Critical Net Practice
A critical discourse on new information technologies has been underway for a good 20 years – as long as this journal has existed. Every three months we seek in the net section pages to present contributions to and prospects for this discourse and to spotlight the key issues. The emphasis here has shifted from a narrow focus on the Internet and the World Wide Web, which were both entirely new phenomena when springerin was founded, to a consideration of more general contemporary media dispositives and their role vis-à-vis art. The notion of the network remains a central aspect in this context, although this has begun to fan out into a cornucopia of diversity within individual media spheres – a movement that we attempt to cover as comprehensively as possible in all its nuances in the net section.
Discourse on critical network practices has long been conducted by a host of different structures and – initially often “illegitimate”, indeed extra-institutional – players. One of the most important local intermediaries in this context, founded at roughly the same time as springerin, is the Institut für neue Kulturtechnologien (Public Netbase – t0), later renamed the Word-Information Institute (http://world-information.net). To mark its recent 20th anniversary, we aim in this jointly conceived edition to showcase the most important way-stations and the lines along which this ongoing Net discourse has developed.
A handful of fundamental questions have guided and driven cooperation: To what extent can islands of “temporary autonomy” still be found on the Internet, which has now become part of the reality of our everyday lives? Conversely, to what extent have the dire warnings we have long heard about the darkest dystopias of control and surveillance actually prevailed? How have digital connectedness and modelling in general begun to transform our life in society? What kind of new information regimes are involved in this process? And what kind of critical role can be played nowadays in this respect by creative spirits producing art and culture, the erstwhile pioneers who first inhabited digital worlds?
The thematic focus is in the first instance on the “deployment” of network connectedness – not just in the sense of a historical beginning but also in terms of what is at stake in the course of this activity and the phenomena that pose the greatest threat to it nowadays. Developments since the mid-1990s are reviewed by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, who have cooperated with us on this undertaking as representatives of the World-Information Institute, for which we would like to express our warmest thanks to them. They conduct this review in conjunction with colleagues from a partner medium: together with Becker and Stalder, Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Josephine Berry Slater, both involved with the British magazine Mute, recap their experiences and the entrepreneurial spirit that led to the proliferation of platforms like Public Netbase in Vienna or Metamute in London 20 years ago. The range of topics they encompass in their discussion extends right up to the present day and the question of how resolutely critical considerations can still hold their own in today’s net practice, and indeed which forms of practice are appropriate in a thoroughly networked contemporary world.
Graham Harwood from artists’ group YoHa issues a trenchant warning cry in this respect. In what is known as “agent-based modelling”, a network technique utilised in spheres as diverse as urban planning and e-commerce, he identifies a perfidious control mechanism at work, which actually leaves subjects less and less scope to act. Does this inescapably lead to a paralysis-like state of rapture, as Harwood ironically suggests? Steve Kurtz from Critical Art Ensemble, who has “had his fingers burnt” already, having found himself entangled years ago with unexpected ferocity in the clutches of FBI surveillance, is a tad more optimistic, despite all his negative experiences: although creativity is nowadays exploited institutionally almost exclusively to produce marketable commodities, there are nonetheless breakaway tendencies here and there – forms of dissidence, which perhaps nurture the paradigm of network connectedness “from the grassroots level” once again.
In his essay on new political networks and collectives in Greece, Ilias Marmaras portrays the form this might assume in concrete terms. Precisely because of the draconian austerity programmes imposed “from above”, it seems to be more necessary than ever to seize the initiative oneself and to take over control of the situations in which production takes places, in as much as this is possible at all within the globally controlled network. Brian Holmes argues along similar lines with reference to the so-called “soya republic” in South America. In the light of increasingly elusive “players” in the global economy, whose pursuit of profit does not stop at any natural or geographical border, Holmes argues that it is up to activist art, working within an equally global framework, to bring a networked political ecology into being.
A series of essays address the fact that critical net practice always also discusses ownership structures and questions of communitarisation: Alessandro Ludovico, for example, examines the controversial aspect of “DIY” with reference to contemporary media technologies; Cornelia Sollfrank engages explicitly with the question of what it means to process or relay things that do not belong to you.
A stance whose enduring impact more or less spans the decades resounds throughout the entire edition: the notion that in net discourse and practice an almost untameable critical impulse is at work, which even the persistent media consolidation of the last 20 years has not managed to silence.