Waves – the art of deconcealment

This text is my first attempt to reflect some of the issues arising from the two Waves exhibitions. The exhibitions in Riga (2006) and Dortmund (2008) were conceived as research projects. By looking at waves as "a principle material and medium of art" the exhibitions were made with an outlook on building a bottom-up, materialist theory of media art.

This text was written for the peer reviewed publication Spectropia. Acoustic Space. Liepaja: MPLab, RIXC. No. 7, 2008. Special thanks to Zita Joyce for her thoughtful comments and editing work. Thanks to Douglas Kahn for comments.

Introduction

The discovery of electromagnegic (EM) waves, and the understanding and mastering of their mathematical and technical foundations, has facilitated the building of a 'global'1, electromagnetic society. Applications of em are manifold, ranging from broadcast media radio and tv, to remote sensing techniques such as radar, to medical and scientific usages of the spectrum. While artists were keen on exploring the new electromagnetic medium from the beginning [Kahn,Whitehead 1992], the biggest attention has been given to the electronic mass media of radio and tv2 [McLuhan 1964, Barbrook 2007]. The problems of mass media and propaganda have shaped political history for almost 100 years. Mass media culture, once dubbed the 'consciousness industries' [Enzensberger 1996], has been the place of struggle over political, social, and economic domination. With so much attention on electronic mass media, other issues concerning the electromagnetic society have been sidelined. Only now, as new wireless communication and data networks are blossoming, are societies slowly becoming aware of how dense the 'electromagnetic jungle', which surrounds us and passes through us, is becoming. Concerns over the health impact of mobile phones and mobile phone masts are rising. The fact that the electromagnetic basis of society has been neglected in discourses on society and mass media and media art, as well as generally in social understanding, became the starting point for the Waves exhibition project. The field of media art has been troubled by its fascination with the surfaces, the user interfaces based on machinery built for consumer culture, and the audiovisual stimuli of a 'spectacular' mediascape. The underlying structures - the waves - have been ignored not just in society but also by the mainstream of media art. The postulation that waves are the “principle material and medium of art" for the first Waves exhibition in Riga signalled a 'stepping behind' the commodified user interfaces of today's mass media culture. The exhibition was conceived as a tool to build a new theory of media art, to cast a fresh look at the whole field via the 'prism' of waves. Artists, by engaging directly with waves through their self-built systems, are circumventing the hegemonic mass media system to engage with 'primary sources'. EM waves have different properties on different wavelengths of the spectrum. As art works engage with those different properties on different wavelengths, they deconceal their scientific, technical, political, commercial and cultural content. Works of waves art are those that use waves 'directly', and not just as a carrier of information. Artists, by engaging with flows of electricty and energy, make the audience see, hear, feel, and engage with those realities that are normally excluded from human perception. The work of the artists exposes the reality of those layers – they inform about and contextualise our relationships with the em aspects of the world.

The Waves concept enabled a different viewpoint on a wide range of artistic practices which had until then been scattered across other media and categories, such as sound art, as the first Waves exhibition in Riga [Waves 2006] showed. The continuation and expansion of that theme in Dortmund [Waves 2008] under the new subtitle of "the art of electromagnetic society", show that there is still a lot of ground to be covered in this area. This text is a first attempt to take stock of some of the original intentions behind making these exhibitions and what they offer in terms of developing a new vocabulary, or even grammar, of media art. I am proposing to look at the art works in the Waves project as speculative objects, works that make possible a deeper intellectual engagement with the artistic and social dimensions of the electromagnetic force.

Anthony McCall: Fighting "Monopolies of Consciousness"

Anthony McCall became first known for his 'solid light films' [Joseph, Walley 2005] in the 1970s. He produced a series of 7 works which dealt with the light beam of the projector directly, rather than emphasising the projection of an image through film on a screen. This work, exactly because of its 'simplicity' and precision, reveals key ideas and positions that are relevant to the Waves project. McCall's most well known work is Line Describing a Cone (1973); when it was first realised a 16 mm projector was used to send a strong light beam3, starting as a single point and slowly growing to a cone of light. The 'content’ of the film is not the projection of a flat image of a screen as in conventional film, in which 'meaning' is derived from a representation of the moving image, but the gradual creation of a space with which the viewer gets directly involved.

Illustration 1: Doubling Back (2003 - 2006), Anthony McCall, Photo: McCall

While the genre of the interactive digital art [Brouwer, Mulder et al. 2007] installation claims to get the audience involved in the creation of the piece, it does so often on the basis of a very narrow set of choices for the 'user' of the art work. Often, the whole 'interaction' is defined by the artist (or the software, or the technician) and the user has to 'learn' in which way s/he is actually supposed to 'interact' with the work. In McCall's work nothing is 'interactive' in that sense, yet the viewer gets involved and participates in the creation of the artwork on a much deeper level [Ballard 2007].
The Waves exhibition included McCall’s new work Doubling Back (2003), which continues the project of the solid light films. Here, two intersecting waves slowly move towards and then again apart from each other. The movement is so slow that at first it is hardly noticeable but over time creates very complex spaces. Artificial fog from a modern type of fog machine (using tiny drops of water and not dry ice as its source) makes the space created by the two slowly moving lines almost tangible. The changing relationships between the lines in the otherwise completely darkened room challenge the perception of the user. Often, people will stretch out their hands to feel if the light beams actually can be felt, if they offer any resistance. It is also very much part of the intention of the author that people would move around in the projection space and set their bodies in relation to the changing spatial patterns created by the moving light beams. As Anthony McCall has explained solid light films are 'dealing with the projected light-beam itself rather than treating it as a carrier of coded information' [Dasgupta 1977, 51], as the artist carries out his own act of 'stepping behind'4. Going one layer behind, relieves the burden of representation from the work:

"The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real-time (in contrast, most films allude to a past time). It contains no illusion, it is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e. the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential." [ibid, 52]

The facilitation of this 'primary experience' however, is not motivated by any 'intrinsic interest in formal light geometries', just as the Waves exhibition is not motivated by any intrinsic interest in 'pure waves science'5. Artistic research has its own set of values which can but must not overlap with 'science and art' as we know it. Rather than the emergence of 'pure form' McCall was/is interested in facilitating the self-'empowerment' of the audience by 'attacking the notion of the audience [...] another culturally approved form of passivity" [ibid, 55]. He considered 'art as a tool for constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing current ideological and cultural sets' [ibid, 56]. The way he does this is not by spreading explicit political messages, but by questioning the conventions of the medium. In Long Film For Four Projectors, a work of six hours' duration, he uses time to give the members of the audience the possibility to find their own viewpoints; people are free to enter and leave the work at in their own time. The work of McCall is based on a critique of 'participation' art as a "token gesture" [ibid, 59], and a society based on a consumer culture with inherent social divisions between producers and consumers. While the work is 'open' in the sense of Umberto Eco's [Eco 2006] demand for an open art work, and it encourages the participation of the viewer, it does not reduce the viewer to a laboratory rat engaged in a multiple choice experiment. The work is, in the words of the artist "didactic, authoritative", comprising "professional statements formally constructed to question things", and remaining "closed off, definitive" [Dasgupta 1977, 56]. Because 'empowerment' of the audience in the utopian tradition of avant-garde movements is a key objective of the artist, he avoids the patronising rhetoric of 'inclusion'. The minimalist and intellectual 'composition' of the works facilitates participation as an open act of enagegement. The works become speculative objects, things to think with, which deconceal the ideological content of, in this context, film and the projection machinery. In the 'durational' work, the repetition of simple elements is shared over 4 projectors that each at times use the same material, but at different speeds and in almost random relation to each other; time and space as homogenous and universal entities are broken up and become individual6. However, the aesthetic and formal perfection of the work is also its potential weakness, as the work, within the culture industry that is the contemporary art exhibition circuit, can also be perceived as 'merely beautiful'7. The political objective and effect of a work do not necessarily coincide.

Science and 'Waves' – at the margins of the real

The Maxwell equations and the experimental verification of the existence of electromagnetic waves by Heinrich Hertz made Einstein's Relativity theory possible [Greene 2004]. In the sequence of events, first Relativity Theory, and then the not so unproblematic8 [Whitaker 1996] arrival of quantum mechanics, shattered Newtonian physics and taught us to understand that the 'truth' about the universe is counterintuitive, that the rules governing the macro world which we inhabit are not what we had thought they were, and that they are incompatible with the 'laws' governing the microworld of atoms and quarks. In a probabilistic universe, does 'god throw the dice'9 or not? The existence of the universe was an extremely improbable thing to happen, yet our existence is evidence that it did. How can we know we exist? Not through the 'mind-in-vat trying to gain some objective knowledge of the world 'out there' through the power of mathematics and geometry', argues Bruno Latour [Latour 1999, 4–5], not through that 'false epistemological settlement, [one] that treats consciousness as a tool to fend off the rule of the mob' [ibid, 13]. Once 'objective knowledge' came from the skies to oppress self-rule by the multitude [Bachelard 2001]. But science, as it started to know more, suddenly looked less omniscient.The findings of Relativity Theory and quantum mechanics are not just great breakthroughs towards a new scientific understanding of the universe, they are also surprising 'hard' scientific evidence for the possibility of human freedom [Castoriadis 1976]. The more critical scholarly work is undertaken, the more clearly we can see the links between deterministic concepts of nature and totalitarian religious or philosophic and political doctrine. The 'swinging' atoms with their unexpected quantum leaps come to the rescue of liberatory political ideologies from the grassroots democratic spectrum. At the scale of the individual very small 'particle' or 'quantum' we are faced with indeterminacy. As we engage with those non-humans, i.e. 'forces of nature' or so called 'scientific facts' [Latour 1999], they are being socialised, and their social, political, economic and artistic connotations are being revealed. Science historically 'produced' nature as its subject, a lifeless, dead nature [Hayles 1998]. Nowadays such universal models are taken apart, deconstructed [Weber 2001]. Science becomes visible as a historically contingent activity by humans10. The disciplinarian and authoritarian framework of science gets deconstructed through science studies, but also through media artists 'doing science studies' dirty work' as I have postulated elsewehere11. Media artists carry out the dirty work of science studies by socialising Latour's 'factoids' and by opening spaces for political, social and philosophical speculative thought, through their concrete work.

The Electromagnetic Sculpture

As we have seen with Anthony McCall's work, the relationships of simple and concise geometric forms, changing over time, create a 'relational' [Bourriaud 2002] artwork which needs the participation of the viewer to get 'produced'. Both Joyce Hinterding and Franz Xaver deal with another type of relationship and proportionality, that of the antenna. The antenna is a unique class of object because it acts as an intermediary between the world of 3-dimensional objects and the world of electromagnetic waves. Because of the way the world is physically shaped there is a relationship between the wave, its frequency and wavelength, and the physical properties of an object12. Any object made of conductive material resonates when it is placed within an electromagnetic field. If the object has the right proportions, it resonates with waves of a specific wavelength. The most simple example is a piece of wire:

"If the length of the wire exactly corresponds to the distance the wave needs from one end to the other, then exactly one single wave is situated in this wire. With the feed-in at the right location, the zero points of this wave are located at the beginning and the end of this wire" [Xaver In: Waves 2008].

The wire acquires a 'natural oscillation' and a 'standing wave' is created. What works with a simple wire antenna works with electrically conductive materials shaped in other ways as well. There exists a link between the material and the proportions of an object, which are properties classically associated with sculpture, and the capacity of the same object to send and receive waves, a property normally ascribed to a technical apparatus or machine. The Austrian artist Franz Xaver thinks that through this connection between form and formlessness, between the 'Hertzian space' of waves and the physical, analogue dimensions of objects embodied in the antenna, the 'artificial divisions' between visual arts and media arts can be overcome. Whereas traditionally fine artists deal with objects, paintings or sculptures, media artists deal with flows of energy and electromagnetic fields. Historically those differences have contributed to the separating out of different artistic genres. Whereas sculpture was primarily concerned with space [Krauss 1981], electromagnetic art forms are usually subsumed under the time based arts. There is a widespread perception that this contributes to the problems media art has in finding acceptance. This must not be so, says Franz Xaver [Waves 2008], because the antenna is the link between the world of static objects and the world of flows, as the antenna has agency in both domains.

To make this point Xaver has created a 'painting' using conductive silver paint. The work, called 433 MHz (1993), consists of a black canvas on which straight silver lines have been painted. The length of the lines has been calculated to correspond to the wavelength of 433 MHz. This frequency belongs to a so called ISM band, one of a range of frequencies which are licence exempt and can be used as a waves 'commons' for industrial, scientific and medical applications. This particular frequency, 433 MHz, is used for instance by baby monitors and wireless keys such as car keys, as well as wireless microphones. When waves of that frequency pass through that painting, it starts to 'swing', as the painting gets charged with energy.

llustration 2: 433 Mhz, Conductive Silver on Canvas

Joyce Hinterding has created a similar work Oscillators (1995), using three sound producing drawings. Here, graphite lines on paper are wired into a solar cell and a simple speaker/transistor. The changing light conditions and the patterns of the drawings determine the sounds produced. "What more traditional and time-honoured mode of artistic production?" exclaims Ann Finegan in a catalogue essay about Hoyce Hinterding's work [Finegan 1995]. Indeed, Franz Xaver's postulation, that the properties of the antenna transcend the false dichotomy between fine arts and media arts, gets confirmed through Hinterding's work.

Heidegger and the machine

Joyce Hinterding's series of works under the title Aeriology combines the properties of a sculpture and of a 'machine'. In one particular work of that title, Hinterding uses 20 km of copper wire to create a large coil. This coil is both a beautiful object that can be perceived as a 'sculpture' in the classical sense, and an 'untuned antenna' that picks up all sorts of frequencies and static 'from the air' and charges itself with energy through resonance. Ann Finegan describes in vivid words her first reaction to this art work:

"Aeriology: when I enter into the space of the gallery I am confronted by a machine. At first I may fail to read it; [...] I see a sculpture; perhaps a writing or a graphic; I don't at first see the machine. My eye has not been trained to view this coil of wire as a machine, much less as an energy gatherer." [Finegan 1995]

Illustration 3: Purple Rain, Hinterding and Haines, 2006

Finegan then continues to describe the artwork in language inspired by Heidegger, as a 'deconcealment'13. The work of artists such as Hinterding and Xaver does indeed deconceal something. Despite problems with Heideggerian 'essentialist ontologies'14 [Habermas, McCumber 1989], I have decided to use the term but try to strip it off 'Heideggerianism'. It is a common trait of Waves artists to make accessible, audible, visible the world of electromagnetic waves, and to open up important issues related to that. The waves are made to 'speak' to us15 without having to be essentialised in the Heideggerian way. I propose to understand the term deconcealment in a manner that is closer to what Brecht did with the V effect: 'deconcealment' in the sense of laying bare the workings of the theatre machine that creates the illusion; deconcealment also in the tradition of critical art forms since the beginning of modernity that seek to 'enlighten' the audience under a broad emancipatory framework [cf. Bourriaud 1998], and finally, deconcealment as the work of the artist who creates relationships with a world for which we have no sense organs.

As humans we do not have organs with which we could participate in the sphere of waves except for the relatively narrow band of visible light and heat. Therefore we need aerials to connect us to Hertzian spaces. For Joyce Hinterding, making her own aerials is a way of interacting with the forces of nature and 'tuning'16 into frequencies. In her conference talk at the Waves conference, Riga 200617, she described spending time in the open spaces of Tasmania or the Australian interior where there is comparatively little electrosmog. Hinterding works with em frequencies in the very low range -- so called Very Low Frequencies (VLFs) [Kahn 2008], which occur naturally and are triggered by lightning from thunderstorms. Very Low Frequency waves get reflected by the earth's ionosphere and because of that can travel around the world. Hinterding considers her Aeriology work as research, a 'science of the ethereal', as Finegan calls it [Finegan 1995]. While she uses electronic equipment similar to that used by scientists, Hinterding insists that her research is based on a different episteme, that of art. Scientists and engineers are concerned with exact measurments and increased efficiency, but for artists, carrying out those works is another type of speculative thought18. Artistic practice is both enabled by and in turn facilitates speculative thinking about the work that only becomes possible through that practice. While scientists conduct experiments to verify theories19 [Feyerabend 1988], and have to make measurements and generate 'data' to create intersubjective knowledge, artistic research can be carried out without 'hard data'. The practice enables intellectual speculation, it propels the artist onto another mental state or 'plateau'.

The work shown by Hinterding at Waves together with David Haines, Purple Rain, uses the energy received by an antenna to modulate and interfere with a 'romantic' image, a computer animation of an avalanche endlessly falling off a mountain range. Here, the "noise transmissions, normally silenced in TV," are amplified and allowed "to dominate in order to yield a physical experience of the electromagnetic force behind the broadcast image" [Hinterding, Haines In: Waves 2008]. The work reveals the strong electromagnetic force that is emitted by radio and TV transmitters, and refers also to a concern with the ecology of em waves. The antenna, a resonator, a special kind of object which sits at the margins of the real, acting as instrument, tool, sensor, machine, yet also art work, an intermediary of different forms of existence, which allows us to 'feel' electromagnetic fields and energy differences, just like pressure swings in the atmosphere, as the missing link between sculpture and more fluid practices, is also the focus in Franz Xaver's work.

Beyond the 'information society'

Illustration 4: Hydrogen, Franz Xaver, with Visitor leaning, Photo: unknown

Franz Xaver began to produce kinetic sculptures in the late 1970s, which lead him soon to work with computers and computer networks. In and around 1993 and 1994 he saw 'the utopian horizon of his interpretation of media art being realised by Linux and the internet which forced him to rethink his strategies'20. He built his own Radiotelescope, RT03, placed on the Austrian countryside near Linz and powered by a solar panel. RT03 tunes into the frequency of Hydrogen, the basic building block of the universe21. Hydrogen was created shortly after the Big Bang and from it came, in the long run, all the other elements, molecules, stars and planets. Hydrogen keeps floating through the universe22, and expanding with the universe. In Xaver's work, the radiation received from space is turned into an audio signal. This signal is being streamed live via the internet into the exhibition space. At Waves Dortmund, the audio signal could be listened to via speakers which were embedded in a large white wooden cube in such a way that the black speakers looked like the eyes of a dice. Referring to Einstein's famous dictum that 'God does not play dice', the work carried the subtitle 'yet he does (play dice),' referring to the formation of atoms and molecules out of the superhot mixture of matter and anti-matter in a completely shapeless and random state, shortly after the Big Bang.

The work puts the viewer into a relationship with outer space. The radio waves do not just come from deep space but also from deep back in time: despite travelling with the speed of light it took them a lot of time to arrive. Creating expanded electromagnetic sculptures whose size can only be described in millions of lightyears allows the artist, Xaver says, to keep a perspective on this world. As an artist, or indeed, a human being, he needs to be able to make value judgements23. Being constantly embedded in the webs of signs and relationships that constitute the current information society, it was impossible, he says, to have a 'perspective on' society. Extending the notion of 'sculpture' into outer spaces makes it possible to put the information society into its place: the installation in Riga carried a little handwritten note that asked "what is the internet compared with 10 Million years of radio history?" Do-it-yourself radio astronomy is an attempt by the artist to create a 'work' in a classic artistic sense. The sculpture, by being very 'long'-- millions of lightyears long -- confronts the audience with a deep relationship with the universe. As the electromagnetic sculpture propels the viewer into outer space it enables a reassesment of the here and now in the socalled 'information society'24
.

The workshop "demons in the aether" by Martin Howse [Howse 2008, In: Spectropia. Acoustic Space No. 7], held at Waves, Dortmund, also dealt with the relationship between wave and form. Small radio receivers were built by the participants to explore EM spaces and record 'demons' in the wireless medium25. As in Franz Xavers's Hydrogen (1993 - 2008), and Joyce Hinterding's Aeriology (1995 - 2008), the works deal directly with changing power patterns of em fields, translating them into sound to create an em 'mapping' of the environment26. The practical work is linked to a theoretical discourse about 'demons' (EM bodies), Robert Clark Maxwell, and the 'aether', which was once assumed necessary for the waving of waves, then declared non-existent, and now reinstated through the backdoor [Howse 2008, Greene 2004]. Artists such as Franz Xaver, Joyce Hinterding, Martin Howse and his workshop group use their own aerials and self-built equipment when listening to Very Low Frequencies (VLF). This DIY aspect and the direct relationship it enables with EM as material is an important aspect when it comes to the formulation of a new theoretical approach to artistic practices using technology.

But not just artists use VLF, known to enthusiasts also as 'natural radio'. According to radio art expert Douglas Kahn, who has worked extensively on this subject, early telephone and telegraphy engineers spent hours at night listening to VLF sound phenomena, as long distance phone lines also can pick up VLFs. At first they thought they were picking up 'aether music' [Kahn 2008]27.

The Austrian artist Udo Wid also has a long history of work with VLF and also Extreme Low Frenquencies (ELF), yet coming from a slightly different angle.

Illustration 5: Udo Wid, asked everyone to lie down for the opening ceremony of his "Deceleration Point".

Wid started his career as a scientist working in theoretical physics and chemistry. He still occasionally contributes to academic journals. However, already 30 years ago the way that science 'questions' nature became too narrow for him and he started do develop his own strand of research. One long term project that Wid is carrying out is concerned with ELFs, which are waves even longer than VLFs and which are said to have an influence on our pysche. ELFs are, like VLF, triggered by ligtning and travel around the world, being reflected by the ionosphere. The space between the surface of the earth and the ionosphere serves as a cavity resonator with a wavelength is equal to the circumference of the earth, which produces the frequency 7.8 Hz, called a 'Schumann resonance'28, which happens to be the same frequency as alpha waves in the human brain. In a public park in Dortmund Wid installed a Deceleration Point, a small low powered radio transmitter powered by a small solar cell, all concealed behind unbreakable glass and protected by a piece of plastic pipe sunk into the earth. Passers by were invited to lie down on the grass and allow their brains to be tuned into alpha waves, thereby slowing them down and getting into a state to receive new ideas [Wid 2008, In: Waves 2008]. The point is not whether Wid actually influences the brain waves of passers by, but the imaginary he develops, which is as much around his gesture of making 'donations' to cities as about the very weak 8 Hz signal (which does not really influence anything or anyone). Wid has 'donated' such Deceleration Points now to a number of cities, each time placed very consciously at a specific venue, for instance next to Trinity College, Dublin, where Erwin Schroedinger held his famous lecture on What is Life (1944)29 [Reichle 2005]

For the long term project When ELFs Sing (1994 – 2008) Wid created reception stations for ELFs in remote areas where there is as little electrosmog as possible30, and carried out long term measurements trying to find corresponding patterns between ELF emissions and psychological states of being. Because of his scientific background Wid is well aware of the fact that it is near impossible to establish any causal link between ELFs and the psychological internal states and cognitive functions of humans. We are very complex beings, and our moods depend on so many things that it is very hard for 'proper' science to establish conditions under which an experiment could show anything. For artists, however, there are no such off-limits zones. For more than one year Wid lived in a little log cabin in a very remote forest area of Austria to conduct his daily ELF measurements. Later he fed them through a graphical computer software which interpreted the data through a cellular automata [Wid (s.a.)] algorithm to produce abstract graphics in correlation to the recorded measurements. Again, the artist does not suggest a strong link but leaves it to the audience to decide if there are such links at all.

Conclusions

Since Einstein's Special Relativity Theory in 1905 – the year of Malevitch's Black Square and the sailor's revolt in Kronstadt – artists have felt compelled to go "behind": to step further and further back and reveal new layers of reality. There is no such thing as 'pure science', as waves of science studies authors and philosophers of science have shown since Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend [1988]. The scientific theory (or 'fact') immediately affects the social world and vice versa. Theories about the 'true nature' of the physical world are influenced by the social system which forms the humus for those theories. In 'relational' artworks [Bourriaud 2002] the 'social interventions' carried out by artists are burdened by an 'as if'. The intervention is both real and unreal, but fundamentally it is possible only within the reference system of the art world, which has reached a post-conceptual conceptualism. The artworks of artists in the Waves exhibition can exist with much more self-confidence than the works of neo-conceptualism, as they can rely on immanence as well as context. The electromagnetic sculptures of Franz Xaver, Joyce Hinterding, Udo Wid, et al, combine the traditional values of art and craft, as Ann Finegan writes. The 'workliness' [Finegan 1995, paraphrasing Heidegger in 1970s] of the work combines 'work' and 'effect'31. The 'works', results of a manual and intellectual effort by the artists, are dealing with 'real' forces, with flows of energies, with 'effects' in the physical world as well as within social systems32. The Waves art works have left metaphor behind. They are not 'representations' of something, the artist does not behave 'as if' s/he was a scientist. The artists are conducting inquiries of their own, unlimited by science's reductionism. Although the artists do not try to get 'objective data' as the scientists do (or pretend to do), they need to be convinced of the validity of their own data. To that end they can not rely on black box commodities produced by corporations. They need to build their own DIY antennas to feel the particles rearranging and energy flowing between their fingers33. As the artists 'go out' (into the bush, into the cabin log, a remote research station, but also into the 'electronic jungle' that is the contemporary 'Maxwell City'34
) they discover new spaces for thinking. Going out into isolation, the reduction of the possibilities in an isolated situation35 opens new spaces around 'speculative objects'. The presence of such objects imbues us with special powers, like talking with non-humans [Latour 1999], such as EM waves, about things that we have in common with them. The works are not actors who pretend to be something else, they are, what they are. Waves are actually emitted from, and received with, pieces of metal, and sounds are captured. Through their 'truthfulness' the works can at the same time be speculative. While the scientist 'queries' nature, as in a court case, to hear 'nothing but the truth,' the artist asks 'nature to open its eyes' [Habermas 1968] and speak back and allow a dialogue with 'physis' (Greek)36.
.
As the artists seek to conduct their own inquiries together with nature they also display a form of respect for people which compares positively with the patronising attitude of the broadcast system and the limited options of multiple-choice consumer society. The works offer deeper and more open forms of engagement and participation than many of the supposedly 'interactive' computer art works which have enjoyed privileged attention in the media art world for so long. As exhibition visitors stroll around Franz Xaver's cube they have to think about what they see and hear; attracted by curiosity, held back by fear of the unknown -- when they are told they can listen to 'outer space' -- visitors slowly overcome their reservations and get closer and closer to the object until they put their ears to the speakers, not only to listen to, but maybe also feel, sounds coming from light-years away and ago. Similar processes can be observed in the way people react to McCall's or Hinterding's work. Rather than a narrowly defined interaction, participation of the full person, from head to toe, with body and mind, is asked for. The rules of engagement are quite open, compared to the rules bound behaviour of computer based interactions. The member of the audience is taken seriously as a potential co-conspirator against the media monopolies and technopolitical domination by state and corporations. Since the technical threshold of participation is low (radios can be built cheaply and quickly out of a few easy to get parts), the exhibition is an encouragement for people to become active themselves, rather than to stand in awe at the 'artistry' of the professionals. The presentation of waves works in exhibition spaces compares favourably to the stereotype of the typical media arts exhibition with many monitors and computers. For Waves artworks often no computers are needed either to produce or present the work, so the 'office equipment' character of typical media art installations is avoided, and many works do not even need screens, as there is a spatial or temporal dimension to them. As people engage with the works, and as new layers of reality are unveiled, the works gain another dimension. Because of their 'radical realism' [Bourriaud 1998], because they are 'truthful' insofar as real and not fake matter flows through those circuits, the works are often janus-headed, looking in different directions, exploring parallel universes at the same time. The works are significant as 'real' or 'symbolic only' overlays, as works often exist in a dual state of being, as bare acts [Sarai Reader 2005] or as speculative objects, as real or as mythical. After deconcealment, the work closes in on itself again and leaves us wondering anew, under a sky wide open.

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Hayles Katherine N. Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.

Heidegger Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art. In: Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, and In: Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row, 1977/1993.

Hinterding Joyce, Haines David. Purple Rain (Broadcast Delay). In: Waves. The Art of the Electromagnetic Society. Ed. by Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Armin Medosch, Rasa Šmite, Raitis Šmits, Inke Arns. Dortmund: HMKV/Kettler, 2008.

Howse Martin. The aether and its double. In: Spectropia. Acoustic Space. Liepaja: MPLab, RIXC. No. 7, 2008.

Joseph Branden W., Walley Jonathan. Anthony McCall: the Solid Light Films and Related Works. Ed. by Christopher Eamon. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 2005.

Kahn Douglas, Whitehead Gregory. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

Kahn Douglas. Joyce Hinterding and parasitic possibility. In: Re-inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art. Ed. by Heidi Grundmann et. al. Frankfurt: Revolver, 2008, pp. 435–448.

Krauss Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
Latour Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press 1999.
McLuhan Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Reichle Ingeborg. Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience. Wien; New York: Springer, 2005.

Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts. Ed. by Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Geert Lovink. Delhi: Sarai/Center for the Studies of Developing Societies, 2005.

Tuters Marc. Blog, 2006

Waves. Electromagnetic Waves as Material and Medium of Art. Ed. by Rasa Šmite, Armin Medosch, Daina Siliņa. Acoustic Space, No. 6. Riga: RIXC, 2006.

Waves. The Art of the Electromagnetic Society. Ed. by Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Armin Medosch, Rasa Šmite, Raitis Šmits, Inke Arns. Dortmund: HMKV/Kettler, 2008.

Weber Jutta. Umkämpfte Bedeutungen: Natur im Zeitalter der Technoscience. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2003.

Whitaker Andrew. Einstein, Bohr, and the Quantum Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Wid Udo. Deceleration Point. In: Waves. The Art of the Electromagnetic Society. Ed. by Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Armin Medosch, Rasa Šmite, Raitis Šmits, Inke Arns. Dortmund: HMKV/Kettler, 2008.

Wid Udo. Forschungen: Exhibition Catalogue. Berlin: Galerie Unwahr, (s.a.).
Xaver Franz. Wave and form. In: Waves. The Art of the Electromagnetic Society. Ed. by Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Armin Medosch, Rasa Šmite, Raitis Šmits, Inke Arns. Dortmund: HMKV/Kettler, 2008.

• 1. I would like to be careful with the use of the word 'global' as global communications, traffic and interchanges have occurred for a long time. And as electricity and electromagnetism are natural forces they have shaped this world for as long as it has existed, however a global society in a specific sense (as capitalist and based on the industrial revolution) started in the mid 19th century with telegraph and later radio.
• 2. See on this point the impact of Marshall McLuhan's theory in Understanding media: extensions of man [McLuhan 1964] and the legacy of McLuhanism [Barbrook 2007].
• 3. Nowadays digital projectors are used and the source file is a digital film as well, but that does not have a strong impact on the meaning of the art work.
• 4. McCall uses this phrase in Dasgupta 1977.
• 5. As Marc Tuters implied in his blog [Tuters 2006]
• 6. We become carriers of our own space-time, which is actually a consequence of relativity theory and quantum mechanics that is not so well known [cf. Greene 2004].
• 7. My emphasis [McCall, Dasgupta 1977, 59], Anthony McCall suffered from the gap between the political intention and the political effect of the work so much that he gave up doing the solid light films, and only recently returned to the art circuit [cf. Joseph, Walley 2005].
• 8. Waves based relativity theory and quantum mechanics at first did not go down well with each other, an argument known as the Einstein Bohr debate [cf. Whitaker 1996].
• 9. An expression attributed to Einstein, who disliked the probability in quantum mechanics. [cf. Whitaker 1996]
• 10. As opposed to claims that science is 'objective'. The epistemological framework of religion, whereby a deity serves as organisational principle in the world, was replaced by science, whereby the deity was simply substituted by 'laws of nature'. Such a naive belief in the 'realism' of science amounts to the construction of science as an ideology, as scientism, granting it a privilege of knowing which cannot be contested by 'social' claims [cf. Habermas 1968].
• 11. In a text about Ambienttv.net (2009)
• 12. In physics wavelength is signified through the Greek character (Lambda). The wavelength of an electromagnetic wave is the result of the speed of light divided by the frequency. For instance, the frequency on which wireless LAN operates is 2.4 Gigahertz. 300 000 / 2400 000 = 0.125 km or 12.5 cm. To transmit or receive at this wavelength, the length of an antenna needs to be λ/2 = 6.25 cm or multiples of it. [Waves 2006]
• 13. "From the undifferentiated matter of the earth's concealing (of materials as diverse as leather, or stone, or clay), the artist's techne deconceals, reveals the knowing in the work" referring to Heidegger's The Question of Technology [cf. Keltner 2001 in Finegan 1995].
• 14. I think the intellectual rehabilitation, in recent decades, of Heidegger via France is problematic. There is not only the question of whether he was a Nazi – this has been clearly answered, yes, he was – but also whether his philosophy as such carries a 'totalitarian' bug: the approach behind Heideggerian 'ontologies' may itself be prone to 'essentialisms' close to blood and soil ideologies. [cf. Habermas, McCumber 1989].
• 15. In the sense of Latour [Latour 1999], as dialogues between humans and non-humans.
• 16. Interview with Ina Zwerger, ORF Ö1, Matrix.
• 17. Audio recording, unpublished, archive of RIXC.
• 18. See also McCall on that matter, who says something like that the value of art is the speculation itself rather than the hard data [Dasgupta 1977].
• 19. Which is a simplified version of the basic methodology of natural sciences which has been disputed by Paul Feyerabend (Feyerabend Paul. Against Method. London: Verso, 1988).
• 20. Paraphrasing Franz Xaver, from an interview with the author, 2006, unpublished.
• 21. See catalogue text for waves exhibition
• 22. Among scientists, the radiation coming from Hydrogen is discussed according to its wavelength of 21 cm: "The 21-cm line of atomic hydrogen was detected in 1951, first at Harvard University followed within a few weeks by others. The discovery demonstrated that astronomical research, which at that time was limited to conventional light, could be complemented with observations at radio wavelengths, revealing a range of new physical processes." See uplink.space and Wikipedia .
• 23. Interview with the author, 2006, unpublished.
• 24. I consider the 'information society' an ideological term which has to be contested, for instance through reference to the electromagnetic society, a term which I have proposed for „Waves“ exhibition in Dortmund, see Medosch 2008.
• 25. Cf. report by workshop participant Lindsay Brown
• 26. The workshop also corresponds to the Mini FM project, insofar as small radios can be built by everyone. Cf. Kogawa Tetsuo. A Radioart Manifest. In: Spectropia. Acoustic Space. Liepaja: MPLab, RIXC. No. 7, 2008.
• 27. Douglas Kahn discusses phenomena such as 'sferics' (short from atmospherics), 'tweeks', 'whistlers' and 'chorus' in more detail in this volume in his text on Alvin Lucier.
• 28. There are also Schumann resonances on higher frequencies, see Schumann resonances in Wikipedia .
• 29. This by now classic text constructs parallels between biologic life and information, thereby being foundational for the new science of Bioinformatics. [cf. Reichle 2005]
• 30. 30.In cities a big source of electromagnetic pollution is, for instance, power lines.
• 31. This works much better in German as 'Werk' and 'Wirkung'
• 32. Whoever turns on a microwave oven or a red light bulb participates in the discussion about 'open' spectrum and electromagnetic spectrum licensing issues; this aspect is explored further in Priest Julian. The Visual Spectrum. In: Spectropia. Acoustic Space. Liepaja: MPLab, RIXC. No. 7, 2008.
• 33. This is not a fetishisation of craft but a celebration of a specific type of artistic autonomy, which is very different from the more traditional notion of artistic autonomy. The artists need to be in control of the instruments, which they use to engage with nature, they cannot engage middlemen or unseen, abstract 'dead labour'. [cf. Marx 2007]
• 34. Maxwell City was the title of a workshop held by Martin Howse and Erich Berger in Oslo, 2007; documentation available online: .
• 35. The notions of 'isolation' and 'insulation' have been very prominent in Marko Peljhan's work, which is in many ways relevant for this article and the Waves exhibition concept and evaluation, but had to be left out for the sake of brevity of this text. See for instance the by now 'historic' Makrolab homepage.
• 36. Such a dialogue, which transcends the epistemological (and sociological) framework of 'science' in the traditional way could be the beginning of a new, more 'open' type of science that does not deny its link with the social world. Such a science would be at its core philosophical, its realisation the making of 'speculative' art works.

Where the Radio Stops, the Music Begins

Where the Radio Stops,

In 1895, Breuer and Freud published Studies on Hysteria, a seminal account of the development of the first scientific method for analysing the realities of the human mind, which suggested a new way of making inferences from the symbolic forms created in dreams using techniques such as free-association. This same year also saw the development of one of the first motion picture cameras by the Lumiere Brothers. The Cinematograph, a device that acted as a camera, developer and a projector, had its first public demonstration in the form of a twelve-film screening in Paris. The Cinematograph not only pipped Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope to the post as the first publicised machine to enable a ‘cinematic’ event, but also hailed the start of an era of innovative communication, story telling and recording of realities. Thus a new narrative of the anthropological was born, in the moving cultural and social act encased in the archaeological object of film. A key element in this process of encasement was electromagnetism in the form of light. With its interaction, reflection and attenuation on, against or through surrounding objects, light provided the pattern of frequency to allow this recording process to take place. In effect, the moving photographic paper or film had been modulated, a modulation that had witnessed a specific moment in time. For the next half a century, the responsibilities of handling the Cinematograph and other subsequent recorders of social and political relationships, fell into the hands of a select few and in much the same sense as the myth of the artist genius, a myth was created that implied only special types of communicators and journalists should have access to this medium. Post Second World War however, saw the familiarisation with society of the moving image through newsreels, cinema and the television set. With the increased demand for modern expression and a thinking that ran alongside to the American dream1 young people in the 1950’s and 60’s demanded that they be taught the use of the movie camera to record their own individual narratives about the world.

Today the motion picture that once could only be created by film and transparency, is digital. A multitude of easily accessible equipment such as the digital camera, mobile phone or the computer, provide a means of recording personal histories with ever-increasing ease. Now not only imagery can be electronically recorded, but sound and written text. The means of sharing these separate histories has also become commonplace. Email, SMS and Bluetooth are all examples of the way individuals transfer and keep information. As in the days of film where light was modulated into a pattern to create an image, social and political concerns are now carried by radio and microwaves that are manipulated by frequency, amplitude or phase to carry code in the shape of a pattern. Similar to the short paragraph in Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow where the inhabitants of a town mark their every move by unraveling thread wherever they go, today’s inhabitant leaves a modulated thread which is a unique pattern of their journey through life. Thus a saturation of aether space has occurred where threads of personal, sociological, political and military codings exist together; the act of modulation providing the pattern of a history that is sometimes short-lived, but at other times extends outward, traveling through our galaxy forever marking a specific moment in time.

Thus the perceived scale of the spaces we now live within becomes distorted. In parallel to the text Non-Places by Marc Auge, and his description of Supermodernity as a non-place where the ‘capitalist phenomena’ produces a ‘self-contained…logic of excessive information and excessive space’, the electromagnetic spectrum that we inhabit for our communication, work and leisure is expanding with Supermodern overabundance. Internet connections open doors to new landscapes through the mirror2 of the monitor, secret lives exchange communications in textual heavens, housewives draw new social boundaries with the telephone whilst military muscles flex themselves with stealthy anticipation via satellite. Images, words, plans and theories move past each other at nearly three hundred million metres per second facilitated by an ever-increasing expansion of commercial bandwidth. The accumulation of electromagnetic cultural patterning thus has the paradoxical effect of creating an excess of space by the opening of new areas of potential interaction, yet in the same instant making distance appear smaller. Distance in space-time is collapsing, and everything and everyone can enjoy an unparalleled, if disincarnate, proximity. This collapse of distance is not limited to what we immediately experience as ordinary space and time, but includes complex arrangements of knowledge, behavior, values and social structures.3 The proximity of events, social structures and values has the effect of pushing the notion of History further and further towards the present, where an individual can feel his own history intersecting with History, and can imagine that the two are interconnected.4 No longer is History only present on dusty bookshelves that talk of the French Revolution. History is present in the lifetime of the individual. In terms of the microwave and radio sections of the electromagnetic spectrum where communication has its own modulated mark in time, History was created yesterday, an hour ago, or just in the last moment.

This essence of time is crucial in the notion of non-place, as non-place is a place with no identity, a through point such as the airport, where the individual has had no time to bond with others enabling the formation of a community marked by place. The exemplification of a community would be in the monuments it leaves behind and the codified social structures we would normally associate with place, such as the physical interrelation between church and common, signifying the relationship between religion and community. The airport, the station and the autoroute however are all places of the solitary traveler who through itineraries, timetables and other abundant textual instructions, has no time to create his own inscriptions that would indicate a link to other social identities of place. Yet in the electromagnetic spectrum, we see a History where the modulated wave becomes an inscription, a monument in space and time marking that very development of a modern society. Through their unique patterns and interrelations in time, the inscriptions signify a social and cultural relationship that marks specific codified structures relating to identity, society and community. In this sense then, we can view the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that mankind uses for communication as anthropological; a cultural and sociological record, an artifact crafted by its users where modulation signifies that craft. Much like the potter or the toolmaker, the modulator of electromagnetism creates a pattern code onto an object that is at once both being and nothingness, yet is embodied with our experience, our signature, our past. The act of consciousness becomes the act of handling this world of information.5 Therefore taken as a whole, this ‘sea’ of modulated mumblings could be interpreted as an unspecific space, a cultural reservoir and an open take on the classic Jungian notion of the collective consciousness, where reoccurring symbolic archetypes can be randomly accessed; space in the literal sense is a point somewhere between points, and in a phenomenological sense, a space not distinguished by its various places, but by one’s sense of “being”.6 However, in viewing this reservoir in an opposing light and by looking at the unspecific whole as a set of very specific self- contained relationships, a new narrative of the anthropological appears; that is, the moving cultural and social act encased in the archaeological object that is the modulated wave. Thus spaces whose analysis have meaning because they have been invested with meaning7 become places. The electromagnetic spectrum with its modulated monuments of societal relations, identity and History becomes at one with an ethnological tradition that holds an idea of a culture localised in space and time.8 Therefore with our intervention, the self-contained unspecific non-place of the ‘supermodern’ electromagnetic spectrum, can become a place.

the Music Begins.

In 1854, James Bowman Lindsay the Scottish inventor and early pioneer of telegraphy, patented his ideas for underwater telegraphic communication by the use of insulated wires. However, due to the excessive length of wire that his system required, which was almost double that to the stretch of water that was attempting to be crossed, it was superceded by other more practical designs. Lindsay nonetheless continued with his research, and turned his attention to transmitting messages wirelessly through the water, which he was successful in doing over short distances. Nonetheless, over one hundred and fifty years later, man still retains the inability to reliably transmit wirelessly through the water over any great distance. As regards transmissions from the land to underwater vehicles such as submarines, direct wireless communication via conventional radio and microwave frequencies is virtually impossible when the submarine is at working depth, which can be around six hundred metres for nuclear-powered attack submarines. High-powered signals used for many satellite and mobile messaging systems are simply ‘lost’ in salt water as the sea absorbs or attenuates the electric part of the wave. Radio communications broadcast on even the VLF (Very Low Frequency) range have wavelengths that only penetrate the water to between ten to forty metres, depending on the salinity (or conductivity) of the water. This is barely periscope depth for a modern submarine. To get around this problem, previous American and Russian governments developed ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) programmes that were broadcasting at 76-82 Hz enabling a carrier wave of sufficient length to penetrate the water deep enough so that sub-maritime vessels around the world could receive information. However, similar to Bowman Lindsay’s problem in the 1850’s, the amount of land-based wire that was needed to produce waves of this length was phenomenal. As the wavelength for ELF communication was around 3500km, which is a quarter of the earths diameter, the antennae needed to produce such a wave was so vast that the earth itself was used as an antennae by utilizing base-rock formations such as igneous granite. Due to the amount of power required to transmit this form of radio, it was a one-way system only from shore to submarine, where the data rate took the form of a few characters per hour. Needless to say, in the last five years these systems have been scrapped for communication purposes due to economic pressures, and dialogue with submarines now takes the form of a beacon that is dropped into the water telling the sub to surface. However this method is still dependant on a pre-organised itinerary, where the submarine will be known to be in the localised area as the beacon is dropped. In this respect every Captain of the sub-mariner fraternity retains a certain degree of autonomy, as when he and his crew are at their maximum depth of over six hundred metres, they electromagnetically do not exist; the contained world of the supermodern anthropological machine finds its boundary. In the un-contactable world of the deep then, they retain the myth of the sea monster, the stealth of being at one with the sea where every Captain’s name is Nemo and every craft is the Nautilus.9

Thus in the Nautilus or the autonomous vessel of the modern submarine, the theories of place and non-place come back into focus. In his text Non-Places, Auge does not posit a non-place in direct opposition to a place, or suggest that the Supermodern is ‘all-encompassing’. Contrary to a more traditional view where ‘old and new are interwoven’ he describes the condition of Supermodernity as being self-contained where places exist separately and outwith non-place, and likewise the non-place can exist within place. In this self-containment, the submarine has the condition of the Supermodern intrinsicly interwoven into its physical and circumstantial properties. By the very nature of the medium that this vehicle travels through and no matter whether the vessel is of military or commercial concern, movement for a submarine is a necessity and itinerary is always a priority. Complacency is avoided as for every ten metres in increased depth the water pressure increases by one bar, which is one kilogram of weight for every centimetre squared of area.10 Submarines therefore not only have a maximum depth rating but also a collapse depth. A series of continual checks must be made in respect of buoyancy, air, humidity, pressure, fuel, temperature and depth, whereby the actions of these checks have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us: their instructions for use.11 The necessity for these actions are ones of survival and are evident throughout a vehicle where function takes over from form, where space is a necessary constraint. The containees in this working machine live by timetables, shifts, actions and reactions for the protection of their enclosed environment, a protection that requires focus at all times and a focus that allows no other social codifications or individual identities to form. The submariner becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver.12 If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity, will be a non-place.13 Thus in the submarine we see exemplified the classic notion of the Augean non-anthropological, a place that is only traveled through and holds no identity or social codifications that would mark its relationship to place; although the vessel will be occupied by the same inhabitants for months at a time, whilst in the company of the deep, the human submariner will always be the traveler in the non-place of his container.

So the autonomous submarine skirts stealthily around its deepest depth of six hundred metres, electromagnetically invisible in the Twilight Zone14 of the ocean. For a diver at full saturation this depth is probably at the limits of what human physiology could take.15 Standing at the edge of a Moon Pool,16 the threshold between non-space and the other, the diver prepares himself to enter a new world that places him at the centre of a conjunction of space and place. On entering the pool, he is plunged into darkness where all visual representation that would normally provide a sense of scale in relation to self, is absent. Once underwater he is immediately compelled by the sensation of flying, free falling and suspension as he is in his dreams.17 The aquanaut is thus rendered into a space of consciousness, through which his perception restricts the use of space to a sensory experience.18 For that moment, a human in the state of immersion views the subaqua as a sensory space. A space where no relation to anthropological codifications or supermodernity exists, where the mind moves back to notion of the primitive, where interior and exterior are one and the earthly world joins that of the soul.19 However by recognising that a relationship between air, breath and the spirit occurs when the bio/tech unit sustains life in a saturated environment,20 the diver soon snaps back into the realms of non-place. His body as the traveling vehicle, resuming the focus of checks necessary to sustain his life, and returning him to the textual realm of action through instruction. Yet this depth also signifies the edge of a new kind of place, one where another type of frequency attenuates and therefore another form of anthropology exists. From the depths of six hundred to twelve hundred metres, The Deep Sound Channel21 moves through the oceans and around the world, transporting low frequency sound vibrations for thousands of kilometres. In the upper reaches of this channel the diver thus finds himself at the conjunction of three different worlds; one where the space of consciousness merges with the vibrational place of sensory sound, yet is kept in check by the contained non-place of survival. Existence at this meeting point is fleeting, and with the experience of being part of the Deep Sound Channel for just a very short while, the aquanaut returns to his moon pool and the dry seclusion of his vessel.

However, much like electromagnetism in the medium of air, sound in water reverberates for long periods of time providing a poetic view that the sound does not disappear, only gets quieter and quieter. Even though the oceans provide man with a new type of space to conquer, the medium of water that we habitually take for granted, provides us with an undiscovered wealth of possibility. Some say that the special qualities of water extend to electromagnetic and acoustic memory,22 the unique hydrogen bonding of the molecules providing helixical structures23 that trap, record or echo specific frequencies. In a world that is becoming increasingly aquatic through Global Warming, our powers of communication would have to realise, adapt and utilise the very unique qualities of water that could provide new ways of thinking about the modulation and combination of acoustic and electromagnetic wave systems. For the radio transmission that continues forever into deep space marking a point in time, the acoustic reverberates through the oceans forever, celebrating the moment where the radio stops and the music begins.

• 1. The American Dream was/is a belief in hard work and prosperity through which any American could realise their life goals on an equal footing to one another,
• 2. The mirror in Foucault’s Heterotopias: of Other Spaces, was a place between a Utopia and an ‘other’ space. The mirror embodied both of these worlds.
• 3. Novak, M. (1998) Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures and the Loss of Inscription. Accessed 23/03/08
• 4. Auge, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London: New York Pg 29
• 5. Silva, Camile A. (2006) Liquid Architectures: Marcos Novak’s Territory Of Information Information, Visualization (IV’06), Computer Society, IEEE
• 6. Ibid: Martin Heidegger, “Art and Space,” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 121-4.
• 7. Auge, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London: New York Pg 52
• 8. Ibid pg 34
• 9. Captain Nemo is a fictional character in the novel 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne. ‘Nemo’ is Greek for no-one and in the book, Nemo was a self-imposed refugee and vigilante from the rest of society. The Nautilus was his submarine that was independently electrically powered by sodium batteries, the sodium for which was converted from seawater.
• 10. BSAC, (2006) Student Manual, The British Sub Aqua Club
• 11. Auge, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London: New York. Pg 96
• 12. Ibid: Pg 103
• 13. Ibid: Pg 134
• 14. The Mesopelagic Zone is the area in the ocean from 200 – 1000 metres deep, where light is very limited thus no photosynthesis takes place. Mesopelagic in Greek means ‘twilight’.
• 15. Cross E, R. (unknown year).
• 16. The moon Pool is an opening in the floor or base of the hull platform or chamber giving access to the water below.
• 17. Pell S, J (2005). Second Nature, Second Skin, Aquabatics as New Works of Live Art, Thesis.
• 18. Silva, Camile A. (2006) Liquid Architectures: Marcos Novak’s Territory Of Information Information, Visualization (IV’06), Computer Society, IEEE. (Merleau-Ponty)
• 19. This notion of the primitive mind that does not separate the earthy world from the spirit was a theory of the anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857–1939)
• 20. Pell S, J (2005). Second Nature, Second Skin, Aquabatics as New Works of Live Art, Thesis.
• 21. The deep Sound Channel is also known as the SOFAR (Sound Fixing And Ranging) Channel, and is caused by fluctuations in temperature and depth that enables sound to move with greater attenuation. It is also thought that whales use this channel to communicate.
• 22. See Jaques Beneviste and Viktor Schauberger .
• 23. Smith, C; Best, S. (1989) Electromagnetic Man, Dent. Pg 115.

0.1. Introduction

2.2. Paid in Full: Copyright, piracy and the real currency of cultural production

2.3. Re 'Paid in Full'

2.4. The fantasy of cultural control, and the crisis of distribution

2.4. The fantasy of cultural control, and the crisis of distribution

Jonas Andersson comments on Medosch’s and Fleischer’s contributions

Often when I debate with Rasmus Fleischer or participate in events like the ones organised by Adnan Hadzi – events which I would characterise as quite “continental” in their intellectual tradition and largely “activist” in their political orientation – I find myself coming from a very Anglo-American approach, despite being Swedish. Probably this is due to my background in relatively mainstream ‘media studies,’ an area which has been dominated not only by the U.S. American imperialism of the mass media itself but by the way cultural studies has been formulated along largely Anglo-American debates.

Still, the point of encounter is fascinating; the ever-so-slightly different understandings of the same phenomena are inherently fertile. This is also something which we have seen in the academy at large during these early years of the new millennium, with an increased adoption of theory that ascertains decidedly material, non-human energies and ontologies (key names: Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and Gilles Deleuze) among the previously human-centred and discourse-obsessed social constructionists.

How “freedom” turns into control...

What strikes me, when reading Armin Medosch’s fascinating account of the increasingly hostile downside to all the “free” culture hype of lately, is how different logics of control become layered upon one another and serve to reinforce each other in rather nebulous ways. New technologies allow for freer exchange, but this becomes seized upon also by the cultural industries which then come to expect cheaper terms of trade for everyone involved, especially struggling artists. All this while we’re all applauding, because “free” is always good, isn’t it?

Despite talking about “freedom” as a concept, what is inescapable here is what Hong Kong-based theorist Laikwan Pang (2006) labels the ‘fantasy’ of cultural control. While for example German media theory has taught us to attribute this control also to non-human, machinic or code-derived factors, Anglo-American cultural studies have often kept insisting on placing either individuals or institutions as key forces. Either this social constructionism comes in the flavour of discourse-obsessed postmodernism stressing the inherent polysemy of texts and the freedom to make aberrant readings, or it comes as “mainstream” political economy, tracing cultural control in policy documents, NGOs and trade bodies. Pang attributes socio-economists like Saskia Sassen to this latter group: Here, culture is engineered by governments or powerful institutions, instead of the scattered controls exercised and felt in the looser cultural domain. Here, legal documents are essentially what shape culture, and interestingly this is also in some way where we find the “big three” of the U.S. American copyleft literature: Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Yochai Benkler.

Because the Creative Commons ethos presupposes that culture follows law, and with the right laws implemented (i.e. CC), “better” or “freer” culture will follow. Like Rasmus Fleischer points out: Stallman the father, Lessig the son, and the wireless spirit of 2.4 GHz thus comes to gel to form a holy trinity of copyleft.

Funny thing, then, that this copyleft is not so different from its opposite: Compare on the one side the religion of copyright – the belief that WTO rules, restrictions and conventions can actually harness culture into preferable shapes – with this religion of copyleft; the belief that alternative rules, restrictions and conventions can harness culture, but differently. Two equally martinet, rule-obsessed approaches.

Now contrast this with the anti-transcendental, anti-dialectical urge of Deleuze, Kittler and McLuhan where technology has its own morphogenesis and rationale, distinct from human desires to harness it.

What is interesting is that depending on where one lays the emphasis, one sees different regimes of control, and ultimately different registers of who is actually leading the fight. Because this latter view – that code has a logic of its own – is what justifies the copyleft argument, while the old-school IFPI/MPAA/RIAA etc. copyright defenders tend to deliberately ignore this and instead lean on the earlier, human-centred approach.

If one understands the nature of code, through the ontological reasoning of Kittler, Florian Cramer, Norbert Bolz, the McLuhanists, the actor-network “ants,” and other theorists linked more to Deleuze and his postscriptum on control societies (Manuel de Landa, Alexander Galloway etc), one sees a dominant force of decentralisation through protocol, and unrestricted dissemination through the way the Internet is based on copying.

Yet, to entirely dismiss the role of human agency (policies, uses, appropriations) would be to somewhat miss the point as well. If one understands how policymaking, norms, and the way technologies do not develop by technical logic alone but by social and cultural conventions, one cannot but agree with Raymond Williams and a whole body of literature that serves to complicate the issue of pure technological determinism: STS (the ‘social construction’/‘social shaping’ of technology thesis), political economy (where coincidentally both Lessig and the WTO fit in), sociology (Manuel Castells) and anthropology (Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Miller, Don Slater). Different theorists tracing the workings of the digital realm, in somewhat different ways.

It is all about “finding a middle way” between the temptations on either side of the extremes. Since file-sharing, p2p and ‘piracy’ involves exchange and infrastructure, a traditional media studies approach has to give way for a perspective that takes up issues essentially of human and machinic agency. Who or what drives the whole thing forward?

Where’s the room for escape?

What is common to all these academic accounts is that they can, after all, only debate those phenomena which are traceable. Either one could monitor the flows, movements and artefacts of online networks; or one could focus on the legal text, the lobbyist memos, op-eds and policy documents; or one could conduct participant observation, interview users about their everyday behaviour etc. The ways in which we can conceptualise these new phenomena are determined by or sensory instruments. For example Bruno Latour has presented a methodology for this in his more recent work (2005; 2007).

What I find riveting here, though, is the realisation of how much of our world that after all remains outside of these observed vectors: the ‘dark matter’ of the Internet, and of everyday life. There are so many uses out there that simply slip outside of our view, and – partially – slip outside of control. One-off file transfers, failed attempts, spontaneous exchanges. The whole phantasm of cultural control is a by-product of modernity, of Euclidian space, and yet it is our only tool to systematize what is going on.

The key, therefore, is to not remain blind to complexity, and to try seeing the strengths of each perspective – nationally, methodologically, epistemologically, politically – and further, seeing the connection points between perspectives that might appear different at first. Like Rasmus Fleischer says, there can never be one solution for all the problems affecting cultural production in the age of digital reproduction.

This is where decidedly local contexts like Deptford are important – once you spend some longer time in a local environment such as these neighbourhoods, you realize that there is so much cultural production going on, hidden from view, in the margins, simply unaccounted for, leaving few if any traces. This is in part a sad aspect of cultural meshworks like London, something I have seen especially in music production where plentifully more works are produced than is ever represented by record deals, releases or for that sake MySpace profiles (think of each MySpace artist as the tip of an iceberg of already existing connections and work hours largely external to the Internet).

Similarly, this granular, spontaneous and specifically local production is what is cool with the case of the Swedish pirates, as they never aspired to take part in the ‘hype’ or in this martinet sanctioning of a “legitimately free” sphere that Armin Medosch describes, but instead kept on copying, kept on deriving, building quirky little controversial web pranks while a norm took hold in the broadband-heavy North of not even thinking twice, but to freely and casually file-share cultural products before considering buying them.

A crisis of distribution

A further reflection on Medosch’s text is how the current crisis in the cultural industries appears to be one primarily of distribution and marketing. Much of the ‘file-sharing debate’ has in the mainstream press in Sweden and elsewhere been portrayed as mainly a problem of producer remuneration: the fact that cultural consumption as it moves into the digital realm equals less warrants for profit streams within the established guilds of cultural producers. However, the viewpoint that is embraced in this reader, thanks to its focus on strategies for alternative (that is, non-sanctioned, non-guild-based) media, presents a dilemma which all the more interesting: the issues pertaining to how to get your locally produced content “out there” in the first place – as a non-established, corporately non-affiliated producer – and how to be able to find revenue streams without violating or trying to stem the rising tide of ubiquitous file-sharing.

As it happens, cultural production takes place – in local settings, worldwide – all the time. Thanks to the radical cheapening and growing access to technical tools, it is arguably easier to be a cultural producer now than ever before; similarly, crude broadcasting technologies allow for a publication (as in literally “making public”) of private life that was simply not possible before. Like Lennaart van Oldenborgh shows in chapter 4.2, blogs, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook all allow for an extensive documentation of one’s everyday reality.

Similarly, consumption is something which the youth of today excel in; as citizens of the Western world, this is arguably the primary area of cultural expertise for all of us, being knowledgeable, demanding yet highly casual and pernickety consumers. In media and cultural studies, the term ‘consumer’ is largely interchangeable with ‘user’ since with cultural consumption, nothing is really “consumed” (as in exhausted and/or ingested). There is a dimension of disposal inherent to cultural use and consumption though; Michel de Certeau (1984) points to this ephemeral, transient dimension of everyday cultural consumption, which he defines as largely ‘quasi-invisible,’ played out in the margins. When not accounted for, or concretely materialised, the traces of consumption and use are very short-lived. Maybe the ‘datascapes’ of social networks and p2p-based technologies allow for an increase in this traceability, as Bruno Latour has recently argued (2005; 2007), but what I find as our everyday lives are increasingly permeated by these technologies is that these traces are inherently restricted to the micro level. They are short-lived – like the IP address temporarily logged in an IRC or p2p exchange, or the textual exchange maintained only during the duration of a chat session – and they are local in that they are visible and/or overseeable only to the agents directly involved. The topology of MySpace or Facebook does not stretch itself out as a vast landscape from which I can oversee it in panopticon-like ways – it rather takes the shape of several interconnected but exclusively segmented rooms, only overseeable through the local, myopic interaction that Latour (2005) rightly labels ‘oligopticon’.

The problem with distribution on the Internet is that it is granular, and dispersed in a way that is in fact antithetical to panopticon-like overview. Instead, it favours an accessibility that primarily operates through a search function.

The online topology thus overlays the offline topology of naturally segmented producers, or occasional acts of cultural production.

In local, creative environments like the London hotspots of Deptford, Hackney, Brixton etc. the problem has become one of improving the connections in-between such acts of production – essentially, making them aware of one another, so that they can start feeding off each others’ creativity, and generate those collective sums that exceed the individual parts – but also to improve the visibility, communicability and relevance of these acts to the wider world, in an economically viable way. (Hence the pressure on urban redevelopment that Ben Gidley presents in chapter 1.3.: a lot of societal benefits, and a lot of pure profit can be found in effective interlinking of such creative hotspots.)

This economic viability is precisely what also Armin Medosch’s article comes down to: once the damaging expectancy has taken root that culture is to be produced with very little economic gains or incentives to these producers, the table does turn towards a mode of production which is more sanctioned the more transient it is. Effectively, what is favoured are amateur forms which do not require much involvement in terms of personnel, time, capital investments etc.

This favouring of transient, agile, mobile, lean modes of production is not exclusive to the corporate sponsors, but is found across the board among new media sympathisers – this book included! Hence the common fascination among us all for anything “grassroots,” and hence the active support among copyleftists and activists for typically minute, D.I.Y. musical forms such as grime, dubstep, laptoptronica and punk rock over more traditional, multi-vocalist, multi-intrumentalist, studio-intensive, dare I say ambitious ones. One might say that these latter forms are dismissed for being too “polished” – not “polished” as a formal property, since a purely stylistic surface thanks to Logic, ProTools, Ableton etc. is increasingly accessible to all – but rather because they embody a mode or ethos of production that is accomplished, the opposite of minute, and comparatively investment-heavy.

What is presented to the poor struggling artist or musician who is bloody-minded enough to pursue these latter, more unweildy, more ambitious forms of expression is a double burden: a climate favouring opportunist media creation above anything else, on top of the crisis of distribution that I have already outlined. The key is to become known, to find avenues to get one’s productions recognised by the wider public in the white noise of millions of competing cultural messages. The easy route is of course to put on a funny hat and perform a YouTube mime to any given pop song, but if your aspirations are somewhat more labourious than this, what is the right outlet?

Further, even if finding an initial outlet, one can expect to be copied, appropriated, pirated to degrees that are simply beyond one’s own control. Is the luxury of public discovery something which can no longer be afforded without accepting vast degrees of free use and consumption of one’s work? Perhaps so, but in order to become pirated to begin with, one needs to have a name which is recognised and – ultimately – respected.

A concrete example of this is presented by the London-based burntprogress collective, which this spring presents their second CD compilation burntprogress 2.1 to the world, highlighting some of the artists who feature at the burntprogress monthly club night CDR – A night of ideas and tracks in the making mixed from recordable CDs and other digital media. Here, an avenue to potential recognition is provided, from starting blocks which are essentially noncommercial yet providing the potential to capitalise on one’s own production. The first compilation, burntprogress 1.1 (2006) was (besides its legally available forms) for a long while available as a ripped torrent, something which burntprogress co-founder Tony Nwachukwu welcomes as a living proof of the actual popular acclaim of this music. The illegal dispersion of the compilation, parallel to its legal dispersion, here becomes perhaps not complimentary, but in any event an unavoidable side effect which affirms some sort of success in the first place.

What is more, we see here how instances of production that might otherwise have been separated by space and time become apprised to one another – CDR very much serves as a real-world hub or community for a long list of artistic collaborations – and how an initiative like burntprogress acts as a connector or aggregator of talent.

Unlike the fragmentary, jungle-like worlds-in-their-own of MySpace and/or Facebook, who surely help to showcase creativity yet do nothing to comprehensively promote noncommercial acts in an orchestrated way, connectors like burntprogress and Deptford.TV work against the grain of the transience and de-territorialisation outlined above. They essentially re-territorialise; something which requires intentionality, the possibility of failure, and ultimately some form of political agenda. Strategy rather than tactic. Orchestrated ‘data spheres’ amid the amorphous ‘datascapes’.

Surely MySpace, with its specific disposition towards pop music, has helped many artists gain increased visibility despite its primary intention to lure unsuspecting eyes to increasingly narrow-cast marketing – but its entire mode of operation does nothing to steer away from the ultimately neo-liberal agenda of leaving ‘each to his own abilities’. Its economic externality of allowing potential collaboration and discovery can be seen as an economic subsidy to struggling artists, but it is a subsidy which is intended only as a “trickle-down” effect ultimately benefiting the hugely popular, already-established over the multitudes of unknown talent, prompting a model of society where these lesser-known artists should count themselves lucky if ever reaching the mainstream.

(Temporary) conclusion

Cultural production and consumption takes place everywhere all the time; the problem is when these instances remain discrete, muted, and soon-forgotten. The digital ameliorates this, it helps making known that which is unknown, but only to a degree:

Any Internet-mediated cultural production, no matter how banal, becomes textually instantiated and searchable. As Clay Shirky recently, rather provocatively stated, most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum, and hence not actually “content” at all, since it is not designed for an audience in the first place (Shirky 2008). All this conversational material drowns out the potentially audience-orientated, adds to the noise.

So the common word that digitisation makes it easier to access stuff is in fact only superficially true. Once again, on the raw, jungle-like networks this accessibility is directly determined by the search function. Mesh-like spheres like p2p and Web 2.0 networks might help to heighten the visibility of individual acts of consumption/production, but only in a way which is temporary, never fully overseeable, and ultimately statistical, where a panoptic view can only be attained by means of a search. And searches, as we all know, require prior knowledge.

Precisely because of this, well-maintained and comprehensive metadata is not enough. Active and deliberate connectors are still needed, especially since one of these primary connecting practices is the one linking the online with the offline, a gap which should not be seen as a barrier but which becomes exacerbated by the purely online ventures of social networks and torrent archives. Here Piratbyrån, Deptford.TV and burntprogress share similarities, despite the decidedly different practices of these three examples. They re-territorialise and by doing so, compel everyone into opinion or at least awareness. They shed light. They editorialise. They redistribute, or at least help users organise themselves to privately re-distribute in more orchestrated and thus more meaningful, potentially profitable ways. That can only be a good thing.

4.3. Involve me, and I will understand: Introducing the data sphere

4.3. Involve me, and I will understand: Introducing the data sphere

by Adnan Hadzi

     Tell me, and I will forget.
     Show me, and I may remember.
     Involve me, and I will understand. (Confucius, BC 450)

We are in many ways living in times of slavery of the mind. Through Intellectual Property, our culture is owned by a few. As parts of this reader take up the fraught issue of how Deptford’s history is entangled in slavery I want to elaborate upon this idea of slavery, extending it to our ideas and our minds through referring to Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762/1968).

Thus, however we look at the question, the “right” of slavery is seen to be void; void, not only because it cannot be justified, but also because it is nonsensical, because it has no meaning. The words “slavery” and “right” are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: “I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it so long as I wish.” (Rousseau 1762/1968)

The Debian Foundation, one of the biggest platforms for the Linux operating system, coined the ‘Debian Social Contract’ for the free and Open Source software community reflecting many of Rousseau’s thoughts:

Our priorities are our users and free software. We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system. (Debian, 2004)

In this chapter I will extend the idea of the Debian Social Contract to media, suggesting similar principles that can be applied to free and open media and define these as a pre-condition for peer-to-peer database documentaries such as Deptford.TV. In the field of media, so-called Open Content licenses have been created over the last decade in response to how copyright laws have changed in favour of huge media conglomerates. A famous example is the copyright-term extension act of 1998 – often labeled the ‘Mickey Mouse Protection Act’, due to the extensive lobbying by the Walt Disney corporation that ensured that Mickey Mouse’s absence from the public domain.

Another, more recent example of the battle over social contracts and the sharing of rights – and its connected wealth – is the Writers Guild of America Strike which took place in Hollywood in 2007: more than 12,000 writers went on strike from November 2007 until February 2008. The strike was against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers which cares for the interests of the American film and television producers. The strike started because the two sides could not agree on how to handle the revenues from digital media sales such as DVDs and, more importantly, the increasing revenues from Internet-distributed media. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers refused to negotiate an increasing share for the digital media sales.

On the 8th of January 2008 the strikers had a symbolic victory with the shutting down of the Golden Globe TV gala and it looked likely that also the Oscar Award Ceremony would be cancelled for the first time in its history. The writers decided to compete with the studios by collaboratively producing and distributing their own shows online and The Independent went so far as to state that the strike could ‘potentially [...] revolutionise the way television is made and consumed in the online area’ (Gumbel, 2008).

With social contracts such as the Debian Social Contract in place one can decide how to produce, distribute and share media. But these alternatives are quickly corrupted if the issues, especially in regards to author’s rights, are not looked at in a sincere way as once defined by Rousseau and rewritten by the Debian Software Foundation.

I ask: are FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) and other, related open and free content licenses likely to develop further in the future providing a platform for alternative media practices? I argue that the development of computers and microchips with built-in copy control technology, and the current changes in the Intellectual Property legislation endanger the sustainability of such alternative practices and licensing schemes. Worryingly, the social contracts that relate to copyright and intellectual property tend to breach the current privacy protection of consumers: in order to enforce new copyright laws, control needs to be tightened by surveying the computers consumers use in their private sphere. Unfortunately these new control mechanisms can also be used to silence critical voices.

These are ultimately issues of legislation. I know that I am now digressing into the legal terrain, but I do so in an attempt to outline a possibility practiced with the Deptford.TV project. The concern was how to move from an abstract idea of social contracts to a concrete legislation which could enable a cultural production that is not deemed antithetical, or oppositional. This can be done through defining the independent terms and conditions, namely free and open content licenses. At this point I would like to offer the reader a link to the video clip Staking a Claim in Cyberspace from Paper Tiger TV, in order to involve you into the practice of media production. Unfortunately this is not legally possible within the academic context: one can only get hold of a copy or link to the file through the more nebulous file-sharing networks...

Social contracts

Yet in spite of this broad spectrum of possibilities, there is no place where one can prepare for a collective practice. At best, there are the rare examples where teams (usually partnerships of two) can apply as one for admission into institutions of higher learning. But once in the school, from administration to curriculum, students are forced to accept the ideological imperative that artistic practice is an individual practice. (Critical Arts Ensemble, 2000)

With the concept of social contracts, the assumption that all individuals are sovereign changes. With social contracts the people give up sovereignty to a system that will make sure that individual rights are protected. A portion of each individual’s sovereignty is given up for the common good (in anarchist terms one would speak of solidarity). Rousseau believes that the sovereignty stays with the people. If the people are not content with the governing force they rise up. Rousseau’s social contract was therefore one of the main references for the French Revolution.

In the 18th century Rousseau published The Social Contract (1762/ 1968). Rousseau thinks that there is a conflict between obedience and people’s freedom. He argues that our natural freedom is our own will. Rousseau defined Social Contract as a law “written” by everybody. His argument was that if everybody was involved in making the laws they would only have to obey to themselves and as such follow their free will. How could people then create a common will? For Rousseau this would only have been possible in smaller communities through the practice of caring for each other and managing conflicts for the common good – ultimately through love. He imagined a society of the size of the city of Geneva, where he came from, as an ideal ground for the implementation of the Social Contract theory. Ironically it was France through its revolutionaries (amongst whom Robespierre was a great admirer of Rousseau’s writing) which implemented the Social Contract theory. Nevertheless France read it differently, imposing Social Contracts to the people.

In this chapter I outline the concept of social contracts in terms of freedom and ownership through a form of coalition as defined by the Critical Arts Ensemble. I explain how one can have an ad-hoc coalition to implement a strategy in order to achieve a common aim. Therefore the coalition only needs to function until the strategy has been implemented. Then a standard is created which can be adapted by society.

In other words, for peer-to-peer film-making the extension of copyright legislation is an important social contract. As argued below, copyright laws are not in effect functioning anymore in regard to digital distribution. Consequently, artists, programmers and activists have been looking for alternatives and extensions of these laws. According to the Critical Arts Ensemble (CAE), collectives can configure themselves to address any issue or space, and they can use all types of media. The result is a practice that defies specialization.

Solidarity is based on similarity in terms of skills and political/aesthetic perceptions. Most of the now classic cellular collectives of the 70s and 80s, such as Ant Farm, General Idea, Group Material, Testing the Limits (before it splintered), and Gran Fury used such a method with admirable results. Certainly these collectives’ models for group activity are being emulated by a new generation (Critical Art Ensemble, 2000)

In the Deptford.TV project the groups doing a documentary film together often share a similar political and/or aesthetic approach to the film but different levels of technological know-how. I borrow the term ‘cell’, used by the CAE to describe the organism of their group, to refer to the Deptford.TV collective. In these cells, solidarity arrives through difference. Because the individuals bring in different knowledge into a cell, the possibilities of endless conflicts are reduced. Film teams are ideally built up with participants specialised in directing, editing, producing, operating the camera etc. When a cell decides how to produce the film/project those members with the most know-how in their special fields are becoming authoritative in the sense of deciding how to film, direct, edit etc. CAE argue that solidarity based on difference creates functional and more powerful groups. They compare this to the dominant approach of solidarity based on equality and consent democracy, which was adopted by many tactical media groups such as the Ant Farm collective. Such groups had a fear that hierarchy would lead to stronger members becoming dominant over the weaker members within the collective. The Critical Art Ensemble does not follow the democratic model.

Coalitions, not communities

The collective does recognize its merits; however, CAE follows Foucault’s principle that hierarchical power can be productive (it does not necessarily lead to domination), and hence uses a floating hierarchy to produce projects. [...] Consequently, there has always been a drive toward finding a social principle that would allow like-minded people or cells to organize into larger groups. Currently, the dominant principle is “community.” CAE sees this development as very unfortunate. The idea of community is without doubt the liberal equivalent of the conservative notion of “family values.” [...] Talking about a gay community is as silly as talking about a “straight community.” The word community is only meaningful in this case as a euphemism for “minority.” The closest social constellation to a community that does exist is friendship networks, but those too fall short of being communities in any sociological sense. (Critical Art Ensemble, 2000)

In Deptford.TV people are coming together from different backgrounds but share similar concerns. We deliberately try to group together participants with different skills. These participants choose to document specific topics that fall within their personal interests thus accepting that conflicts could occur, while approaching these as positive for the overall production of the documentation process. CAE explain that this kind of alliance, ‘created for purposes of large scale cultural production and/or for the visible consolidation of economic and political power, is known as a coalition’ (Critical Art Ensemble, 2000). Those who take responsibility within a Deptford.TV cell are also those who are most involved in decision-making in the spirit that, in order to keep the coalition together, what is important is tools, not rules.

Similarly, theorists of the online world like Howard Rheingold increasingly acknowledge that notions of ‘community’ with all its gemeinschaft-like connotations (close-knit, familial, based on mutual solidarity etc.) are often overstated. Steven Jones (1995) notes how ‘community’ is generally conceptualised as (1) solidarity institutions, (2) primary interaction or (3) institutionally distinct groups. Only really the third of these, Jones argues – community as institutionally distinct groups – makes sense in the context of computer-mediated-communications. While I would diverge from Jones’s argument in that this mode of communication is not only socially produced, but equally technically constituted, it is notable how it still challenges the idea of community as being based on geographic proximity to the extent that one could, like Jones, talk about computer-mediated communities as ‘pseudo-communities’.

Communities formed by CMC have been called “virtual communities” and defined as incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both “meet” and “face”. (Jones 1995: 19)

With the recognition borrowed from Miller & Slater (2000) and effectively repeated by andrea rota both in this reader and our previous one (2006) we must not assume an insurmountable gap between the alleged ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds: Deptford.TV is a local, situated practice as well as one which stretches into the online world. Nevetheless, it is one which should not be mistaken for a permanent, tight-knit community; rather, it is a temporary, tool-based (technological as much as social), if not occasional coalition.

Open Content Licenses

Open Content Licensing schemes, as outlined in Lawrence Liang’s book Guide to Open Content Licenses (2004), help to create an understanding of a shared culture – culture as a communication medium rather than a commodity. Culture and creativity very often build upon previous works, through reusing, remixing and reinterpreting works; often this is a fundamental part of any creative practice. Therefore the academic and journalistic concept of ‘fair use’ could be an import part of social contracts for creative practices. But fair use and even ‘public domain’ is under threat. New digital copyrights such as the Millennium Copyright Act (1998) where written in order to tackle file-sharing, illegalising this new technology in many countries without considering any of its the benefits.

This is a recurring discussion that tends to take place around any invention of new communication technologies. An example is the invention of VCR recorders: at the time it became clear that those trying to stop the distribution and production of VCRs, especially the big studios, made huge profits from rentals and sales in the new home-video market. The same could prove to be the case in regards to the file-sharing technologies.

The original intention behind copyright laws was to support a vibrant production of culture through the protection of producers and artists. As the current copyright legislation cannot be fully implemented when it comes to practices of online distribution and file-sharing, new copyright laws are proposed by the lobby of media giants which violate the private sphere of the consumer and threaten the existence of a democratic public sphere. The irony behind the attempt to create a more strict copyright through eliminating fair use is that this original intention to support cultural production might come to a stand-still, as the artists will not be able to access and use cultural materials they need in order for them to produce new work. As a result, stricter copyright laws disadvantage artists and small producers while they work for the benefit of the already powerful media conglomerates.

For the most part, copyrights are not held by individuals, but by corporate entities who are part of the content industry. The content industry would argue that strengthening their position allows them to provide greater incentives to individual creators, but many creators vociferously challenge that notion. Strengthening copyright laws does improve the position of the content industry by giving them a relatively untempered monopoly over content, but it does so at the expense of the public good. (Besser, 2001)

The public sphere has traditionally been determined by law. Here I coin the term data sphere as an extension of the public sphere following Fenton & Downey’s (2003) argumentation on ‘counter-public’ spheres, in order to describe a digital and networked public sphere where practices such as peer-to-peer networking cannot possibly adhere to traditional copyright laws and cultural content is made available in complete disregard of current legislation. This happens largely through processes that are wholly machinic: automated, self-emergent, governed by protocol rather than direct human intent. Consequently, these copyright laws are, for the first time, being breached by a critical mass of technology; technologies which are mainly in the hands of consumers. When observable coalitions arise out of this mass, they resemble a ‘data sphere’ more than an intentional, human-centred ‘public sphere’ in the traditional sense, since the coming-together need not be by personal volition but by the ways the actual infrastructures are configured. If the ‘datascapes’ of Latour and others (which Jonas Andersson writes about in chapter 2.4 of this volume) make possible a tracing and documentation of how existing social structures come together and become constituated, ‘data spheres’ are the more particular instantiations that form through an actual mobilisation within these datascapes.

Social contracts and laws will eventually be defined for these data spheres, but until then the big ‘user-generated’ platforms such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook try to get their hands on every uploaded piece of content in accord with the old, non-efficacious, copyright legislation. Reading the terms and conditions of those mega-platforms makes one wonder how it can be that so many artists and independent producers hand over the rights for their content to these platforms. This is an excerpt from Facebook’s own terms and conditions:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. (Facebook Terms & Conditions, 2008)

These platforms present themselves as open-content providers that host a democratic discourse by offering members of the public freedom of speech. In reality they hold the contributors as slaves to advertisement which is, at the moment, the only real means of income generation and profit-making for these ventures. Investments in this field can be on a grand scale: Google bought YouTube in 2007 for $1.65 billion. These companies need to see a quick return on their investment so they become a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” marketing themselves as providers of free and open content while in fact implementing strict proprietary rules.

Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making. (Debord, 1994)

I suggest that the only use of these platforms should be tactical – as when publishing content on YouTube one can benefit from higher visibility, but this comes with abandoning one’s rights. The use of file-sharing technologies on the other hand is strategic – as the participants do not need to abandon their rights and can bypass the draconian terms and conditions imposed by platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. Michel de Certeau defines ‘strategy’ in The Practice of Everyday Life:

I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment.” A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, “clienteles,” “targets,” or “objects” of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. (de Certeau 1984)

Often strategic models depend on the building of infrastructures and the production of laws, goods, literature, inventions, etc. Through this production process a strategy aspires to sustain itself. I argue that Internet is such an infrastructure and is, by its very ontology, a file-sharing technology. As such, use of the Internet through file-sharing is almost impossible to restrict by enforcing non-realistic copyright laws. This use is a strategical utilisation of an infrastructure that is already anti-hierarchical. This strategic utilisation generates data spheres, which have to be moderated through social contracts since the anti-hierarchy and openness of the datascapes does not lend itself to restriction in the traditional sense.

Adding Open Content licensing schemes to the file-sharing distribution technology enables audiences to become active not only in the process of viewing and criticising content but also, and more importantly, in its production process. Open, free content licenses are often referred to as ‘copyleft’.

In the online hacker lexicon jargon.net, copyleft is thus defined as:

copyleft /kop’ee-left/ /n./ [play on ‘copyright’]
1. The copyright notice (‘General Public License’) carried by GNU EMACS and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also General Public Virus)
2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims.

In 1983 Richard Stallman, a software programmer, started the GNU Project, creating software to be shared with the goal to develop a completely free operating system. For this, Stallman invented the General Public License (GPL) which allows for the freedom of reuse, modification and reproduction of works.

Copyright asserts ownership and attribution to the author. Copyright protects the attribution to the author in relation to his/her work. It also protects the work from being altered by others without the author’s consent and restricts the reproduction of the work. Copyleft is not, as many think, an anti-copyright. Copyleft is an extension of copyright: it includes copyright through its regulations for attribution and ownership reference to the author. But it also extends copyright by allowing for free re-distribution of the work and, more controversially, the right to change the work if the altered version attributes the original author and is re-distributed under the same terms.

For the “copy-paste generation,” copyleft is already the natural propagation of digital information in a society which provides the possibility of interacting through digital networks. In doing so one naturally uses content generated by others, remixing, altering or redistributing this.

Simple “public domain” publication will not work, because some will try to abuse this for profit by depriving others of freedom; as long as we live in a world with a legal system where legal abstractions such as copyright are necessary, as responsible artists or scientists we will need the formal legal abstractions of copyleft that ensure our freedom and the freedom of others. (Debian, 1997)

One of the main current Linux platforms is the Debian Project. Debian describes itself as ‘an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system’ (Debian, 1997). Debian, as a group of volunteers, created the Debian GNU Linux operating system. ‘The project and all developers working on the project adhere to the Debian Social Contract’ (Debian, 2004). In this social contract Debian defines the criteria for free software and, as such, which software can be distributed over their network.

The Deptford.TV project is strategically building up its own server system with the goal to distribute over file-sharing networks rather than relying on YouTube or MySpace, thus distributing the files over the Free Art License in the spirit of the GPL and the Creative Commons ‘Share-Alike’ attribution license. Nevertheless, Debian reviewed the Creative Commons licenses and concluded that none of the Creative Commons core licenses actually are free in accordance to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, recommending that works released under these licenses ‘should not be included in Debian’ (Debian, 2005).

Creative Commons (CC) was critically discussed in the first Deptford.TV reader by rota & Pozzi (2006), specifically criticising the ‘Non-Commercial’ clause of the CC license. This Non-Commercial (NC) license forbids for-profit uses of works. Despite that, it is often used by content creators who want their media to be distributed and find useful the exchange of information and critical opinions about their work. In this way, a common pool is created. For commercial use of material distributed under the the NC license, one would have to contact the original author for permission. Nevertheless, the definition of ‘Non-Commercial’ is, strictly speaking, very difficult. Many producers use CC licenses to distribute content cheaply via the Internet in order to raise attention to their works. It is interesting that through this attitude we see more artists relying on revenues coming from higher visibility rather than sales of their work. For musicians, for example, this can be live concerts; for photographers, ad-hoc commissions. According to rota, ‘the Non-Commercial clause would only limit diffusion of their works, as well as limit the availability of freely reusable work in the communal pool from which everyone can draw and contribute back’ (rota & Pozzi 2006).

Unfortunately these uncertainties in the Creative Commons system made it corruptible. This is the reason why YouTube, MySpace etc. are often referred to as “open” user-generated content platforms. They provide tools which merely make it seem as if there’s real sharing going on, whereas in reality these sites are about driving traffic to one single site and controlling this site.

Deptford.TV uses the General Public License (GPL), the Free Art License and the Creative Commons Share-Alike attribution license as a statement of copyleft attitude. The basic reference for the Deptford.TV project is the General Public License, a Free Software license, which grants to you the four following freedoms:

0. The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
3. The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. You may exercise the freedoms specified here provided that you comply with the express conditions of this license. The principal conditions are:
• You must conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy distributed an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty and keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the Program. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License.
• If you modify your copy or copies of the program or any portion of it, or develop a program based upon it, you may distribute the resulting work provided you do so under the GNU General Public License. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License.
• If you copy or distribute the program, you must accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code or with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to furnish the complete corresponding machine-readable source code.

Michael Stutz (1997) describes how the GPL can also be applied to non-software information. The GPL states that it ‘applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License,’ so according to Stutz this ‘program,’ then, may not necessarily be a computer software program – any work of any nature that can be copyrighted can be copylefted with the GNU GPL (Stutz, 1997).

The Free Art License as well as the CC Share-Alike attribution license follow the attitude of the GPL. As the Creative Commons ‘SA-BY’ license states, you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work).

In many ways, the GPL provides a de-militarized zone. Everyone agrees to leave the big guns at the door. Period. The non-commercial CC license, on the other hand, is a pledge not to use the guns, if you play nice. And, to be on the sure side, being nice means to consume, but not to build upon works in a serious way. [...] essentially (and to daringly simplify) GPL comes from an ethical conflict/dilemma, while CC comes from economic/jurisdictional observation. (Princic, 2005)

These licenses are unfortunately not entirely compatible with each other, however they carry the same attitude. Like with the discussion between free and open-source licensing schemes and the resulting labeling of FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) I argue that alternatively the same can be done with media to represent the same attitude. Therefore one could perhaps speak of “FLOMS” (as in Free / Libre / Open Media Systems), since the discussions and differences in the open media field between GPL and CC are like the ones in the software field between free software and open-source software. To use file-sharing as technology and to apply the attitude of copyleft is a possible strategy for alternative media practices with the aim of creating a social contract, a legal model in which the culture of sharing becomes valuable. Therefore concentrating on a copyleft attitude for media production might be a better way forward to bring social contracts into the data sphere and with it a new discussion around the meaning of the public sphere and the shared cultural heritage of the file-sharing generation.

Thanks to Jonas Andersson and Maria X for comments and contributions.