RHIZOME DIGEST: 8.29.03

discussion

Posted Aug. 28 2003 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 8.29.03

RHIZOME DIGEST: August 29, 2003 Content: +announcement+ 1. Lauren Cerand: WIRED ICONS: A Conversation with David Byrne 2. Mark Garrett: New FurtherCritic - Ryan Griffis… 3. Marije Stijkel: Publication My First Recession by Geert Lovink +opportunity+ 4. Rachel Greene: Drift: Call For Participation +review+ 5. Joy Garnett: Future of War conf., reviewed by Tom Vanderbilt 6. Dyske Suematsu: The Works of Jonah Brucker-Cohen +interview+ 7. Ale [awcr] Piana: ten.net.qstns - interview .001 [10 questions to Wilfried Agricola de Cologne] +feature+ 8. Rachel Greene: Interview with David Ross + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 8.23.03 From: Lauren Cerand (lcerand@92y.org) Subject: WIRED ICONS: A Conversation with David Byrne In conversation with Wired magazine editors, speakers in this special series on technology and a world in transformation discuss how their work is shaping the future. David Byrne?s most recent project is Envisioning Epistemological Information, a book of artwork done with the presentation software PowerPoint. Byrne explains how to take subjective, even emotional, information and present it in a familiar audio/video form using a medium in a way that is different and, possibly better, than what was intended. Best known as one of the Talking Heads, Byrne has been making visual art for more than 25 years and is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, NYC. This event takes place at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (at 92nd Street) in New York City on Monday, September 15, at 8pm, and tickets are $25. Future guests in this series include Barry Diller (10/28) and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University's Center of Internet and Society (3/23). More info is available at www.92y.org. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 8.26.03 From: Mark Garrett (mark.garrett@furtherfield.org) Subject: New FurtherCritic - Ryan Griffis… Furtherfield welcomes Ryan Griffis who is now our current resident critic for next year. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.furtherfield.org/furthercritic.php">http://www.furtherfield.org/furthercritic.php</a> FurtherCritic offers regular and informative reviews of varied explorative projects & artworks featured and hosted by furtherfield, as well as other digital/net art works and activities in virtual space. US based Ryan Griffis replaces Lewis LaCook as Furtherfield's current critic in residence. His interests, professional and personal, include activism, technology, education, skateboarding, art, loud music and anthropology. He has produced articles, reviews and interviews on art for print and electronic journals and zines. Ryan's most recent project, Yougenics, is an exhibition investigating the social implications of biotechnology. He is also a founding member of ArtOfficial Construction Media, a collaborative effort to screw in a lightbulb. Ryan's Site Lewis LaCook has now stepped aside, as Ryan takes on the FurtherCritic role. Lewis will now be a regular reviewer at Furtherfield on works featured on the site; along with Neil Jenkins, Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. As FurtherCritic he has contibuted various reviews that have offered insightful and intelligent text's, communicating beyond the converted audience of the net art world. A warm big thank you to Lewis for daring to join us dysfunctional 'upstarts' at Furtherfield. If you wish to read Lewis's past reviews at furtherfield simply click on the above link also… for more info - info@furtherfield.org (If you are wish to unsubscribe to the furtherfield mailing list or you are not supposed to be on it, simply put unsubscribe in the 'subject header'. And you will no longer receive any creative information by us…) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 8.28.03 From: Marije Stijkel (marije@v2.nl) Subject: Publication My First Recession by Geert Lovink My First Recession Critical Internet Culture in Transition by Geert Lovink Published by V2_ and NAi Publishers ISBN nummer: 90-5662-353-2 My First Recession starts after the party is over. This study maps the transition of critical Internet culture from the mid to late 1990s Internet craze to the dotcom crash, the subsequent meltdown of global financial markets and 9/11. In his discussion of the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle, Geert Lovink lays out the challenges faced by critical Internet culture today. In a series of case studies, Lovink meticulously describes the ambivalent attitude that artists and activists take as they veer back and forth between euphoria and skepticism. As a part of this process, Lovink examines the internal dynamics of virtual communities through an analysis of the use of moderation and "collaborative filtering" on mailing lists and weblogs. He also confronts the practical and theoretical problems that appear as artists join the growing number of new-media education programs. Delving into the unexplored gold mines of list archives and weblogs, Lovink reveals a world that is largely unknown to both the general public and the Internet visionaries. Geert Lovink is a Australian-based Dutch media theorist and Internet critic, a co-founder of numerous online projects such as Nettime and Fibreculture, and the author of Dark Fiber and Uncanny Networks. More info on: www.v2.nl/2003 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 8.26.03 From: Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org) Subject: Drift: Call For Participation Begin forwarded message: From: info@mediascot.org Date: Mon Aug 25, 2003 4:30:38 PM US/Eastern To: info@mediascot.org Subject: Drift: Call For Participation ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Drift: Sound Art + Experimental Music Call For Participation ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ New Media Scotland calls for participation for Drift - an exploration of sound art and experimental music which comprises live events, radio broadcasts, moving image and publications. The accessibility of the Internet together with new tools and methods for digital recording, manipulation, reproduction and distribution have changed forever the way that we think about and interact with sound, giving us new ways to communicate our ideas. An increasing number of artists, producers, DJ's and sonic creators, from a broad spectrum of disciplines and varying modes of practice, are exploring streaming media as a viable format. We want to open up this channel further. We are offering four opportunities to take part in Drift, details follow. Further information, guidelines and application forms available from the Drift web site: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org/drift">http://www.mediascot.org/drift</a> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Drift Radio Art Commission 2003 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ New Media Scotland invites proposals for radio art projects for Drift. We aim to commission a new radio art work for broadcast both online and on-air, via audio streaming and FM transmission. Fee - £1,000 Support - We will provide practical assistance, access to streaming media tools, and can offer some limited technical support on a negotiated basis. New Media Scotland will facilitate the broadcast of the commissioned work. Eligibility - Only artists based in Scotland can apply We will not accept proposals for: - audio documentation of projects that exist in another form - projects which have already been produced Guidelines and application form available from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org/drift">http://www.mediascot.org/drift</a> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Drift Radio Programme Proposals ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ New Media Scotland invites proposals for radio art programmes. We want to provide a platform for your ideas - one-off events, regular shows, experimental sound projects, radio art work for broadcast both online and on-air, via audio streaming and FM transmission. We cannot pay a fee for this opportunity, but we will support you to realise your programme ideas. Support - We will provide practical assistance, access to streaming media tools, and can offer some limited technical support on a negotiated basis. New Media Scotland will facilitate the broadcast of your programmes. Eligibility - Open to artists, musicians, producers based in Scotland and the UK Guidelines and Programme Summary form available from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org/drift">http://www.mediascot.org/drift</a> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Resonant Cities: Call for Sound Works ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ New Media Scotland seeks sound works for 'Resonant Cities': Internet radio streaming that explore the sonic identity of our surrounding space and that engage with the fragmented 'noise' of the city soundscape: people, traffic, communication intrusions, mobile phones, radio traffic, city wildlife, buildings… We are particularly interested in audio works which involve one or several of the following ideas or processes: - Acoustic Ecology - Acousmatics - Phonography - Sonic research - Radio art, Internet radio - Microsound - Lowercase sound - Internet communication media and audio streaming - Electronic communities - Artists' software for sound and music - Sound work developed using open source processes and principles - Generative sound - Sound archives - Spoken word / oral history - Field recordings - The re-purposing / representing of existing analogue sound recordings, such as amateur recordings, scientific recordings, and accidental, lost or abandoned recordings - The works selected by the Drift team will then be curated into themed streams that will be available via this web site. Our intention is to expand the audience for the work, encourage appreciation of sound art, and broaden access to a genre which is too often labelled as esoteric and inaccessible. We cannot pay a fee for this opportunity, but we will facilitate the broadcast of your work. Eligibility - Open to artists, musicians, producers in the UK and across the globe. Guidelines and submission form available from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org/drift">http://www.mediascot.org/drift</a> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Drift Touring Video Programme: Call for Moving Image Works +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ New Media Scotland seeks sound-based moving image works for Drift. We plan to curate and tour a feature-length programme of short moving image works. We are looking for films and videos which take as their starting point sound art or experimental music. This can include experimental moving image works by artists and films made by musicians, as well as pieces which combine performance aesthetics with sound. The Drift moving image programme will tour to venues in Scotland, the UK and internationally. A specially designed brochure will be produced featuring information on the artists and their works. Fee - Selected artists will be paid a fee for the rights to tour the work. Eligibility - Open to artists, musicians, producers based in Scotland and the UK. Guidelines and submission form available from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org/drift">http://www.mediascot.org/drift</a> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Drift organised by New Media Scotland. Supported by the Scottish Arts Council, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Liverpool School of Art & Design. For further information, visit the Drift web site <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org/drift">http://www.mediascot.org/drift</a> or contact New Media Scotland at the address below. ——————————————————– info@mediascot.org ——————————————————– New Media Scotland tel: +44 131 477 3774 P.O. Box 23434, Edinburgh EH7 5SZ fax: +44 131 477 3775 Scotland, UK <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mediascot.org">http://www.mediascot.org</a> ——————————————————– + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 8.26.2003 From: Joy Garnett (joyeria@walrus.com) Subject: Future of War conf., reviewed by Tom Vanderbilt hey all - this just in: ———— War as Architecture by Tom Vanderbilt [published summer 2003 in The Knowledge Circuit, Design Institute, University of Minnesota] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://design.umn.edu/go/knowledgeCircuit/smr03.1.vanderbilt">http://design.umn.edu/go/knowledgeCircuit/smr03.1.vanderbilt</a> NEW YORK, NY. War, as the old Clausewitzian saw goes, is the extension of politics by other means. As we have been reminded in recent months, there may be cause for a new dictum: War is the extension of architecture by other means. Apart from the obvious architectural connotations of war the need for defensive shelter, the status of architecture as a target there is a breadth of associative meaning between the two enterprises: both are about the exercise of control over a territory; both involve strategic considerations of the most apt site-specific solutions; both involve the use of symbol, rhetoric, and cultural context. In the Iraq campaign, the architectural connotations were legion, from the New York Times Op-Ed writer who commented upon the fact that the Hausmannian avenues and relatively low, dispersed skyline of Baghdad boded well for its military penetration; to the surgical extraction of architectural assets, shown in remarkable overhead clarity by the satellite imagery of Evans and Sutherland, looking like the aerial mosaics employed by urban planners (in fact, aerial warfare and urban planning have long shared an eerie confluence of language and tactics, and even practioners, as in the Air Forces Curtis LeMay, who studied urban planning before overseeing the devastating aerial campaign on Japan); to the mere fact that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost far more than its invasion. More than a war of destruction, this is a war of construction. The terrain itself was filled with three-dimensional militarism; an absolutist regime produces absolutist architecture, after all, and nowhere was that better signified than in Saddam Husseins crossed swords monument, fashioned from the melted metal of Iraqi weaponry, festooned with myriad helmets (some even functioned as speed bumps) taken from some of the one million soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. Architecture, or a gesture of war itself? Architecture, like war, is never entirely one thing, but a condition, occasioned by culture and history, mediated by time and opinion. As Wayne Ashley, curator of Thundergulch (the new media initiative of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and organizer of "The Future of War," said in leading off the event, buildings can be seen as secure environments, but also as objects to be destroyed. Is that really a hospital, or a weapons cache? Is that an office building, or a symbol of imperialist domination? As participants were to reiterate in different ways, architecture can be the object of terrorism, or it can be terrorism: Mohammed Atta was a student of urban planning; and as cultural theorist Benjamin Bratton pointed out, a member of the "Black September" team of terrorists at the 1976 Munich Olympics was an architect who had worked on the complex they occupied. War can be erased by terrorism or in some strange way constructed by terrorism; who knew anything about the unremarkable Alfred P. Murrah building before "Oklahoma City" as the event itself has come to be known? The entire city has been collapsed by the metaphoric weight of the bombing, turning the building into a shrine, more visited than any architectural landmark known for its aesthetic merits. One might reduce war to violence and art to aesthetics, but it is more useful, albeit more unsettling, to explore what happens when one removes those perceived oppositions. This was one of the underlying themes of the "Future of War" conference, to "challenge comfortable categories" as moderator Helen Nissenbaum phrased it at the outset of the opening panel, "The Aesthetics and Politics of Technologized Warfare." While the first presenter, the artist Joy Garnett, spoke while behind her on the screen flashed images of her paintings drawn from the haunting imagery of the military complex, stark images of contrails streaking through a night sky ("Tracer Fire") or stealth bombers in patterned flight. Her paintings, which seek to use a more primal medium to wrest meaning out of an image saturated environment, evoked from one audience member a comparison to the recent use of "satellite phones" by embedded correspondents in Iraq. Did the shaky, pixellated images, with literal and figurative gaps in their composition, obscure the "reality" of what was happening or did their low-tech immediacy actually enhance the realism? We needed a McLuhan was the satphone a "hot" or "cool" medium? Imagery is another condition shared by war and architecture: just as most of us do not experience war, we often do not experience architecture; rather, we "know" a building (through its repeated transmission) via photography. But images do not just happen, they are created, and for a reason. Many of Garnett's paintings were drawn from weapons effects testing in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. The hundreds of thousands of images (still and moving) generated by this activity were, largely, classified for many decades. These were "images as dangerous as the isotopes that produced them," she noted. Images as toxic waste, to be buried beneath the sand. Inherent in her work is a questioning of the "effects" of classifying these "effects tests." What happens when imagery is removed, left in the dark for decades? What happens when it is returned to the light? Scratchy footage of atomic tests from the Nevada deserts, as men in goggles look on, functions nowadays more as historical kitsch than pure horror. It has been sanitized by time, rendered as a strictly historical document. "Declassification" speaks to their political and aesthetic impotence. Of course, the weapons tests were hardly secret people gathered on predawn Las Vegas rooftops to view them. They saw in the blasts (they never saw the "effects") something else: perhaps a sublime beauty, felt perhaps an awed speechless and frightened reverence towards man's ability for self-destruction. Tom Keenan, director of the Human Rights project at Bard College, presented a countervailing narrative of sorts: He wanted to explore what he calls "the paradoxes of openness." In other words, contrary to the idea that war is a secret activity whose violence occurs off camera, away from the public eye, and contrary to the notion that it could thus be fought against if people only knew what was going on "mobilizing shame" in the words of human rights groups Keenan argued that there is "nothing in art that resists violence." Images and exposure do not necessarily stop war in fact they may even "lead the charge," according to Keenan. He screened footage from the Kosovo campaign that showed Serbian troops looting villages near Pristina. They did not seem to be taking much, the BBC correspondent noted, they merely seemed to be putting on a symbolic display. The fatal moment came when one militia member, Kalishnakov rifle in hand, waved to the cameras. The casualness of the gesture was disturbing: They were not afraid of their violence being exposed, indeed they seemed to welcome it. Keenan followed with another example, this time the humanitarian intervention of U.S. troops in Somalia. He used the example of the first Marine landing, a supposedly secret, "tactical" approach that came ashore to a cavalcade of some 600 journalists, in full klieg light, drawn like moths to the flame. As one Marine commander worried about the presence of the press, a journalist chided back: "Like you didn't know we were going to be here." The military, the media, both were joint players in a performance, each feeling a bit awkward in the role. Later, when an audience member decried the corporate ownership of the U.S. media and the shortage of available imagery and information from Iraq, Keenan begged to differ, noting the abundance of information sources made possible by the internet and other outlets. The question was not, as he put it, what the media was doing about the war, it was what we were doing about it. Art has been intricately intertwined with war at least since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings of siege engines and other commissions for the Borgias rival anything in his corpus in terms of technique and mastery. Those drawings, which in some cases presented fantastic new visions of what war could be, are echoed in the simulation programs the military now uses, created by partnerships involving the film and computer programming industries. Art can even be used in the conduct of war e.g., it was recently revealed by a Spanish historian that a group of anarchists in Spain during the Civil War had employed specially designed cells, outfitted with surrealist decor inspired by Dali and Bunuel, for what they called "psychotechnic" torture; as El Pais described, "The avant garde forms of the moment surrealism and geometric abstraction were thus used for the aim of committing psychological torture." So too can architecture become a weapon, as revealed in a fascinating presentation (part of a panel entitled "Architecture, Violence, and Social (In)Security") by Eyal Weizman, a Tel Aviv-based architect. Weizman, detailing the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, noted their "panopticon" like arrangement over neighboring Palestinian villages (usually at a lower elevation) as well as their linkage, in certain cases, by infrastructural devices (roads, tunnels) that bypass intervening zones of Palestinian autonomy. Thus the Israeli superhighway soars over Palestinian farmland, creating, as Weizman put it, "sovereignty in three dimensions." The landscape as a whole, as he put it, is "in effect an artificial arrangement of a totally synthetic environment, as designed as any built environment, within which all 'natural' elements like streams and mountains, forest orchards, rocks and ruins function not as the things being fought for but as the very weapons of the conflict." Weizman surveyed the architectural history of West Bank settlement, from the frontier like "tower and stockade" outposts of the 1930s, in which walled compounds were connected visually by tower reconnaissance and Morse Code; to the energetic campaign to colonize the mountaintops (so often containing the historical sites where Zionists hoped to return) in 1967. As Weizman noted, as there was little experience of building in the mountains, the "battle for the hilltops" began with an intensive aerial photography project; the West Bank became "the most photographed terrain in the world," to the topographic groundwork for occupation and cultivation. His photos of settlements were haunting, capturing such bizarre imagery as the trompe l'oeil paintings of an idealized rural scene on a looming wall dividing Israelis from Palestinians. His images of stucco-and-tiled houses surrounded by walls and deserts eerily replicated Las Vegas suburbia (the American gated community represents a similar, if less overtly political, securitization of space). For Weizman, the land-use patterns characterized by vast walls, barricades, even the planting of pine trees to forestall the planting of olive groves (by Palestinians) amount to a military action, and he says architects should be prosecuted for war crimes. Weizman did not disagree when an audience member compared the settlements (a "postmodern diaspora," he called it, ad hoc nation-building) to some new version of the shtetl, the Jewish ghetto so ruthlessly and architecturally demarcated by the Nazis. The "two-state solution," Weizman conclude, "is a design solution that doesn't work." During the weeks of war coverage, it became typical to see a military analyst or general standing before an aerial photograph of Baghdad, pointer in hand, cataloging the damage done to a ministry building while its neighbors, in most cases, appeared remarkably intact (Michael Sorkin recently referred to this as a "good building/bad building" dichotomy)no indication of casualties, no "on the ground" perspective. And yet how often have we seen this same presentation by architects and planners, this Olympian perspective of spatial rearrangement in which humans are absent or simply a statistical "user mix"? Listening to a number of presentations, it soon occurred to me, as I grew lost in the fog of architectural discourse, that much of what passes for the language of architecture icy, jargon-laden, bolstered by a reliance on dehumanized, abstract "spatial production" and other clinical terms bears a certain resemblance to the language of modern military planning, with its "battlespace," "kill boxes," "network-centric warfighting operations," and the deck of cards depicting high ranking Iraquis as characters. What both of these languages, and both of these practices which both involve the physical manipulation of human relations neglect is the human equation, the people who live and die in these theorized constructs. When Bratton discussed the suicide bomber as the proponent of a "counter-habitation" of space, the act of bombing a "suspension of the premise of habitation itself," or when he described the World Trade Center attack as a form of architectural criticism, he was, beyond offering an implicit condonement, resorting to the spatial, strategic primacy of military thinking itself (suicide bombing victims would thus be "collateral damage" to act of counter-habitation), wherein there are no crimes, no victims. Bratton's formulation was of a symbolic piece with that influential Naval War College thesis, which bore the infamous title "Shock and Awe," with the lesser known subtitle, "Achieving Rapid Dominance." That document, which seeks the immediate control of the "operational environment," articulates its mantra thus: "The goal of Rapid Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and military objectives." Neither war nor architecture are immune from the violence of language. +++ "The Future of War: Aesthetics, Politics, Technologies" took place at The New School, New York, NY, USA, May 2-3, 2003 and was organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's new media initiative, Thundergulch. Tom Vanderbilt is a Brooklyn-based writer and the author of Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn=1568983050">http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn=1568983050</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 8.27.03 From: Dyske Suematsu (dyske@dyske.com) Subject: The Works of Jonah Brucker-Cohen Hi all, I wrote a review of Jonah Brucker-Cohen's work after seeing him at Upgrade! yesterday. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dyske.com/default.asp?view_id=767">http://www.dyske.com/default.asp?view_id=767</a> Best, Dyske + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 7. Date: 8.27.03 From: Ale [awcr] Piana (awcr@awcr.org) Subject: ten.net.qstns - interview .001 [10 questions to Wilfried Agricola de Cologne] Interview in 10 questions to Wilfried Agricola de Cologne, the first of a series of interviews with net.artist, curators, net.people. Read the interview on awcr.org at the following url: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://awcr.org/interview001.htm">http://awcr.org/interview001.htm</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 8. Date: 8.28.03 From: Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org) Subject: Interview with David Ross I first heard of Radical Software in an Artforum article by David Joselit published in May 2002. Joselit gave a history of the magazine (of which I had never heard) and I was intrigued by how ?net culture¹ and ?mailing list¹ it seemed beyond the use of the term ?software¹ in its title, I was struck by how in Joselit¹s account the publication seemed to yoke together different topics and stand next to the art scene, constituting its own autonomous cultural space. I heard rumors that the entire run of RS was going to be published online (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.radicalsoftware.org">http://www.radicalsoftware.org</a>), and when it came out this summer I read a number of issues front to back. It seemed, again, like many of the mailing lists I have been involved with, to be part of a scene and a culture, not just a publication. I turned to longtime Rhizome member David Ross, a curator, writer and net art enthusiast likely known to most on this list for his net art advocacy during his tenures at the Whitney and SFMOMA (including this interesting lecture, ) –  I wanted to talk to someone who was there during the publication¹s original and could help give bring its paradigms and ethics to life. -Rachel Greene * * * RG: What was your connection with the publication during its run time? I have read a bunch of issues but maybe I have missed your articles…   were you a reader or a writer? What was its reputation? How was RS   considered next to more official publications such as Artforum and Art   in America? DR: Radical Software was an inspiration for me. For sure, I was an avid reader –not a RS writer.  When I was a student, RS represented the inside of a world I wanted to enter and engage. The alternative media pantheon was reflected in its pages: Buckminster Fuller, Gene Youngblood, Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut,  Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Douglas Davis,  Raindance  the fabulous  Video Freex, Eric Siegel, and so many more.  I imagined them all together, smoking great pot, screening tapes and bringing on the media revolution. RS was the only source of information about the emerging video scene, and aligned as it was to the hip universe of the time, it had the aura of Woodstock, theå Whole Earth Catalogue, and was ³counter-culture² writ large.  I aspired to be in that world, rather than the straight journalism universe I seemed headed towards. RS was anti-hip hip, to me, it was a real art forum, a site for a radical discourse about how changing the idea of mass media could produce a cultural revolution. It was not some fawning art world public relations machine, but rather a no-nonsense, how-to kind of journal, as well as a genuine space for the expression of the hopes and (real) concerns of an emerging  generation of media makers. No one who read RS from my perspective (that of a 20-year-old, pre-maturely disaffected radical media wannabe)  gave a shit about Artforum, Art in America, Art News, or any of the  official art magazines. We loved Avalanche, Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear¹s incredible, square-format, black and white, magazine of interviews with the likes of Joseph Beuys, Yvonne Rainer, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, et al.  Artforum represented another universe, and though the distinctions  eventually blurred, in the early 70¹s all things video and performance  were considered weird (that is to say interesting to a few, but  generally not of real importance to the commercial world of art  central to their ad revenues).  Even though some of the artists in the Artforum pantheon made video, it was seen as a curiosity to be  acknowledged and dismissed  as boring and silly.  It wasn¹t until the Ileana Sonnabend and Leo Castelli artists insisted that their  galleries form a joint video unit (Castelli-Sonnabend Video, run by  Joyce Neraux), that video received a certain art world stamp of  approval.  Of course, Howard Wise had already transformed his gallery into Electronic Art Intermix, and it had a stronger relationship to  the RS universe ?though RS was strictly non-commercial and unsupported  by the gallery advertising dollars that fueled all the mainstream art  mags. I was strictly an avid reader until the 1973 issue that was guest-edited by Juan Downey and Frank Gillette which included coverage of several of the exhibitions I had produced as Curator of Video Art at the Everson Museum.  It contained the print catalogue for ³Circuit: A Video Invitational,² a group exhibition of videotape works by 50 artists (actually combining the EAI, Castelli-Sonnabend, and independent videographers I had encountered during the first two years of my curatorial work.)  It also referred to other Everson exhibitions, including Gillette¹s survey show, and Juan Downey¹s evolving ³Video Trans Americas² project.  But RS was already running into financial hard-times, as well as a change brought about by its relationship to the science publisher Gordon and Breach, and it was clear that the counter-culture spirit of it early issues was fading or quickly being transformed into something else. RG:  You note in your essay on the RS web site that it was hard to   recognize the video/cable shift as an economic one – can you expand on this – I understand that people were unaware of how centralized cable would become, but what should they have used better judgement about? DR: What was unclear was that cable television would succeed and fail at the same time.  It succeeded in transforming the centralized notion of television as a function of three broadcast networks (the economics of scarcity at its most obvious) into an economy of apparent abundance. Bill Viola had the great line that he had a ³seven-channel childhood,² and cable promoters promised hundreds of channels ?surely a sea change if not a paradigm shift!  But how naïve not to see that the same corporations that controlled the networks would eventually find that cable had just given them control of over vastly greater amounts of shelf space, and that the promise of choice and  interest-specific channels would not so much as transform the media (as we¹d imagined and hoped) as make it a more effective and precisely  targeted selling machine.  Richard Serra was the incredibly prescient in the video piece he made with Carlotta Schoolman called ³Television Delivers People.²  He got it right. The notion of an economy of abundance didn¹t re-surface until the mid-90¹s when it became clear that the Internet held the promise that cable had breached ?but by then we were all too jaded to be fooled again quite so easily.  What we see today in the attempt of the major media-owning companies to extend their control of broadcast, print and on-line, is a direct continuation of the war to control the minds and purchasing power of the greatest marketing system ever devised.  Yet for the time being, the Internet has held on to it ability to contain both corporate media conglomerates as well as the independent voices   of artists, poets, and people who dissent. RG: Why did RS get reborn now? Do you think it has anything to do with   how the genre of net art is increasing seen as in dialogue with more   historical movements (as opposed to the early years, when net art was   touted as being new and different)? DR: You¹d probably best ask Davidson Gigliotti or Ira Schneider about why RS was republished on-line.  It was not reborn, as that would involved the re-establishment of an editorial space and mindset that no longer exists, it was disinterred.  I hope that what you say is true, that is, that the relationship of the idealism and remarkable focused (as  well as free-form) intelligence found in RS bears some relationship to the current radical media discourse taking place in the thoroughly de-centralized world of the Internet.  And yes, I agree that we now see that the promises of an Internet-borne revolution may have been, in some critically important ways, vastly overstated. RG: One of the most distinctive and interesting aspects of RS to me is   the way the publication umbrellas topics together – Video and Kids,   Education, Technical information… In contrast most art publications seem so single-minded. Why are art magazines so on the discurisve   straight and narrow these days – what do you make of this? Is this generational as well as discursive? DR: I need to re-state one thing.  RS was not an art magazine.  It had a relationship to an emerging new art practice, but its purview was quite different.  It was an extension of an imagined universe in which?to paraphrase Gregory Bateson on the reason the Balinese lacked a word for art? art was an irrelevant category since one did everything as well as one could.  But the focused late issues of RS were the function of each issue as the site for a new group of editors to express their specific interests.  By the way, my favorite theme issue was the TV Environment by Billy Adler, John Margolies and a Ilene  Segalove.  That issue was a work of art. But you are right, the Education issue raised some profound questions that remain unanswered still. I can¹t tell you why so many art magazines have remained on what you call the straight and narrow.  Probably because they are trying to survive as businesses during an economic downturn, but perhaps because they are just risk averse and trying to hold on to an old view of the ßworld ?the one in which art needs to be segregated and maintained in   its own language-protected sphere. RG: I was really amazed to see all the highly technical information and detail in RS… where to get the cheapest tapes, how to alter and personalize cameras… these were gearheads of a different era. Was video considered a technical genre akin to how net art relies on programming? DR: Video of the early RS/Whole earth variety, was hardly a technical genre. It was home-made stuff. In some ways, a high-tech craft form, it was decidedly low-tech. It was an attempt to use cheap consumer-grade video technology to engage the well-armed world of broadcast engineering…and (at the risk of sound like an old fart) it was really hard.  The people who were attracted to video ?dancers, poets, painters, print journalists, photographers, and the occasional film maker? were all struggling to find ways to use this beautiful, grainy black and white video.  There were no classes, no how-to books, and no grizzled veterans. So RS played that role ?at least for a while. The thing to remember was that video was radical not because those making it were producing such interesting programs.  Rather, it was the simple fact that an alternate media universe, one within our putative control, had emerged as a viable working environment.  And, like Rhizome today, it was the healthy evolution of that environment to which RS was dedicated. RG: I am interested in what you note above, in the response to Question 1, when you say that RS was "not some fawning art world public relations machine, but rather a no-nonsense, how-to kind of journal, as well as a genuine space for the expression of hopes and (real) concerns of an emerging generation of media makers." I feel pretty simpatico with that mission and affirmed by it – especially since critics of Rhizome have often cited its chatter, personal discourse and un-regimented topics as detractions. Do you think that non-atomized forums, wherein people discuss everything from technique to frustrations and ideals – do you think these are always to be small-scale and somewhat marginal projects? I mean, I think Rhizome Raw is one of those forums, as are other mailing lists, zines, hobbyist and online forums. I am interested in this 'scale' issue because our forms of public space seem now to be media spaces. DR: Of course you are right. The nature of these new public spaces is small-scale…but you have to redefine the term ³small-scale.²  What we mean is enormous, nearly global reach in order to assemble a community of people with ³elective affinities.²  This may produce a relatively small gross number, but the intensity of the engagement, and the other specific qualities of dialog that follow the shared field of interest far outstrip the simple size of the community. RG: Feedback. A section of RS magazines but also a defining principle. It's so rad and funny to realize that 'feedback' was a 1960s/1970s term as well as being an internet buzz word. I guess I tend to think of it almost exclusively as being operative online. In a general way I wanted to get your perspective on the history of 'feedback' within art and related fields. In the 1960s there were much more visible protest and 'feedback' movements. We have had a few outbursts of protest in the 1990s – but also internet feedback and activism have become really exciting and vital fields. ` DR: Well, feedback is one of those late 40¹s Claude Shannon terms that come from the defining moment of cybernetics as a field of inquiry…and it means the same thing today as it did then…though for most audiophiles it still means the painful high-pitched squeal that accompanies a closed loop of microphone and speaker in an incorrect connection loop.  The analog to this, early video feedback was the stuff of dumb stoner video-play, that was used with great wit and skill by Paik and others. And though the current social use of the term has become dominant, it is still one of the great mid-20th-century neologisms. RG: It's amazing how when a group with decent ingredients gets together so much can happen – even in a very short time span. For example Radical Software, Fluxus, the net.art all star group (Bunting, jodi, Lialina, etc.)… Have you seen a lot of these short bursts of collective invention in your life in the art world? How to nurture them is really my interest but it's a vague one. What's your take? DR: In real time, it is hard to see how any of these groups relate to one another. In fact, the early video scene was quite fractious and competitive. Not only was grant money scarce, but in Nixon-era paranoia, I always suspected that government agencies wanted to keep us from uniting, and used grant competition to foster mistrust and to defeat what should have been a truly harmonious moment. Ideology aside (as if that¹s ever possible), the groups that were contemporaneous in the 60¹s and 70¹s shared several things (anti-war sentiment being primary, the fight against racism being more localized), but never found common ground based in technology or aesthetics.  The attempt to foster and nurture these types of creative cross-fertilization and mutual support is a great romantic struggle ?one in which I continue to indulge. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 8, number 35. 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