Interview with Geert Lovink - N5M programmer
By Bas Raijmakers and Willem van Weelden
Question: What is the big difference between the first Next Five Minutes (1993) and
this second edition?
Geert Lovink: The first edition was an outburst of energy, a total chaos.
Looking back, the program was a rather cautious inventarisation of the field
of tactical media. The landscape has changed considerably since. Only the
demand for public access has remained really. Now you see connections between
all kinds of media. E-mail is used widely by radiostations to get news from
all over the world. Internet has moved into TV, look at the BBC and the dutch
public channel VPRO, but also Hoeksteen TV on the Amsterdam Open Cable TV
Channel uses Internet a lot.
Q: So you see a convergence between media happening. Is this why The Next
Five Minutes brings together all these different kinds of media - print,
radio, TV, Internet?
GL: Yes, but the convergence on the human level has not happened
yet. Media are merging but people still work quite seperately in underground
media all over the world. That is why you still see a lot of hard-core
documentaries presenting a kind of counter-information. You can see these
for instance in the VPRO TV-program WEB Wereldontvanger (on dutch national TV)
which is a kind of CNN World Report of the underground media. At this
conference we offer a chance to the people working in the underground media
to meet each other and exchange experiences. They can build their
international contacts here. In that sense you could say that this conference
just wants to be a facility for the people in underground media. Again we
want to create a chaos, a creative one.
Q: You said that the demand for access has remained since the first edition
of The Next Five Minutes. How is this reflected in the program of this
conference?
GL: Accessability is the starting point of this conference. We want to find out
what kinds of access are around. How do people distribute their contents? There
are always new channels of distribution possible. Look at Vakuum TV. from Hungary. They make a hybrid of live TV
and theatre, and call it unplugged TV. Also the videomagazine has become a very
important distribution channel lately, after a slow start in the eighties. Or
look at the Exploding Cinema initiative in Vrieshuis Amerika (in Amsterdam).
There is still a lot of creativity possible in combining different channels of
distribution.
Q: So at the beginning of the conference the question of access is dealt with.
What after that?
GL: More to the end of the conference we have planned the big debates: on netcritisism, on metaphores, on copyright, on research. That is
where we go beyond being a facility. At that moment our political agenda comes
in, but we want to be cautious with that agenda. We do not want to set
ideological points of departure for the discussions. You must remember that
access to all kinds of media is very good in Amsterdam. In many other places big
battles over access are fought. Because we have such good accessability here, we
are in the position to facilitate a global meeting, a conference like this.
Q: The visitors and guests should set this agenda?
GL: Yes, we want everyone present here to be reflective upon their own
practices in underground media, discover that there are many other people in
world doing more or less the same thing, and develop a common agenda.
text by Bas Raijmakers
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