The new model for the promotion of Viennese Net culture launched in April 2006 purported to be tailored to the needs of the »community.« This is why grants from the cultural office of the City of Vienna were for the first time not to be conferred from above, but instead by the »community« itself, which developed a model with four modules. In addition to fostering so-called »backbone projects« that make Web infrastructure available, the goal was to create a relatively uncomplicated way to access subsidies, in order to support young, as yet unknown Net culture initiatives, as well as to establish an annual convention presenting the activities of Viennese Net culture while networking and positioning them internationally.

What read in theoretical terms like a breakthrough in the egalitarian awarding of funding turned out to be not exactly unproblematic in practice, either in social or digital terms. In the first round of judging, there were not enough »independent« voters, meaning that mainly »friends« had to be courted, who then supported the project applications they themselves had submitted. This was further compounded by the fact that the software application designed to distribute funds »objectively,« i.e. without a curator, is still not finished. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the award procedure is still in the works and suggestions for improvement are welcomed (http://netznetz.net), the new model does not seem all that disagreeable. After all, the pie provided by the City of Vienna must be divided up somehow and the experimentation with procedures that depart from the conventional curatorial model could prove fascinating to behold.

The first attempts to implement the new model were criticized for several reasons (in »MALMÖ« among other places), but especially because the size of the pie, which is not wholly irrelevant here, was apparently left out of the equation in the elaborately administered new »participatory« award mode. Thus, the scarcity of means only became evident in the course of the new model’s implementation. One result was that Public Netbase for example, which, thanks to city funding, had established itself in the course of the last ten years on the international scene as the center of Viennese Net culture, was forced to shut down.

The fact that – in contrast to what the new funding model suggests – Vienna’s Net culture can by no means be seen as a homogeneous mass, was also demonstrated recently by »paraflows 06,« at which a Vienna public transport bus brought visitors around to the various sites of the city’s network culture, now also spatially decentralized, at least within the scope of the festival. At each of seven different locations (Artware-Lounge, Vekks, WerkzeugH, Umraum, Projektwerkstatt Soho, Blumberg and Metalab) three to five selected works were presented by international, but above all also local Net artists, who, in the words of the call for proposals: »expand our understanding of data protection and privacy, decentralization and self-publishing, who occupy themselves with the impact of free ›social software‹ in real space, and who investigate the meaning of software and computer programming as cultural technology.«

This focus on sociopolitical processes in connection with digital technologies was realized only in part, however, and therefore some of the projects presented in Vienna might have felt just as at home at the Ars Electronica, where this year, under the title »Simplicity,« priority was once again given to the »creative economic« handling of digital technologies. At »paraflows 06,« however, which ran parallel to the Ars, the effort to encourage theorists, artists and visitors to participate in exhibitions, a symposium and workshops led to attention being focused on projects that view the digital world poetically, ideologically or with bewilderment, but in no case straightforwardly.

The contributions by the young Viennese Metalab project space, which looked at the implications of copyrights and software patents, stood out from what was offered at the Ars Electronica insofar as star designer John Maeda, who curated the »Simplicity« symposium, knew better than to address such hot issues. In comparison, the Vienna symposium, which placed central emphasis on the fight against software patents and copyrights – including contributions by the Net activists Rena Tangens (Big Brother Award), Vladimir Jeric (Creative Commons Serbia) and Florian Hufsky (Piratenpartei Österreich) – took part in an exciting international discourse.

Also noticeable was the fact that the local social net that is meant to catch this metadiscourse is not yet all that closely woven, as the room installation »Coordinated Sewing Machine for Mapping, Analyzing and Transforming Social Groupings of Interactive Systems« by Helga Köcher, eSel, Andres Ramirez Gaviria, Jörg Piringer and Stefan Nussbaumer illustrated. What was missing as well was a successful tie-in to the specifics of the local Net cultures. For this, the new funding model would have provided sufficient material, because the outsourcing of responsibility really leaves room for only one conclusion: Vienna is indifferent to Net culture.

http://www.paraflows.at/

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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