[spectre] Read_Me 2004 review

[Peter Luining]

Here's my review of the Read_Me festival 2004. In the first part I give a chronological review of the events (the conference and the the Dorkbot city camp) and in the second part I explain what makes Run_Me/ Read_Me so totally different from all new media presentations and festivals around.


This years Read_Me festival had 2 parts, a conference part (held on the first two days) that was aimed at an academic discourse and a Dorkbot city camp part that existed for the biggest part of 20 minutes presentations. First let's start with the conference part that was held at the University of Aarhus. What we saw here was an effort to deepen the emerging discourse of software art and cultures. The lectures were about subjects as different as the history of Phillipinian bulletinboards (Fatima Lasay), the contextualization of software art (Jacob Lillemose), the consumer power of internet communities (Mirko Schaefer) and live coding (toplap.org group). 
What all this diversity made clear is that the discourse as a whole is still very fragmented but also that some parts are developed already quite thoroughly (e.g. socio political aspects and implications of software) and that others still seem to be in a very early stage, as for example the research of histories of bulletin boards. 
What the lectures also made clear is that software art is still a hard to grasp term. Here we can see a similarity with the term conceptual art that arose in the 60's and even today is still hard the define. Interesting to note in this case is that at a certain level somebody remarked in a discussion that the definition of software art should not become too rigid because else software art could easily be declared dead as (he remarked) happened to net art. Though this sounded reasonable it did miss the point what software art is about. I think it's good to have discussions about definitions because as long as there is discussion the term is alive, and futhermore they help to define what an artform is. However the misunderunderstanding here seemed  (especially because it was compared with net art) that software art was looked at as a movement, and movements rise, fall and in the end are declared dead. To get back to a term net art, net art isn't dead, what is in my eyes dead is
  a movement that was made of it by some critics and theorists. The artists that belonged to this group (also referred to as the netdotart group) were seen as a movement because they were in contact with each other and shared some common ideas (for this I want to refer to the exhibition "Written in stone" held in the the museum of comtemporary art of Oslo last year). But seen at large the group of artists doing net art was/ is of course much bigger. Now back to software art and it's definition, as I said software art shouldn't be looked at as a movement and though there's a group of people that share some ideas, the diversity in software art is so big that critics can't make a movement out of it. Software art is a category and should defined that way, though a definition will have the same difficulty as defining conceptual art, there are so many currents within it that grasping it as a whole is a complex task. 
I think the conference part was a succes not only because it started discussions but also because it gave an impression of the wide variety of subjects software art and cultures can deal with. What also is worth mentioning here is that outside the lecture halls the organizers had created a good atmosphere that made connecting very easy.
The second part of Read_Me was the Dorkbot city camp. Which was oppossed to what some might think not a camp with tents that were somewhere put up in the city. For the camp the Read_Me team worked together with the organizers of Dorkbot New York and London. And for those who don't know, Dorkbots are informal meetings where artists, etc. do presentations of their work. Dorksbot's slogan is "people doing strange things with electricity", for the Read_Me festival this slogan was changed in "people doing strange things with software", a slogan that was also printed on a t-shirt that was handed out to all participants. The city camp was for the largest part held in Aarhus Art Academy that besides a presentation space put several spaces at the disposal of the festival, one of them being made into a special chill out (meeting) space. In the evening a local underground club and an artspace were used for some special performances.
The first day of the city camp part started off quite nervous, on forehand all partcipants were told that they got 20 minutes for their presentation because there had to take place 60 presentations in two and a half days. The presentations had something of small performances, people got 20 mintues and after that a computer started to play a tune. When time was up there was a quick change of computers and another presentation started. Used to the formula and also because the tech part worked better the second day of presentations became more relaxed. Ending on the third day in even a more relaxed atmosphere. Although on forehand a littlebit sceptical about this way of presenting projects I think the formula worked well. Especially after the first day when the situation became less tense and interfering with questions within the presentations themselves became more usual. A point of critique could be that because of the high pace- and the enormous quantity of the presentations 
 you start to loose concentration fast. Although I see this as serious critique I think the whole setup of the space and the easiness with which you could walk in and out of the presentation space created also an atmosphere that didn't oblige you to stay and sit, you could chill out, meet and talk to other participants and audience whenever you wanted to.  And also here as with the lectures we also saw here a large variety of projects as for example Sergey Teterin's project "Minced Cinema" that used an old style Russian meat mincer to control digital movies or the Rand()% project by Tom Betts and Joe Gilmore who set up a live streaming net radio program that plays especially by artists developed software that creates random sound and music.
A last thing that I shouldn't forget to mention is that in the evenings performances were held in Musikcafeen (an underground place) and the local artspace Rum46. Here the performers used their own software to perform. Performances ranged from unpretending VJ work (salsaman) to live coding (toplab.org, slub.org) to a gigantic laptop performance orchestrated by Amy Alexander in which material playing on a large number of laptops of Read_Me participants was mixed.

Now to the second part of this review in which I want to try to give a picture of Run_Me/ Read_Me as a whole. The online part of the project started in 2001, while the first festival was held in Moscow in 2002. This first festival, that entirly dealt with software art, was still structured like new media festivals as we know them. There was a jury who choose some winners and there was a jury statement that was used to define software art. Besides that there was a publication in the shape of a DVD. 
The second edition took place last year in Helsinki and what was new to the structure of the festival, or better to all new media festivals that were organized before it, was that the process of choosing winners was abandoned for the catalog. Everyone who submitted a piece to the runme site was reviewed and got a space in the printed catalog. This catalog is only for that reason already an interesting work because it translates the spirit that comes with software art, and what is even more interesting is that it holds a moment of "artistic" software production that isn't based on (personal) curatorial choices. To a certain extend it is comparable with Lucy R. Lippard's book "Six Years" that gives a good impression of  the production of conceptual art between 1966-1972. Though the difference is that Lippard in the end made personal choices what to include in and exclude from her book.
In relation with this I think it's also important to note that when software art became hyped last year and the Run_Me crew got invited to the Ars Electronica, one of it's core members, Alexei Shulgin, made a radical gesture for the Ars catalogue by just summing up all urls of the runme.org entries. With this pointing to the people (urls) without whom Run_Me and software art would be impossible.
In this years festival the concept was developed further and deepened. In the first place all the people that did submit a work in the past to the runme site were invited to meet in real. Secondly a conference to deepen the discourse was added. And in the third place the publication that came with this years festival became a real source book, full of publications of the lectures and with loads of reviews of recently submitted works to the runme site.
The trickiest part of the whole festival probably was the split of the conference and Dorkbot city camp part, this because many theorists left the festival after their lecture. So here not that mix of theorists, artists and other participants. Though it's interesting to know that some of the speakers told me that they did stay longer than they had planned because the presentation and the social part of the last days of the festival exceeded their expectations. 
>From my description above it might be clear that Run_Me/ Read_Me is different from what we know. It is a model that breaks away from the traditional structured festivals in the sense that it wants to grow by adapting and deepen itself but not for the sake in itself or the carreers of the people involved but for the sake to pose a social alternative to institutionalized new media festivals and organizations: it brings together people that are involved in and it builds a discourse around software art and cultures, and it does this without creating hypes or stars ("Read_Me decided to reject awarding prizes and choosing the winners" as Olga Goriunova states it in the Read_Me 2004 book), instead it offers people as different as academics, professional artists, diehard activists, VJs a platform where all can connect, exchange ideas, mix, etc. Thus we can say that Runme offers a real alternative to the institutionalized forms of art- presentations and the way nearly all new media fe
 stivals are set up nowadays. Looking at it this way the whole Runme project can be seen as institutional critique. And a very succesfull form of it, because the model it uses works and perfectly fits the subjects it deals with: software art and cultures.

Peter Luining 


Urls:
http://www.runme.org (main site)
http://readme.runme.org (Read_Me 2004)
http://www.dorkbot.org (main site)
http://www.kopenhagen.dk/net.art/blog/ (blog that contains a minute by minute report of the whole Read_Me 2004 festival with loads of pictures)
http://www.museet.no/english/exhibitions/netart (Written in Stone, A net.art archelogy)