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When New Media are No Longer New and Everyone Creates on the Internet
On Platforms and Art
'Olga Goriunova
Olga Goriunova
Simplicity is worse than theft.
Russian proverb
Our starting point is the topic of Ars Electronica 2006—Simplicity. What is simplicity today and why is simplicity central for the new media/communication/cyber/digital avant-garde art of 2006? The topic is good, old, and could have been expected. In addition to this, the Transmediale 2005 theme was: Basics!
Ars Electronica’s themes over the last ten years, as far as I can judge, have more or less reflected what was happening in the scene: CODE, The language of our time in 2003, the year of software art; Unplugged, Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts in 2002, the year of faith in the power of politically-minded art and activist projects, just before the war on Iraq was launched, which ruined that faith; a whole series of topics relating to gender, body and sex, summarizing discourses of the late 80s and 90s (1996, Memesis, The Future of Evolution; 1997, Fleshfactor; 1999, LifeScience; 2000, Next Sex); and Welcome To The Wired World in 1995, pointing to the rise of WWW technology and net art.
So what is happening today that evokes such a topic as simplicity? Simplicity means authenticity. Is it a sign of some kind of a crisis? What do people do when they are in crisis? They turn back to simple, basic things that supposedly won’t prove wrong.
There have been talks and texts on the crisis in new media art appearing all year round. There have been discussions, for instance, on the Spectre mailing list in the summer/autumn 2005, relating to the closing or scaling down of media labs across the developed countries;(1) there have been texts and reviews stating or analyzing the ongoing changes.(2)
I will try to look at the issue from the point of view of “simplicity”. Simple means authentic, true, basic. Simplicity cannot deceive or make a mistake. Simplicity cannot be forged. Simplicity is a kind of synonym for “bare life”, with something “nature” does and “people” do.
Here is the key. What do people do today with communication technology? They blog, they contribute to encyclopedias, they share their photographs and videos, they date and maintain relationships with friends, they bookmark together, they link, they broadcast, they map. And all these activities they perform everyday and, dare I say this—and I am not mocking, without the (media) artists and institutions.
In the early days the Internet, WWW and new media used to be inhabited by scientists, programmers and artists. Today, with the dropping costs of technology and bandwidth, with the wide use of mobile devices, we witness the true “massovization” of the Internet and, more generally, communication technology. The number of Internet users worldwide reached one billion in 2005.(3)
If there is a crisis in new media art, it is also because people do not need artists anymore to guide them through media experiences and to shape media experiences for them. As the book title and the, since then, much-loved slogan “the wisdom of crowds”(4) proves, the crowd became wise. Full stop. Why does it need anyone else?
Everyone is becoming a content producer these days. People do creative things: write diaries, take photographs, annotate. There are platforms for publishing and managing all kinds of content created by users. There are open encyclopedias, friend-of-a-friend networks, social bookmarking sites, group-forming networks, photoblogs and other blogs, collaborative mapping and other visualization and sonification tools, not to mention various digital product repositories. Orkut, a social network service “providing friendships”, similar to Friendster, FaceBook and MySpace, had reached 2 million users already in 2004, half a year after it had been launched. A well-known phenomenon is that around 70 percent of its users are Brazilians.(5) In Brazil, as the Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman says, it is safer for teenagers to meet online than outside the house.
LiveJournal, a blogging service, has a distinct aura in the Russian part of the Internet. Some researchers believe blogging is new journalism and the main activity of bloggers is commenting on political news.(6) As shown by other academics, the typical blog is maintained by teenage or adolescent girls.(7) Russian LiveJournal (this particular service has become synonymous to Blog in general), as researcher Eugene Gorny demonstrates, was firstly populated by male professionals, including Internet workers, journalists, writers, philosophers and artists. Thus, LiveJournal in Russia “acquired the aura of a playground for intellectuals”.(8) Russian LiveJournal has become a source of news and information competing with official media, a platform for politicians, writers, researchers, critics, a discussion forum and a socializing tool. Besides Russian LiveJournal was often organizing offline meetings for, for instance, Moscow-based users.
Here are some more geography-specific facts on bloggers’ capacities. One of the well-known LiveJournal campaigns was the Anti-Barbie campaign of 2005. An online contest for the most beautiful girl in Russia was organized.(9) Anyone could enter their profile and be voted for. The one who received the most votes would go to the Miss Universe contest. Soon after it was launched a LiveJournal user found a profile of a girl who didn’t conform to the “Barbie” 90-60-90 measurements, but who entered her data for the contest. A large voting campaign was launched over LiveJournal in the course of a few days, and when more than 10,000 original users had voted for Alena Pisklova, pushing her through to the semi-final, the service hosting the contest announced that she didn’t qualify to represent Russia in the Miss Universe contest as she was only 15.
If we turn to mapping, we can find projects ranging from annotating Google maps, basically overlaying things other than business data or statistics onto existing Google maps, to projects linking Wikipedia to mapping, and to projects building entirely free maps from scratch using GPS devices. Wikimapia, OpenStreetMap, GlobeFeed, Tagzania is a very incomplete list of such platforms. With Tagzania, for instance, people create as different maps as the Da Vinci Code guide of Paris and police action chronicles.
MapOMatix is an open-source collaborative environment for creating and editing maps; it is a psycho-geographic “geo-wiki” or, better, a tactical mapping tool. As the developers state: “In the times of real-time fear watching, when centralized and controlled instances deliver localized and time-stamped information, based on satellite data but processed through a chain controlled by big telecommunication companies, a need for a tool based on the exact negation of these characteristics seems useful and draws a line between service providers and self-organized groups of individuals”.(10) GPS, mapping both physical elements, human practices, and relations between them, not centralized, horizontal exchange, not involving the usage of any expensive technology—all these elements are their choice.
Everything mentioned above covers a tiny part of today’s Internet users’ activities. I haven’t referred to people sharing their music,(11) building semi-professional and professional communities on digital photography,(12) VJ-ing(13) or sharing links.(14) Nor have I paid attention to the miracle of Wikipedia referenced in this text a dozen times. The range of social media platforms uniting manifestations of digital folklore and practices of everyday lives (in the sense of De Certeau(15)) to possibilities of professionalization and education is vast.
The history of some of these tools as well as of these activities trace back not only, but also, to early net art practitioners and new media art practices in general.(16) The origin of today’s blogs and photoblogs can be found in online diaries and reports, such as Kathy Rae Huffman’s and Eva Wohlgemuth’s Siberian Deal project from 1995, which consisted of “text and picture files … sent regularly from different locations on the road to majordomos Chrono Popp in Vienna, who forwarded … information to the … on-line report“ through which, “viewers could follow the travel, interact…, and (the authors) … were able to react to their questions and remarks”.(17) Another example is a mapping project by Heath Bunting Visitor’s Guide to London(18) from 1995 that suggests an alternative sightseeing tour.
Micromusic, a platform for 8-bit music, was co-created by a former member of ETOY group that got a Golden Nica in the World Wide Web category at Ars Electronica 1996 with their etoy— The Hijack Project.(19)
However, not only artists or engineers create platforms. Corporations buy existing platforms and create new ones. LiveJournal created by an enthusiastic student and based on open-source software existed as an independent project from March 1999 till January 2005 when it was bought bykSix Apart (one of the largest blog providers) that also owns TypePad, which will be mentioned later. Orkut as well as other platforms announce in their copyright statement that “By submitting, posting or displaying any materials on or through the www.orkut.com(20)
And finally there appear announcements concerning future Windows Live™, a platform that will unite a set of personal Internet services and software, and will include search, e-mail, instant messaging, file and photo sharing, PC based calling, and much more.(21)
There is also a trend called moblogging (from mobile weblogging) meaning maintaining an Internet blog by posting photographs and comments to it from a mobile phone or a PDA.
Nokia, for instance, equips its suitable phone models with software such as Lifeblog that gathers all information produced with your phone, including text messages, photos and video and as follows from a Nokia official guide to moblogging(22): “automatically organizes your digital media between your mobile phone and PC so you can view, search, edit, and share your images and messages”. Such blogs are published online by services such as Typepad.com.
Apart from the issue of surveillance that is getting hotter and hotter these days, what comes to mind is actor network theory,(23) turned from an academic concept into an essential element of a capitalist enterprise. As Victor Pelevin, a contemporary Russian writer, has noted: when one buys downhill skis, one also pays for the snow.
Buying a phone with software enabling moblogging, one buys and signs up for a certain culture. Working and the popular concept of moblogging are as central to Nokia, and especially to its sales department, as the work of the chief engineer of the phone. Moblogging makes sure that the features of the phone will be used and phones will be sold out. Technical and cultural production goes hand in hand. Maintaining a moblog phone is included into the capitalist production cycle, as much as working on assembling the phone itself.
A number of books have appeared recently about terms and myths on blogging and other forms of Internet activities,(24) but what seems a more relevant concept to use when talking about these issues today is the concept of immaterial labor.
The concept originates from the Marxist debate on post-Ford production. Among the key figures in the debate Italian thinkers such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, and Tiziana Terranova could be mentioned.
Labor no longer produces material commodities; it is formed by the montage of humans and technology and often performed outside the official experiences, during free time. The production of surplus value tends to depend on the expansion of commodities, as Tiziana Terranova explains: “information-rich commodities … (that) are not destroyed in the act of consumption but…persist and reverberate as events able to transform the sensorial basis of subjectivity”.(25) The creation of wealth depends on the production of subjectivity, on cultural production and based on the usage of the whole time of life. For Terranova: “…this is socialized wealth, which cannot be measured by money but resides in the intensive value of relations, affections, modes of expressions, and forms of life”.(26)
Precarious cultural production becomes central to this type of economy. For Virno, culture provides training in precariousness and variability,(27) it drives innovation. For Marazzi, cultural production helps in identifying potential future social needs and desires. For Terranova, culture provides a new type of product—a commodity that is “more akin to a work of art rather then a material commodity”.(28) The worker experiments as an artist, transforming subjectivity. Immaterial labor feels more like Art.
Immaterial labor is paradoxical because it contains the potential for emancipation as well as for the intensification of exploitation.
As Terranova sums up: “this mode also signals the emergence of new machines of control and subjectification which re-impose hierarchical relations at the service of social reproduction and the production of surplus value. These are moments which turn qualitative, intensive differences into quantitative relations of exchange and equivalence; which enclose the open and dissipative potential of cultural production into differential hierarchies; which accumulate the rewards or work carried out by larger social assemblages …”.(29)
Do we all recognize the place our platforms, users and corporations take in this picture? Coming back to new media art and simplicity, in the final part of the text I would like to draw an optimistic picture of open platforms not subsumed to new forms of control and built by people like us, of people creating artistic work that doesn’t become a commodity so easily, of people making a change on the cultural landscapes—with instructions of how to do it.
These are relatively small platforms based on databases, voting systems, blogging tools, commenting threads, little chats, hit charts and other tools. The main idea here is to have an idea. If there is a key idea, inspiration, some common ideology, the platform is open for change, and if there is a relatively small devoted group of people-administrators, it can produce wonderful results.
I have co-published elsewhere a paper analyzing three platforms, two of which were partly built by (new media) artists: www.Micromusic.netwww.Runme.orgwww.Udaff.com(30) Here I could also add MapOMatix that was mentioned earlier and many others. I will quickly repeat the reasons for their—I believe—success.
Such platforms appear as reactions to the development of a particular practice they focus on. They are quickly built by a few enthusiasts, which is possible with modern technology. Such platforms are always moderated. Platforms need to be open and customizable, moreover they must be able to change significantly according to the needs and demands of a cultural practice and the social groups of people it works with. Such platforms accumulate quite a number of creative products that in turn attract new people. Platforms often suggest new modes of education, knowledge building, creative work and a supportive social environment, as well as models for the development of some creative activity. Working with “gray” zones of cultural production, with grass-root practices, such platforms can create significant artistic and cultural phenomena.
It is not very important what form the platform takes, whether it is a blog, a database or a wiki. If there is a shared aesthetic, social, political horizon, if there appears a need to build a piece of knowledge or art, a group of people is able to filter and shape the data using similar, but still very varied techniques of administration, voting, ranking, commenting, linking, editing, etc, and thus transfer the practice onto a different cultural level. Still such a platform or corner of a larger platform is very distinct from most popular spaces described earlier.
The dream of net artists came true: people can exchange their creative work without institutions and corporations, they can build collaborations, communicate; they can do art; people have technologies now. We should just beware.
Is it simplicity? Maybe. Russians say: “Things of genius are simple”.
But more likely it is complexity.
(1)
See threads entitled “ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?”, “the media art center of 21 c” at: http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre back
(2)
For instance a review of Transmediale by Armin Medosch: Good Bye Reality! How Media Art Died But Nobody Noticed at: http://www.mazine.ws/node/230back
(3)
See http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0106.htmback
(4)
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2004 back
(5)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkutback
(6)
J. D. Lasica, “Blogging as a form of journalism”, in USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, May 24, 2001. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1017958873.phpback
(7)
“Perseus Blog Survey”: http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/index.htmlback
(8)
Gorny, Eugene: “Russian LiveJournal. The Impact of Cultural Identity on the Development of a Virtual Community”, in Schmidt, Henrike, Teubener, Katy, Konradova , Natalja (Ed.) (2006): Control + Shift. Public and Private Usages of the Russian Internet, Norderstedt: Books on Demand. Available online at: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/russ-cyb/library/texts/en/control_shift/control_shift.htmback
(9)
http://www.miss.rambler.ru/back
(10)
“PGS versus GPS: On Psycho/Subjective Geographic Systems” by elpueblodechina dialoguing with yves
degoyon (MapOMatix) in Goruinova, Olga, (Ed.): Readme 100. Temporary Software Art Factory, Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2006. Available at: http://mapomatix.sourceforge.net/mapOmatix-3.pdfback
(11)
http://micromusic.neta back
(12)
http://fotokritik.ru/back
(13)
http://vjcentral.com/back
(14)
http://listible.comback
(15)
de Certeau, Michel: The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984 back
(16)
For an excellent account of the history of blogs, see the Wikipedia entry “blog”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogback
(17)
http://nr00226.vhost2.sil.at/siberian/vrteil.htmback
(18)
Some documentation is left at: http://www.irational.org/heath/london/back
(19)
Have a look at: http://www.etoy.com/back
(20)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkutback
(21)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-01PreviewSoftwareBasedPR.mspxback
Thanks to Mercedes Bunz for this link. back
(22)
http://europe.nokia.com/BaseProject/Sites/NOKIA_MAIN_18022/CDA/ApplicationTemplates/About_Nokia/Content/_Static_Files/moblogbackgrounder.pdfback
(23)
The actor network theory was developed primarily by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law; it is applied to explaining technological products, events or productions as structures, components of which act together to produce certain results. Such components could be scientific facts, tasks, human relations, economic factors and others that are traditionally excluded from thinking about technology and society. back
(24)
For example, Rheingold, Howard: Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Basic Books, 2003 back
(25)
Terranova, Tiziana: “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labor in Open Systems”, in Krysa, Joasia (Ed.): Curating Immateriality, Autonomedia, Data Browser 03, 2006, p.28
back
(26)
Ibid., p.29 back
(27)
Virno, Paolo: A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), 2004 back
(28)
Terranova, Tiziana: ibid. back
(29)
Ibid., p.33 back
(30)
Goriunova, Olga, Shulgin, Alexei: “From Art on Networks to Art on Platforms”, in Krysa, Joasia (Ed.): Curating Immateriality, Autonomedia, Data Browser 03, 2006 back
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