Open Air – Radiotopia,:
http://www.aec.at/radiotopia
Search :
http://www.onair.co.za/thetrinitysession
http://www.onair.co.za/thepremises
http://www.onair.co.za/sanman
The festival brochure of Unplugged, Ars Electronica2002 featured R.Buckminster-Fuller’s Re-Mapping Our Mental Model of the World on its introductory page an apt correlation with Gerfried Stocker, Festival Director’s statement: ”Perspectives obtained by looking out beyond one’s own horizon are meant to intersect and interact with points of view held by ”others,” and thereby make this festival for art, technology and society itself a setting for the complex dynamic of a global reorientation.” Accordingly, the various viewpoints of African theorists, artists and activists were prominently featured over the five day Unplugged Symposium. Beyond the conference presentations, concerts of the Urban African Club as well as African Art screenings contributed to the conceptual remapping of African culture. The collaborative Search project, fully rounded the African panorama of Ars Electronica 2002.
Predictably, Unplugged, offered a rich variety of events, which made choosing difficult between attending the symposium, participating in live performances, or visiting the exhibits. The most exciting part for me by far, was to experience some of the networked, process based projects. I will confine my brief subjective report to Open Air – Radiotopia, and Search, as these collaborations reflected best, in my opinion, some of the leading concepts in the borderless landscape of digital culture. Both projects involved the onsite and virtual involvement of many participants.
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Open Air – Radiotopia, the most extensive festival conceived program this year presented a global sound network data base at http://www.aec.at/radiotopia. The project was hailed as the first of its kind: ”a simultaneous storage bank of freely accessed sound material that transcends time, location, cultural and geographical borders.”
As a festival visitor you could hear the live mix of sounds of Radiotopia on the Main square of Linz, in the Bruckner House festival venue, on the river banks, on radio stations and of course on the internet. The main ”control desk” complete with a lot of gear and featuring an info desk (decorated with the names of participants) was located in the Bruckner House, where at all hours of the day and night people congregated, watched or participated in the broadcast sound events. Music, noise and spoken words were heard for days on end – all of this facilitated by the networked sound data base.
”Radiotopia, -as Rupert Huber, the artistic director told me – can serve as a model, to bring people together who share certain ideas”. Rupert’s self confessed aim was to create a space for peaceful, creative co-existence and he felt this has been achieved. The idea for Radiotopia, was shaped between Rupert, Gerfried Stocker, Andreas Bosshard and Elisabeth Zimmerman. The concept for the sound network database originated from August Black and Norbert Math with contribution from Rupert. To provide a better insight, I have asked August, Norbert and Isabella Bordoni from the Radiotopia crew, for comments on their project involvement.
”It was important for us – said August- to develop as easy a structure for online uploading and downloading as possible. At the same time if anybody sent a cassette, we did our best to encode it and incorporate it in the database, which consist mainly of sound and some text and image files and incorporates a play list of 500 files.”
August’s main interest in the project was directed to the question of how to deal with static database files and how to turn it into live elements -alive network where five or six individuals or radio stations play together. He also designed the website and organized a large part of the network. Together with August, Norbert Math was involved in the preliminary work to set up the database, server and the online mixer. He felt that while his contribution is often of a technical nature, it as also artwork, ”or framework for artwork -as he noted – because it is the creation of a system between people and sounds”.
What fascinated Norbert, was the possibility to create a network, which is self-organizing. ”It becomes a collective decision for each node -said Norbert- it is an experiment in relinquishing control, because the database is used by so many people, people with different backgrounds and different quality of work.” He felt that at this point the open ended approach was not made visible enough: ”but it is still a learning process. After all we are all used to be in control.”
Isabella Bordoni, an Italian sound artist participated in the live Soiree performance as well as day to day live mixing. I was in the audience at the Soiree performance and truly enjoyed her contribution to the concert. While she was pleased by the success of the project, she has also noted that ”it is very important to take a next step and go further.” No doubt, they will.
Hundreds of people signed up ahead to participate online and hundreds more joined in the course of the ongoing event. The enthusiasm was infectious. Late one evening Honor Harger and Adam Hyde of radioqualia arrived by taxi from Ljubljana as they did not wish to miss their broadcast in Linz. On Tuesday evening the long night of broadcasting lasted till early next morning, while earlier Tuesday evening at the Soiree, presenting remote hook-ups, conference calls, concerts, and performances – online, onsite, on air -festival visitors as well as remote audiences could fully experience the sounds of Open Air -A Radiotopia,
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Search, a workshopping discussion and collaborative project originated from Johannesburg and Capetown, South Africa. The project has been developed by the Trinity Session group: Kathryn Smith, Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter and has been realized in collaboration with the Southern African New Media Art Network.
A year and a half ago, on my visit to South Africa, Marcus has told me about the emerging new media and digital culture scene, including ”sanman” plans. At that time, some activities and exhibitions have already taken place, but it still looked like if pragmatic realization of these interesting but seemingly far flung ideas would be further ahead in the future. Surely, it is a sign of the rapidly developing digital culture in South Africa that one could experience firsthand a fully operational workshop with nine participants at Unplugged.
”Four
months ago -told me Marcus- we began to discuss with Gerfried about the
South African digital landscape. What does digital mean in South Africa?”
It means a wide range of things from the popular music scene to web/print
design all of which incorporate digital tools. The discussions led to
the invitation of Search. The aim of the project is to chart the
different resources, interesting participants as a broad concept in South
Africa. The nine member teams, including Marcus and Stephen came to Ars
following a 3 months residency. Each team member is a professional in
his/her ownright.
Some of the team members are more established, some are young and upcoming.
Their expertise ranges from corporate design, through journalism to online
activism. Stephen Hobbs is an urban investigator, Marcus is focused on
the art environment. The eclectic interest of the Team include pop music,
street culture, pop culture, videos, sound art and many other things.
The Ars Electronica residency started with a two day workshop by reacting creatively to the differences and similarities between South Africa and Austrian Linz. Videos and stills were captured, sounds and texts recorded -the often complimentary, sometimes clashing results were all reworked and uploaded in the emerging collaborative website. In the last three days the participants were busy to develop a platform to take home. Many issues were discussed, such as the points to be defined for a build-on digital environment. What type of communication approach should be used for effective results? Considerations of a list of people to invite were discussed. All these different factors were mapped out and brought together. Surprisingly by the end of Ars, a rough business plan for the next 6 months emerged, including how to help communication and exchange towards a sustainable future.
”There are many brilliant ideas for community building -told me Marcus- but people seldom follow through. In South Africa, most of us live and working separate communities, Search was an opportunity to operate within a larger context, and present a mix of elitist and pop culture. In addition to develop our own workshop experience our aim was to tell people informally what South Africa is about. There might not have been enough feedback as it was difficult, perhaps even alienating for the audience that they couldn’t engage. But it is an ongoing process…”
Open Air – Radiotopia, and Search were linked in more than one way. On Tuesday, September 10, local Johannesburg sound artists contributed to the Radiotopia broadcast. Beyond this active contribution there were many informal connections – all in the nature of collaborative process based work.