[Reader-list] Notions on policy in Eastern Asia-Europe media spaces

[Rob van Kranenburg]

Notions on policy in Eastern Asia-Europe media spaces
after:
http://www.commonroom.info/bcfnma/artcamp2005/

What can we learn?

One of the most intriguing aspects of Bauhaus is that the most 
successful unit, - the unit coming 'closest to Bauhaus intentions', 
as Gropius stated, the pottery workshop - was located 25 kilometers 
from Weimar, in Dornburg. It was hard to reach by train, and hard to 
reach by car. The workshop master Max Krehan owned the workshop, so 
there was a business interest from the start. The relationship with 
Marcks , the Master of Form, was not contaminated with formalized 
roundtable discussions, but was a productive twoway 
(abstract-concrete) interrelationship. 

"More important still, in terms of what Gropius hoped for the entire 
Bauhaus, was the way in which the pottery workshop operated in close 
co-operation with the local community in which it found itself. It 
made pots for the community and the town of Dornburg leased the 
workshop a plot of land which the students used for vegetables and on 
which, it was hoped, they would build."

So what can we learn from this? That we must not aim to define, alter 
or transform practices, processes, places or people. The aim should 
be to define a vision.

A vision that should be able to inspire and empower young people in 
their concrete experience of agency in this seemingly undesignerly 
new ambient world, towards a humanistic and optimistic positive 
attitude in the role, function and leadership of the creative 
individual in her  capability to make sense, to work within an 
uncertain framework of unforeseen consequences, unintended uses, and 
procedural breakdown.

What can we do?

So what does this mean for new media, emergent technologies and 
cultural policy departments and funding strategies?

In terms of new media and policy there is very little clear and good 
practice and this is very logical as the visual metaphors of 
digitisation for artistic purpose began only (with the exception of 
an it/virtual reality driven trend) thirtheen years ago with the 
launching of the browser. Rasa Smite from RIXC  claims that the 
reason why she and other public domain driven artists in Latvia liked 
new media immediately was that there was no advantage for any one in 
any country as it was just as new for everybody. No one could claim a 
history that was uniquely theirs, every country had its own equally 
important story. Shuddhabrata Genupta from Sarai relates how Bulgaria 
for example developed the highest expediency in software viruses as 
it had been assigned software production from Comecon.

At the ASEF-Commonroom Bandung organized and produced Third 
Asia-Europe Art Camp this very fundamental insight to the basic 
ingredients that make up new media was highlighted in the student 
presentations from a range as varied from Germany, Indonesia, Norway, 
Estonia, Myanmar, Japan and France. (see url).

The diversity was shattering, yet it would be very hard to categorize 
presentations in terms of level of conceptualisation, expertise or 
creativity.

All presentations are a necessary node in and on the modes of 
connectivity that makes up what we call new media.

There are a few common threads though. One is risktaking. As ASEF 
itself has taken a risk on focussing on emergent and not established 
practices, through showing a clear interest in hardwiring the future 
designers of our mediascapes through theoretical lectures, local 
assignments, a view of new media spaces in Bandung and interviews 
with the founders, and last not least and most important, giving 
every participant a clear insight into her own daily praxis, ways of 
working, strategies of communication and the level of digital 
saturization.

This brings us to the second point. As Annabelle Felise Aw   
(Singapore) states the issue is about Space, yes, but perhaps more 
importantly about Pace. This is a term that describes the various 
ways in which the digital context that informs everyday practices is 
matched by a level of conceptualisation that allows innovation.

The third common denominator lies in the basic irrelevance the 
participants assign to terminology. For them being called or labelled 
an artist, designer, creator of original ideas is only relevant when 
it comes to issues of funding.

The fourth is the belief that it is both extremely necessary to have 
a physical place where people can meet as well as a space that might 
also be thought of as a method, a format, a way of looking at the 
world that you have in common with a few or a group of other people. 
This space  can and should be supported by as much digital 
connectivity as possible ( web, mail, gps, roaming).

What can we do from a cultural policy point of view?

I. Place

We do not fund beginning places.

De Waag and V2 are our Dutch most successful labs. In less than 10 
years they have grown into academic nodes on the SURFNET network, the 
Dutch academic network. This is unprecedented. Never before has a 
group of autonomous, critical individuals been able to get their 
ideas, narrative, theories and projects accepted as credible in terms 
of the existing academic discourse in such a short time span. How was 
this possible? Because of the liberal climate in the eighties and 
early nineties in the Netherlands that did allow for bottom-up 
creative initiatives. De Waag grew out of the non profit Digital City 
that was supposed to last for six weeks, the first Digital City in 
Amsterdam in 1993. Young idealists, hackers, 'hippies from hell' as 
they are called in Ine Poppe's documentary, provided free email and 
started the digital revolution with their internet provider xs4all. 
We are only eleven years later and the analogue world is becoming 
more hybrid as we speak with digital connectivity. Xs4all has become 
a part of corporate KPN. V2 was the name of a squat building in Den 
Bosch, the Director Alex Adriaansens was there in 1981. He is still 
Director now in 2004. V2 participates in numerous European networks, 
is focussing on their own kind of R&D that is rapidly drawing 
attention from the regular and corporate research labs, hosts its own 
V2 publishing and V2 Archive. The young people that started these 
digital connectivities in spaces and actual places were concerned for 
more then their own particular work, products or living, their 
concern was for the public domain; xs4all.

As in Bandung, Delhi, Amsterdam, Riga, Minsk there was no government 
funding in the creation of the place. You deal with highly idealistic 
persons who care for public access and domains.

Labs that come from abroad unchanged go bust (Medialab Dublin). Labs 
that are dependent on one particular line of money can switch 
directions any time (Merging of IVREA with Domus)

Strategy of the place: bypassing (see Bauhaus story)

Strategy of funders: co-find the satellites (ITB-Common Room for 
example) and fund specific projects.

Question: When do you decide that the proposed alliances are going to 
do something no one else is going to do?

In Holland: In the Ministery of Education, Cultuurnota, individuals 
took risks. They funded through the visual arts budget 
(film/video/painting) a number of places that all have delivered 
quite something else. Instead of Visual Art the Waag is making 
socio-cultural applications (www.verhalentafel.org) that turn out to 
be very good for dementia. None of this was in the original research 
proposal. (This also shows that academic institutes need common rooms 
as much as they need them for asking questions that are not being 
deemed relevant within specific frameworks). Because of this 
risktaking and trust in young idealistic professionals ( who in new 
media could be making much more money working for regular companies) 
Holland now has an extremely rich and densely saturated network of 
new media institutions that themselves now are becoming experts in 
fields that are economically viable: documentation, heritage, media 
formats, entertainment.

II. Triangle: arts, technology and business: creative industries

A clear difference between Europe and Asia is the lack of funding 
even after the initial phase of a place. Places in Asia describe 
themselves as for profit. In Europe it is the other way around. These 
two positions are coming closer though. De Waag has set up a business 
structure to sell de Verhalentafel to the US.

Policy focus in new media interfacing with Ministeries of Economy, 
Education, Tourism: creative industries

New media is about the soft side of innovation  (ways of 
brainstorming, visualization techniques, mapping, designing trust for 
users in digital environments, didactic models).

Proposal: Meeting with Europe-Asia culture officials, companies 
(telecoms, media) that are very eager to work with new media artists 
and designers but need very good reason, arguments and a theoretical 
framework for doing so.

III.  A possible focus for 2005-2010 projects: urban studies: living 
in the digital city.

As the Sarai Reader list so poignantly shows, people are beginning to 
map, debate, discover ways of writing and ways of publicizing their 
everyday lives in cities. As much as counter-research it is the 
emergence itself of a new kind of research that will have more 
repercussions for the academic research tradition then for the media 
places. Eventually it will become the default. As with new media 
itself, the uses of blogs,  email, email lists, websites, mobile 
phones, play out fundamental changes on the news information 
mediascapes all over the world. Upstreaming says that the first 
pictures about incidents are now blogged before they are published. 
All over the world dominant paradigms of dispersing data and 
information will have to change or go bust.

 From a policy point of view: Who would you rather help or fund? 
People who will show onesided information? Or idealistic young 
professionals with a heart for the truth and the heart of the matter?

A focus on urban digital realities (cctv, microphones, rfid, active 
sensors) will hopefully (as has happened with de Waag) spawn off 
community enhancing project (see i3 website/Lime) instead of the use 
of digital technology for ubiquitous control.

Again, in this respect there is no Europe-Asia gap.

But the tables have turned. Here in Bandung you can say that Dutch 
Art Deco architecture mapped its way through an intuitive walking 
that has since embraced the map. This walking is now walked in our 
cities in Europe. Speaking only of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag we 
encounter the creole at home. Over half of the young population has 
Dutch nationality but is from foreign descent.

The mix, the creole is the future and our cities are very much in 
need of the Asian expertise in not running-running them.





-- 
http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/listpublish.php?q_mm=rob







-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20050818/f27dc315/attachment.html