Syndicate: Artforum column

[Jordan Crandall <crandall@blast.org>]

European net communities
Jordan Crandall


published in Artforum, March 1998, p. 20



Dancing, running, blinking, spinning, most Web graphics seem to jostle
to fill every space, as if a virtual gym instructor -- aerobobot? --
were whipping them into perpetual motion from the sidelines. How much
more invigorating it can be when Web pages sit still.  If many critical
media sites like Telepolis (http://www.heise.de/tp) have avoided
unnecessary frames, animated images, and colors, they more than make up
for a lack of visual pyrotechnics in the political resources they offer
users.  These sites interface with e-mailing lists, publications, online
conferences, and offline meetings in various cities, revealing complex
and highly mobile communities.  Members of these communities move
quickly across geographical barriers yet are relentlessly committed to
their local cultures and histories.  One wouldn't refer to them as
virtual communities, since they engage a multiplicity of online and
offline territories -- territories that now intertwine, not
unproblematically, as much as those of the West and (former) East.

Resisting the market boosterism of the "digital revolution," these
groups are attempting to forge a new kind of media criticism from
informed positions deeply embedded within the networks.  Oriented not
within the context of the museum but within that of the globalized
culture industry, they are less concerned with making artworks per se
than in developing tools, formats, workspaces, and media strategies
within cross-disciplinary and multiregional communities. For many of
them, often working within volatle political and economic situations,
the stakes for what counts in the communications landscape have never
been higher.

NETTIME (http://www.desk.nl/~nettime) is the most widely influential of
online venues dealing with global media politics, continually spawning
regional formats and influencing countless other net discussions.
Founded in 1995 by media activists Geert Lovink of Amsterdam and Pit
Schultz of Berlin, Nettime confronts the workings of the culture
industry from a historically-engaged, Western European perspective,
making a strong case that contemporary cultural phenomena must be
understood in in political and economic terms.  It is committed to local
grass-roots practices as well as strategies of media activism within the
globalizing communications networks.  Developing "groupware"
collaborations among its dispersed constituency, it intervenes in
debates over communications standards, censorship, worker's rights, the
social effects of corporate practices, and the constitution of civil
societies under globalization.
 
SYNDICATE (http://www.v2.nl/east) concentrates on the artistic and
political situations of Eastern Europe to foster links of communication
and collaboration among media art communities throughout the continent. 
Founded in 1996 through the Rotterdam-based V2_Organisation and
facilitated by media critic Andreas Broeckmann, this network connects
artists, activists, theorists, and media producers from 28 European
countries through both online and offline venues, embodying the tensions
and conjunctions arising from the cultural, geographic, and economic
remapping of Europe.  Syndicate connects to regional groups such as
CYBERNS, created by Branka Davic last year in Yugoslavia as a way to
bypass the information monopolization of government television and to
maintain communication among former citizens.

FACE SETTINGS (http://thing.at/face).  Hosted by media practicioners
Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wolgemuth in Vienna along with Budapest-based
Diana McCarty, this website, e-mailing list, and "mobile kitchen"
explores cyberfeminist issues and the specific needs of women online,
with an emphasis on connecting women from developing countries.  It
employs culinary metaphors such as spinning plates and vegetables in
order to structure conversational activity around the virtual setting of
a kitchen table.  Men are not invited.

THE THING (http://www.thing.net / http://www.thing.at), straddling the
US and Europe, is the forerunner of these net discussions. Founded by
artist Wolfgang Staehle in 1991 as a Bulletin-Board System (BBS), a
virtual town hall, with nodes in the US and four European countries, it
was for many the beginning of the net as a critical space and artistic
community.  Many artists and critics cut their wings here in forums such
as the "Dungeon" and "Intershop," organized around specific items of
interest.   Holding out during the gold-rush euphoria of the Web, when
its discussion forums dwindled and its membership diversified, The Thing
has now developed an interface that reintroduces some aspects of the
community-BBS model.  It combines a Web-based discussion format, strings
of emailing lists, and windows that allow live conversation, revealing
users that move much more than the visuals.