Art+Communication 2000, Riga
Chronicle of "InterCultural Jamming" Festival and NICE Meeting
Tatiana Gorucheva
24-26.08.2000 Riga E-LAB and RIXC (the newly founded Centre for New Media Culture) organized the 4th ART+COMMUNICATION "InterCultural Jamming" festival <http://rixc.lv/00 > and NICE [Network Interface for Cultural Exchange] <http://nice.x-i.net/>meeting. All events happened at the "Noass" Gallery, which was transformed of floating quay (project supported by the Riga Soros Foundation) staying in a dock on Daugava River almost in front of "E-Lab" Centre.
Opening "dam" party in the rain happened in the struggle of the elements, natural and artificial: "long reverb time vs. intellectual (TG: or natural?) non-musical tones and structures" (Clausthome/Riga) in real time and wet real space. Culmination, i.e. fire, water, and steel tubes which were sounding with the help of natural gas, burners, and men in black overalls and masks, - was the performance by Eric Hobijn "Fire whistling compositions" /Amsterdam. "Features of minimalism" (AG, Raitis, Clausthome/ Riga) played at the end were preceded by visual "mini-geo" sets and other video features by F5 / Riga which accompanied to compositions from DGs Pollution, Charlie Ferrari, AG, Raitis, Clausthome.
Next day started with the open working session for NICE members. The Network Interface for Cultural Exchange was initiated a year ago and the first meeting took place in November 1999 in the frame of "TEMP - temporary media art lab project" in Kiasma Museum, Helsinki. At the moment NICE unites several media centers and art organizations from Baltic Sea and North-East European regions.(*) This meeting agenda included presentations of members activities, discussion of some strategic and practical issues of future collaboration and its support. Questions appeared in the process of presentations and discussion can be summarized in the next key points: how NICE can be beneficial for its members? What are the objectives of its existence and function? What sort of activities and projects can be realized and supported through NICE? What sources of support might be available for these projects and how NICE might help? What perspectives of further development of NICE? Answers to these questions are needed not only for proposals in order to enforce bureaucrats from foundations and local authorities to invest money in media culture. Taking into consideration the actual interests and needs of every member of the multicultural network and collaborative search for the most appropriate forms of self-organizing and ways of activity that meet them should be the starting point.
From very beginning, like many mailing lists we aimed to provide sharing of information, ideas, opinions in order to stimulate closer communication and provoke cooperation between people who have common interests, NICE was established in the form of a virtual network on the Internet. The primordial aim was to pedal physical cooperation between subscribers through exchange with information about events, projects, programs, etc. The next step was an idea to propose a project which will help to understand deeper local situations of NICE members and, thus, to make collaboration more productive. It became a project of the Mobile Media Lab inside the bus which would move from one "NICE place" to another around Baltic Sea organizing events and educational programs, and thus, making network visible. Kristin Bergaust (Atelier Nord/Oslo) and Rasa Smite (E-LAB/Riga) told about practical details of the project and it seemed that Mobile Media Lab would demand serious technical and organizational preparations as well as serious funds.
This meeting aimed to become the next logical stage of NICE development, i.e. a step towards official recognition in order to make virtual network into a real umbrella, which can provide its members with necessary support at the institutional level. At the same time being a non-formal self-organizing network community, NICE in its activity goes beyond the institutional constraints. Earlier examples of similar networks related to media culture are Nettime and Syndicate. The Nettime mailing list was initiated, first of all, in order to distribute media discourse, Syndicate's primordial goal was to help media artists and curators from Eastern Europe to find partners on the West what would make easier to get support for joint projects from European foundations. NICE's objectives are tight mostly with local context(s).
It's not the first initiative of this kind in Baltic Sea and North European region. Two years ago in the frame of Art+Communication III two relative initiatives were presented in Riga: Baltic Interface Net and Interfund. Both seem to slow down. The first one was going to rely on support of national governments establishing itself as "a joint forum for culture" and "a vehicle for co-productions and events". The second one conceived as "the international decentralized self-supporting platform for innovative and creative projects and research works in new media field" was supposed to be a shared "Resource Pool" and a sort of buffer between official structures and artists at the same time preventing the latter ones from self-institutionalizing.
NICE appears to be a mostly practically oriented project aimed to develop "self-sustaining media culture practice" based on "mutual support <…> employed as both a local strategy (e.g. Norwegian production network) and a tool for investigating and supporting development of new models for organizational infrastructure (e.g. RIXC - the centre for new media culture in Latvia, M-Cult in Finland), as it stated in the final press-release. Technically the network interface is going to be established in the form of a shared data base <http://bin.rixc.lv/demo/nice.gif > presented at the meeting by Janis Gnarrs /Riga. Almost all NICE's active members are media art practitioners themselves. In fact the orbits of practitioners and policy makers very rarely intersect in real time and real space. One more try to make "policy meet practice" (one of the panels) was not realized as it was planned. Invited officials from Latvian Ministry of Culture and City Council went on their holidays. Only representatives of foreign cultural organizations that supported the festival attended the meeting. After speech of Andreas Drufva from Swedish Institute discussion got going around some practical aspects of communication with foundations.
The next day was almost entirely dedicated to presentations of art projects and activities: Internet based works, experimental soft ware and CD ROM art, video and actions. ASCII Art Ensemble (Thomax Kaulman and Walter Van Der Cruijsen) <www.desk.org/a/a/e> was demonstrating their Streaming ASCII video during the conference by doing live video broadcasting of the meeting on the web in ASCII format. Heath Bunting perplexed the audience by proclaiming that genetically modified products and people who eat them are new media. That's the truth because biotechnology and genetic engineering deal with nothing less than the transmission and modification of hereditary information contained in genes what may have crucial consequences for our civilization.
Would it be the second information revolution when not only objective world around us will change but also the next generations will look absolutely different and will have absolutely different mind? Let's follow artist's experiments <http://www.irational.org>. Alexei Shulgin told about his experience of challenging the potential of porno business on the web. The results excelled all expectations. His fake on-line shop "Fuck You Fuck Me" where he presented gadgets for remote cyber sex with the help of computer, to be more precisely - CD drive, risked to become highly profitable enterprise. But morally firm artist didn't betray himself and art. So he left it as "a small size provocation" <http://www.fufme.com/>. 0100101110101101.ORG did a sort of performance by reciting the history of their struggle for free possession (downloading) of web art projects.
Tilman Buamgaertel /Berlin told about and gave some examples of art in the form of software that he considers the new form of public art <http://www.numeral.com>. This phenomenon indeed deserves to be seriously explored as new turn in the aesthetic evolution being an interesting symbiosis of pragmatic method of programming and irrational artistic ideas.
Special panel was dedicated to streaming media. E-LAB was one of the firsts who started to experiment with net radio broadcasting - OZOne project <http://ozone.re-lab.net>. Then they founded Xchange net audio network with own mailing list <http://xchange.re-lab.net>, which united independent net radio stations from different countries. The first part of the panel consisted of presentations of alternative net radio stations: Pararadio <http://www.c3.hu/para>/Budapest, Fallout <http://www.fallout.org.uk> /London, MZX <http://www.radiostudent.si/mzx> /Ljubljana, Net. Radio Jeleni <http://www.cafe9.cz>/Prague. Rachel Baker /London demonstrated her TM Selector project, a sort of navigation tool on the web where one can find a list of net radio stations with some additional practical info and other things <www.tmselector.net>.
Appearance and the spread of alternative radio stations on the web were inspired by two needs. The first is a natural resistance to commercial main stream and wishes to have different and diverse content, very often experimental and innovative stuff, on radio waves. The second one is to satisfy tastes, interests, and demands of relatively small communities (youth, subcultures, artists, minorities, etc.) to which initiators of net radio belong themselves and which are not necessary geographically determined. Thus, from very beginning these stations became energetic points of new network communities by following the actuality of their life and involving their members in production of programs. Any collective activity tends to be centrifugal and to diffuse through making contacts with adherents. Following this logic, small networks started to form bigger networks by putting cross links to each other on their web sites, communicating through mailing lists, IRC, and on-line conferences, organizing joint events, and establishing common interfaces. How produced audio and video stuff could be archived and then used by everyone via the Internet was demonstrated by Thomax Kaulman /Berlin - Orange project <http://orang.orang.org>.
Quick technological evolution very soon permitted not only easy access to production and transmission tools, integration of activities and projects but also possibility of hybrid content production. Thus, development of video streaming and web tv inspired appearance of net projects produced at the combined technological platform. Movement in this direction was demonstrated by Manu Luksch's London project Ambient TV www.ambienttv.net which includes: online film, online game based on the film, live webcasts and communication interfaces, collaborative production of TV programs with means of the net, fusion of linear narrative and open data structures. Another web tv projects that was presented at the festival was Tvvv_ plotas by Jutempus group/Vilnius. The project was initiated few years ago during which the authors Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas produced a series of tv programs about local contemporary art scene and international media art movement.
There were presentations of other media initiatives from all over the world, including Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico. See more info: http://rixc.lv/00.
Tatiana Gorucheva
Moscow MediaArtLab
* Nice Members:
Atelier Nord http://www.anart.no Oslo, Norway
Association Of Contemporary Arts http://nice.x-i.net/outskirts Minsk, Belarus
Baltic Center http://www.bc-ctp.lv Riga, Latvia
E-Lab http://re-lab.net Riga, Latvia
Crac http://www.crac.org Stockholm, Sweden
Jutempus, Vilnius, Lithuania
Locomotive http://www.borderland.org Riga, Latvia
M-Cult http://www.m-cult.org/ , Helsinki, Finland
Media Art Lab http://www.danet.ru Moscow, Russia
Muu Media Base Helsinki, Finland
Pro Arte http://proarte.spb.ru St.Petersburg, Russia
Rixc http://rixc.lv, Riga, Latvia
And Individuals...