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Many of our choices of that period were more spontaneous than
reasoned, but we found ourselves exactly in the middle of an
extremely confusing historic phase of changes throughout the world
of production phases of work, while, in the cultural field, the
crisis of the punk opened new and large contradictions.
Living in chaos had become a normal condition, so we created a
DECODER, as an instrument for survival. That which we saw around
us was a psychic dimension that we defined as an "imaginative
cloak" that prevented from seeing new utopias.
This same concept was defined a few years later by Hakim Bey
"closure of the map". Our DECODER had to search, projecting into
the future, to create breaches in the block of the mind and to
favour the birth of new imaginaries. The first consequence made to
study was that of the mutation of the body and of the spirit in
respect to the epiphenomenon, more importantly, of that which
resembled being a new era: the invasion of technology. If we would
have been able to demonstrate that the transformations were
already happening, we should have modified the relation between
the temporal perception and the possibility of action in the
present.
For these reasons we have always tried to approach articles reguarding work together with forms of culture and the creative avantgard. The first numbers of DECODER brought articles reguarding production in outer space, how to revolutionize television, the demistification of the informatic sciences, on free festivals, Japan and drugs. These tendencies in the choices of themes have never been modified. At this point we started traveling throughout Europe and we discovered that there were other magazines, or groups, that had more or less our feelings and perceptions of reality. The "Encyclopaedia Psychedelica" and "Vague" were our points of reference in the U.K., while in Germany there was the Chaos Computer Club. In exactly the same period speech was beginning to be heard of a new current in Science Fiction literature: the "Cyberpunk". This label exists in reality of human behaviour and more or less was interpreted as a "head in technology and the feet in the street". It was used as a point of symbolic reference for all of a series of people in the world who thought that technology could be used in an alternative or transgressive manner. The Cyberpunk, in the facts, represents the figure of the rebel of the new era.
1) make 11 issues of DECODER, that is always becoming more of a magazine of social informatics and at the same time a publication for mutants. Decoder has around 50 contributors spread all over the world.
2) publish 25 books and we have provisions of publishing at least 8 a year starting in 1994.
3) open a Bulletin board system, that works like an everyday telematic journal for 400 users in the Milano area and an information network that has 32 hosts throughout Italy with around 2000 users. Open a web site.
4) organize about 30 media parties, where interactive installations are made and elementary courses for the use of new technology.
5) participate in over 250 debates on the question of new technology and the liberty of information.
It's clear that in all this process the philosophy of the "refuse of work" has become a distant memory but, although in Italy those benefits or dole don't exist from the part of the government, no one in the ShaKe is paid for the work that's done, so the relation with the market is particular.
Our intentions for the future are to create through editorial activity the conditions and the countercultural humus, because the movement can regenerate, this is how it happened at the end of the sixties. We want to intervene into what could be called the "crisis of the social center", a valid model of resistance during the eighties, but it must necesarilly mutate and evolve in the view of the year 2000. In a paradoxical epoch where the maximum of the diffusion of technology for the distribution of information, corresponds with the minnimum of real communication between social subject, the only prospective is to reason around a hypothesis of upturning this of this relation of dominion.
Anyone interested in collaborating with the magazine DECODER or with the ShaKe editions, is invited to send articles, reports, book reviews, books, videos, and projects of installations.
Contacts: ShaKe Via C. Balbo 10, 20136 Milano, Italy Tel. +39-2-58317306
DECODERBBS: +39-2-29527597 (from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m.)
E-Mail: decoder@stinch0.csmtbo.mi.cnr.it
http://www.iol.it/magazines/decoder