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svimle essay

From The White Cube to The Black Box to The Personal Computer
and out in The Grey Wide Open – or how to reapproach new media.
An essay on the postdigital artscene.

Av Jan Inge Reilstad

Motto
Political art is always bad. Good art is always political.
Contemporary Norwegian Author

Antimotto
That which is reasonable is real. That which is real is reasonable.
Stone dead German philosopher

Walking prologue

Upon arrival at the central railway station in Oslo on a 140 kroner airport shuttle from Gardermoen, I rummage through my pockets for an emailed map from Per Platou, project leader and host for the weekend’s RAM seminar. It’s the second of a series, following the first which was held last fall in Visby on the island of Gotland in Sweden.

RAM – Reapproaching New Media – is an EU financed series of seminars in the Baltic and Nordic states, hosted by the leading electronic media labs in the respective countries. Each seminar gathers participants from all of Europe and the rest of the world. The title of the RAM2 seminar was: A Joker in the Global Bunker. Roughly 35 participants had been confirmed, from about 10 countries in Europe and the USA.

I looked at the map and decided it was just a matter of holding a two o’clock angle from the station exit, and the Anker Hotel would appear on the horizon in about ten minutes. Just past the hotel I would find Atelier Nord, our Seminar’s location for the next three days. I started to follow the frosty fog standing like a toppled tree out of my mouth. Luckily I was carrying plenty of heavy luggage.

Atelier Nord is the only media lab in Norway with a spreadsheet allotment in the national budget. They have scouted ahead and tread a path through the snow for the Norwegian arts scene, into the digital frontiers. Today they host, among other things, a video workshop, an art video archive, various databases, a set of equipment for lease, digital workstations and not to forget PNEK – the Production Network of Electronic Arts, an umbrella organization and a coordinating resource geared to the development of the electronic arts milieu in all of Norway. Keywords are network building and production initiatives.

As I made my way along the icy sidewalks I found myself walking behind an old tractor, distributing salt from a rusty old spreading device mounted on its rear end, tucked in between two mansized, looming tractor wheels. My mind immediately opened a correspondence with images from my childhood on Finnøy in Ryfylke, one of the most quiet and rural places I could imagine. The relatively modest Big City Mystique immediately faded into something quiescent and personal, and not just a little nostalgic. The tractor was old and run-down, the kind my grandfather could have owned in 1973, and nothing like what you’d find in the Norwegian countryside today. But here nonetheless, here in Oslo.

I. Background text for RAM2 – A Joker in the Global Bunker

Joker
While the hacker may be the Mole in the ranks of technocrats, and the politician the Loudspeaker, the artist in this context is the Joker. Subversive in such ways that both the notion of criminality, insanity and political resistance are avoided, and any disciplinary reactions from the authorities are obvious oppression. Skirmishing the borders, acting as both the decoy and the trespasser. And, still smiling, carefully moving the limitations of everyday life, opening the ways for practices far more powerful.
biomatic.org

Global bunker
The term Global Bunker points at the situation where ownership is no longer held by local capitalists but by networks of omnipresent speculants, where the revolution in transport have made the sites of production more or less independent from local resources and local markets, when the collective sites of work are disintegrated and replaced with individual, home based workstations through the use of global virtual reality networks, and when all sites are carefully defined in terms of their socio-economic use.
biomatic.org

II. RAM’s self-conception

Reapproaching new media = Joker + Global bunker = The “free” and happy artist, who in the context of the network society and capitalist media surpasses the neoliberalist “bunkerization” (= the real name for globalization) of the world, engaging with a set of practices far more powerful than those of the establishment.

Give it a negative spin and RAM is just another example of the aloof and pompous artist’s hubris.
Give it a positive spin and RAM is a leap forward in the artist’s conception of self and view of the world, from a digital to a postdigital reality. In which the contemporary artist’s toolkit incorporates social events and masquerades as well as electronic crosswirings and media strategies. In which the media employed are just as likely to be deeply ingrained expressions of folk culture as highly sophisticated software, and in which the artistic goals are ambitious.



		Leon Cullinanes grafitti-joker var RAM2s logo.

Visually speaking, by using Leon Cullinane’s graffiti joker as a leitmotif for the seminar, RAM2 expresses the return of the politically conscious artist, here portrayed in the guise of the jester, a figure with a long history. He holds the letters U$A – with the dollar sign in the middle – in a hand of partially obscured and probably magical cards, and dances about strewing swastika – known as a Greek sun cross before Nazism, symbolically representing the movement of earth and life itself. This joker does not carry a laptop under his arm. There’s no Apple in his hand. There’s no sign of any digital signs. If you were to read this imageworld looking for signs, you’d find no digital world.

Outside, in the world of global politics, things were looking very different. On the same day as RAM2 was inaugurated at Atelier Nord in Oslo (5th of February 2003), Colin Powell was addressing the UN on the evidence of Iraqi weapons production. Now there was a man who was reading the world as signs. The all-seeing God of the day was his own American intelligence. God’s eyes were the satellites orbiting the earth more than 30 miles out in space, armed with huge cameras clicking and capturing their “true” and “real” images of the various axes of evil. Most newspapers would later describe the presentation as a superb performance and a gigantic multimedia show; as a proof of the advances made by new technology – in the service of the free world.

But the advanced images communicated above all else that Powell’s multimedia show was nothing but a vast blowup of his own paranoia, as it was impossible to read anything truly significant from the images. (One of the weapons inspectors in Iraq would later, anonymously, state that the material was unintelligible garbage, as fake as it was incorrect.) In the aftermath it even became clear that parts of the written material which accompanied the visual presentation, ostensibly from new intelligence reports, was actually copied directly from a grad student’s research paper, which was based on material from around the first gulf war in 1991.

Again it became very clear that advanced technology, like everything else, is always totally hinged to the wheres, the whys and the for whats of whoever puts it to use. Marshall McLuhan will always be right about this: All technology is merely an extension of our selves. It can never replace us.

THE MAIN QUESTION follows: When and why do the arts need extend themselves? I understood that this was something the best electronic artists had understood a long time ago, and that this was why we were here, at RAM2: To find the motivations underlying the different/various practices in electronic arts. To find the right connections between the electronic arts and people and society at large beyond The White Cube, The Black Box and The Personal Computer.

III. Confessions of an Essayist

Know thyself, the oracle of Delphi would frequently respond. Later this would be reformulated as Acknowledge thyself. The most modern variant – after the suspicious hermeneutics of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, and those pioneers of anti-art, Duchamp and Warhol – might be Acquit thyself. As with all expressions of language and art, such words of wisdom can have at least two edges. To acquit oneself of the inhumanity of power and the market (read: the people) can’t be done without a sufficient sense of shame and an oldfashioned feeling of guilt – perhaps the most important emotions in collectivity.

Confess thyself is the medieval version of the oracular tenet, and entails an acquittal of self through an other or the others. A confession is the result of a rite of confession. A confession is nevertheless always exclusive, directed towards a judicial and forgiving instance in order to achieve an adequate peace of mind and soul. To confess is thus an act of adapting, but also an incredibly optimistic and hopeful act:

i) The essayist knows himself as identity-saturated – in other words full of minor and major identities, all highly malleable. This means that he continually has to search for an overarching self with a worldview relevant to all identities, weaker and stronger.
ii) The essayist acknowledges himself as a literary thinker – first and foremost through classical European edification literature and modernist lyricism. This entails a predominantly intellectual, language sensitive and academic approach to the world.
iii) The essayist acquits himself from any form of artistism – the free artist and the stock broker are fraternal twins. This means that the essayist is almost always looking for antiart within an ethical-aesthetical regime.

Jesus was a young man when he died, younger than Leon Cullinane, and profoundly related to Che Guevara and a whole heap of other radical rebels. (Whereas Nelson Mandela, for example, is one of the few contemporary versions of Buddha.) Most important among the rhetorical devices Jesus used were surely the parables, that is, the ability to compare like and unlike in a striking way, often poetically and artistically consummate, but always with an unexpected knowledge of totally different people and social spheres. He would frequently use these parables in encounters with poor and open minded people living in grips with physical realities. In confrontation with the powers of the church, the state or the market, however, there were two other rhetorical devices he would use. He would either just hold his tongue, or speak back in the same words. In child’s play these two devices become: the Silent Game and the Parrot Game.

The most important device to the Essayist in this context is the Parrot Game. It follows from the nature of the report. Parables occur from time to time. The Silent Game is not practiced. Some are mentioned, more forgotten. But any report should at least qualify as an overarching commentary, perhaps preferably as a personal essay, this being the mode closest to the heart of the Essayist within the field of expository prose. The mode which tries to position itself between art and the world, the aesthetical and the ethical, humanity and reality, the physical and the metaphysical, society and the individual.

The Italian semiologist and essayist Umberto Eco regards the new media as a return to modes of writing and thinking from the medieval ages, not least because of the library-like qualities, the encyclopediac longing and the digital main chords cut & paste, open source and p2p.

In the medieval ages one spoke of four possible modes of writing, belonging to four roles in the process:

The Author – authoritatively finds his subject and its pertinent evidence, chooses his own topics and personally writes it all down
The Compiler – assembles texts into new wholes, filling in gaps if necessary
The Commentator – copies others’ texts , but interleaves his own comments in order to clarify or ridicule
The Scriptor – merely copies other writers’ texts

The four medieval writing modes are always suitable, and should be understood as relevant artistic strategies or aids for understanding ones own work. Autors hardly exist, which is good. There are a few Compilers, but they are likely to be lone wolves, roaming outside of most networks. There are more Commentators, but the part demands knowledge and courage above and beyond the average. The largest group by far are the Scriptors, who function in the networks by mimicking each other’s thoughts and actions, which is a very important function. A good network is an umbilical cord of Scriptors.

The Writing mode of the Essayist bears the closest relationship to that of the Commentator, but probably switches between all modes, though usually with the exception of the Autor. This is most likely true for the electronic artist as well.

IV. On the diversity of the RAM2 projects

After reading the presentations of the participants (still available at http://www.anart.no), I had a working title for my report written down before the seminar had even started: The Homo Ludens of new Technology. Several of the participants described their artistic work in words like “play”, “playful”, “joy” and “humorous”. Many of them said they were involved in projects for children.

The most marked theme in the presentations was nonetheless a pervasive attitude towards drawing art away from hardcore technology and virtual fantasies and into the social and physical world. This came from some of Europe’s leading electronic artists and activists. No predigital artist could come up with something like that.

If I had been aware of Victor Vina’s work on the application “Fluid”, I would naturally have written the report as detailed notes entered in real time into this unusual piece of software. “Fluid” is a text and image processing application structured around a timescale offering levels of detail anywhere between years and seconds, displaying all entries in a flow of time right down to the second of its creation. On the other hand, the application is engineered to eventually forget. Any entry will ultimately disappear from its memory, sooner or later.

Thus, Victor’s motivation is in line with the RAM program of reapproaching new media, manifested here as an attempt to humanize the “modes of thought” of the computer. “Fluid” is a work which exposes differences between humanity and technology, and poses the question of whether we have gone too far in “technologizing” human sensibilities in relation to the scales of the new media. Even so, “Fluid” was one of the least open works presented during RAM.

“Public Safety” was presented by artist and professor Jørgen Svensson, the driving force behind this extensive project in the small town of Skoghall in Sweden, built upon 500 years of paper industry. In the year 2000 Svensson, who was born in Skoghall, convinced the municipality to try contemporary art as a remedy for the town to develop new resources and identities more in tune with the open and globalized network society. In the course of the three years the project lasted, art and artists entered into communicative processes with bureaucracy, politicians, churches, media and audience. As well as participating actively himself, Svensson invited three artists to create art projects in the town. The Chilean-American artist Alfredo Jaar developed a building project, constructing an arts hall in the center of town, which was incinerated in front of a public gathering after only one day. The arts hall was later elected building of the year by the town’s architects.

French artist Esther Shalev-Gerz initiated a storytelling project, inviting local citizens to tell the story closest to their heart in front of a video camera; a recently experienced or overheard story or just whatever seemed important right there and then. The video was shown in the town church, which had never been more crowded, and was described as a modern evangelism by the priest.
Paco Cao from Spain chose to send himself as an artwork (parcel mail) from Spain to Skoghall – an operation which was problematic enough in itself – where he was leased out as an art object to anyone with temporary needs of the sort. Conscious as well as subconscious objectification of art and mankind alike were thus presented in many facets.

Svensson himself invited two U.S. police officers to the town to patrol the streets, and something best described as mass idolatry ensued, illuminating our mythical relationship with America in a forthcoming and subtle way.

Planning and completing the project took more than three years. An important element in the strategy was to maintain a good dialogue with the media. The documentation video we were shown at RAM2, which has also been broadcast on Swedish television, was an unusually warm and unsnobbish affair. Public Safety was elected art event of the year in Sweden in 2000.

The township of Skoghall has used experience gathered from the project to rethink its city planning. Alfredo Jaar has designed a new playground in the middle of the town, and water is going to be led through the city center from a lake nearby. An altered perception of identity can be documented by the fact that the people of Skoghall have started inquiring about Public Safety II.

Notions of art and culture have undoubtedly been revaluated in Skoghall, and Svensson acknowledged that he had gained some sort of heroic stature in the small, social democratic town. “Public Safety” is way beyond the white cube, the black box and virtuality.

SKART from former Yugoslavia were represented by Djordje Balmazovic and Dragan Protic. They have been working for 10 years as a “collective-in-progress”. SKART had many inspiring projects running. One was called the “Single-Mother-Project”, in which single mothers who had lost their husbands in the war were invited to participate in an embroidery project. The women, who would normally be embroidering standard representations of scenes from a romantic era – falling into line with the nationalist spirit – were challenged to embroider humanist manifestos or poetic expressions of their own situation.

These embroideries are now going to be documented and published in book form in Germany, as “Kitchen-Poetry”. The “Single-Mother-Project” is an unusually good example of how art can seek out the deep roots of peoples’ culture and really change attitudes and cultural patterns, in a positive, personal and humanistic way.

Another project presented by SKART, again choosing small communities and subcultures as their focal point and audience, was a mixed choir of amateurs and semi-professionals traveling around to refugee camps, performing songs by the greatest poets of Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe.

SKARTs artistic strategy was in many ways just that simple: Into the world. Meet people at home, engage with their actions and potential. It’s the only way to change anything, the only way art can be “community-building” or “community-work”. Document everything on video. Distribute the video to your networks. Seek out institutions and media later with documentation and the story behind the work. SKARTs philosophy was: to always commit to creating a new language. To always keep their art right out there on the streets.

Several laughing projects were presented.
Jane Suviste from Estonia showed us a performance at the Estonian contemporary art museum, where several women were tied to chairs yet constantly bursting into laughter, following the musical direction of a conductor. She spoke about spreading joy as their most important motive, but also sought answers to how laughter could become something subversive.

The RAM participants immediately responded that the laughing performance would be more effective in a railway station or in a bookstore, than in the Estonian variant of the White Cube, in which a feeling of coercion and sorrow was preserved, institutionalized or societal, and kept the action from surpassing performance and giving way to a true feeling of joy of life, or into a truly subversive surprise for that matter.

SKART had also done a laughter project. They’d been invited by a small village in Montenegro to set up an “Art shop”. Instead, SKART had recorded 6 hours of rowdy laughter, and played the recording in the “shop”. After what seemed like a humorous overture, most spectators felt closer to madness after only half an hour.

Laughter probably gets stuck in the throat eventually, in any social setting. Someone who tries to be sensitive is insensitive at the outset. Someone who tries to be happy has abandoned the prospect of joy. Nevertheless, the SKART project seemed to have several apertures, perhaps, in all its simplicity, to some form of transgression.

The projects that were most dependent on the economic resources of the market economy were undoubtedly the various web projects. The more hardcore technology a project required, the greater the economic requirements. Developing software and virtual worlds is time-consuming and places high demands on technology.

Juha Hytönen from Finland presented his peculiar flashanimated virtual world, in which the participants could create their own virtual personas. After two years of work he didn’t know for sure what he wanted to do with the product. He was hoping that his networld could be utilized by an organization, for example. As it turned out, the RAM2 participants had few fruitful suggestions for Juha.

Darius Bagdziunas from Lithuania showed several advertising films for a beer brand, published in Flash format on their website. The distinctive feature was that all films had been created from scenarios suggested by the audience. A cast of characters was predefined. Using these, the audience could send in scenario suggestions for an advert movie. Every week a winner was selected, who received some prize money in addition to seeing their scripts realized. Their website received 7.000 hits every single day. The RAM2 participants responded immediately with questions of whether this work was a form of “community-building” or just plain “corporate marketing”? Darius assumed that his work used the latter as a foundation for the former, and not vice-versa...

A third web project, called “coyBOTt”, was presented by Paula Roush from Portugal. On the one hand, the 100 biggest transnational corporations in the world were gauged by the amount of boycotts directed at them at any given time. So far, she had gauged this through simple Google searches. But at the same time the same companies were being assessed by how much they spent on cultural funding. Thus, “coyBOTt” was simultaneously measuring the number of sins committed as global capitalism strode forward, coupled with the value of their attempts at atonement, represented by some of the prime agents. Paula had considered getting the project sponsored. The RAM2-ists were unconvinced that this was an appropriate strategy. EMI was brought up as an example of an agent which was paying people to shout “Fuck EMI” in the right places, in an attempt to boost credibility and sales in EMI’s more “underground” subsidiaries.

As a literary scholar and editor of an internet magazine entertaining plans of starting its own POETRY-column, RAM2 gave me many ideas. We’ve been wanting for a long while to present poetry, not just in literature, but also in visual arts, electronic arts, popular culture and folk art. SKART and Jaka Zeleznikar described poetry projects which were very interesting. SKARTs most important poetry project was really their “Single Mother Project” with embroidered Kitchen-Poetry. Back in the 90’s they had also done a poetry project called “The Sadness of Potential …”, with poems on different subjects published on pieces of cardboard, like this one, “The Sadness of Potential Geneology”:

belonging
to mummy and daddy.

like you.

(after all,
there are
photographs.)

it’s sad
if they think
belonging to history and geography.

Jaka Zeleznikar from Slovenia invited the seminar participants to collaborate by using his hypertext application, which enabled the user to send subversive hyperpoetry to anyone, with the surveillance system ECHELON as a silent listener.

I was reminded of the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s words in Stavanger last year, speaking at a festival of literature: “I think poetry is the place for a new political agenda, where you can translate the untranslatable, where you can translate yourself into the other, where you can complicate, not simplify, where you can deal with any hegemony of language – and where you can develop a new poetics of hospitality for “democracy to come”.” Those were very apt words. Also in relation to most of the postdigital arts scene.

We were alerted to a number of interesting projects in which the goal was to expose an aesthetic or logic of imperfection. As a tangent to the underlying discussion of the artist’s economy, a reference was made to an exhibition in which an artist had displayed hundreds of funding applications for different artistic projects, all of which had been rejected.

And in Berlin, we were told, there is a festival where artists can come and present their worst work.

Juha told us that there’s a similar festival in Helsinki where artists and filmmakers can show the first piece of film they ever made.

I think most participants had an intuitive sense that we were still following a thread here, between art and society, between work and process; in the amateur, in situationism, in punk, in detechnologized dogma experiments, in electronic processes, in incompleteness as a goal; the Sisyphean task.

The tactical and strategic media projects were relatively few. Joanne Richardson from Romania, media theorist, editor and organizer of countless culture jamming projects, was given the task of presenting the term and the practice known as “Tactical media”. The foundation of the term is linked to the fact that new media, especially video cameras and computers, have become so inexpensive that most people – though not in the poorest countries – are able to become producers: recording their own perspectives of reality; Making their own documentation of work and events; With the potential to reach a greater community – if they’re networked.

As a consequence of this, organizations/artists who are engaging tactically with the media are making an effort to function as the immediate network interface for artists or people in general who are producing or simply have access to material which has value to the general public. Beyond this they strive to encourage autonomous production and organization of groups or individuals who want to work with media activism. They also involve themselves in different forms of jamming actions against primary media.
Objective: Cultural kidnapping of lesser and greater public discourses with perspectives different from those of the establishment. Through the redistribution of competency, subversive discourses and subsequent shaping of opinion can arise from within an oppressive society(system) or cultural regime, and not just as intellectual media critique from outside.

In this, the tactics of “Tactical Media” are fundamentally related to the tactics of power, as they were so recently and brutally actualized with the American leaflets dropped over Iraq prior to the war, with the bombing of media institutions during the war, and the rapid establishment of their own television broadcasts in Iraq as soon as the war was over. And let's not forget the host of journalists who accompanied the occupation forces into Iraq, becoming “critical” disciples and the first missionaries in a crusade of proponents of the happy occupation gospel.

The war for domination of the public sphere has always been at the core of any war, but it's becoming increasingly obvious in the age of media capitalism. The war for public opinion is the war for history, for the ideological prejudices we are going to live by. Jamming is a term lifted straight out of the logic of war.

During a gathering at RAM2, a debate arose over the difference between tactic and strategy. It was claimed that tactics is synonymous with an invisible struggle, in which the methods are to exploit the errors of those in power, to use henchmen or simply to document minor humanistic or artistic interventions in a social sphere, ad hoc and immediately. The tactical thus means to capture an event and expose it to the public with a certain twist, often anonymously.

Conversely, strategy involves long term planning of how to use the intermedia to change the contents and cultural understanding of discourse and public opinion. In many ways, the overarching goal is to create a relevant and common understanding of just how media-controlled the members of a society are, how much the media are influenced by power, or – how market-controlled the media are, and how power-controlled the market is.

Joanne asked the most pertinent question with regard to the future of “Tactical Media”: Shouldn't our activities rather be focused on what we're for, than on what we're against?

One project should be mentioned in this context. “Tactical.virii” is the name of Norwegian Atle Barcley's (who is also the general manager of Atelier Nord) sketch for an application designed to virificate the verification systems of power, their own apparatus of investigation and classification. But the most revealing aspect of the programme text might be all the wideranging problems raised by such a subversive motive. Not only would such an application immediately be scooped up by the powers it was designed to attack, it would soon fall into the hands of the people with really bad ideas. And it's quite likely that the stations of power are already equipped with similar applications en masse. So the software sketch was denounced as “romantic guerilla-thinking” and someone asked if the whole thing couldn't be done with more humour(?), for example by showing its presence as flowers on the desktop of an infected computer. But still we can say that “Tactical.virii” also revealed the potential of the subversive in the electronic, as a way of spreading attitude as well as knowledge. As a text, “Tactical virii” reveals the contours of the mighty electronic arsenal held by the powers.

In many ways the debate on tactical media use was just a new point of entry to the old problem of realism. The great realist novels by Charles Dickens and Emile Zola exposed oppression and power abuse, not just to the people, but also to those in power. And the established powers have always had an advantage in resources, technology and media. With the help of “realism” it only becomes faster and easier to feign a move designed to defend an action and disarm future criticism – without changing the true structures of power.

It might be worthwhile to remember again the wonderfully worded formula of the forefather Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message, The Medium is the Mess Age, The Medium is the Mass Age, The Medium is the Massage. An ossified medium or an ossified understanding of the media can rapidly become a totalizing massage of entire societies and epochs. It becomes a part of the rhetoric of surveillance which the authorities at all times use to preserve discipline. The Internet is hardly an ossified medium yet, as no 10-year-old would be.

The need for activism and demonstrations will hardly diminish. The possibilities for such actions in electronic media must of course be investigated, certainly by artists, and hopefully in collaboration with people from other branches of knowledge. Nor will the need for art's ability to estrange the familiar grow any lesser, but the artist must understand why she estranges what, or else she's just a pawn in a capitalist media strategy. It's been said before: education is a form of estrangement. A desire to communicate the attitude and direction of art demands a media strategy, a consideration of tactics.

RAM – Reapproaching new Media introduced a highly politicized artist's role, in step with the times. Therefore it is only natural to ask, and many did, whether a postdigital arts scene also entails a posttactical relation to new media? Whether artistic strategies for political resonance mean saying goodbye to traditional visions for “Tactical media”?

V. 10 turns, discussion threads and trains of thought for the postdigital art scene

1. ART and ART DEFINITIONS

Of course, there are consequences of art leaving its traditional domains and entering the high risk zones of an everyman's or no-man's land, also for definitions of art:

a) In The White Cube the idea of art is defined by the space and the owners of the space. Something is art because it exists within an institution of art, managed and curated by professionals. Let's call the followers of this definition CUBISTS.

b) In The Black Box the idea of art is defined in reaction to the establishment, of the institution as well as in society in general. This is art because it doesn't exist within the establishment, but in the underground or as an artistic counter-language. Followers may be called BOXERS.

c) In The Personal Computer the idea of art is defined as an obligation to explore the artistic potential of new digital technologies in a global public space. It's the artist's responsibility to be concerned with the contemporary mechanisms that are producing societal change – whether they do this willingly, unwittingly, or unwillingly. Followers may be called jammers, netartists, mediaactivists or HACKERS.

d) In The Grey Wide Open the idea of art is defined as an obligation to explore the artistic and humanistic potential for new social and digital practices in their immediate physical, public space. It's an artist's responsibility to be concerned with the language and collective efforts which can progress society humanistically – benevolently. We may call the followers neohumanists, network builders, language builders, media optimists or PROCESSUALISTS.

It is important to remember that the art produced in the White Cube context still secures a reputation and a financial market for art in general, of sufficient magnitude to also support new and innovative contemporary art. A totally de-arted definition of art, refuting the traditional value of the work and even stripping the artwork and the art space of its aura, could just as soon rob the artist of the joker role as it is described in the RAM2 invitation (and previously in this essay).

The postdigital art scene is The Grey Wide Open. The postdigital artist is nevertheless experienced with work in new media, and must seek disciplinary, social and political networks with hackers, boxers and cubists for distribution and display of documentation of projects and processes.

2. ART and ECONOMY

The relationship between art and economy runs like a red thread through every conversation between artists. At RAM2 this topic was brought to attention by Jørgen Larsson, with a study of the Norwegian cultural economy. Norway is a social democracy, which has grown filthy rich in short time from oil production. Along the possible road from a black oil based economy to a greener, knowledge based economy, the country has elected to spend most of its money on sub sea tunnels and expensive roads, Larsson said. 0.8% of the National Budget is spent on cultural funding in Norway.

Culturally speaking, public Norway is divided three ways between state, county and municipality, but also has overarching arts and culture institutions which provide funding, such as the Norwegian Cultural Council. All instances demand elaborate applications with detailed descriptions of the art projects before any support is awarded to the artist or group.

Larsson’s point was that there can only be application-based art in Norway, no action-based art reacting directly to events in society. And as a consequence, a great loss in terms of artistic potential, buried in the institutional and financial structure of cultural life; artistic actions are hardly ever realized before half a year after they took shape – in application forms.

Moreover, Larsson thought, this organization placed excessive demands on the artist's administrative and bureaucratic competency, which was stealing too much time from artistic activity. The artist has become client, bureaucrat and business manager.

However, there is much to be missed in this line of reasoning. One objection is that open market institutions are hardly preferable to those of the state, or to any institution for that matter. It's very likely that the artist has a lot to thank the State Educational Loan Fund and the Norwegian Cultural Council for, despite all. Besides, artists must be credited with a certain degree of self-sufficiency and ability to reason and act independently. The Norwegian Cultural Council is a supporting organization for Norwegian arts, not an employer of artists.

Another point is that artists can be more active in the political shaping of the Norwegian art constitution, to improve conditions for action based art. Likewise, the Norwegian cultural budget has plenty of room for redistribution of means; a shuffle of the allotments could benefit the performing arts and conversely reduce the bureaucratic management of the art and culture scenes.

Besides, Larsson himself had some answers to how we could alleviate the problems stemming from the safe and sound and slow regime of application-based arts. To a greater extent, artists should form independent production units handling the bureaucratic portions of artistic activity; more cooperation, better networks, less selfishness and resource hoarding.

The development of mobile production units will surely happen, and will make important contributions to the development of the art scenes of the future. This will increase the processualist's potential of developing a relevant and contemporary artistic activity.

The postdigital arts scene seems to be especially concerned with improving the financial viability of a more process oriented form of art. Establishing new adaptive production units and production networks, locally and internationally, is a natural activity for the postdigital artist, who will eventually be able to spend more time working with art, and cutting down the gap between art and reality.

3. ARTWORK versus ARTWORK

The concept of the work of art has been in flux for ages. The artwork is less important than the artwork. The latter concept places the artistic process at the centre of attention, and moves further and further towards an understanding of art as “work”, very much like the term other people have to resort to when describing their everyday efforts to put food on the table.

This work or process, however, seems to involve more than before - just as in the digital arts scene – working with people and micro communities; an artistic process directed at minor physical public spaces.

We are dealing with two approximately identical shifts of meaning. A. from work (noun) to work (verb), from object to process, and B. from the finite work to the unfinished, incomplete – a turn from the goal to the road.

At the same time it's hard to imagine art keeping its position without holding on to a traditional concept of its work. Just as it's difficult to imagine art without autonomous institutions, whose relation to art is like the church to religion – to ritualize, recognize and acknowledge.

The most puristic digital or network based arts have faced the same problem, which has been demonstrated by the debates about whether museums of contemporary art can display and collect net.art, for example. The Hacker and the net artist both have propensity for old-fashioned thinking, viewing everything within the institution as static object work, and would rather not contribute with a pessimistically scaled-down adaptation of her own work.

On the postdigital arts scene the art tends to be process work rather than product work. Nevertheless, the postdigital artist observes the fact that the institution is the most suitable broadcaster, and is therefore concerned with finding artistic ways of molding process into product, as an optimistic transgression and expansion of the traditions of The White Cube and The Black Box.

4. NEW TECHNOLOGY and NEOHUMANISM

The childhood years of new technology on the arts scene were already over around the millennium. The internet and open source are well past their teens. Holes have been punched through the hardcore technical fascination and introverted technological analyses, much like what the kids go through at school when they have to start using math to solve everyday problems with actual consequence for our actions.

Neohumanism obviously grows out of a political motivation, but can also be seen as a reaction to something other than unilateral systems thinking with money as the only scale. It is also a strong reaction to the technologification of humanity, whether this is happening through television, the mobile phone or the many alluring possibilities of the computer.

In the middle ages they said: God is the measure of all things. The renaissance was a rediscovery of Greek humanism: man is the measure of all things. The fundamental thesis of capitalism is: money is the measure of all things (an idea which according to Max Weber also has the blessings of protestant ethics). The 20th century has laid waste most of the old European humanistic thoughts, until now.

Neohumanism upholds much of the old humanism, but does not raise the human being above nature, nor places it at the centre of cosmos. Neohumanism is also a renaissance of sorts, giving new life to disciplines of antiquity like classical education and rhetorics, after 200 dormant years during the industrial and romantic ages. But neohumanism is also much more concerned with the physical, the corporeal, with differences and micro deviations, historically and geographically, rather than the universal and utopian leanings of European tradition.

For example, it is telling that the digital network building is now moving further and further into a form of physical network and society building, community-work.

The postdigital arts scene seems to be especially concerned with bringing new technology into an artistic practice built on humanistic principles. Work in the service of the fellow human and human fellowship becomes the measure of all things, in which the role of technology is to support and mediate.

5.MOTIVES FOR ACTION and A DESIRE TO COMMUNICATE

The motives of art are often invisible, even to the artist himself. I'm speaking of the motive behind the artistic act, not about pictorial motives in the works of art. We might be able to find this in the postdigital arts scene as well, even though there are many indications of a greater degree of awareness of one's motivation for making art.

Several of the seminar partakers introduced themselves by presenting their work as something motivated by a desire to be subversive and/or to spread joy. On the other hand, many had no other motive than to be doing what they did best, like programming virtual worlds, without even knowing what to use them for, or who should use them.

Without belittling the other seminarists at RAM2, Jørgen Svensson and the SKART group's projects may have been the strongest, also in terms of motivation, and the best representatives of the postdigital arts scene. To both, the cultural and political motives were just as important as the artistic motives.

We can do a simple comparison of their work, and see if we can find relevant motives for these:

	*Public Safety*	SKART's projects
WHERE	Sweden – peace Small town, skoghall "Rich" municipality, stagnant	Jugoslavia – war, unrest Small villages, towns “Poor” places, movement
MISSION	From the municipal government Industrial totality Identity Humanistic purpose	Self appointed Destruction by war Humanity Humanistic purpose
WORK	Many processes Community-work Art-art	Many processes Community-work People's art
TARGET GROUP	Local inhabitants	Local inhabitants
PURPOSE	Understanding art	Understanding culture
CHALLENGE	Bureaucracy, politicians, audience	Politicians, military, people
TECHNOLOGY	Video	Video
MEDIA INST.	TV, radio, newspapers	Publishing, radio
MOTIVATION	Changing local discourse Changing mediated public sphere Conditions for contemporary art Discussion of identity issues	Changing local discourse Changing physical public sphere Conditions for human culture Discussion of identity issues

There are obvious historical and geographical differences between the projects. Beyond this fact, and of course the artistic experiences, the motivations of Svensson and SKART are still very similar, in that their artistic processes have communication as a goal. The desired result of the artistic process is a change in the public discourse and cultural state of affairs. But while SKART are much more concerned with the physical and public sphere, Svensson is concerned with changing the ideas of art, not just locally, but nationally, through media strategy.

The differences between Svensson's and SKART's projects are probably archetypal of the relationship between the processual art we can find in a rich western country with industrial tradition as well as a history of industrial cutbacks, contrasted with a poorer country with humanitarian disasters in its very recent history. Nevertheless, both projects have clear motives and clear goals.

The communicative aspect is central in the projects, both of which are characterized by offering new forms of counter language, far from the human polar opposites of counter-language strategies, which we can exemplify here as the caveman and the broadcaster.

The credo of the caveman is Non Serviam. She is a spectator and not a participant, since she assumes that participation would only aid the enemy. The same forces she wants to destroy. To speak up means only to demonstrate one's own inefficacy, to the great satisfaction of those in power. The public is thought of as a toilet; it would flush down all good intentions, along with all the crap.

The broadcaster, conversely, believes that only total participation can promote progress, and his goal is thus to broadcast or at least produce an instrument that can reach broadcasters.

The media tactical efforts of the hacker are used to achieve broadcasting, but generally by fooling, or engaging in combat with the opponent powers. Svensson, on the other hand, seeks and achieves broadcasting by entering into a positive collaboration with the authorities, and succeeds almost in spite of insisting on a high intellectual standards and contemporary artistic insight. Svensson captures the spirit of the times, and thinks dialogically about the present needs of art and of society (Skoghall).

SKART, on the other hand, are much more concerned with the cultural changes that are needed in the society in which they are artistically active, which is quite different from Swedish society. The immediate environment, individual people, cultural patterns and habits, this is their public sphere.

In this respect, Svensson is closer to the broadcaster than SKART are, who are as profoundly concerned with the individual as they are with a greater public sphere. Both of them would rather be an active participant in a small game than a critical spectator at the big game, something we might accuse the bragging boxer and the hacker of doing frequently.

The postdigital arts scene is concerned with finding new modes of communication, to achieve a history of effects first and foremost in his local public sphere, but also in the bigger picture, if possible. The motives of the postdigital artist are, through artistic community-work, to reveal the roles of art and culture in our patterns of behavior and lifestyles, for freedom and collective values.

6. METAPHORIC REGIMES and COMMUNICATION MODELS

In extension of the strengthened wish to communicate and the focus on the story around the work, there has undoubtedly also developed a knowledge and attentiveness to what I will call the metaphoric regimes in art.

At RAM2, this was apparent through the way that many were describing their work with literary terms like metaphor, story, poetry, etc. Many projects were about remediating old storylines, to give them new relevance for political reasons. Many of the projects were pure poetry projects, in which new media were utilized or where old techniques were transformed into new poetic practices.

Any expression – an image, a text, an action – will always be readable according to the direction of the metaphoric regime. To be aware of the metaphoric effects of one's own means is to have a solid grip on one's own rhetorics. It is of course decisive for an artistic work if we consciously or subconsciously read something into it – deification, animalization, technification or humanization, for example.

Simply put: does children’s TV humanize animals or does it animalize humans? More difficult: Does Paco Cao – who sent himself as a parcel from Spain to Skoghall – present an objectification of man or a humanization of art? (Of course, the motivation behind presenting the objectification of man must also ultimately be to humanize our society.)

The metaphoric regimes are related to the various communication models an artwork activates, and which part of the communication model is focused through the work. Is it the artist? The message? The context? The language? The shape? Something else? Or does the work mostly reflect the recipient?

In The White Cube art is mostly objectified, and will always convey a great deal of attention to the artist as an advanced originator and an outstanding shaper. In The Grey Wide Open art will conversely induce a focus on the recipient of the artwork, who will generally have some sort of participatory status in the work.

In the extension of this, the postdigital artist will to a greater extent be dedicated to creating a new and suitable language for the recipients, than to creating original art for the cubists, boxers or hackers.

The postdigital art scene seems to be very concerned with the humanization of its own work as well as society. In a communication model it is undoubtedly the recipient/participant who is the postdigital artist's actual “work”.

7. CRITICAL TACTICS or POSITIVE DIALOGUE

Jamming is a term which borrows metaphorical power from the logic of war, at least for the hacker. For the processualist, we must assume that jamming has a meaning closer to the musical jargon, intuitive and rough-cut playing between friends, Bob Marley-like; we're jamming.

Chess is recognized as the tactic and strategic game per se. It's a game all about seeing into the future and acting upon a resistance you expect to meet many moves ahead. The goal is to overthrow an entire society, from pawn to king.

In our context, it is natural to look at how a traditionally tactical counter language like adbusting has developed in the course of its struggle against the antisocial profit-desire of global capitalism. An interpretation of this development could look like this:

1. Corporations advertising
2. Artists adbusting
3. Corporations adbusting
4. Adbusters corporating

Global capitalism learns even faster than the old national one did, to adopt the strategies invented by the opponent for, while the tactical opposition increasingly often ends up adapting itself to the arena and gameplay rules of turbo capitalism. In this game of chess, it seems impossible that any king will ever fall. Instead, an involuntary dialogue seems to be central to the development.

As Svensson's project demonstrated, voluntary dialogue and positive collaboration are more prominent as working modes for the postdigital artist. SKART’s overarching strategy was to create opportunity for dialogue and discussion. Even with the media, which can only be educated by giving them the information and knowledge they need to educate themselves, even if such a task may seem ever so Sisyphean. Instead of jamming the media, the processualist tries to help the media. And the corporations. And the schools. Even so, the local optimist can still be a global pessimist. The question was put: Is being against something false solidarity?

One of the most frequently recurring themes at RAM2 was the will to toss out old critical bullwhips and adopt new, more optimistic practices. The person who laughs is impressionable, not the one who feels criticized. And the person one hopes to help through criticism may often feel humiliated and deemed unable to sort out his own affairs.

The dangers of such optimism and faith in the positive dialogue is that the arts let themselves be completely overwhelmed by anything from science to meda to market to reality to popularity. This is a chance the processualist seems willing to take. Not least because the opposite strategy hasn't been rewarding. Nonetheless, the processualist is an incredibly demanding artist's role, and hardly something one merely chooses, no, it has to be worked on for years.

The postdigital art scene isn't necessarily posttactical or poststrategic. The postdigital artist is oriented to the minor public spheres, often all the way down to the physical individual. The motivation to make change seems to have lost its most utopian aspects. The practice is rather a form of optimistic and dialogic participation than one of critical distance.

8. CORPORATIVE MARKETING versus COMMUNITY-BUILDING

The artists’ own names for their projects were often “community-work” or “community-building”. SKART even posed the beautiful rhetorical question: Where is the Internet? Whether their projects were online or not was obviously less important than whether their project was down-to-earth.

To the postdigital artist, networks have ceased to be faceless virtul networks, and to a greater extent become social networks, with geographical and historical specificity.

Furthermore, it’s clear that the many hallmarks of the postdigital arts scene correspond with developments in the world of business and social life in general. In coincidence with these network-building, social tendencies in the arts, we can observe that terms like relation building and CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility – have some merit in and among corporations, along with increasing support for artistic and cultural projects.

Consequently we are seeing the grey area between artistic and corporate activities blurring more and more, which makes it all the more important to gain insight in this area. And this is certainly no less important when art itself is becoming as dialogically oriented as the postdigital arts scene. At the same time, this is of course a golden opportunity for expanded dialogue as well as economic potential. In a situation like this, the artist must be conscious of what she is trying to legitimize, and this can only be done by maintaining a focus on how and by which means and for which purposes such a cooperation should be carried out.

Jørgen Svensson’s collaboration with the municipality of Skoghall demonstrates that this form of collaboration is possible, although demanding, and that it is an important part of the artistic process. Svensson emphasized the importance of having many financial sources for one’s artistic work and for every single project, because this was the only way to safeguard a certain degree of artistic freedom, while keeping the economy secure for project as well as artist. For example, Public Safety received only a small share of its financing from the municipality of Skoghall. Financial networks and power networks can be used to transfer knowledge from artistic and social networks, as well as contributing to the development of these networks and including them in artistic projects.

As Paula Roush’s web project “coyBOTt” has shown, a great deal of knowledge is required to judge whether a corporation or financial partner is engaging in CSR for the sake of alleviating their sins or out of a social commitment.

The postdigital art scene judges corporations by their will to engage in dialogue, but also by their will to engage in true local community building. The postdigital artist only cooperates with corporations which she knows are fulfilling the actual goals of the artistic project.

9. ESTRANGEMENT versus DOCUMENTARISM

The postdigital condition is by all appearances a choice of documentarism as a media strategy, as well as an adoption of the mediation modes of the primary media. In this respect the postdigital arts are approaching journalism in terms of media use and rhetoric.

This is yet another tripwire for the postdigital artist, which may contribute to the reduction or eradication of the artists’ joker role.
But in the work of both Svensson and SKART, we are dealing with documentations of processes which are intrinsically estranging. That is, they exhibit cultural patterns through different estranging methods, thus hinting at alternative modes of thought and action.

In both of these examples, they use documentations which in their own right possess qualities which separate them from ordinary journalistic expressions.

The postdigital artist is aware of whether society around her has a greater need for estrangement or reality effects, and uses her technology accordingly.

10. ART versus POLITICS

Global society as such has left behind a decade of unusual political and technological histories. The fall of the Soviet Union brought an escalated Americanization of the supranational institutions of the world, as well as turbocharged capitalism and extreme market power.

The history of the Internet is analogous with the digital revolution. The Internet is, like many other things, an invention with military origins, but with its unique qualities it is obviously the best opportunity for counter currency that technological development has ever offered. As demonstrations have rallied all around the world, it is obvious that the artist’s role has again been spun into politicized revolutions.

The problem with all political art – or better: art which calls itself political – is that the intention in itself makes a true political art impossible. Political art is always bad, whereas good art is always political. The political potential in Svensson’s and SKART’s work is so evident that it’s unnecessary for me to declare. Conversely, most demonstrations will only confirm what everyone already knows, that those who take part in the demonstration want to be political in some direction or other.

It’s the dialogical and ambiguous nature of an artistic work that can give it political potential, and these are the same things that give it artistic potency. A parole should be unusually well formulated to have a political potential separating it from its target for criticism, and still, it’s only advertising. Without saying that advertising for noble causes is not necessary.

A problem with politically motivated, process oriented art is encountered from the opposite approach as well. How does one criticize SKART, for example? Without criticism and critical discourse, there would hardly be a public for art politics. SKART’s humanistic and interpersonal work is so good and well-meaning, even correct, that it’s hard to criticize it at all.

Even if the work deviates radically from typical Scandinavian modes of humanistic engagement, which tend to align with the general discourse of goodness that plagues all self-satisfied societies distanced from all real problems. Norway is perhaps the world leader in churning this discourse of goodness into the thoughtless and immobilizing space of our common public. Stuffed as it is with do-good superficial debates, always accentuating “democracy”, “freedom”, “the others”, “developmental aid” and “freedom of expression”, the absence of true international cooperation makes our quasi democracy obvious, constituent of ideological agendas both sub conscious and sub rosa which are dictated by religious, political and economic tie-ins, and the adaptation of the media to the people’s presumed entertainment needs and their own income requirements.

Good thoughts neither matter nor give salvation, as Christianity postulates. One can only be measured by one’s deeds, individuals and nations alike. In the big picture, the western world’s latest contribution to international cooperation is nothing but newspeak about mass murder and occupation and the dismantling of multilaterally obligating international treaties. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the mission of bringing salvation to everyone else without making any sacrifices.

This is where the boxer and the hacker are likely to strike. SKART, however, had some very simple and good rules for their artistic praxis. To them it was more important to show what they were for, than what they were against. They put no emphasis whatsoever on being subversive, but let subversivity come if it may, after evaluating the human and artistic content of their work. They emphasized the small things, and let bigger things come along if they did.

The postdigital art scene is a politicized art scene. The postdigital artist is political on a small scale, most of all in the form of a human and moral attitude in relation to her own work and her audience, which might as well be a local community as a global public. The postdigital artist is concerned with defining her own political role through her work with and within a physical community, not necessarily through the reception of the work beyond this community, in the art world.

AT DEPARTURE, after the seminar had discussed anything from war to the market through laughter to media strategy and web technology and social concern, all with equal intensity, I still had to pinch my arm and ask myself: Do we really exist? Are we real? Or are we living right now only as the negative RAM2ist? Is it the pompous and detached artist’s self-image, projected into the seminar room here at Atelier Nord, right now performing the Oracle of Delphi for 35 voices in unison? Did we exist outside, in The Grey Wide Open, as the ideas we were formulating within the safe confines of Atelier Nord? Here, in something that was by all appearances a mix of The Black Box and The Personal Computer?

I’m still not sure. But the ability to reflect and the will to innovate were evident during RAM2.

Michael Mandiberg’s documentation video of the project “The Exchange Programme” lay in my backpack on my way home. Mandiberg lived in Los Angeles, and had made a habit of challenging his own identity. “Shop Michael Mandiberg” was another project, in which he released absolutely all of his personal property for sale. Revenue had been reasonable, and probably not affected his identity enough to register, but of course it had revealed the increasing objectification of humankind, which Karl Marx and George Lukacs had once voiced. In “The Exchange Programme”, Michael made a total identity switch with a woman from Toronto for 11 days.

Of course I had to see the video, even though the ideas behind a project like this were miles away from the interests of the Essayist. The Essayist already has a perception of his self as consisting of an infinite number of identities, and would hence be more interested in conglomerating a relevant and overarching self, and not so much in forcibly inserting yet another foreign element to confirm or refute an original identity.

A GOOD NETWORK is really nothing more than what I’ve described above. It is to meet and get to know each other, exchange experiences and ideas, drinking habits and mental ailments, projects and love of work. So that one might meet again. Pen pals and pen enemies. In progress.

One could also say that a good network is knowledge in orderly ranks, like a row of people handing buckets of water from the river and up to the burning house. Except the buckets are filled with knowledge, acquaintance, caring and mapping while the house is the cultural public. A good network is a list of good bucket handlers. An umbilical cord of sharp-penned Scriptors – although often with a semi or demi conscious desire to be an Autor. In order.

Optimistic epilogue

The Internet and other networks can only become more and more important to the common practices of this world. The postdigital condition can of course only come through – trans – the digital world.

Two days after RAM2 I read an interview with the Russian critic, curator and art historian Ekaterina Dyogot, who said this, among other things: “People’s art will always fall outside of contemporary art as we see it in the most important international arenas. It’s a fact that Contemporary art is a western phenomenon, it has arisen in the West and is controlled by the West.”

I thought: this was the tension which we had explored at RAM2. The electronic contemporary art which wanted to be more of a people’s art, but wasn’t sure if it could take the risk of yanking its roots completely free.

Dyogot rounded up by saying: “The world has been globalized all wrong, and the former Soviet states should go together with Europe in another globalization, a globalization based on an alternative internationalism.”

It is a good motivation, if nothing else – also for contemporary artists of all varieties:

To regard art as totally de-arted already, but only to find new ways of giving art a language, legitimacy and aura
To use an understanding of a problem to create a sense of being
To use the political to create something imminent
To approach something ethically in order to lift us culturally and aesthetically
To delve into the interpersonal and pave way for a new humanism
To move into The Grey Wide Open to take greater risks on behalf of the arts

The postdigital jester may be a good metaphor for the artistic personality which is needed right now. The postdigital jester’s greatest challenge is probably to define her court, of whom it consists and where it is at any given time. And if it’s worth serving. The postdigital jester can only work if she’s done her homework on the subject of the digital world, knows the expanse of this world, which is also the world of media control and transnational corporations, and puts its products into her toolbox along with literature, brush, camera, scissors, junk, courage, laughter, classical education, shame, friends and money.

And where do we stand on our initial main questions:

1. When and why should art extend itself?
2. What are the motivations behind the various practices of the electronic arts?
3. Where do we find the right connections between the electronic arts and society at large, outside of The White Cube, The Black Box and The Personal Computer?

Answer:

1. Art needs to extend itself only in order to make an example, most often through a qualitative documentation of work. If documentations and mediations of “community-work” and “work-in-progress” really have artistic qualities, it will not only change ideas of art, but also reach a much bigger audience.
2. The motivations behind the practices of the postdigital art scene stem from neo-humanism, exploring language, physical experience; are related to people’s culture; are democratic and anti-authoritarian. The message is self-education within one’s immediate community, counter-education in relation to global society. Not necessarily directed critically at an enemy, but positively at one’s self.
3. The connections that were presented during RAM2 were digital, documentary and societal. The connections exist everywhere, as they always have. First and foremost in the form of virtual and physical networks, and also as adequate knowledge of popular, medial and digital culture. But also to a certain degree in the form of traditional artistic qualities, even though the polar opposite was more pronounced, like the conscious search for the aesthetics of imperfection (read: punk attitudes, dogma experiments, people’s culture, new forms of situationism), with relational and processual qualities.

In the same interview, Ekaterina Dyogot says she doesn’t have “faith in the expressive force in isolated video documentations of artistic actionism”. She also implies that artistic actionism as such is generally doomed to fail, to a great extent because of language barriers and the artist’s “superposition”, in other words, a lack of classical education and popular knowledge.

But this is precisely what the postdigital artist is optimistically attempting to surpass, through constructive strategies rather than critical and destructive. Dyogot describes the difficulties in moving from the position of the actionist hacker to that of the constructive processualist.

The postdigital artist is thus perhaps the electronic artist grown up.

Endgame: RAM = ART = HUMAN

The RAM seminars can continue to be good arenas in which to move closer to a definition of The Grey Wide Open – the losses, the pitfalls and the potentials. In this, they can be good arenas for establishing a self-conception for the electronic artist within the postdigital condition. The advantage of these seminars lies in the plentiful resources with which to gather important artists and activists within new media from all over the world. But it is after all only possible because these seminars are part of an EU-backed program.

RAM2 – A Joker in the Global Bunker pursued its intentions of moving back to the basics. The questions asked this weekend were foundation questions. Reapproaching new media is reapproaching art is reapproaching the human conditions of society. Art is a necessary part of the big conversation, the most important art today is being formulated by those who have passed through and not around the digital cloudbank. That art is a mode of action, has become clearer with the digital revolution. Art is research, a gay science, which at its best isn’t ruled by any other regime than that which at any given time is protecting humanity. This is how it’s always been.

Even though the surroundings were the relatively safe Oslo, we had the feeling of running around in a strange landscape, more real than virtual, almost like Tarkovskij’s Stalker, with a hankie tied not to a bolt, but a tiny webcam, which we threw ahead, as the best indicator of the path our journey would take.

Jan Inge Reilstad is the editor of the netmagazine Localmotives. Contact: janinge@localmotives.com