Some points of departure

Andreas Broeckmann, V2_Organisation Rotterdam, December1995

Contents

* Introduction: Tactical Media
* Next 5 Minutes
* Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL/USA): Alien Staff
* Paul Garrin (US): MediaFilter
* Knowbotic Research+cF (D/A): Dialogue With The Knowbotic South
* Economy / Ecology / Subjectivity
* Conclusion: A New Media Ecology
* Bibliography and Hypertext References

"It will be a decisive programmatic point of the social
ecology to guide these capitalist societies of the age
of mass media into a post-mass medial age; I mean that
the mass media have to be reappropriated by a
multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to
administer them on a path of singularisation." (Guattari
1994, p.64)

Introduction: Tactical Media

Many media practitioners find themselves in a rather frustrating situation.
It has been decided that what they are concerned with are 'old' media - a
fatal verdict in an age where the average attention span seems to be no more
that 30 seconds. The 'new' media are those which use digital computer
technology and of which one can be sure that in less than four years they
will not only be old, but hopelessly obsolete. 'New' is, in this case, not a
signifier of actual novelty - it is unlikely that anybody would identify the
recently invented wind-up radio which makes radio reception independent from
power supply through cables or batteries, as a 'new medium', however
revolutionary it may prove to be in areas with little or no electrical
infrastructure. 'New' is an indicator of speed, both of transmission and of
aging. Say 'media', and the in-crowd immediately translates this as
Internet, cellular phones, cable television, or even worse: World Wide Web
sites.

Computers have clearly had a huge impact on recent developments in media
technology, but digitisation and the politics of electronic networks are not
necessarily the most important factors for an evaluation and the critique of
contemporary media practice. Take, for instance, Shotgun TV, a new medium
invented and built by the group Contained from Linz in Austria. Shotgun TV
is an automobile video-weapon with a camera and projection unit mounted on a
pickup truck. Two VCRs, a headmounted surveillance camera and a camera on
the "Big Gun" give the input for the projections from a large LCD beam next
to the driver's window and a small LCD beam on the small gun which also has
a loudspeaker. The audio-part has various inputs for tape recorders and
microphones and is connected to a transmitter with a range of about a
kilometre. If the tactical media accept an inherent affiliation with certain
military dispositions and traditions of piracy, this is a machine that media
tacticians can be proud of. (Shotgun TV will, unfortunately, not be
available for the Next 5 Minutes.)

Yet, the analogy between weapons and media suggested here has also been an
important topic of discussions in the run-up to the second Next 5 Minutes
conference. Is the military metaphor appropriate for describing what media
artists and activists do? Doesn't the metaphor jeopardise efforts for more
peaceful, more thoughtful, also more compassionate approaches in the
independent media which are often directed precisely against the suppressive
and violent practices of the media conglomerates and the Powers That Be?

I won't try to find an answer right now, but will first unfold some of the
issues that seem important for an analysis of the function and functionality
of tactical media today. A definition of what tactical media might actually
be will be attempted in rather abstract fashion in a moment, and I will then
move on to describe some of the projects that will be presented by
V2_Organisation during the N5M, outlining their tactical impact. I will end
with a defense of the term 'media ecology' which has been criticised by
others as being an inappropriate and unwelcome metaphor.

Media ecology as I understand it describes an interrelated series of
material, practical and theoretical trajectories which constitute a
'formation', a stratum, a spatial and temporal machine which is driven by
other machines, as much as it helps to drive them. If this definition is
accepted, the contentious issue is whether we should use the eco- prefix for
something that is unrelated to the natural environment. I believe it is
worth recovering a wider meaning of the notion ecology where it denotes not
so much the relation between humans, animals and plants and their natural
environment, but the knowledgeable engagement with, as Félix Guattari calls
them, the three ecological registers, that is the environment, the social
relations, and human subjectivity (1994, p.12). It has become virtually
impossible to think nature without culture: "We have to learn," writes
Guattari, "to make our thought traverse the interrelations and mutual
influences between eco-systems, the material world, social and individual
relations." (p.35) The critical understanding of the media ecology, which
Guattari calls ecosophy, is a way for media activists and artists of
enabling themselves to conduct their social and political lives in a
considerate and responsible way. But more on that later.

Some remarks about the notion of the tactical, and about its application in
relation to media practice. The Mexican-American writer Manuel de Landa, in
his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), describes the
military as

"a 'machine' composed of several distinct levels (...): the level
of weapons and the hardware of war; the level of tactics, in which
men and weapons are integrated into formations; the level of
strategy, in which the battles fought by those formations acquire
a unified political goal; and finally, the level of logistics, of
procurement and supply networks, in which warfare is connected to
the agricultural and industrial resources that fuel it." (p.5)

The main objection perhaps to the implied analogy between military and media
tactics is that the military scenario described here is based on a situation
of confrontation and struggle against an opponent, whereas the use of media
like television, printed matter, or electronic networks often has the
function of communicating, of linking, of bringing together. More
specifically, the military machine is tuned to operate in the exceptional
and limited spatio-temporal continuum defined as 'war', whereas tactical
media are used under everyday conditions as well as in more extreme social
and political situations.

Nevertheless I feel that the analysis taken from the military scenario can
help us understand at which operative level media tacticians are engaged -
whether their cause is the dissident struggle against an oppressor, or the
attempt to create a new social form at a juncture of need and possibility.
Let me paraphrase de Landa's section just quoted:

The media ecology is a machine composed of several distinct levels: the
levels of media and related tools and instruments; the level of tactics, in
which individuals and media are integrated into formations; the level of
strategy, in which the campaigns conducted by those formations acquire a
unified political goal; and finally, the level of logistics, of procurement
and supply networks, in which media practice is connected to the
infrastructural and industrial resources that fuel it.

The analysis still has its short-comings. It is purely formalistic and, more
crucially, suggests a primarily operational function to the tactical level,
while the political thrust of media practice only comes into effect at the
strategic level. However, de Landa continues to argue that the possibilities
of decentralising command structures by the means of telecommunication media
have, in the 20th century, shifted the emphasis of military activities away
from the larger strategic units of armies and divisions, towards the
tactical level of platoons. The effectiveness of strategic media is highly
doubtful. Just as it will remain highly doubtful whether the strategic
nuclear weapons stationed during the Cold War have, on a political level,
ever been more than expensive junk.

What I regard as crucial for the assessment of tactical media practice as it
is being attempted by the Next 5 Minutes, is the realisation that the
relative structural weakness of a tactical approach and the absence of a
unified political goal among media tacticians has its strengths in the
flexibility, in the compatibility with other initiatives, and in the ability
to form alliances notwithstanding political and ideological differences. We
will see in a moment that this does not only account for guerilla-style
media activism, but for any practical approach to choosing one's path
through and making one's mark on the media ecology.

Let me emphasise the importance of the hardware, that is the tools as well
as the infrastructure, that supports media practice. The work of many media
tacticians shows that the medium is not (necessarily) the message, and that
the contents of messages can point far beyond the narrow circle drawn around
the games of technological innovation. This does not take away, however, the
need to consider the dependence of these practices on a particular technical
equipment, the functions of which determine a lot of the possibilities of
our work. The limitations of the ready-made software packages are at times
as stifling for computer users as the compatibility problems that video
makers regularly have to struggle with.

What is at stake in a critical consideration not only of media practice, but
of hardware as well, has been pointed out recently by Tim Druckrey:

"Questions of machine intelligence and political empowerment are
becoming questions of artificial life and massive, albeit
invisible parallelism. Rather than an encounter with technology as
the crucial mechanism in the culture of the late 20th century, the
discourse is shifting into the implementation of software
solutions that veil the staggering impact of machine culture.
Instead of radical questions concerning the sundering of ethics
and the refiguration of communication, we are hypnotized by
innovations in imaging and processing that unhinge so many of our
assumptions about the fallacies of progress that yet hold our
imagination in the balance." (1995)

Such considerations led to the decision to open the Next 5 Minutes with a
programme about "The Matter of Media", a programme that highlights the
complexity of the hardware we are dealing with, and of the depth of its
influence on our being. The original idea was to do something about cables,
about the heat generated by electric circuits, and about the power cuts (!)
that are so fatal for many of our everyday activities. The programme will
eventually get us there, but we will start at the high end of technological
development to work our way down to the level of rooted activity. Kevin
McCoy who, together with Jennifer Bozick-Mccoy, will be presenting the
performance "Achieving Sufficient Fluidity - Tactics in Implementing
Advanced Media Strategies" during the opening evening, writes: "The new
media seem to require us to endlessly aquire new vocabularies and levels of
technical expertise. For the artist who's goal is to communicate specific
messages and create alternative experiences, these new media seem to provide
promise. The down side is the incredible distraction and sense of dizzying
confusion this technology produces."

Where the McCoys work through critical affirmation, the Critical Art
Ensemble ruthlessly exposes the excesses of cyberculture as it preys on the
human body: cyborg slaves, data body, and tongue spasms. The CAE suggests a
series of tactics, through which these invasions can be irritated, if not
countered: countersurveillance, data body infections, and electronic civil
disobedience. On the same evening, and in order to offer - on a lighter note
- a few practical examples, we have invited the submission of drawings,
prototypes or verbal descriptions of Techno-Parasites whose main aim in life
is technological disruption on all levels. These suggestions will be on
display during the opening evening as well.

The warning that "The Matter of Media" tries to formulate goes out to media
artists in particular who, while more readily than others accepting some
kind of wider moral responsibility for their actions, are at the same time
more prone to fall rather naively for some exciting piece of hardware. In a
strong trend within the scientifically informed section of the current
discourse about electronic art, the technical equipment (as well as,
besides, the human body) is conceived as a mere shell of immaterial
possibilities, as though the hardware was uneigentlich, something that we
will get rid of if we can just make a little step forward, and something
that we can now already ignore, just as we are told to ignore the cultural
and psychological baggage that we bring into the simulations with our
desiring bodies. Druckrey cautions us not to follow that logic, and reclaims
a position of critique which questions its own means of production:

"The promises and pitfalls of a cybersphere obstruct some of the
essential cultural issues of digital media in the yet vague hope
that matters of access and meaning will fulfill themselves in the
future. This is a difficult presumption of technology and
creativity linked with the scientific view that a problem is not
so much surmountable as it is contingent and evolving. For so much
work utilizing electronic media, the characteristics (often seen
as limitations) of the delivery system represent a hurdle to be
overcome rather than a form to be interrogated."

Yet, this interrogation of our tools should not lead into a new form of
Luddism. Seeing the symbolic and political implications of certain
technologies is an important prerequisite of identifying the cracks in the
system, for identifying the breaks where usages can be moulded into new and
productive forms and strategies. For this the media have to be understood
both as physical and technological apparatuses, and as cultural tools of
communication. On both levels their applications have to be tested against
the background of content, context and impact.

Siegfried Zielinski has drawn the consequences from such an approach for the
activities of artists on the Internet, while the same can easily be said of
other forms of art that engages an attitude of responsibility:

"It is our aesthetic duty to take that which is versus, that which
is turned over, that which is turned inside out, seriously and to
combine it with multiplicity and incalculability. However, this is
only feasible if you take up a basic position that is split:
facilitate the symbolic expression of locality, of heterogenous
events, in the global Net, use the Net to strengthen local events
but at the same time keep the option open to do without it. To be
inside and to be able to imagine what its like outside, to be
outside and think the inside: it is the action and the movement at
the boundary that make such a stance possible. That's what I call
subjective."

Approaching a more generalised definition of media we must first recognise
their inherent dialectics of conjunction and separation. To the degree that
media connect and facilitate communication, they affirm difference. The
assessments of such a differentiation vary quite considerably. Paul
Virilio's interest in and disgust for the media is based on their function
as 'trajectory machines' that produce separation and, according to him,
increase the physical distance between the subject and the mediated object.
The mediatic distantiation destroys the human individual's ties with
material reality. Félix Guattari talks of 'transversality' rather than of
trajectory and relates it to more processual, more immaterial and streamlike
formations in which distance is a mere temporary inscription and in which
differentiation is not per se an objectionable event.

In a line similar to Zielinski's, Guattari defends disruption and
singularisation as two crucial tools of contemporary cultural practice:

"Far from the search for a stupefying and infantilising consensus
the aim will in the future be to nurse dissent and to create
singularity." - "The ecological registers are subject to what I
have called a heterogenesis, that is a continuous process of
resingularisation. The individuals must, at the same time, become
solidary and ever more different." (Guattari 1994, p.46-7, 76)

From the previous discussion, the pertinence of his remarks for the
development of non-hegemonic media practices that prefer to operate on a
tactical rather than on a strategic level will be immediately clear.

"The many practices should not only not be homogenised and
combined by a transcendental guardianship, but should sensibly be
taken into a process of the production of dissimilarity, of
heterogenesis. (...) It is appropriate to allow for the unfolding
of cultural specificity while inventing new agreements about
citizenship. It would be useful to maintain singularity,
exception, scarcity, alongside the least weighty state order."
(Guattari 1994, p.49)

The potential of media to be machines of difference, to be machines of
heterogeneity must be exploited by media tacticians in ways that find
creative solutions for specific situations. In this, subjectification can
function as a useful guide-line for the choice of tools and strategies.
Again Guattari:

"It is important to concentrate on those dispositions which can be
useful for the production of subjectivity, and which work towards
an individual and/or collective reconstitution of the self,
instead of furthering the business of the mass-medial machine
which represents a permanent state of emergency and desperation."
(1994, p.21)

These things require passion, enthusiasm and an almost perverse kind of
optimism whose main rhetorical tool is the word 'despite'. Just to remind us
what we are up against, Druckrey describes the drives towards homogenesis
which subvert any notion of public space and independent action, and replace
it by strata of predispositioned behavioural patterns:

"Subsumed in the immaterial space of information, culture, the
sphere of public action, is destabilized as a sphere of knowledge,
a sphere of discourse, and a sphere of difference. Ubiquitous
computing, the intelligent ambience, the wired world, only serve
to suggest the clear fact that the triumph of technology has
already occurred, that the shift from agency to behavior has
become the focal point of technology research. Rather than
liberating, the trajectory of so much of this work is to map, to
record, to simulate, and to produce behavior." (Druckrey 1995)

This again suggests the need for a renewed critical analysis of the social
and cultural terrain in which the media operate, and to formulate an
aesthetics of media practice that is, at the same time, an ethics and a
politics. Forgive me the philosophical crudity, but if we can describe media
are relays of power, I would like to suggest a definition of tactical media
are relays of dissident power, of disruption and singularisation.

Maybe Guattari is right in suggesting that the artist (and not only the male
artist, as Guattari may be accused of suggesting) is particularly
well-equipped to conceptualise the necessary steps for this work, because he
or she "can be led to completely rework his piece because of the intrusion
of a chance detail, an event or accident which makes his project suddenly
change its course to drive him far away from his earlier perspectives,
however well-founded they may have been." (1994, p.50) In any case, the
claim made here for allowing for disruption, reversal and reworking in any
process is an important pointer to the attitude that is needed for the
development of effective media tactics: not to take anything for granted,
and not to insist on stability and continuity where dynamic behaviour is
required. The tools have to be melted down and recast whenever necessary.

Next 5 Minutes

The Next 5 Minutes: Tactical Media conference and exhibition is a brief and
densely programmed event that tries to take stock of the current work of
media artists and tacticians, and that seeks to develop a critical discourse
about this work in the context of contemporary cultural and social
situation, especially but not exclusively with regard to the media. The
following passages of this text will be devoted to the projects that form
part of the N5M exhibition at V2_Organisation in Rotterdam: Krzysztof
Wodiczko's Alien Staff, Paul Garrin's MediaFilter, and Knowbotic Research's
Dialogue with the Knowbotic South.. The exhibition will be complemented by a
series of afternoon and evening programmes in Rotterdam which will be
presented under the titles: Translocal Media Networks and the Diaspora
(Friday, January 19), Aggregates of Information and Communication (Saturday,
Jan 20), and Media Metaphors: Society / Information / the Body (Sunday, Jan
21). These titles point to the trajectories along which we want to
investigate the function and aesthetics of media art: firstly, the questions
of space, non-localisation, nomadism and displacement; then the
accumulation, the structuration and the productive potential of mediated
data for the purposes of information and communication; and thirdly the
cultural and symbolic impact of media on social formations as well as on the
individual.

Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL/USA): Alien Staff

Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff is a mobile communication system and
prosthetic instrument which facilitates the communication of immigrants and
aliens in the countries to which they have migrated and in which they have
insufficient command of the language to communicate on a par with the native
inhabitants.

Alien Staff consists of a hand-held staff which has a small video monitor
and loudspeaker at the top. The operator can adjust the height of the
staff's head to be at a level with his or her own head. Via the video
monitor, the operator can replay prerecorded elements of a conversation, an
interview, or a narration of him or herself. The recorded material may
contain biographical information when people have difficulties constructing
coherent narratives in the foreign language, but it may also include the
description of feelings and impressions which the operator normally doesn't
get a chance to talk about in the new environment. The instrument can
function as an interpreter both in the sense of a translator, and in the
sense of a mediator. The Staff is used in public places where passers-by are
attracted to listen to the recording and engage in a conversation with the
operator. Special transparent segments of the staff contain memorabilia,
photographs or other objects which indicate a part of the personal history
of the operator and which may be used to introduce a conversation about the
operator's background.

With this instruments, Wodiczko approaches the question of art and media
from the perspective of interpersonal communication. He devises a
performative technological design that is not directed at the transmission
of general information to large and often indistinct public audiences, but
that allows individuals who are normally silenced and deprived of the
possibility of speech by their living circumstances, to communicate about
themselves and make themselves be heard. Wodiczko's project - which has
previously been realised in Paris, Helsinki, Stockholm, Warsaw, and New York
- encompasses the video recording sessions, the presentation of the taped
material, and the ensuing conversations with passers-by or addressees, and
thus not only serves to draw attention to specific marginal groups, but also
helps them to concretise mentally their own displacement, to construct
themselves and to recognise their own complexity.

In December 1995 Krzysztof Wodiczko has spent a week in Rotterdam in order
to prepare the project for January. Together with Andreas Broeckmann and
other members of V2_Organisation he visited a centre for asylum seekers, a
local centre in a mixed neighbourhood, and held a long series of
conversations with migrants from Ethiopia, Germany, Liberia, Mongolia,
Poland, Scotland, Somalia, Turkey, and the United States in order to find
operators for the Alien Staff. These conversation revealed the complexity of
problems that migrants have to deal with in this country, but they also
pinpointed the striking similarity of many aspects of the lives of migrants
in the 1990s. Each story is different, each migrant has her or his own
particular fate and way of handling it, but because they are all up against
the same system of borders, of institutions and administrators, of residency
permits, of migration laws whose main purpose is to prevent migration, and
legal insecurity, their lives are forced into patterns which are then often
interpreted as 'typical', further fuelling existing xenophobia.

The Alien Staff project instigates a communicative performance which is set
against the stereotypification and silencing to which many migrants are
subjected. It offers individuals an opportunity to remember and retell their
own story and to confront people in the country of immigration with this
particular story. The Staff helps to re-subjectify the migrant who is often
perceived as the representative of a homogenous group of problematic
individuals, he or she can reaffirm their own subjectivity and communicate
this affirmation to others who in turn are confronted with the problems of
migration and with the images that migrants have of the receiving country.
Thus the Staff also becomes a mirror for the receiving society, revealing
aspects of its 'unconscious'. The Staff operators do this not as
representatives of 'the migrants', but as representatives of themselves.
Beyond its actual content, their performance symbolises the disparity and
individuality of what is too often considered as a generalisable set of
problems.

Wodiczko will return to the Netherlands before the N5M to supervise the
recording of the video tapes with the operators and their performances on
the streets of Rotterdam. A special programme at the Zaal De Unie in
Rotterdam on Saturday, Jan 20, 20.00 hrs., will bring together the artist,
operators and others for a discussion of the social and cultural dimensions
of the project. (Together with Joshua Smith of MIT's Media Lab, Wodiczko is
working on a new prototype of the Alien Staff which will have enhanced
performative functions. We are planning to continue working with this new
prototype in Rotterdam in the first half of 1996.)

In the context of the Next 5 Minutes, we want to use the project to explore
a specially designed medium that is intended to communicate personal
information and to facilitate interpersonal communication. It will be
important to ask what the lesson is that one can learn from these
instruments in relation to the communicative, social and psychological
function of other media. The plea for an enhancement of immediate
human-to-human and face-to-face communication reintroduces a function for
the media which we often forget about through our the focus on the mass
media.

Paul Garrin (US): MediaFilter

While Wodiczko's Alien Staff addresses the question of tactical media from
the perspective of personal communication by and with migrants in the
diaspora, the electronic and computer networks offer media structures which
allow for the development of translocal communication. They have the
potential for maintaining the ties between dispersed communities, and for
forging links between newly emerging translocal communities. Their success
strongly relies on the degree of accessibility that can be achieved to these
networks, and on the amount of freedom that the users have in shaping the
network architectures according to their own needs.

We have chosen the World Wide Web site MediaFilter, set up by a team around
the New York art activist Paul Garrin, as an example for the different
layers and modes of communication that such networks can support.
MediaFilter provides information and facilitates communication about and for
politically tense areas, including war zones, it offers analyses of current
political developments, and supports various initiatives of political and
art activism. A current focus lies on the situation in former Yugoslavia,
where MediaFilter cooperates with the Zagreb-based Zamir network that has
maintained communication channels across Yugoslavia via the German Zerberus
server of the group Foebud in Bielefeld, and with the periodical arkzin, one
of the few remaining independent media in the area. The site is thus a forum
for discussion, for making contact, and a switchboard between a variety of
information channels.

Mediafilter articulates the close relation between art, media, technology,
and political action. It creates an actual site on the WWW which allows for
meetings, communication and information exchange which would otherwise be
impossible. The presentation of MediaFilter during the N5M will be in the
form of an information centre on the first floor of the V2_Building. A
number of computer terminals will be available for visiting the internet
site and its links. Via cable and satellite dish, connections will be made
with local, national and international tv and radio channels, and an on-site
juxtaposition of different communication media (newspaper, tv, telephone,
etc.) will make it possible to explore the functions of and the relations
between those media. In a series of presentations, workshops, live and
on-line discussions and events, we will deal with the relation between
different communication channels, information and political action.

An important part of the presentation of Mediafilter during N5M will be its
linking with partner projects in former Yugoslavia, some of which will be by
their members at the N5M, and with related sites and projects elsewhere. In
a special workshop on Friday, Jan 19, 14.00 hrs., people from Mediafilter,
Zamir, arkzin, FoeBud, and other groups, will present and talk about their
translocal collaboration. The space will also be available as a laboratory
for other participants of the N5M to explore the possibilities of
establishing new collaborations, and to learn about the technical
requirements of setting up and maintaining such networks.

While investigating the potentials of using the WWW for dissident political
and artistic activities, the Next 5 Minutes will also continuously have to
raise the question of the dialectics of power that invades any kind of
political activity but seems to be particularly urgent with regard to
electronic networks for whose usage we are highly dependent on commercial
and other, official support. For the current situation in the United States,
Tim Druckrey suggests the following scenario which is probably not far off
from what media tacticians are facing in Europe and other parts of the
world:

"Every creative act which seeks to question the apparatus of
domination runs the risk of continuing to carry within itself the
imprint of the system in which the creator is inscribed. Never has
this been more true than in the web - where the social
infrastructure is so neatly supplanted by the technological
circulatory system. Too often with this medium, we fall into the
trap of the mystificationof universalization, not remembering that
deterritorialization is not always a signifier of nomadic
empowerment. In the agencies of communication, the illusion of
power can be as seductive as the fall into utopia. And while the
colonization of cyberspace by artists and theorists is a sign of
tremendous creativity, the linked forces of privatization and
control are breathing down our necks. Playtime is over. Candidate
Bob Dole has already attacked Hollywood, Newt Gingrich, Dick Army,
and Jessie Helms are attempting to purge the cultural life of the
imagination. Beneath these public attacks lies a substrate of
materials finding their way across the porous borders of the
network that disseminate neo-fascist, christian-reactionary, and
nationalistic materials that ground events like the rise of
militias, vigilante police, and even the support of separatist
anti-semites like Louis Farrakhan. And while we consider the
vectors of whether VRML will actually render space in a browser,
or whether Hot Java will actually not continue to crash Netscape,
the mobilisation of the network is occurring, not for the
dissemination of wonderful and creative hyper fiction and
quicktime movies, but for the tactical ambiguity of dispersed
power. Indeed, the metaphor of dispersal, along with invisibility,
is a crucial aspect of understanding the politics of the network."
(Druckrey 1995)

Rather than seeking a 'clean' position, we must probably revert to
continuous self-criticism as regards the 'tactical ambiguities' of our work.
Designs and practices are needed which can subvert the homogenising,
molarising currents to which work in such a charged mediatic environment is
often prone. And the readiness to give up projects whose impact turns out to
be counter-productive. In a conflict of ethics, aesthetics and material
survival, this latter point is extremely difficult where funding sources
demand the delivery of an end product that is in accordance with the
proposed project. Tactical media practice should mine the advantage of
flexibility, of mutability and speed, with which it can adapt to new
circumstances and new insights. In an age of residual humanism, however,
radicality must start with self-scrutiny.

Knowbotic Research+cF (D/A): Dialogue With The Knowbotic South

An interesting example of the complexity of interlaced aesthetic, ethical
and technologico-scientific issues is the third main project that
V2_Organisation is presenting during the Next 5 Minutes. The Cologne-based
artists group Knowbotic Research+cF have developed an installation that uses
global electronic networks and data bases for the creation of "a public
knowledge space for a potential dialogue about potential nature." In
Dialogue with the Knowbotic South they assemble information about
Antarctica, available from networked computer sites, by means of knowbots,
i.e. dynamic interfaces in computer-based networks. In the physical
installation of DWTKS, the collected information is visualised and made
accessible by a variety of media: a head-set which allows the visitor to
navigate to a virtual information space and access the represented data
files; a large projection screen on which the collected information is
represented in the form of 'clouds' of pixels; a temperature zone that
translates data from meteorological stations in Antarctica into streams of
conditioned air; light pads on the floor which indicate the current
temperature streams in selected icebergs as recorded by measuring stations.
Thus, the knowbots "facilitate sensory experiences of yet vague events in
data landscapes."

DWTKS allows the visitor and user to witness an interaction between the
actual, the virtual, and the hypothetical. The project traces the emergence
of new aesthetic fields through shifting technological and cultural
parameters, and offers an analysis of the structures and constructions in
informational spaces. In the context of the N5M, DWTKS will serve as a
prototypical example of how such informational spaces are ordered, how they
are being used, and how they might be deployed strategically. The
presentation consists of multiple layers - the agency of the knowbots on the
electronic networks; the interaction between exterior scientific sources and
the newly created DWTKS data bank about the Antarctic; the interactive
interfaces on the computer and projection screens; and the installation
which transposes specific types of information into artificial phenomena
that can be experienced by the human senses. The project makes it possible
to explore the notion of mediatic interactivity in a non-linear and dynamic
environment. It raises crucial questions about the relation between human
and machine intelligence, and about the relation between information,
knowledge, and perception.

In the scientific and ecological context, DWTKS highlights the intricate
relation between representation and action. The project investigates the
digital fractalisation of natural phenomena, their modelling and simulation
in scientific representations. To an increasing degree, problem solving in
biological and environmental contexts is done at the digital level, i.e. at
the level of digitally synthesised, reconstructed, or: Computer Aided Nature
(CAN).

The insights from this observation have an immediate relevance for mediated
information and communication in general. We are constantly operating on
more or less abstract levels of representation, delegating important
interactive and symbolic functions to machines that produce their own
semantic input in the process of handling the respective data. The knowbots
active in DWTKS are therefore just one example for the growing
responsibility that we customarily hand over to increasingly self-organising
technological devices. Additionally, the movement in the simulated data
space is an elaborate representation of the detachment of knowledge from
experience which media culture appears to propel.

In a yet rather tentative fashion I would like to suggest that it might be
here, in relation to machine agency rather than human agency, that we can
start addressing the power question with regard to the media. In human-human
relations the question of power is frequently obscured by the understandably
large impact of emotional investment that we have in asymmetrical power
relations. Perhaps it is the idealist philosophical tradition that still
makes us think that 'power enjoys repression', and that it is important to
hate your own or somebody else's oppressor. Would it make sense to suggest
that power - as it appears here in the form of deliberate visual
representations which inform a certain perception and understanding of
nature - is a line of force that is generated in a socio-technical
aggregate? That its effects are culturally and morally arbitrary? And that
it is therefore necessary to develop both technical and cultural critiques
of particular aggregates without being blinded by prejudice against certain
lines of themes and products? If this was a useful model for thinking about
mediated power, it might also become possible to develop from here an
analysis of the tactical impact of knowbots.

Knowbotic Research themselves emphasise the aspect of juxtaposing different
levels of what is regarded as reality and of bringing these different
realities into collisions whose effects of intensity and violence KR want to
radicalise in the future.

"Such breaks have to be deepened, especially given an 'internet'
that presents itself as a slick and perfect order for the exercise
of prescribed individual, sequentially determined steps. We regard
the harmonic and peaceful coexistence and community of various
so-called interest groups on the internet and the world wide web
as an unfortunate state which is based on the obsolete ideology of
a rather abstract individualism. The fact that anybody can choose
to deposit something on the networks cannot possibly define the
ultimate boundary of this technology. We cannot see any progress
in this. We hope to be able to induce unrest into such orders. In
the first instance internet is only a communication structure. But
on the www we can, at least for the moment, see no attempt at
creating an independent quality. It is a cliché of what is
happening anyway and of what is based on automatisms, on worn-out
old metaphors which are coming back, like the metaphor of the
digital cities. Such presentations transpose the established
artistic contents and models straight into a new technology. They
prove to be without imagination." (unpubl. interview, Nov. 1995)

The disruptive strategies that Knowbotic Research themselves seek to
engineer are based on the contention that in the contemporary situation it
is technology which forms the primary basis of radical agency:

"We believe that technology, the processual landscape of actions
and their mediatisation, is the primary nature which we know and
through which we can act. Transcendence can, joyfully, be rejected
in order really to be able to play with contingency. (...) In
order to reach one's own parameters one has to reconstruct the
things, meanings and contexts accordingly. To extend communicative
perspectives one has to find and invent places of a new art. Today
these are more likely to be places of temporary intensity than
institutions of permanence."

There seems to be a productive conjunction between this decentering approach
to art and the invention of new strategies for media practice on the one
hand, and the reconstitution of subjectivity described earlier with
reference to Guattari on the other. Both take a decisive departure from a
concept of subjectivity which would imply that the kernel of truth and
reality resides with the continuous human subject, and suggest an active and
transgressive play at the boundary of the known terrains of life, reality
and humanity. The affirmation of singularity implies giving up the
insistence on wanting to maintain that what we are. Siegfried Zielinski
claims that subjectivity is the very product of such transgression which
becomes a prerequisite of the project proposed by Guattari:

"What we need are models of working toward, models of
intervention, of operation (opis=fortune, riches). This is what
taking action at the boundary, that which I call subjective,
targets: strong, dynamic, nervous, definitely processual aesthetic
constructions, as for example, the unclosed bodies of knowledge of
Knowbotic Research, are introduced into the Net, not in order to
assume a virtual identity there that can then be retrieved in this
or that state, but to demonstrate the impossibility of
constructing identity through the exchange of pure symbols. The
deficits that these constructions exhibit, namely that, quasi
reeling, they have lost their connection to the real, is that
which needs to be developed as their strength: they produce new,
autonomous realities - in the case of Knowbotic Research, this is
at the boundary between art, politics and natural science - that,
daydream-like, develop beside our experiences and our experience
into constructs of the mind, visionary models, precipitating
meaningful interference with order, turbulence but also inertia,
they irritate, they help to make greater complexity imaginable."
(Zielinski, 1995)

Economy / Ecology / Subjectivity

This brings us back to the discussion about the media ecology which was left
incomplete earlier. To reiterate, Félix Guattari insists that the concept of
ecology does not only refer to nature - "The connotation of ecology should
cease to be connected with the image of a small minority of nature-lovers
and specialist-bureaucrats. It questions the entirety of the subjectivity
and power formations of capitalism." (Guattari 1994, p.51) Therefore, the
current ecological crisis does not only affect the natural environment, but
it is a crisis of social, political and cultural dimension which requires a
complete reorientation of the aims of the production of material and
immaterial goods. "This revolution must therefore not only concern the
relationships between the visible and large-size forces, but must also
affect the micro-areas of feelings, of intelligence and of desires." (p.13)