| Inke Arns on Tue, 26 Mar 2002 17:15:56 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: [rohrpost] intermedium2 / medienkunst |
On 26 Mar 2002, at 14:56, oliver@firstfloor.org wrote: > was genau willst du uns mit damit sagen? dass das alles begrifflich > nicht so scharf gefasst ist, wie man es von anderen (deinen?) texten > kennt? dass es einfach scheisse ist, genauso wie der bayerische > rundfunk? oder dass dir es generell nicht passt, wenn andere was machen? mir ging es genau so wie florian ... hey florian, habe gut gelacht, also ich deine reaktion gelesen habe. die behauptung, dass das internet DAS neue bildmedium an sich sei, ist wirklich unhaltbar. tim druckrey spricht dagegen im hinblick auf das internet heute von einem "post-optischen" zeitalter. genau darum gehts. zu dem thema noch eine art kurzrezension zur ausstellung "ctrl-space", die im zkm stattfindet/stattfand. ist leider auf englisch, da fuer eine andere liste verfasst. gruss, inke ------- Date sent: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 14:17:00 +0100 Dear Sarah and others, someone said ctrl_space? I reach for my revolver ... sorry for that crude allusion. Here's why (some quick notes written yesterday night on the train between Regensburg and Berlin): I went to see ctrl_space at the ZKM in Karlsruhe in December and spent two days in the exhibition (the catalogue was not published by then -- I don't know if it's already out by now). There's a huge amount of great video installation pieces, almost all the classics, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, and all that, and some more recent stuff, also quite interesting, at least some of it. It is a very large exhibition .... it is a bit too big perhaps. But this is not the problem. I find the exhibition extremely disturbing - not because of its theme or because of what it shows, but precisely because of what it DOES NOT show and talk about. Again and again we are told in this exhibition that surveillance takes place only when a camera is present and taping something. Surveillance and control entirely rely on images and the visual -- at least that's apparently what the organisers want to tell us. How can you curate an exhibition on the theme of surveillance in the year 2001/02 and not mention Echelon one single time? Seriously, today the Internet is not something new anymore, not even for the ZKM (who has ignored it for a long, long time). Why curate an exhibition in the year 2001/02 when all you want to do is boil up again that old (1980s) video surveillance aesthetics? It is certainly easier to find media art works dealing with or exploiting this kind of visual surveillance techniques, because -- they simply rely on visual material. Were the organizers afraid of having to deal with realities that are too difficult, too abstract in order to be thematized in media art works (an argument which does not hold anyway: just look at Marko Peljhan's makrolab project at http://makrolab.ljudmila.org)? Or that these realities would be too difficult to be presented in an understandable way for a general public? Were they afraid of having to deal with realities that are not concealed by visual surfaces, i.e. of having to deal with the reality of "raw" code? This is what surveillance and control in electronic space are targeted at today. It is exactly what Lawrence Lessig's "Code is Law" (by now almost classic) slogan is about. Yes, in the exhibition there *are* indeed some pieces using the Internet -- but here again, these pieces use web *cameras*, suggesting that even on the Internet surveillance only happens where a camera is present. I find this really problematic - especially if you see that at the ZKM whole school classes being sent through the exhibitions. One can imagine that these school children, who won't necessarily read the books on data surveillance that are on display in the reading room of the exhibition (yes, they are, good works by Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti, for example, a German investigative journalist and specialist on data surveillance and Echelon), will come home at night, saying: "Mom, look, [it did not hurt!] - if I surf the Internet nobody can see me, thus there is no surveillance!" Of course not all surveillance concerns exclusively the "code" below the surfaces (well, in a way, even the following examples radically differ from 1980s video surveillance simply because they rely on digital data). Yes, there are new forms of surveillance using images, just think about the automated face recognition systems installed in a town in Great Britain, or the iris recognition systems which are about to replace other (analogue) identification technologies. But most of the works in the exhibition do not even *mention* the new quality of these digital visual surveillance techniques. My main argument / criticism is that the "nature" of surveillance in electronic space such as the Internet is completely ignored in this exhibition. Electronic space not only connects people, but also allows for a much more perfect and ubiquitous, and less and less noticed control and surveillance -- precisely because surveillance and control are not relying on visual images anymore, but on code. Perhaps one can say that we are not relying on the model of the "panopticon" anymore (as claimed by ctrl_space), but rather on a model of the "pancodicon". Have to think about that. For further information tune into makrolab http://makrolab.ljudmila.org world-information.org http://world-information.org Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti http://members.aol.com/InfoWelt Duncan Campbell's homepage <http://www.gn.apc.org/duncan/> SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL Saturday 9 March 2002 Starr Auditorium, Level 2, Tate Modern, London, UK <http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/surveillance.htm> Inke Arns http://www.v2.nl/~arns Out now: Inke Arns. Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) - eine Analyse ihrer kuenstlerischen Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslawien [NSK - an analysis of their artistic strategies in Yugoslavia in the 1980s]. Regensburg 2002 Sprache: Deutsch (German), ISBN 961-90851-1-6, 200 Seiten/pages, 26 x 18,5 cm, Design: Novi Kolektivizem/NSK, 120 s/w Abbildungen / 120 b&w illustrations, Irwin-Katalogteil durchgehend vierfarbig [Irwin catalogue part in full color], 20 Euro http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/NSK/abstract-NSK2002.html ------------------------------------------------------- rohrpost - deutschsprachige Liste fuer Medien- und Netzkultur Archiv: http://www.nettime.org/rohrpost Info: http://www.mikro.org/rohrpost Ent/Subskribieren: http://post.openoffice.de