Streaming media have exploded since the last next5minutes. The
prediction three years ago was that the amount of livestreams which are
available now would collapse the net. It did not. Interestingly enough
the net seems to adapt time and time again to new demands, no matter
how much it is burdened by them. How this happens, nobody really knows.
It is subject to much speculation. Every now and then we receive rumors
that organisations which are crucial players in the shaping and
maintaining of the internet want to initialize taxes or fees for heavy
traffic. Until now there is no clear indication if, when and how this
would happen. Furthermore the internet, and with it the streaming media,
is opening itself up to larger parts of the world. Though most often
internet access still is a privilege, cheaper and better technology
offer attractive solutions for, for example, third world country
projects too. Think of the project we hope to present in our forum,
in which the Panos Institute has helped the production of a website
which is used to exchange indepth radioprograms from nine frenchspeaking
African countries. All programs are entirely available online, with
background information. The obscurity concerning the decisionmaking and who ultimately has the
real power on the internet leaves us with a large vacuum in which a lot
is happening and has happened the last three years. Especially audio
has manifested itself in all kinds of shapes, but we expect video, (or
motion pictures, or television,) will catch up in the same numbers soon.
WebTV developments are proceeding very much -now-, and is like net.radio
most often part of a cluster of activities within a computerscreen or
project. The texts of Raoul Marroquin, Drazen Pantic and Derrick de
Kerckhove all refer to this, next to their individual emphasis on
aspects of organisation and legislation in the field of webcasting and
traditional broadcasting media. It is impossible to speak of radio and television on the internet
seperately from the same media outside of it, the 'traditional media'.
Eventhough for instance a lot of alternative net.radio projects are
about small circle communication and experiment, 'traditional media'
have caught on to the idea of audience feedback, and are using input
of its audience to shape programs. Also larger alternative net.radio
projects like Interface (pirateradio.co.uk) offer far more then simple
pleasure in music: its website has involved its audience closely from
the beginning, thus acting as a kind of meeting place. What ultimately is most interesting about streaming media is not so
much their features as such, but their content. This is what the
streaming media forum will mostly try to focus on, and this is what
Micz Flor, Tetsuo Kogawa and also Drazen Pantic write so passionately
about. From different backgrounds, and with maybe totally different
goals in the end which can overlap (political, artistic, social), the
issue of tactical media is mostly one of content, or: what are we doing
it all for? In the n5m streaming media forum Freespeech TV will also present its
work, which now involves a large number of activities, including an
online activist video archive. Drazen Pantic, former head of the
internet department of B92 from Belgrade, started to put his energy
into disclosing remote and politically suppressed communities (like B92
has done for the opposition in Serbia), using all media available, from
radio and video to satelite and internet. His work involves a critical
examination of the entire medialandscape. Veran Matic gives a view into
the present actual situation of B92 and Serbian media politics. Tetsuo
Kogawa and Micz Flor could both, even considering their differences, be
called art-activists, as they are occupied with art embedded in a
context of political and media niches. Focussing on the media as a tool,
they refine and explore this tool from a background of social and
art-criticism. Helen Thoringtons' text is the most art and software
centred, and shows us a tiny fragment of the world of streaming media
outside of RealMedia and MP3. Older or less used software like CUSeeme
or VRML are used for interesting projects, that can serve as experimental
examples, of which Adrift is one. As Micz Flor wrote: Stop pushing or I'll stream... We hope the reasons
for research and exchange in te field of alternative streaming media
will somehow cristalize and reveal themselves, in between the lines
maybe, like with Tetsuo Kogawa's text, which can be read in many
different ways or edits. The evergrowing presence of broadcasting media
which serve only one interest, which is making money (commercial radio
and television), might ask for a statement from us. In the Netherlands
the broadcasting company VPRO had to find a solution to the problem
of 'horizontal programming' inside the public media, which left no
room for alternative music programming. For the moment this solution is
the internet. Do we simply use the escape route while it is still there
or do we get involved in its preservation? There are many different
answers. There are many different solutions, temporary and definite.
Any which way, our immersion into the 'megamedium' (a combination of
all media with computernetworks, Robert Adrian) is nearly completed. Josephine Bosma, Nina Meilof
Amsterdam, Februari 18th 1999 |