Syndicate: Igor Markovic: Why One Evening...

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

Dear Syndicalists,

this text by Igor Markovic will be included in the next Syndicate reader.

Best wishes,
Inke

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Why One Evening In Ljubljana Is Better Than 
Five Days Of a â??New Media" Festival in Zagreb? *

Igor Markovic


Media Scape 5, International New Media Festival
Zagreb, Museum of Contemporary Art, 18 - 22 November 1997

CAE: Flesh Machine, lecture & performance
Ljubljana; Kapelica Gallery 25 November 1997


1. Embryo of an uncertain future

Critical Art Ensemble is a group of five to six media artists,
theoreticians and activists mostly from Chicago, and is one of the best
things that has happened in the past couple dozens of years in the art
world. Their performances, along with their books (The Electronic
Disturbance, Electronic Civil Disobedience), together with public
appearances in all parts of the globe, are a significant breakthrough from
the classical, old-fashioned and boring limited spaces in which most of the
artists and â??art-theoreticiansâ?? wiggle helplessly into an almost tabooised
sphere of electronic control and manipulation. They appear as a direct
consequence of digital networking, globalisation processes, and everything
which will be in a very near future simply an everyday fact.

Their interventions into sacred spaces of authority present provocation
pointed both to the dilapidated tradition of cultural policy of public
sphere and to the futuristic presumptions of technology implications for
generations intoxicated with â??virtualisationâ??. CAE usually work on a field
of questioning possibilities of new body in virtual environments, and came
to the conclusion that virtual body can not be economically reproduced, so
it's meaningless for everyday labor division. The virtual body is a body of
great potential. On this body we can reinscribe ourselves using whatever
coding system we desire. We can try on new body configurations. We can
experiment with immortality by going to places and doing things that would
be impossible in the physical world. For the virtual body, nothing is fixed
and everything is possible. Indeed, this is the reason why hackers wish to
become disembodied consciousnesses flowing freely through cyberspace,
willing the idea of their own bodies and environments. (â??Utopian Promises -
Net Realitiesâ??, lecture at Interface 3)

Now, turning frontally to the body very convincingly they argue that dreams
about virtuality are nothing but a spectacular show for real action:
development of biotechnology pointed to the real citizen's bodies in the
service of transnational order. If virtual bodies are just a false promise,
so useless on the market, what can be done, and what is done with the real
bodies in the postindustrial age?

Flesh Machine is their answer. It's unusual mixture is a melange of
traditional lecture and classical performance, a bastard form which proves
its value as being very successful and easy to understand, but also acting
in accordance with the implementation of bastard technologies which we are
witnessing. Such a bastard show is very hard to transpond on to paper, and
it's hard to say  what they were doing", unlike what one can do with
classical performing arts, or lectures, in which it is not so hard to catch
the basic topic, form and performing characteristics in a few sentences.
The common denominator of the â??performing partâ?? was one possible answer to
the question of the future of human reproduction, and what is going on with
genetic experiments. The public was able to save the embryo which should be
removed from it's criocontainer. Namely, to decide whether the embryo will
be stored to fulfill future market needs, or removed to make space for
â??betterâ?? embryos. And, voilà , they kill the embryo in a second. Also they
present the BioCom CD-ROM, sexual education for the third millennium which
teaches kids new in vitro fertilisation technology. And, voila, they make a
baby in a second. Visitors were also given the opportunity to give a DNA
sample, and store it for future market needs.

The â??lecture partâ?? is a little bit easier to reproduce. The essence was
thinking about new image technologies which enable body images to be
fragmented, disassembled and again put together in a new way. New imaging
technologies better allow body images to be disassembled and reframed.
Interior body space can now be represented in whatever way best fulfills
the needs of the market. For example, through sonographic imaging, uterine
space can be represented as a part of the wholistic bio-system of the
woman, or as an independent space belonging to the fetus. Thereby, media
can be produced to reinforce whatever political position is the most
advantageous. With this new imaging technology, the body can be fragmented
and reconfigured to conform to the pancapitalist ideology of organic
spatial order. (Telepolis)

Rationalisation of reproductive processes already produce a massive market
for body â??products (egg, sperm, embryos'). At this very moment,
reproductive products and services are primarily a luxury market and
products are not fully reliable. When we talk about technology, focus is
mainly on new information and communication technologies. That only makes
sense, from the market viewpoint, since new technologies offer, on the
first look, a new utopian frontier for the public; however those who work
every day with the complex new technologies,are very well aware that their
primary function is to push market dynamics, which will intensify the
working process. Organic systems - humans for example - in our technocracy
can not stand on the top of that acceleration. It's too late for
decelerating the economic machine of technoculture, and the only solution
is in drastic body reconfigurations.

One of the leading genetic scientists in the thirties, Frederick Osborne,
believed that genetic engineering will be accepted as a part of normal
everyday life. In an era of â??surplus economyâ?? and â??nucleus familyâ??, people
will not only be willing to be a part of genetic manipulations, but they
will also pay for them. Market competition, and richness as an ultimate
measure of the quality of life, will force people to accept â??anythingâ??
which may help them to be â??more successfulâ?? on the market. Such a future
still is not a present, and first attempts at voluntary participation in
genetic researche are just isolated experiments. If such a scenario is good
or bad, CAE do not explicitly show. Their performance/lecture is not an
ultimative answer, rather just a viewpoint, presentation of possibilities,
a warning; in other words an embryo of uncertain future. What we will do
with that embryo - collect it and care for it in virtual cryotanks, or
terminate it as a genetically incorrect - is still our choice.


2. Brats of a gloomy present

Media Scape 5 is much easier to describe, one of the reasons is that there
was no clear connection between different presented works, e.g. lack of
straight concept of the festival in whole. Another missing link was the
approach to the new media art. Everyday video screening, followed with not
especially interesting conversations with the authors (usual more kind of
technical workshop of how they were doing certain parts, and not why), was
accomplished with an exhibition - very strange and diverse, the common
point was only the use of technology. Unfortunately, despite to some well
known names (Lawrence Wallen, Heiko Daxl, Marko Kosnik), the final product,
offered to the public was something between play and experiment.
Minimalism, present in some of the works, and particularly the mixing of
different forms, were not founded in any kind of theory, as one should expect.

Even if left aside the question of the engagement of an art work, which is
one of the conditions for participation at any festival (â??pureâ?? art is not
so fancy anymore), art without theoretical support (in this particular case
it was natural to expect some traces of contemporary media theory) can not
create a relevant artwork, no matter how it may be technically superior.

But, what was offered to the Zagreb public was not even on technical level
good, it's just a collection of average works. Not a single avoided the
tendency towards the many kinds of social reflection, and not a single
piece was anything but traditional artwork attempting to be beyond reality.
Lost in artspace. Using a traditional, exceeded concept of art from the
nineteenth century - the artists somehow isolated themselves from reality,
created, and then returned to reality to show the work, which will be
verified and become Art. With such a concept artists put themselves on a
quasidistance from events, - exclude themselves from dynamics of reality.
Transfer to passive position of cognition of finished history, and lose
active position of taking part, responsibility, uncertainty, contingency,
position which stand that mistake is legitimate. It's impossible to be
beyond society, beyond criticized circumstances and state, beyond the same
matter which is putting in question.

CAE do not hide behind â??Artâ??. They are offering a clear and precise picture
of their explorations and that is something nobody can stay indifferent to,
in other words unmotivated for rethinking. Exhibits at MediaScape stick to
the old line that art long time ago surrendered to good taste, which demand
that words or images, even when they are allowed to disturb, never should
destroy. Shock of pleasure, shock of the new, destructive and surprising,
which art was traditionally producing, is removed from such works. Media
Scape 5 is something like Babylon 5. Technically it's a good job for the
usual gallery visitor in Zagreb (intellectual snob, in other words) cool,
sexy, new, but the content (not to talk about the context) just does not
exist.

But it's a very important event. It disguises in a very transparent way the
situation in Zagreb art scene, particularly in the field of new media. If
we know that the only quotation of media theory in â??officialâ?? art circles
(curators, art historians, scca stuff) was one from Being Digital, it's
clear why Media Scape 5, as the only exhibition of new media art in Zagreb
(excluding some individuals attempts like projects of Darko Fritz or
Magdalena Pederin) is constructed like it was. The idea of belonging to any
kind of unclear identities, expression of doubtness in the idea of
â??progressâ??, or any kind of attempt for re-thinking of reality through the
art work is not welcome. Is obsolete in the atmosphere predominating by
vision of high culture as the Culture. Is that what should be offered to
the public a nice, smooth vision of a lovely world with singing birds on
every corner, works which by no means should make them think? After all how
else should old-fashioned academic professors, self-proclaimed as a
cultural elite survive? Asking questions was never accepted with sympathy
in Zagreb. Under the shadow of a nationalistic government, even â??liberalâ??
artists and theoretician very often decide that it's much easier to accept
conditions in which art should be a simulation of a politically promised
better future. If this sounds like soc-realism, do not worry - it's
precisely the same vocabulary, exactly the same denying of global
processes, the same ignorance and same autoghettoisation. No good for art,
no good for artists, no good for the audience, but the only way for
established art-service structures to remain in power.

In that sense the CAE message that we still can choose our future, and
resist the (genetical engineering) manipulations of our own bodies was
missed. The future, according to organisers of Media Scape, will be as
gloomy as the present is. And the final message is after all a very simple
one - do not churn, and everything will be fine. Tonight.


Note
* An earlier version of this text was published in Arkzin No. 100/1


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