The Next Layer

My "New Tendencies" Recent Book Tour

Armin Medosch — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 17:28:54 +0000

English

New Tendencies

book launch

cabinet_book_launch.JPG

In this picture story, I recapitulate my recent New Tendencies book tour between early September and end of October 2016, which took me from Madrid to Zagreb, from, London to New York and Warsaw.

The lecture series started in Madrid, at the Cold Atlantic conference at Museo Reina Sofía. I was happy to meet well known scholars and have discussions with them, such as Serge Guilbaut, Terry Smith and Sarah Wilson which helped to open my horizon on the contested zones of what used to be called Modern Art and it feels great to be involved in that collective endeavour of rewriting its history and possibly 'provincialzing Modernism' as reportedly Okwei Enwezor demanded, in other words, making productive the cracks in discourses and developing new ideas not just on the past but also the present and the future.

Sara Wilson at Cold Atlantic

The next stop was Ars Electronica in Linz. There, I was surrounded by creative robots:

The book launch and panel discussion at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb felt particularly nice since the lecture and panel was attended by participants of New Tendencies, and by colleagues who had supported my research.

This was the view from the panel:
On the panel the atmosphere was cheerful, with Matko Mestrovic next to me, background Hrvoje Klasić, historian and Sunčica Ostoić, a member of the curatorial collective Kontejner.

The OpenFields conference by RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga from September 29 to Oct 1st was another highlight. RIXC have been organising this kind of event since 20 years. In 2016, both exhibition and conference were held at the new National Latvian Library, a giant hypermodern building on the river bank, opposite the city centre. My book was presented together with Christiane Paul's book Companion to Digital Art. The event was very well attended and we have a great time exchanging ideas.

The lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, on October 6th, held as a Thursday Club in Ben Pimlott building, was like a 'homegame' for me. Here I did my practice based PhD in Arts and Computational Technology, supervised by Prof. Janis Jefferies. Sean Cubitt, Prof of Media and Communications, and series editor of Leonardo Series at MIT Press who commissioned my book, was present, as were Atau Tanaka, Josephine Berry, Mukul Patel, and other friends, old and new. Ann Twiselton of the London office of MIT Press was there and sold quite a few books which I then had to sign, so this was a proper book launch.

From left to right: Atau Tanaka, Janis Jefferies, the author, Ann Twiselton

The next stop was New York City. The Austrian Cultural Forum allowed us to stay in their building, an architectural landmark designed by Raimund Abraham, located on 52nd street. My first engagement in NYC was a seminar by Trebor Scholz at the Eugene Lang College of the New School. The next lecture was organised by Mark Tribe at the School of Visual Arts on October 18. The evening was jointly hosted by several MFA and MA courses which made for a great, mostly student audience. Participation in the discussion afterwards was lively. The last event in NYC was a book presentation and panel hosted by Cabinet in partnership with Rhizome. Michael Connor of Rhizome chaired the panel, with contributions from Eva Díaz and Rachel Wetzler. It was great to get such expert feedback to my book from people who had already read it.

The final stop was Warsaw, where on October 21 and 22 the conference The Other Transatlantic - Theorizing Kinetic and Op Art in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America was held at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie/ Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Here I found myself again in very good company with theorists and art historians such as Ariel Jimenez, Magdalena Moskalewicz and Monica Amor (see link above for full program).

Yet also my earlier talks this year, at the College Art Association conference in Washington DC in February, at the wonderful and really fantastic ContestedSpheres conference at Kassák Múzeum and the book launch at 21er Haus should be seen as part of this exciting tour. I have made many friends and rekindled old friendships such as - to name just a few without any attempt at an exhaustive list - Atréyēē Gupta, Klara Kemp-Welch, Adair Routhwaite, Amanda Rath, Eszter Fogarasi, Reuben Fowkes, Paula Barreiro López, Michael Connor, Mark Tribe, Christiane Paul, Rasa Smite, Darko Fritz, Monica Amor, Marta Dziewańska, Geoff Cox, Marcus Lund, Paul Brown, Atau Tanaka, Josephine Berry and many more.

My very next lecture will be at University of Applied Arts, Vienna, November 3, followed by two university seminars in Germany, one with Frieder Nake in Bremen and one with Wolfgang Ernst at Humboldt University Berlin, but this is it for the time being as far as my book tour is concerned. I hope that this book now gets legs and starts a life of its own. Of course I will be happy to give further lectures and participate in conference if I get invited, but this is it in terms of a concerted initial tour. It has been great, so thanks to all who made it happen including support by the various Austrian Cultural Forums in various cities and the Art Section of the Federal Chancellery who kindly supported me with a stipend.

Talking with our planet

paoleb — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 21:22:10 +0000

English

In 1901 Nikola Tesla published an article in which he describes the possibility to communicate with other planets through radio waves. His hypothesis can be seen as part of a speculative field shaped by spectral theories based on a common ground where scientific and spiritual beliefs were indistinguishable. Are there messages hidden in chemical elements that we could trace though spectral lines? More than a hundred years later intriguing signals coming from the universe challenge skeptics and ask for attention. Are we being mesmerised, our brains directly affected by extraterrestrial electromagnetic radiation?

In Sweden it is possible to observe how the highly charged particles of the solar wind interact with our atmosphere, colliding with oxygen and nitrogen molecules and producing luminous glow and unusual sounds. Our expedition to this region will serve as an experiment to reconnect matter, light and sound, creating a dispositif to generate audiovisual data, that will be recombined in a Ghost Cinema séance.
In our experimental cinema theatre, an object in close proximity to the observer act as a transducer making the conversion of electromagnetic radiation into acoustic waves. This object is our experimental Spectometer, divinatory machine to read encrypted messages through both xamanistic an scientific methods. Combining microphones and a VLF antenna we will explore a very low frequency, looking for embodied messages around the Geomagnetic Pole. This is an invitation to listen to the universe and place planet Earth in perspective, thinking of Anthropocene from an alien viewpoint.

Art in a Third Space: New Tendencies and the Nonaligned Avant-gardes

Armin Medosch — Fri, 20 May 2016 05:58:20 +0000

English

New Tendencies

This talk “Art in a Third Space” was held at the CAA conference in Washington D.C., February 04 2016, as a part of the panel Non-aligned: Art, Solidarity, and the Emerging “Third World”. The paper presents a condensed investigation of the international art movement and network New Tendencies. Non-alignment, in the context of my talk, refers both to political circumstances but also serves as a metaphor to gain access to a rich transdisciplinary understanding of New Tendencies.

The movement and network New Tendencies began in 1961 in Zagreb, Croatia, which was then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After Yugoslav initially has been described as more Stalinist than Stalin, it came to a falling out with the Soviet Union in 1948, which forced Yugoslavia to define its own brand of socialism. Between 1948 and 1951 Yugoslavia developed a new state ideology of self-managed socialism. The path that Yugoslavia took from then on was read as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. In this lecture I will argue that this created the unique conditions for New Tendencies to emerge. This movement created a “third space” through its activities, which produced a non-aligned art which broke through stereotypes of art in a socialist (and capitalist) context.

Yugoslavia was together with India, Egypt, Indonesia a founding nation of the non-aligned nations movement. The latter became formalized by a declaration signed in Belgrade in 1961, the year of the first New Tendencies exhibition. My thesis is not that New Tendencies was a meeting place of artists from non-aligned nations, but that Yugoslavia, by being non-aligned, offered itself as that meeting ground where neo-avant-gardes from East and West, North and South could come together, physically and also regarding their artistic aims. I posit that those neo-avant-gardes participated in political and artistic-cultural topographies which remain insufficiently explored. Giving due consideration to those non-aligned neo-avant-gardes will result in a qualitatively different map of postwar modernism.

Taking Zagreb as a center, the movement had participants to the East, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and even in Russia; looking – from Zagreb - to the West, there were many southern and western European participants, from Spain and Italy, from Germany and France; last not least, there were many participants from Latin America, most of whom lived in Paris at the time. But this map did not only contain different players and regions, out of this matrix developed also a qualitatively different type of art.

As I argue in my book, New Tendencies – Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (2016) (Illustration 0), a climate of modernity developed in Latin-American, Western, Southern, and South-Eastern Europe where a “constructive nexus” in arti was linked to a modernization project in politics and social development. Those artworks adopted the visual vocabulary of modern art to formulate a “project,” a modernistic projection of a utopian but attainable future.

Some of the precursors of New Tendencies, such as Exat 51, participated in the creation of a modern image of Yugoslavia at trade fairs through exhibition displays (see illustration 1) and at the Brussels World Expo of 1958 through the pavilion designed by Vjenceslav Richter (see illustration 2)

New Tendencies was from its beginning to the end a formally innovative movement, conducting “visual research” and experimenting with new media such as light and movement. The choice of materials and their aesthetics and poetics was linked to an emancipatory project of creating a better future through rational organisation. Following convincing periodisations by art historians from former Yugoslavia, such as Misko Suvakovic, New Tendencies were a neo-avant-garde movement. While connecting with the concerns of the historical avant-gardes, New Tendencies developed something genuinely new. New Tendencies created a specific politics of form, which needs to be reflected in the context of the historical situation.

Many of the participating artists stemmed from peripheral nations in a catching up process of modernization. The economic example to follow was provided by the USA who emerged from the New Deal in the late 1930s with a new economic model – Keynesian Fordism. This was copied in various ways, not only in the west but also in the Soviet zone of influence in the Khrushchev era. Those projects of modernization were of course each quite different, since each country had specific conditions and circumstances, different economic and political regimes. The processes were also uneven, they happened to be strongest in urban centers and were not evenly distributed among geographies and populations, and precarious – they remained unfinished, as we will later see.

In Latin America, nations such as Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela had not been directly affected by the Second World War. When the war ended, they entered periods of democratization, rapid economic growth and urbanisation. Brazil launched the first modern art biennial outside Europe in 1951, and built its modernistic capital in the middle of the country. Venezuela built the highly ambitious University City of Caracas. Doubt had not yet crept into the modernistic project in those countries, similar to Yugoslavia. Argentine, Brazil, Venezuela and other nations have highly original and genuinely interesting kinetic art movements, but for reasons of space I need to assume that cornerstones of those are well known.

New Tendencies was the result of a chance conversation between the Brazilian painter Almir Mavignier and Zagreb based critic Matko Meštrović. The first exhibition was called New Tendencies in the plural for good reasons. It brought together a diverse range of groups and collectives, as well as individuals. Piero Manzoni is said to have had a strong influence behind the screen. He sent three works, Achrome, one of his “Lines” and a famous can of Merda da Artista (see illustration 3); according to a famous anecdote, the organisers decided not to test the tolerance of the party apparatus by showing the Achrome.

Other participating artists were Group de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), Group N from Northern Italy, Zero group from Düsseldorf, and other individuals from Germany (Gerhard von Graevenitz, Uli Pohl and others from the Geitlinger class), Marc Adrian from Austria, and Paul Talman and Karl Gerstner from Switzerland (see illustration 4, Exhibition view NT1).

Since 1957 increasingly dense networking between those groups and individuals had been formed, which also included Spanish group Equipo 57 and Italian T group, and as supportive elder figures Yves Klein, Jesús Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely and Lucio Fontana. The first Zagreb exhibition brought home the point that this collection of artist resembled a new movement.

Despite big differences among the participants, there were also a lot of common ground. The orientation of those groups and individuals was in many cases collectivist and anti-art. The market was seen as distorting the function of art. In their view, art was not hanging in galleries, it was supposed to be part and parcel of the human life-world, realized in everyday objects and the environment. Between this first and second exhibition in Zagreb in 1963, New Tendencies became a veritable movement and network with a shared, but not unified, agenda. Those collectives of mostly young men and a few women abandoned the term art for visual research.
French painter Francois Morellet expected “a revolution in art, similar to that in science.” Some of those groups such as GRAV and N combined collective work with a rational, constructivist orientation, and leftist ideas. There were also those groups who primarily saw their new aesthetics as experiments, to create new sensations, such as Zero, who thought that by creating new aesthetic experiences they were liberating their audiences from social norms.

The Italian critic Giulio Carlo Argan became one of the most prominent supporters. He argued that artistic research helped to realize homo ludens (man the player) inside homo faber (man the maker). Argan's term Gestalt ricerca (Italian, Gestalt research) became the name of a new movement in Italy. Gestalt psychology had strong roots in Italy because of the existence of a native branch of Gestalt psychology in Padua. In this illustration (Nr 5), we see members of Group N on the rooftop of their studio in Padua, holding a work, Dynamic Vision, which is a good example of the application of Gestalt phenomena. Plastic tape is mounted in front of a painted background in such a way that rapid foreground-background relation changes appear.

The artists creatively applied principles from Gestalt psychology. Those optical illusions create a visual vibration or a dazzle, a sensation which is real and intersubjective, yet can only be explained by perceptual processes, because what is seen is not actually there, it only exists in the perceiving eye and mind. New Tendencies artists sought a dynamic relationship between work and viewer which resulted in an optical instability, a vibration on the margins of the visual field, a dazzle (see illustration Nr 6 large version of Dynamic Vision).

I suggest to understand the aesthetics of New Tendencies in the context of unorthodox postwar neo-Marxism, represented in the West by figures such as Henry Lefebvre, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse. In Zagreb and Belgrade, philosophers edited Praxis magazine, which published articles by those international starts of the new left, as well as by homegrown philosophers. Praxis also organised the famous Korcula Summer School from 1964 to 1974. Praxis was, although not directly linked with New Tendencies, like a theoretical counterpoint or equivalent to it. Praxis' core topic was self-management, the official ideology of Yugoslavia.

“Autogestion” (French for self-management) became the battle cry of the 1968 generation. The Yugoslav third way attracted the interest of leftists from all over the world. After Yugoslavia had become founding member of the nonaligned movement of nations, it tried to find a third way also intellectually and artistically between the capitalist West and the Soviet dominated Eastern bloc. Yugoslavia did not impose any restrictions on art and allowed its own citizens to travel abroad and granted Visa free entry to citizens from East and West.

I propose to understand the “relational aesthetics” of New Tendencies in this context of a quest for self-management and self-governement as part of a “project”. In Ernst Bloch's philosophy of the project, which was in turn derived from Marx and Hegel, history was understood as negation of reality as it existed and the result of creating an outline for self-development in front of an open historical horizon. The participatory artwork can be read as the physical manifestation of the Hegelian process of mediation between subject and object, between the particular and the universal. The dazzle is the moment of reversal, the turning point (German “Umschlagpunkt”) of Hegelian dialectics, when a thesis, through its negation, turns into synthesis.

The moving artwork or the work that demands movement leads to a sudden visual sensation, the dazzle. This sensation can be understood in analogy to the expected revolutionary, qualitative jump arising from the actual realization of the political ideal of self-management. Hegelian, Marxist views of history emphasize the sudden jump: a long and slow build-up, the tendency, leads to a sudden explosion, the qualitative shift.ii The relationship between work and viewer in the visual field created by the artworks is equivalent with the abstract logical form of the Hegelian close of argument. The kinetic art work realizes such a qualitative shift, as if under laboratory conditions, in art. This projective, ideal moment was arrived at with the viewer experiencing the dazzle – when a Gestalt effect physically worked in the mind of a viewer.

According to co-founder and chief theorist of New Tendencies Matko Meštrović,iii the historical tendency was one of the total humanization of the life-world. The project of New Tendencies was to link this with the humanization of the sciences through art. The modernistic expectation to go pregnant with the future at any moment becomes realized in the artwork that materializes such a leap inside its own structure. The content of each work is nothing else but a demonstration, in the abstract, of Hegelian turning points, each one marking a point in history when new horizons open, when the dialectics of master and slave, capital and producer, order giver and order receiver experience qualitative changes; when the objects of history turn themselves into subjects.

New Tendencies were most productive between the first and the second exhibition in 1961 and 1963 respectively. The movement became nearly dominant in Europa by the mid 1960s. The scale of works also shifted from small objects to environments. Sometimes the whole range of dynamic, visually interactive experience was deployed together in large scale cooperative artworks, such as the Labyrinth created by GRAV. After a first version created for the Biennale of Young Artists of Paris in 1963, another Labyrinth was produced on the occasion of the New Tendencies exhibition at the Louvre in Paris in 1964 (see illustration 7). The Labyrinths were signed collectively; those works amounted to strong visual shock tactics, consisting of stroboscopic lights, virtual movement (the phi effect), mirrors and other devices on a grand scale.

Many artists involved in New Tendencies participated in The Responsive Eye at MoMA in 1965, but sudden fame was corrosive for the movement and some of the groups involved. A crisis was experienced and reflected at the symposium in Brezovica in 1965 (see illustration 8). After a break from the biannual rhythm, New Tendencies returned in 1968/69 under the banner of “the computer as a medium of visual research.” The Stuttgart Circle of Max Bense, and the information aesthetics of Bense and Abraham Moles provided the theoretic background for work such as Frieder Nake's and Hiroshi Kawano's (see illustrations 9 and 10).

In a string of events, from summer 1968 to 69, and then again in 1971 and 1973, New Tendencies showed visual research realized by computer, but also still constructive art. The Zagreb exhibition of 1973 presented constructive, computer and conceptual art side by side. That time saw conceptual art and related new types of practices gradually gaining in importance. Artists from the autonomous region of Vojvodina, like Bosch + Bosch group and Bálint Szombathy carried out work such as Szombathy's famous Lenin in Budapest, which challenged the conventions of image making in a socialist state (see illustration 11). The 1973 exhibition was seen as a failure by contemporaries, but in retrospect becomes recognized as an important moment in 20th century art, to be put into a sequence with Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), Software (1970) and Information (1970), as well as When Attitudes become Form (1969).
The curators in Zagreb also published a magazine, Bit International, from 1968 to 1972, which reflected not only on computer art and information aesthetics, but also on design and on electronic media (see illustration 12). New Tendencies created art of an advanced neo-avant-garde position on the cusp of the transition from industrial society to the information era.

Around the late 1960s, Keynesian Fordism started to experience its own crisis, and modernization projects fell apart for different reasons. Yugoslavia, after enjoying high economic growth rates of up to 11%, suddenly entered a start and sputter pattern. After 1968, in which Yugoslav students had participated lively, the regime turned increasingly repressive and shut down Praxis in 1974, while New Tendencies was left to peter out. In Latin America, hegemonic influence, such as the USA-supported military coups in Brazil and Chile, brought about a change in governance, which abandoned the modernistic emancipatory project and initiated what would become known as “neoliberal experiment” and “lost decades”.

Conclusions

The “third space” created by this movement in non-aligned Yugoslavia enabled an art movement that took the modernistic paradigm and developed it into something that pointed beyond it. The peripheral status of the country of origin of many participants enabled them to embrace modernity more radically and produce a project where bottom-up forms of social self-organization were rehearsed in a participatory, 'social' art. Yet for exactly the same reasons – the peripheral status of the critics and institutions supporting it, and the precarious character of the modernization projects – this movement lost its support structures after 1968 and went almost forgotten in the 1980s. I would like to end with questions rather than strong conclusions: What can we learn form the demise of such a movement, that centered on a project? Is there anything to be recovered as an unrealized but desirable potential? Or can we also learn from the failure, from the impossibility of its unrecognized, sometimes contradictory assumptions?

Vortrag: New Tendencies und Kinetika 1967

Armin Medosch — Fri, 06 May 2016 06:40:47 +0000

Deutsch

new tendencies

Armin Medosch lecturing at 21er Haus

Vortrag gehalten am 26.04. 2016 anlässlich der Eröffnung der Ausstellung Rückblick Kinetika 1967 im 21er Haus. An der Ausstellung Kinetika, gezeigt im damaligen 20er Haus, nahmen viele Künstlerinnen und Künstler Teil, die in der Künstlerbewegung und Netzwerk New Tendencies eine wichtige Rolle spielten. Dieser Vortrag fasst einige Grundzüge der New Tendencies zusammen und nimmt Bezug auf den höchst interessanten Kinetika 1967 Katalogtext von Otto Antonia Graf.

Die Neue Tendenzen nahmen ihren Ausgangspunkt 1961 in Zagreb, der Hauptstadt von Kroatien, das damals eine der Teilrepubliken der Föderation der sozialistischen Republiken Jugoslawiens war. Eine erste Ausstellung in Zagreb im Jahr 1961 gab dieser sehr internationalen Bewegung ihren Namen, die auch als Nove Tendencije, Nouvelle Tendance oder New Tendencies bekannt sind. Initiiert wurde diese erste Ausstellung vom brasilianischen Künstler Almir Mavignier und dem kroatischen Kunsthistoriker und Kritiker Matko Mestrovic. Das ist insofern interessant also wir es hier mit einem dezentralem Modernismus zu tun haben, einer außerhalb der damaligen Zentren, Paris und New York entstandenen Neo-Avantgarde. Im Einklang mit führenden ex-jugoslawischen Kunsthistorikern und Theoretikern wie Misko Suvakovic und Ales Erjavec möchte ich festhalten, dass es sich um eine dezidiert neo-avantgardistische Strömung handelte, ein Modernismus also, der also nicht bloß abgeleitet war aus den Errungenschaften der historischen Avantgarden der Zwischenkriegszeit, sondern, in dieser Tradition stehend, eigenständige Entwicklungen vollbracht hat.

Die Neuen Tendenzen beruhten auf einer Verbindung aus einer kritischen, politisch engagierten künstlerischen Praxis mit einem positivem, allerdings nicht eindimensionalem Verhältnis zu Technologie und Wissenschaft. Dass diese zwei Dinge als zusammengehörig gedacht werden können ist heute gar nicht mehr so selbstverständlich. New Tendencies Mitbegründer Almir Mavignier war damals an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm tätig, wo er 1953 unter Max Bill zu studieren begonnen hatte. Ulm wurde damals als ein Neues Bauhaus bezeichnet und entwickelte unter dem Argentinier Tomas Maldonado eine extrem rationalistische, verwissenschaftlichte Design-Ideologie. Andere Quellen, aus denen sich dieses Nahverhältnis von Kunst und Technologie, Kunst und Wissenschaft speisten, waren die holländische De Stijl Gruppe und der russische Konstruktivismus und deren Zusammentreffen in Deutschland ca. 1922. So ist überliefert, dass einer der etwas älteren Vorbilder der Neuen Tendenzen, Jesus Rafael-Soto (neben Vasarely und Lucio Fontana) nach New York fuhr um Piet Mondrian zu besuchen. Soto soll gesagt haben, ich möchte ihre Bilder beschleunigen, worauf Mondrian antwortete: "aber meine Bilder sind bereits sehr schnell."

Ein weiterer wichtiger Punkt ist die Entstehung der Neuen Tendenzen an einem ganz bestimmtem Abschnitt der Nachkriegsgeschichte. Die erste Ausstellung der Neuen Tendenzen war zwar erst 1961, doch es gab eine wichtige Vorlaufzeit, die etwa ab Mitte der 1950er Jahre begann. Ein ganz wichtiger Punkt ist in dieser Hinsicht das Verhältnis zu den Verbrechen und industrialisierten Gräueltaten der Nazis einerseits und zu den damals dominanten Kunstformen, dem abstrakten Expressionismus, in Europa auch Informel oder Tachismus genannt. In der reduktiven Logik des Kalten Krieges wurde die freie, gestische Malerei eines Jackson Pollock mit Individualismus und westlichem Liberalismus identifiziert, und der Sozialistische Realismus mit dem Massenmenschem Sowjetregime. In diese binäre Logik haben die Neuen Tendenzen eine große Bresche geschlagen.

Dazu muss man wissen, dass erstens, das ehemalige Jugoslawien nicht Teil des Ostblocks war. Schon 1948 kam es zum Bruch zwischen Stalin und Tito, in dessen Folge Jugoslawien eine eigene, bewusst anti-stalinistische Ideologie entwickelte, die auf dem Konzept der Selbstverwaltung beruhte, eine Ideologie der dezentralen Selbstorganisation aller Teile der Gesellschaft; was dazu führte dass, zweitens, auch die Kunst in den Genuss der Selbstverwaltung kam, es also keine von oben verordnete Linie gab, so dass sich ab den 1950er Jahren modernistische Tendenzen entwickelten, die z.B. in Zagreb an gewisse konstruktivistische und auch dadaistische Vorläufer der Zwischenkriegszeit anschließen konnten; und drittens, führten diese Entwicklungen dazu dass Jugoslawien Gründungsmitglied, gemeinsam Mit Indien, Indonesien und Ägypten des Blocks der Blockfreien war, alles Staaten also, die sich eben erst von imperialistischer Vorherrschaft befreit hatten und nun nach einem „dritten Weg“ suchten, einem Mittelweg zwischen Kapitalismus und Kommunismus.

Aus all diesen drei Gründen also konnten sich die Nove Tendencije in Jugoslawien entwickeln, doch war es keine jugoslawische, sondern eine extrem internationalistische Künstlerbewegung, die auf dem blockfreien Boden gedeihen konnte. Nach der ersten Ausstellung 1961 kam es zu einer zweiten Ausstellung in Zagreb 1963, ein extrem kurzer Zeitraum, innerhalb dessen die Neuen Tendenzen nicht nur zahlenmäßig gewaltig anwuchsen, sondern auch eine eigene Programmatik der künstlerischen Forschung entwickelten. 1963 kam es auch zur Konsekrierung der Neuen Tendenzen am internationalen Kongress der Kritiker durch die damals hervorragendsten europäischen Kritiker, Giulio Carlo Argan, Rom, Pierre Restany, Paris und Aguilera Cerni, Madrid. Es folgte eine gemeinsame, große Ausstellung im Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris und die Teilnahme wesentlicher New Tendencies Künstler an der Ausstellung The Responsive Eye, 1965 in New York.

Diese Ausstellung wurde nicht nur als erster Blockbuster der modernen Kunst bezeichnet, sondern brachte auch die Begriffe Kinetic Art und Op Art in den öffentlichen Diskurs. Von den stärker politisch motivierten Künstlerinnen und Künstlern der New Tendenices wurde diese Ausstellung allerdings als „Begräbnis erster Klasse“ wahrgenommen. Insbesondere durch den Begriff der Op Art, mit dem diese Kunst zum Konkurrenten der Pop Art aufgebaut werden sollte, wurden nur die oberflächlichsten Charakteristika ihrer Kunst wahrgenommen, auf Kosten der politischen Motive, welche diese Künstler angetrieben haben.

Was waren aber die politischen Motive dieser Kunst, die sich oberflächlich recht hermetisch-neutral präsentierte? Dazu müssen wir nochmal zurückgehen in diese Nachkriegsära. Für Michel Tapié, den Papst des Informel und Tachismé hatten die Greuel der Nazizeit das Erbe der europäischen Aufklärung, ja die Grundfesten der Moderne ins Wanken gebracht. Die Kunst konnte sich an keinerlei überkommene Formen mehr halten, alles was noch gelten konnte war die ungefilterte, spontane Expressivität des Künstlers.

Für die Neuen Tendenzen war es jedoch genau umgekehrt. Sie folgten der von Georg Lukacs im Buch „Die Zerstörung der Vernunft – der Weg des Irrationalismus von Schelling zu Hitler“ vorgegebenen Linie. Lukacs identifizierte den Nationalsozialismus mit Irrationalismus – mit dem Unhinterfragten Glauben an Intuition, Genie, das Schaffen von Mythen – und erledigte damit in einem Aufwaschen eine ganze Reihe idealistischer Philosophien, von Schopenhauer über Kierkegaard und Nietzsche bis hin zum Vitalismus Bergsons und der deutschen Lebensphilosophie.

Für die Künstler der Neuen Tendenzen bedeutete das „Niemals Wieder“ gegenüber dem Faschismus eine Abkehr vom Künstler als Genie durch die Entwicklung einer sich auf wissenschaftliche Methoden beziehenden, forschenden künstlerischen Praxis. Diese visuelle künstlerische Forschung wurde vor allem in Künstlergruppen oder Kollektiven gepflegt. Diese Gruppen bezogen sich auf eine Neue Ethik des kollektiven Lebens, was sich auch dahingehend auswirkte, dass Arbeiten kollektiv signiert wurden, oder überhaupt anonym nur mit dem Gruppennamen, wie zum Beispiel bei den Spaniern Equipo 57, den Franzosen und Lateinamerikanern von Group de Recherche d'Art Visuel, kurz GRAV, und der radikalen sozialistische italienischen Gruppe N, nach dem Buchstaben N, auch ausgesprochen Enne. Daneben gab es aber auch einen anderen Strang in den Neuen Tendenzen, verkörpert durch die deutsche Gruppe Zero und deren holländischen Ableger Nul, die es als ihr Hauptziel sahen, den Menschen durch die Entwicklung einer neuen Ästhetik von den Konventionen des Denkens zu befreien.

Diese Ethik des kollektiven Lebens zeichnete sich auch dadurch aus, dass die Künstlerinnen und Künstler der Neuen Tendenzen mittels der visuellen Forschung eine neue Ästhetik für alle schaffen wollten. Ein Kernbegriff ist hier die „planetare Folklore“ von Vasarely, eine Ästhetik, die auch Menschen ohne künstlerische Vorbildung unmittelbar ansprechen sollte.

Den zeithistorischen Hintergrund bildete die von Amerika ausgehende, neue Welle der Industrialisierung auf Basis neuer Technologien der Automatisierung. In den Autofabriken von Detroit und Michigan, aber auch in den FIAT-Werken und bei Olivetti in Norditalien schlug ein neues, elektronisches Herz. Durch kybernetische Techniken der Steuerung mittels Feedback und Information erlangte die Automatisierung eine neue Qualitätsstufe des Charakters der Maschine.

Diese Entwicklung fußte auf einer Dialektik, die einerseits mehr Menschen zu mehr Wohlstand verhalf, zugleich aber die Entfremdung und Vereinzelung des Menschen in der Gesellschaft der Massenproduktion und des Massenkonsums auf ein neues Niveau brachte. Die Neuen Tendenzen waren überzeugt, dass eine progressive künstlerische Praxis sich vor diesen Entwicklungen nicht verstecken durfte. Ihr wichtigstes Ziel war deshalb, die Betrachterin, den Betrachter zum Mitgestalter des Werks zu machen und so die Subjekt-Objekt-Schranke zwischen Werk und Betrachter aufzuheben. Lange vor Nicholas Bourriaud, der den Begriff der relationalen Kunst populär machte, war dieses neuen Beziehungsgefüge ein ganz zentraler Punkt für die Neuen Tendenzen.

Ein Beispiel um diesen Gedanken zu illustrieren: 1962 wurden einige der wichtigsten italienischen und französischen Vertreter eingeladen, an einer Ausstellung finanziert von der Büromaschinenfirma Olivetti teilzunehmen. Das Sponsoring durch Olivetti ermöglichte es, zahlreiche dieser Arten von Maschinen herzustellen, die auch in dieser Ausstellung zu sehen sind, man denke zum Beispiel an Gianni Colombo. Die Ausstellung erhielt den schönen Titel „arte programmata“, die programmierte Kunst.

Den Katalogtext schrieb niemand geringerer als der kürzlich verstorbene Umberto Eco. In diesem Text, mehr oder weniger zeitgleich verfasst mit Ecos berühmtem kunsttheoretischem Text „Opera Aperta“, das offene Kunstwerk, sprach Eco davon, dass die programmierte Kunst in Gestalt dieser von Elektromotoren angetriebenen Maschinen ein Spiel von Ordnung und Zufall erzeugen würde, und somit ein Feld von Möglichkeiten zwischen Werk und Betrachter. Das Werk ist also nicht das Objekt für sich genommen, sondern die Gesamtheit der Konstellation Werk und Betrachter und der Interaktionen, die sich daraus ergeben. Ecos These, die man als eine Art Grundthese für die gesamten Neuen Tendenzen ansehen kann, war, dass die Betrachter, indem sie zu Benutzern werden, ihr eigenes kritisches Handlungspotenzial entdecken und dieses neu gefundene Wissen und Potenzial auch auf das Alltagsleben übertragen.

Der schnelle Siegeszug der Neuen Tendenzen bis nach New York, das neue Zentrum der Kunstwelt, wurde bereits vermerkt. 1966 erhielt Julio LeParc den ersten Preis der Biennale von Venedig, 1967 folgte die Kinetika in Wien. Dabei ist es höchst interessant, welche Deutung der österreichische Kunsthistoriker Otto Antonia Graf den Neuen Tendenzen gab. In seinem Katalogtext für Kinetika stellte er zunächst den Bezug auf das Konstruktionsschema maurischer Ornamente her. Für Graf beruhten die Neuen Tendenzen auf einem „Ende der Unterscheidung von Grund und Muster“, einer „Ausschaltung des Tiefenraums.“ Illustriert wurden diese Textpassagen durch Mosaiken aus der Alhambra in Granada.

Tatsächlich war es so, dass einer der wichtigsten Künstler dieser Bewegung, Francois Morellet, Anfang der 1950er Jahre nach Südspanien gefahren ist und sich von der maurischen Kunst inspirieren hat lassen; ähnlich auch Almir Mavignier, der unmittelbar vor der ersten New Tendencies Ausstellung eine Studienreise nach Ägypten unternahm.

In einem weiteren Schritt geht Graf auf die Subjekt-Spannung zwischen Werk und Betrachter ein; in meiner eigenen Arbeit1 wird dieses Verhältnis in Analogie zwischen Vordergrund / Werk und Hintergrund / historischer Kontext betrachtet. Den philosophischen Kontext, der in meinem Buch ausführlich erläutert wird, liefert eine durch Marx gefilterte, hegelianische Geschichtsphilosophie.

Diese wurde damals von den Philosophen der Praxis-Gruppe in Zagreb und Belgrad gepflegt, die das Praxis-Magazin herausgaben und von 1963 bis 1974 die Korcula Summer School organisierten. Dabei handeltes es sich weltweit um da wichtigste Treffen der philosophischen Neuen Linken, mit Größen wie Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch oder Herni Lefebvre. In deren Hegel-Interpretation nimmt der Begriff der Tendenz eine zentrale Rolle ein. Frei nach Hegel geht eine Gesellschaft mit der zukünftigen schwanger. Für lange Zeit ist das den meisten Menschen kaum bewusst, die Tendenz ist, wenn überhaupt, kaum wahrnehmbar. Erst wenn die Umstände reif sind, kommt es zu einem plötzlichem schnellen Umschlagen – zur Revolution. Wenn wir uns die Werke in dieser Ausstellung ansehen, dann erscheinen viel wie eine Illustration eines solchen tendenziösen Tendenzbegriffs – die Werk haben einen Umschlagpunkt. Otto Antonia Graf stellte aber in diesem Zusammenhang die zentrale Frage zum Verhältnis von Kunst, Technologie und geschichtlichem Telos:

„Der Künstler skizziert eine Welt, in der die Deformationen des Industrialismus und der Technologie beseitigt, Technologie und Dynamik aber zu geistbefreienden, künstlerischen Gestalten erhoben und verklärt werden können. Kunst ist die Apotheose der Wissenschaft.“

Für Graf und auch für mich, behandelte die Kunst der Neuen Tendenzen nicht nur ästhetische und formale Fragen sondern globale Probleme. Die „planetarische Folklore“ Vasarely's zielte auf eine ästhetisch durchgestaltete Lebenswelt als Korrektiv gegen die zerstörerischen Einflüsse der technisch-industriellen Existenz. In dieser Welt sollte Kunst als irdisches Paradiesversprechen für alle wirksam werden, frei nach Ernst Bloch:

„Ohne Kunst, gestaltende Ordnung und Schönheit für alle ist Gesellschaft unmöglich.“

Ohne Kunst, Brudermord, Krieg, Faschismus. Grafs tiefe Genealogie erhebt das Ornament zur "Seelenmassage" und begreift die Kinetische Kunst nicht als Phänomen des 20.Jahrhunderts, sondern als eine Parallelgeschichte zur Malerei seit dem 16. Jahrhundert. Laut Graf sei Barock ohne Kinetik nicht zu denken. Von hier geht der Weg zu den „Molekularen Architekturen der Saint Simonisten, den mechanisierten Architekturen, den Weltausstellungen, Film, Licht.“

Dahinter steht die Hoffnung auf eine einheitliche zivilisatorische Formgebung, auf dem Finden einer neuen Balance von technischer Existenz – mit all den fürchterlichen Dingen welche diese hervorbringt und einer der menschlichen Phänomenologie adäquaten Sinneserfahrung; gesucht wurde ein dynamisches Equilibrium, das auch schon der Architekturhistoriker Siegfried Giedion gefordert hat.

In Mechanization Takes Command hatt Giedion eine „anonyme Kulturgeschichte“ geschrieben. Damit verbunden ist, um wieder zu Graf zurückzukehren, „eine kopernikanische Wende," in folge der der Mensch nicht mehr statisch und anthropozentrisch im Mittelpunkt steht, sondern in einem dynamischem Verhältnis mit Umwelt und Universum. Das bedeutet auch das Ende der Priviligierung der Subjekte über die Objekte.

Diese kopernikanische Wende, konstatiert von Graf 1967, ist etwas, das immer noch vor sich geht, zum Beispiel in der neueren Philosophie des New Materialism, des Speculative Realism oder auch Post-Object-Philosophie deren gemeinsamer Fluchtpunkt die Aufhebung der Subjekt-Objektschranke ist, ein Punkt der Intervention an dem genau die Kunst der neuen Tendenzen ansetzt. Die Vermittlung zwischen der konkreten, individuellen Erfahrung des Menschen oder Künstlers und der geschichtlichen Tendenz, die von Technologie geprägt ist, war die selbstgestellte Aufgabe dieser enorm wichtigen und leider fast vergessenen künstlerischen Bewegung. Diese Aufgabe erscheint mir gerade heute von ungebrochener Aktualität. Die Technologie ist nicht unser Feind, sondern die irrationalistischen Fantasien, die sich ihrer zu bedienen hoffen, um einen neuen nietzscheanischen technologischen Übermensch zu erschaffen. Doch genau das wollen wir hoffentlich nicht.

1. Siehe dazu mein Buch: New Tendencies – Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978), MIT Press (2016) http://www.newtendencies.eu/

Tracing Information Society – A Timeline

drupaladmin — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 08:08:01 +0000

Tracing Information Society is the new project of the Technopolitics Working Group. This text was collectively written on the occasion of the Technopolitics Salon@Social Glitch where the timeline project was discussed together with two respondents, Aneta Stojnić and Noit Banai, and the audience.

This informal group began in February 2010 and comprises about 10 core members and about 30 contributors. Most of us work as artists, theoreticians, curators or journalists inside and outside major institutions. What brings us together is an interest in the impossible project of analyzing the Information Society as an open totality, that is, an integrated network of actors and events with dimensions that change depending on the perspective taken. The aim is to produce cultural criticism and art works that engage with the deeper structures of the present as a contribution to the globally distributed efforts of transforming them.

The concept of the Information Society, after being over-hyped in the 1980s and 1990s and used as a pretense for many dubious political projects (for example, by Newt Gringrich or Tony Blair) at the time, has fallen out of use lately. This offers us the freedom to re-purpose it as an umbrella term to connect multiple strands that drive complex societal transformations. One strand is the emergence of a distinct techno-economic paradigm, usually called post-fordism, following the economic crisis of the 1970s. Since the 1990s, processes of financialization have become ever more important. Another strand concerns the political transformation that brought about a system of governance which privileges market-structures in all areas of life––what is usually called neo-liberalism. A third strand is the social transformations and pluralizations of subjectivity, of gender and of what has become known as the non-human that challenge the dominant models of Western universalism and of patriarchy. A fourth strand has been created by environmental movements which have begun to transform the human relationship to nature, a task made all the more urgent by the increasingly pressing reality of climate change. Using the concept of the Information Society as an umbrella – like the group's own title Technopolitics––emphasizes the role of the technological infrastructures that underpin, though do not determine, all of these developments. Culture, society, nature and our own agency cannot be conceived of independently of these technological capacities.

The conceptual and technological foundations of the Information Society were laid in the first half of the 20th century. As a social formation it became dominant in the USA and Europe in the 1970s and globally after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. There is a considerable debate whether the contemporary economic and political transformation following the economic crisis, which started in 2008, necessitates a new umbrella term or not.

The goal of this impossibly large project is not to produce a new master narrative but to provide a framework for inquiry that is, at the same time, internally coherent and open to heterogeneous inputs and outputs. Even more, this project also provides complementary and competing pathways through an expansive and still shifting terrain. The coherence is provided by the emphasis on the simultaneous presence of all of these strands in all fields of inquiry while the openness is provided by an extreme variety of methods of research and formats of output. Thus, the projects cannot be contained within the knowledge practices provided by academia or the art system alone.

The main method of operation of the working group are regular, convivial face-to-face meetings, often with a potlatch of drinks and food, in which one member or invited guest presents his or her current research/artistic project as work in progress, which is then subjected to sympathetic but rigorous criticism from the point of view of the overall framework. These meetings, while not formally closed, are not aimed at a general public and are not recorded.

After a series of public talks we decided to engage together in a material project that couples artistic as well as theoretical research and practice and initiated Tracing Information Society – A Timeline. The timeline provides a format that is both clearly structured––everything is organized according to its datum––and open to multiple perspectives as of what constitutes a relevant event. The value of a timeline is not to signal the return to a simple linear chronological model of historical development but to show the parallelism of heterogeneous events. So, for example, the year 1962 brings, among others, two entries next to each other: one is Beat the Dealer – probability theory and computation meet casino-gambling the other is the publication of Fritz Machlup’s groundbreaking empirical study of the “knowledge economy.” It is the claim of the project that these events, while usually not considered together, are nevertheless directly related to one another.

The timeline––in its current manifestation in print measures 2.8 x 7 meters––shows data on six main layers, color-encoded, and annotated with keywords that are considered relevant for the coming into being of this social formation. As heterogeneous as both the entries and the group are––there is no binding theory––they all come from a critical angle and hence articulate struggles and contradictions as well as turning points (such as major political events and natural disasters) via individual entries in a single but multilayered timeline. The idea was to bring things into a relation that is not necessarily a causal one. By showing things together, new associations arise.

The Timeline is a work-in-progress with a participatory angle: the visitors of the exhibition are invited to make suggestions of their own and insert them in box placed next to the Timeline print. The Timeline can serve several functions: it serves as a heuristic device; by exploring new cross-connections such as in the example given above, it gives new insights into the process of self-instituting of information society; the printed Timeline can be shown in exhibitions and allow visitors to explore associations, memories and inspirations of their own; it can also be used as a teaching device, in workshops, and in particular in an extra-university and activist context. The aim is to produce further versions of the timeline and to incorporate more diverse viewpoints as to which are the defining events in the historical development of the Information Society. Future versions of the work will include a digital version and an exhibition which transposes the 2D timeline into 3D exhibition space and electronic space.

To discuss the conceptual outreach, the potentials, and the implications of the project, a round table discussion was held on November 19th, 7 pm.

Tracing Information Society so far carries the shared input of: John Barker, Sylvia Eckermann, Doron Goldfarb, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler, Felix Stalder, Axel Stockburger, Matthias Tarasiewicz, Thomas Thaler and Ina Zwerger. Graphic Design: Fatih Aydogdu. The first version is on view at the exhibition SOCIAL GLITCH. Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events from September 25 - December 5, 2015, curated by Theories in Mind

NOTE: This text was first published in Continent Online Magazine http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/216

Robert Adrian Smith (1935-2015): The Artist and the Media Condition

Armin Medosch — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 07:49:13 +0000

English

The Canadian Artist Robert Adrian Smith, who had lived in Vienna, Austria, since 1972, passed away on Monday September 7th 2015. Robert Adrian X is widely known as an art and telecommunications pioneer, but also was a painter who developed an analytic, conceptual practice, uniting aesthetics and politics in his answers to the question “What is Art?”

Born in Toronto on February 22 in 1935 into a family of artists, he studied commercial art at high school but did not go on to college and began his career as a painter instead. After moving to London in the early 1960s, and running a business cooperative that produced behind-glass paintings, Adrian started reflecting on modern art and broke with traditional “painterly” painting in the late 1960s. In 1969 in London he met his future wife, the Austrian radio journalist Heidi Grundmann, and in 1972 resettled to Vienna.1 Adrian's work found a positive reception in the small contemporary art scene in Vienna, which basically consisted of three galleries, one of whom, Gallery Grita Insam, became his gallery.

In the early to mid 1970s Adrian made “analytic paintings” which interrogated and deconstructed the constitutive mechanisms behind modern art. In Black Silk (1975/76) and Grey Series (1975/76) paint was added to self-supporting surfaces. A key subject for Robert Adrian was the encounter with Duchamp and the readymade and its appropriation in minimal and Pop Art. Towards the end of the 1970s, Adrian's interrogation of the modernist art paradigm led him to the creation of objects, using cheap industrial materials – another hallmark of his work. In Seascape (1980-81) Adrian built small toy ships from cardboard and in 1980 had them sail from the Giudecca in Venice as part of his participation in the Aperto show of the Biennale. In 24 Jobs (1979) he used Nimo, a modeling clay for children, to depict himself in 24 jobs he had taken on to support himself while being an artist, from working as a picture framer to a shopping window decorator. While those works use objects, those are not to be misunderstood as sculptures but are “meta objects”2 which assume a role in a photograph, performance or video.

As Adrian wrote, “it seemed that art - or at least painting – was fragmenting, splitting into its components all through the 1970s: the act of painting was played out as performance, video dealt with narrative, photography with illusion; the painted object was turned into its own subject matter while subject matter dematerialised into conceptual texts or manifestos.”3 The turning point from the 1970s to the 1980s was the beginning of a long engagement with the links between the Fordist mode of production and modernism in art, on one hand, and postmodernism, the codes of image production and distribution and the (new) media condition on the other hand.

In 1979, Adrian participated in a conference called Interplay, which brought him in touch with the emerging world of art and telecommunications projects. At about the same time, he had a solo exhibition at Insam gallery and participated in the Venice Biennale. Adrian's engagement with telecommunication started very much against the currents of the art system. 1980 saw a big comeback of painting and re-modernist minimalist geometric and neo-conceptual art. At the same time, Adrian became introduced to a company called I.P. Sharp that ran worldwide timesharing networks (a form of data networking different from the Internet as it uses central mainframe computers). Adrian got a free account on the I.P.Sharp system and started a project called Artex in 1980, an online communication project and network. Artex was probably the first artist-initiated online community. Artex became the platform for a number of seminal art and telecommunications projects such as Wiencouver I-IV (a series of projects linking Wien – Vienna - and Vancouver); The World in 24 Hours at Ars Electronica in 1982 and La Plissure du Texte (with Roy Ascott) in 1983. This was followed by the formation of the group Blix in Vienna in 1983 which carried out a series of telephone concerts between Vienna, Budapest and Warsaw.

In those projects, Adrian never glorified the technology. As Timothy Druckrey wrote, one of Adrian's achievements was sustaining, in works and writing, an adversarial role for the contemporary and media art scene, creating resistant images that could not be easily absorbed, neither by the commodified media machinery, nor by the art market.4 The work with electronic networks continued his intrinsic interest in questioning and expanding the possibilities of art. The art and telecommunications projects were, on one hand, about a new type of space, and secondly about bringing together the human, artistic network. Adrian revealed in an interview how he realized that the participants, although physically separated, met in an in-between space that was constituted through those projects.5 For The World in 24 Hours (1982), the ORF center in Linz was connected with Vienna, Bath, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Wellfleet, San Fracisco, Vancouver, Sidney, Tokyo, Honolulu, Floremce, Istabul and Athens. In each of those places a number of artists performed work, among them Hank Bull, Helmut Mark, David Garcia, Annie Wright, Roy Ascott, Jupitter-Larsen, Eric Gidney, Min Tanaka, Shinobu Kurokawa and many more. An enduring image of “Bob” as Robert Adrian was known to friends, was him at the telephone checking with other destinations, if all lines were up and running.

Adrian highlighted the collaborative and ephemeral character of the telecommunication art projects. Those existed only as long as people were there and also did not have an audience in the traditional sense, thereby undermining categories of art theory such as work and authorship. As early as 1982 Adrian emphasized the low-tech character of the technology used, such as time-share computers, telephone, fax, slowscan TV and anything else that could send and receive signals (as for instance radio amateur technology).

As the technology progressed, Adrian got in contact with young computer enthusiasts and started the Zero network in Graz, Austria. Adrian also became webmaster of the Kunstradio website (www.kunstradio.at) since 1995. In the 1990s he became an inspiration for many young artists who just started to discover computer networks and the early Internet. When the Web arrived, however, he was on the skeptical side, expressing his concerns about the looming commercialization of the Net in the seminal text “Infobahn Blues” (1995).6 Adrian was a bridge builder, an artist's artist, whose attitude was an inspiration for many artists, young and old. He also kept building electronic bridges, for instance with projects such as Horizontal Radio (1995), where Internet radio stations were connected together and through public radio also brought to the airwaves.

Adrian also continued artistic interrogations of the media condition that surrounds us. In the 1980s, Adrian carried out a number of projects that inserted themselves into the communications infrastructure. The project Surveillance (Überwachung) (I, 1979; II, 1981) used the camera system of the Vienna underground lines turning the system into an early sign of the emerging infrastructure of the society of control. For Adrian, the art and telecommunications projects and his other art were part of the same continuum of asking, as an artist, how can I understand this world today and how can I make a meaningful gesture in it. Great Moments in Modern Art I-II (1983-84) questioned the making of meaning in modern art and the power system behind it. Robert Adrian's work was driven by a political impetus, questioning the media-military complex, for instance with a series of works that presented collections of toy fighter jets, collaged with other materials: 76 Airplanes (1984-5); Yellow Airplanes (1986); Vicious Circle (55 Airplanes) (1989).

At around 1990, Adrian carried out a large scale public art work, Picasso's Eye (1989/90), a mosaic showing a pixellated eye on the outside of a building. In 1996 he realized the last step of the project Art and Politics on the cultural politics of the Nazis, a project that had begun in 1989 as a Hypercard project on the Mac.

The most interesting questions probably emerge where Robert Adrian, media artist and contemporary artist connect. While both areas of work were for him part of a continuum of his own practice, for the outside world those areas were at best engaged in a cautious flirtation sometimes, but more often characterized by long phases of separation, whereby media art's part was that of the sulking partner, feeling treated harshly for not being recognized by contemporary art. Yet as Robert Adrian said, “why should it?” Creative practices that involve new media, but also scientific knowledge and artifacts from science, constitute an unstable but burgeoning field that can only grow in importance, although it has still not found a proper place in the art canon and maybe never will.

In the 1980s the term media art became widespread, in the 1990s this was followed by net art, later by digital art. Yet all of those terms seem to be too closely linked to the technical medium used, and thus wedded to an outdated modernist concept of media-specificity. The 2000s saw therefore the rise of a new term, of the postmedia condition, a discourse that peaked about two years ago, when the “post-digital” was the official theme of Transmediale. Now, there is no one single adequate and agreed term to cover those practices. At the same time it is undeniable that there is a long and distinct legacy of practices, from Constructivism and Concrete Art, to the Experiments of the Black Mountain School and E.A.T., but also the New Tendencies in Zagreb to the contemporary art and technology, art and science practices – a long and proud but often troubled tradition with which the art market never really agreed and which finds itself today almost as marginalized as in the 1980s, as the worlds of contemporary and post media practices have once more separated.

I would thus go back one step and claim that Robert Adrian questioned and represented the media condition in his work, in art and in society. He reflected on the changing media condition in the context of a transition from an industrial to a networked age. One of the foundational problems in both philosophy and art is the question of mediation, of the link between the subject and the object, between societies and the cultural forms of self-representations they produce. Such an understanding of mediation had, initially, little to do with technical media, since the term was introduced by Georg Friedrich Hegel in the early 1800s. Soon thereafter, however, through photography and telegraphy, the fast rotating printing press and Linotype, and finally through film, radio and television, technical media became involved in the process of mediation. As the Toronto School of media theory found out, the structure of those media had an influence on the way we perceive the world. Connected with this thesis is not only Marshal McLuhan but other less well known Canadian scholars such as Harold Innis and Jack Goody. From the position of being an artist, Adrian was also a Toronto School media theorist – he questioned and theorized media in art and writing. Adrian saw art as still belonging to the industrial paradigm, a world based on making and selling objects/commodities. The art and communications projects transcended that context and pointed to a new type of art where concepts such as object or authorship, on which the old system of art depended, made no sense any longer.

Yet while Adrian conducted his practical, experimental investigation of the media sphere, he should be remembered not only for what he did, but also for what he consciously avoided doing. He shied away from a glorification of the technical apparatus and avoided commodity fetishism – the belief that mistakes social relations for relations between things. In other words, he never conducted an idolatry of technology, as is so often the case today. He also did not use the technology to put himself as the artist into the center of attention by creating pretentious art which projected back the values of old bourgeois art on the new media condition. His approach was always exploratory, testing the limits of the media condition, finding out about its structures and its structuring influence on the mediation between the personal and the social, between the particular and the universal. In this regard, he had the capacity to bridge the gap between everyday life and the grand techno-political transformations of the world, which, it must be said, contemporary art finds itself increasingly unable to understand because of its technical and media illiteracy.

While doing this work, as a practical, experimental inquiry – as opposed to scholarly book research – he always kept his critical guard and did not resort to esoteric metaphors of, for instance, a mystified collective intelligence. While Robert Adrian had a strong personality, his work never dwelled on meek, individualist, psychological stuff. His critical thinking made his work resistant to the increasing pressure for the instrumentalisation of art in the discourse on the creative industries. And all those things together made him a role model for many younger artists, I must say, like me at the time, who also started to play with computers and modems in the mid to late 1980s. It was his presence and example as an enabler and facilitator that encouraged many to continue in that direction.

Last not least I would like to highlight something more personal. Robert Adrian was certainly a nice person, as Gerfried Stocker said at the funeral ceremony, a “friend of humanity.” But being a friend of humanity sometimes makes it necessary to object and contest dominant patterns of thought. Robert Adrian had a passionate, sometimes combative and opinionated debating style. As Heidi Grundmann has pointed out, he could not help but think about art, always looking at the connections rather than the isolated facts, questioning the appearance of things and asking for a deeper truth, which made him a real connected thinker. At the same time those properties are not very popular in the network age where everybody is constantly shapeshifting in order to fit into project structures and adapting to the expectations on the creative individual in the innovation machine. I think that also in this sense Robert Adrian Smith should be seen as an example – and I am optimistic at least in that regard that this critical attitude, which sometimes has to quite harshly and abruptly negate the status quo in society in order to attain something better, will not die out with Bob.

1. When Adrian participated in a group show at Gallery St. Stephan the Austrian artist Marc Adrian complained that he had taken his name and even went to court. Robert Adrian then had to add an X to his artist name, and for many years was known as Robert Adrian X. The X was silently dropped after Marc Adrian passed away in 2007.
2. Robert Adrian, 1976. “Meta Objects.” In: Exhibition Catalog, Gallery of Taxispalais, Innsbruck, no pagination.
3. Robert Adrian X, 2001. “Interview.” In: Robert Adrian X. Exhib.cat., edited by Lucas Gehrmann and Kunsthalle Wien, pp 46-73.
4. Timothy Druckrey, 2001. “Absurdities and contradictions … Signals and Noise: Feedback from the Old and New World Order.” In: Robert Adrian X. Exhib.cat., edited by Lucas Gehrmann and Kunsthalle Wien, pp. 25-41.
5. Robert Adrian, Interview with the author, February 19 2015. Accessible online: http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1314
6. Robert Adrian, 1995. “Infobahn Blues.” In: Ctheory, online, available at http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14531/5378

Art and Technopolitics: Resist, Subvert, Accelerate!

Armin Medosch — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 09:16:54 +0000

This is the text of my Riga lecture. It has a philosophical introduction, then touches on the notion of Post-Art and finally analyses the Fields exhibition. Drawing on my own curatorial work, conducted in cooperation with RIXC, in the exhibitions Waves and Fields, I hope to arrive at criteria of what makes good art today.

Foreground – Background

NOTE: This is the text that was the basis of my speech in Riga on 8th of October 2015. It does not have the usual academic annotations and would benefit from editing. That would probably mean that it would not get published any time soon. I hope this gets accepted nevertheless as a contribution to a discussion on postmedia and contemporary art.

Let me begin with an Image. Imagine you are at the seaside and you have these goggles with which you can see under water. When you are above water you can see the sky, the sun, some clouds, maybe some people at the beach, sunbathing, children playing. Everything looks quite solid and clear, the things behave accordingly, they obey Newtonian physics. Now you dive and you enter the under water world. There, everything is quite different. There are strange fish in strange colours, and other animals, there are corals and underwater grasses. Everything is in constant motion, following the waves and the water currents. It is difficult to identify things clearly as the water and the sun play optical tricks, and there might be hidden dangers, such as poisonous fish or sea-snakes hiding between rocks; or, the other way round, you might be a danger to this beautiful but strange underwater world, as your feet could touch and break corals.

Now, which of those two worlds is the truer one, the one above or the one under water? With your goggles you can swim in such a way that your eyes are exactly at the surface level of the water, you can see both the world above and the world below the surface. What separates the worlds is the surface, a thin layer of water molecules on the top. The surface of the water is different from the rest of it, acting like a membrane. It breaks and diverts the light beams, acting like a mirror and a prism. It also regulates the exchange of molecules between air and water, its capacity to absorb CO2, its osmotic qualities, the evaporation of water under the influence of heat.

The worlds above and below the surface of the water are not as categorically separated as it initially may have seemed. The exchanges between water and air, land and sea are discernible for those who have the gift of observation. You have to see beyond the surface appearance to understand the inner principles that govern the behaviour on the outside.

I have chosen this image as an entry point into a reflection on art and technopolitics. For technopolitics, for the moment, think historical background. Art is the foreground, technopolitics the historical background. My thesis is that thinking about art always implies thinking about a foreground and a background. Art actually establishes that separation. If you have a blank sheet of paper and you draw a line, you demarcate something against something else, a foreground, the line, against the background, the white surface of the sheet. Art rises from a historical background, it does not exist in a vacuum. Art is grounded in its time, but this ground is unclear, it is like the under water world, it is shaped by tendencies that we do not necessarily understand. In order for something to become visible, the artist needs to create an artwork. Taking the creative act seriously, then it means that art does not just depict something that already exists, it essentially creates its object. By creating its object it lifts it from the ground, makes it stand out. The background recedes, it becomes background through the creative act. Most of art history has focused on the object only. The history of art becomes a history of objects, of things that have become separated from their background. This may suit artists who also try to cover their tracks. The process of creation is messy and fraught with difficulties. For artists, it may seem preferable that only the artwork as thing remains, which then can get collected by museums and thereby enter a canon of important works who inscribe themselves into a timeline – the history of art as it is conventionally understood.

But this history of art is a history of repressed historical backgrounds, it is a history that tells only half the story. It folds the social conditions of the making and thereby creates a repressed – I would like to be this understood as a holding remark to be explained later – something that becomes repressed, an un- or subconscious, which, because it gets repressed, does not go away but only gets more potent.

Art as seen from the artist's side

The process of the making of art can and should also be seen from the other side, not from the object, but from the subject, from the side of the artist. The artist is someone who exists in concrete social, historical conditions. This actual social, historical being in the world is characterised by suffering caused by lack of something. The German language knows one word for the lack of something “der Mangel.” In English you have a whole arsenal of terms, from lack of via absence to shortage, deficit, defect, want and many more. The artist, driven by those deficits, suffers and develops, out of this suffering, a desire to overcome those deficiencies. This desire drives the artist to create. It is a desire driven by need to address the blemishes of life in this world, but it is also a desire to be recognized. The artwork created by the artist contains a proposition for a state of being in which the suffering is temporarily overcome; art solves the contradictions of the time by lifting them to another terrain where it can be resolved symbolically. The desire of the artist has created an object which desires to be recognized as a work of art by others. The reflection of the artists about her or his existential condition of being has led to a specific proposition or solution which now stands out in this world as an object.

This object, as it becomes perceived by other human beings, gets reflected in their minds. They may just perceive it, look at it, try it out, if it offers ways of interaction and participation, or they contemplate it, reflect and analyse it also with their intellectual capacities. The reception of the artwork – not just by one individual, but by a whole apparatus and system of other artists, curators, critics, institutions – establishes the truth of the artwork. By truth I mean the intersubjective quality of its being (not its objective truth which does not exist). It had some truth for the artist, some relevancy, meaning, and now, through its process of social reception, it also has acquired this meaning on a wider social level. The artist has realized something that was inside her or himself, a lack, a need, a desire, and this has become objectified, a thing that stands out from a background. This thing, through the process of reception, becomes objective now in a fuller sense of the meaning of this term, an object that has a truth value for a larger number of people. The objectified desire of the artist becomes a discursive entity. The artwork contains the highly subjective and particular position of the artist but also stands in relation to something that is much more general – in the past I would have written universal. The artwork links the particular condition of its existence with a shared and thereby objectified condition of being of a larger social group.

Art is always about this relation between subject and object, between the particular and the universal. Those relationships are not fixed and static but always fluid, always dialectical, always in a state of becoming. It is a sign of contemporary regressions when the duality in motion is reduced to one side only. Those relationships become frozen, static, bipolar opposites that do not communicate. This is the art history that knows only things and the history that knows no art (or no theory, no philosophy). The dual opposites are broken up, and only one side remains, either the world above water, or the world underneath the surface, the base or the superstructure. From this one-sided viewpoint the question regarding the socio-historical background of an artwork raises a huge problem. How can this artwork be understood in its historical background. Conventional art history denies that it can be. It has decided to accept only one side of the coin, the superstructural side. Artworks are objects which have inscribed themselves into a timeline of other objects with whom alone it can be compared. The social context is just that, a context which can be severed from the artwork without any damage being done to its meaning.

Base and Superstructure

The problem between subject and object replicates itself on the level of the society. Societies create mirror images of themselves and their worlds in the products of their culture, of which fine arts are a special case. The metaphor of base and superstructure is interpreted here in the footsteps of Raymond Williams as a dialectic wellspring of conflict and thus creation. The movement of base and superstructure through time, that's history. Technopolitics is a concept of history which tries to consider the historic totality, the dialectical dance of base and superstructure. According to this approach, the economy does not occupy a privileged place because we believe in the economy as an elevated sphere of importance but because the economy has become so all-encompassing and pervasive. The same counts true for technology. Technopolitics does not mean that we are ruled by the technology. We think that technology and the economy are abstractions and realities at the same time. The economy does not happen elsewhere but right in our lives. There are relationships between technologies, value systems, ways of doing things and the economy which together form a social whole. It is art's task to present such a wholeness and not just abstractions. With abstractions I do not mean abstract art but abstract thought, thought that stands isolated from life. Art's task is to show the connections, the relationships between the universal and the particular, the theoretic and the concrete.

Any base, means a specific socioeconomic life form, creates itself a superstructure adequate to itself. It is an articulation of the conflicts and contradictions of that society. It is the world reflected in the reflective interiority of the collective artist who created an artistic product. Society creates an image of itself in which it presents itself as it wants to be seen. But this image also creates its own double negation. Societies are in a mode of denial about that which is least tolerable about them. This repressed social content creates the political unconscious of the mirror image.

The world of reflection, the interiority of a person and of the collective, is the world of freedom, of self-discovery, of image making. There is another dialectic here, between determination and freedom, between necessity and possibility. Self-conscious being is always a projection of an open horizon, of the potential of limitless becoming. This is the idea of freedom which we have since the French Revolution. Freedom is the self-realization of man by applying work to forces of nature. But this is self-realisation under the unfree conditions of current society. The artwork contains human potential realized but realized under conditions of falseness. It is human potential realized under the given conditions, existing technologies, the level of consciousness, the state of the art in sciences. It is not absolute potential realised.

Base and superstructure are not like fixed entities that form somehow containers, they are much more like background – foreground, the one conditions the other, in a process of permanent becoming. There is no doubt that the superstructure also “determines” the development of the base as it creates desirable future images. But what is much more important is that those dialectical pairs are less to be seen as entities and more like a force, a potential for becoming. The dialectical philosophy I have laid out here which contains more than a few traces of Hegel is a philosophy of process. The surfaces do not tell us what happens, we need to look behind the surface to engage with processes which together form a historical tendency.

Consciously acting in the world as artist or curator means to try to understand the historical tendency and think and do accordingly. The world is a socioeconomic technological and political system, which includes also an art world. Art gets studied as a social phenomenon and practice. We thus need to turn very briefly to art's history.

Historical Forces since 1800

The most important fact to start with is the autonomy of art as it developed from the late 18th century on. Autonomy of art meant that it remained outside the utilitarian capitalist system that was developing. In the sheltered sphere of autonomous art, the ideas of the French Revolution were kept alive. The category of autonomy contains the seed forms of what characterizes modern art, and also its internal opposition, like reactionary modernists such as Nietzsche and Baudelaire.

A Critique of Alienation and of the commodity.

The 19th century was characterized by the rise of the machine system in production. First the political, then the revolution in production. Marx's critique of the machine ”as the intellectual power of another realized in machine form that confronts the worker as a power outside of him that rules over him.”

The basic elliptic thought by Marx, that the worker the more he works the more he helps capital to become more powerful. That the process of technological innovation is systematically directed against the workforce, that there are historic tendencies which are driven by the contradictions of industrial modernity. The machine, as the objectified intellectual potential of another continues in Weberian rationalisation and in processes designed - as described by Braverman and Noble - to divest knowledge of the working process from workers and implement it in machine form. The information society is when this is applied to information.

Capital is creative, it revolutionizes the forces of production in struggles over competition, political hegemony, and retaining the class structure. By revolutionizing the forces of production capital creates the conditions for its own overcoming but constantly has to deny and stop that dynamic.

Commodity Fetishism: The industrial system also implements the commodity as central component. The commodity form allows everything to be exchanged against everything. The labour that has gone into the commodity has become invisible because of the exchange value. In a world governed by commodity relationships, the thinking becomes obscured, fetishized, because what are social relations become perceived as relations between things.

Those tendencies were addressed in one single gesture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, with Fountain. The signing of an artwork has wiped out the relationship with craft. Art becomes the decision making power to say what is art. Duchamp defined art in the beginning Fordist age, at about the same time as Henry Ford switched on the first production line. Art becomes a signature on an industrial object. The magic of commodity fetishism and of art comes together. The power of the signature has now been adopted widely.

Art as Metalanguage critique of art

In the tradition of the autonomy of art and of Duchamp's signature object a critical branch in modern art and contemporary art has grown since the early 20th century. After the historic avant-gardes and after the Second World War, neo-avant-gardes formed in the industrialized countries. Here we have the legacy of Surrealism and Dada on one hand, and of Constructivist and Concrete Art on the other hand. This has been shaken up by the explosion of art movements in the 1960s. In the 1960s conceptual art formed as a meta-language critique of art. Art making became identical with creating a theory of art. We can conclude with Peter Osborne that all contemporary art is post-conceptual art.

After conceptual art in the narrow sense, the 1970s saw a revolution of post-conceptual art practices, which maintained the main thrust of conceptual art, the question “what is art?” but became more directly involved in politics, or rather those forms of politics where the private becomes political. In movements such as land art, arte povera, body art, performance, feminist photography and video art and community art practices. We, as postmedia art community, owe a lot to these practices, because without them, our practice would not be recognized as art. Those practices, however, were holding on to the autonomy of art, and positioned themselves outside production relations. A common characteristic of those practices was that they formulated a critique of industrial society and its managerial, bureaucratic apparatus, and the forms of identity that it offered people. The avant-gardes of the 1970s formulated many micro-political critiques of Fordism, thereby preparing the ground for a new paradigm, information society.

Critical contemporary art is a child of those post-conceptual art practices. This type of art, under the banner of institutional critique, has left no stone unturned investigating the support structures of art.

This institutional critique, with its focus on the artworld, produced important insights which point beyond the artworld and can be extrapolated into a critique of the present. I can find a lot of interesting things in this domain, especially with regard to recognizing that we live in a new world order of capitalist globalisation, a world which has become culturally less Eurocentric and more diverse in every aspect, while on the other hand new monopolies are created with regard to money and information. At the same time, this type of art is linked to the art market which seems to be going from strength to strength.

Since the 1980s, but more widely since the 1990s, contemporary art and finance have become friends. Speculative capital has found speculative conceptual art to its liking. Art adds that special touch, even when it keeps being critical, because that asserts its autonomy. The value arises because of the fact, that it cannot have any objective value. This is the mystery of art, the mystery of the success of contemporary art. Art has arrived in the center of society, one “goes art.” The question arises if this type of art can still form a meaningful oppositional force. The weapons of this art are skilled construction of images.

Worlding

If we follow the artist, art historian and theorist Terry Smith, the artist's task is to make an image of the world. “Worlding” as he calls it. The image does not have to be a painting or photograph, but also a mental image, an idea, in visual form. It should give us a meaningful image of the current world. This image created by the artist is a reflection of the world he lives in, by necessity. The collection of artworks at a time would be a reflection of the contemporary world. Because each of those artworks would necessarily also contain an aspect of critique of the world, of the suffering of the artist it also contains the world's context as implicitly known. As I have argued in my keynote speech last year, the mirror of art is broken. Art is now in competition with a stream of commercial image worlds, trying to stem the flood. But the problem is that meaning, images, information are inflationary. The image has become something that is socially constructed and distributed.

The resistance against and subversion of commercial image-worlds and ideologemes and memes shows us that the Emperor is still naked. But resistance and subversion have become something like a Sysiphos task. Because critique needs an addressee, and in the current situation there is no addressee, the social contract has been revoked, from above. There is no higher entity to which a critique could appeal. This is even more so the case in what Boltanski and Chiappello have called the projective city. In networks truth does not function as a regulator, there are only the mechanisms of network power. This ultra-hip viewpoint once more reduced people to an object of history. The critical contemporary wing of the art system is found more often on biennales than in the gallery system. It carries on with a critical function by negation, but also by negation of negation. The capacity to carry out such a negation is based on the institutional system, which is now in peril, or rather under a slow and long squeeze of eternal budget cuts.

Resistance and subversion, or disruption have also been a common battle-cry in digital art. Groups such as RTMark, Yes Men, Ubermorgen, and individuals such as Paolo Cirio have used a range of media hacking and attention engineering techniques which form a particular corner in the digital art world. On one hand securing legitimacy through ancestors such as Duchamp and Picabia, Grosz and Heartfield, on the other hand bordering on new mass techniques of image making online, where a certain type of culture jamming has become commons knowledge. Those works have used wit and humour to try get a reaction from a major corporation, as, for instance, in Google Will Eat Itself. Cirio's projects such as Loophole4All successfully establish a critique of the current financial system and the corruption it invites, but this critique offers no way of going beyond the criticized. These works have all their individual merits but they have a problem, they negate but then stop. There is no futurity in the present, no tomorrow today. It is a dialectic at standstill.

The Fields Exhibition

Fields Exhibition, exhibition view, Photograph RIXC

In this situation where contemporary art is loosing its bite between market forces, and where political digital art produces ever more stale signifiers, RIXC and me have organised the exhibition Fields last year. The curators, Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and me asked “which transdisciplinary combinations of different fields hat the greatest transformative potential.” Our starting point was the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing general structural crisis of western societies. Building on work done with the exhibition Waves, the exhibition Fields was designed to give answers to the question what makes good, transformative, political art. We did not ask for political art in the traditional sense but for work that had transformative potential, that asked to do things differently, that invited for action. This proposition was profoundly postmedia, we were postmedia in every known sense, from Rosalind Krauss, to Lev Manovich to Domenico Quaranta. Our approach, however, was not only postmedia but also post-art.

We recognized that change now pressures and pours from many sectors in society, as each discipline is looking for a solution to the crises and dilemmas. Besides art and postmedia art there are large ranges of other practices who try to find hands-on solutions for present challenges. Only some of them are considered contemporary art, others not. This was the subject of a lively curatorial discussion. There are people who just experiment with technology: they go by many names, hackers, makers, designers, critical makers and transformakers. From urban gardening to economics of solidarity, many different initiatives today try to drive change beyond the confines of informational capitalism. Many of those initiatives use tactics and forms that have a semblance with art.

This is because we live in a Post Art Society. This is no cheap thesis about the end of art but the idea that societies have passed through modern art. Central concerns in modern art have become absorbed and internalized. Art is only a special case of a much larger set of different forms of visual meaning production, or image cultures. Today, people take selfies and look after their images on social media. But it is not just the fact that people invest time and energy into their self-images. From modern art what we take is maybe not so much a specific style but the idea that art is connected to central values of western liberalism. Modern art is about freedom and the creative genius, and people are living that now, they integrate artistic strategies into their everyday life.

Modern art came also with a specific time-structure, of dreamtime, of dreaming in the present a future to be collectively attained. The break with modernism occured through speech acts by subjects who had been previously excluded from speaking, such as women, ethnic and other minorities. The structures of modern art were exposed as another way how white males formulate their particulars as universals. The break with modern art has resulted in contemporary art. And contemporary art has also been partially absorbed by Post-Art. In network society creative labour has taken on a new meaning. It has become an imperative, dictated from above to partake in creative labour. Sharing is not just caring but a demand Now, every one acts like Andy Warhol when they take selfies, the attitude of being an artist has become generalized, but not as a freedom but as a duty in an economy which has become “artified”. As Suhail Malik recently said, we don't have the aestheticisation of politics, as Walter Benjamin complained but the aestheticisation of business and consumption. It is not enough any more to carry on with a critique of industrial society because we have left this society already behind. At present, the notion of critique as such is questionable.

Hayley Newman, Histoire Economique, exhibition view, 2014

In her work shown in the Fields exhibition, Hayley Newman has made herself a Self-Appointed Artist in Residence at the City of London. The City of London is the seat of the financial industry. Newman asked employees of bank branches if she could do Bank Rubbings, frottages of decorative architectural elements at the bank's entrance. Those frottages are indeed like a natural history, Newman has pinned down some objective historical content, creating over time, a Histoire Economique, a natural history of the financial center. The work is not only programmatic with regard to the aesthetic means but also because of the artistic strategy behind it. Newman's artist-in-residence is a lie, but no more blatant a lie than the self-legitimization of city institutions. The self-appointed artist in residence makes the city, the markets, who consider themselves supreme subjects of history, into objects of a «natural history».

Today, speculative capital is driving an immense flexible innovation regime. It is still legitimate to refer to art's critical function and look at the “social glitch” as the title of a recent exhibition in Vienna has been. Art comes as an intervention into the smooth running of those innovation machines, as a queering of them, but for the price of not being central to them. Because the regime of flexible accumulation can take on board any critique as a new source of profit. For artists the question arises how they can position themselves in relation to the military-entertainment-education-information complex?

Maja Smrekar, Hu.M.C.C. m.k.2 (Human Molecular Colonization Capacity) Exhibition view, Fields 2014

One particular answer has been given by Maja Smrekar. Philosophically similar to the Accelerationists, a new Marxist philosophical school, her proposition is to accelerate current developments in order to use that energy to divert change and drive it in new directions. In Hu.M.C.C. m.k.2 (Human Molecular Colonization Capacity) an artist's gene has been inserted into yeast to make a special yoghurt, the Maja Yoghurt. Maja Smrekar contextualizes this work with a reference to Marx's critique of the appropriation of surplus value, arguing that the enzymes, living substance from our bodies, have now also to work overtime. The setting of the work, as a kind of deep frozen advertorial, continues a line of thought that can be summarized by subversion through affirmation. The type of stem cell research necessary for Smrekar's work operates still in the taboo zones of post-christianity. Smrekar undermines any humanist critique of her work by placing the stem cell research in the context of food and high-tech advertisement. What is interesting about this work is how many-layered it is. A cool high-tech aesthetic to sell cheap yogurt, advertorials and high-end Marxist aesthetics find together in the work.

When publishing our calls for proposals we expected a huge swell of techno-ecological projects. Techno-ecologies and renewables have been consistent streams in RIXC's work. I think also that the Three Ecologies by Felix Guattari are recommended reading. However, those are very short texts and leave a lot to the imagination. Among the many propositions received, a lot of work appeared simply too literally concerned with Fields. Plenty of propositions somehow had to do with agriculture and nature, participation and documenting things, but the art was missing. The artists were incapable of distilling the conflicts and pressures in those areas into a coherent world-image. The works which we did select had an ecological component without being fully absorbed by that.

Erich Berger and Manu Luksch, in installation of Erich Berger, Polsprung

Manu Luksch's Kayak Libre. The “free Kayak” project translates the free software metaphor into an imagined public transport system using Kayaks. Luksch has recorded the conversation and edited them into pieces which can be listened to in the Kayak. The work corresponds with that of HeHe's imaginative uses for rail systems.

Manu Luksch, Kayak Libre, installation view with exhibition visitor

The meme of open/free/libre has jumped into the open, where new digital habits affect old physical processes, in particular the digital habit of cooperation and sharing. Shu Lea Cheang's Underground Seeds Exchange series of works from 2013 bring Open Source thinking to agricultural seeds. Cheang has pioneered the crossing of the fields from the digital to the analog, with her Stream the Greens as early as 2002, and has carried out many works in that vain. In Get Garlic Bio-organically farmed garlic becomes the reserve currency in the exchange economies «after the crash». Cheang invents future scenarios of which the “performance” or action carried out by artists constitutes the sole tangible bit, everything else is in the wider storyboard created by “suggestions” by the artist.

Luksch's Kayak Libre, heHe's railway systems and Cheang's participatory net art and ecology projects are also « suggestive » pieces, the artist suggests a specific practie which can be adopted by the viewer/participant. Those projects have an actualy agency and change the life-world of participants. It is a huge missing chapter in Bishop's Artificial Hells. These artists are bringing together Open Source, ecology and idras about the commons.

Annemarie Maes, Foraging Fields (2014) Detail

Annemarie Maes showed Foraging Fields (2014) a live-monitoring data-sculpture of beehives living around a green corridor in Brussels. Foraging Fields is just a snapshot of an ongoing project of Maes on bees, urban gardening, urban development and Open Source. While not implied in the work, it reminds of the fable of the bees, and also of the ruse of reason, that history does something behind our backs. The fable of the bees, later adopted by Adam Smith, explains how from the private interest of people can arise the public good. It is basically a metaphor for the market as utopia. Annemarie Maes engages in a very close relation with her bees, tracing the flight-paths of urban beehives through analyzing the pollen they bring home. Maes' practice makes her adopt many different techniques, from gardening and bee keeping to pollen anlysis. My argument is that she unites that into an artistic practice, although strongly based on scientific methods, yet still brought together within an art project. Maes' work has urbanistic, ecological and anthropological orientations. She increases the sensorial domain by working with bees, thereby also entering into inter-species communication. Maes practice suggests to use communication networks differently, to tell stories 'from the “mouth” of the bee-hive.' Her work also presents interesting perspectives on a postindustrial, edible city (a slogan used by another artists, Debra Salomon, who did not participate in the Fields exhibition).

As I have said above, creative capital creates the conditions for its own overcoming. One such technology is the Net. The Net could become the decentralized storage of all human knowledges, permanently available to all, for free. The net has a potential as an enabler of end-to-end innovation between people. A lot of that potential is currently blocked, for instance through intellectual property laws. Other blockages stem from social structures, questions of access, who participates in those knowledge economies, and of course, Big Data and raw power, who has access to all that information. The network utopia has given way to a dystopia, yet the positive potential still remains.

We Should Take Nothing for Granted – On the Building of an Alert and Knowledgeable Citizenry, exhibition view 2014

Marko Peljhan and Aljosa Abrahamsberg (SI), Matthew Biederman (CA), and Brian Springer presented We Should Take Nothing for Granted – On the Building of an Alert and Knowledgeable Citizenry. The group juxtaposed the speech by President Eisenhower under that title with real, ongoing surveillance activity. It was Eisenhower who coined the phrase of the military industrial complex. Although a conservative himself, he feared that the apparatus of power could become autonomous, no longer reigned in by political power. What helps against that are alert and knowledgeable citizen and how to get those would be a free and open Internet. Peljhan and his cooperators have consistently formulated a neo- and retro-constructivist position. They are leaving the conventional field of art and are constructing technologies which empower their users. Some of those, such as the spy plane they built a few years ago, are autonomous technologies. Here, by definition, only the technology is free. Makrolab and other projects have provided a kind of anti-surveillance kit, equipping ordinary citizens to do something against surveillance, at least in principle. This time again a real supercomputer is sitting in the centre of the installation, like a buddha statue in a shrine, carrying out real acts of counter-surveillance, scanning the networks and airwaves. An aspect of that work is also conversion, converting military to civilian tools.

Darko Fritz, explaining his work OK 200

A number of works presented such post-Internet art, for instance, Darko Fritz showing internet error messages grown by plants in real fields.

YoHa, Endless War, installation view 2014

YoHa's Endless War takes the viewer inside the database with its minimalistic aesthetics. Using datasets which have become public through one of the famous leaks of WikiLeaks, YoHa used search algorithms in the same way as intelligence agencies do, scanning through thousands of documents according to specific techniques based on word frequency. An area that is normally beyond comprehension, the way how search algorithms are used in massive surveillance operations, becomes in immersive life-data-base art piece.

However, unfortunately the emancipatory potential of the Net comes atop of social structures that are unsustainable. The network economy is based on highly unequal structures also in the rich nations. Apart from the money class as such, there are hierarchies of new types of workers: there are well paid knowledge workers, precarious ones, and there are precarious jobs on which both the well-paid and the badly-paid knowledge workers depend, as part of their infrastructure. These social structures are particularly intense in so called Global Cities where network power manifests itself in new gentrified quarters. People are living their lives locally, in a bubble, without being aware how that affects others or how this is all related.

Ines Doujak and John Barker, Loomshuttle Warpaths (2011-14) Detail, photo taken outside Arsenals exhibition hall

Ines Doujak and John Barker's piece Loomshuttle Warpaths (2011-14) exposed networks linking lines of trade and just-in-time production with narratives informed by indigenous people's perception of clothes as alive, as was and is common in Andean cultures. The project brings together mythical and logistics chains, labour relations and the whims of fashions, exposing how one affects the other. A change in taste in a hipster ghetto in London may transmit into a weekend of work for a factory in Bangladesh. While the western “we” can engage in immaterial production, the existence of JIT and logistics makes sure that those “feelings” are communicated as “ commands” down the line of the global production chain. Through its reference to Southern American approaches to clothes, the piece avoids moralising, showing how resistance can come from an internal psychological mode of being or attitude.

Martin Howse Earth Computer 2014

No material is off-limits any more, everything can go into a unity with everything else through software and through semantics. Martin Howse started a series of experiments with Earth Computers. This was like an experiment in computer shamanism, pretending that the earth was computing, or behaving digitally. Working with rocks and fungi, for example, an assemblage is created that gives some credits to the idea that earth also computes. Gints Gabrans served a new enzyme which would allow people to eat paper and small pieces of wood. Food problem temporarily solved.

Gints Gabrans, Foood, installation view

Erich Berger's work observes if the world's magnetic poles are swapping sides, a process that would take decades, if it ever did occur. Berger's work is like a study room that allows people to engage with this “science”.

RIXC, Biotricity, Fields opening night

In many of those works – I should mention als RIXC's biotricity – a new relationship with nature is the central topic. A common denominator is that those works ask nature to do something. We have reached a historical turning point in our nature relation. Science has constructed nature as its lifeless other, a thing. Because nature was turned into a thing, it could also get exploited by capital. But now we discover that this thing has new characteristics. Through our technical prosthesis we can communicate with nature in new ways and thus develop a new nature relation. This nature relation is not characterized by its surface characteristics but by engaging with it as a lively force. In this new nature we discover a lot of ourselves, it is a nature 2.0 which has already been formed by us. Personally, I started reading philosophy of art from the Jena Romantics.

Their philosophy of art is interesting because it still had a premodern configuration, according to which philosophy stood above all other sciences. The extreme idealism, while providing absurd results when judged through the reductionist, positivist lense, contains a lot of inspiration for thinking about art and nature differently. In this Nature 2.0 information has become the key, it is the glue that brings everything together, the “force” behind the visible things. The next big task will be to deal with information in a way that goes beyond the limited concepts of mathematical information theory. We need to develop a new aesthetics and politics of information. We also need to consider data as a realistic sphere of our existence. Many such artworks together develop new ontologies, new materialisms. Nature, reconstructed in the digital image, emerged as a larger topic from Fields.

The exhibition Fields has raised the question which transdisciplinary practices offer the greatest potential for social change. We got some answers but these are just dots on the landscape. The exhibition has indeed confirmed that there are political art practices based on a particular crossing of skill-sets. What remains to be done is to look deeper into this question of transdisciplinarity. In the institutional system, they talk about interdisciplinarity since 40 years without ever coming closer to it. The system is built in such a way that over each field a chief watches so that nobody crosses it. Art thus remains one of the few areas where critical interlopers are possible. At the same time it would be wrong to assume that it is easy to cross the fields. Therefore, my proposal remains to start a discussion on categorisation. We need a critical vocabulary in order to formulate our topics, not just the old hat rhetoric of art and science. Such a critical vocabulary needs to become shared common knowledge, otherwise there can be no progress in this area. This is the other great danger, that everything becomes absorbed by innovation. That our creativity, skills and desires become part of he next big thing, some form of green capitalism, which is already on the horizon.

My own thinking goes away from technology. I think we have made a mistake by allowing people to belief that it is about technology, but it is not. It is about making an image of this world of which technology is a part. The technology is maybe better understood as a metaphor or allegory. The technopolitical tendency of history plays itself out. It also has a psycho-analytical side. The dialectical movement can liberate us from old thinking, from myth and superstition. The subject, as it becomes self-conscious, also uncovers the technological unconscious. Hegel and Lacan belong together, the moment of becoming is also passing through the collective psyche. We become conscious of what was lingering in the subconscious. But we can also fall back, as societies, that's what we experience with the populist neo-rightist parties which are so successful everywhere.

One tendency that I see is that a certain type of practices often hides the artist, the artist vanishes behind the work. Contemporary art has conducted a politics of form. What media art is doing is a politics of content, but this content is often purely machinic.

There exists an artistic subgenre, the experimental Kit, from Superweed Kit by Heath Bunting and Kate Rich, to the Dullart Media Player and projects such as Superglue, artists build technical Kits which they offer to the public. The art project takes on the outside demeanour of a commodity. It can be a piece of hard- and software, or use the commodity form in the way of a multiple. In the European context, the multiple has become popular in art through Edition MAT by Daniel Spoerri, and has been close to Pierre Restany's Noveaux Realisme.

While Superweed Kit clearly presents its subversive aims, the Kit art type assumes that the Kit allows you to carry out an activity which is basically an affirmation of liberal freedoms. Often this is some kind of communication tool that allows you to transmit freely some content. But this only replicates on the latest layer what has already been possible in this society. The Kits assume the liberal utopia of free choice and free media. Through buying the Kit, you assert those freedoms. Freedom of Speech but only for property owners. Only those Kits which are built in a Dadaistic manner have this irony already in their DNA.

The artistic repertoire of the Kit type of art remains limited, especially when considered more from a hacker point of view. The artists appear to promote something that open source developers have been doing for years, such as the Dyne software and player and the OpenWrt firmware. Dullart's media player presents itself as a piece of proprietary hardware, by the artist. The free and open soure software developers of Dyne and OpenWrt produce something that has moved beyond the commodity form, a peer based community software.

We need to identify the forms of mediation in the early 21st century which allow us to find a new synthesis of contemporary art and postmedia art. This means that hopefully we can continue with Fields, realising the second part, a critical vocabulary of notions of postmedia art.

Cities of the Sun: Urban Revolutions and the Network Commons

Armin Medosch — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 07:40:49 +0000

In this talk, I want to bring together two notions: the city as utopia and project; and the recent developments, over the past 10 to 15 years, with regard to the development of a network commons. The network commons is one among a number of other initiatives that propose alternative future developments, from alternative and creative uses of technology, to alternative energies to alternative economies and ecologies. Those propositions, however, have remained separate. The thesis that I propose is that as long as those propositions remain separate, they will either be absorbed or destroyed by capitalism. There will be some change but ultimately nothing really will change, the world will not become a better place, which is, as I assume, that what really interests us all and brings us together here. We thus need a coherent and collective vision that is anchored in reality. As the locus of this vision I have identified the city as utopia and project.

Introduction

The network commons1 is part of a swell of initiatives to create a digital commons: this includes free and open source software, open data, open sensor networks, or what is called by industry the internet of things; in this area a lot is happening that has not received a proper name, a bricolage of technologies and collaborative methods; when this applies to design and everyday objects it is called critical making; it is part of a wider DIY – or do-it-with-others – culture which does not necessarily use high-tech but deploys common but underused knowledge such as fermentation, agricultural and green technologies, permaculture, alternative energies. There exists also another type of innovation which has more to do with democracy and participation, with economy and politics. The notion of the digital commons has emerged from cooperative hacker culture within computing. But meanwhile this starts to develop links with another discourse on the commons which comes from what was once called the developing world. In poor nations mainly of the global south, ecologies based on the sharing of common resources are still pretty much in place. There, primitive accumulation is still happening every day, the process described by Marx whereby subsistence farmers are turned into worker-consumers. As a reaction to that, as well as in crisis hit countries such as Greece and Spain, economies of solidarity are developed. The commons of all types and shapes and economies and ecologies of solidarity have become an alternative vision of a post-capitalist economy in a peer-to-peer culture. All those visions, however, are usually addressed separately. The people behind those initiatives are from different demographic groups. They rarely meet in one place and discuss common strategies. For this reason, each of those initiatives, left to its own devices, will be either absorbed and co-opted by capitalism or fought, destroyed, made impossible by legal changes, sidelined by other innovations. What is thus necessary is a coherent and collective vision that brings those alternative strands together.

The thesis that I am testing in this talk is that such a coherent and collective vision can be developed on the basis of the city as a utopia and project. This projection of a collective future does not have a name yet but it can or should not be called socialism or communism for two reasons: first, Marx's ideas, as much as I like them and although Marx's writing is still an inspiration for me, was too much steeped in the industrial culture of 19th century. The working class, considered as an avant-garde, this notion was based on Marx's insight that in the future everybody would be a wage worker. We now live in a time that has already moved beyond that future. We know now that it is unlikely that everyone will be a wage worker. In the past this has only been the case in industrial societies in Europe, North America and Japan. Now a few more nations, notably Taiwan and South Korea, have reached that stage. The great majority of people on the Earth, however, live under unstable and precarious circumstances. Even in the post-industrial, rich countries, wage labour is receding. Secondly, socialism and communism as terms have become an impossibility for historical reasons. The forms of actually existing communism have deteriorated into inhumane, dictatorial regimes of a backward mentality. If we want to develop any coherent and collective vision for the future that does not apply only to the most developed urban centres, such a vision must not exclude from consideration the vast majority of people, what autonomous Marxists such as Toni Negri call the multitudes.

But why the city, you may ask, and why this strange combination of terms, utopia and project? Aren't we living in a thoroughly globalised world? Yes and no. The world has indeed been shrinking through the forces of technology and commerce, but these forces were mainly directed and deployed by transnational capital. This recent wave of globalisation that started in the 1970s and reached its peak in the early 2000s has emphasised the free flow of money and information, while it has built fences to prevent the movement of people. It has used wage differentials between people in different places to create profit and it has developed an international division of labour which has concentrated the production of intangible goods in so called Global Cities, as Saskia Sassen has called them, while material production could be literally everywhere. The different organs of a globalized cybernetic production system have also had implications for the dominant ideology. The appearance of the waning importance of material production has furthered the flourishing of various theories of immateriality, of a weightless economy, of immaterial labour, of capitalism having become “cognitive.” At the same time an aspect of the digital revolution has received little attention which was focused on Just-in-Time production and logistics chains, on driverless forklift trucks in container terminals and super-freighters. Material production has intensified, yet the dominant ideologies of Western cultures, by the left and the right, focused on immateriality. The dialectical relationship between the production of intangible goods in the centers and extraction of raw materials and the production of consumer goods in conditions near to slave labour at the edges has been left underexplored. In addition to that we are faced with a condition of contemporaneity – the existence, at the same time, of developments which are incommensurable to each other. Those are contradictions of a type that do not resolve into dialectical opposites but rather create antinomies, unresolvable contradictions.2 It is therefore of greatest importance to create new collective visions that can deal with the plurality of developments without resorting to idealism. Following a methodological suggestion by Saskia Sassen, it is thus necessary to ask where those global developments come together? Where does this material/immaterial production and reproduction come together? How can a vision for a future collective project be anchored in the here and now? And my preliminary answer is the city. The city has always been the locus of utopia as a place that allows to express a meaningful collectivity. It is important to avoid the pitfalls of a utopianism that paints a blue-sky picture without any real content. It is necessary to be able to dream, to develop a vision that may seem a bit far off, but this vision should also have some concrete starting points and ties to lived reality in the here and now. Otherwise, it becomes a utopianism of the kind that has no real consequences. And for this reason I have added the notion of the “project.”

A “project” in the sense of Marxists such as Ernst Bloch or Henri Lefebvre is distinct from utopia insofar as it projects a future that is actually attainable. While utopianism is necessary, it can become disconnected too easily. The project can bring all those threads together into something that I would call a positive ideology. The Cold War discourse about totalitarianism has discredited any ideology as a bad thing. Even the Left has chimed in, practising “ideology self-critique.” But this ideology self-critique has run its course. It has been ineffective in stopping neoliberalism. At best it has made some academic careers, in particular in the art field. Rather than critique we need to rewire the strings that connect network society to create new force fields that drive change into a different direction. If those ideas have some cohesion, they may well be called an “ideology.”

The City as Utopia and Project

I will now turn to a brief genealogy of the city as a project. This will necessarily have to be a sketchy version. The city as utopia has a deep history in human thought, but this utopia has often been tainted by its association with class society and its need to repress aspects of its social life on which it was based. This can be traced back to the very place where we stand now, Athenian democracy. The Greek Polis is widely seen as the cradle of democracy, but what also has been recognized is that this ideal was tainted by the exclusion from the political Agora of women and slaves.

The Greco-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis3 has provided the most vivid and insightful description of Athenian democracy. Castoriadis emphasized that voting was one of the least important aspects of Athenian democracy. What mattered more was that large numbers of people participated in political life and negotiated subjects in intense exchanges, forming large ad-hoc committees on specific subjects, often voting by acclamations – expressing a majority decision reached by other means than that of voting. Speeches were often short and sharp, and the outcome of decisions was determined by educated, lucid and rational judgements achieved at collectively. The democratic society for Castoriadis was the self-instituting society. It was, in a Hegelian sense, a society that became conscious of itself as a political unity which produced its own institutions, but was also capable of changing those institutions when needed. Politicians, while democratically elected, could also be removed from positions relatively quickly. The self-instituting society, Castoriadis stresses, had the means of educating itself to create a collective social imaginary. In the educational process also women and slaves participated. But it was not to last.

Learning from Athens means also to learn how democracy degenerated into tyranny. Plato's ideal city state was a dictatorship of philosophers. Even Sokrates supported tyranny, the rule of the few over the many, on the basis of their superiority. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, Greek philosophy was shaped by the class structure of its society.4 The separation into a leisurely class of philosopher-politicians and a class of enslaved producers was constitutive for a tendency to give preference to intellectual over manual labour. This found analogy in the philosophical domain, where metaphysics was regarded to be more important than practical ideas. The technologies of the ancient Greeks did not achieve the high levels it might have, simply because the Greek ruling class saw no need for it.5

I touch upon the medieval city only very briefly. We note that this was a city idealized as an organic community based on sharp separations between the city and the countryside. It was a religious community whose highest expression was the building of cathedrals, which were built through a huge intergenerational and interdisciplinary effort of builder-engineer-artists.

The Renaissance city reached again the level of urbanism already achieved in antiquity. It re-rediscovered architectural and urbanistic concepts based on the sensual and rational concepts of Greece and Rome, using grids and perspectives. The Renaissance was also the era of the rebirth of the ideal city. Urban utopias were in plentiful supply, among those the one that provided 50% of the inspiration for the title of this talk, Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun. The City of the Sun was conceived as a form of theocratic dictatorship. However, Campanella also engaged in an “explicit polemic with Aristotle and Plato, who had excluded artisans, peasants and those involved in manual labor from the category of full citizenship and from the highest levels of virtue.”6

In the City of the Sun all occupations were of equal dignity—in fact, those workers who were “required to expend greater effort, such as artisans and builders, received more praise.”7 There were no servants, and no service was regarded as unworthy. It was also a community where everything was held in common, from food to houses, from the acquisition of knowledge to the exercise of activities, from honors to amusements, and, somehow disconcertingly for us today, a form of free love that must appear as sexual slavery for women. What strikes most readers of this dialogue is that the city walls are also the curtains of an extraordinary theater and the pages of an illustrated encyclopedia of knowledge. The citizens of the City of the Sun were engaged in a permanent process of education and all knowledge was always publicly accessible.

The Great European City of the second half of the 19th century had inequality written into its structure. It was based on the destruction and undoing of parts of the medieval city, destroying grown working class communities. The Haussman Boulevard's were designed to counter the tendency of the urban masses to spontaneously erupt in revolution. But it was also a city that was only possible because of another great revolution that took place in the 19th century. As is often forgotten, the industrial revolution was based on an industrial revolution in agriculture. New techniques in agriculture achieved huge increases in output with ever fewer people. As people moved from the country to the city, they became proletarians, forced to live by selling their labour power. Fredrick Engels has described the horrible conditions in which the English working class lived around mid century.8

This caused various counter-movements:
- the hygienic movement, a movement of the educated bourgeoisie, of doctors and planners, who argued for rooms with high ceilings painted in white, for an architecture of light and air to counter the spread of epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis.
- the Garden City movement formed a specific version of this approach, proposing grand schemes for new urban dwellings
- the working class movements formed themselves, asking not only for typical trade unionist goals such as better wages and a shorter working day, but also for political emancipation.

At the beginning of the 20th century those movements converged to create functionalism and the Fordist city. The political working class movements changed the course of history successfully claiming universal voting rights after 1918 in many countries, bringing socialist administrations into government. The Fordist city was based on an alliance between the reformist sectors of the educated bourgeoisie who believed in rationalism and the ability to plan a better world, the political emancipation of the working classes and the functionalist spirit of what Reyner Banham calls a New Machine Age.9 The Fordist city led to achievements such as Red Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, large scale public housing developments which provide working people a decent standard of living together with amenities for sports and leisure, education, political gatherings and entertainment.

The Fordist city comes more fully into force only after the Second World War. It is a space where the political emancipation of the working class is brought together with the functionalist and technological spirit of the new machine age. The Fordist city is also a very fragmented city, divided into areas for production and leisure, into working class and middle class quarters. It continues the destruction of grown working class communities, for instance in London, where people from the East End were resettled in New Towns just outside London. While planned according to some of the ideals of the Garden City movement, the new spatial arrangements destroyed networks of kinship, as a famous study from the 1950s was called,10 therefore making life actually more difficult for working class people.

The Fordist city was the city of the atomized individual or at best of the family as the nucleus of society. The atomized structure was overlaid by force fields of mass media communications through radio, television and illustrated mass media magazines and the yellow press. It was a city characterized by the separation between producers and consumers, order givers and order receivers, senders and receivers. As Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, the Fordist city was of a destructive effect on forms of everyday life which had existed in the older forms of city life.11 A political critique that was oriented towards Praxis, towards a realisation of political philosophy in life, could not only focus any longer on those domains traditionally associated with politics, such as political parties, and the state. It would also have to proceed from the critique of everyday life. Lefebvre's rebellious disciples, the Situationists actually claimed that political revolution had to be raised from the ground up, through the decentralized passions of the many revolutions of everyday life.

The ideas of Lefebvre and the SI were put to the test by the revolutions of 1968, from the Parisian May to the many revolutions and revolts that broke out simultaneously nearly all over the world. It was a revolution against the social and political forms of Fordism, its one-dimensionality and its one-directedness. What we have now in Europe is in many ways the long term result of those revolutions on the micro-scale of where the personal becomes political.
As Fordism has been replaced by the Network Society – a term by Manuel Castells – this has brought forward the networked city, also to be understood as the projective city (to be differentiated from the city as project). The projective city is part of the analysis brought forward in The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappello.12 It is based on a new flexible regime of accumulation, a term introduced by David Harvey13 and elaborated by Brian Holmes.14 In this flexible regime the life-long job is replaced by a succession of projects in which networked individuals come together for a limited period. The project creates a highly activated segment of a network with dense connections between protagonists which intensify into a critical mass of active connections which are able to create new forms, what Boltanski and Chiappello call … “a temporary pocket of accumulation.” Moreover, the authors claim that those pockets of accumulation actually realized the demands of the revolts of 68, albeit in commodified form. The changes demanded by the 68 generation in those areas where the personal becomes political have been captivated by the new spirit if capitalism and streamlined into new products and services. What they describe is how capitalism is capable of mobilizing terms and concepts that have developed outside it, autonomously.

I find it debatable if the 68 generation can really be blamed for everything that goes wrong in networked capitalism, especially if the claim is made that the decline of those ideas was already contained, in seed form, at the point of their inception. I agree with Brian Holmes that this would constitute a denunciation of the radical social imaginary of '68. At the same time we can witness that something of the kind they are describing is actually happening. But it is not the spirit of 68 that is becoming commodified, but individual aspects of it, which are taken out of context and then realized in a commodifying form.

As a holding remark, lets recapitulate: I have advanced the idea that the current city, the city of informational capitalism, is the projective city, where a new regime of flexible accumulation reigns. Capitalism is a dynamic and creative force which has the capacity to appropriate concepts developed outside itself and turn them into new sources of profit, by creating temporary pockets of accumulation. We need to leave the urbanist discourse and turn to a technological discourse.

The General Intellect and Peer-based-commons Production

A foundational insight by Marx was that capitalism is based on contraditictions. On one hand capital develops the forces of production. The laws of competition make this constant innovation necessary. Through capitalist innovations, new modes of production are created, which have the potential of completely changing social relations. Through processes and innovations summarized as industrial automation, the socially necessary labour time could be reduced, for instance to a 20 hour week. This would allow a completely different society to emerge, in which people's highest priority would be to develop their personal faculties, their senses and sensibilities, their creative faculties, their capacity for speculative thought, their need and desire to maintain affective relationships. This potential for an actually possible utopia is consequently thwarted by capitalism's other need to maintain current relations of production. The existing social relations, the class structure of society which, in its most extreme form has now become the one percent against the rest, has to be maintained at any cost. Marx has expressed this most pointedly in a famous passage in Grundrisse: The combined power of all this highly skilled human labour develops the general intellect which reaches a stage where it would “blow the foundations of industrial society sky-high.”

According to Toni Negri we have reached that stage. Science and technology can be viewed as accumulated, dead, collective labour. As capitalism mobilizes this accumulated dead labour, the labour theory of values does not apply any more. Labour time cannot be the foundation of value. Whence labour time, the time spent by us in sweat and toil, can no longer form the basis of an assessment in the wage-labour relation prices become arbitrary, dictated by the labour market and by the markets in general. While Fordism found a way of balancing real incomes and prices of consumer goods and services necessary, this balance has been lost in network society. What follows is the “real subsumption of labour” under capital, as Negri calls it, through arbitrary rule and through sheer command, and under the threat of violence.

For the very reason, that the overall trajectory of technology is dominated by capital, any technological utopia which is based on this or that property of the technology alone, is doomed. It is not just doomed to fail but to bring about its opposite, not the technological utopia but a dystopia.

As Marx has predicted correctly in the fragment on machines and the general intellect, over the last 40 years new conditions have arisen from the most advanced poles of capitalism, from computer science and information technologies, to blow the foundations of this society sky-high. As the United States was locked into an ideological battle with the Soviet Union, it spent enormous sums of money to beat its rival for global hegemony. The surplus of Fordism was used to invent the Internet and thus create the conditions for capitalism to be overcome. I do not claim that the Internet was invented with anti-capitalist ideas in mind, but that, as an unintended consequence of high spending on information and communication technologies from the midst of the military-educational-industrial complex, arose ideas, techniques and protocols that have an unmeasurable potential for the social good. Moreover, the way in which those technologies were created were based on a type of freedom that existed, at the time, only inside the closed worlds of Cold War computer science.15 The high-tech bubble of military Keynesianism enabled a commons-based-peer production as a new production method amongst those scientists and engineers inside the techno-bubble.

The social method of peer-production was matched by a new type of communication structure. Bert Brecht's demands for a two-way communication of radio was realized on the level of the protocols. The protocols of the Internet enabled synchronous two-way communications in many-to-many networks. At the same time as the Internet protocols were written, in the late 1960s, the student movement demanded a new horizontal, de-centralized politics and new forms of participatory media communications, for instance in the free radio movement.

Fast forward 30 years later, in the 1990s, the surplus created by advanced capitalist society, the capacity to carry out socially necessary labour with an ever smaller number of people, set free the capacity for people to participate in creative economies and in peer-based-commons production. The Linux operating system, followed by many other innovations, set up the formula for the digital commons.

The 1990s: Internet as Electronic Agora and New Economy

In the 1990s the Internet was hailed as a new electronic agora. The forms of participatory democracy that had existed in Athens 2500 years ago could be re-created, on much bigger scale, through participatory, synchronous communication in networks. The electronic agora combined ideas of participatory democracy with the US-American ideal of the liberal modernist utopia. It connected a John Locke type of liberalism, based on individual ownership, with network utopia. Everybody was a node in a network and could communicate, unfiltered and uncensored, with everybody else, in peer-to-peer communications. Through those “communicologies” as Jürgen Habermas has called it, the rational and polite exchange of ideas could take place for a new civil society to form. This civil society would be global and no longer Eurocentric and it would, guided by an ethical sense, develop global collective consciousness, through which pressing social, political and ecological problems could be addressed.

As we now know, it did not happen like that. The 1990s utopia was based on a disembodied notion of information. Advocates of Internet utopia such as John Perry Barlowe posed the digital communications sphere as a separate reality. Saskia Sassen asked the question, where those disembodied communications in electronic networks actually touched ground. She found out that although at the time the properties of disembodied information were hailed, there were actual places and spaces where those new forms of communication touched ground, the Global Cities. Those were cities such as Hong Kong, New York or London who had little to do with their hinterlands or the nations they belonged to, but were interlinked in high-speed communication networks which fostered new forms of financial speculation in derivatives.

Those privileged virtual market places were based on support structures that needed the actual cities, places that fostered close proximity between speculative financial capital and the professional classes it relied on, such as lawyers, accountants, policy makers, think tanks, and also a second layer of professions that provide the quality of life that this new class finds to its taste, nouvelle cuisine, new bars and night-life scenes, museums of modern and contemporary art and types of cultural production that project a liberal, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan elite – which they found in the Global City. LTJ Bukem is playing in a few days here in Athens. Thus, allow me this pun, what we got in the late 1990s was “intelligent drum-and-bass for cognitive capitalists.”

As the 1990s played themselves out, ideas of the electronic agora were sidelined by the boom of speculative capital investing in new Internet companies, the New Economy. The capitalist dream of the New Economy came crashing down in the year 2000.

The Rise of the Network Commons

At the moment of the demise of the New Economy, a new cycle started with new projects and new ideas. In London in the year 2000, and in Athens independently from London, two years later, movements started to build wireless community networks. Using a license exempt part of the electromagnetic spectrum and Wifi – Wireless Local Area Networks -- network enthusiasts built their own networks. Based on the property of the Internet protocols that allow creativity at the edges, they could create networks of their own. Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network was initially started mainly by technology experts. They knew about other initiatives, such as Seattle Wireless, but developed their own “technological style”. Using the urban topology of Athens with its hills and cooperation with radio amateurs, they could create a network that covered a vast area, the Attica peninsula and beyond. The social model was based on the liberal utopia of individual ownership. Each node was built and maintained by its users, all the nodes together formed - and continue to do so - a network commons. The particular idea of AWMN was that it did not offer Internet access. Some nodes were connected to the Internet but this was not publicized as a reason to join the network. The idea was that the network builders would together create a network which would be attractive to its users because of its services. Services offered include mirrors of free software repositories, file sharing, streaming services, games, voice over IP and much more.

Consume in London proposed a slightly different idea. Informed by experiences with Backspace, a net art creative hub in central London, the idea was to have synchronous broadband networks which offer also gateways to the Internet. The net should become a shared resource, both as an Intranet and as a network that connected with the wider world. Backspace, initiated by James Stevens, was a place that allowed many initiatives to thrive, where people could realize their own projects, people such as net.art artists Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting. But it also hosted the Vulcano free film festival, a website for a transgender-cyborg club, and a festival for Buskers (street musicians). A particular noteworthy initiative that emerged from Backspace was Indymedia London. On June 18th 1999 a global “Carneval against Capitalism” was organised by the collective Reclaim the Streets. This protest brought together the multitudes – a new social class that substituted the working class as a new social subject. The size of the protest took police by surprise, and also the decentralizing tactics of protesters, marching out in three different columns, so that for several hours the City of London, the seat of multinational financial capital, was taken over by protesters dancing to samba drums. It was a happy day, until a police van drove over a woman who was seriously injured. This afternoon was filmed by artist activists, among them Austrian multimedia artist Manu Luksch. Couriers cycled back and fourth between the sites of protest and Backspace, where video tapes were transcoded and live streamed by techno-activists such as Gio d'Angelo. Half a year before Seattle, where Indymedia was officially founded, Backspace had become an Independent Media Centre which presented a different viewpoint on the protest of the Multitudes against financialized capitalism. While mainstream media focused only on the police's failure to keep control and the stupid acts of a minority who smashed some windows – possibly police agent provocateurs anyway – the videos streamed from Backspace showed a different reality, a Bakthinian carneval, where the multitudes became aware of its political agency and its mass creativity as a form of opposition against bureaucratic capitalism, the grey men and women of the City of London.

To cut a long story short → for a fuller account I have to refer you to my forthcoming text “Shockwaves in the New World Order of Information and Communication (Wiley-Blackwell 2016) – we saw a relatively short period of the prospering of Consume in London and the UK, where the network commons was merged with ideas by avant-garde digital artists and media activists.

In 2002, the Consume idea was transplanted to Berlin, Germany, where able technician-activists started the initiative Freifunk (free radio). Freifunk adapted the Consume idea to German reality. There were two issues: on one hand, there were areas in East Berlin and East Germany, which could not get ADSL connections for broadband because of the existence of proprietary fibre optics technology of the telecom incumbent. So this was a big motivating factor. Secondly, Berlin in particular and Germany in general has a large reservoir of what I would call ethical hackers, creative free software people, who are happy and willing to carry out free voluntary labour. Those two factors allowed Freifunk to spread rapidly, so that within a few years Berlin alone had more than 1300 free radio nodes and many more users. However, after a phase of rapid growth in the early 2000s, this development slowed down in the second half of the 2000s, some networks even started to shrink. The Deutsche Telecom had recognized the issue with its fibre optical technology and pushed other broadband technologies such as ADSL and cable. Freifunk was no longer needed to get affordable broadband Internet.

At around 2003, Guifi.net started in the rural area of Catalunia, near the small town of Vic. At the time, it was impossible to get broadband Internet in the villages. An initiative started to build wireless community networks. Guifi.net developed around similar ideas of AWMN, Consume and Freifunk, but with a number of differences. It set itself the explicit goal to bring good internet service to the highest number of people at the cheapest price; it developed a system where people could pay technicians to install a network node. Guifi.net did not see this as in contradiction with the idea of the network commons. As long as the nodes built by small service providers joined the network commons, the fact that some money was paid for installation was not an issue. This idea enabled Guifi.net to grow more rapidly than any of the other systems. It now stands at 30.000 nodes.

The projects just described constitute the counter-thesis to the network model offered by the ISP and telecom corporation with their centrally managed operations and their practices of metering and controlling the data flow in their networks. The atomized ethical technologist recognizes him or herself as a community networker who becomes a builder, owner and maintainer of a network node. Those network nodes together form a network commons, a network, where each node transports data according to the original Internet utopia, in two-way synchronous forms, without any discrimination between types of data and users. The network created by the community networker realizes the decentralized utopia. Its political structure was, depending on your viewpoint either anarchist or libertarian, an abdication of centralized control, but also a rejection of strong social regulation mechanisms. While some of those networks have created some form of legal entity, an association for instance, the association usually does not create the network. It does fund-raising, and it is there to assist in fending off political and legal challenges, but it does not own and run the network.

The technological and economic foundation of those networks, however, rest on the production mechanisms of advanced capital exploiting global imbalances and cheap labour. Advanced capitalist production methods using automated machine labour and cheap energy, mainly derived from fossil fuels reduce the socially necessary labour time to such a degree, that people in the capitalist core countries are freed up to devote their time to innovation practices and to participate in peer-based-commons production. The beautiful achievements of the network utopia are built on silicon sand, since those conditions are subject to change. The boom and bust of the New Economy was followed by a relatively mild recession in the early 2000s. New ideas about a commons based economy started to flourish.

The Artistic Urban Utopia

In 2001-2002, the artist Shu Lea Cheang started creating a series of wireless projects which can be considered exemplary for the idea about the city as utopia and project. The very first work, Steam the green, Stream the field in New York highlighted the potential of the coming together of social self-organisation with a social and trans-media art practice that combines landscapes and datascapes, the natural and the digital commons. Cheang organized the harvesting of organically farmed garlic from her own farm and brought this together with the idea of sharing bandwidth in a wireless commons. Inspired by the Argentinian cooking pot revolution, where people created their own barter economies in so called truque clubs, she created a community currency, the Garlico, which would enable people to engage in sharing economies, whether sharing bandwidth or organic food or services such as haircuts. Cheang intermixed the political economy of communications with that of the real economy, by involving participants in a gift economy on- and offline. For several days she and her associates drove around Manhattan in a truck whose load was filled with fresh garlic and on whose side were painted the words RichAir Equals Garlic. Those organic cloves were to become something resembling the gold standard transferred onto a gift economy. This was embedded into a fictional after-the-crash scenario: capitalism had collapsed, the only networks still working were those made by the wireless community network activists of NYC Wireless, the currency was worthless, and organic garlic became the 'new social currency.'

In 2006 Cheang realized Porta2030 together with the Hivenetwork group around Alexei Blinov. Blinov built so called Portapaks – a technological remake of the portable video equipment that was released by Sony in 1965 -- in a low-cost free network form. The Portapaks built by Alexei Blinov and Hivenetworks, were pouches made of a synthetic material. It contained cleverly slung together cheap gear to send audio signals and images within a local area. The main feature was an emergency button, to warn the local community about threats. At the time, gentrification was raging through East London like a wildfire. Rogue developers were sending demolition crews to destroy homes and businesses of people who could not afford the rent which had been drastically raised. Porta2030 played itself out in a tense social setting around Broadway Market in southern Hackney, London, where at the time a very real gentrification process threatened to rip apart communities.

More recently, Shu Lea Cheang has been linking different data sets of nature and culture with Composting the city, Composting the Net (2012-13). People in support of the urban gardening project Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin could adopt a composting box to provide urgently needed compost. This was brought into association with using mailinglists of network culture such as nettime and syndicate/spectre as compost for a new type of thinking. And in Seeds Underground Exchange she used the net to create seeds exchange networks. Those project point at the merging of topics surrounding network ecologies with alternative energies and food sovereignty, providing building bricks for the cities of the sun. As art projects, however, they remain symbolic, they indicate a direction that developments could take without actually being able to initiate such change. Cheang's projects are also riddled with contradictions. In particular, Porta2030 was seen as cynical by some, doing an art project on the back of a community that actually suffered from evictions against which the art project could do nothing.

The Automatic Utopia of Mesh Networks and the Social Development of Technologies

At around 2004, citizen technologists from Freifunk in Berlin and Funkfeuer in Austria started to experiment with the mesh network routing protocol OLSR. Mesh network routing protocols such as OLSR and BATMAN and its recent variations are special routing protocols, optimized for the conditions of wireless networks. They do not need manual configuration, but automatically recognize when new nodes join the networks or existing ones drop out. Their capacity to automate route-finding allows the development of fixed and mobile wireless ad-hoc mesh networks.

The rise of the network commons in general and the development of mesh network protocols by the community in particular illustrate that technologies are inherently social. We have been made to believe that the development of technology is somehow autonomous, that technology follows a course of its own and that people have to adapt to the technologies that are created by corporate research labs and universities, who are often closely interlinked. Yet the development of wireless community networks in Athens, London and Berlin followed trajectories of the social development of the communities it was connected with, communities of practitioners (the ethical hackers who write the code and build the networks) but also the social structures those technological developments are embedded in, which includes the communities of users, but also wider social structures. This can have positive and negative consequences.

The Consume way of developing networks, for instance, was strongly emphasizing workshops and local knowledge. Through those workshops people came together and formed ideas about how to grow the network locally and to what uses to put it. In the process as such, the technology became socialized. Non-techies, like me, became knowledgeable about technology, started to understand networking technology better and began proselytizing about those social technologies. As such knowledge spreads, it contributes to the demystification of technologies. In capitalist societies, technologies are mystified. Technology is surrounded by an aura of being complex and difficult to understand. This creates the fetishized believe in technologies which makes people think that they are either ruled by technology or that they can solve any problem by technology alone. The technologies are understood as things outside us that have a power over us. But once we take developments into our own hands, we learn that those objects are man-made and relatively simple. The overall social complex that produces those objects and how they are deployed in the fabric of society, these things are much more difficult to understand. As we become techno-social communities we discover that the development of a technology is not separated from the social sphere but influenced and guided by it.

The developers of mesh network protocols in Berlin, Vienna and Catalonia first analyzed the needs of the wireless community networks and found an answer. In order for those networks to spread and become more efficient, they thought they needed to create firmware that would contain mesh network technology. Based on the Linux firmware distribution OpenWRT, each of those communities developed their own firmware. With so called firmware flashing, the firmware on a cheap WiFi router can be replaced by a high-end free firmware running mesh network technology turning a piece of industry hardware into, as Freifunk called one such hack, a “Freedom Box”. It is without doubt that community networks have been key drivers of the development of wireless mesh network technology. As Elektra, one key developer in Berlin put it:

“The sleeping beauty of mesh network protocols has been kissed awake by the community networks”

No company, corporation or university has been as efficient and as good in developing those protocols than the community networkers. Those developments, as beautiful and commendable they are, also have several dark undersides. First, the distributions and the mesh network protocols are all open source. That means that everybody can use them, change them, as long as they publish again the source code. The technology of mobile ad-hoc networks has originally been developed by the US military. There is no doubt that those circles are watching what is being done and that the code produced by ethical hackers potentially can find entry into new weapon systems that deploy wireless mesh networks in the battle field, especially as military technology is becoming ever more automated and autonomous. The peer-to-peer based methodology of ethical community hackers offers no way of resisting this form of adaptation.

Secondly, the achievements of open source hackers have also no resistance against being appropriated by the advanced forces of informational capitalism. The freedom on the level of infrastructure gets harnessed on the application layer for commercial gain, by Google, Facebook and other players. The activities of community hackers, guided by an ethical sense, contribute to an economy that creates ever more inequality.

Since the network commons does not exist in a political and economic vacuum, the achievements of community networkers are of a temporary kind only and always in danger of being reversed – the negation of the negation. We can say that wireless decentralized community networks are the antithesis to the broadcast model of communication. Rather than one-sided flow of commands, they allow egalitarian two-way communication. Yet the ethical hackers often claim to be apolitical. They say that they are not interested in politics, they just care for the politics of technology. As long as the network is held in a commons, and every packet of information is routed freely, the hacker's utopia is in good order.

In the past, when non-techies such as me encountered a problem, hackers used to tell me RTFM: Read the fucking manual. Now I tell techies also RTFM: Read the Fucking Marx.

The mesh network utopia is an automated utopia. You take the device, you flash it and up you go. The idea was promoted that firmware with good mesh routing protocols would make it easy to create large scale ad-hoc communities. Indeed, the technology has matured and technically speaking, the utopia is a utopia no more, it is here and real.

In recent years, Freifunk in Germany has experienced rapid expansion. After the revelations of Edward Snowden about the scale of surveillance by governments with the complicity of informational capital a second wave of German community networkers has become active. Those groups have developed their own firmwares, using mesh network protocols, but they do not share the anarchist spirit of the original Freifunk cell. They are growing, and at a very fast speed, but the question remains, what is growing here. Through the use of mesh routing protocols, the user does not need to do anything at all. The automatic utopia creates mesh networks, but the users are left behind. The type of knowledge transfer envisioned and practiced by Freifunk and Consume does not take place anymore. Some of those new networks have become like veritable service providers, they even have the capacity to update the software on all routers from remote.

Mesh network technology, rather than becoming the boon of community networks, tends to reinforce the separation between producers and consumers, between network builders and those who just passively use them. Rather than engaging with the network commons, they enjoy whatever commercial services they receive from the Internet, which itself has become thoroughly commodified. The new Freifunk initiatives have even started to call the groups who started Freifunk “legacy”. In software development legacy is something you need to acknowledge exists and may still be in use so you have to offer backward compatibility. But at some point you will start to consider if you still want to offer backward compatibility or if you simply detach yourself to offer faster growth and greater efficiency. A new generation who has never known anything else but neoliberal informational capitalism follows the patterns of the start-up mentality and of a competitive commercial environment. In this environment, mastering the technology becomes a pretext of commercial success and mastery over other people.

The network commons is embedded in the current political economy and exposed to its force fields. Athens Wireless Metropolitan Networks are suffering from the general economic and social crisis in Greece. Since the model of network freedom they have chosen is based on liberal capitalism, which means individual node ownership and responsibilities, the network deteriorates, as some node owners are affected by the economic crisis and cannot maintain adequately the rather high-tech installations they have built.

The impact of the overall social development on the wireless utopia reaches a particular poignancy in Global Cities such as London, where the city itself is subject to rapid change. As gentrification moves through the districts of London like a wildfire, people have to move to ever more remote areas (or abroad). The maintenance of a community and a network becomes an impossibility. Donating free voluntary labour becomes ever more difficult when rents are so high that you are working day and night just to keep a roof over your head. The urban space itself becomes completely reshaped by a form of aestheticized hipster consumerism. As the open culture of the Internet becomes substituted for the closed commercial world of Apps, and the cities ever more saturated with bandwidth on commercial mobile frequencies, the conditions for a sharing culture deteriorate.

The network commons is also threatened by practices such as Wifi off-loading practiced by mobile telcos. Whenever a phone detects a free open WiFi network it uses that rather than its own infrastructure. Commercial providers thus contribute to the tragedy of the open spectrum commons. Other threats are of a political nature. A new EU directive has been released which would make firmware flashing illegal. Although mesh networking appears to have solved the technical issues, the network commons is in peril through political, sociological and economic threats.

From Community Networks to Citizen Networks

There is a notable change going on regarding the way in which community networkers start to understand themselves as political networks. The “old” groups behind Freifunk have drafted a memorandum of understanding which defines the network commons less technologically rather than politically. The Freifunk umbrella association has also started to organise itself better, and is constantly engaged in lobbying efforts, trying to shape public opinion and the opinions of their political representatives, the members of parliament. Whilst the network commons had initially been built by ethical hackers, they now start to recognize themselves as citizen networkers. Freifunk have begun setting up free and open WiFi in refugee accommodation centers throughout Germany.

Community networks, with their decentralized forms of organisation, have set up mesh networks, technically and socially decentralized networks. The economic crisis that developed in the wake of the financial crash of 2008 has led to an economic crisis which now has become a social crisis. The social crisis undermines the capacity to participate with voluntary labour. The business environment, under lobbying influence by mobile telcos, who have to pay billions for spectrum licenses, and in a climate that is generally sharpening, makes the conditions for the network commons ever more difficult. Under those conditions, the network commons has to become political. Rather than being just another project in the projective city of network society, the citizen networkers who build the network commons need to consciously join other commoners to build the city as utopia and project. As the network commons joins forces with civil society, it could turn into an infrastructure that supports a new commons-oriented mode of production. Areas that immediately come to mind are alternative energy and networks of food provision. Rather than having corporations and the state who centrally organize production and consumption, in such a commons mode of production peer-to-peer forms of cooperation link infrastructural, political and cultural layers. The decentralized utopia envisioned by the 68 generation can now become a concrete project. With citizen networks and decentralized computing power localized exchange economies can be organized.

In a study titled City of the Sun – which formed the other 50% of the inspiration for my title – the EU concludes that a marked effort in using solar energy could replace fossil fuels on a scale much bigger than believed up until now. It could reduce carbon emission of the scale of the annual output of India, a whole subcontinent. However, such change would still only bring us into a new climate economy. What we need are new ecologies that bring nature, the flows of material production, people and ideas into close communication. The methods of Athenian democracy to form decisions on the basis of a close and rational exchange can, with the help of meaningful two-way communication be replicated on a much larger scale. We have learned, however, to distrust a one-dimensional, instrumentalized rationality. Hybridity needs not only connect the city with new technologies but also new forms of being in the everyday, with new forms of conviviality, and with a greater emphasis on education. This should also include the arts. The city as utopia and project needs to consider also the invisible cities about which Italo Calvino wrote; it needs to provide spaces for societies other, the refugee, the outcast; it needs to be an open and permissive city, but also offer new forms of social cohesion. Many initiatives have sprung up in recent years that envision new forms of food provision, not just urban gardening, but also urban beekeeping and ideas about an edible city. Ideas about a Situationist City, developed by Constant Niewenhuis, can come together with Castoriadis ideas of the self-instituting society, a society that became conscious of itself as a political unity and which produced its own institutions out of its shared social imaginary. In such a society, public opinion would be truly well informed rather than manipulated. And maybe in the long run, even the notion of information could be replaced by something more beautiful and more useful, more akin to philosophy and poetry rather than just bits and bytes.

Citizen networks, wireless or not, could become a transversal infrastructral layer, reaching across society and different domains, becoming a revolutionary enabler of a new urban life in a way that points beyond capitalism as we knew it.

1. see my forthcoming book on the subject: The Rise of the Network Commons
2. see Smith, Terry E. Contemporary Art: World Currents. Prentice Hall, 2011.
3. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Castoriadis Reader. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
4. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
5. Farrington, Benjamin. Greek Science, Its Meaning for Us. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953.
6. Ernst, Germana. “Tommaso Campanella.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2014., 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/campanella/.
7. Ibid.
8. Engels, Frederick. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. BookRix, 2014.
9. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: Architectural Press, 1962.
10. Young, Michael, and Peter Willmott. Family and Kinship in East London. 2nd ed. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
11. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1 : Introduction. London: Verso, 2008.
12. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2005.
13. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
14. Holmes, Brian. “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.” In Economising Culture : On “the (digital) Culture Industry,” 23–54. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
15. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Boston Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Neurath’s offenes Museum: Ziviles Engagement auf Augenhöhe

Hadwig Kraeutler — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 19:58:28 +0000

Otto Neurath (geb. Wien 1882– gest. Oxford 1945), der Philosoph, Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschafter, gründete und leitete das in der Tat Aufsehen erregende Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (1925–1934). Der “Universalgelehrte“ Neurath ist vielen als Organisator/Motor des neopositivistischen Wiener Kreises ein Begriff. Unermüdlich propagierte er eine “wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung“ und wissenschaftliche Haltung – dies in vielfältigen Arbeitszusammenhängen und unterschiedlichen Foren.

Neurath behandelte und verwendete Museen und Ausstellungen als außergewöhnliche gesellschaftliche Werkzeuge, besonders geeignet, den Diskurs und Austausch über brisante Themen ‘auf Augenhöhe‘ zu ermöglichen – auch und vor allem zwischen den Laien (Neurath: Ungebildeten, Analphabeten, Kindern) und den Experten (die andernorts mit Fachwissen und einem zu hintergehenden Fachjargon gerüstet auftraten).

Die Frage stellt sich aber: Welche der vielfältigen Leistungen Neuraths werden in unserer Zeit rezipiert, während andere – eigentlich brisant und breitenwirksam interessant – bisher unbearbeitet blieben? Im kommunikations-wissenschaftlichen Diskurs werden Neuraths Arbeiten mit der Bildstatistik meist beschränkt auf “Visualisation of (technical) information“ diskutiert, ohne die weiteren Zusammenhänge, nämlich die Praxis der Museums- und Ausstellungsarbeit, die ja als treibender Motor fungierte, gesamthaft zu reflektieren.1 Auch im Museums-nahen Betrieb ist die Neurath-Rezeption oft stark zusammen-gestutzt: meist beschränkt sich dies auf ein paar bildstatistische Elemente, also (relativ leicht zu reproduzierende) Versatzstücke, die – quasi als Verweis/Ausweisung für die Karriere-entscheidende ‘peer-review‘ – ohne strukturellen Zusammenhang eingebaut werden.

Hier ist nun Gelegenheit, Neuraths Museumsarbeit und die topaktuellen Ideen dahinter zu diskutieren. Ausschlag gebend waren die neuen Ansätze: der Prozess der Transformation, die Orchestrierung, das Collage-Prinzip, und damit einhergehend, eine betont egalitäre und demokratie-politisch ausgerichtete, funktionale Beziehung zu den “Usern“. Neuraths Konzepte erhalten Aktualität durch heutige Technologien und die revolutionierten Kommunikationskulturen.

Neurath wird in den gegenwärtigen Diskussionen im Kontext unterschiedlicher Disziplinen behandelt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Neurath). Mein Zugang (museologisch theoretisch und praktisch begründet) untersucht Neuraths Museums- und Ausstellungsarbeit in Bezug auf deren Anliegen, Wirksamkeit und Aktualität und unter Hinweis darauf – wie auch er durchwegs betonte – dass dies die Arbeit eines Teams war, das im Wiener Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum koordiniert und verantwortlich agierte. Diesbezüglich belegen/bestätigen heutige fach-wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen: Museen und Ausstellungen sind ideale Medien für partizipative und befähigende Kommunikation.2

Demokratisch-kommunikative Arbeit mit (u.a.) Museum/Ausstellung bedeutet im Sinne Neuraths: relevante Inhalte interessant und nachvollziehbar zu präsentieren und damit die User – informiert, befähigt und mitverantwortlich – zu involvieren für ein gesamtgesellschaftliches Mehr an Demokratie und selbstgewählter / selbstbestimmter Lebensqualität.

Aus der aktuellen Wiener Museumspraxis, die (lt. Homepage) Ähnliches erreichen will, wäre zum Beispiel die MAK-Ausstellung ‘2051: Smart Life in the City’ zu nennen. “[Sie] … untersucht die Rolle von Design als Werkzeug für einen weltverträglichen und solidarischen Lebensstil.“ Bei einer Info-Veranstaltung (2015-09-01) wurde gefragt: “Was waren die strukturellen und organisatorischen Herausforderungen bei der Realisierung des Konzepts? Warum bleibt die museale Praxis träge? Wie kann Design als Strategie vermittelt werden?“3

Hier kann Neuraths Arbeit konkrete Antworten geben. Im Folgenden werden zentrale Strategien/Ideen dieser Arbeit anhand von 4 Beispielen beleuchtet, dann das GWM- Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum kurz vorgestellt (Einblick in die Museums- und Ausstellungsarbeiten, in Wiener- /Isotype-Methode, Visual Education) und dies abschließend in einen Zusammenhang mit heutiger progressiver Museologie, zum Thema ‘Museum mit Club-Atmosphäre‘ gebracht.
Vorweg drei kurze Passagen (Stimmen) zu ‘Museum der Zukunft‘ und zum Glücksmaximum, die den komplexen Gesellschafts-Teppich und seine verwobenen Muster an- und aufzeigen helfen:

Stimme 1 – 1933:

Otto Neurath im Artikel ‘Museums of the Future’: “Supposing somebody … said, ‘Build the museum of the future just as you want it.’ (…) ‘Agreed,’ I would say, ‘but that is not the way to put it. There is no such thing as the museum of the future. I can only talk about the museumS (sic) of the future.’ And I would go on: ‘Museums of the future, anyhow, ought not to be as I would like to have them, but as the visitors and users would want them if they knew what makes a museum.’ (…) Museums, exhibitions and periodicals might be regarded as three different means of education with the identical purpose of making (…) less afraid of the world. (…) The museums of the future will have to be organized by agents of the museum users and not and not by specialists who want to exhibit what they consider important.” 4

Stimme 2 – 2011:

Chris Dercon, Direktor, Haus der Kunst, München, “Das Museum der Zukunft ist eine riesige Plattform, eine Agora, auf der das Publikum die unterschiedlichsten Fragen stellt. Oft … Fragen, die nichts mit Kultur oder Kunst zu tun haben, sondern mit Politik, mit Nachhaltigkeit etwa. (…) Neue Kommunikationsmuster und -strategien, aber auch Informations- und Publikationswege zeichnen sich ab, die unsere Gesellschaft nachhaltig verändern (…)“. 5

Stimme 3 – … nochmals Otto Neurath (Manuskript 1945):

“Mostly, museums and exhibitions are fatiguing, and only a few have facilities for recreation and relaxation in adjacent rooms. Rarely does one feel comfortable in exhibition rooms, as in a club.“ 6

Museums-/Ausstellungsarbeit – Interaktion unterschiedlicher Communities auf Augenhöhe

Neurath und sein Team organisierten ihre Museums-/Ausstellungsarbeit als vordergründig beteiligende Diskussion und Interaktion unterschiedlicher Communities auf Augenhöhe (Wissenschaft, Laien, etc.). Die Aufmerksamkeit galt der primär visuell-bestimmten Formulierung offener Settings. So wurden, in systematisch reflektierter Praxis, engagierende, multidimensional strukturierte Lern-, Begegnungs- und Aktionsstrategien entwickelt, um – im weiteren Sinn – bezogen auf ein gesellschaftliches Ganzes, eine Utopie, ein ‘pleasure maximum’ in den Bereich des Möglichen zu stellen.

Welche topaktuellen Ideen stehen nun hinter Neuraths Museumsarbeit? Ausschlag gebend waren seine neuen Ansätze: der Prozess der Transformation, die Orchestrierung, das Collage-Prinzip und damit eine betont egalitäre und demokratie-politisch ausgerichtete, funktionale Beziehung zu den ‘Usern‘. Diese Konzepte erhalten Aktualität durch heutige Technologien und die revolutionierten Kommunikationskulturen.

Neuraths neue Ansätze – 4 Beispiele

1.Beispiel: wir kennen interaktive Tische/Oberflächen, wie sie oft in Ausstellungen verwendet werden. Dies wurde von der Magnetreliefkarte von Österreich (damals ein “junger“ und umstrittener Begriff, den es zu erkunden galt) im Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (ab 1925 in der Volkshalle des Wiener Rathauses) vorweggenommen.
Das höchst attraktive Modell konnte aktiv (durch die Hände und vor den Augen der Anwesenden), d.h. durch Dazugeben oder Wegnehmen von Magnet-Symbolen, in ihrer Aussage und Interpretierbarkeit verändert werden. Es lockte die (damals medial absolut nicht verwöhnten) Menschen an und sorgte für Partizipation und Diskussion.
2.Beispiel: Ausstellungen wurden ‘mehrfach‘ erzeugt (konträr zu jeglicher Vorstellung von elitärem oder monetärem Wert ‘Original‘), zum Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit der Tuberkulose-Bekämpfung in 5.000 Exemplaren (US-National Tuberculosis Association, 1935-1938) oder mit 3 Exemplaren der Kunst-soziologischen Ausstellung “Rondom Rembrandt“, die gleichzeitig in drei Flagship Stores des niederländischen Warenhauses De Bijenkorf gezeigt wurden (1936 in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag).
3.Beispiel: Usern und zukünftigen Usern (Ungelernten ArbeiterInnen, Schulkindern, Lehrlingen …) wurde zu aktiver Ausstellungskompetenz verholfen.
Sie lernten diese “Sprache“ verstehen und verwenden.
4. Beispiel: Evaluierung – im heutigen Museumsgeschehen oft ein Desiderat – wurde quantitativ und qualitativ ausgerichtet durchgeführt, und die Ergebnisse re-integriert.

Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum im “Roten Wien“

Das sozialdemokratisch organisierte “Rote Wien“ bot für Neuraths Wirken exzellente Rahmenbedingungen, vor allem auch für die Aufsehen erregend-erfolgreiche Arbeit im Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, die Neurath und sein Team in den Jahren von 1925 bis 1934 leisteten.

Keine Unbekannten arbeiteten mit, so war z.B. Josef Frank (http://www.architektenlexikon.at/de/146.htm) der kongeniale Museumsarchitekt und Gerd Arntz (http://www.gerdarntz.org) war ab 1929 als Chefgrafiker engagiert. Ein hochmotiviertes, ‘handverlesenes’ und interdisziplinäres Expertenteam und zahlreiche, oft auch nur kurzzeitig engagierte MitarbeiterInnen (u.a. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Marie Jahoda) waren mit den vielfältigen Aufgaben betraut.
Kooperationen mit herausragenden Wissenschaftern und Künstlern und der gezielte Einsatz neuester Technologien gewährleisteten die Aktualität des GWM.

Die Arbeitsthemen im GWM betrafen: Gesundheit, Wohnen, Bildungschancen, Ökonomie, Handel, globale Zusammenhänge, und, wie kurz angedeutet, auch Kunst aus soziologischer Perspektive.

Im direkten Zusammenhang mit dieser Museums- und Ausstellungsarbeit entstand die “Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik“ (in der Emigration, ab 1934: Isotype – International System of Typographic Picture Education), deren Piktogramme gemeinsam mit Arntz entwickelt, heute unverzichtbar und im öffentlichen Raum ubiquitär präsent sind. So wurden z.B. die Zahlen der Arbeitslosen … oder der Warenproduktion in verschiedenen Ländern auf eine Art und Weise dargestellt, die es den Ausstellungs-NutzerInnen leicht machte, diese zu vergleichen und mit anderen “Tatbeständen“ zu korrelieren.

Das GWM im Rathaus wurde so charakterisiert: “Eine kommunale Einrichtung, mit Abendöffnungszeiten, gratis und frei zugänglich für alle;
Menschen versammeln sich dort in kleinen Gruppen um die Bildtafeln und diskutieren die vorgestellten Themen. Die Leute erfahren über das Leben in ihrer Stadt, über ihre Position in der Welt; sie lernen denken und argumentieren, miteinander auszukommen. Dies war Neuraths Ideal. Es war ein demokratisches und sozialistisches Ideal.“ (Robin Kinross, 1994, 76) Diese Kurzdarstellung trifft die Kernidee des GWM perfekt, sagt aber nichts über die größeren Zusammenhänge, den tatsächlichen Umfang der Aktivitäten oder die Arbeitsformen und die erreichten Qualitäten aus. Halten wir uns vor Augen: neben der permanenten Hauptausstellung im Wiener Rathaus, wurden im Schnitt sieben Ausstellungen pro Jahr organisiert; daneben gab es drei Zweigstellen in Wien: in einer davon, der ‘Zeitschau’, informierten sich bis zu 2.000 Personen pro Tag über Wirtschafts- und Sozialdaten; dies war, ab 1933 in der Tuchlauben im ersten Wiener Bezirk, also mitten im Zentrum der Großstadt.

Im Kontext der Wiener Schulreform – oberflächliches Stichwort Otto Glöckel – wurden im GWM nicht nur neueste pädagogisch-didaktische Erkenntnisse integriert sondern auch die breite Anwendung der Wiener Methode geübt – Ausstellungspraxis mit Kindern, Jugendlichen, Unterrichtenden, oder in der Lehrlingsausbildung.

Das GWM, Neurath und Team, arbeitete für den Teil der Bevölkerung, der durch das Verwerfen von überlebten Traditionen nichts zu verlieren hatte, der weder über tatsächliches noch über ‘kulturelles Kapital’ (Pierre Bourdieu, Elmar Altvater) verfügte. Es mussten daher ‘Sprachen’, Darstellungsweisen, und Methoden gefunden werden, die den ‘(akademisch) Ungebildeten’ interessierten, und die es erlaubten, rasch betreffende Information zu relevanten Themen zur Verfügung zu stellen.

Diese an verschiedene Öffentlichkeiten gerichtete Informations- und Aufklärungsarbeit mit Hilfe von Visualisierungen – hier (siehe Abbildung Rembrandt/Rubens) ein gut ‘lesbarer‘/merkbarer Überblick über komplexe Prozesse – war ein politisches Projekt zur Demokratieerziehung, das nicht allein auf die von Neurath so genannten ‘Ungebildeten’ abzielte, sondern auch auf die besser gestellten, die ‘Gebildeten’ bzw. ‘Experten’ (gegen deren befremdenden Jargon). Dies war in Museen, Ausstellungen, Publikationen und Vorträgen. Erklärtes Ziel von Neuraths demokratie-politischen Bildungsbemühungen war, die breite Masse durch Zugang zu relevanter Information in gesellschaftliche Kommunikation und Entscheidungen einzubinden. Als wirksamstes Mittel dafür sah er das Schaffen von ‘offenen’ Gelegenheiten für Austausch, wie Ausstellung und Museum, und den Einsatz der visuellen Sprache.

Das GWM arbeitete mit einem Netz an Multiplikatoren: In Arbeiterbildungsvereinen und Gewerkschaftsgruppen, in der Schulstruktur. Es propagierte seine Methoden - bei Konferenzen, bei Besuchen von Fachleuten und/oder Politikern (aus anderen Städten/Gemeinden/Staaten) und beriet über die Möglichkeiten der Kooperation. Dies weckte auch andernorts Interesse, u.a. beim Völkerbund in Genf, in Mexiko, Norwegen, Russland, USA. So entstanden schon nach den ersten Aufbaujahren viele Arbeitsaufträge im In- und Ausland, vielfältige Kooperationen und Netzwerke, Zweigstellen oder Vertretungen (in Berlin, Den Haag, London, Moskau, New York, Zagreb).

Die oben erwähnte, mit 8 x 4 Metern groß-dimensionierte, inter-aktive Magnet-Reliefkarte von Österreich, die im Eingangsbereich des GWM, die Menschen direkt vom Rathausplatz ins Museum “lockte“, z. B. sorgte für Aufsehen in der internationalen Fachwelt. Das Chicagoer Museum of Science & Industry ließ bei Neurath anfragen, was dieses Magnetmodell koste und ob es zu beziehen wäre.

Eine Neujahrsgrußkarte (Abb.) von 1939/ 1940 zeigt die Isotype-Export-Routen, und vergegenwärtigt – sozusagen visionär – Neuraths tatsächliche Fluchtsituation nach England – auf einem überfüllten offenen Boot, nur wenige Monate später (Mai 1940).

Neuraths ‘utopisches’ Projekt der Zwischenkriegszeit – beendet in Wien 1934 durch den Austrofaschismus, später vertrieben aus Holland durch NS-Terror – integrierte u.a. folgende konkrete und ideelle Ziele - im Sinne eines PLEASURE MAXIMUM: die Verbesserung der Lebenslage der Bevölkerungsmehrheit (Gesundheit, Wohnen, Bildungschancen), politische Bildung (Arbeitsrecht, demokratische Strukturen), Meinungsaustausch/ Meinungsbildung auf Augenhöhe (Austausch der Positionen ‘user’ und ‘producer’).

Neurath unterstrich, dass visuelle Lehrmethoden und visuelles Lernen (“visual education“) eine zentrale Rolle in dieser Bildungsarbeit spielen sollten. Nicht nur die prinzipielle Egalität der direkten Sinneswahrnehmung (zu beachten der Zusammenhang zu philosophischen Debatten im Wiener Kreis und Neuraths ‘Protokollsätze‘) fiel dabei ins Gewicht, sondern auch die Vorteile der Bildpädagogik bei der Überwindung nationaler, sozialer und kultureller Grenzen.
Drei spezifische Isotype-Ansätze: Transformation, Orchestrierung, Collage.

Der oder die Transformator/in, eine Schlüssel-Position im Team (Marie Neurath arbeitete hauptsächlich in dieser Position), war für die Auswahl der zu übermittelnden Information und die Formulierung der Angebote an die User verantwortlich. In der Transformation entstand das Gesamterscheinungsbild (Visualisierung der Experten-Daten und ihrer Zusammenhänge mit bildstatistischen Tafeln, Anordnung, Proportionen; Informationsstruktur und Dramaturgie; Lichtführung, etc.) und wurde entschieden, was dem Publikum wie zugemutet wurde, also wie die gewählten Inhalte an vorhandene Erfahrungen (der potentiellen User) anknüpfen, und diese erweitern und aktivieren sollten.

Ein Beispiel für Orchestrierung : Durch orchestriertes – abgestimmtes, akkordiertes – Zusammenwirken unterschiedlicher Medien (Buch, Film, Radio, Ausstellung) und/oder zusammenschauendes Betrachten diverser Komponenten (Bild/er und Text/e) z.B. einer Schautafel, nicht allein durch eine Informationsquelle oder durch Lesen nur einer Abhandlung, entsteht die implizite, von den unterschiedlichen ‘Usern’ selbst und das heißt in ihrer eigenen Sprache zu produzierende Botschaft. Hier ist eine Ausstellungstafel, die 9 eigentlich unauffällige Porträtfotos zeigt. Die knappe Überschrift fordert auf, herauszufinden, wer von der TBC betroffen ist, und führt drastisch die unberechenbare weil unsichtbare Gefahr auf (siehe Abb.).

Neurath unterstrich, dass Darstellungen, die auf diese Weise aktives Kontemplieren/Abwägen und Formulieren der Aussagen verlangen und die Nutzer direkt und emotional betreffen, besonders geeignet sind, persönlich zu involvieren und nachhaltig zu motivieren.

Die Portraits-Tafel war Teil von ‘Modern Man Fights Tuberculosis’ – ein Ausstellungs-Auftrag der US-National Tuberculosis Association, die – so Marie Neurath – ‘auch die Eskimos’ erreichte, und in 5.000 Exemplaren hergestellt wurde. Die Begleitpublikation verkaufte sich 200.000 Mal. Es gab spezielle Information für die Organisation und die Multiplikatoren vor Ort, wie sie die Ausstellung - Layout und Botschaft für die lokale Bevölkerung aktualisieren sollte. 7

Zum Collage-Prinzip

Im GWM wurden betreffende Themen nicht als ‘fertig’ vorgestellt, sondern als ‘eröffnender’ Beitrag und nachvollziehbares Informationsangebot, das aus divergierenden Perspektiven und in partnerschaftlicher Diskussion weiter beleuchtet werden sollte. Es war daher Platz für unterschiedliche Auffassungen und Lebensvorstellungen und für die Qualität ‘kontroversiell’ – dem einem demokratischen Verständnis notwendig innewohnenden Aspekt – nämlich Unfertigkeit, der Verhandelbarkeit und Veränderbarkeit der Verhältnisse.

Wirkung und Methode unterschiedlicher Informationsmedien im Zusammenspiel / in der Orchestrierung abwägend, hob Neurath Museum und Ausstellung hervor
als Orte, an denen die Auseinandersetzung mit neuer Information in Gruppen, im Austausch und in gemeinsamen Lernprozessen -
Stichwort: Community of Learners - stattfindet.

1933 formulierte Neurath das übergeordnete Anliegen so: “Museen, Ausstellungen und Zeitschriften (dies kann heute erweitert werden: Radio, Film, TV und Internet) können als ... verschiedene Unterrichtsmittel angesehen werden, die denselben Zweck haben: die Angst vor der Welt zu verringern. Jemand der sich vorher von der Verzwicktheit der Tatbestände bedrückt fühlte, sollte nach einem Museumsbesuch das Gefühl haben, dass man schließlich doch ‘durchblicken kann’“ (Haller/Kinross 1991, 256).

Interdisziplinarität, Team-Arbeit und Transformation bildeten so die kritischen Schnittstellen für Inhalt, Formulierung und Evaluierung der gesamten Arbeit des GWM. Aus diesen spezifischen Ansätzen wurde abgeleitet: Ausstellungsarbeit ist als optimierbare und (bis zu einem gewissen Grad) erlernbare Technik zu sehen. Es wurden also Arbeitserfahrungen aus der Isotype-Arbeit, Dokumentation und Evaluation gesammelt (Archiv für bildhafte Pädagogik; siehe Abb.), um der Planung und Verbesserung von künftiger Arbeit zu dienen.

Visuelle Kommunikation /visuelles Lernen – Wiener Methode/Isotype

Neurath war klar, dass Bilder – überall sehr beliebt – die schnelle, scheinbar anstrengungslose Übermittlung von Information erlauben.
(in Film, Reklame, Zeitschriften, Tagespresse). Unter Hinweis auf das ‘Jahrhundert des Auges’ und darauf, dass sich die Kommunikationsmittel und die durch sie geprägte Wahrnehmung wandeln, vertrat er die Überzeugung, eine breit angelegte Bildungsarbeit geschehe am besten mit visuellen Mitteln. Seine bekannten Slogans, ‘Worte trennen, Bilder verbinden’, oder, ‘Was man mit Bildern zeigen kann, sollte man nicht mit Worten sagen’ finden sich in vielen Artikeln zu diesem Thema. 8

Neurath sah visuelle Kommunikation als demokratische – egalitäre, nachvollziehbare, kontrollierbare und sogar international funktionierende – Möglichkeit, als ein mächtiges Mittel für die erforderliche Verständigung über gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse. Er argumentierte: “der moderne Mensch ist gewohnt, in der Freizeit, schnell und vergnüglich informiert zu werden, wie Kaufhaus und Künstler wissen“ (Haller/Kinross 1991, 337).

Im Lauf der 10 Arbeitsjahre in Wien wurde ein komplexes, den gesamten Gestaltungsprozess betreffendes Regelwerk entwickelt, also ‘Best Practice’-Standards für sorgfältig visuell aufbereitete und organisierte Ausstellungen (Regeln für Struktur, Aufbau, Kapitelgliederung; für gleich bleibende, wiederholbare Symbole, deren Größen, Kombination und Anordnung, Farbkodierung, ...). Ausstellungen wurden im Modulsystem produziert, austauschbar, veränderbar, verschieden kombinierbar. Zur leichteren Handhabung durch die jeweiligen Organisatoren vor Ort wurden Manuals erarbeitet.
(siehe Abb. Begleitheft zu einer Ausstellung mit 20 Educational Charts.)

Bildstatistische Charts / Tafeln (und Gestaltungsmutationen) sollten thematisch und sprachlich an die Zielgruppen angepasst werden, und flexibel – auf die unterschiedlichen örtlichen etc. Vorgaben reagierend – arrangiert werden. Marie Neurath, Ottos 3. Frau, bezeichnete das GWM als ein ‘visual centre’, da es neben den Ausstellungen auch Bücher, Zeitschriften und Ausstellungs-Begleithefte publizierte, Symbole, Lichtbildserien, Tafeln als Unterrichtsmaterialien herstellte, viele Kurse und Vorträge angebot. Im ‘Archiv für bildhafte Pädagogik’ wurden die Fotodokumentation der Arbeiten des GWM, sowie ein Thesaurus der Bildsymbole angelegt.

Bildung und Museumsarbeit. Museum mit Club-Atmosphäre

Neurath hat seine Überlegungen zu Erziehung und Bildung, im speziellen zu den gesellschaftlichen Funktionen von Museum und Ausstellung sowie zu visueller Erziehung vielfach dargelegt, theoretisch begründet, mit Praxisbeispielen erläutert. In den 1940er Jahren (auch in Zusammenhang mit Überlegungen zur Re-Education nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg) stellte Neurath fest, dass ‘education’ (Bildung, Lernen, Erziehung) – mit der Fähigkeit zu tun habe, Beobachtetes zu analysieren, etwas herauszufinden und unter allen relevanten Gesichtspunkten zu betrachten. Er betonte, dass dies der Entwicklung der eigenen Urteilsfähigkeit und einer ‘wissenschaftlichen Haltung’ diene und setzte dafür den Ausdruck ‘Meditation’ ein.

Eine solch offene, wissenschaftliche Haltung sollte gefördert werden, um von vornherein auszuschließen, dass Vorurteile oder gar ein Anspruch auf eine scheinbare ‘absolute Wahrheit’ die Oberhand gewinnen. Die Sprach-Bilder ‘Collage’ und ‘Orchestrierung’ deuten auf diese Offenheit, auf Interdisziplinarität und eine grundsätzliche Erweiterbarkeit.

Dieser Anspruch, der dem traditionellen top-down-Modell zuwider lief (zuwider läuft), entsprach der Auffassung von gesellschaftlich verantworteter Wissenschaft, wie sie im Wiener Kreis zu finden war. 9

Das GWM, als ‘trustworthy knowledge broker’ – eine Qualität, die heute den Museen generell zugesprochen wird – das GWM also, Teil der Kommunalpolitik im Roten Wien, war als Werkzeug für demokratischen und beteiligenden Austausch konzipiert, als Instrument für gesellschaftliche Veränderung. Dieses neue Modell ‘Museum’ sollte durchaus auch eine Demokratisierung des Museums erreichen und überlieferte institutionelle Arbeitsweisen zur Debatte stellen.

Auch beim letzten praktischen Arbeitsvorhaben Neuraths, das all die Erfahrungen des Wiener GWM (Stichwort: Rotes Wien, Sozialdemokratie, Wohnen, Gesundheit, Bildung) noch einmal aufleben ließ, dem sogenannten ‘Bilston Venture‘ (ein ‚housing and city-planning‘-Projekt, 1945) konnten die Isotype-Methoden für Empowerment und Bürgerbeteiligung im Sinne eines selbstbestimmten “besseren“ Lebens überzeugen. Der Bilstoner Kommunalpolitiker (the administrator), der diesbezüglich in Kontakt mit Neurath war, beschrieb seine Erfahrung wie folgt:

“Having met a man like Neurath (…) one is very chary of the pompous and phony in the field of planning. His capacity to adjust the desirable to the practical was an achievement which inspired and instructed the administrator who, under his influence, came to know and feel that plans were of no use unless people could participate in them and be happy with them (...)”. 10

In dieser (Prozess-fördernden, aber Ergebnis-orientierten) Isotype-Arbeit sowie in den Projekten des GWM wurden die Machtverhältnisse, die traditionell im Museum vorherrschen, zugunsten der immer wieder neu zu entwickelnden und zu reflektierenden Position aufgegeben (Ausstellung als Auslöser von Diskursen). Im traditionellen Museum sind diese Positionen entsprechend lang vorher durchgesetzter Interessen und Fach-disziplinären Strukturen bestimmt (Sammlung als Fundament; Ausstellung als ultimativer und autoritativer Standpunkt). Neurath lehnte eine prinzipielle Unterscheidung zwischen der Arbeit der Wissenschaft und derjenigen des gewöhnlichen Alltags ab: Er sah beide als abhängig von kritischem Denken und Wissen, wobei er unterstrich, dass der Begriff ‘Wissen’ wiederum oft verunklärend sei, da er ein positives Urteil vermittle, und dass etwas (schon) akzeptiert sei. Museen und Ausstellungen waren bestens geeignet, um im Zusammenspiel mit den anderen ‘gesellschaftlichen Werkzeugen’ entsprechende Traditionen zu entwickeln.

Zeitgemäße Museologie fordert vom ‘Museum’, eine bürgernahe und beteiligende Lernkultur zu leben, als offen zugängliche, sichere Orte für die verlässliche Behandlung aktueller Themen der Zivilgesellschaft. Entsprechende institutionelle Veränderungen werden von vielen renommierten MuseologInnen vorgeschlagen, hin zu einer demokratischen und beteiligenden Museumskultur. 11

Vor 90 Jahren hatten Neurath und Team wirksame gesellschaftliche Werkzeuge entwickelt, im Sinn einer reflexiven Aufklärung und Demokratisierung, der nachhaltigen Teilhabe über Klassen- und Sprachgrenzen und räumliche Distanz hinweg, für demokratisches Argumentieren, und den Austausch zwischen den ‘Ungebildeten’ und den Sach-Experten. Wir wissen um Neuraths Feststellung, dass sich Museen erst am Beginn einer bewusst zu gestaltenden, produktiven Beziehung zur Öffentlichkeit befinden, dass erst aufbauende, Gesellschafts-verändernde Arbeit und die Berücksichtigung der Nutzer-Interessen, die erwünschte Wirkung erhoffen lasse, und immer Kontextabhängigkeit und Unsicherheiten bestehen. Auch mit der zeitlichen Distanz und gerade wegen des drastisch veränderten Umfelds – medial, politisch, kulturell, ökologisch und technologisch, mit revolutionierenden Kommunikationstechnologien und Interfaces – stellt das Museums- und Ausstellungsprojekt Neuraths und seines Teams ein aussagekräftiges Beispiel wirksamer Museumsarbeit dar. Als reflektierte Praxis ist Isotype anregend und herausfordernd für die heutige Diskussion.

1. Vgl. einschlägige Fachliteratur (u.a.): Hartmann/Bauer: 2006, Bildersprache: Otto Neurath Visualisierungen, WUV, Wien; Burke/Kindel/Walker: 2013, Isotype: design and contexts, 1925-1971, Hyphen Press, London; Kinross: 1994, Blind Eyes, Innuendo and the Politics of Design: A Reply to Clive Chizlett, in: Visible Language, 28, 1. S. 68-78; Marie Neurath/Robin Kinross: 2009, The Transformer: principles of making isotype charts, Hyphen Press, London.
2. Ich verweise auf (z.B.) Forschungsprojekte diverser Museen in Großbritannien; auf die Arbeit der School of Museum Studies, Leicester (http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies), auf Arbeiten und Strukturen von ICOM, dem internationalen Museumsrat (http://icom.museum/ ), Themen und Diskussionen der Jahrestagung der American Alliance of Museums (http://aam-us.org/), oder den Österreichischen Museumstag 2015 (http://www.museumsbund.at/).
Mit diesen Web-Adressen haben Sie auch einen Teil meiner professionellen Vernetzungen im Griff. Die hier verwendeten Abbildungen sind aus meiner Neurath-Publkation (Kraeutler: Otto Neurath. Museum and Exhibition Work: Spaces (Designed) for Communication, Peter Lang, 2008); Die Übersetzungen sind von mir, teils sind Original-Texte in Englisch; alle Web-Abrufe, 27. 08. 2015.
3. ( http://www.mak.at/jart/prj3/mak/main.jart?content-id=1343388632770&rel=de&article_id=1439611879480&e...).
4. (Survey Graphic, Vol.22/9, New York 1933, pp.458-463.)
5. Chris Dercon, Direktor, Haus der Kunst, München, 2011 (http://www.ausstellungen-einstellungen.de/museum-der-zukunft-ist-eine-plattform/).
6. Otto Neurath (Manuskript 1945): Museums Today and in the Future, in: Visual Education. Humanisation versus Popularisation, in Nemeth E. and Stadler F. (Hg., 1996), Encyclopedia and Utopia. The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882-1945) - Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, Bd. 4, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London. SS. 245-335, 314).
7. Marie Neurath (1947), ‘An Isotype Exhibition on Housing’, in, The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 54, 13, Royal Institute of British Architects, London: 600-603).
8. Vgl.: Haller/Kinross, (Hg., 1991): Otto Neurath, Band 3: Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften, Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, Wien: 190, 242, 342, 346).
9. Stadler, F. (1997), Studien zum Wiener Kreis. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des Logischen Empirismus im Kontext, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main.
10. Williams, A.V. in: Neurath, M./Cohen, R. (1974), Otto Neurath. Empiricism and Sociology, S.78.)
11. Vgl. (u.a.) Anderson 2004, Dodd/Jones/Sawyer/Tseliou 2012, Falk/Sheppard 2006, Heuman-Gurian 2006, Hooper-Greenhill 2007, John/Dauschek 2008, MacLeod 2013, Marstine/Bauer/ Haines 2013, Roberts 1997, Sandell 2006, Sandell/Nightingale 2012).

Vortragstext: #AccumulatePleasureMax - Neurath im Informationszeitalter

Armin Medosch — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 07:51:50 +0000

Deutsch

Beispiel: Anwendung der ISOTYPE-Methode

Dieser Technopolitics Salon unter dem Titel #AccumulatePleasureMax - Neurath im Informationszeitalter geht der Frage nach, wie sich die Ideen des Philosophen und Ökonomen Otto Neurath ins Informationszeitalter übertragen lassen. Im Zentrum steht dabei die gemeinsam mit Marie Reidemeister und Gerd Arntz entwickelte Methode ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) auch bekannt als die Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik. In diesem Artikel, der die Grundlage meines Vortrags am 04. September 2015 bildete, stelle ich einige Querverbindungen zu den anderen großen Themengebieten her, mit denen sich Neurath beschäftigte.

Neurath war Mitglied des Wiener Kreises, ein Zirkel hochkarätiger Intellektueller, die heute vor allem als Gründer einer neopositivistischen Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Erkenntnistheorie bekannt sind. Neurath war auch Ökonom und beschäftigte sich lange Zeit intensiv mit dem Problem der sozialistischen Wirtschaftsrechnung. Einige der Kreuzungspunkte dieser Linien möchte ich im Folgenden zusammenführen.

Gerin Trautenberger, Organisator von ViennaOpen, ist zu verdanken, dass er mit der Titelwahl „Pleasure Maximum“ an Neuraths Idee für ein Maximum der Lust (oder auch des Glücks oder Wohlergehens) erinnerte, und damit an eine extrem zeitgemäße Idee. Wir, d.h. Technopolitics knüpfen mit dem Hashtag #AccumulatePleasureMax daran an. Es ist eine Forderung, die wir gerade auch in neoliberalen Zeiten wie diesen aufrecht halten müssen, dass das größtmögliche Glück für Alle die Maxime sein sollte. Interessanterweise gibt es alle paar Jahre Wiederentdeckungen Neuraths, vor allem auf der Basis der bildstatistischen Methode. Dabei werden jedoch häufig die anderen Aspekte seiner Arbeit ausgeblendet. Umso wichtiger ist es, diese Zusammenhänge wieder herzustellen.

Meine erste Begegnung mit Neurath erfolgte im Philosophiestudium Anfang der 1980er Jahre in Graz, das eine starke Ausrichtung auf analytische Philosophie hatte. Der damalige Leiter des Philosophieinstituts, Rudolf Haller, war gemeinsam mit Robin Kinross Herausgeber des deutschsprachigen Standardwerks zur bildstatistischen Methode, der Band Otto Neurath: Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften.1

In meinen Einführungsvorlesungen in die Philosophie wurde Neurath als Mitglied des Wiener Kreises präsentiert. Hervorgehoben wurde die stark anti-metaphysische Ausrichtung dieser Denkrichtung, die auch als logischer Empirismus bezeichnet wird. Viele Fragestellungen der klassischen, d.h. vor allem deutschen idealistischen Philosophie wurden als Scheinfragen entlarvt. Dazu wurden die Mittel der Logik und der Sprachphilosophie herangezogen. Philosophische Aussagen wurden mit scheinbar simplen Fragen konfrontiert wie „was genau meinen Sie damit“ und „wie können Sie das wissen.“ Viele der vom deutschen Idealismus geerbten Probleme der Philosophie, vor allem Kants, lösten sich damit in Luft auf. Die Radikalität der anti-metaphysischen Stoßrichtung mündete zu Aussagen wie jener Ludwig Wittgensteins: „Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.“ Nur Fragen, die auch eine sinnvolle Antwort zuließen, sollten gestellt werden.

Was uns im Grazer Proseminar damals nicht gesagt wurde, war, wie eng dieses Gedankengut mit einer linken, materialistischen Weltanschauung zusammenhing. Es wurde zwar erwähnt, dass Neurath Marxist war, aber so getan, als sei er das einzige offen linke Mitglied des Wiener Kreises gewesen und obendrein habe das keine Rolle für die Entwicklungslinien seines philosophischen Denkens gespielt. Der Text Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis, verfasst von Hans Hahn, Rudolf Carnap und Otto Neurath gilt allgemein als das Manifest des Wiener Kreises. Dort heißt es:

„Die Lebensintensität, die in den Bemühungen um eine rationale Umgestaltung der Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsordnung sichtbar ist, durchströmt auch die Bewegung der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung.“2

Für die Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises war der Kampf gegen den Irrationalismus in der Philosophie auch ein Kampf gegen rechte Ideologien, deren Aufstieg sie mit ansehen mussten und deren Opfer sie bald werden sollten. Neben Moritz Schlick, der ermordet wurde, sahen sich alle Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises gezwungen 1934, oder spätestens 1938 aus Österreich zu emigrieren. Es ist gerade dieser Emigrationsbewegung zu verdanken, dass der logische Positivismus und die analytische Philosophie in den Jahren nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zu einer international wichtigen philosophischen Strömung werden konnten. Umgekehrt betrachtet, hatten nur wenige der Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises in Wien eine Professur oder einen Lehrstuhl inne.3 Wien brüstet sich zwar heute gerne mit dem Wiener Kreis, viele dessen Mitglieder waren damals verkannt, und wären verkannt geblieben, wären Faschismus und Krieg nicht passiert. Nach dem Krieg hat das offizielle Wien nie etwas unternommen, um sie zurückzuholen – soviel zur „besten Stadt der Welt.“

Neurath und seine Ko-Autoren des Manifests waren überzeugt, dass die Anstrengung „den philosophischen Schutt der Jahrtausende“ wegzuräumen, in enger Korrespondenz damit stand, sozialistischer Gesellschaftsreform zum Durchbruch zu helfen. Für sie waren die Gegner des Programms einer wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung auch die Gegner sozialistischer Gesellschaftsveränderung.4 Man wollte die rationalen Werkzeuge schaffen, mit denen eine neue Einheitswissenschaft geschaffen werden sollte. Diese Einheitswissenschaft, dachten die Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises, könnte zur Grundlage der Weltanschauung der Arbeiterbewegung werden. Von der dünkelhaften Halbgebildetheit des Bürgertums unverdorben, würde sich die Arbeiterbewegung einer rationalen Weltauffassung zuwenden, deren wichtigstes Ziel es war, die Zustände im Hier und Jetzt zu verbessern, und nicht über unergründliche Dinge zu räsonnieren. Diese Zielsetzung brachte dem logischen Empirismus nicht nur erwartbare Kritik von rechts ein, sondern auch von der linken Orthodoxie. Moskau verurteilte den Neopositivismus als „Waffe der modernen Bourgeoisie im Kampf gegen die Kräfte des Fortschritts, der Demokratie und des Kommunismus.“5

Wie Johann Dvorak schrieb, bestand der wahre Radikalismus der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung des Wiener Kreises nicht in der engen Anlehnung an neueste physikalische Erkenntnisse, etwa in der Quantenphysik, „sondern in der Neubestimmung der gesellschaftlichen Stellung und Aufgaben der Wissenschaft, in dem Versuch einer radikalen Demokratisierung der Wissenschaft, einer systematischen Verbindung von Wissenschaft, Bildung und Alltagsleben.“6. Diesem Programm fühlten sich alle Mitglieder verpflichtet, d.h. neben den „radikalen“ wie Neurath, Hahn, Zilsel und Carnap auch die gemäßigten wie Schlick und die apolitischen wie Popper und Wittgenstein. Sie alle waren in Projekten zur Volksbildung tätig, engagierten sich für Schulreformen, viele von ihnen hielten Vorträge an der Volkshochschule.7

Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt erscheint es etwas unglücklich, wenn nicht gar verwunderlich wenn Robin Kinross in seiner Einleitung zu den bildpädagogischen Schriften schreibt:

„Wenn man Neuraths Werk als Ganzes übersieht, so verringert sich die Versuchung, irgendeine Sonderverbindung zwischen Aspekten der Philosophie des Wiener Kreises und dem Versuch, eine Bildersprache zu schaffen, vorauszusetzen. Man kann dazu vermerken, dass Neurath selbst einen solchen Zusammenhang nicht erwähnt hat und daß die übrigen Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises und später der Bewegung für Einheitswissenschaft kein besonderes Interesse für seine visuelle Arbeit gezeigt haben.“8

Diese Feststellung scheint gewagt und von den Fakten nicht gestützt. Trotzdem hat die Entkoppelung der verschiedenen Arbeitsgebiete Neuraths sich langfristig in der Rezeption durchgesetzt, ebenso wie die Entpolitisierung des demokratiepolitschen Anspruchs des logischen Empirismus. Es ist festzuhalten, dass im Roten Wien der 20er Jahre Sozialismus und wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung als eng zusammengehörig gedacht wurden. Neurath war überzeugt, dass das Proletariat Träger einer antimetaphysischen Weltauffassung werden würde. Diese Verbindung zwischen linker Politik und wissenschaftlicher Weltauffassung wurde jedoch von der Nachkriegsgeneration durchbrochen. Das Material dazu lieferte ausgerechnet die Frankfurter Schule oder kritische Theorie. Zunächst hatte die Frankfurter Schule, allen voran Max Horkheimer, noch Interesse am Wiener Kreis gezeigt. In den dreißiger Jahren jedoch verfasste Horkheimer eine vernichtende Kritik. Der logische Empirismus sei ein „Verzicht auf Vernunft.“ Indem man nur das gelten lasse, was sich über die unmittelbare Erfahrung erschließe werde die Philosophie „zur Dienstmagd für die je geltenden Zwecke der Industriegesellschaft.“9 Mit der Ablehnung großer Teile der Philosophiegeschichte, der Verneinung der Tiefe und des Grunds, sowie der Betonung der Oberfläche mache sich der logische Empirismus sogar zum Handlanger faschistischer und stalinistischer Systeme, argumentierte der spätere Ko-Autor des Buchs Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944). Diese Thesen Horkheimers – und auch der durch Faschismus und Krieg erzwungene Bruch einer Tradition, die linkes Denken und Wissenschaftlichkeit in eins setzt – wurde in den späten 1960er Jahren zum Standardrepertoire der deutschen und österreichischen Studentenschaft, und dabei blieb es lange Zeit. Linke Kritik verarmte zur eindimensionalen und undialektischen Technik-Schelte. Erst mit der Netzkultur der 1990er Jahre sollte sich das wieder ändern, mit Linux und Open Source, Freier Hardware, freien Netzen und der copyleft und Commons-Bewegung.

1925 begann Neurath mit seiner Arbeit am Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum. Praktisch von Beginn an war auch Marie Reidemeister dabei, spätere Marie Neurath. Zunächst in Zusammenarbeit mit verschiedenen Grafikern wurde die bildstatistische Methode entwickelt. Neurath war überzeugt, dass unter den Bedingungen komplexer Industriegesellschaften eine neue Form von Literacy gefragt sei. Die Arbeiterschaft müsse, um in die Lage zu kommen, sich selbst zu emanzipieren, ein höheres Maß an ökonomischer „literacy“ entwickeln. Schreiben und die Grundrechenarten genügten nicht mehr. Ein Verständnis der Welt erforderte auch eine Durchdringung der herrschenden politischen Ökonomie.

Neurath argumentierte, dass der moderne Mensch nur einen Teil seiner Information durch geschriebene Worte erlange. Immer mehr wichtige Informationen würden durch eine Flut visueller Eindrücke vermittelt. Dazu kämen der Film und der Rundfunkapparat, später das Fernsehen. Neurath sprach oft von Hieroglyphen. Die von einem Team unter seiner Leitung entwickelten Piktogramme seien wie eine neue Bilderschrift. Diese reduzierten Bildsymbole sollten genau festgelegten Gesetzmäßigkeiten folgend in Anwendung gebracht werden, um statistisch ausdrückbare Verhältnisse darzustellen. 1926 lernte Neurath bei einer Ausstellung den deutschen Grafiker Gerd Arntz kennen. Andreas Siekmann, von dessen Vortrag ich hier nichts vorwegnehmen möchte, betont die Unterschiede des Ansatzes. Arntz hatte selbst eine vereinfachte grafische Sprache erarbeitet, um gesellschaftliche Konflikte darzustellen. Sein Ansatz war jedoch weniger auf Piktograme fixiert, sondern darauf, mit schattenrissartigen Hintergrund-Vorderrundkontrasten Narrative Herzustellen. Ab 1928 arbeitete Arntz mit Neurath in Wien und blieb bis 1940 bestimmend für den grafischen Stil der Isotype.

Anfang der 2000er Jahre gab es eine vom Medienphilosophen Frank Hartmann und Grafiker Erwin K. Bauer organisierte Konferenz zur Neurath/Arntz-Methode in Wien, an der ich selbst teilnahm. In dem Text und der Publikation „Bildersprache“10 kontextualisiert Hartmann die ISOTYPE – inspiriert von Marshal McLuhan und Vilem Flusser – vor allem im Kontext des Medienwandels. Die Bildersprache wird im Kontext einer Pendelbewegung gesehen: von den Hieroglyphen und der mittelalterlichen Ikonenkultur zur Gutenberggalaxis mit ihrer Linearität; und nun dank der digitalen Medien und des Internet wieder hin zu einer neuen, visuellen Kultur. Für Hartmann war das wiedererwachte Interesse an ISOTYPE Teil eines größeren Iconic Turn. Sein Text, der durchaus als Referenztext angesehen werden kann, teilt Seitenhiebe gegen die deutsche Medienarchäologie – gemeint ist damit wohl vor allem Friedrich Kittler11 – aus, ebenso wie gegen den technologischen Determinismus von Howard Rheingold. Die ökonomische Ideen Neuraths und seine gesellschaftspolitischen Motivationen werden zwar erwähnt, dennoch läuft Hartmann selbst Gefahr, zum Unterschied vom technologischen Determinismus Kittlers einem medialen Determinsmus aufzusitzen. In der McLuhan-Flusser Denkrichtung wird medialer Wandel als primäre Quelle sozialen Wandels gesehen und die politischen Spannungen und Widersprüche vernachlässigt. Die Geschichte wird zu einer einzigen Folge medialer Innovationen, von den babylonische Tontafeln zu den Hieroglyphen zum Alphabet zum Buchdruck und schließlich Radio, Fernsehen und Internet. Es ist richtig dass diese Medien einen Einfluss auf Denkweisen haben, und dieser Anstoß von McLuhan und der Torontoer Schule war zweifellos wichtig. Problematisch wird es aber, wenn alle anderen Faktoren ausgeblendet werden.

Otto Neurath war als Sozialist ein Leftwinger. 1918 bis 1919 war er in der Regierung der Bayerischen Räterepublik für Wirtschaftsfragen zuständig. Unter Berufung auf Marx und Engels wollte er das Geld abschaffen und eine zentral gesteuerte Plan- und Naturalwirtschaft einrichten. Außerdem sollte die gesamte Wirtschaft binnen 5 bis 10 Jahren vergesellschaftet werden. Dazu kam es aber nicht, die Räterepublik wurde gewaltsam niedergeschlagen, Neurath wegen Hochverrats angeklagt und entging der Haft nur durch die Intervention führender österreichischer Sozialdemokraten wie Karl Kautsky. Nach seiner Rückkehr nach Österreich beschäftigte sich Neurath eine Zeit lang weiter intensiv mit dem Problem der sozialistischen Wirtschaftsrechnung, einer Debatte, die damals in Wien intensiv geführt wurde, unter Beteiligung von Personen wie Helene Bauer und Karl Polanyi, aber auch der Gegenseite, vertreten durch Ludwig von Mises.12

Neurath war überzeugt, dass eine zentral geplante Naturalwirtschaft nicht nur möglich, sondern der Marktwirtschaft überlegen sei. Neurath argumentierte, dass die enge Fokussierung auf die Preisbildung durch Angebot und Nachfrage allzu viele Faktoren außer Acht lasse. Die Rechenmethode nach dem Geldsystem sei zwar präzise in Bezug auf den errechneten Preis, würde aber nichts über den wahren Wohlstand der Menschen aussagen, nichts über den Gebrauch der von den Rohmaterialien gemacht werde, nichts über den Anstieg und Fall der Todesraten und der Krankheiten oder darüber, ob es den Menschen besser oder schlechter gehe. Neurath erwähnte die Erschöpfung der Kohleminen, die Verkarstung der Gebirge und andere Umweltfaktoren. In einer sozialistischen Gesellschaft sollten alle Faktoren berücksichtigt werden, die für das Wohlergehen der Menschen von Bedeutung seien und durch eine Zahl repräsentiert werden. Eine Veränderung des Plans würde in einer anderen Zahl resultieren und so könne die höchste Lebensqualität erzielt werden.13

Kurzfristig trug die neoklassische Ökonomie den Sieg davon. Ludwig von Mises nutzte die Löcher in Neuraths Argumentation um zu beweisen, dass zentral gesteuerte Planwirtschaft auf der Basis von Naturalien der Marktwirtschaft unterlegen sei. Die Mängel im sowjetischen System, etwa lange Schlangen vor Milch- und Brotgeschäften in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren wurden als weiterer Beweis für die Unterlegenheit der Planwirtschaft gesehen. Viele der Ideen Neuraths aber erleben heute ein Comeback durch die Sozialökonomie. In den 1970er Jahren haben William Nordhaus und James Tobin ein Measure of Economic Welfare entwickelt. Davon abgeleitet, wurde ein Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare entwickelt. Dabei werden alle diese Dinge berücksichtigt, die von der Marktlehre als Externalitäten behandelt werden, wie die Einkommensgerechtigkeit, unbezahlte Arbeit in Erziehung, Pflege, Fürsorge, Bildung, Luftverschmutzung und andere Umweltressourcen und die Folgen für den Klimawandel.

Anders als der englische Neurath-Experte Kinross behauptet, stehen Neuraths ökonomische Konzepte, seine wissenschaftstheoretischen Überlegungen und seine Arbeit mit der bildstatistischen Methode sehr wohl in einem Zusammenhang. Dieser Zusammenhang ist kein logischer oder kausaler sondern existiert in Form der zugrundeliegenden gemeinsamen Intention und Motivation. Neurath und der Wiener Kreis verfolgten das Ziel einer Einheitswissenschaft auf physikalischer Grundlage. Vor allem Neurath leitete daraus die Notwendigkeit der Entwicklung einer Enzyklopädie der Einheitswissenschaft ab. Mit Hilfe der ISOTYPE wiederum sollte ein visueller Thesaurus für die Enzyklopädie geschaffen werden. Ab 1930 verstand Neurath diese Idee – die Enzyklopädie und der visuelle Thesaurus – zusehends als seine philosophische Lebensaufgabe. Das gab der Bedeutung der Philosophie als Disziplin eine neue Wendung. Ähnlich wie Carnap und Wittgenstein dachte Neurath, Aufgabe der Philosophie sei es nicht, allgemeingültige Sätze zu formulieren, sondern betrachtete diese als eine Tätigkeit: Philosophieren als organisieren, als Erledigung jener Aufgaben, die gelöst werden müssen, wenn man Wissenschafter und das Wissen verschiedener Disziplinen zusammenführen will.14 Aus den Philosophen werden „einfache Hilfsarbeiter bei der Lösung der Lebensrätsel.“15

Das Enzyklopädie-Projekt solle eine Art Portal werden, ein „institutionell-publizistischer Ort,“ an dem die Probleme interdisziplinärer Zusammenarbeit gelöst werden können. Dazu zählten u.a. auch die Bemühungen ein Basic-Scientific English zu entwickeln. Doch für Neurath war keines dieser Einzelprojekte ein Fetisch. Das Enzyklopädie-Projekt war seinem Charakter nach kollektivistisch, systematisch inter- und transdisziplinär. Die Erkenntnisse waren immer nur provisorischen Charakters, prinzipiell revidierbar, und das Projekt hatte einen volksbildnerischen Charakter. So werde man zwar nicht unbedingt die breite Masse damit erreichen, aber immerhin jene, welche die breite Masse erziehen. Bis zuletzt sah sich Neurath als „social engineer of collective happiness.“

Die Idee einer Einheitswissenschaft im Dienst des allgemeinen Glücks führte zur Idee der Museen der Zukunft und zu breit gefächerten, internationalen Kooperationen. Neurath betonte explizit den Plural in Museen der Zukunft. Diese sollten hergestellt werden wie Bücher, in Serie gefertigt. Die Museen der Zukunft sollten „von den Interessensvertretern der Museumsbesucher organisiert werden, und nicht von Spezialisten, die ausstellen, was sie für richtig halten.“16. Die Grundfrage, die Neurath bezüglich der Museen der Zukunft bewegte war, wie soziale Beziehungen gezeigt werden können. Das berührte eine Reihe von Grundfragen der bildstatistischen Methode: was ist es wert, gezeigt zu werden und wie lässt es sich zeigen? Vor allem: welche aussagekräftigen Datensätze gibt es und wie lassen sich diese in eine grafische Darstellung überführen. Dieser Arbeitsschritt wurde Transformation genannt, und hauptsächlich von Marie Neurath ausgeführt. Ich habe selbst 2003/4 einen Versuch unternommen, mit der bildstatistischen Methode zu arbeiten, und musste schnell herausfinden, wie schwierig es ist. (Siehe Beispiel mit Yippieyeah Gunnar Baur und Tina Borkowski).

Ende der 1920er Jahre begann das Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum eine Kooperation mit dem 1910 gegründeten Mundaneum von Paul Otlet gemeinem mit dem Friedensnobelpreisträger Henri La Fontaine. Das Mundaneum, gegründet unter dem Namen Palais Mondial, stellte sich zur Aufgabe, das gesamte publizierte Wissen der Menschheit in einem zentralen Karteikartenregister zugänglich zu machen. Otlet und La Fontaine hatten schon Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts das Universal Decimal Classification System entwickelt, ein Zahlensystem zur Indizierung von Büchern, das in vielen Bibliotheken bis heute in Gebrauch ist. Bis Ende der 1930er Jahre htte dieser Index 12 – 15 Millionen Karteikarten.17 Otlet und Neurath verfolgten das Ziel, einen Internationalen Zivilisationsatlas – Orbis, zu entwickeln. Laut Neurath wurde ihnen dazu von der Internationalen Vereinigungen der Pädagogischen Organisationen in Genf ein Auftrag verliehen.

Otlet selbst war ein belgischer Pionier der Wissensorganisation, der in den letzten Jahren eine späte Anerkennung findet. Schon 1908 visionierte Otlet, dass Wissen über drahtlose Wellen kommuniziert werden könne. Otlet's Vorstellungen über das Mundaneum umfassten nicht nur den Karteikartenindex, sondern auch ein Weltmuseum, ein Weltarchiv, eine Weltuniversität und ein Welthauptquartier für Internationale Organisationen. Das Mundaneum war somit nicht nur ein Gebäude sondern auch eine architektonische Metapher für die Wissensarchitektur, und an dieser Stelle treffen Neuraths und Otlets Vorstellungen zusammen.18 Die Brüsseler Künstlergruppe Constant beschäftigt sich seit Jahren mit Otlet und dem Mundaneum und wir wollten eigentlich Femke Snelting oder jemand anderen von Constant einladen, aber die sind im Augenblick selbst mit einer Veranstaltung beschäftigt, in Mons, Kulturhauptstadt und auch der Ort, wo sich heute das Mundaneum befindet.

Als Genf zum Sitz der Leage of Nations (Vorläufer der UNO) wurde, wollte Otlet das Mundaneum dorthin verlagern und dafür Le Corbusier beauftragen (vgl. Van den Heuvel). Otlet beschäftgte sich intensiv mit der Frage, wie Wissen mit anderen Methoden als in Büchern gespeichert und verbreitet werden könne. Schon 1913 schuf er zusammen mit Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh eine Encyclopedia Synthetica Schematica, eine visuelle Enzyklopädie. 1934 und dann nochmal 1943 ermöglichte es der technische Fortschritt Otlet seine Ideen eines drahtlos vernetzten Mundaneums zu spezifizieren (Ibid.). Denken wir das zusammen mit der Aussage von Neurath:

„Die Museen der Zukunft sollten auf alle Fälle nicht so sein wie ich sie gerne haben möchte, sondern wie die Besucher und Benutzer sie sich wünschen würden, sofern sie wüßten, was ein Museum ausmacht.“19

Es ist unschwer zu sehen, dass die von Neurath gemeinsam mit Paul Otlet ausgearbeiteten Ideen für ein Universalmuseum, das mit einer neuen Wissensarchitektur ausgestattet sein sollte, als Vorläufer des WWW im allgemeinen und der Wikipedia im besonderen verstanden werden kann.

In diesem Sinn bietet der Abend keine Wiederaufbereitung von Neuraths Ideen, sondern nimmt Neurath als Ausgangspunkt und Orientierungshilfe für neue Projekte. Es werden drei Projekte vorgestellt und diskutiert, die bei aller Unterschiedlichkeit bestimmte Querbeziehungen aufweisen.
Eine Leitidee Neuraths wird aufgegriffen, derzufolge es nicht genügt allein darzustellen was man bereits weiß, sondern dass Methoden wie die Bildstatistik Werkzeuge des Denkens sind. Ein weiterer Leitgedanke ist jener, dass es falsch ist zu behaupten, die Zusammenhänge der politischen Ökonomie seien zu komplex um dargestellt werden zu können – und das insbesondere im Zeitalter globalisierter Finanzmärkte. Es ist sehr wohl möglich, die Machenschaften der neoliberalen Eliten darzustellen. In diesem Sinn freuen wir uns auf die Präsentation von Andreas Siekmann über seinen Politischen Konstruktivismus, die wir als nächstes hören werden. Das derzeitige vorherrschende Paradigma der neoliberalen Informationsgesellschaft ist, erstens, nicht ohne Alternativen, und bietet zweitens trotz seines permanenten, krisenhaften Charakters, nach wie vor emanzipatorische Potenziale. Für diesen Aspekt soll die Arbeit von Marcell Mars mit dem Public Library Projekt als Beispiel dienen. Nicht zuletzt werden wir, im Anschluss an dieses Panel, unser Projekt Tracing Information Society vorstellen.

1. Neurath, Otto. Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften. Rudolf Haller und Robin Kinross, Hg. Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1993.
2. Stadler, Friedrich, ed. Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis. | Springer. Vol. 3. Veröffentlichungen Des Instituts Wiener Kreis. Wien: Springer-Verlag, 2012. http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783709111277.
3. Hegselmann, Rainer. “Otto Neurath, der Wiener Kreis und das Projekt einer empiristischen Aufklärung.” In Neurath, Gramsci, Williams: Theorien der Arbeiterkultur und ihre Wirkung, Herausgegeben von Ursula Apitzsch, 13–36. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1993, 32-33.
4. Hegselmann 1993, 23
5. Akademie der Wissenschaften der UdSSR, zitiert von Dvorak, Johann. “Wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung, Marxismus und Arbeiterbildung im Wien der zwanziger und frühen dreißiger Jahre.” In Neurath, Gramsci, Williams: Theorien der Arbeiterkultur und ihre Wirkung, Herausgegeben von Ursula Apitzsch, 37–51. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1993, 39.
6. Dvorak 1993, 42
7. Ibid.
8. Kinross, Robin. „Einleitung,“ in: Otto Neurath: Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften. Rudolf Haller und Robin Kinross, Hg., IX-XXIII Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1993.XIVfn9
9. Max Horkheimer 1937, zitiert in Hegselmann, 1993, 13
10. Hartmann, Frank, and Erwin K. Bauer, Hg. Bildersprache: Otto Neurath Visualisierungen. Wien: WUV, 2006.
11. Hartmann, Frank. “Bildersprache.” In Bildersprache: Otto Neurath Visualisierungen, Frank Hartmann und Erwin K. Bauer, Hg., 14–105. Wien: WUV, 2006. 98
12. Chaloupek, Günther. “Otto Neurath’s Concepts of Socialization and Economic Calculation and His Socialist Critics.” In Otto Neurath’s Economics in Context, edited by Elisabeth Nemeth, Stefan W. Schmitz, and Thomas E. Uebel, 61–76. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 13. The Hague: Springer Netherlands, 2007. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-6905-5_4.
13. vgl. Chaloupek 2007, 71
14. Hegselmann 1993, 26
15. Neurath zitiert in Hegselmann 1993, 26
16. Otto Neurath, „Die Museen der Zukunft (1933),“ in: Neurath 1993, 244
17. Hartmann 2006, 97
18. van den Heuvel, Charles. “Architectures of Global Knowledge: The Mundaneum and the World Wide Web.” Destination Library 15 (2008): 48.
19. Neurath 1933/1993, 244

The Next Layer

My "New Tendencies" Recent Book Tour

cabinet_book_launch.JPG

Related Links:

Talking with our planet

Art in a Third Space: New Tendencies and the Nonaligned Avant-gardes

Conclusions

Vortrag: New Tendencies und Kinetika 1967

Armin Medosch lecturing at 21er Haus

Related Links:

Tracing Information Society – A Timeline

Related Links:

Robert Adrian Smith (1935-2015): The Artist and the Media Condition

Art and Technopolitics: Resist, Subvert, Accelerate!

Foreground – Background

Art as seen from the artist's side

Base and Superstructure

Historical Forces since 1800

A Critique of Alienation and of the commodity.

Art as Metalanguage critique of art

Worlding

The Fields Exhibition

Cities of the Sun: Urban Revolutions and the Network Commons

Introduction

The City as Utopia and Project

The General Intellect and Peer-based-commons Production

The 1990s: Internet as Electronic Agora and New Economy

The Rise of the Network Commons

The Artistic Urban Utopia

The Automatic Utopia of Mesh Networks and the Social Development of Technologies

From Community Networks to Citizen Networks

Neurath’s offenes Museum: Ziviles Engagement auf Augenhöhe

Stimme 1 – 1933:

Stimme 2 – 2011:

Stimme 3 – … nochmals Otto Neurath (Manuskript 1945):

Museums-/Ausstellungsarbeit – Interaktion unterschiedlicher Communities auf Augenhöhe

Neuraths neue Ansätze – 4 Beispiele

Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum im “Roten Wien“

Zum Collage-Prinzip

Visuelle Kommunikation /visuelles Lernen – Wiener Methode/Isotype

Bildung und Museumsarbeit. Museum mit Club-Atmosphäre

Vortragstext: #AccumulatePleasureMax - Neurath im Informationszeitalter

Beispiel: Anwendung der ISOTYPE-Methode