cream 2
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Bath in cream. cream is an experimental collaboration of writers and
curators in the field of net art. cream will come to you as a (sometimes
iregular) bi-weekly newsletter devoted to theory and criticism
concerning art in network culture. All texts and reviews are kept as
short as possible, they are not introductions to larger texts elsewhere
on the net. The idea behind it is to provide a continuous injection of
critical thought into the net art field, to provoke a more prominent
critical and theoretical discourse around art in net culture and to do
this in a way that asks for discussion rather then that it obstructs a
flow of discourse. You can subscribe to cream, yet the first half year
of its appearance cream will also go to the a few mailing lists:
nettime, Rhizome, Syndicate. We invite you to forward this mail to
anybody you feel might be interested in the content of cream who is not
on any of those lists.
Contributors to cream: Saul Albert, Inke Arns, Tilman Baumgaertel,
Josephine Bosma, Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Frederic Madre, Tetsuo Kogawa
and more to come.
In this second issue:
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:reflection:
Report: Tetsuo Kogawa - ketai
Review: Sarah Cook - hard, soft and wet
Review: Tilman Baumgaertel -
notes on writing the history of the digital 0.1
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[Tetsuo Kogawa is currently Professor of Communication Studies at Tokyo
Keizai University's Department of Communications. Kogawa introduced free
radio to Japan, and is widely known for his blend of criticism,
performance and activism. He has written over 30 books on media culture,
film, city and urban space, and micro politics. Most recently he has
combined the experimental and pirate aesthetics of the Mini-FM movement
with internet streamed media.]
- ketai -
One of the most idiosyncratic phenomena of Japanese media today is
"ketai"[pronounced 'kay-tai'). Ketai means mobile telephone, a tool
which is very popular all over the world. This same familiar technology,
however, creates different cultures and social appearances.
Individualism is unstable and vulnerable in Japanese society but it
looks stable with the support of electronic media. I once called this
circumstance "electronic individualism" referring to the "Walkman"
phenomenon. People looked independent and selfish where they otherwise
looked shy and hesitating. Ketai boosts this phenomenon and guarantees a
consistent individualism. Ketai is a transcendental subject for Japanese
young people. They are eager to add their favorite ringing sounds
("chakumero") into the machine. While these young people create the
sounds on the computer by themselves, there are professionals who
produce various ready-made "chakumeros". The variety and the number of
them could create a collective music if they got together and sounded
chakumeros.
The first personal socialization starts with letting someone know your
ketai number. Quite young people often have two or three ketais. One is
for personal use: this number is told only to special people. This
attachment to the most personal or intimate ketai can go quite far.
Especially young women sometimes throw away their beloved ketai and this
apparently means that there was a separation. When young people get
together for their new project or to prepare for some other event, they
exchange their ketai numbers (supposedly their second ketai's) with each
other and memorize them into the machine. Name cards and business
cards are history.
Few people will borrow other person's ketai. In fact, ketai becomes more
and more personalized: there is a plan to use it as a personal
identification and password for shopping and banking. More and more
personal data are stored in them. Ketai is the completion of the
PERSONAL computer. I think it shows the computer becomes more and more
personalized and miniaturized to become something like a package of
artificial brain cells. But the forthcoming cyborg body with implanted
electronics will need a new techno-otherness. Media art made interesting
use of such an otherness. As long as the computer was not yet totally
personalized (like when it was connected to a network) there was a
shared space between physical bodies, a shared space that was activated
by technology. Media art has ended with ketai, because media art so far
has been pursuing a self-complete package without otherness even if it
relates to the internet. Media art has considered the internet as if it
were a global package of data.
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[Sarah Cook is a PhD researcher at the University of Sunderland, England
where she coedits a site called the Curatorial Resource for Upstart
Media Bliss (www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb). Having worked in
Canada and the US, she tracks the institutional shifts in curatorial
practice brought on by the introduction of networked new media into the
art world, and wonders how many of them are geographically and socially
based.]
- Hard, Soft and Wet -
Melanie McGrath's book "Hard, Soft & Wet: The Digital Generation Comes
of Age" was published in 1997. Considering its topic, that's ages ago
now. It chronicles her experiences discovering networked cultures - from
her home in London, and her friend's house in San Francisco. The book -
while old - is, however, not out-of-date; it testifies to a cycle of
optimism and despair which is always current in the field of new media.
"Hard, Soft & Wet" documents the early days of the online world in a
manner that is equally applicable to the newfound interest on the part
of the museum-institution in the new media art world.
Midway through McGrath describes a scene at an Internet caf
