Transmediale 04. Fly Utopia! Conference Report
The Transmediale 04. Fly Utopia! – Conference explored ‘the potential of utopian ideas in an age that is suffering from a hangover of too many social and technological utopias in the 20th century and from an inability of projecting ourselves beyond the current cultural and political crisis.’ The two day conference was dedicated to ‘an exploration of the currency of utopia in fields such as art, design, architecture, social and political philosophy, bio-technology and mobile communication.’ Past and present Utopian art and cultural projects were presented, as well as critical analyses of the pitfalls of Utopian dreams and promises.
Fly Utopia! Transmediale ’04.
An excursion into the utopias of an age determined by media and technologies.
There is Hope
The ideologies of the 20th century and their illusions about a perfect world are obsolete. Modern technology has lost the air of a universal remedy, instead its potential for the development of creative action and human community is being explored. Artists are turning to the design and reflection of the information society, i.e. to the factual and to the many hypothetical societies of the digital age. The uniformity of a standardised global media zone is countered by a heterogeneous multiplicity of competent users and producers who are appropriating digital technologies according to their own cultural needs.
There is No Hope
At the beginning of the 21st century, the modern ideals are transformed into the ugly caricature of a world torn apart by global conflict and claims to unlimited power. Calls for technological progress hide the emergence of ever more perfected, irrational societies of control which are busy destroying their cultural and natural resources. This unavoidable reality can only be escaped by means of the projection of imaginary places. These may be mythical pasts, unreal parallel worlds, or a fantastic Science Fiction future. They are the escape vehicles of an imagination which attempts to surpass the boundaries of reality.
Conference Report
The Transmediale 04. Fly Utopia! – Conference explored ‘the potential of utopian ideas in an age that is suffering from a hangover of too many social and technological utopias in the 20th century and from an inability of projecting ourselves beyond the current cultural and political crisis.’ The two day conference was dedicated to ‘an exploration of the currency of utopia in fields such as art, design, architecture, social and political philosophy, bio-technology and mobile communication.’ Past and present Utopian art and cultural projects were presented, as well as critical analyses of the pitfalls of Utopian dreams and promises.
Keynote Address – Antonio Negri
The conference started with a keynote statement by Toni Negri (Co-author of Empire – Time for Revolution) who is one of the most influential thinkers on the contemporary condition of globalisation. Negri stated that it is difficult to imagine Utopia in the post-modern era we live in. We are living in a de-ideologised age and we don’t have any large transcendent narratives anymore. We have lost the vision of Utopia as the projection of a grand narrative like Thomas Moore’s “Utopiaâ€. According to Negri we can find Utopia today in the swarm – the multitude. We see Utopian Moments that manifest themselves in the carnavalesque acts of this swarm. This multitude can be conceptualised as a coming together of a large body of singularities. In concrete the multitude refers to the carnivals against globalisation like those in Seattle and Gothenburg. These carnavalesque moments are the manifestation of a Utopia which is immanent in this world. Utopia lies in the resistance against empire and this resistance is situated in ‘non-spaces’.
Migrating Hope – Geert Lovink / Ghassan Hage
Media theorist Geert Lovink invited Chassan Hage, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. In his introduction Lovink explained that for him the concept of Utopia is a call for action. It doesn’t have to be a grand theory, he goes even further by pointing out that this isn’t possible anymore. Utopia has to do with a notion of time: Utopia is “a moment of festivity, carnival, ecstasyâ€. The TAZ-parties at the beginning of the 90s with Hakim Bey were an important moment for New Media Art and Practice. Utopia is manifested in a moment of disruption, “a disruption of the ordinary regimes of time and spaceâ€. Utopia is about moments of excitement.
Lovink invited Chassim Hage because he clearly puts concepts like caring, hope and aspiration in a political context. Hage started by explaining his perception that until recently, the capacity of the great majority of migrants to settle in western society was dependent on the availability of a ‘surplus of hope’. It is clear today that while the west is producing a surplus of many things, hope is not among them. In his paper Hage criticises holistic utopian systems because these are intellectually biased. They start from the idea of a ‘perfect utopian society’. However this ‘intellectual utopia’ is merely a variant of Utopian thinking in general. Utopian thinking is something everybody has to deal with, it is not just an intellectual exercise. But not everybody has the same capacity or the same possibilities to hope and to aspire. As anthropologist Hage studied Utopias in the everyday life in Lebanon.
Because not everybody has the same ‘acces’ to aspiration we can speak of a ‘political economy of hope’. These minor utopias aren’t political in the Platonian sense (like the major intellectual utopias) but they do have a political impact. Utopias aim at the future but are grounded in the present. There is a present situation “what is†and Utopia has to do with “what might be, what could be, what is about to be.†Utopias can lead to action so Utopian aspiration has a positive dynamics. For Hage this insight is the core of the political aspect of Utopia. The politics of Utopia refers to a politics of Potentiality. Once actuality is imagined, it becomes a social force which activates. The possibility to hope and imagine utopias has a direct influence on the possibility of ‘becoming’. The social milieu in which one lives can be a propeller to aspire but also the other way around. Now the political aspect becomes very clear. Some people want to stop the possibilities for aspiration so they can block action. This is manifested clearly in neo-conservative realism. The realist discourse wants to come to terms with reality and doesn’t allow imagination. Hage ended his presentation with a call to maintain the capacity to fantasize otherwise the reality is to the neo-conservatives.
New Utopias and Old Developmentalist ruins: information society in India – Ravi Sundaram.
Ravi Sundaram, again introduced by Geert Lovink, addressed the new discourse for an Information Society among Indian elites who are striving to join the world economy with all its aporias. On the one hand India has entered the form of contemporary myth making but on the other hand the uproot of call centres seems to challenge these contemporary myths in India. These call centres have to be seen in the context of the intellectual property rhetoric and the culture of pirate modernity. It are new (illegal) commercial channels which the state can’t control and they are the topic of social conflicts. The culture of the copy doesn’t rime with the discourse on welfare and progress in a Network Society. In public discourse this piracy culture even is compared to terrorism. The elite discourse in India which uses a rhetoric that pleats for participation in the global knowledge economy (is being tackled from within by this piracy culture that starts from the same technology as the elite discourse but bends it over to its own use. Sundaram compared this contemporary scenario with earlier moves by South Asian elites, reaching back to developmentalism in the 1950’s, and English colonialism in the 19th century. Art and cultural practice, like elsewhere, seem to struggle to play more than a secondary role in this game, conducted mainly in the new and fragmentary urban spaces.
Social Fictions: Inventing Utopias – Andreas Leo Findeisen / Christophe Sperr / Rebecca Gomperts.
This panel reflected on how Utopia’s could be implemented in relation to collective institutions. The aim was to think about social fictions in the context and framework of a collectivity.
Christophe Spehr stated that a society can choose different paths to follow. If a path is chosen, it becomes self-reinforcing until a chosen path comes to an end. The neo-liberal path that was taken at a certain moment also tapped into existing wishes and expectations. Nowadays more and more voices are raising to leave this path and follow another one. According to Sperr ‘Free Cooperation’ is the current social fiction. We need an understanding of what this different logic of development could be. There are different models of free cooperation so this means there are several paths to the new ‘ideal situation’. But the Utopia of open collaboration doesn’t dictate what it should look like, it leaves everyone in the game to negotiate.
Andreas Findeisen also focused on collaboration. In his lecture he talked about two languages that were developed in a community and at the same time were the reason for the existence of this community: Wilopuk and Esperanto. These are languages that had the potential for community building, but because of a too strict copy right mechanism (Wilopuk) and bad organisation (Esperanto) didn’t have the possibility to bring this potentiality to a good end.
Rebecca Gomperts presented her action group Woman on Waves that sales ships to countries where abortion is illegal. They sale women into international waters to execute a safe abortion. This is a social fiction, a Utopia, because it is not a solution in itself, it wants to create an awareness which can be empowering.
Mobilotopia – Drew Hemment / Marc Tuters / Jason Harlen / Teri Rueb / Ben Russel / Armin Medosch
Besides bio-technology, mobile communication is now the prime technology that manages to spark utopian hopes. Mobile phones, 3G, wireless networking, satellites, and even radio, are the objects of desire for a media-savvy class which holds on to the idea that new media technologies can make you money, and might even enhance the democratic potentials of a globalized world – whether in Smart Mobs or as anti-WTO protesters. As a response, artists are exploring the emerging field of ‘Locative Media’ which combine the mobility of the device, with the fact that the mobile user can be tracked and located. Journalists, researchers artists and designers investigate the potential of mobile communication technologies. They deliberately speak about ‘locative media’. The difference with ubiquitous computing is that it isn’t about the human machine interaction anymore, but about an evolved form of human-human interaction. Locative media can be liberating because we can leave the screen behind which offers new potential for art and activism. But this ‘liberation from the screen’ also brings the treat of a stronger social control. The artists in this panel investigate this dialectics between the possibilities and dangers of locative media.
http://www.locative.org
http://www.futuresonic.com
http://www.mobilecommunications.org