Artists and new technologies:
Imagining a new global community
By Elizabeth Donovan Stuelke
Elizabeth Donovan Stuelke is a Ph.D. student in sociology focusing on art, culture, and the sociology of knowledge with an interest in ethnographic (qualitative and quantitative) research and methods. She frequently imagines all kinds of new communities.
Today in the face of an increasingly global web of <economies and cultures> one question raised by scholars of globalization is: “What are the real effects of globalization -- media’s part in it -- on our everyday lives, and how do we respond to these?” As I began to ponder this question, I was reminded of a group of artists who are dealing with this question in very interesting ways.
Case study: 16Beaver group
On any given Monday you can find a group of from 2 – 10 or 20 people
gathered together on the fifth floor of an old factory-style-turned tenant
building on the edge of the financial district. Space on this floor was
purchased by members of a class of curators and artists from the Whitney
Program to continue the forum of discussions on art and politics after
their graduation. The air is still but carries dust kicked up from the
floors, mainly from the accompanying studio spaces that are part of the
16Beaver location. A film or slide projector usually hums in the middle
of the 11 x11 space marked off for presentations and exhibitions from
the kitchen, bathroom, and 4 studios, and the gray metal folding chairs
scrape the floor as the speaker adjusts his or her focus before giving
their talk. A portion of the presentation had been made available for
all who would attend, and those who couldn’t because of distance
from the space etc., and the room is full of anticipation of the spirited
discussion to come. As the stragglers find their seats and hellos are
finalized, with expressions of interest in the latest show being staged
of this one’s work or the latest publication of this one’s
curatorial statement, etc. the room is darkened and the presentation begins
in earnest.
From
their website
“16Beaver is the address of a space initiated/run by artists to
create and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production,
and discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects.
It is the point of many departures/arrivals.” ( HYPERLINK "http://16beavergroup.org/about/"
http://16beavergroup.org/about/)
The projects that are undertaken by this group range from readings (weekly
at their most active) to teach-ins and exhibitions and interventions in
local and transnational institutions.
16Beaver -- Mass Moca Series -- The Ongoing Conference
“16Beaver is a network of artists, curators, writers, thinkers and
activists who converge on a regular basis at a space in Lower Manhattan
to discuss issues, exchange ideas, and raise questions. Some people are
‘regulars’ and involved on a day to day basis, and others
come in and out at their liking. The arrangement remains open to anyone
who is interested. Some collaborative projects are born out of discussions,
in other cases people take the discussions as a starting point for their
individual pursuits. In addition to artist presentations, political discussions,
organized happenings, lunches, walks, parties, screenings and the like,
participants regularly share and discuss readings with one another, opening
the space for what Joseph Beuys referred to as an ‘ongoing conference.’
An ongoing conference that combines the most pressing social, political,
artistic, and philosophical questions within the framework of the everyday,
the routine, the quotidian.” (http://www.16beavergroup.org/massmoca/)
Using the new media technology, such as the Internet and e-mail, to expand their reach and find new creative partners, these artists are asking questions not from the remove of academia, but ‘in the trenches,’ as it were, where they are interacting with other artists and activists from varying cultures and backgrounds to create and present projects that not only question the uses and abuses of media and globalization, but that actually enact and prescribe alternatives to the ‘official’ economic and political uses of media, particularly in the arena of the increasingly global capitalist economy and increasingly global consumer culture which seem to be intent on shaping our world.
"The
Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance"
Brian Holmes (4/16/04)
“Since June 18, 1999, I have been involved in a networked resistance
to the globalization of capital. This resistance has been inextricably
connected to art. It has taken me from London to Prague, from Quebec City
to Genoa and Florence. It has given me an interest in experimental uses
of advanced technology, like the <Makrolab project>. It has pushed
me to explore new organizational forms, like the research network developed
by <Multiplicity>. It has encouraged me to support cross-border
solidarity movements, like <Kein Mensch ist illegal>. And it has
resulted in collaborations with Bureau d'Ètudes, in their attempts
to map out the objective structures of contemporary capitalism. But the
experience of the movement of movements has also led me to ask a subjective
question. What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what
exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option? Or are
we not becoming what we believe we are resisting? Are the ‘multitudes’
the very essence and driving force of capitalist globalization, as some
theorists believe?” (http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/
archives/000865.php)
In thinking about how these artists and their understanding, or spin, on globalization may add to the debates on the subject, we can look to Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) to consider ‘the global’ as a part of a new form of imagined community. We might feel that the ‘powers that be’ and corporate conglomerates of ‘the West’ are controlling the very idea of what it means to be global, and that the vision put forward by these institutions is one of people all over the world wanting to be just like ‘us’ – American, wanting to wear clothes from the gap, drive SUVs, etc. This itself may in fact be largely a construct of the imagination, one – and only one - version of an imagined global community, but only one of many possible versions, albeit one which these institutions obviously hope that we will continue to buy – literally - into. But if this is the “official” corporate capitalist view of an imagined global community, what could be accomplished by REALLY imagining a new global community?
Where
Art the New Communities?
In his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism mentioned above, Benedict Anderson posits that the construction
of the nation state was originally dependent on the social and cultural
acceptance by people living in or near any given area (within western
Europe) of being “condensed” as a social unit, via the new
medium of print. The advent of print and its use in condensing disparate
social segments into a unified, cohesive social and political unit led
to the formation of the nation state, nationality, national identity,
etc. Of our present day situation, anthropology scholar Jon Anderson posits
in his article, “New Media & Globalization in the Internet Age,”
that the “twentieth century’s one truly new organizational
form was the inter-national organization in which the members were national
states, culminating in the United Nations Organization, but including
others from labor to finance to culture to food and agriculture, each
predicated on nations as members. The breakup of empires -- from the Ottoman
at the beginning of the century to the British and French in mid-century
to the Soviet at century’s end -- ratified national states as the
only legitimate kind. If this is the 20th century story, many now believe
its undoing is the story of the future and that communications technology
is central to the process.” From the newspaper and the advent of
the nation state, through imperialism of the late 18th-19th centuries,
to the late 20th- early 21st-century and the “re”nationalizing
and “de”nationalizing of the world in response to an all too
“universal” mindset of the global, there is something that
the coalescence (and divergence) of people through and with new technologies
(be they newspapers, sailing ships, or the Internet) have in common: a
changing social environment and agents (people) who bring these advances
to fruition.
With this fact in mind, one thing Anderson’s scenario of both the
imagined and the real points to is the ability for people to “create”
the reality of the world in which they live. If believing in the idea
of a community beyond your actual view is a key factor in actually creating
such a community, that is, if this act - of believing that sharing a common
reading medium and living within a certain border constitutes a set of
commonalities upon which a community is based - actually creates a scenario
in which these beliefs in fact become the bases for national communities,
what possibilities does this point to about the creation of alternative
scenarios of social organization and community, through other, alternative
imagined similarities or commonalities? If the realities of technological
communication bring together people over vast distances (economically,
politically, and socially), and then reinforce at the same time (for some,
at least) the idea of “the nation” as the only real unit of
sovereignty in a global world, albeit in the ‘transnational’
sense of a non-Eurocentric global environment (Dussel), what does this
say for the power of imagination in relation to the material realities
of our social and political systems of organization?
If the nation is an imagined community, as per Benedict Anderson, then
today in our post- or transmodern world we are re-imagining the community.
Some of these ideas expand on the idea of community itself: what does
it mean to be part of a community, does it mean that members all buy the
same commodities or that they all think about certain issues, or speak
the same language? Today we are facing new conceptualizations, new extensions
of the idea of community, and it is up to us to define for ourselves what
these new communities will be. If we don’t, then they will be defined
for us.
“Imaginary
Maps, Global Solidarities”
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhimaginary/
Brian Holmes (4/16/04)
“Earth at Night – November 27, 2000”
“Introduction: The Social Imaginary”
“Incommensurably large with respect to human perception, what we
call ‘the world’ appears first in the domain of representation
– most concisely in the form of maps. For the literary mind, a map
is the round earth on a flat sheet of paper, the planet at your fingertips:
an invitation to dream of far-off continents and climes. In practical
terms, a map is the graphic or computer-generated depiction of a clearly
outlined territory, with features that are natural (mountains, oceans,
rivers) or artificial (highways, cities, borders). Most people use these
printed or pixellated guides to get somewhere, asking only for effectiveness
in motion. Yet so-called ‘thematic maps’ (or ‘information
graphics’) carry a far wider range of knowledge about human beings
and their activities, their relations to each other and to the environment
(demography, industrial production, political orientation, cultural and
linguistic grouping, educational levels, infrastructure, etc.). What's
more, topological figures, derived from landforms and mathematics, are
now used to chart processes and relations outside any geographic frame,
the most obvious example being the virtual realms of the Internet. In
these representational adventures we rediscover the terra incognita of
the ancient cartographers. By condensing complex information about the
human world, thematic maps can have the uncanny effect of making us feel
disoriented – lost amidst the flows and the conflicts. In a period
of political, social, and technological upheaval like the one we're living
through now, when ordinary people find themselves entangled in processes
of global scale every day, maps can help us to expand our perception of
ourselves, of our present situation and our closest or most far-off possibilities.
The stuff of dreams then mingles with the challenge of reality. But how
to meet that challenge, the way one meets another human being on common
ground?”
(http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000868.php)
J. Anderson states that, “In the longer run, this blurring of boundaries [between global and local, old and new technologies] aligns the use and impacts of more participatory information technologies with the processes of contemporary globalization. These include taking local discussions ‘off-shore,’ reintegration with diasporas and with their interests, identities, and networks, and a coming to the fore of creolized discourses. Here is where the blurring of boundaries starts. And here it becomes possible to imagine contradictory processes – the extension of networks that is a conservative force and the expansion of discourse that fragments authority – that meet in new media technologies. In the short run, new technologies from cassette recorders to the Internet facilitate networks that are already international…[and those such as] religion are quite old and already ‘transnational.’ Some of the more vibrant uses of the Internet today ensue from such quarters” (J. Anderson, 1999).
As J. Anderson puts it in response to efforts to theorize the impact of
new technological advances in developing parts of the world, “Socially,
the Internet arrives in developing countries along with other technologies
that together open channels of communication, choice, and, with the Internet,
participation in an expanding public sphere fostered by popular access
to new media” (J. Anderson, 1999). These advances bring the possible
to the present in these places and speak to the power of the imagined
and the ‘Utopian’: the idea of a place that is ‘not
yet’; an idea that can view the future from <potential realities>;
a conception that is found very often in art. The utopian potential of
art is well noted in the work of theorists from <Mannheim> to <Jameson>.
The artist and their ability to extend and ‘envision’ the
not yet possible, the not yet conceived, is very potent.
This extension is what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define as remediation
(Bolter and Grusin, 2000). In our present world of mediated space in which
we work and play, this theory explains media as a thing in itself, not
as a simulacrum of the "real" world. Media helps “frame”
the way we look at our world: this includes how we understand, communicate
about, and visualize our world. Whether as makers or providers of culture,
those who work in the arts and sciences, or those who don’t create
in these ways but only consume media in its various forms. Whether we
acknowledge its influence or not, everyone is affected in some way by
media.
Bolter and Grusin stress that all media is a form of mediation, not an
attempt to show the real, which it conceals, but actually different levels
of re-mediation and comment on that media which has come before. They
see media as either a form of immediacy or hypermediacy, and their goal
is not to reduce media to something less than what it is, which is an
object and subject in the world, but to realize it as an experience and
to understand the emotional and real (authentic) potency it has in shaping
and being shaped by our culture. This idea dovetails nicely with J. Anderson’s
view of how “The multiplicity and specificity of responses [in new
media] mirror capabilities of the technology first to open the public
sphere to more actors and then to widen that public sphere itself. Communication
is a social process and embedded in social networks, which are its real
authors. Instead of a global village, there are globalized villages, as
such networks break the limits of time and space previously inscribed
by earlier means of communication” (J. Anderson, 1999).
When I first encountered this group on a Monday reading night, I began
to ask myself: When is art politics? Was it art to meet every Monday to
discuss the war in Iraq and other issues that are represented in published
(mostly on the Internet) pieces that are read by the group and then discussed?
I also started to wonder about the connection between the global and the
local; that is, when do the projects that these people have initiated
and joined become part of their particular collective organization (and
their everyday lives) and when are they something larger than this, something
not just local, but global? Or are they ever really global? Do joint efforts
like some of the ones presented below constitute a unified voice, or are
they better described as spaces for individual voices to be heard together?
When are ‘our’ voices divided and when they are unified or
united? What are the roles of and relationships between the individual
and society? Where are the boundaries between the desires and needs of
the individual and those of the society, and how do they blur or can they
be reconciled? What are the allegiances to the individual and/or the collective
and what does either change?
I
thought I Saw a Global Future
In art there is a place for resistance and for power without resorting
to a purely oppositional stance. It is possible to “be” without
being “against” or “instead of” the so-called
dominant cultural/political/economic norms. Artists create and envision
the world around us in ways that are not always tolerant of or appreciated
by ‘the mainstream,’ or the ‘capitalist powers that
be.’ As a part of a larger culture, artists have many voices and
some of them use these voices to imagine what our world could look and
feel like into the future. Projects and topics discussed here are but
a small sampling from only one group. The questions of imagined (or real)
communities of globalization, art as politics, the global as local, and
the unity or division of our voices are still open for debate. Other questions
are: Are people really directly affected by globalization? What are the
ways it actually affects specific locations or situations? These artists
are working to bring these questions to the fore. They ask what is the
actual, concrete, the local, the particular from the universal, which
we can look at and see within globalization? What are the consequences
of globalization? What is the collective power of globalization wherein
everyone can benefit by sharing in the profits of the world’s resources?
What are the ramifications of the capitalist frame where some owners,
etc., are controlling how the ‘frame’ is developed and worked
within in that global world?
In imaging the future, some propose an agency centered focus which emphasizes
people as the actual participants in any situation; people interpreting
their world and each other in situations based on symbols built up by
culture and always changing with these new situations. Change comes not
only through the new understandings we gain through interpretation and
action with each other in different situations, but also through these
changes as they affect the institutions and organizations that also make
up our world. All these scenarios --- agent centered and agent as structure
centered --- are actual social creations. There is no larger “they”
that makes the rules of interaction and how our world will be --- beyond
the life that situations and organizations and institutions take on after
being created --- as with bureaucracy as the prime example in western
capitalism. But even this is a “they” that once was and still
is a “we.” In light of this, the global is one place where
our imagination can take us and as it is always influenced --- both constrained
and empowered --- by the past and the present it can be a place that uses
different, new, expanded, kinder, gentler, rules of organization and institutionalization
within our situations.
Hopefully we can find new questions, possibly, ‘transquestions’
---non-Eurocentric questions --- as we <think globally and act locally>.
Some artists as one group of people committed to communicating within
society are thinking about these questions and how new media can help
them ask and answer them. What are some of the answers for you? We CAN
imagine the future. What will yours be like?
“ARTicles”
November 25, 2004
“art after the networks communication media”
Dimos Dimitriou (CFront-2000 workshop 4/01)
“1. art after the net interactions is no more what it was before the use of the net…
2. …a poetic principle is the initial and substantive impulse for a manifestation (a poetic principle is not an artistic principle…)
3. …poetics are founded on the interrelations of personal expressions and aim at a new vision [not at a subject/object perception] persons are present through linguistic actions (in real or remote mode)…
4. expressed personal relations are new artistic principles…the net of relations is a new artistic principle
5. art can now achieve the presentation of interpersonal relations art after the net is founded on the contextual expressed interactions of at least 2 people: the interaction of the artist and the viewer…
6. the use of the media is the artistic intermediation of the representation of the media…
7. in art, the mediations of ‘person to person’ interactions are now represented where: the ‘person to person’ interaction is the poetic principle, and the use of the media represents the artistic principle…
8. any action that connects 2 persons is manifested as a structure = artistic principle any action, under art conditions, is perceived as a structure
9. art [in its artistic net extension] represents ‘the intermediation of the media’s uses’…[characterized by expressions with no external references], art now is structured by its live referential contexts…
10. …there is no context form that does not contain relations with expressed telos…art now investigates, plans or destabilizes the soft technology of the mega- or micro-power, i.e., organizations, councils and corporations art [in its artistic net extension] represents ‘the intermediation of the media’s uses’
11. art comments on the [open-source] contexts of values
12. doing art is commenting on art's context of validity”
LINKS, NOTES:
On-line resources (from these few resources you should be able to go to many unexpected places and add to this list for future viewers) please send us new links
Think
Globally, Act Locally --- The phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally”
was first used in 1972 at the UN’s first international conference
on the human environment in Stockholm (http://www.unep.org/Documents/Default.asp?DocumentID=97),
by pioneering environmentalist, microbiologist and experimental pathologist,
René Dubos, http://www.dubos.org/.
Multiplicity --- HYPERLINK "http://www.multiplicity.it/"
http://www.multiplicity.it/
Kein Mensch ist illegal --- HYPERLINK "http://www.contrast.org/borders/kein/" http://www.contrast.org/borders/kein/
http://www.stewdio.org/confess/
Markolab --- "Makrolab is an autonomous communications, research and living unit and space, capable of sustaining concentrated work of 4 people in isolation/insulation conditions for up to 120 days. Three primary global research fields have been identified within the Makrolab project. These are: TELECOMMUNICATIONS, MIGRATIONS, and WEATHER SYSTEMS." HYPERLINK "http://makrolab.ljudmila.org/" http://makrolab.ljudmila.org/; “Located in the hills of Scotland, MAKROLAB functions as a fully autonomous research, communications, housing and creative unit. Its premise is built on the idea that sustainable architecture can fuse with digital practice to provide a haven for collaboration within a self-contained shell. Since our connected lives require more infrastructure everyday, the MAKROLAB project proves that our digital lives can exist in a resource-free world where reliance on ourselves is the only option.” HYPERLINK "http://greenmuseum.org/c/new_media/" http://greenmuseum.org/c/new_media/
CITATIONS, SOURCES:
References
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of
Nationalism [revised addition]. New York and London: Verson, 1991.
Anderson, Jon. “New Media & Globalization in the Internet Age.”
edited by Dale Eickelman & Jon Anderson, Indiana University Press,
1999.
Appadurai, Arjun: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,
University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1996.
Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New
Media. MIT
Press, 2000.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, University of California
Press, 1997.
Jameson, Fredric and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization
(Post
Contemporary Interventions). Duke University Press, 1998.
Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology
of Knowledge.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.
Marx, K. The Marx-Engles Reader. (2nd Edition) Robert C. Tucker (ed.)
New York
and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978.
Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Kathleen
Blamey and
John B. Thompson (Trans.). Northwestern University Press, 1991.
Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. George H. Taylor (ed.).
New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986.