Andreas Broeckmann on Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:44:12 +0100


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Syndicate: Demilitarizing Technology - initiative at MIT


http://web.mit.edu/mit-cavs/www/DemilTech.html

Demilitarizing Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been engaged for many
years in national defense research projects involving the most
advanced scientific and technological experiments. The present post-Cold
War period, demanding the reorientation of defense
technologies, resembles the period after the World War II, which gave
birth to many new applications of advanced technologies in
civilian industries. the creative role of artists and designers in this
process was exemplified by works of Buckminster Fuller, Henry
Dreyfuss and Gyorgy Kepes.

In this post-ColdWar era, MIT's renewed interests in transferring
military research to civilian use must be critically supported by
contemporary artists and designers, not only as an economic and
political process but also as a challenging and complex cultural
project of the post-Cold War era. this work must be developed in
dialogue and collaboration with contemporary cultural criticism and
informed by multicultural, feminist and post-colonial theory in the
context of new social and technological initiatives of the United
States government - in public health, education, housing and information
access -while battling urban armed violence, the HIV
epidemic and drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction. The Center for
Advanced Visual Studies believes these programs must be
complemented by cultural and aesthetic research projects.

CAVS, located at MIT, and in the intellectual environment of Cambridge,
with all of its history of technological and scientific
research born of the cold War, is an ideal institution to undertake this
new research and to continue its own historical,
interdisciplinary role for those working in the fields of art, design,
advanced technology and social and cultural theory and practice.
The exploration of unknown and often kept-in-secret potentials crossing
disciplinary boundaries can provide a vision for the future.

Today, the intellectual community, with the assistance of CAVS, must
address how contemporary defense technologies can be
transferred toward the empowerment of the most vulnerable sections of
our civilian population - children, the elderly, the sick,
unemployed, women, immigrants, minority populations, the homeless and
those who live with HIV.

One of the most urgent issues is uneven access to high technologies of
communication when there is a devastating lack of
communication between and among displaced and alienated groups and
individuals. Communicative rights and consequently the
rights to public visibility and media representation are guaranteed by
the First Amendment to the United States constitution.
Emerging, displaced and alienated populations have a right to those
constitutional rights. In the light of this fact, we must first
examine the most advanced communications potentials, which have until
recently been harbored for military development.

At a time of unprecedented conflagration and dissolution of communities
and a crisis in traditional notions of identity, an
unprecedented development of communication technologies is taking place.
Today's processes of mental and social displacement and
alienation must be examined together by artists, designers,scientists
and those working in the psycho-social and techno-cultural
fields. All will be asked to explore the unknown technological military
heritage. Designers and artists can become catalysts, opening a
dialogue between the human and technical sciences in directing the
transfer of defense technologies into critical/cultural projects.

Contemporary media culture and the built environment of monuments
commemorating and perpetuating the ideology of war are an
important symbolic heritage. We must demilitarize not only our economy,
but our minds. The combined artistic, scientific and
technological project is needed to reexamine critically our
subjectivities and our ideologies before we can transfer ourselves to
the post-military era. The built environment is often a continuation of
war by other means, from war memorials and former military bases
to rapid real estate development and environmental pollution.
architectural and industrial design and public art research is necessary
to respond to the simultaneous processes of demilitarization and the
militarization of the built environment. While military bases are
being closed and opened to new civilian use, the children in our cities
are forced to arm themselves for urban warfare, while war
memorials, films, and advertising continue to perpetuate the "ethics"
and aesthetics of violence. One of the tasks of design research
must be the exploration of history, memory and patterns of thinking
perpetuated through such a symbolic environment - the
landscape in which we live - examining and proposing the modes of
cultural and artistic use of this environment by the present and
future urban population. The post-military processes contribute to the
problems of the post-industrial era. For large sections of the
population urban life is urban survival. The basic issue is how to
demilitarize civilian life today, and how demobilized military
technologies can be used in this process. The new Director of CAVS
intends to continue his artistic work and research, examining the
use of war memorials and experimental design projects for displaced
urban populations. The application of defense technologies to
those projects will comprise his contribution to this post-military
endeavor.

Art and Design as Cultural Disarmament, Cultural Defense, and
Demilitarization of Subjectivity

The end of the Cold War has delegitimized and unemployed the aggressive
rhetorics of popular and media cultures on both sides of
the former Iron Curtain. The continued presence of an enormous surplus
stock of cultural weaponry, accumulated during forty years
of imperial ideological warfare, poses real cultural and social hazards.

A vast heritage of violent cultural norms and symbols built upon
19th-century pedagoguies and expansionistic phraseology creates
aggressive semiological and psychological armaments. These armaments are
deeply embedded in national and ethnic cultures and
economies. during the Cold War, military rhetoric was legitimized by the
threat of Communism. Now this potentially dangerous
surplus is awaiting redeployment in the domestic social conflict. If
state armies and military research were designed to defend the
nation from attack by an authoritarian empire, can their defensive
military power be deployed now to defend all of the victims of the
break-down of Cold war order, both abroad, on the ground of the former
enemy, and at home, where peace means survival?

If there is a necessity for a war academy (military academy), perhaps
there is as well a necessity today for a peace academy (academy
of demilitarization). In the past, the co-Chairman of the Senate Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee, Daniel Inouye, proposed a
national peace university. We are now at the stage of forming U.N.
peace-keeping forces which are at best barely prepared to deal
with post cold War international ethnic conflicts. Perhaps it is now
time to redeploy cultural forces toward the establishment of
cultural structures of peace.

The post cold War surplus of aggressive rhetorics must be disarmed in a
most careful and de-contstructive way, at the psychical as
well as the ideological level. Toward this end, cultural and artistic
experimental techniques and research methods must be found. any
aesthetic research must explore our subjectivity and the complex theater
of ideologies inhabiting our minds as an ammunition to our
aggressivty.

The real task is to imagine if some kind of post-military cultural force
could be formed and sent into the domestic and international
theaters of potential conflict years in advance. The objective of such a
force would be to dismantle the layers of resentments and hate
inhabiting the mind, and perpetuated through language, popular culture,
the media, and technological/electronic games. Questioning
the traditional socialization of American youth through games of war, we
have heard Vietnam veterans appealing through the media
for the demilitarization of the toy industry. If this vision is to be
realized, artists and designers must play a responsible role.

Examples

Many artists and designers are already "well-armed" and experienced for
such service. The analytical and critical visual study
developed during the past decade by feminist artists, for example, and
directed at the dominant world of media images, forms an
important methodological tradition for future deconstructive cultural
disarmament projects. The work of Victor Papanek, who
proposed critical design as a cultural defense for a thrid world invaded
by the first world's industrial expansion is another
methodology appropriate to this task. (Papanek also examined the extent
of damage of what he called murder by design on the home
front in industrialized nations.)

Many artists and designers working in the U.S. today already wrestle
with the problematics of the post cold War era and with urban
survival - for example, Group 2 AES and the well-known Survival Research
Group operating in San Francisco. In New York city,
the Storefront for Art and Architecture initiated "Project Atlas", a
competition for the cultural transformation of obsolete missile
launching stations. Other important projects concern the transfer of
military technologies into cultural entertainment, such as Nuclear
Heritage Park. The Storefront also organized EcoTECH conferences, which
received international support and established links with
communities in San Francisco concerned with the fate of closed military
bases.

Most of the proposals for former military bases are to use them as sites
for a variety of real estate developments, erasing in this way
the military past from the collective memory of the nation. No attempt
to create critical monuments to the past are proposed on those
sites. One cannot close one's eyes on both the present and the past,
however unacceptable, deplorable, shameful they may be. The
writings of William J. Mitchell, Scott Bukatman, and Donna Haraway
suggest that electronic networks and bio-cybernetic
empowerment may become liberation technologies for the marginalized and
oppressed. These and other projects may contribute to the
development of an alternative artistic and intellectual public sphere,
changing the public imagination and perception of technology and
its future, connecting technology with culture, contemporary art, and
social and philosophical concerns born of recognition and
exploration of the technocultural and social present.

Call for Proposals

As a first step, CAVS will seek artistic proposals focusing on advanced
military technologies and their transfer to non-military social
and cultural use. The proposals should be for year-long research
projects submitted by artists and designers working as individuals
or teams, which might include representatives of other disciplines.

These proposals will be selected and reviewed to form a coordinated
larger project, for which funding will be sought. authors of
proposals will be invited to continue to develop their work on the
grounds of MIT. CAVS will offer assistance in creating
collaborative links with others at MIT engaged in relevant technological
and scientific research. CAVS will provide the map of vital
links and connections at MIT, Cambridge and elsewhere to the applicants.
If necessary, CAVS will use received funding to invite
groups and individuals from outside the MIT community to join in
criticism, social theory, media studies, art education and art
therapy - fields not yet well represented in the Institute's faculty and
programming.

Proposals should include an educational component, explaining how
research developed at CAVS could be made accessible and
visible to both graduate and undergraduate students of the School of
Architecture and Planning and to the larger student community
of the Institute. This would be a necessary educational contribution on
the part of each research group. CAVS will of course provide
coordination and working dialogue to help the researchers in organizing
their educational component in seminars, conference,
workshops and publications. Innovative use of electronic communications
media will be a central goal of the Center's educational
programming. More generally, CAVS will seek to engage students and
faculty and to create an intellectual climate supporting the
development of each project.

The practical objective is to develop, on the bases of the selected
proposals, a consolidated budget for all projects, the associated
educational programs, and the necessary human and technical resources.
This is preferable to accepting projects that have already
received financial support. Thus, proposals should be short, outlining
general goals, requirement, and methods, leaving more
specific clarifications and plans for a later stage. Proposals should be
supported by material illustrating the work that each individual
or team had already developed, relevant to the problematics introduced
in this letter.

       William J. Mitchell <wjm@mit.edu>
       Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT

       Krzysztof Wodiczko <wodiczko@mit.edu>
       Director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT