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TEMP
- Temporary Media Lab
Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki,
Finland
October
8 - November 14, 1999
Opening September 15: http://www.kiasma.fi/temp
TEMP stands for temporary media lab, a production facility
that enables groups, networks and, individuals working on
the crossover between new media arts and social, political
and economic topics to discuss, develop, and realize their
projects.
Program:
Cross the Border, October 8-16
Opening and No One is Illegal Presentation, October 9
Designing the Future State of Balkania,
October 17-23
Linux Land/Nokia Country, October 24-30
Debate: Centers for New Media Culture in Finland, October
28
Night of the Critic, October 29
Debate: Finland and Cultural Technologies, October 30
Baltic Sea Media Space & Net.Radio,
October 31-November 4
eko.katastro.fi, November 5-7
Cities on the Move Conference,
November 6
Exhibition of the results, November
9-14
What is a Temporary Media Lab?
The idea of a tmp\ media lab, situated within an existing
event, museum, or similar institution originates from dissatisfaction
with the current forms that presentations of media projects
typically take during conferences and other public events.
Exhibiting webpages still does not make much sense: their
lively, layered complexity gets lost. Even the interactive
installation is not the proper medium to express net.works.
In previous years much has been done to introduce new media
to an ever-growing audience. But the networks themselves,
their mysterious and seductive aspects, remained invisible.
It is hard to represent or even visualize what is actually
happening on a mailinglist, a newsgroup, a chatroom. Demo-design
can give us a clue, but it remains soulless, empty and too
easily turns flows and exchanges into dead information. Now
that the varieties of virtual communities are growing, it
is no longer enough to merely announce their existence. People
demand substance--not only outsiders but, most of all, the
members of the groups themselves.
The best way to speed up the process of production is to meet
in real space, to confront the loose, virtual connections,
to engage in the complex and messy circumstances of real time-space,
to and present the audience (and possible future participants)
with actual outcomes. And then go back again, in scattered
places, on-line.
New media are not merely storing the old. They do not only
give access to exisiting information. Their most lively and
attractive aspect lies in their apect of communication, collaboration,
and exchange. This is the essence of today's computer networks.
Large media corporations, on the other hand, view these innovations
differently. For today's virtual class, new media merely offer
new ways of electronic commerce and e-business, effeciency,
and flexibilization of the labor force and control over the
on-line behavior of the masses. The role of the former welfare
state is ambivalent, to say the least. On the one hand, it
was the state which did the groundwork and built the costly
infrastructure, while this very state now is selling out,
cutting social costs to zero, installing a new regime of (private)
control, and policing its populations (mainly young people).
Communication means noise to them, empty exchanges that can
be studied to maximize their attention profit. Users are being
reduced to potential buyers of goods and services, controlled
by companies and police units.
This is not a doomsday scenario. It is becoming a reality,
despite all naive, neoliberal talks of bright cyberfutures,
dating from the early days of the Internet hype. People are
indeed becoming aware of this dark aspects of the use of digital
technologies. One way not to give up on these positive, utopian
aspects is to increase awareness, to fight conspiracy mythologies,
and, most of all, to organize scattered users in the struggle
against surveillance and corporate takeover. Should we still
dream of interactivity and other, more accessible interfaces?
Access to what? Are portals with the CNN type of WebTV the
only remaining option now that the Net is rapidly approaching
its controlled and regulated status of mass medium? And is
this return of the real closing down our phantasies? How would
we define tactical use of media? Which particular connections
between text, audio, image (and noise) do we find useful?
In what way could radio, Internet, print and real-time/on-line
events be combined?
The idea of temporary media labs were born of the desire to
cover events, conferences, festivals, and demonstrations in
search of a specifically Internet style of reporting. We could
mention here some early examples, such as the live web journals
produced during Next Five Minutes 2 and 3 (www.n5m.org),
the Ars Electronica festivals since 1996 (www.aec.at),
the Euro-protests in Amsterdam, June 97 (www.contrast.org),
or the hackers' gathering Hacking in Progress in August 1997
(www.hip97.org).
The format of the on-line journal is trying to bridge the
real and virtual by building-in interactive elements between
on-line audiences and the actual site. Web journals are exploring
unusual ways of reporting, with image, sound and text, allowing
remote participation, before, during, and after the event.
The Temporary Media Lab concept goes one step further. It
no longer covers an ongoing event but, instead, targets the
hands-on production of content in and around an already-exisiting
group or network of groups and individuals. It is patently
clear that networks are good at discussing and preparing but
not at actual production--that has to be done on the spot,
face-to-face. Only in this setting can we overcome the tensions
that so easily build up in virtual worlds and, thereby, produce
small multimedia pieces together using available resources.
Conferences are known and respected as effective accumulators
and accelerators. They offer ideal opportunities to recharge
the inner batteries in the age of short-lived concepts. Temporary
media labs are even more effective in this respect: they focus,
speed up, intensify, and exert a longer-term effect on local
initiatives and translocal groups. Meetings in real space
are becoming a more and more precious good for the way they
add a crucial stage to almost any networked media projects,
whether in the arts, culture, or politics. Unlike conferences,
though, the role of the (passive) audience remains open yet
undefined. As with any other concept, the broader public will
be confronted with the issue anyway, sooner or later. Temporary
media labs are experimenting with social interfaces, visual
languages, and cultural/political processes. Though the immediate
outcomes can be presented at the end of the session, the real
impacts of such small task forces, perhaps, only comes later,
elsewhere.
Hybrid WorkSpace (HWS), which took place during the 1997 Documenta
X in the Orangerie in Kassel, went on for a three-and-a-half-month
period; it received an impressive share of the 620.000 visitors
who came to the event. Fifteen groups stayed for a ten-day
period each; among those groups were the German Innercities
campaign, No One is Illegal, We Want Bandwidth (www.waag.org),
some audio initiatives (which later turned into the Xchange
real-audio/net.radio network: www.re-lab.net),
loosely affiliated or unaffilated tactical media practitioners
involved in focussing on global media (www.n5m.org),
the Deep Europe/Syndicate group from former Eastern Europe
(www.v2.nl/east),
a group preparing the nettime _README!_ book, which has now
been published (www.nettime.org),
and finally the first Cyberfeminist International, which brought
out their own documentation (www.obn.org).
The documentation of the Workspace can be found at www.medialounge.net.
Medialounge is a database of 250 small European media art
labs, a result of Hybrid Workspace and other meetings in which
bottom-up networks of European new media culture is being
created.
The Revolting Temporary Media Lab in Manchester, which took
place for five weeks in August/September 1998, has been a
follow up of HWS. Revoling, organized by Micz Flor (www.yourserver.co.uk)
took place in very different social environment, compared
to Kassel, away from the big art crowds. It had a similar
mix of people, themes, and low-tech approaches. It brought
together local groups and communities to focus on practical
outcomes, small presentations, and debates. Revolting had
a special emphasis on spreading specific content via different
media, such as a regular free newspaper, local radio, and
the Net.
TEMP
The third Temporary Media Lab will take place in the project
space on the fifth floor of the Kiasma, the Helsinki contemporary
arts museum, which opened in June 1998. The media lab will
be open for five weeks. In principle, the space will be open
for the general audience a few times a week when lectures,
debates, on-line conferences, net.radio casts are being given
there. The main focus of the lab will be to produce content
and concept offered both by local and by international groups.
Each group could do a presentation, party, (press) conference
at the end of each week to inform the audience about the outcomes
of their working period, perhaps in collaboration with different
halls and institutions outside Kiasma, depending on the group
and the topic. The name TEMP is a reference to the TEMPOLAB
meeting in the Kunsthalle Basel (June 98), a closed session
of a distant though neighboring tribe, the global contemporary
arts scene, curated by Clementine Deliss. It is of course
also reference, and tribute, to Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous
Zones, a reminder that revolts of anger and desire, of passionate
bodies and souls, remains an option, despite the overall victory
of global capitalism.
TEMP has an editorial board of 8-10 people from Finland. The
group consists of mainly young programmers, artists, designers,
critics, and activists, all working in the field of new media.
The concept has been developed by Geert Lovink. The temporary
media lab has been commissioned by Perttu Rastas from Kiasma,
the new media arts curator, and will be produced by Seppo
Koskela. TEMP is developed in close collaboration with MUU
Mediabase, katastro.fi, kaapeli.fi (The Information Cooperative
Katto-Meny), KSL Media Workshop (The Media Workshop of People's
Cultural Organisation) and Lähiradio.
TEMP
Concept
& Coordination: Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>
Kiasma contact person: Perttu Rastas <prastas@fng.fi>
Production: Seppo Koskela (seppo.koskela@ksl.fi)
Design: katastro.fi
(juha huuskonen, mikko karvonen, simo rouhiainen)
Address: TEMP c/o Kiasma, Mannerheiminaukio 2, 00100 Hki 10,
Finland
tel. ++ 385-9-17336598, +358-40-5602116
fax. ++ 385-9-17336575 (to: TEMP)
www.kiasma.fi/temp
www.katastro.fi/temp
e-mail: temp@kiasma.fi
Supported by: APEX
Fund, Open
Society Institute Croatia, Finnair,
Arts
Council of Finland.
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