Syndicate: report from deep europe ...

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

Deep Europe workshop
at Hybrid WorkSpace, documenta X Kassel, 28.7.-6.8.97

short report on the third day


We have arrived. The first two days are over and we are slowly making
ourselves feel at home here in Kassel. The Berlin Biennale, the organiser
of the Hybrid WorkSpace, is providing us with two flats where we can sleep
and have breakfasts, and most of the day we then spend in and around the
WorkSpace in the Orangerie on the documenta grounds. We do public
presentations in the afternoons and have casual conversations and work
meetings in between. The main topics for the discussions have been defined,
the newsgroup on the website is getting started - we are on our way.

Aleksandar and Branka Davic Milic are here from Novi Sad, Edi Muka from
Tirana, Marjan Kokot from Ljubljana, Lisa Haskel from London, Iliyana
Nedkova from Sofia, Dimitrij Pilikin (St.Petersburg) and Andreas Broeckmann
from Rotterdam/Berlin. Calin Dan from Bucharest/Amsterdam had to leave this
morning (not without leaving us his text about the obsolescence of Europe
which was posted earlier), Nina Czegledy (Toronto/Budapest) is leaving
tomorrow, and Inke Arns (Berlin), Kit Blake (Rotterdam), Luchezar Boyadjiev
(Sofia), Marta & Michiel van der Haagen (Warsaw), and Rasa Smite and Raitis
Smits (Riga) are yet to come. (Surprise guests welcome ...)

In the public presentations we have seen video productions from Albania,
Slovenia and Yugoslavia, the results of the Crossing Over video workshop,
the Happy Doomsday! work in progress and a discussion about the
Cyberknitting project. Dima Pilikin and Valerie Savchuk did a performance
this morning with the memorable title: 'Bad English Today and
Post-Information Communication Tomorrow'. And later this afternoon we will
attempt the first Letters Home performance - members of the Deep Europe
workshop report about their experiences of the last days in their native
languages - which should create an interesting acoustic tableau of the
diversity of the group ...

Two important topics for discussion will be the start-up of a Syndicate
Publication Series, which has all sorts of practical problems attached to
it but would be a very useful development of our net-work, and the European
Media Policy which the Council of Europe is trying to formulate at the
moment and which we may be able to have an impact on if we are able to
formulate our position as regards the relationship between media technology
and culture in Europe. (Please, expect more information about these things
in the coming days and feel free to comment or make suggestions that we can
include in our discussions here.) Other things we are talking about is the
Cyberknitting project, the Ostranenie festival in November, the V2_East
website, and some of us are working on a video documentation of the
workshop.

The programme of what we are doing is posted daily on the
http://www.documenta.de/workspace/ site, and you can go to the newsgroup
from there.

Greetings from Kassel !

-andreas