Matthew Fuller on Tue, 28 Apr 1998 11:43:52 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> A change of address letter from Graham Harwood |
A change of address letter from Graham Harwood. I wrote this letter when I was finishing at Artec and as a change of e-mail address notice, but as it has circulated a lot of people have said that curcumstances surounding the letter apply to them as well. So here is a version of my change of address letter. Please note change of Email Address( Harwood@mongrel.org.uk) May 98 During the past ten years. I have worked with new technologies and opening up social spaces. For the last three and half years, I have worked at Artec training unemployed people and have made many good friends and set up many good working relationships with the people I taught. This was an extremely busy time for me finishing and publishing Rehearsal of Memory as well as running courses and being involved in the arts programme at Artec. There were many sleepless nights, stress, excitement, and above all there was the possibility of creating a space in which people could safely explore culture clash and exclusion from the trough of society. I wanted this space to be experimental, away from immediate poverty and also away from the excesses of a municipal post socialist pretension. Before I went to Artec, I saw technology as an open window of opportunity for the activist in me and so I did not mind being employed to prove its "power and universality when dealing with social problems". After all, I could get inside intellectual properties and places from which I had been banned. Take a few things, rearrange a few more and get out unscathed, hidden by technical knowledge. This mobility was a new experience for me and proved very useful in projects like Rehearsal of Memory. Even if I was spotted, boss culture would give me a pat on the back for being creative with such a dull old space. However, now it seems in the wider context that R&D is over and the creative types must be shown the door. Now boss culture wants mastery: political, cultural, social and creative mastery. Now is the time for Labour's workfare movement rather then the movement of labour for fair work - which itself has had a enormous impact on Artec. It's no coincidence that during the writing of this letter that Newham Council - the first area in England to elect a Labour MP - West Ham Football Club, and the local police have come together to create a face recognition system in its town centre. This system scans crowds for individual faces, compares them to a database of known felons and then informs the local security services. At the same time, Newham is employing these new services it has stopped funding the Newham Race Monitoring project, a project collaborating with Mervin Jahman, an ex-student of Artec working on the Mongrel search engine "NaturalSelection". So these are the new technologies of opportunity. The social purpose of technologies.... This is the space, that tracks the face, that creates the bars of social class.... and of Newham's justification. Newham needs to attract more middle class aspiration to its area in order to create wealth and nothing attracts the middle class like surveillance... After all, "the innocent have nothing to fear". Enough, I'm being sidetracked. What I want to say is, in the last few years, I have seen the context in which Artec and similar organisations operate steadily tightening up, becoming accredited to a new social order. There is a very real danger that these constrictions - or to put it another way, the reordering of powerful elites to cope with technological change - will strangle the technologies bastard miscarriage of social opportunity. Over the last few years, Artec formed spaces where those without crept unseen into situations of value, under their newly acquired technical and creative mantles. Artec I feel, like many other smaller organisations, could be lured into adopting the agenda of academic and political organisations and agencies which may dwarf it. People at Artec work hard and usually do not have the luxury of distance from the day to day grind of running courses and making things happen to see what's coming round the corner. It's always useful to be reminded that the academic and political organisations and agencies now setting the agenda are the ones which failed the client group in the first place. Anyway last year I became ill with stress and stomach ulcers through trying to work as an artist/activist for which I was paid nil, not a bean, and as an educationalist dealing with society's failings for which I was paid badly to service the shit fuckups of society but not to be creative about them. I finally decided to resign my position at Artec in order to improve my health and to pursue those spaces once more. I still support Artec as the only place I know where you can get trained for free if you are from the bottom of the barrel. I wish the organisation well and leave it with these chilling words from Philippe Queau (IMAGINA 97): "The power and universality of digital and virtual technologies no longer need to be proved. The Web is turning into the meta-media, a ubiquitous, integral crossroads. Now that the time of pioneers and prophets is over, it is time for mastery: political, cultural, social and creative mastery. We must lay the bases for the cyber-civilisation which is about to be born. The task is a difficult one. We must pool our strengths to buffer and temper the inevitable chaos of the maelstrom currently being provoked by a generalised short circuit." Yours sincerely, a short circuit, Harwood --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl