Andreas Broeckmann on Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:59:04 +0100 |
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Syndicate: <nettime> RIKS update (from jo van der spek) |
Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 22:04:18 +0200 (CEST) From: jo van der spek <jojovds@hotmail.com> hello everybody, The first concrete proect of RIKS has started! I want to welcome and present Burim Murtezani and Muhamet Mulaku who will in the next two months set up the workspace and start creating content. And I want to thank doctot Abazi for his inspiration and advice. And I call on all subscribers to support this pilot-project in Tetova. I talked with Marko P. and Borja about going to Tetova, they are thinking about it. And we found Nebojsa Vilic ready to do a workshop. For the first two months we have a budget of 20.000 guilders, donated by the Dutch chapter of ISOC, Internet Society. I thank them too! A project-description is being prepared, including budget-proposal for short and longer term. WeÃll keep you posted! The Pilot Project of RIKS in Tetov@ became real on Monday the 26th of July in cafe Sirena on Marshall Titostreet. Dr. Alajdin Abazi, inspirator and supervisor, sat down for coffee with Burim Murtezani and Muhamet Mulaku, the coordinators and the author of this pece, Jo van der Spek, the initiator of RIKS. We rented a small space, we made the necessary contacts and investigations, we collected the necessary skills, and most important of all, we had the inspiration and the juice to say yes. We decided to do it in Tetova, focusing on strong relations with Prishtina and Prizren. The workspace in Tetova will be something in between a medialab and a cybercafe, and it might serve as a model for similar spaces in the whole region. However, it is too early to start concrete projects now in Kosov@. We will establish the project in Tetov@ as a civil association (or local NGO), in partnership with the Project RIKS. It will be a content- , community- and culture- oriented, independant non-profit Internet-workspace. Of course this one-liner does not mean so much, but it is as close to a definition as we got. But, bearing in mind the general principle of RIKS (better or complex identity than an identity complex), I will try to describe it in a way that answers some basic questions. The most common comment on the first presentation of RIKS to the internet-community of Balkania was "interesting, even exciting, but pretty vague. The original idea was to facilitate Internet-acces to all refugees from Kosova. Two weeks of field-research in May during the war, the deportations and the refugeecrisis served to develop the idea into facilitating a communication infrastructure aimed at reconstructing Kosova Society, involving as many people around the globe, both Albanian and Nonbanian. Then of course some surprising things happened. NATO won the war, (and Milosevic too, of course) and most Albanian deportees turned returnees, returning to what they feel is their liberated country. Meanwhile Kosova is being occupied under the same humanitarian flag as NATO's aircampaign, and you may start to wonder who will liberate Kosova from it's liberators. Kosova today can be seen as a theatre of institutional anarchy, a marketplace for all brands of Aid-agents, a racing track for Albanians to take position/possession after losing too much, and of course a traumatic site for Serbs. The Roma are as a group the most tragic player on the field: they are losing a country they even never had. After one week spent on the ground in Tetova, Skopje, Prishtina and Prizren, I want to refine the object and approach of RIKS as follows: facilitating tools and tactics to create free zones for netculture and netcontent related to reconstructing and reinventing Kosov@. That's okay, says Ruta. Kosov@, by the way, is a situation which I see as an integral part of Balkania, Europe and the Globe. # distributed via nettime-l: no commercial use without permission of author # <nettime> is a moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # un/subscribe: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and # "un/subscribe nettime-l you@address" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org/ contact: <nettime@bbs.thing.net> ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- Syndicate network for media culture and media art information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at> in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress