»Media Architecture« after VR Quake

RIXC, the Riga Center for new media culture (formerly E-lab), is known for its wide and deep interest to up-to-date communication technologies. It offers a kind of inspiring experimental polygon for pushing the borders of art’s tools, subject, and even language. One of the first A+C festivals brought the issue of net radio into the focus of extensive international discussions, as a form of both production and distribution of art content. But what was even more intriguing is that on the basis of diverse and often collaborative artists’ experiments and theorists’ inquiries, the whole creative network of adherents emerged and started to live as a big distributed unstable open media tribe.
The 6th festival’s edition »Media Architecture« gathered both those who had already been involved in several joint network initiatives in different parts of Europe, including the Network Interface for Cultural Exchange [NICE] that was started in Riga in1999, as well as new-comers. The wide-spread dissatisfaction with the idea of virtual escapism and increasingly worrying »troubles at home«: political, economical, social, environmental, - have already provoked diverse creative investigations into the questions of how the model of a global deterritorialised »information society« can be effectively reconfigured into localised and contextualised forms of mediated community networks? This general current preoccupation of many of those who attended the festival as representatives of local initiatives in the field of new media culture was to some extent a determinant background for presentations and discussions. They revolved around the following major topics: possible interrelations between media networks and physical urban and social environments, media art and cultural activities regarding current problems of the development of the public space, the potential of mobile and locative media for art and social geography. In all these issues, Architecture, both as a term and as a phenomenon, got multidimensional shape projected through concrete material, experimental theoretical, social, technological, artistic, political, and even psycho-geographical notions.
Most of presentations at the conference were project-based. A few of them were physically represented either as installations at the exhibition or performances, which happened at the new, though still to be designed and equipped, RIXC space. Regarding the latter one the dissatisfaction of the RIXC people with a mere idea »just to have space« resulted in a project proposed by specially gathered international group of architects after a five days collective workshop. The manifestations, which can stand behind the idea of architecture of a space with advanced requirements regarding its functions and socio-cultural agenda, one may trace in the claims of architect Tuomas Tuivonen (FI), workshop and conference participant, in his manifesto for a »Now Architecture«. His basic point is responsive and responsible Architecture, which reacts to current social dynamics, plays an active role in modelling situations, and keeps the doors open for infusions from other professional domains.
Media and mediation in the perspective given by the festival are considered now a key (or at least one of the key-) structural element of urban design and environmental planning. On the one hand you have the visionary conceptual project »Idensity®« by Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar (NL), for development of hybrid public space where media and physical spaces meet. Their design of such an interface for social interaction integrates several functional concepts, like »Media Babies« (feeder houses for narrowcasting activities), »Bridge Clubs« (spaces for public events and larger broadcasting facilities), »Mobile Containers« (any means of transportation equipped with transmitters/receivers and interactive life jackets), and others, - under the slogan »Replace the right to vote with the right to broadcast. On the other hand there is the »Urban Drift« festival presented by Francesca Ferguson (DE), which is organised in Berlin, and deals directly with the local urban context, which faces socio-economical crisis and dramatic transformation. Its multidisciplinary agenda brings into focus the street level of urban life, natural dynamics of multilayered social and material activities through »reinstating spontaneity, the random, and experimentation in architectural discourse« and »reactivating negative space«, i.e. places left empty.
Hybridity is a contemporary condition which constitutes the logic of inter-media and inter-spatial communicative relationships today, - says Eric Kluitenberg in his paper »Constructing the Digital Commons. A Venture into Hybridisation«. The Digital Commons is a strategic concept for repositioning the idea of publicly shared non-material resources: information, knowledge, ideas, - which stresses their active meaning where people should take responsibility for their creation and sustainability themselves, though problem of access to the spaces of these resources accumulation remains crucial.
Some of the presented projects related to the idea of socio-symbolical and mental reconstruction of space, which were associated in either way with the domain of Psycho-geography. Among them Esther Polak’s (NL) »Real Time Riga« (production: De Waag, Amsterdam, co-production: RIXC): visualisation (on a screen in the public space) of mental city maps of inhabitants through tracing their movements all over the city by means of individual GPS transmitters. Following the Situationist’s logic and tactic Psycho-geography can’t be limited just by visual representation. Marko Peljhan’s and others’ (SI) »Project Atol« – Signal Server! performance is a live collecting, processing, intermixing, transforming and distributing of signals, sound and visual, what resulted in generating of real-time compositions. While »Radioqualia« by Honor Harger & Adam Hyde (NZ/UK/AU) is not only art initiative on »experiments with the concept of artistic broadcasting«, but also a sort of technological pool which suggests software and hardware tools, developed by artists themselves, to facilitate artistic streaming media projects. One of their credo is »to celebrate the hidden spaces where the alchemic transference of intent and error happens«.
The idea of rediscovery and reactivation of spaces and places became a starting point for the project »RT-32 – Acoustic Space Lab« - symposium and workshop which took place in 2001 and which was a collective multimedia exploration of the VIRAC* radio telescope – a 32 m dish antenna in Irbene (LV), former Soviet military object. Presentation of the project’s DVD happened at the closing of the festival – right in the telescope, where all participants and guests were brought by bus.
There was a wide spectre of creative, investigative, critical, challenging ideas presented within the festival, which seek to develop new spaces and forms for diverse unrestricted free socio-cultural communicative practices. The question is whether their producers and organisers will sustain their will to disillusioned reality.

ART + COMMUNICATION
The 6th International Festival for New Media Culture
Riga, May 15-18, 2003
http://rixc.lv/03

More info in: Acoustic Space: Media Architecture, Reader n4, Riga, 2003