Notes about Art Production and Collaboration in the Age of Post-Media
In the following, I want to talk briefly about the forms of production and distribution that are currently becoming available to artists through the development of, and the access to new media technologies. In the following, I will offer a brief sketch of the notion of post-media and mention some of the networks of people, formal and informal institutions that support and perform post-media practices today. After comparing these practices and the networks which support them with the circumstances of avant-garde modernist modes of artistic production and collaboration, I will suggest that the physical distance between people in a solely distributed, translocal working environment might not be able to bring about the sympathetic, synergetic collaboration between artists and their partners, which has frequently proved vital in successful projects.
Howard Slater, a cultural critic from England, has defined post-media practices or operations in opposition to the mass media. Post-media practices are characterised by small, diverse, distributed networks of operators who make use of the new, digital means of production and distribution. Post-media practice grows out of the networked activities of passionate individuals and groups working in local and translocal contexts and using such media as magazines, record labels, websites, club events, mailing lists, etc. Differences in these networks are not eliminated but relished. Post-media practice is characterised by a critical attitude towards the media in use, acting in lateral rather than vertical configurations, and an acceptance of the processuality and continuous transformation of context and practice.
If we look at the field of art production that makes use of media technologies today, we can see that some of the most exciting new developments can be found in an area where there is not individual artists realising their singular projects, but groups of artists working together in open-ended creative and collaborative processes. An exemplary project in this respect is the Xchange network for audio experiments on the Internet that was initiated in late 1997 by the E-Lab in Riga. The participating groups in London, Ljubljana, Sidney, Berlin, and many other cities, use the Net for distributing their original sound programmes. The Xchange network is 'streaming via encoders to remote servers, picking up the stream and re-broadcasting it purely or re-mixed, looping the streams' (Rasa Smite). Xchange is a distributed group, a connective, that builds creative cooperation in live-audio streaming on the communication channels that connect them. The people of Xchange and others are thus also exploring the Net as a sound-scape with particular qualities regarding data transmission, delay, feedback, and open, distributed collaborations. Moreover, they connect the network with a variety of other fields. Instead of defining an 'authentic' place of their artistic work, they play in the transversal post-medial zone of media labs, live-venues and networked personal computers. The mailing list of the Xchange network functions as an important communication medium between like-minded people who share ideas and information, announce events and contact potential project partners through the list.
Similarly, the Syndicate network and its mailing list can be described in the context of the emerging post-media practices. Though less oriented than Xchange at concrete artistic production, the Syndicate creates a social and communicative context in which artistic projects can develop and thrive. A crucial aspect of such community-building mailing lists is that a significant portion of the people on the list have opportunities to meet in the real world. In the case of the Syndicate, these meetings take place at exhibitions, art festivals, in workshops, etc., and at special Syndicate meetings which are organised about twice a year. The Syndicate list was also the result of such a meeting at the end of the second Next 5 Minutes conference in January 1996, so the list was from the beginning established as a channel for people to stay in touch with each other between meetings. The Xchange community, on the other hand, has managed to organise workshops and live-events during which members from different countries would get together and cooperate on specific net-casting projects.
On a more institutionalised level, there are the cultural centres which host websites, organise events and workshops, offer residencies and sometimes also employ artists. These centres are often outside of what can be termed post-media because they depend on a level of territorialisation which is hardly compatible with the flexible, at times precarious networks of post-medial cooperation. Yet, the role of some of these institutions in indirectly supporting these operations should not be underestimated - just as the responsibility should be stressed that established institutions have to offer that kind of support generously.
The Virtual Revolutions project is an interesting case in point here. It was initiated by a free-lancing curator, affiliated with a cultural institution. After finding three partners in other institutions, a loose and temporary working relationship was established between four cultural centres in so many different European countries. This relationship was built on the trust ensuing from prior acquaintance and, in some cases, the experience of earlier collaboration between individuals. Facilitated by a mix of local, regional and international funding, plus a good deal of material commitment on the part of the media cultural centres, a large and varied group of artists from many different countries responded to an open call and travelled to the Virtual Revolution workshops that were then held in the four different cities during 1998. Some of these artists went to just one, others to several of the workshops, weaving a complex network of personal relationships that resulted in multiple artistic cooperations. The results of these cooperations are partly collected on the website, they are also documented in a book, but a lot of the work that was started during these workshops was also either ephemeral or took on completely different directions and resulted in projects that may or may not be traced back to an encounter under the sign of the Virtual Revolutions project.
Key parameters of an initiative like this are the communication media that help to coordinate it, the network infrastructure which makes easy exchange of information and online collaboration possible, and the financial and material means for people to travel. It has been remarked many times that these conditions - save for the infrastructure of the Internet - have already been in place in Europe throughout the 20th century, a supposition that is frequently used to claim that there is little new in the conceptual dimension of artistic work that makes use of these media.
The European postal service in the first decades of the 20th century was excellent, and many artists were staying in touch with each other on an almost day-to-day basis between cities and even countries. Publications about the modernist avantgarde are full of reports about travels, mutual visits, frequent migrations, improvised meetings and temporary art camps, small-scale publications, artistic improvisations, interdisciplinary experiments. The contacts and correspondences that some artists of the modernist avantgarde maintained across Europe and beyond are stunning, as is the breadth of their cultural horizon.
What is needed for such a diverse and creative translocal environment is a good balance between rhizomatic channels and nomadic practices on the one hand, and sites of temporary localisation and territorialisation on the other. Art production requires sites of production that lie at nodal intersections of these translocal networks - galleries, studios, cafes, academies, etc.. Today, more than in the 1920s, the geographical dispersion of such sites can itself be integrated into the creative process, rather than hampering it or slowing it down. Intercontinental air travel and global courier services are still part of the old distribution system in which people and goods are moved around physically, whereas the Internet creates a genuinely new social and technological situation, in which the real-time cooperation of distributed collaborators has become a much-practiced reality. The Xchange-network of artistic and audio-experimentation, which I mentioned earlier, is only one example of such distributed cooperation communities.
However, even the artists connected to a network like Xchange need places to work, and they need places to meet. Which is why the expansion of the Internet and the provision of higher bandwidth connections cannot replace the continued development of institutions that can function as focal points for artistic work, exchange and attention. Face-to-face meetings, the building of sustained personal relations between artists, writers, technicians, programmers, etc., is vital for a productive dynamics of cooperation. Even the cultural friction between people of different countries, social backgrounds, or from different professions and disciplines, - that productive friction is only realised in situations where people live and work together in the same environment, however temporarily.
By way of finishing, I would like to recount a scene from the Bauhaus Dessau, which was recently quoted in an exhibition there and which testifies to the way in which a physical, architectural situation can breed the creativity of eating, living and celebrating together. Alexander Schawinsky, student at the Bauhaus Dessau in the late 1920s, describes how everybody cherished the communicative qualities of the Studio Building which had shared kitchens on each floor and little balconies for each studio, offering plentiful opportunities for conversations and encounters. If somebody had, for instance, a new record that he wanted to present to the others, he could simply put his grammophone on the balcony after dinner and play the record, thus inviting other students to reciprocate, triggering a lively and varied musical evening. The Internet may allow for more widely distributed, more technically complex, even more diverse ad-hoc forms of artistic cooperation, but it cannot surpass the superiority of the atmosphere of the party on the corridor outside the studio. I'd rather be there.
(Berlin/Rotterdam/Tokyo, September 1999)
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