[spectre] Re:(6) Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Spectrites,

Another 'institutional' discussion on the list - every now and then we 
seem to need one, but as Armin wrote, in the end without any 
institutions (of whatever kind) how can the field develop?

I also see the general point that Tom Holley is making about the need 
for audience education and explanation - that is certainly a role for 
various art and culture institutions. This is an issue I hear all the 
time, have been hearing for years, and something that needs to be taken 
seriously, i.e. some decent projects and programs should be put in 
place. I think that by now there are more than enough art historians, 
cultural critics, curators and others who could put good quality 
programs together that really mediate this (important) work well to a 
broader audience.

But I would be a little less pessimistic than the gerenal tone of the 
discussion so far, and take up in particular the question that Andreas 
Broeckmann has put forward:

Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> i cannot really say much about the actual role that the ICC has played 
> in japan over the last 10 years, besides being a beacon of 
> internationally oriented activities with high-profile events, and 
> certainly an important motor of discourse. what i am concerned about is 
> that, just as the existence of ICC, ZKM, AEC have until now worked as an 
> argument to support smaller media art initiatives all over the world, 
> the demise of the ICC could be used by local politicians everywhere as 
> an argument that 'media art is finished' ... - so, not least, i am 
> afraid that we might face a communication problem when we talk about 
> public funding, if this trend continues.

It's something that I was worried about for a while as well, but now 
much less. To some extent the position of new media art / new media 
culture has always been precarious, in that it is intimately tied to the 
fate of the new media industry, which saw a huge collapse and recession 
after the dotcom implosion and the breakdown of the new economy concept 
in 2000. Coupled with that was a general economic slowdown and the burst 
of the UMTS bubble (what The Economist called "The great telcom crash"). 
One of the fascinating questions was if there could be something of a 
new media art and culture in its own right, independent of the industry 
which was in recession?

Well, yes and no - yes in the sense that artists and cultural intiatives 
went on to develop new projects, ideas, tactics and strategies, and no 
because ultimately without new 'new media' there can be no 'new media art'.

A few years down the line from the great crashes it is easier to 
separate the substance from the noise, and a few things are quite 
evident. There are still many critical issues around information 
technology / new communication tools / the new media industry, prominent 
among them is the shift in emphasis from dot.com to security and 
policing aspplications of new information and communication 
technologies. Also a huge amount of market consolidation followed the 
dot.com and telcom busts, that was hardly a suprise. But what is 
apparent is that the new media industry has not disappeared altogether, 
that new broadband technolgies have been rolled out, that the wireless 
media are booming (even if less miraculous as predicted before the 
telcom crash), and the new media industry is finding a new equilibrium 
and 'market' for itself.

So, we can be quite confident that on many different levels new media 
development will continue, that ict and networking technologies will 
continue to play a crucial role in economic development suis generis, 
that the information sectors of economies world-wide will continue to 
dominate other sectors (also quite soon in emerging mega-economies such 
as China and India).

In response to that there will be a lot of concern with citizens, with 
civil society organisations and initiatives, from independent political 
actors with these developments. I would find it absolutely unthinkable 
that such enormously important tendencies in contemporay society would 
remain unquestioned at a cultural and artistic level, and that cultural 
and art institutions would not live up to the challenge these 
developments pose. And of course this has already happened, is happening 
and will continue to happen - the discussion should rather be in what form?

Are the models of ZKM, ICC, AEC outdated? Should they be renewed / 
transformed, and can they be?
Should they rather be replaced by something else? Smaller institutions 
and support structures perhaps, or more distributed? Or, conversely, 
should new media arts and culture be more appropriately integrated into 
the fabric of regular cultural institutions (museums, libraries, art 
education, amateur art centres, cultural centres, theaters, 
universities, etc..)?

In my own recent experience at De Balie, the centre for culture and 
politics in Amsterdan, we are going through a dramatic reorganisation 
process.  New media and art & culture as a focus area has always been 
part of a much broader set of programs referencing cinema, theater, 
local, national, and international politics, social and cultural debate. 
Yet, the 'new media wing' has been quite important for the centre in 
recent years, generating a long string of events and projects - the 
bigger of which have been circulated over this list.

Now, in the current transformation of the place virtually everything has 
been called in question: the editorial and support staff, artistic 
directorship, organisational structure, legal structure, board, 
programming priorities, division of fte's, financial flows and 
structures, use of the building - you name it....

The media wing of De Balie had been restructured already in the past two 
years, where we decided to develop a new line of (mass-)media criticism 
(The InfoWarRoom), alongside the new media and art programming, and 
heavily intensified the web publishing, streaming media and audience 
interaction development activities (around the open source CMS MMBase 
platform).

In my recent discussions (with people notably outside the field of new 
media) about the profile of the new organisation that needs to be built 
we touched upon the lack of wider public visibility of a lot of the new 
media culture, the need for improved communication, not just with the 
audience, but also with decision makers who control public funding for 
culture, media, ict and the social sector, or in other words the wider 
public domain. These discussions were quite harsh yet constructive and 
critical. At no point has the relevance of continued support for new 
media art / culture as a crucial ingredient for the new organisation 
that will be built be called into question. Nor did we opt for the 
corporate bail-out, collaboration between art and industry and other now 
highly fashionable ideas around a terrain that the info-crats call 
"e-Culture".
(Do I need to mention "creative industries"??)

Instead our preliminary assesment is that new media art / new media 
culture should be located within a wider social context - that the 
relevance and critical role of these activities needs to be highligthed 
and be made visible to a wider audience, both the audience at large as 
well as the opinion leaders and decision makers who in the end decide 
where the available (public) money should go - in the face of an 
immanent threat of further marginalisation of the new media field within 
the sphere of influence of key players in that public institutional 
domain - who belong to a pre-new media generation and whose 
understanding is generally superficial, i.e. succeptible to simplifying 
trends and slogans yet missing the real substance of what is changing in 
society and culture.

Personally I think that collaboration between the art and  culture 
sector and the industry (as well as other domains such as publically 
funded research) can be highly effective and useful. But I just do not 
believe in the model of realising everything via 'the market'. Therefore 
the debate about the legitimacy and the channels for public supprt to 
new media arts and culture remains on the table.

In our own case (De Balie) we decided to expand the media program with a 
targetted positon for new media and infopolitics, alongside new media 
and art, (mass)media criticsm and open source development. More than 
that the new editorial team will have to seek the active integration of 
new media structures, forms and tools in all other programming domains 
of the organisation, because art, culture, politics, economics, and the 
future development of the social organism simply cannot be thought 
independently anymore from the evolving media, information and 
communcation structures - all these domains have become symbiotic - they 
need to be critically disentangled and reintegrated to figure out what 
is going on in our societies....

My main questions here would therefore be, how do artists and cultural 
initiatives position themselves in this process outlined above? What are 
the most adequate and effective forms of (public) support for this, and 
how can this be organised? And finally, how can the relevant 
stakeholders - opinion leaders and decision makers - be convinced of the 
right approach?

I would almost want to end with one the worst corporate slogans ("Es 
gibt viel zu tun - packen wir es an!"), but I know that this is too 
controversial so I won't do it....

Best wishes,
Eric