] Richard MUIR 1975, p. 119, quoted after Benedict ANDERSON, Die
Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts, [orig.
Imagined Communities, London 1983], Frankfurt / M., New York 1996, p. 173.
[17] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, Rhizom, [orig. Rhizome, Introduction,
Paris 1976], Berlin 1977, p. 11. Rhizom was included in revised form in
Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus [orig. Milles
Plateaux, Paris 1980], translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota
Press 1996. The term "rhizome" has been used very often in media theory in
recent years to describe the Internet.
[18] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 7
[19] WEINRICH, quoted in: Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand
Plateaus, p.7
[20] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 7
[21] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9
[22] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12-13. In
Rhizom (1977) they say: "The tracing has already translated the map into an
image and transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. In line with its
own axes [...] it has neutralised the multitudes [...] the tracing may
think it is reproducing something else, but it is only reproducing itself.
That is what makes it so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates
them." (p. 23)
[23] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21-22
[24] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25
[25] Inke ARNS / Andreas BROECKMANN (eds.), Reader of the V2_East /
Syndicate Meeting on Documentation and Archives of Media Art in Eastern,
Central and South-Eastern Europe (Rotterdam: V2_Organisatie / DEAF96,
1996), <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr0.html>. 
Inke ARNS / Andreas BROECKMANN (eds.), Deep Europe: The 1996 ? 97 edition.
Selected texts from the V2_East/Syndicate mailing list, Berlin, October
1997, 143 pages, <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr1.html>. 
Inke Arns (ed.), Junction Skopje, selected texts from the V2_East/Syndicate
mailing list 1997 - 98, Skopje, October 1998, 197 pages [ISBN
9989-745-23-4], <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr2.html>. 
Cf. also Inke ARNS (ed.), "New Media Cultures in Central, Eastern and
South-Eastern Europe", Convergence: Journal of Research into New
Technologies, Volume 4, No. 2, University of Luton Press, Summer 1998 [ISSN
1354-8565] [ISBN 1-86020-032-X]
<http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Projects/Converge/toc.html>
[26] Timothy DRUCKREY, "The Fate of Reason in the Global Network:
Teleology, Telegraphy, Telephony, Televicion, Telesthetics", in: ars
electronica, Mythos Information: Welcome to the Wired World, Exhibition
Catalogue, Vienna / New York 1995, p. 152
[27] Michel FOUCAULT, "Andere Räume", in: Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder
Perspektiven einer anderen Ã?sthetik, ed. by K. Barck, P. Gente, H. Paris,
S. Richter, Leipzig 1990, pp. 34-46; here p. 37. The potential limits to
every kind of translocality are, of course, contained in the existence of
these "phantasms" in the local or national context.
[28] Lisa HASKEL, "Tunnelling to Deep Europe. A letter from my Island
home", Syndicate mailing list, 15th August 1997.
[29] Karl SCHL�GEL, "Kosovo war überall. Die ethnische Säuberung ist eine
Ausgeburt des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Bilanz der Vertreibungen in Europa",
in: Die Zeit, No. 18 / 29th April 1999, pp. 15-19
<http://www.ZEIT.de/archiv/1999/18/19918.schloegel_ii_.html>
[30] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 8 and 7
[31] Gilles DELEUZE / Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 15. In the
"Fischbüro" in Berlin?s Kreuzberg district, a cultural club which was
active from 1986 to 1989, prizes could be won during competitions and
guessing games (e.g. "What Am I?" ? an off-beat adaptation of the popular
television panel game chaired by Robert Lemke). The most coveted award was
the "Headlamp", a Polish miner?s lamp in its original packaging. Working on
this article ten years later the author, who was an active member of the
"Fischbüro" at the time, has finally grasped the true meaning of the
"Headlamp".


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