[n5m4 ] 9-11 and after

essay

9-11 and after

Barbara Abrash

For the early part of the TML we were joined by Barbara Abrash who with others from the Center for Media Culture and History presented Virtual Case Book a web publication gathering commentary about tactical media responses to 9/11. During her stay at the TML Barbara not only spoke at our kick off evening at De Balie but also contributed to the Virtual Shelters development project presenting the Virtual Case book as a refference point for the development of the Virtual Shelters website.
Below is an edited text of her presentation.

Center for Media Culture and History
11 September 02

Introduction
9-11 and after [www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb] is what we are calling a "virtual casebook" or VCB - a web publication produced at New York University's Center for Media, Culture and History that gathers commentary and resources on how people, particularly in Lower Manhattan used media, especially small and ephemeral media, in the days following the attack on the World Trade Center.

While the burning towers have become the iconic image of September 11, our subject is the vast amount of ephemeral material - photographs, e-mails, poems, websites, missing posters, sculpture, drawings, voice messages, murals - that filled every public space -- virtual and physical -- in Lower Manhattan almost immediately after the attacks.

When it came time to commemorate the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the city fathers said they were at a loss for words - and therefore would recite the Gettysburg Address instead. As the Economist noted," the establishment's poverty of imagination stands in sharp contrast with the inventiveness of ordinary Americans." ??

This VCB is a repository of that remarkable inventiveness - on the Web and in the streets.

Genesis of the Project
The Center for Media, Culture and History is located in Lower Manhattan - in the area near Ground Zero below 14th Street - that was cordoned off in what was called "the frozen zone" in the days after September 11, closed to non-residents and traffic. People poured into the streets, taking over parks and streets with demonstrations, flags, poetry, vigils, music, and posters of the missing - along with messages of all kinds. ???

At the same time, the web and the Internet were our lifeline-to find friends and loved ones, to get information and to express ourselves. The virtual and physical, old and new media seemed to have merged. At the Center, we became interested in how the new media environment framed the event and what it made possible at a time when the matrix was broken. It seemed to us a convergence of virtual and physical worlds, of old and new media.

We are an interdisciplinary center at New York University, based in the Anthropology dept. Our subject is the social practice of media, especially the role of media in cultural activism. For many years, the focus was on independent film and video, but three or four years ago we began to look at how new media was transforming our landscape.

We work collaboratively with several departments and centers at NYU, including the Tisch School of the Arts, and also with MOMA, the National Museum of the American Indian, and other cultural institutions in the city. Three years ago, we looked to our colleagues, to see how others were approaching new media.

At that time, the university itself was becoming aware of the economic potential of "distance learning," and of IT programs where the institution could claim ownership of work produced by students and faculty. What we couldn?t find at that time was a space within which to look systematically at work under the rubric of new media, or the support needed for the kind of theoretical and practical work we have been doing for many years with film and video. We needed to think about how to analyze this work, how to introduce it into our teaching; and we needed a non-commercial space in which to experiment.

In conversations with people at NYU like Drazen Pantic, who was running a research project at NYU, we discovered that the world of tactical media was speaking to our issues. So, with funding from Joan Shigekawa at the Creativity and Culture program at The Rockefeller Foundation, we organized a brainstorming session in April 2001, which brought together 25 tactical media theorists, artists and activists (Ravi Sundaram, Gregg Bordowitz, Natalie Jeremijenko, and Daoud Kuttab were among the participants) to explore the ways in which new communications technologies have opened multiple forms of connection for cultural activism.

Our question was: how could a university-based program like ours contribute to a field so rich in expertise and experience? Was there anything tactical media practitioners and other activists needed that we could provide?

Two things came out of that meeting: First, a desire to meet again for face-to-face conversation, which we plan to do in December, when we sponsor a Tactical Media Lab in conjunction with the N5M4. Second, the idea of a series of web-based case books that would gather analysis, journalism, first person accounts and resources on media activism. In view of the contextual nature of tactical media, we thought each case book should deal with a specific area of activism that is enmeshed in web-based activity: human rights, HIV/AIDS, prison reform, etc.

With these case books, we hoped to produce a platform for teaching and research, an interactive resource for activists and theorists, and a space for global dialog around specific examples. We'd be dealing with particular areas of media activism, but also consider what these various and diverse practices have in common, to begin to build a discursive field.

From this request, my colleague Faye Ginsburg and I, with advice from several members of that core group at the April meeting, decided to develop a hybrid form of publication - which we called a "virtual case book" or VCB.

In our proposal we said that it would combine 1) the interactivity and accessibility of the web, with its capacity to incorporate and archive print, visual, and audio data, 2) the intellectual focus and range of academic research and 3) the organization of information that enables quick overall comprehension of an area of activism enmeshed in web-based activity..

We again approached The Rockefeller Foundation for funding, and invited Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson of Picture Projects (they had been at our April meeting) to collaborate on the design, having been blown away by their sites -- including 360 degrees.org (linked with prison reform) and akakurdistan (Susan Meiselas' Kurdish photo project). Sue and Alison, in turn, brought Britta Frahm into the design team. Most recently, Picture Projects launched SonicMemorial.Org, an audio archive of the World Trade Center.

We thought we would begin with HIV/AIDS activism. And then there was September 11.

9-11 and After: A Virtual Case Book
The attack on the World Trade Center was--among other things--a stunning media event, and there was no shortage of analysis on mass media coverage. ?We saw no reason to replicate what others were doing. What no one seemed to be looking at closely was the significance of this ephemeral material that filled the streets and parks in New York below 14th Street or its relationship with the new media that was also flooding our lives. This part of Manhattan, not far from Ground Zero, is our neighborhood, and during the days that it was cordoned off, it became a pedestrian city, with people claiming the streets. We were an isolated neighborhood, but also a community that is at the epicenter of global communication.

As the patriotic rhetoric of "war against terrorism" kicked in, and TV became our national grief counselor, the rains came and the City moved to dismantle the shrines, murals, memorial walls, and photographs; ?at the same time, weblogs and e-mails threatened to disappear. We became aware of just how important small and ephemeral media was, and how little serious media attention (other than a kind of sentimental trivializing that further marginalized it) it was receiving.

To us, it was evidence of the daily lives and spontaneous creative expression of a community responding to crisis; as the raw material of history; as the material of counter-narratives to the official versions; and for what it revealed about the forms and networks of expression took shape in that chaotic time. We also realized that we had colleagues at NYU who look at questions of everyday life, performativity and politics who had begun to look at the same issues. We solicited contributions from them, from students, and from the members of the group who had met in April.

9-11 and after is an experiment, a prototype and still very much in process. It is a gathering of essays, reports, websites, first-person accounts, films and videos that document, frame and analyze the ephemeral material of September 11 and the days immediately after, specifically focusing on Lower Manhattan.

It is a hybrid publication - an interactive reference book that is not only a resource, but a site for research and analysis, and a teaching tool.

9-11 and After Is organized into five main sections:
Reverberations provides larger perspectives on the unexpected capacities of old and new media.
Extreme Close-Up documents and contemplates the implications of the effusion of ephemeral material in Lower Manhattan, as people tried to comprehend and communicate.
Rethinking, Rebuilding, Rewiring demonstrates how New Yorkers used public spaces to rebuild their relationship to the city, in the face of exhortations to "get back to normal." Field Reports offers examples of how people around the world reshaped trajectories of news and information from around the globe ?
Resources provides extensive lists of websites, films and videos organized in categories: first-person accounts, news/activism, etc. - with contextualizing essays.

The virtual case book is, at the same time, an archive and a gathering of archives. ?For some (see interview with Andrea Vasquez on 911 Digital Archive, www.911digitalarchive.org), it is a depository of suppressed or unnoticed stories, folk art and information--a source of material for historians and for counternarratives. Here is New York (see interview with Charles Traub and www.hereisnewyork.com) combined visual and virtual worlds a website and a public space to which anyone could bring their photographs of the attack and its aftermath, to be digitized and displayed. Television Archive (http://tvnews3.televisionarchive.org/tvarchive) gathers 9-11 coverage from 19 television stations available to the public proposing, as Meg McLagan notes in her essay, "Archival Interventions," a digital alternative to copyright.
www.peoplespoetry.com, was a site to which anyone could submit a poem. True to the recombinant character of digital material, selected lines from this site (and from lines solicited from professional poets) were fashioned into two poems in the shape of the towers, each 110 lines, which became part of Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning (see interview with Marci Reaven.) Ted Byfields Reconstruction Report (http://reconstructionreport.org) is a multi-faceted research and information site that seeks to promote "public understanding of the redevelopment of the WTC site."

These examples only begin to suggest the range of interventions, issues, and opportunities for research and commentary that are embedded in the virtual case book.

The VCB will be the center of discussion at our TML in December. Our goal is to develop cooperative research projects--with special focus on how the VCB can facilitate teaching. ??Some possibilities that have been proposed include: ?the complexities of archiving and evaluating ephemeral material; issues of intellectual and cultural property; and the kinds of social and aesthetic interventions this material represents. ?

We look forward to your suggestions and responses.