Andreas Broeckmann on Wed, 18 Dec 1996 23:11:11 +0100


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Prague Repor


Odysseus, not Ariane
Report about a new European space programme

Andreas Broeckmann


In November 1996, the Council of Europe staged a large international
conference whose multiple titles and subtitles point to the complex and
possibly too broad thematic range which the event was supposed to cover:
"Culture, Communication and New Technologies: The Impact of New
Technologies on European Culture. Conference on a New Space for Culture and
Society (New Ideas in Science and Art)". The conference was, on the one
hand, meant to initiate a renewed discussion of the relationship between
art and science and to encourage co-operation between the two fields. On
the other hand, it sought to explore the 'new social and cultural space'
that has been opened up by new technologies, and to discuss the
socio-political and cultural implications of the changes effected by these
technologies.

The idea behind this combination of topics was the hypothesis that there is
a conceptual convergence between the three domains represented here, and
that it makes sense to discuss them in conjunction: first, the new
scientific paradigms as they have come out of quantum physics, chaos theory
and systems theory; second, the effects of recent technological change,
esp. related to digitisation and the emergence of 'global' electronic
networks; and third, the practice of artists, mostly, though not
exclusively, working with electronic media.

The practical agenda, then, was to discuss the transformations and explore
the assumed convergence between the different domains, to raise current
issues and ideas in order to determine the state of the theoretical
discussion regarding the social implications of the new situation, and
finally to propose cultural policy directions to the Council of Europe.

Organised by the Cultural Policy and Action Division of the Council of
Europe, the conference brought together more than 150 people: artists,
media researchers, cultural and social theorists, art historians, TV
producers, film makers, journalists, sociologists, philosophers,
physicists, mathematicians, as well as representatives of the Culture
Committee of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. There were
around 20 speakers and chairpersons who gave presentations or led the
discussions during this four-day event, and another 80 invited guests who
were there to contribute by taking part in the open discussions. Half of
the invited guests (though none of the prominent speakers) were from
Eastern Europe. (It would go too far to list the participants here. Most of
them are represented on the WWW site that was prepared for the event,
pconf.terminal.cz, including biographies and short statements about the
topics of the conference. Further documentation of the presentations and
discussions will also be made available there.)

It is always difficult to say after the event, which people were absent and
who should have been there, especially when looking at a forum that was
packed with some of the most influential European artists, thinkers and
researchers in the field of new media. A group, however, that was blatantly
absent were the young people - artists, media activists, hackers - who are,
to a large degree, shaping the new emergent spaces of the Internet at the
moment, and whose work is far more relevant to the understanding of the
'new space' than some of the theoretical deliberations and assumptions
formulated during the conference. Innovation in the creative sphere is
emerging from a generation whose affiliations are not formed within
academia or huge media institutions, but in so-called 'grass-roots'
initiatives that stand outside of and challenge the sovereignty of the
cultural establishment. Instead, the conference was dominated by people who
view the the issue of culture and technology from a perspective that was
shaped in the sixties and seventies when electronic art, and the
relationship between art, science and technology, were approached much more
strongly within traditional artistic paradigms. The lack of practical
experience with the current network culture, coupled with the rather
telling mix of political and corporate affiliations exhibited in the
biographical notes of many an older conference participant, pointed to the
fact that, more than anything, the policy makers who initiated this event
have a generational problem: they themselves, and those people they tend to
ask for advice, often hardly understand, let alone 'live' the new cultural
paradigms that the conference was addressing.

The combination of the three agendas of the conference - the relationship
between art and science, the 'new space', and the invitation to make
suggestions towards the European media policies - implied that there was an
increasing awareness of the political impact that certain statements would
have. This impression was intensified by the increasing visibility and
presence of the members of the CoE Culture Committee at the head of the
table. At times, the conference turned into a staged discussion, a
performance aimed at eliciting certain reactions or attitudes from the CoE
audience, with carefully pitched, self-conscious, even self-censoring
remarks. A political necessity from which this text will also not be free.

Thus, the things that were not said in Prague were probably as important as
those that were. The role of television, and of US American TV productions
in particular; the role of European culture in a global cultural and
political economy; the extreme regional differentiation of access to and
usage of new technologies - such rather contentious issues were hardly
touched upon. Similarly, the as yet unresolved question of copyright for
digital cultural productions was only mentioned in passing. The range of
issues raised during the conference was partly determined by the illusion
of an inherent contiguity of all things new and digital - an illusion that
might prove most fatal for in the development of cultural policies for the
'electronic age'. In a small intervention, Muntadas pointed to this notion
when he said - in Spanish, so that what he said would not be translated via
the intercom: 'We believe that we live in a world that is completely
translatable, but there are things that cannot be translated. Very often,
this realm of the untranslatable is the substance of what artists deal
with.'

The setting of the conference was the Games Hall in Prague Castle, a richly
decorated hall which had a long, U-shaped table for the invited guests, and
chairs along the walls for the further participants. Lunches were offered
by the Castle administration in two near-by restaurants, coffee breaks gave
ample opportunity for lobbying and networking. There was a string of
official receptions and visits to exhibitions, and in the evenings the
crowd would disperse into smaller groups for the Prague bars and
restaurants, for the usual trading activities in news, gossip and future
project proposals.

The actual conference was less dominated by an open discussion, but by the
often lengthy presentations and the question-and-answer times that honed in
on the specified areas of the speakers, rather than opening up towards the
more general topics raised by the individual talks. But then it is
questionable whether a meeting of 100 experts can be more than a general
teach-in for those listening, and whether such a meeting has ever achieved
more than what the participants already knew before they came. It was most
certainly worthwhile as a social gathering for those present, some of the
pressing problems could be raised at least in the form of unanswered
questions, and it will have to be seen what the long-term impact of the
event may be.

Rather than offering a full report of the conference proceedings, the
following will give a short and partial summary of some of the key areas of
the discussion. A basic problem was the lack of terminological precision as
regards the main 'operational categories' used, not only with regard to the
almost redundant broadness of the use of such words as culture, art,
science, but also to the indecision regarding the sense in which people
were talking about science, technology, media technology, or the Internet,
and which of these was the actual motor of the social and cultural changes
that were being diagnosed.

Art () Science

The first 'victim' of this imprecision was the intended discourse between
art and science. The presentations on the first day of the conference
offered a broad range of new ideas about fundamental, paradigmatic shifts
in science theory, from the spiritual essentiality of the quantum vacuum
(Ervin Laszlo) to the neurogenesis represented by the activities on the WWW
(Ralph Abraham), from the birth of the universe out of instability and
irreversibility rather than the eternal return of the big bang (Eduard
Gunzig, replacing Ilya Prigogine), to the significance of both words and
images for the understanding of abstract problems (Benoit Mandelbrot).
However, the understanding of 'art' displayed by these scientists differed
considerably from what contemporary art practitioners and theorists are
engaged with and was mostly based on a notion of art being a decorative
elaboration or enhancement of scientific ideas. It was therefore no wonder
that the ensuing discussion and the string of comments made later in the
course of the conference, was more often critical than enthusiastic about
the possibility of a fruitful merger of art and science. As Don Foresta put
it: art and science have two different languages, two modes of knowledge,
and artists will not become scientists, nor vice versa. Siegfried Zielinski
put it even more radically when he said that we should not even attempt to
build a dialogue between artists and scientists, because their languages
and their interests have nothing to do with each other. There can certainly
be an interesting resonance from particular inter- or transdisciplinary
projects, as was argued by Tor Norretranders with regard to a series of
workshops which were organised in Copenhagen this year. The constructive
dialogue across the differences between the disciplines, the creative
potential of translations between the fields are proof of the usefulness of
public and industry-sponsored artistic projects. However, the assumption of
a 'natural bond' between artists and scientists is a flawed assumption that
serves neither of the two practices.

In his contribution to the conference's preparatory document, Dieter
Daniels stated that the 'inferiority complex of the arts in relation to the
innovative power of technology and natural science' is still 'the central
issue of the topic "art and new technologies".' In a curious trick of fate,
artists and cultural critics present in Prague displayed a much more
materialist attitude towards the cultural, political and economic impact of
the recent technological developments, and, one must say, a much more
thorough understanding of their wider implications. Some of the scientists,
on the other hand, deployed clearly religious or esoteric linguistic
registers, defending a new universalism and calling upon the artists to
embrace a more holistic notion of human agency and, by implication, of
their artistic practice. Rather than worry about a renewal of an
'inferiority complex', cultural theorists might, in this context, consider
the influence that the scientifically inspired, spiritualist and holistic
ideas of the 'eco-fundamentalists of the universe' could have on political
decision makers.

Art Practice () New Technologies

The second day of the conference was dominated by a series of presentations
by artists who have been working with electronic technologies since the
1960s and who offered their own practice as examples for the fruitful
conjunction of artistic and technological research (Otto Piene, Steina
Vasulka, Jeffrey Shaw). Don Foresta, the conceptual father of the
conference, set the stage with his programmatic introductory statement:
'For over a century art and science have been defining a new space for
western society, a space which will provide the schema of how we organise
our universe. [...] Art, being the densest form of communication, is often
the supreme test of any means of communication. Each work of art contains
the entire world view of the artist and, as such, demands of any means of
expression the dimension necessary to fulfil that need. Art is the means by
which we test a communication system, and by doing so, the reality that it
defines.'

The successful partnership of art and science, the defence of the authorial
artist, the conviction of the key role that art can play as an experimental
and exploratory tool for understanding our current reality and the future -
these were the crucial messages that the conference was meant to
communicate to the policy makers. Independence of art practice, i.e. the
artists' freedom from the necessity to sell their creativity to industrial
developers, and a call to artists to be critical and 'non-believers'
(Muntadas), were put forward as prerequisites for art to be able to perform
its social and cultural functions.

With regard to new aesthetic categories, overcoming the Euclidean
space-time continuum and interactivity were the two honoured catch-phrases.
There is still little understanding of the cultural and social effects of
interactivity, and it will as yet have to be seen how 'interactive' the
communication channels and services are going to be that will affect
European culture on a mass-scale in the future. Michael Century's claim
that the main aesthetic feature of the new networked environments is the
users' experience of simultaneity, and that this experience will eventually
lead to a new form of subjectivity, may be true on the level of
enthusiastic Internet users today, but he also reminded us that the
introduction of 'interactive television' might neutralise the creative
potentials of the networks and might turn them into just another mass
medium. It is at this level of securing the development of the new
communication infrastructure as a heterogeneous and open cultural space,
that the Council of Europe must see one of its primary roles. The diversity
of European culture is dependent on political freedom as much as on open
communication channels, whether they are print media, exhibition spaces,
radio or the Internet.

New Space () Identity

A more pressing question than the future of artistic practice is that of
the formation of subjective and social identities. If the technological
development does indeed lead to a reconstitution of public spaces and the
social geography, then this will also have its effects on the way in which
individuals and groups relate to themselves and to the socius.

In one of the key speeches of the conference, Pierre Levy put forward the
thesis that the extending communication networks create a new cultural
space in which general participation and interconnection can bring forth a
new form of universality, a global cultural plane that is universal in both
its openness and its continuous internal transformation, and that is not
totalising as regards the contents or ideologies it carries. In its
tendency to be 'universal without totalisation', cyberculture 'embodies the
horizontal, simultaneous trajectory of cultural change.' Levy is one of the
most influential thinkers about the cultural impact of new technologies at
the moment, and his ideas are certain to leave their mark on the future
policies of the Council of Europe. In a recent 'Report about Cyberculture',
entitled 'The Second Deluge' and written for the Council (Oct. 1996), Levy
gives a broad overview over the different areas of cultural and social
change that will have to be considered with regard to the ongoing changes.
(It would be interesting to compare his analysis to that, for example, of
the American cultural critic Mark Dery who, earlier this year, published an
account of cyberculture [Escape Velocity, New York 1996] that is closer to
its subcultural and 'grainy' aspects, and that therefore has far less
illusions about the preservation of existing cultural forms of expression
and ideals which looms large in Levy's report. Levy's is an attempt to free
the notion of cyberculture from its subcultural, 'cyberpunk' connotation,
and to draw it into the realm of European state cultural policies.)

Levy's notion of cyberspace as a 'universality without totality' describes
an ideal which needs to be approached in a practical, constructive manner.
Strategies and policies for the recognition of individual capabilities, of
individual uniqueness and ones that allow for the growth of local
difference should not, as Levy tends to do, rely too much on the
'essential' openness of the architecture of the networks. They have to
address the determining and potentially stifling recent developments
concerning the build-up of the cable and satellite infrastructure (web-TV,
commercial intranet services, monopolisation of access, service and content
provision) and break through the totalising and homogenising tendencies
which is not as alien to the 'new space' as it may seem. The parameters of
these problems are technical, political and economic as much as juridical
and cultural, and only insofar as the policies manage to tackle the
multiple layers of this complex, will they be able to succeed in keeping
the new cultural field open and diverse.

While Levy insisted that cyberspace is an additional social reality which
we have to learn to deal with and act within, Siegfried Zielinski
reiterated his thesis that Cyberspace 'is not a possible locality, in the
Kantian sense of a space that is actively appropriated and thus
individualised. [...] It is not a suitable place for subjects to stay, not
even temporarily. And as such it has neither territory nor definable
borders. In it, it is not possible to develop an identity, not even for the
interim.' This theme was further commented on by Raymond Rehnicer who posed
the pertinent question of how it will at all be possible to build
individual and group identities in a cultural space that is to a large
extent deindividualised, let alone that it has effective conventions for
communicating on a group level. What is at stake here is the problem of an
identity that is not necessarily tied to a physical locality, to a nation
or an inbred culture, but one that is in a dynamic relation with its
transforming cultural environment and that takes difference and tolerance
as its main starting points. In terms of a cultural policy, this means that
the question is not so much how we can maintain or defend what we are, but
how we can learn to, and create a culture of, becoming different, of
heterogenesis, as Guattari has called it. Kirill Razlogov pointed in the
same direction when he remarked that the potential social danger associated
with the new technologies was the fear of the new way of life associated
with them, and the fear of losing one's established way of life. Embracing
instability as a cultural value will be highly problematic on a continent
that, more than anything, prides itself of its cultural history, and that
yet has to accept that, rather than of stability, civilisation and
progress, it has a history of change, migration and instability.

An important underlying factor of the transformation of identities is the
use of language. The fact that English is the main lingua franca of
contemporary science and technology discourses and of Internet
communication, was seen by some as a threat to cultural diversity, while
others claimed that it was a mere temporary phenomenon and that the degree
too which non-English speaking communities would come on-line, the balance
would shift to a greater mix of languages used. The current technical
impossibility of using different languages (accents, special letters, etc.)
in the same HTML document was pinpointed as an important impediment for the
presentation of the diversity of European languages on the WWW. It was
suggested that the Council of Europe should take the initiative to create a
European Web browser that supports the many different linguistic
conventions, and if only to counter what Siegfried Schmidt indicated as the
signs of 'a broad dedifferentiation of differentiated social systems'.

Technology () Politics

Towards the end of the conference it became increasingly clear that the
cultural and philosophical considerations of the cultural impacts of new
technologies have practical, technological and political dimensions which
are now frequently left in a cultural vacuum and which politicians and
administrators have an urgent responsibility to deal with. It is, I
believe, questionable whether Levy's attempt 'to imagine a universality
that unites humanity without making it uniform', whether the very notion of
universality is actually a useful guiding principle for the task of
maintaining cultural diversity and respecting all sorts of marginal social
groups. A definite short-coming of the conference was the fact that, while
theorizing about the future of the 'new space', it failed to recognise and
present the diverse and lively culture that already exists in the 'new
space', and that needs attention and support in order to be able to
continue to flourish.

The policy proposals that were suggested to the CoE in the final round and
that were meant to point in the desired direction of political action,
included: a European Charter of Cultural Rights, including the right to
access; the creation of a 'Virtual Academy' where the ideas raised during
the conference could be further developed; an initiative for the
wide-spread translation and publication of the literature that deals with
media theory and the relationship between culture and technology; and a
research project for the multi-lingual browser mentioned earlier.

An area that was not addressed appropriately and that was dramatically
watered down in the philosophical discussion on the final day of the
conference, was the political economy of media technology, i.e. the problem
of the ownership of the telecommunications infrastructure, of licensing
rules, of the availability (and artificial scarcity) of bandwidth, etc.
John Wyver raised this point and said: 'The development of the Internet
into the differentiated, complex and vibrant cultural environment that it
is, was possible because it was not regulated. This diversity is now
threatened by the private ownership of the wires and by the desire of
governments to control and restrict this cultural space on a content as
well as on the infrastructural level. The Council of Europe should see its
responsibility in keeping this space as open and diverse and unregulated as
possible.' It is one of the lessons that social scientists have learned
from 20th-century science theory, that these kinds of dynamic structures
are self-organising and much more successful when they are allowed to
develop 'bottom-up', rather than 'top-down'.

Rethinking the questions of democratic participation, of social
responsibility and of artistic creativity on this level necessitates a
critical evaluation of the material, economic and technological foundations
of the 'new space'. This is also where the Council should direct its active
attention. Its wish to maintain the diversity of European culture is
constantly in danger of being jeopardised by the size of the machinery and
projects which it tends to support, i.e. mainly large and homogenising
projects. At the same time, there is an urgent need for continued public
sponsorship of independent cultural projects and initiatives and if the
Council, or any other public funding body, wants to maintain cultural
diversity, it should support this diversity at the level where it actually
occurs. The great challenge for European cultural politics is therefore the
absolute necessity to develop funding and support strategies aimed at
heterogenesis and singularisation, at the continuous becoming different of
individuals and groups.


Berlin/Rotterdam, December 17, 1996