http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/decoder.txt from: gomma date: Jan 96 If you don't know the history of the most active cyberpunk group in Italy, here is: The Decoder and ShaKe history: seizing the times. ladies and gentlemen, goodmorning. Todays program opens with... bzzz... bzzz... Decoder signifies decodifier... Were like many Frankensteins, composed of human members and artificial elements created by technology. I've seen one whose hand had three fingers, with the thumb and index finger, substituted by a pair of pliers and functioning like a crooked beak. A small antennae came out of his mouth and he spoke in megahertz to a woman who had no ears, but instead two parabolic dishes to capture television messages. Not being able to comprehend each other, the two made love, in such a way that it excited my pity, now with clogged movement from the wheels on his feet, now facilitated by her tongue, magnetic-tape-made, sixty minutes long, while following the rythym of the electronic drum that beat in their chests. From this incest, DECODER was born, the son of communication, of diversity, and of provocation. It has no more mutations like man, it's completely technological. A small automaton, self composed by many means of communication assembled anthropomorphically with the greatest esteem of speaking a universal language. I hope that you can meet it and speak to it, if you can, wish yourself a good future, and I remind you that the transmissions are taken tomorrow morning, with DECODER it means... With these words we opened the first number of the "DECODER" magazine in 1987. The group founders are formed of diverse cultural and political experience: anarchists, punks, communists, liberals and autonomists, all working in the field of communication - music, video, radio, graphics, literature, computers, photocopying and mail art. In reality, the project was born two years earlier from inside a bookstore in Milano. Over there, the memory. (nearly a scene from a science fiction novel) At this point it's necessary to tell a little of the history of the situation of the "movement", or what's called the underground scene in Italy. Here, whether you believe it or not, at the end of the seventies we were almost at the point of revolution. Illegal behaviour had taken a mass dimension and was diffused to an enourmous level that was called the "counter-power". In a few words: demonstrations, occupations of schools, self reduction on ticket prices at concerts, expropriations - or massive theft at supermarkets, and violent attacks on the police, became everyday events. The authority had no degree of control over the situation, and the air that was breathed was very particular. Clearly, all of this influenced the behaviour and culture of thousands of youth. There was the sensation of having power and being able to change the course of history. Unfortunately a series of armed groups mixed up "the sensation of having power" with the "flight of power", and they radicalized the attack to prime a violent response from the state, which reacted by arresting 12,000 people in two years and proclaimed a special legislation, that was one of the hardest in the world. Improvisationally the air of freedom changed to an atmosphere of lead, that made a black hole, aspacial and temporal gap between the seventies and the growing eighties. The chaotic streets became deserted, post-atomic, where junkie zombies strolled, destined to die a short time after; they were the survivors of the atomic bombardment at the end of a dream. The party was over. >From the unscarred wounds of the social body monsters are born In this atmosphere of grand suffering a strange link was created with the past, and it's political action. There were people who tried at all costs to avoid the cultural force of the state to reconquest the ground floor, to cancel the human data-base and the memory of the years of the big dream, and who, on the contrary, were absolutely deprived of memory for generational reasons, they tried to open new streets of subversion. Like this, by a proceeding of social genetics that could be defined as monstrous, the birth of a counterculture that saved the skin of many people: the punk. In a monstruos manner, copying the english experience, but with the originality of an incredible cultural and political collage. The devastating force of a few hundred kids had renewed a categorie of radical political action in Italy. In only five years, they counted tens of punk collectives, they occupied houses and abandoned factories, transforming them into workshops of communication to make music, punkzines, or just to stay together. This way of radical transformation of urban spaces with strong countercultural connotations that was to be spread and called a few years later from the journals of the power of "the movement of the self managed social centers" ("movimento dei centri sociali autogestiti"). Between the absence of memory and no future, the punx created a temporal dimension, essentially that of the "present". The City Lights In 1985 five young people, who in diverse ways passed through the experiences mentioned above, met inside the bookstore "Calusca City Lights" in Milano. The bookstore was born in 1972, and modeled on the "City Lights" of San Francisco, for who has not been to S.F., you could say that it's very similar to the "Compendium" of London. Here in Milano, in the mid eighties, the battle between the diverse conceptions of memory, of which it spoke strongly over, was really hard, and the diverse present experience could not create interaction. At this point the manager of the bookstore proposed us the creation of a newsletter that would try to make transversal communication, and more profound relationships with all of the identities of the bookstore. The project failed, but our group of people, excited by the idea of creating human networks, decided to continue the research anyway, by founding a magazine and beginning to study a series of problems. The first objective layed down was the examination of linguistics, meaning, how to curb the principles of communication between different subjects. When we chose the temporal dimension on which to work we had no doubts: the "future". Decoder-ShaKe history part 2 On the starship Many of our choices of that period were more spontaneous than reasoned, but we found ourselves exactly in the middle of an extremely confusing historic phase of changes throughout the world of production phases of work, while, in the cultural field, the crisis of the punk opened new and large contradictions. Living in chaos had become a normal condition, so we created a DECODER, as an instrument for survival. That which we saw around us was a psychic dimension that we defined as an "imaginative cloak" that prevented from seeing new utopias. This same concept was defined a few years later by Hakim Bey "closure of the map". Our DECODER had to search, projecting into the future, to create breaches in the block of the mind and to favour the birth of new imaginaries. The first consequence made to study was that of the mutation of the body and of the spirit in respect to the epiphenomenon, more importantly, of that which resembled being a new era: the invasion of technology. If we would have been able to demonstrate that the transformations were already happening, we should have modified the relation between the temporal perception and the possibility of action in the present. A look from outside: Cyberpunk! For these reasons we have always tried to approach articles reguarding work together with forms of culture and the creative avantgard. The first numbers of DECODER brought articles reguarding production in outer space, how to revolutionize television, the demistification of the informatic sciences, on free festivals, Japan and drugs. These tendencies in the choices of themes have never been modified. At this point we started traveling throughout Europe and we discovered that there were other magazines, or groups, that had more or less our feelings and perceptions of reality. The "Encyclopaedia Psychedelica" and "Vague" were our points of reference in the U.K., while in Germany there was the Chaos Computer Club. In exactly the same period speech was beginning to be heard of a new current in Science Fiction literature: the "Cyberpunk". This label exists in reality of human behaviour and more or less was interpreted as a "head in technology and the feet in the street". It was used as a point of symbolic reference for all of a series of people in the world who thought that technology could be used in an alternative or transgressive manner. The Cyberpunk, in the facts, represents the figure of the rebel of the new era. The ShaKe cooperative As we didn't feel alone anymore and we had found brothers all overthe global village, we had not only intensified in strength but together with others we founded a publishing cooperative. We wanted to extend and rend the effectiveness of the messages of the magazine. This crosses into a series of books, videocassettes, multimedia installations and everything with hereditation resembling a way of conceptualizing communication with the libertarian culture, punk and cyberpunk. Our first book was entitled "The Cyberpunk Anthology". It was not a literary anthology, instead it was put together with texts of real cyberpunk subjects: computer hackers, experimental artists, phone phreks, enthusiasts and anarchists of technology. This book produced diverse reactions It was a best seller (eleven editions were printed), many reviews were written in the press, and clearly it grabbed the eyes of the police (our office has been searched, and we we're the objects of two relations with the secret services). But most importantly, an enourmous debate on the part of the freedom of information was unchained, and now, when any Italian newspaper speaks of new technology of information it's constricted to quote the alternative experience described in our book. The hard work phase. WE understood in that moment that with a very hard job we could change things. This is how we began to construct a catalog of books that would be a kind of hammer for the heads of the people. With work rhythyms of 12-14 hours a day in four years we were able to: 1) make 11 issues of DECODER, that is always becoming more of a magazine of social informatics and at the same time a publication for mutants. Decoder has around 50 contributors spread all over the world. 2) publish 25 books and we have provisions of publishing at least 8 a year starting in 1994. 3) open a Bulletin board system, that works like an everyday telematic journal for 400 users in the Milano area and an information network that has 32 hosts throughout Italy with around 2000 users. Open a web site. 4) organize about 30 media parties, where interactive installations are made and elementary courses for the use of new technology. 5) participate in over 250 debates on the question of new technology and the liberty of information. It's clear that in all this process the philosophy of the "refuse of work" has become a distant memory but, although in Italy those benefits or dole don't exist from the part of the government, no one in the ShaKe is paid for the work that's done, so the relation with the market is particular. Our intentions for the future are to create through editorial activity the conditions and the countercultural humus, because the movement can regenerate, this is how it happened at the end of the sixties. We want to intervene into what could be called the "crisis of the social center", a valid model of resistance during the eighties, but it must necesarilly mutate and evolve in the view of the year 2000. In a paradoxical epoch where the maximum of the diffusion of technology for the distribution of information, corresponds with the minnimum of real communication between social subject, the only prospective is to reason around a hypothesis of upturning this of this relation of dominion. Anyone interested in collaborating with the magazine DECODER or with the ShaKe editions, is invited to send articles, reports, book reviews, books, videos, and projects of installations. Contacts: ShaKe Via C. Balbo 10, 20136 Milano, Italy Tel. +39-2-58317306 DECODERBBS: +39-2-29527597 (from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m.) E-Mail: decoder@stinch0.csmtbo.mi.cnr.it http://www.iol.it/magazines/decoder --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de