Syndicate: Theory and Practice of Conferencing

[Arthur Bueno <abueno@v2.nl>]

Theory and Practice of Conferencing
An account of JUNCTION SKOPJE
By Arthur Bueno


A week after the Syndicate meeting JUNCTION SKOPJE. We have a new and very
neat Syndicate reader, there are pictures, 70 hours of video and some
discussion has started on the list about the presentation of net.art, but
there isn't any report yet, so I'll give it a try. This was my first
experience with this kind of event, and I am filled with impressions, many
of which will be obvious to conference veterans.
So what happened there? People fly into the Balkans. An SCCA bus collects
them from the airport and drives them through Skopje. We see the hill at
the river Vardar that more or less divides the Moslem and Christian parts
of the city, on one side shopping malls and cappuccino, on the other
minarets and Turkish coffee. On the hill stands the old fortress and next
to it the Museum of Contemporary Art. The bus stops. Throughout the hallway
computers on pedestals are waiting, only recently filled to the brim with
selected net.art projects.

In order not to get lost between the unfamiliar faces I make a quick
categorisation of the crowd as theorists, artists, local visitors and
organisers. We are led into the dark conferencing hall and the meeting
opens with a web-art presentation VIRTUAL AQUARIUM by Andras Negyessy,
Tomas Kovacs; a project which enables us to deform the face of the person
you are video-conferencing with without him knowing it. I always wanted to
do that!
Deformation remains the subject as Mark Dery, not the typical Syndicalist,
pleads for a re-embodiment in net.art. With much consideration for his
audience the incredibly eloquent Dery slowed his speech down to Warp 5,
which was still a bit fast for many of us, and too much even for the very
skilled translator. 'How am I doing, do I still have a pulse rate out
there?' We learned to see the grotesque as a
model for the re-emergence of the body in art. After 40 minutes Dery leaves
us with a stage filled with monsters and deformed bodies and a sudden
desire for drinking beer or vodka. At just that moment Inke Arns falls from
the sky to present us the second Syndicate reader: the best fruit of the
mailing list, a lot of carefully edited, interesting stuff to read on the
way back.

My categorisation remained helpful the next day, although the divisions
were not as sharp as I first thought. I estimate that the theorists have
the majority over artists. Still it's a strange symbiosis. The one seems to
need the other to legitimate his activities.  So many words appear to be
needed to accompany artistic experiments these days. Aren't artists
limiting themselves more and more to the conceptual? I ask a friendly
looking Ryszard Kluszinsky (Poland) in the canteen. He retreats for a few
hours and returns on stage to give an extensive lecture on 'The position of
the interactive artist'. As a direct reply to my question, is my pleasant
illusion.
In another theoretic discourse Lev Manovich (USA) gives us an academic,
historic account of the development of New Media. The analogy between the
film projector and the Turing machine is discussed, and although it's
interesting I find myself beginning to wonder what to do with this
knowledge. Maybe I'm more the workshop kind of a man.

A meeting like in Skopje clearly functions great as an occasion to meet and
exchange ideas, to find support in the social group the Syndicate has
obviously become. But the official part of the meeting was to me a bit
confusing. Themes had been formulated such as:  
Discussion about implementation of the various aspects of the new and
emerging media in Europe, and:
European East - West exchange of ideas and discussion about techniques for
the communication within European emerging electronic art & media scene
and: 
Ways and means of improving the study of the emerging arts and new
technologies
But these formulas were a bit too broad to be functional. They quickly
vaporised. The program of a meeting might be discussed in the mailinglist
on forehand, resulting in a more detailed program and a clearer view of the
goals.

I suppose I expected a bit more of a pragmatic approach. After all here
people with similar occupations and interests, that work in similar
situations and have similar practical problems are meeting. A beginning
media art could benefit more from the presence of more experienced
organizations. Exchange programs could be set up, strategies discussed,
plans for co-operation made. This feeling was expressed during the
presentation of the Virtual Museum System by van Gogh TV. In the lecture
concentrating on software-development, there was a heartfelt plea for
better co-ordination, co-operation, pragmatism, setting your objectives in
a realistic way. Everybody wants to define the whole area as his working
space, starting projects that include every thinkable activity that finally
result in 20% of the quality that was strived for. It seemed to me an
appropriate approach for Syndicalists, especially the representatives of
local media-labs that want to do it all: developing databases, maintaining
an online gallery, set up education programs, offering facilities,
producing art-projects, being politically active. How often is the wheel
reinvented, what would be gained by co-operation? 

It was useful and interesting to see the work some of the Syndicalists had
made during the past months, like the presentation of Iliyana Nedkova
(Bulgaria) and Nina Czegledy (Canada) of Crossing Over 3 and Virtual
Revolutions.  The presentations of individual art-projects were also
illuminating, although sometimes they took that peculiar form where the
artist takes the audience by the hand and browses them through his website
meanwhile reading the texts that we can see for ourselves in the
computer-beam projection. So much for interactivity. A revelation was the
performance of the Slovenian singer Igor Stromajer. Stromajer, both a tenor
and a countertenor, gave a chilling interpretation of the self-composed
'Story about net.art'. He appears to be active in the net.art business as
well. A quite versatile man.

Things became more (anti) political when Luchezar Boyadziev (Bulgaria)
discussed his initiative for a Culture Board for Bulgaria, a plan already
brought to the mailinglist, and Oleg Kireev (Russia) gave an insight in the
sort of anarchistic, anti-professional views of his group, which although
not really media-related, were interesting for those who read the magazine
RADEK and Kireev;s occasional contributions to the Syndicate list.
Finally there was a second reading by Manovich, who had undergone a total
transformation in two days. His lecture on the Database and Narrative in
New Media was a psychedelic experience. Manovich was rapping through his
text, in front of projected fragments from Vertof's Man with a 
Camera, with one hand conducting a musical soundtrack that consisted of
waves of techno- and ABBA-music, and with the other hand drinking from two
alternating bottles of beer, one of which represented the Data, the other
one the Algorithm. The clear conclusion was: database rules! This live
illustration of the deconstructing of a narrative climaxed in an uneasy
flabbergasted silence as the soundtrack had reached its end. 
Questions? 
Why Abba!