In the words of the hardworking organizers of Chicago's
Version>04:invisibleNetworks (April 16-May 1, 2004, www.versionfest.org),
the festival sought "to uncover and open channels of discussion, hidden
orders, unseen hands, blackboxes, backdoors, wormholes and access
points. Participants in Version>04: invisibleNetworks will function as
nodes and hubs in this amorphous system and construct this year's
decentralized convergence." Wait. "Decentralized convergence"? Is this
self-contradictory? A productive tension between coming together and
dispersing, and especially between publicity and invisibility, was both
manifested and critically explored in a variety of interesting ways
throughout Version>04. My own experience of it was necessarily partial,
and my reflections can claim to be neither comprehensive nor adequate or
representative – but such is the nature of the beast.

The past two Versions took place over a few days each and were centered at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (on the themes of "the
commons" and "technotopia vs. technopacalypse"). Version>04 was more
spread out in both space and time - it took place over three weekends and
the intervening weeks at a wide variety of venues. It comprised a wide
range of media: sound, video, internet, poster, bicycle,
performance/intervention, city walk, presentation, booth,
discussion. These were organized into a variety of threads (VRSN.SCREEN,
VRSN.SOUND, ART OF CULTURAL INTERFERENCE, etc.). Exhibitions included the
participatory ZROX at BuddY, in which people were invited to bring work
and/or to use a photocopier to make their own reproductions of the work
hanging on the walls, and In These Times's "Paper Politics" exhibition of
politically-engaged hand-printed media (both provided an eclectic sampling
of the inventive, the visually compelling, the witty, and the
irate). Screenings included "Cultural Autopsy" with works providing
critical external views of western culture, selected and introduced by
Arjon Dunnewind, director of Impakt Festival in the Netherlands
Fenslerfilm's wickedly funny series of remixed GI Joe PSAs, and a
screening of the soon-to-be released, devastating film The Corporation
(directed by Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott). A range
of bicycle-based media included a Zinemobile from Quimby's that could be
biked around to distribute zines; the Human TV Network with its battery
powered, bicycle-mounted TVs; and Joshua Klinberg's presentation of Bikes
against Bush bicycle-based activist devices. Pink Bloque contributed
(remotely) to the convergence through its rousing performances at the
Washington, DC March for Women's Lives. Anti Gravity Surprise unleashed
utopian energies by encouraging people to fill in and wear buttons that
read "I want a president who [blank]." On the closing night of the
convergence, the Yes Men made an appearance, fresh from their infiltration
of the Heritage Foundation's annual meeting of rightwing think tanks.

The Yes Men, in that they combine website parody, physical world
interventions, and email announcements, typify (or at least provide the
most celebrated example of) the kinds of tactical relationships to
technology highlighted by Version>04. An obvious emphasis on political
action emerges from the preceding list, though some of these actions are
political simply by virtue of the fact that they deviate from the
expectations of regimented and surveilled daily life. If Version>04's
decentralized spatio-temporal orientation also represents a less specific
focus on "new media" (and perhaps, I should say, on "art") than previous
Versions, it also suggests the extension of networked media and metaphors
(rhizomatically, as it were, both in form and content) into other forms of
aesthetic and cultural production and political action. Apart from
facilitating communication on a basic, pragmatic level, what does the
internet offer to creative political action? It offers its metaphors: the
network, the chain of replication, the virus. It offers the opening up of
possibilities for different temporalities, different broadcast modes,
different styles of creating networks and collaborations. Even the
significance of what goes on at the "basic, pragmatic level" – the
possibility of sending an email to five or twenty people, writing a blog
for an audience of a dozen or a hundred – is not to be underestimated.

Much recent discourse links the notion of the internet as a "network of
networks" with the emerging "movement of movements" – molecular,
networked resistance to corporate globalization and violence. While on the
one hand this implies deterritorialization, drift, and loosely affiliated
nodes, on the other hand it privileges the real-time, the face-to-face,
the ostensibly more authentic, the one-on-one or n-on-n – where n is
"small," whatever that means. What constitutes small and how does such a
group conduct itself? (Small enough to fit in a room? Small enough to sit
in a circle?) Modernity and its media, with their
universalizing/singularizing force, their extreme poles of
"private" individual and mass "public," don't help understand small-group
dynamics (or see the family as the only model). If postmodernism supplies
some of the theory, it doesn't necessarily follow that it provides tools
to guide the practice. How can collaborations of various kinds foster
sustainable alternatives to dominant culture? As part of the follow-up to
Version>04, co-organizer Daniel Tucker is circulating questionnaires on
collaborative practice that might prove useful to a continuing discussion
on this topic.

On this topic and others, a series of conversations emerged at organized
discussions on collaboration and alternative resource spaces at particular
spaces (Polvo and BuddY) and in ways that were both more formal (lectures
and other presentations) and more informal (casual conversation) at the
"nfo xpo" at the Chicago Cultural Center. Many of the participants in
Version>04 staffed booths at the nfo xpo, which provided an informal space
in which exhibitors could network with each other and the public in an
unstructured way, and also attend presentations happening next door in the
CCC's auditorium. Because the CCC is in the heart of downtown Chicago,
office workers on their lunch hour - unsuspecting as well as informed -
also wandered in and out.

High School's "Map Room" exhibition, with a selection of works addressing
"cartographies of power, satellite maps of secret facilities, left wing
dialectics and investigations of (sub)urban spaces and real estate" This
exhibition framed an important set of issues: an effective metaphor of
"mapping" emerges as the correlative to the creative network (graphing,
creating alternative spaces and redescribing existing ones, documenting,
recording, situating relationships). This is not a new idea (constituting
something of a trend in recent art) but its proximity to the notion of the
invisible network was a provocative one. Mapping inherently makes
something visible, but alternative maps can make different kinds of things
visible, such as human narratives, memories and emotions associated with
particular places: psychogeographies. Some works sought to render visible
the invisible geographies of power and privilege that construct the urban
environment (such as the critical city walks were conducted by Ryan
Griffis of Temporary Travel Office and Michael Piazza of the Stockyard
Institute). Other street actions temporarily reclaimed public space from
consumer capitalism, as in interventions by UK participants Ange Taggart
of My Dads Strip Club and Richard Dedomenici (acting as "insecurity
guards," altering Starbucks cups to read "Fuck Off," and pushing vacuum
cleaners to "clean up after capitalism" – what Dedomenici's website calls
"poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience"). Members of Carbon Defense
League (now headquartered at RPI in Troy, NY, but still engaged in
projects in Pittsburgh, where the group originated) presented and led
discussion of their maphub project
(http://hactivist.com/maphub/overview.html). This will create a map
interface that keys narratives, descriptions, discussion forums and user
communities to points on a Pittsburgh map and will also provide kiosks
around the city to make the project broadly available. Finally, map-themed
net art projects in the VERSION_NET thread include [murmur] (an audio
project in which sites in Toronto are linked to audio stories accessible
by cell phone), trace route, kmuni city project, and radial (links all
available at the dolphin icon at http://www.versionfest.org).

Invisibility has a lot of potential valences. As the Notes from Nowhere
collective (some of whom were on hand to present their work) writes in We
Are Everywhere, "Clandestinity can be the key to our survival, or it can
be our downfall." The clandestine can be the way in which the
communicative modes and styles and technologies of corporate culture can
be unobtrusively used against it through mimicry and culture
jamming. Secrecy can mean escaping surveillance and
detection. Invisibility can mean submerging individual identities into a
powerful collective force. It can also result in restricting oneself to
solipsism and inefficacy – not having an audience or not feeling
recognized. Elements of invisibleNetworks confronted the governmental
deployment of secrecy and surveillance, the secret histories of covert
action by (for instance) the CIA, the absolute demonization of the secrecy
of the "enemy." As Jack Bratich pointed out, in his talk on "Secrecy as
Spectacle and as Strategy," the putative WMDs don't need to be found if,
by racist definition, Iraqis are so cunning and secretive that they must
have hidden them with absolute success. Using a series of film and video
clips, Mary Patten's talk, "The Romance of Clandestinity," usefully
contrasted the allure of the idea of secrecy as tinged by celebrity
culture (in which concealing necessarily implies some form of revealing),
with unromantic practices of clandestinity, anonymity, and unobtrusiveness
in struggles both historical and present. Invisibility can also be the way
in which some stories don't get told and some people(s) remain
unrepresented. Secrecy can lead to paranoia -= sometimes quite
appropriate, sometimes corrosive. Thus, the theme requires rigorous, if
provisional and flexible, distinctions.

Within these distinctions – while remaining clear-sighted about the risk
of "solipsism and inefficacy" – a crucial lesson, I think, is not to
expect direct political impact ALL the time. One question that arose in
conversations in and around Version>04 is the role of surplus aesthetic
investment – aesthetic attention that goes beyond communicative
functionality, or even (in terms of hand-production and small-scale
actions) might restrict potential audience. One of the lessons of Version
is that there is a time and place for both aesthetic surplus and
communicative directness. And activist cultures also need what Marc Herbst
called "radical group therapy," something that can take a variety of
forms, some of them aesthetic. Creating a sustainable activist culture not
just communicating a political message, but creating a culture that people
can't help but want to be part of.

Finally, the small number of complaints I heard about Version>04 were
about access (some found the schedule a bit opaque and its changes
frustrating) and a corresponding homogeneity of audience (this varied from
event to event, but at many of them, most attendees could be described as
young white artists). The frustration with flexibility – when it's
someone else's flexibility and not one's own – and the homogeneity of
audience might index some of the potential downsides of the "invisible
network" or the privileging of the small group. Niche markets, the
production of highly specialized consumer identities and the development
of more and more narrowly defined demographics, an emphasis on personal
networks and informal modes of communication – these have also been
appropriated or promoted by corporate marketing strategists. The small
scale of the collaborative affinity group is not necessarily an antidote
to manipulation or power relations. The invisible network is a generative
concept, but not an unproblematic utopia.

The temporality of the convergence is further extended by the continued
internet presence, with its series of "hubs" (websites related by
affinity, influence, or submission to the conceptualization of this year's
theme) and "works" (selected internet works curated by co-organizer
jonCates) and an "invisible network repository" that are all well worth
exploring. In terms of the actual time frame the sixteen days of
Version>04 made for a less concentrated experience. But perhaps the best
thing about it for someone living in Chicago was that it allowed events to
enter into the rhythm of the everyday – making the semi-surreptitious,
partially-networked, critically-conscious festival a model for what life
could be like all the time.

Co-organizers: Select Media, Logan Bay, Dakota Brown, jonCates, Dara
Greenwald, Matt Malooly, Ed Marszewski, Rotten Milk, Joe Proulx, Yoshie
Suzuki, Daniel Tucker and a host of co-conspirators.