[spectre] Read_Me 2004 review - "hard" formatted version

[Peter Luining]

For some reason the text of the review I just sent to this list fell
apart, which made it in some mailprograms hard to read. So here's the
"hard" formatted version.


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 festivals 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)