ARTICLE
Locative networking
By: Iliyana Nedkova
Iliyana Nedkova responds to the networking themes that arose at Amorphous combustion, part of a body of specially commissioned writing published now on www.a-n.co.uk
Do you believe that it is important to be affiliated with a network? Do you succumb to the in-group, cult mentality of 'them' and 'us'? Do you respond to love bombing or excess amount of reciprocal flattery? Or perhaps you belong to one of the 'online faithful' networks growing at a phenomenal rate over the internet? Currently, sixty-four per cent of the 128 million internet users in the United States appear to have done things online that relate to religious or spiritual matters1. Or would you prefer to bypass the established social conventions by joining a worldwide network which shares skills, services and goods for LETS, a 'currency' based on barter and issued by a Local Exchange Trading System? There are about thirty LETS networks in London alone and about 450 nationwide, with twenty-six in Scotland.
Networking, with the advance of social sciences, is increasingly viewed as a vital aspect of any professional development. In recent research, seventy-eight per cent of the UK artists have stated that networking is crucial for their own creative practice2. The open question is what kind of network initiatives and tools are being, and could be, employed by visual artists in the 2000s. Amorphous Combustion, a one-day event, devised and directed by artist and curator Jason Bowman, was one of the latest a-n seminars to debate the notion of networks. Behind its rather opaque title, it revealed a fresh and innovative outlook to models of networking outwith the visual arts sector – be it political cults on the left or right, the new cyberchurch or LETS schemes. Looking beyond one's own art circles, localities and specialisms proved inspiring to the imbedded respondents and participants, all artists and art managers from Scotland and beyond.
Appropriately, New Lanark – now a world heritage site, once a home to a model village community – provided the setting and its converted cotton mills the venue for Amorphous Combustion. If the new technology of the Industrial Revolution transformed New Lanark, it was Robert Owen, a mill manager from 1800-1825, who tempered life in New Lanark by a caring, cooperative regime and ethical business practice. Child labour and corporal punishment were abolished, and villagers were provided with decent homes, schools and evening classes, free health care, and affordable food. The arts were not forgotten; there were concerts, dancing, music-making and pleasant landscaped areas for the benefit of the community. Today, largely commodified for the consumption of cultural tourists and wedding parties, New Lanark served as a historical backdrop for the discussions on networking artists with other communities, on artists as community members.
If we are to accept that there are real rewards for those who collaborate with artists and vice versa3 I wonder whether alongside artists-to-artists communities (which could be likened to business-to-business communications), we are not experiencing a new shift towards artists-to-others networking. Perhaps the point of ignition, or else amorphous combustion, is not the question of how to connect artists' communities but to enable artists to form or contribute to mixed communities, which may include people of various backgrounds – young people, social scientists, technologists, activists, housewives, war veterans and many others. Perhaps, the traditional online networks predicated on connecting geographically dispersed but likely minded individuals will be superseded or at least challenged by location-sensitive networks allowing for community mixing, skills swapping and technology sharing in one's neighbourhood.
The new networks open to all, by this account could show a kind of invisible energy, like electricity, that is emitted when different kinds of people bump into each other. One such initiative is Mobile Bristol – aiming to create a metaphorical digital canvas over the city onto which rich digital experiences could be painted4. It has been bringing people from various corners of the UK and the professional spectrum (including artists) to central Bristol to experiment with mobile technology. Sound artist and independent publisher Zoe Irvine, also a self-confessed technophile yet 'a code-a-phobe', was commissioned by Mobile Bristol and Arnolfini to create Moulinex – an interactive work for Queen Square, an area near Bristol's harbourside. While strolling around the Square people were able to map out the area through located audio compositions using a kit consisting of a hand-held computer, headphones and a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit. By form and content Irvine's work could be situated somewhere between a walkman experience of the future and a sonic archaeology of the past. It is Queen Square's recent history as a venue for open-air cinema screenings, which inspired the artist and a team of programmers to craftily edit and encode fragments of film soundtracks and dialogues. The Matrix and Moulin Rouge, once shown on the Square, still linger in people's minds and Moulinex headphones.
It might be a slice of the DJ culture of remix, but Irvine's latest work is only one example of the emerging locative media practice. Still in its infancy, locative media and the locative network attract not only artists but also anyone interested in the recent wireless developments. Arguably, locative media can offer an opportunity for the public, participatory and site-specific art of the last century to reinvent itself in the twenty-first and complete its project of critical revision. Mobile, location-sensitive devices, semantic mapping and biometrics are all locative and wearable tools that are being deployed in non-authoritarian ways on the street and in the body. Even the critics would agree that locative media art at its best enhances locative literacy and augments the ambiance of the physical places. It carries the ability to intervene on local level whether by creating an on-site experience about the place, transporting us to another site or choosing to abstract us from the location. Using audio systems and GPS receivers both 1831 Riot!, an interactive play about Bristol Riots of 1831, and My Lodging and Some Others, a bus tour operated by international artists group e-Xplo around spooky, nocturnal Berlin, are pursuing similar artistic ends. Perhaps, locative networking will be the next quiet leap in driving wireless technology forward to reawaken our sense of geography, to annotate public space and challenge the ownership of the imperceptible electromagnetic zone around us.
For Stewart Noble, a founder of LETS New Moray (Forres), which connects 400 active members, locative networking already seems a way of life5. One can argue that without the development of the tools of global networked resistance, which inform locative media, networking small communities such as Forres would have been futile. Such locative tools include open source software, copyleft devices and friend-of-a-friend-based exchange engines, aligned to semantically structured lists or inventories. Noble reckons LETS philosophy of augmented capitalism has taken off so well because Forres is an area of low pay and high unemployment; where spare cash is in short supply. Forres is rated the second most indebted town in Scotland, according to Noble. The average resident owes £26,000, excluding mortgages.
It is unlikely that Stewart Noble will agree with the government report Culture and Creativity: The Next 10 Years (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2001) which announces that 'Everyone is creative' debasing 'creativity' as a capacity for spontaneous expression lying dormant and waiting to be set free. Noble, who is currently lecturing and setting up more LETS networks across the country, questions the assumption that everyone is an artist. People's talents, skills and knowledge base are different and everyone should be able to nurture and benefit from such diversity. LETS is thus open to artists, musicians and academics who should throw their unique skills in the mix and request services which otherwise will not be available to them. "I have never contemplated buying an original artwork before," says Noble. "It is through LETS that I proudly acquired my first piece of sculpture." Inspired by Stewart Noble's Amorphous Combustion presentation participant Caroline Ross of People's Republic of Poetry entertained the what if scenario for an exhibition exchange between her rural community base and a venue in Glasgow through LETS. For Edinburgh-based artist and filmmaker Chris Dooks, who has been a member of Lothian and Edinburgh Trading Scheme (LETS) for six years such projects are reality. "LETS has come in very handy for my artist-in-residency project at Stills in the summer of 2003. I needed singing lessons to be able to complete and stage a new exhibition. I 'bought' the lessons on LETS for no money! For years, I have been making currency by offering my own digital equipment for hire or by trading my skills in audio restoration, Mac technical support, homemade wholefood and meditation techniques. Other artists can do it, too."
Embracing the ethos of many-to-many networking where everyone works for everyone else, LETS ideology is not dissimilar to FreeNetworks6. FreeNetworks is a voluntary cooperative association dedicated to education, collaboration, and advocacy of free digital network infrastructures. It forwards the futuristic vision of everyone becoming a walking telecommunication device independent of the major governmental or commercial providers. Together with consume network (and despite its highly ironic name), Free2air group7, established by Adam Burns in 2000, facilitates alternatives to current socio-political and economic formations. Both offer a platform for artists and others mainly in the East End of London to operate outside of the already designated electro magnetic spectrum. Free2air proudly hosts and provisions ambientTV – an independent, interdisciplinary practice engaging in a range of installations and performances, through documentary, dance, and gastronomy, to audio-video composition and live data broadcasting.
With locative networking outwith the arts on the rise, is networking within the arts in danger of becoming self-referential and parochial? Is arts networking not working? The joys and perils of networking could be traced in the story of Discordia weblog community8. Inaugurated on May Day 2003 as a discussion forum for art, media, activism and theory, Discordia aimed to overcome the messy, anaesthetic interface of mailing list communications. Instead, collective blogging was hoped to bring advantages through a non-linear, non-moderated process of collaborative filtering and voting of content. Discordia was thus mooted to be able to consign text-based mailing lists to the museum.
A year on, its editors admit that it has been difficult to maintain the sense of community with discussions vacillating between true debates and degenerating into a chat-like exchange of inanities. People still tend to prefer discussion via mailing list, where each new contribution pops into one's own inbox, and 'reply' is just a click away. Dubbed 'networking media arts in Scotland',
In the meantime, Discordia editors, including author and radical media pragmatist Geert Lovink who was one of the founders of nettime, are looking back critically at Discordia's own short history in order to get back onto the path of creating community. This moment of doubt is shared by all internet communities, which are about generating relationships. On most large mailing lists, for example, only a handful of the network members post at all, while most simply lurk. We have known about these patterns for decades, but as yet mailing lists software doesn't offer any features specific to personal preferences of use, nor does it treat high-volume posters and lurkers differently. Most internet applications are impersonal by design as they are built for a generic user and as if to last for many years. By contrast, locative or situated software authored for a particular group, which makes virtue of the fact that a certain internet application only gets a few users for a short period, is already providing some solutions.
One such example is CoDeck – a community-based video server, launched at the New York University and designed to allow video artists to share and comment on each other's work. The programmers-cum-video artists took most of the interface off the dislocated computer screen and moved it into a kiosk placed in a busy lounge with a physical interface in lieu of keyboards/mouse interaction. They retrofitted a BetaMax deck from 1970s with a Linux machine inside, and then used the BetaMax buttons to let fellow artists control the video stream. New York University-based cultural theorist and programmer Clay Shirky, who oversaw the development of CoDeck by his students, speculates about the future and robustness of situated software11. The quality and safety of the tight CoDeck community would have been impossible to replicate on a larger scale over the internet. A password-free 'upload and critique' video website would have become a cesspool of porn within hours and the density of the communication among the video makers would have been diluted within days.
With the growing demand for small, purpose-built software we will probably see a change in our attitude to the appreciation of contemporary art, even if it is by only dozens of people at a time. Imagine a reading club of twelve members set up to discuss media art theory over the internet, which will work better than a group of twenty-five. We may even drift away from the impossible ideals that the arts shall be for all the people all of the time and not a few of the people some of the time. Even if some arts or particular works are enjoyed by only a few and understood by fewer still, the arts may change our perception of the world. They are very few activities in society that are truly inclusive. If inclusiveness were the chief criterion for arts funding or networking we wouldn't have seen such a shift towards the small-scale, but pro-active, locative thinking.
Networking on any scale, however, is not immune from degenerating into an obsessive, cult extreme, according to Dr Dennis Tourish. Co-author of On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 2000) Tourish's Amorphous Combustion presentation sent a ripple of creeping analogies with the art world across the seminar room. We are all vulnerable to modelling our own behaviour on others. A combination of tribal instincts, fears, uncertainties and anxieties can contribute to joining a particular kind of harmful network – the cult, a rigid belief system imposed by a charismatic cult leader with the unlawful intention to recruit members and raise money. Tourish revealed the secrets of cult leadership in how to become one in seven not-to-be followed steps.
Perhaps unwittingly Tourish focused on two unnerving historical examples of cult behaviour, both of which recently re-enacted in the name of art. Conceptual artist Rod Dickinson gained his notoriety in 2000 when at London's Institute of Contemporary Art he staged The Promised Land – a piece of performance art as a re-enactment of the sermons originally given by Jim Jones, the notorious leader of the Peoples Temple religious cult. Reportedly, Dickinson is currently identifying a park in which to recreate the Jonestown massacre, the mass suicide of cult members that took place in their communal retreat in Guyana in 1978. Both Tourish and Dickinson seemed professionally fascinated by Obedience to Authority – a dramatic and disturbing psychology experiment, conducted by Professor Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1960-63. People of all walks of life were recruited, supposedly for a linguistic investigation into 'memory and learning'. Each volunteer was assigned a role of a 'teacher' and instructed to administer a series of increasingly severe electric shocks to a 'pupil' if the latter failed to repeat a string of words. Seventy-five per cent of the 'teachers' turned to be fully obedient, continually administering the maximum 450-volt shocks to the hoax pupils, roles assigned to actors in another room.
Rod Dickinson's authentic yet carefully staged reconstruction of Milgram's experiment took place at Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Art on 15 and 17 February 2002. What Milgram was investigating, and what Jim Jones showed, is that people will suspend belief and reason, and act extremely in a controlled authoritarian environment. Due to our inherent susceptibility to stereotyping, attribution and conformity, Tourish reminded us that we are all potentially recruits of a cult, an artistic clique or a charismatic art school tutor. We tend to think the exceptional is more typical of a category than it is, because of its vividness. All Americans are brash and loud, only because we don't hear the quiet ones. We tend to routinely attribute intention or disposition to the actions of others. We tend to dislike arguments of any kind: they are always vulgar and often convincing, Tourish kept reminding. What seems to have emerged from both Amorphous Combustion presenters – Dennis Tourish and Heidi Campbell, an Edinburgh University Research Fellow interested in how people use the internet for online worship – is a warning sign: while networking beware of doublethink. Love of liberty comes alongside support for totalitarianism. A belief in equality disguises enormous privileges for group leaders. Promotion of strict sexual morality leads to increase of control and sexual exploitation of members.
It will not take a leap of faith then to imagine arts and politics as contemporary religion, but it will take serious efforts on behalf of political or arts activists and organisations to guard against falling into the trap of cultism or even Daily Me – the phenomenon described by political scientist and lawyer Cass Sustein in his latest book republic.com (Princeton University Press, 2001). On the internet, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. The drawbacks of egocentric internet use is that we see only the arts highlights that concern our favourite art forms; read only about the issues that interest us; encounter only the opinions with which we agree. In all of the applause for this personalised Daily Me, we should ask, is it good for our professional and personal development? Is it healthy for the arts? One of the answers to this despairing vision perhaps is the combustion of locative networking, of sharing experiences and exposing ourselves to topics and ideas that we would not have chosen in advance. We will thus avoid networking and hearing louder and ever more extreme echoes of our own voices and our own opinions.
Iliyana Nedkova is a curator and researcher based at both New Media Scotland and Stills, Edinburgh. Also serving as Honorary Cultural Attaché at the Consulate of the Republic of Bulgaria.
References
1 Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark and Lee Rainie, Faith Online Pew Internet & American Life Project, April 2004, www.pewinternet.org
2Networking the networks, a-n The Artists Information Company, 2002
3 Lee Corner, The Code of Practice for the Visual Arts: for Organisations, a-n The Artist Information Company, 2003, www.a-n.co.uk
4 www.mobilebristol.co.uk
5 www.letslinkscotland.org.uk
6 www.freenetworks.org
7 www.free2air.org and www.consume.net
8 www.discordia.us
9 www.mediascot.org/ambit
10 www.nettime.org
11 www.shirky.com
This article is part of a new body of material on www.a-n.co.uk generated around the Amorphous Combustion event which took place in New Lanark on Saturday 27 March 2004, as part of a-n's Networking Artists' Networks initiative.
The specially commissioned material includes an introduction to the concept of the event, overviews of the presentations by Dennis Tourish, Heidi Campbell and Stewart Noble, plus a wide range of responses from artists and curators who attended the event, to the ideas and models outlined over the course of the day: Michelle Cotton reviews Sue Tompkins' specially commissioned performance and considers its relation to the themes of the day; Luke Fowler draws on his own art practice research in his responce to Dennis Tourish's presentation; Gair Dunlop considers the differences and parallels between artists networking and that of religious groups in responding to Heidi Campbell's presentation and John Beagles considers how the art world could be seen as a cult.
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