electrolobby

Ars Electronica 2000, Linz

September 2 ? 7, 2000

Information. A click by the user which fires off a server request, which

fires off a script, which fires off an application, which extracts some

data from a database, which is sent to another script, which formats it

and adds a custom Flash animation, the whole thing then served back to

the user‚s screen within a second, while the user has already made

another click to start another chain of processes. 16,000,000 lines of

code which make up the current Windows operating system, calling each

other to satisfy the user‚s simple information-craving, manifested in

the form of typing on a computer keyboard. A commuter in a TV ad

accessing his stocks via a WAP browser in his cell phone while glancing

on a overhead display to see if his plane is already boarding and

simultaneously checking the time on his watch, all of these displays

constantly shifting as though in some elaborate nineteenth-century

ballroom dance. Streams of phone conversations, numerical data, pixels

and sound bits, floating together through a fiber-optic channel,

entering the gate of a network router, to be split into numerous

streams, only to reunite at the destination. Demonstrations, protests or

simply large parties, "self-organized" on the spot as participants call

each other on cell phones, setting up a chain reaction as a result of

which large groups of people gather in one place in half an hour. Jam

sessions, "net parties," and other forms of social networking activities

organized around telecommunication and computer networks. The gatherings

of net artists and net activists moving from one city to another;

endless "projects" which always involve multiple sites and multiple

participants. Rarely do any of these activities result in something that

can be called "good form" or "formless," for that matter, nor do they

leave behind any finished "art objects" except multi-page proposals and

grant applications. And yet this does not mean that it‚s not genuine

"culture," nor the "art" of our time.

The contrast between form and information is one of the fundamental

cultural dimensions that accompanies the shift from industrial to

information society, or from modernism to what I would like to brand

"informationalism." What the search for good form was for modernism,

information networking is for our own society. And if the first usually

resulted in solid objects--geometric abstractions, sculptures and 3-D

constructions, chairs and teapots, skyscrapers and photographs--the

second is by its very nature dynamic, never thickening into something

solid and fixed.

And yet, as the word inFORMation itself implies, there is a hidden

form-making impulse in information society. Or, at least, we can say

that information processes often leave material residues. Or, to be more

brutal but more honest, that information processes can be forced to

leave material forms. More challenging, though, is to figure out how to

represent, document, and ultimately support social networking as a

genuine cultural practice in its own right, how to present in a museum

or gallery setting information networks and processes while doing

justice to their dynamic character; in short, the ways to translate

information into forms which are intrinsic rather than alien to this

information.

Following a few experiments where a contemporary art festival became a

setting for a real-time social networking activity (such as "Workspace"

at Documenta X, 1997), Ars Electronica 2000 presented "electrolobby"

(http://electrolobby.aec.at)--"a dedicated area inside the Ars

Electronica Festival designed expressively for the net-inspired digital

culture and lifestyle." Skillfully morphing between various speech

genres of contemporary culture, the Paris-based TNC network, which

organized electrolobby, introduced it as "a marketplace of opinions,

projects, branded cultural commodities and their pirated bootlegs--a

networked showroom where ideas are on display and communication is the

coin. Genetic researchers meet experimental entertainers, food jockeys

mingle with MP3 mixers, game designers kibbutz with concept engineers."

Following its I.P.O. (Initial Public Opening), electrolobby ran for the

duration of the festival. I did not see any "food jockeys" in the

program, but other residents indeed represented an exciting mix of

net-inspired culture: Kodwo Eshun, the author of _More Brilliant Than

The Sun_; Lincoln Stein who used the Napster paradigm to create a

program for the publication of genome data; Eric Zimmerman, the author

of the super-addictive _SISSY FIGHT 2000_; and a dozen or so other

personalities and groups, including the bad boys of the Net, the

ever-present etoy.

Did electrolobby work? Have its organizers succeeded in translating

information into form? Like the net itself, electrolobby attempted to

combine various media paradigms: publishing (the festival catalogue and

Website featured interviews with all the participants), Web-casting (a

part of electrolobby was reserved for a small Web-casting studio which

broadcasted live over the Internet daily interviews with the residents

and other specials), and a club-like setting intended to create "an

atmosphere conducive to communication among participants, and to a

playful process of dealing with information." I am not sure that all

these parts came together to form a new gestalt, however. Since

electrolobby took place alongside many other festival activities, most

booths reserved for the participants were always empty; obviously the

participants were busy catching other festival offerings. And since

electrolobby also featured a bunch of computers with email access, my

sense is that checking and answering their correspondence became more

important for festival-goers than focusing on electrolobby

presentations. But it is also possible that to expect a form, a single

gestalt, to emerge here is to apply an old paradigm to net culture. It

is possible that electrolobby‚s ambient, peak-free atmosphere--a few

people talking in one corner; one group showing their project to

another; no big openings or speeches but something always taking place;

things happening in parallel and in small increments rather than in

linear succession and big jumps-- indeed translated the logic of the net

into the right spatiotemporal modality. Yes, information can be

translated into form, but this form is radically different both from

Mondrian‚s hard geometric primitives and Pollock‚s fluid, meandering

drips.