Preface

My earliest radio memories go back to my grandmother's living room/kitchen. In this two bed room flat in a social housing estate in Graz in the 1960ies radio was the dominant medium. Every day during lunchtime the whole family would listen to an hour long news programme on Austrian state radio ORF. Austrian politics as well as world affairs broke into the domestic reality of our kitchen through this apparatus: The Cuban crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedy's, the Vietnam war, the war in Palestine, the political awakening of Muhammed Ali and the student's revolt. The valve audio amplifier inside the brown wooden case of our apparatus delivered the voices of professional news presenters in a particularily warm tone even when they spoke of the threat of nuclear extinction. The radio in the kitchen room empowered my grandparents to be politically informed and make conscious decisions about voting. The right to access to education and the right to vote had been denied to them by a backward and regressive system in the past, which is why they valued those things, education and voting, so highly when they grew older. Memories such as those combine to shape my perception of radio ... radio means voices floating through the kitchen and mixing with the smell of food. Radio means places far away, joys and threats unknown. Radio means a string concert while my grandmother tells me stories about hardship she experienced in her youth. As she was borne almost at the beginning of the 20th century, her stories became for me, inevitably intertwined with the narration of the century of radio. I would like make my first proposition: Those who write about new and old media should not try to become impartial, emotionless and bodyless voices which so often characterise theoretic writing. We should be able to stand fully behind what we say with everything that we have not just as intellectuals or artists but as human beings and we should not be afraid to expose ourselves as fallible humans.

Concepts of Media History

As the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, the concepts of history that exist are amazingly poor 1. There are those historians who focus on big events, big personalities, tyrants, revolutions and intermediate periods of peace. In their accounts there is no logic, no structure. History consists of a series of more or less random events in which identifiable individuals play an important role. This is illustrated best by Bertolt Brecht's short poem where he wrote: "Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him?" (Bertold Brecht, Questions from a worker who reads ). In the Marxist version of history social change is the result of class struggle between antagonistic group actors. As in Marxism the base defines the superstructure, the relationship of the forces of production is of defining influence on what people can think and dream about. Regarding history and new media another version of explaining social change has emerged. According to Marshall McLuhan and variations of his 'philosophy'2 communication media are the main force for social change; the book, the printing press, the newspaper, photography, radio, television and now the computer and the internet are the defining forces which trigger social change which is as inevitable as an avalanche (McLuhan 1964). In the first version of big-men-do-great deeds and in the last version of media being the main cause of socio-cultural change (which are compatible, by the way) the people do not play a role in the making of their own history. They become completely objectified and exposed to external heteronomic forces. Only a small elite of politicians and inventors, the political class and the creative class, have any role in the making of history (Florida 2002, Barbrook 2006). The Marxist version, although it comes with a lot of historic baggage,3 offers itself as a tool to look beyond the surface, gain some understanding of the inner workings of the big wheels of history and seeks to empower people to be the authors of their own history. Therefore I express my preference for concepts of history which seek to empower people to be autonomous, self-defined and the active makers of their own history (although it often looks as if we didn't really have a chance).

That said, I would also like to propose that the discovery of radio waves and the development of first applications in the late 19th century should be understood within a typically capitalist framework of 'innovation'. The age of electrical telecommunications had begun in the midst of the 19th century with the telegraph. The elites of that time were keenly aware of the potential of new communication media for war and commerce and it was a well established model that the inventor of a new technology would then become the founder of a large industrial corporation. The philosopher of science 4Jutta Weber (2003) observed that the conduct of science changed at about the midst of the 19th century. Before that turn science or technological innovation had been an activity of individuals either as academics or private inventor/entrepreneurs searching either for pure knowledge or business opportunities. As the importance of technological innovation in an industrial society had become increasingly obvious, science was turned into an organized activity financed and directed by large corporations and nation states, often working in unison to further goals such as colonial expansion (the logical continuation of this tendency was the WWI). It is this climate in the second half of the 19th century which stimulated exploration of and experimentations with electricity and magnetism. Thus, after Robert Maxwell mathematically postulated the existence of electromagnetic waves and after Heinrich Hertz provided empirical evidence that radio waves existed many engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs tried to find ways of putting this new force of nature to work in human society. Although Nicolas Tesla was hailed as the bigger genius and visionary, it was the more pragmatically minded Marconi who became the first wireless entrepreneur. As soon as he had his patents registered he tried to create a worldwide commercial monopoly for wireless telegraphy.

1. 1. Castoriadis C . 
   1997.  Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution.
   Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. :285-363.
2. 2. such as the work of Vilem Flusser. cf Flusser
3. 3. Not just baggage. As Castoriadis shows, key elements of Marx' theory of history are flawed; cf.Castoriadis 1975/1997. Der Marxismus: eine vorläufige Bilanz. pp.19-120.
4. 4. Foucault M . 
   2007.  Foucault Info.

Making Science's 'Other' Productive

Although the dominant mode of technoscientific 'invention' at the turn to the 20th century was based on rationalism it also brought about its flipside of electromagnetic esotericism. Telegraphy and radio triggered a new age of spiritism.1 Positivism was on the rise and tried to draw a line between real science and crackpot science with its according philosophical superstructures (positivism vs. vitalism and idealism). But, as much as science tried to purge itself from the forces of irrationalism, its less irrational 'other' would not go away easily. First, science needed a close relationship with engineering and much more low level craft work to produce its instruments. Scientific discoveries which were presented as clean and completely rational types of knowledge, abstracted from the everyday experience of a politically messy times, relied on types of knowledge that were tacit, which came from the experiences of craftsmen and women and were never formalized as a theory.2 Second, science also produced truths which seemed irrational to the common man. As the dromologist Paul Virilio remarked, Max Planck's Quantum Theory, postulated in 1900, seemed "irrational to the rational man." (Virilio 1994, p. 23)

I propose to make the schizophrenia of science at the dawn of the age of radio productive for any further artistic investigations into the medium. Artists can re-engage with aspects of early radio science -- earlier thesises, discoveries and speculations which have fallen by the wayside of scientific progress driven by an ultraharsh utlitarianism dictated by buerocratic-capitalistic regime of efficiency. Artists don't need to adhere to the 'productivist dogma', and do not need to be afraid of being labelled esotericists themselves (this would be a grave misunderstanding of my proposition). And artists do not need to buy into a gentrified version of the history of science. The spirit of practical experimentation with electromagntic fields and the tools to do so such as areals, coils, magnets, copper wire, and so on, offer themselves to be materials for the arts, as they do not only provide a functionality but also have aesthetic qualities as objects, surfaces, materials. Concepts such as the luminiferous aether, which was first postulated to exist, then, after Einstein's first publication thought not to exist and now has entered scientific discourse through the backdoor of advanced quantum cosmology again offers interesting starting points, especially because there remain scientific riddles and problems to solve about the nature of matter, time, space and other quite fundamental categories.3

Artists have already shown to create very interesting work with the crumbs that fell from the lavishly decked out table of science. Douglas Kahn writes about naturally occuring very low frequencies and the work of Australian artist Joye Hinterdings with VLF in this volume. At the exhibition Waves in Riga, (Medosch, Šmite, Šmits, 2006) Austrian artist Franz Xaver reminded us that the sun is the biggest 'radio' in our solar system. At the entrance to his exhibition cubicle he wrote defiantly in a little hand written message on a piece of paper "what are 10 years of internet compared to 10 millions of years of radiation from the sun". Another Austrian artist, Udo Wid, has made measurements of naturally occuring Extremely Low Frequencies (ELF) for many years and tries to draw connections with brainwave activities and psychotropic influences of ELF on humans. It is not important if Wid ever finds any strict causal link between ELF and brainwaves -- which would be the scientific approach --, the work as such and the output it generates is interesting in itself (Wid generates plots of his measurements by using neural network software) and has a humanistic quality through the references that Wid makes in his Polihymnia concept.4 Recently at the Maxwell City workshop by Atelier Nord in Oslo, Martin Howse built strangely interesting looking devices which allow to measure electromagnetic waves in the high frequency spectrum from electricity lines in the environment and translating them into audio.5 Such unintentional leakage of em-waves happens all the time, on a small scale in our homes, and on a much larger one next to big overland power lines or electrified trainlines and tramways.6

1. 1. Even now, images of Tesla in his laboratory evoke associations with alchemism (Image of Tesla in his laboratory); regarding the connection between electromagnetism and spiritualism, cf. Becker 2006 Theaters of Possession, Dangerous Transcommunications [conference talk]. Waves RIX-C: Riga. (synopsis available from, last accessed August 2007); for a deep history of s cience and alchemy cf. Yates 1979/2001.
2. 2. cf. Benjamin Farrington about the origins of Greek Science (1954)
3. 3. cf. Howse 2007 The aether and its double(available online last accessed August 2007)
4. 4. cf. Udo Wid, Forschungen, Ausstellungskatalog (undatiert). Galerie Unwahr: Berlin
5. 5. Maxwell City, Workshop, Atelier Nord, Erich Berger and Martin Howse, last accessed August 2007
6. 6. The exhibition Waves in Riga tried to give a panoramic overview of artists engaging with 'pure waves' - waves not as carriers of spoken language as in radio transmissions but waves freed from any such 'payload', waves as a material and medium of art. (cf. Medosch, Šmite, Šmits, 2006).

Closing the Gap Between Apparatic Form and Imaginary Medium

After Hertz found out how to make and receive waves it would still take a long time for radio to find its 'form'. With form I mean the predominant type of social usage of radio waves combined with a specific technological appearance or, in German die apparative Form (apparatic form). Radio, as any mass medium, exists on two different layers, as an imaginary social signification and in its distinct appearance as a 'thing'. I use the term social imaginary significations as closely as possible in the way Cornelius Castoriadis proposes it. Conventionally there is a trivial meaning of imaginary which refers to 'existing in the imagination only'. Recently there has been a lot of hype around 'imaginary media' in this meaning of the word. For Castoriadis the social imaginary has a much deeper meaning as the source of social significations which become instituted in the world. Each individual contributes to and is affected by the collective imaginary. The imaginary consists of the whole of the mental life of people which comprises thought, desires and imagination in the classic sense. It is not congruent with the unconscious but taps also into it.1 In the early days of radio history those two things had not found together yet -- the science and technology of electromagnetic waves and radio as a social imaginary signification. Radio art needs to consider this fundamental categorical difference.

After Marconi, a race started to find other uses of radio rather than just telegraphy. Top of the list was wireless telephony -- appearantly at around 1905 nobody thought of radio as we know it now. The artist Paul DeMarinis (2006) created an installation for the Waves exhibition which uses a forgotten technology for speech transmission involving spark transmissions and a sort of microphone technology based on sulphuric acid. According to known history (unearthed by the artist himself) the technology was only used to make test transmissions between Rome and Tripoli which was then an Italian colony. Much more telling than the transmissions were themselves was the fact that the Tripoli side did not have a transmitter, only a receiver, thereby being exemplary for the relationship between Europe and North Africa at the time.2

As soon as radio waves had been put to work as carriers of transmissions the authorities sought to control this new power. The first international conference dealing with radio regulation in 1903 was initiated by the German Kaiser Wilhelm after an incident involving his brother, when his ship using equipment developed by Adolf Slaby could not communicate with the Marconi coastal station on the US shore. After that any excuse was being used to call for control of the airwaves, notably the sinking of the Titanic and the chaos that reigned in the airwaves during rescue attempts.3

With the tools of wireless experimentation becoming more available, in the United States of America a boom of do-it-yourself experimentation was allowed to happen. The comparison has been made before me that those radio amateurs were, in a way, the first 'hackers'. Similar to the way the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club in California in the 1970ies triggered the development of the Personal Computer, radio amateurs pushed forward the exploration of the wirless medium.4 However, if we take on board this comparison between wireless amateurs and hackers, we will also have to deal with the baggage it comes with. On one hand the first decade of the 20th century in the US must have been a paradise of wireless hacking. Responding to an opinion piece in the New York Times which slammed amateurs for distracting the professionals, Hugo Gernsback wrote that there were "400,000 wireless experimenters and amateurs in the United States alone."5 In Gernsback's view the wireless amateurs "have done much to further the art in general, and many patents have been taken out during the last three years by such students interested in wireless." An interesting side-thread of this narration is that cable bound telegraphy amateurs had created their telegraphy community networks in suburbs. According to an article in the New York evening Post amateurs had created a cable bound community network in a village in New Jersey.6 Yet the class structure of American society meant that even among radio amateurs, sometimes presented as the 'real heroes' of the radio revolution, many came from wealthy backgrounds and were mostly white and male. The wireless hackers of the 1900s and society as a whole showed similar mechanisms of social exclusion which still affect hacking today (to the effect that there are fewer women in the informal hacker scene than in the world of official software development).http://earlyradiohistory.us/1920auto.htm)" href="#footnote7_63hy22n">7 Therefore I would be careful with narrations of radio history which glorify the US amateur scene. However, what I would like to propose is to see the early radio amateurs as transmission artists. In that way they are indeed similar to the latter day computer hackers. Like hackers their main interest is not so much the content of communications but getting the technology to work. The interest in technology is intrinsical. Thus, for a wireless 'hacker' making their own signals is of an intrinsic interest for which no further motivation is necessary. They were primarily concerned with "getting an antenna up"http://earlyradiohistory.us/1917verm.htm), cf. WHITE 2007." href="#footnote8_zzje029">8 and finding someone else who would respond. The act of transmitting, of sending and receiving signals itself is a new artform. The pioneers of the age of wireless engage with the properties of waves, such as the calculation of the wavelength and the right size of the antenna. I would like to differentiate this proposition from the idea that early radio amateurs were the first radio artists. They were not, they were pursuing a hobby and did not reference their activity in any way within an artistic, cultural context. Both comparisons, between Home Radio Amateurs (HAMs) as hackers and as radio artists have their limits. What I think is really important is that HAMs were making their own signals, their own transmissions.9 At the beginning there was the transmission and reception of waves by free consenting individuals. This gains heightened importance especially when considering the catastropic development that radio took after that short window of wireless utopianism between 1887 and 1914.

1. 1. cf Castoriadis 1975/1997VII.pp. 559 -611; also Castoriadis (1978) and (1997).
2. 2. Paul De Marinis, 2006. Rome to Tripoli , Waves exhibition.
3. 3. cf. Captain Linwood S. Howeth, USN (Retired), 1963, pages 153-165.
4. 4. cf. the early book by Steven Levy (1984) described the influence of the Homebrew Club and other hacker clubs on shaping the computer industry.
5. 5. cf. Gernsback 1912.
6. 6. cf. Early Radio History, 2007.
7. 7. Graynella Packer was the first female operator on a commercial ship. But later the law was changed so that other young women could not follow in that profession. Another young woman who had already gathered some experience as a wireless amateur was told that she "could probably pass a telegraph test" but would have also "to qualify as a radio operator, which meant that I should have to learn all about motor-generators, transformers, helices, detectors, three-slide tuners, etc." She left the place "rather discouraged" the young woman wrote, because as a girl it would not have been appropriate for her to "call on strange young men and ask to see their sets." (The Autobiography of a Girl Amateur http://earlyradiohistory.us/1920auto.htm)
8. 8. An Irving Vermilya claims to have been the "first amateur to get an areal up" in a 1917 article (http://earlyradiohistory.us/1917verm.htm), cf. WHITE 2007.
9. 9. For future studies I would like to propose a concept of 'transmissions' to replace the concept of information theory when it comes to analyzing communicatioin media from an arts and humanities point of view. The information theory concept is very limited as it excludes the layer of meaning and therefore has little to offer for the arts.

Mobilisations

The prohibitions and regulations kicking in at WWI which should in a way never be lifted afterwards, only strengthened, would stop artists from making their own signals and therefore take away a great deal of autonomy from what 'radio artists' could do. The importance of making one's own signal is underpinned by the work of the Japanese artist Tetsuo Kogawa who, in the 1980ies, was the founder of a MiniFM movement of people building their own transceivers from cheap electronic parts. For the MiniFM activist the act of transmitting his or her own signal was a very intimate artistic expression where participants were communicating in a very direct way via the exchange of waves carrying energy. Those experiments took part in Tokyo in a highly controlled area where any commercial piracy was strictly impossible.1 The Austrian Artist Franz Xaver has been demanding a band of the spectrum for artists on shortwave radio for years now, so that artists could make global transmissions of their own without being in conflict with the commercial world.http://send.ung.at/)." href="#footnote2_no7ihe8">2 The Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan wants to launch his own communication satellite as part of a bigger project of creating artistic/scientific exploration centres on both poles of the earth.3 Both Peljhan's and Xaver's works make connections between radio and a concept of environmental and cultural/artistic sustainability and autonomy. In summary, I would like to propose that radio artists should be able to make their own transmissions if they wish to do so.4

In the years following WWI radio as we know it now found its form. How that exactly has happened, and which causalities existed, if any, which led to radio 'locking' in and "at a certain but arbitrary point of its development being wrested from the tranquility of the laboratory and turned into a public matter," remains rather mysterious (Ernst Schoen quoted by Walter Benjamin, p. 389). We can only say for sure that despite big differences in the way radio was socially organised in different countries, it settled to become a one-way communication medium whereby radio programmes were transmitted from the centre to the listeners. During the 'hot' peace of the 1920ies radio became the medium of mass mobilisation. Mobilisation can take on very different meanings in this context. In Paul Virilio's interpretation, radio is one among a number of media which all have a mobilizing effect on individuals as well as society as a whole. Modernity is a process of accelleration, societies become hooked on speed and with this process modes of perception change, which has a profound effect on culture on all levels, including the individual mental and psychological faculties.5 In the 1920ies radio mobileses by disseminating jazz and causing the ensuing mobility of humans on the dancefloor. The 'roaring twenties' in the US bring a mobilisation of the masses through the introduction of the assembly line by Henry Ford and the mass production of affordable cars. And, last not least, radio shows its potential for political mobilisation and as a tactical tool of coordination in, for example, urban civil unrest. In the newly mobile societies of the 1920ies radio waves travelling with the speed of light made it the ultimate medium for the new mobile culture. As capitalism had segregated village communities and driven them into the cities where everybody became part of a faceless proletarian mass, radio had an important function in maintaining a cultural life and proliferating a degree of social cohesion. Radio became a 'systemic' force without which a motorised and highly mobile society would probably have faced cultural implosion.6

1. 1. for an expanded introduction to the concept and history of MiniFM cf. Kogawa 2007. http://anarchy.k2.tku.ac.jp/
2. 2. He still pursues this goal as part of a larger concept of creating an 'autonomous unit', a mixture of boat and art/science buoy which would have its own energy source and communication system and be completely independent; cf. Kunstlabor 2007 (http://send.ung.at/).
3. 3. cf. I-TASC -- the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation, http://www.interpolar.org/
4. 4. I would like to avoid giving the impression to fetishise the making of transmissions. Valuable forms of radio art which do not involve the artists making their own transmissions do also exist.
5. 5. Virilio compares the mechanical precision of Muybridge's movement studies with a Rodin statue of an athlete whereby Rodin catches the movement in a static expression which is, on close inspection, not realistic at all, yet better suited to express motion than the realistic picture would be; unfortunately Virilio deals primarily with the image; his line of thought sometimes resembles the McLuhanite tendency of a quasi totalitarian media determinism insofar as there is no space for human agency. cf Virilio 1993
6. 6. by 'systemic' I mean a component of a system which is constituitive and not accidental to it; a component which is a structuring force within a socio-technical assemblage but which is also itself structured by the whole. cf The Social Shaping of Technology, Mackenzie and Wajcman (1985).

Fascist Media Use

The excesses of speed and the emergence of a mass consumer society with its corresponding mediascape were overshadowed by the rise of fascism in Japan and Europe. The gravest challenge of the early 20th century was the "increasing proletarisation of the people and the formation of masses, which are two sides of the same process."1 The rapid progress of technologies at the beginning of the century had increased the power of the productive forces while the ownership structures had been conserved.2 This created a pressure cooker society where "the increase in the productive forces through technological progress is pushing towards an unnatural release, which is war. War becomes evidence that society had not been mature enough for the technological means it had at hands."3 According to Benjamin, fascism tried to organise the masses without changing the existing ownership structures. It gave the masses a way of expressing themselves as a politicised mass but within a conservative political economy. "Fascism, therefore, amounted to an aestheticisation of political life. The abuse of the masses which are forced to the ground in the cult of the Führer, is equivalent to the abuse of an apparatus which has been put to service for the creation of cult values."4 This effort, Benjamin continues, can only have one result, which is war. "Speaking from the position of the technology only war is capable of mobilising the full technological potential of an era while conserving at the same time the ownership structures." The new media radio and film are complicit in the creation of the masses.5

Although radio played hardly any role in the rise of the Nazis to power before 1933, due to the heavily regulated and artificially apolitical character of German radio, the Nazis were quick to unleash the full potential of new media once they had seized power through 'democratic' elections. In the 1920ies and 1930ies more and more countries fell into the hands of fascist regimes while Stalin tightened his grip on the Sovietunion. Radio became the medium of choice for the dictators as it allowed them to address the nation as a unified mass, together, yet isolated as individuals or families in front of the apparatus. In a seminal artwork by Paul De Marinis, Firebirds (2004), he puts the voices of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Roosevelt into birdcages. The speeches are transmitted by gas flames modulated by electric fields, a technique which was used in the early 20th century before the invention of loudspeakers. DeMarinis' work both ridicules the dictator as well as it is able to recall the overwhelming power those voices had over people who were turned into a mass by the force field of the electrified aether.

1. 1. cf. Benjamin 1936/1977 (my translation), p.43.
2. 2. 'Ownership structures' also ment societies ruled by a patriarchic system of abstract fathers which gave young adults little chance to fully grow up so that they suffered psychological damage which made them prone to indoctrination by fascist ideologies, cf. Theweleit 1986.
3. 3. Benjamin 1936/1977, p. 43 paraphrased.
4. 4. Ibid, p. 42, (my translation).
5. 5. According to Benjamin the cinema newsreel has a paticularly high propagandistic potential: "Its capability of being reproduced in great numbers matches its capacity to reproduce the masses." (Ibid, p. 42, footnote 32) The big meetings which were held by the Nazis, sports events, marches, all this is experienced much better through the lens and the possibilities of mechanized perception than live. Mass movements of people suit the camera very well especially if amplified by technics such as unusual angles, the birds eye view, the long shot, the close up, as has been masterfully demonstrated by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

The Participatory Media Paradigm

With an accute sense of urgency the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht and the media theorist Walter Benjamin tried to formulate an emancipatory and anti-fascist artistic theory and practice. When fascism, according to Benjamin, amounted to an aestheticisation of politics, revolutionary communism was engaged in the politicisation of the arts.1 Brecht and Benjamin (and also some of the Russian Futurists) mark the starting point of a participative paradigm in art which aims at using technical media in an emancipatory way. It has taken a long time, many technical innovations and social change up till today for this paradigm to come into full bloom (see later in this text). In a few short texts, summarized under the term Brecht's Radio Theory, Brecht stated that radio had been crippled by leaving only the receiver for the general public. Brecht demanded that every receiver should potentially also be a transmitter. Radio should not isolate people but set them into relation to each other.2

In 1934 in exile in Paris Walter Benjamin gave a speech at the Institute For the Study of Fascism, published under the title The Author as Producer.3 Here, Benjamin looked at the position of leftist writers vis-a-vis society. In anticipation of the critique of the culture industry by the Frankfurt School, he reminded of the capacity of the culture industry dominated by the bourgeois to assimilate and coopt progressive or even revolutionary content. He stated that it was wrong to ask how progressive the work itself was or how it related to the power structures of society -- Marx' relationship of the means of production. It was more important, according to Benjamin, to ask how a work functions within the relationship of the means of literary production.4

Benjamin demanded that the author shouldn't just produce for the literary system, and that he needed to actively seek to change it, to introduce new forms of production and new instruments. Therefore the poet needed to use the 'lowly' medium of the press to seek engagement and further participation of the many in the process of writing and reading. The author as producer was expected to work towards removing the barriers between writers and readers. Benjamin also stated that a constant 'remelting' of cultural and literary forms happened, whereby 'class struggle dictated the temperature' of this process.5 Benjamin was convinced that technique facilitated the invention of new cultural formats and that yet unimaginable new cultural forms would emerge from the combination of social change triggered by class struggle and new technologies being applied creatively by progressive artists. The same artistic programme or behavioural guideline is also embodied in the following quote by Brecht:

"It is not our job," Brecht wrote, "to renew the ideological Basis of the existing social order through innovations, but to make it give up its basis through our innovations. [...] Through continuous, never ending proprosals how to better use the apparatuses in the interest of the general public we have to shake up the social Basis of those apparatuses, and to discredit their use in the interest of the few."6

1. 1. Ibid, p. 44, my translation.
2. 2. cf. Brecht 1932
3. 3. cf. Benjamin 1934/2002.
4. 4. According to Benjamin, by focussing on the 'technique' used by an artist, 'literary production was opened up to a straight social and materialistic analysis.' The term technique (in German Technik - I think it would be inappropriate to translate this as 'technology') 'offers the opportunity to dialectically overcome the unproductive contradiction between form and content,' Benjamin claims; and, he continues, it also contains 'the right direction how to negotiate the relationship between (political) tendency of a work and its quality.' (all passages Benjamin 1934/2002, p. 233) The 'quality argument' is still used today by aesthetically progressive but politically conservative art experts to chastise progressive artists and movements.
5. 5. Ibid, p. 235
6. 6. Aber es ist keineswegs unsere Aufgabe, die ideologischen Institute auf der Basis der gegebenen Gesellschaftsordnung, durch Neuerungen zu erneuern, sondern durch unsere Neuerungen haben wir sie zur Aufgabe ihrer Basis zu bewegen. Also für Neuerungen, gegen Erneuerung! Durch immer fortgesetzte, nie aufhörende Vorschläge zur besseren Verwendung der Apparate im Interesse der Allgemeinheit haben wir die gesellschaftliche Basis dieser Apparate zu erschüttern, ihre Verwendung im Interesse der wenigen zu diskreditieren. cf. Brecht 1932 (see Medienkunstnetz: Brecht's Radio Theory).

The Decline of the Public Sphere

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990) gives a historic account of the formation of the public sphere and its decline. There he argues that in the feudal system, while public events did happen, they were merely of a representational character. Everybody was present, but in a representational capacity only, there was no public discourse, no difference of opinion was allowed and all actual power was centralized in the institution of the souvereign/monarch. The events of public life followed a strict ceremonial protocol. The rise of the bourgeois as a political class was intricately linked with the emergence of a public life characterized by rational debate, the raisonnement of the educated liberal middle class man. The century of liberalism, which Habermas somehow dates between 1780 and 1880, was characterized by the high quality of rational discussion between free individuals. However, this was restricted to males of the capital owning middle class, with very few woman and people from other classes able to participate. By the beginning of the 1960ies in Western European countries class struggle had by and large subsided and been replaced by a postwar consensus that guaranteed a state of frozen peace with increasing levels of prosperity shared more equally in society. While the newspapers, in particular mass circulation daily papers were owned by 'press barons' (a figure immortalized by Citizen Kane, but one which had existed since the 1880ies and the fast rotating press and lithography) electronic media radio and TV were state regulated to prevent any form of leftwing or rightwing extremism.1 In other words, by the beginning of the 1960ies the public as presented by mass media had become representational again, a 'spectacle' as opposed to an open public sphere where a rational debate happened which would not only be critical but also relevant for actual politics. The powers to be had been able to isolate themselves from any real political debate by holding the mass of voters as a captive audience in front of a TV screen which presented a manipulated worldview -- a situation which should only deteriorate from then on till today.

Into this situation of the Frozen Peace of the early 1960ies broke the New Left, a hotchpotch mix of non-orthodox Marxist splinter groups, the free speech movement, various civil rights and minority issue movements and the Anti-Vietnam movement, culminating in the Summer of Love in San Francisco 1967 and the student revolt of May 1968. These groups advocated grassroots participatory democracy or so called self-organisation and practiced a type of media use which was equivalent to their political ideas. Everybody should in principle also be a publisher, a radio journalist, a critique, a columnist or reviewer, in short, a producer. A participatory grassroots model for electronic media was applied by community media activists such as Deedee Halleck (2002) or the student radio during the revolutionary days in Berkeley, and later by the free radio movement in Europe.2

The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger became the media theorist for this newly emerging paradigm of participatory media. Going back to Brecht and Benjamin he reitereated some of their demands, like the one that electronic media should be turned from a distribution medium into a communication medium. But he not only echoed some of the concerns of Brecht and Benjamin, he also updated them. According to Enzensberger, "the technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance." (Enzensberger 1970/1996, p. 64) He scolded the New Left for having reduced its criticism of the "development of the media to a single concept -- that of manipulation," yet agreed that "the present concept of manipulation [...] reflected the feeling of powerlessness of the Left and the objective reality that "the decisive means of production are in the enemies hands". (my emphasis) Like Benjamin and Brecht, Enzensberger believed into the emancipatory power of new media. But, shaped by the postwar experience and the rise of electronic consumer goods, he added some important qualifications. According to Enzensberger the decisive point about media was their collective structure. "For the prospect that in the future, with the aid of the media, everyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only insofar as it remains socially and therefore aesthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model of this." (Ibid, p. 70) He went on to say that this was what the market was already aiming at. Many people were already owning Super 8 cameras and tape recorders but they could become at best "amateurs, not producers."3 Even the radio amateur movement had been tamed and reduced to a "harmless inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered amateurs." (Ibid) Enzensberger's description of the chances offered by participatory media but also the danger of them becoming politically toothless by being kept within the confinement of amateurism or hobbyism were of an almost prophetic quality. Enzensberger also distanced himself from media determinism in the style of McLuhan and his many followers:

Anyone who believes that freedom for the media will be established if everyone is busy, transmitting and receiving, is the dupe of a liberalism, that, decked out in contemporary colours, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests. (Ibid)
Enzensberger stressed that this was the point where "socialist concepts part company with the neoliberal and technocratic ones." No one can expect to be "emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware." To think like that would mean to fall "victim of an obscur belief in progress." (Ibid) This thesis is distilled into the dialectical formula that the "...the media demands organisation and makes it possible..." (Ibid) Enzensberger would like to see the "socialist movements take up the struggle for their own wavelengths." They should, he continues, "build their own transmitters and relay stations."4 (Ibid, p. 70) Enzensberger bemoans the fact that the "innate Luddism of Marxism has left a vacuum into which a stream of non-Marxist hypothesis and practices has consequently flowed." According to him the 'innocent' and the 'apolitical' had made "much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the left." From Warhol's Factory to the Beatles and the Stones Enzensberger still saw an emancipatory potential in what was then underground rock culture, but also the multimedia art of the time as practiced by Pop Art.

1. 1. For a more theoretic approach to the models of media regulation and different forms of media freedom cf. Barbrook 1995, Media Freedom.
2. 2. According to Barbrook this was the first time that a model of media freedom emerged which matched participatory grassroots democracy or self-organisation, a model of media freedom distinctly different from prevailing models of media freedom -- the liberalist or Girondist model and the Jacobinite or state controlled model, and or a mix of the two. cf Barbrook 1995.
3. 3. Web 2.0 platforms such as Flickr, MySpace or YouTube neutralise the potential of any submitted work through the way it is organized. Through the sheer fact that it is uploaded to those 'platforms' copyright is taken away from contributors and the platform owners reserve the right to censor content despite the alleged openness. Any artwork on MySpace competes with millions of images of supposedly individual expression which is in effect just an illustration of how relentlessly conformistic pressures have become. Myspace is actually Murdoch's space.
4. 4. At the time when Enzensberger wrote that in Western Europe this was only possible if the state legally granted a licence to a free radio station or in underdeveloped countries such as Uruquay where the native Tupumaru tribe staged a media revolution using radio; a sort of predecessor to the Chiapas uprisal.

Subcultural Communications

Only 10 years later, in 1980, the post-hippie rock industry had become one of the repressive aspects of capitalism's media machine. The democratic 'spectacle' had been enhanced by modern subconscious manipulation techniques derived from advertisement, the rise of 'telegenic' politicians such as Reagan to power and new techniques of opinion polling. In the early 1980ies centrist German political parties had reached a compromise over the liberalisation of democratic media. The deal foresaw the running of privately owned radio and TV in post-war West Germany for the first time. In exchange for that the left got so called Open Channels, something like a state sponsored (albeit on low level) community or citizen TV and radio. But those Open Channels were structured in such a way that they did not offer any real opportunity for dissenting voices and a different aesthetics. Apart from the positive aspect that some ethnic minorities gained access to a window into the media landscape the programmes only illustrated Enzensberger's dictum that, "the programs that the isolated amateurs mount are always only bad, outdated copies of what he in any case receives." (Enzensberger 1970/1996, p.71)

In 1985 I started to work as a media artist and I was at the same time writing a lot of poetry and fiction. In one of the fragments that I wrote at the time I formulated my criticism of the media landscape of the mid 1980ies. In that story fragment the media mainstream consisted of a state-business duopoly which exerted a near total mind control on the people. It was fought by two underground guerrilla media outfits. One was called Radio Subcom, a mobile radio station which broadcast counter-propaganda -- all the things the mainstream didn't want you to know; the other outfit was the much more radical and secretive O.T. (untitled). The name was the message. O.T. would not get involved with counter propaganda. It's only message was the black screen, it's only aim was to disrupt the broadcasts of the media mainstream in the hope that any prolonged black-out of the 'system-media' could trigger a revolution. As time would show, the more reformist agenda of Radio Subcom would survive (and maybe get compromised) whereas O.T. just vanished.

At that time I started working with the musician Urs Blaser alias Oil Blo and the graphic artist Antonia Neubacher. In 1986/87 Oil Blo converted an old Mercedes Hanomag into a mobile platform for media practice. The loading bay of the small truck got seperated into two parts. The back part remained loading bay and was carrying our special PA sound system. In the small middle compartment he installed a system of instrument racks which housed a small audiovisual studio. It had just enough space for a small video editing suite on Sony Betamax, an Atari, a mixer, some special effect machines and two skinny artists. Blaser's van became the physical hardware structure for the fictitional Radio Subcom. Thus, Neubacher designed a text based logo which was written in big white letters from bottom to top on one of the sides of the van. From then on Blaser, Neubacher and me formed the core of Subcom which could, for bigger projects, expand to up to 30 people.

With this van we travelled the roads of Europe as, what I would call in hindsight, a mobile tactical media unit. We saw ourselves as an interface mediating between the European underground and subcultural movements and the bourgeois media avantgarde sometimes also called media art. We declared that we intended to bring an 'artistic dimension' to the new paradigm of information. "Networking, co-ordination, the immaterial art of communication, the qualitative improvement of the stream of data" were our explicit goals (Subcom Dossier, 1988). Our early work between 1987 and 1988 had been dominated by a remix aesthetics. The sound sample, or what we called the 'cliché' was at the centre of our work. We understood the media mainstream as a totally reified and alienating environment. So we took samples from it and thought that by cutting it up and remixing and recontextualizing it we gave it new meaning.

But after our mobilisation through the van a new way of working emerged. Our idea about mobility was not influenced by romantic notions of the postmodern intellectual as a nomad. It was more practical, about being able to be mobile and to keep being able to be a fully functioning media unit. We could go around places, make field recordings, and then settle down somewhere for a couple of weeks to produce radio programmes which we distributed via pirates and legal free radio stations in Europe such as Radio 100 in Amsterdam, Radio 100 Berlin, Radio Lora, Radio Dreyeckland. We could also drive onto a derelict industrial estate or a squat or a social centre, unpack the sound system, put up the video projector and make an audiovisual performance, or a party, or both, within a few hours of arriving.

Moving around Europe with the slow pace of the old truck from squat to arts festival and back again, allowed us to experience the deep transformation of the political and social life of Europe from the sharp end. Around that time the mainstream media narration was about the transformation from an industrial society to an information society. But under this pre-text the power elites were trying to squash alternative and autonomous political movements. The spectre of RAF terrorism was used to clamp down on politically active scenes in Germany. The context, as we understood it then, was that the creation of the European Union was equal to building a corporate Europe, cleaned up, where the politically undesireable had either been locked up or made to hyde. This was the time, leading up to the Maastricht Treatment, when under our eyes fortress Europe became a reality. Travelling with a battered old van allowed us to gain insights into layers of those emerging control structures which we otherwise wouldn't have had.1

As by the end of the 1980ies the last 'open living spaces where alternative life styles could be tried out,' were closed down or battled for survival, the van was in a way like a sensor/probe, picking up the political movements of the day on the street level. The postmodern vagueness of the mid-80ies gave way to a new political clarity about the sharp divisions that were created in the New Europe. Moving around, recording and transporting messages from place to place was what we called 'physical networking'. Part of that was also to look for collaboration partners within the cultural avantgarde of the squatters and underground movements.

In 1987 we were introduced to Heidi Grundmann. In 1988 she commissioned us together with Julie Lazar from MOMA L.A. to produce our first radio art piece "Europe Report 1". The work was the synthesis of the mobile life-style and a new concept inspired by it. The remixing agenda was pushed to the background and we developed the concept of 'authentic' recordings as opposed to media clichés. In Europe Report I we painted a scenario where the fictitional New European Security Forces in their Star Wars uniforms cleansed the streets while bio-fuel trains glided noiselessly through the large business innnovation park that Europe had become. Europe Report 2 In Between Cities was based on a two-week stay in a Milan Squat where we got much more aware of the urgency of the immigration question with hundreds of people Sans Papiers at the time squatting churches in Paris and council buildings in Milan which were then arsoned. Berlusconi media fuelled hatred of immigrants and then somebody put the actual fuel and lit it. The middle class and the mainstream media had successfully isolated themselves from such events and it was the role of underground media like Subcom to carry that message. We were an Indymedia before the time.

Our goal was to create a living archive of authentic recordings as a source for real-time composition. The idea was to have a digital database with our recordings, sliced into digestable pieces, annotated and key-worded, so that it would be easy to use and draw on for making programmes. Establishing such a framework for long term archiving as a tool for real-time editing and composition was a major conceptual project, and more important to us than the individual programmes which we produced. It was related to our understanding that real radio art could never be satisfied with having a slot on state sponsored media, however benevolent the editor, but must, conceptually at least, always seek to create models for autonomous free radio stations.

Under this headline message we shared some other concerns which were of a more particularly aesthetic nature. Subcom tried to create a new radio aesthetics by experimenting with a mix of low- and hi-tech. We firmly believed that it was better to work with technology which we knew and controlled rather than high tech which was beyond our means. This was partly a political argument about DIY technology, partly stemming from aesthetic concerns ablout craftmanship. We thought that an artist needed to be able to control the means of production and know them from the inside out. Thus, Blo built his amplification and speaker system himself, using old valve amplifiers and self-built speakers. This low-tech approach was matched by the early use of DAT technology and binaural microphones which allowed us to go into micro sound and stealth recording (using the earphone microphones and a small DAT hidden in a holster inside a jacket). Another important part of Subcom's radio philosophy was that we considered ourselves to be sonic environmentalists who tried to counter the pollution of the acoustic environment by traffic and the mass media.

At around 1991 we started our own mailbox with the help of a computer security expert from Frankfurt. We had developed a system that could be accessed via Atari Portfolio computer, an early breast pocket size computer for which an obscure Dutch company produced an acoustic coupler. With the bus we did what we called physical networking. The mailbox allowed Subcom agents to roam Europe and phone in reports from public phone boxes with acoustic couplers and the Portfolio. At that time we also had added an Amiga for real-time computer graphics and we used it for VJ-ing at free squatter parties as well as art events. We had created ourselves a working situation in which we owned and controlled most of the tools of production and we combined those to weave together physical/analogue and digital networks. Not content with this at around 1992 we got very ambitious and started project Stubnitz art-space-ship which became an entire story of its own. Subcom somehow melted into the Stubnitz and ceased to exist 1993.

1. 1. For instance, while the official talk was of removal of internal borders in the EC (then it was still the EC, only later it became the EU), what actually happened was that the border became virtual and omnipresent, extended into the Hinterland. The immigration regime was tightened.

The Internet as Democratic Media Cornucopia

The 20th century can be understood along the lines of a process of democratization of access to media and the means of cultural production. Things that originally were the privilege of social elites only became accessible for a much greater number of people. At the beginning of the 20th century access to education and knowledge was restricted as well as access to high culture. People from lower income classes had insufficient means of participating in the democratic process because they were either not allowed to vote or they did not have an opportunity to get an informed opinion. The socialist and social democrat movements in the 1920s tried to change that. After WWII radio facilitated free access to cultural goods, and, as this progressively increased through miniaturization and the introduction of the transistor in the 1960ies and 1970ies pop and rock radio democratized the means of cultural hedonism. In a parallel development people also started to get access to the means of cultural production1 -- starting with Super 8 film cameras, small film photography, cassette machines and the first portable video machines. However, what is eerie is that each of those steps of democratisation of access which at a different point would have meant a real revolution -- a significant change of social relationships which inevitably would have implied a political revolution and not only one of the communication media -- was always absorbed by the capitalist system. I do not propose to construct this as a rule of the form that media revolutions were only allowed to happen once society was ready to absorb them. To say that would be defeatist. But I want to point this out as a warning to those who too enthusiastically project political hopes into improvements of the configuration of the media. In the 1980ies with Subcom we thought that once we had access to the means of production we -- whereby I refer to a collective we of underground media producers -- could have a significant impact on the media landscape. We found that not to be true and that, on the contrary, we were lacking a distribution medium and on top of that accessible free spaces for cultural self-organisation were breaking away.2

In the late 1970ies, early 1980ies the home computer made its debut. Rather than just being one medium it promised to be a meta-medium, a freely programmable machine which could be used to build other 'machines' -- tools, instruments, media systems. The computer could be a printing press, a desktop typesetting studio, a graphic layout studio, a sound studio, a film/video studio and it could be combinations and crossovers of such things. Media convergence was looming. Despite the appearance of early BBS systems in the 1980ies, what was still missing was access to the means of dissemination. This arrived with the internet.
As the internet started to open up for public use in the early 1990ies it was welcomed by many people and groups from a broad spectrum who all belonged to counter- and subcultural movements who finally saw their moment coming. Distribution was what everybody had been lacking. The fanzine culture of the 1980ies, the community media groups working with radio and video, many of them saw a chance of finally getting their own channels. However, there remained a number of problems. While the internet was fairly open from 1993 onwards, bandwidth remained the bottleneck. Another problem was the software. In order to stream audio and video a codec is needed. The only available software to do that was proprietary. The 'player' software for a person to listen to an audio stream was free, but the producer software and the server cost money. Despite those limitations in the 1990ies many media activists settled on the net and a thriving culture of online forums, discussion groups, live streaming events and online magazines quickly originated. This was matched by a culture of real life meetings. It was not just enough to communicate online, it was important to meet in real space, to make friends, to learn together, to discuss strategies and projects.3

For the first time in history there existed the real possibility of a full on participatory, interactive and decentralized media paradigm to become the dominant model.4 There were problems and bottle necks but there were no more real barriers to a participatory media practice as Brecht, Benjamin and Enzensberger had imagined it. One important focal point of this energy were the Next 5 Minutes conferences in Amsterdam in 1993, 1996 and 1999.5 The decentralized, participatory and interactive media utopia had become real. However, what it could not do, was change the economic basis. On the contrary, the internet was instrumentalized to prop up an already fading neoliberalism. A strange alliance of US post-Hippie techno entrepreneurs and neoliberals drove the 'digital revolution' through media such as Wired magazine and boasted about the superior model of private enterprise, epitomised in the culture of networks of small companies financed by venture capital. By 1996, when Netscape went to the stock exchange and made billions, it was clear that a veritable boom was under way. The internet boom was ideologically and propagandistically used by the Clinton administration as evidence that the US system of a particular mix of market economy and democracy was the most inventive one in the world. US style neoliberalism became the model for social change, which was unanimously accepted to be the way to go by most countries.6

At the same time the internet became also the means of political organisation for a very scattered and fragmented opposition which included all sorts of people, from the party anarchists of Reclaim The Streets to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to trade unionists in Latin America and the more middle class Attac people in Europe. The potential of the internet as a platform for political organisation was highlighted by two powerful protest events, by June 18 1999 in London and by 'Seattle' later that same year, which brought all those people togaether and showed that the new 'movement without leaders and an ideology' could achieve critical mass. Highly decentralized participatory grassroots organisations had found with the internet an equally decentralized and participatory medium. Another important aspect had more drirectly to do with the technology and its form of social production. Key technologies of the internet were produced through a methodology which became known as 'peer based commons production' (Stalder 2005). Since 1984 the Free Software Foundation led by Richard Stallman had been fighting what was at first a rather lonely struggle for Free Software. Believing that all software should be free, free to use, free to inspect and modify and free to give away again, the FSF had developed a licence model, the General Public Licence which enshrined those freedoms. It also set out to create a completely free operating system which it called GNU. But first it had to go through the arduous task of wrighting tools to make tools, an editor (Emacs), a compiler (gcc) and many other useful bits and pieces. So, when in 1991 the Finnish computer studend Linus Torvalds used those tools to write the operating System Linux, it was only natural for him to publish it under the GPL. The combination of the GPL, the GNU tools, Linux and the internet enabled software developers all around the world to collaborate on complex software projects without the need for a company structure or expensive computer labs. This extraordinarly successful 'bazar model' was eagerly adopted not only by the mainstream of open source developers who considered themselves to be 'apolitical' but also by hacker-activists with a politicized worldview. The licence model of the GPL helped to further a collaborative production method between equals or peers with the result of their labour becoming public goods -- which is the essence of peer based commons production.

Hackers driven by social motivations and sometimes loosely, sometimes more closely aligned with the new global opposition movement used this methodology to satisfy Benjamin's demand that 'authors' work towards the facilitation of cultural and political self expression of the general public. Illustrating the 'collective' aspect that Enzensberger has emphasised this new culture thrives around open hacklabs where people can meet, collaborate, exchange ideas. Since the 1990ies this political netculture scene has been growing and expanding. It is like a matrix from which continually exciting new projects emerge.7

The Italian computer hacker and artist Denis Jaromil Rojo is the lead developer of Dyne:bolic, a customized Linux distribution and Live CD optimized for cultural production in general and radio in particular. His initial idea was to create a 'nomadic' radio station which would move from server to server and thereby evade any attempts of control. With the Dynebolic Live CD almost any computer can be turned within minutes form a boring office machine into a net radio studio for production and dissemination. Particular attention has been given by the developers to the system being able to work on old machines with low processor speed and on bad internet connections -- the quality of the stream adapts to the quality of the internet connection.http://dyne.org/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote8_04h8qnq">8
The processing of audio signals has been revolutionized by the software Pure Data.http://puredata.info/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote9_fktfopg">9 Its inventor Miller Puckette has deep roots in the electroacoustic music scene. The software which he wrote consists of a graphical toolbox to model acoustic events inside the computer -- sine wave generators, oscillators, amplifications, filters and effects. Every conceivable sonic machine or instrument can be built through a combination of those simple elements. Pure Data is much more than an instrument or tool in any conventional sense, it is a meta level tool which is based on deep knowledge of electroacoustics and the science of waves. It is also open and extendable. Users of the software can swap the 'patches' they have written (tools which they constructed) while expert progranmmers can write extensions to the software, so called 'externals' in the programming language C. Those properties make Pure Data particularly popular among sound artists and radio artists such as Martin Howse/xxxxx,http://1010.co.uk/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote10_zl48z4e">10 Yves Degoyon, Ramiro Cosentino, Tatiana De La O, and many others, who use Pure Data in very unconventional ways to create live streaming environments for radio art improvisationshttp://r23.cc/interface/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote11_wd72pgp">11 and live art.

Examples could go on almost endlessly, with content management systems of a new generation such as Drupal, which facilitates the creation of 'social media' such as online magazines, podcasts, blogs and fora, or Puredyne, which combines Dynebolic and PureData, and the free streaming media environment Shoutcast. In addition to that free software and the bazar model of creativity is also used for artistic projects such as the work of the group Mongrelhttp://www.mongrel.org.uk/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote12_23n1wwx">12 with projects like 9Nine, an internet platform for the formulation of digital subjectivity, and Telephone Trottoir, a communication system for the Congolese community in London using Voice-over-IP (Internet telephony). The exact border definition between artist and engineer become difficult when artists become engineers of social media platforms and programmers create artful tools.http://interrupt.org.uk/symposia/engineer/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote13_c0eijyn">13

A process underpinning this development is that the capacity of communication technologies increases while at the same time they get ever cheaper. Often falsely attributed to Moore's law alone, this has to do as much with technical innovation as with the exploitation of cheap labour in China and other rapidly industrializing economies. However, the outcome is that consumers worldwide can buy cheap electronic goods with ever higher processor speeds and more memory.

Radio is making a comeback with wireless data networks. Technically that means that receiving and transmitting EM waves can now be controlled by computers in very efficient and inventive ways such as spread spectrum and frequency hopping technologies. This is the basis of a variety of wireless data network technologies for different purposes and in different bands of the EM spectrum, from Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) to 3rd Generation mobile telephony networks and protocols for short distance communication such as bluetooth. The combination of wireless transmissions and computer technologies opens up a wide variety of possibilities, both technically and socially.14 Since around 2000 a movement has started, first in cities such as London, New York, Seattle, to build wireless community networks using WLAN, an idea quickly picked up by people in Berlin, Madrid, Athens, Jakarta and many other places worldwide. These networks are created by the people in a collaborative effort without central command and control; those network infrastructures are communally owned and based on conventions of free traffic of information so that those independent network infrastructures form a Network Commons. A range of projects in London around the free network provider Free2air.org have shown the potential of free wireless infrastructures for art whereby some of those projects have been carried out in collaboration with conventional radio stations such as Resonance.fm, Radio Fro and Radio Cycle.15

While the old order controls the mass media, the oil and the weapons, so that those things are still in the hands of the enemy so to speak, the dissenting unorthodox left is not just owning the means of production, it is actually producing them and thereby shaping the course of future technological development. As Bert Brecht has imagined, this has the potential to unspin the capitalist system from within. Just as he said, the continuous, never ending production of new apparatuses (and not just proposals as to their uses) in the interest of the general public shakes up the social Basis of those apparatuses. The commons based peer production makes technologic development autonomous from the dictate of capital and puts the decision about what to produce into the hands of the programmers themselves.

Yet we need to be careful about predictions of the imminent end of capitalism. It is an interesting notion that, as Marx said, capitalism will be happy to produce the shovels needed to dig its own grave. Those shovels could well turn out to be computers and cabled bound and wireless network technologies. At the same time mass media are are keeping a corrosive grip on people's imagination. Capitalism is now promoting its own version of the participatory media paradigm. A new internet boom has started since 2 or 3 years which uses many of the tools and ideas created by the free netculture movement and sells it back to the masses as an achievement of venture capital driven innovation. So called Web 2.0 or social software platforms such as YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, are the most prominent examples of a new industry which threatens a new enclosure movement. First, in the attention economy of the mainstream media we hear a lot about those but nothing about this other world of free software which has created the conditions for those venture capital funded network platforms to grow. Secondly, also free and open source software programmers live within a capitalist economy which forces them to earn money. A process of buying up scores of key people form free software projects to work on those proprietary projects can already be observed. And last not least the copyright industry is trying to clamp down on the free exchange of information and is trying to cripple the hardware architecture of computers and the inner working of the net in order to install global copy protection schemes. Finally, the paranoid militant nation state is seeing it as its good right to install surveillance architectures to monitor the global flows of information.

1. 1. None of these processes happened without problems. Dictatorial states and elite groups did not easily give up the privilege of education and the right to control the flow of information in the first half of the 20th century. When some industries started to produce consumer electronics other industries started to fear for their business models as tape recorders could be used to copy music at home.
2. 2. Another way of looking at this would be to say that aesthetically we won as the subcultural media aesthetic became copied and in many ways is the dominant aesthetics now, but politically this did not further our concerns at all.
3. 3. A lively collection of the concerns of the time can be found in the online documentation of the conference Art Servers Unlimited, London 1998. http://asu.sil.at/
4. 4. In a way this was also the point when the subculture/mainstream dichotomy stopped making any sense. On this point compare Stalder 2005.
5. 5. cf The Next 5 Minutes http://www.next5minutes.org/
6. 6. In the late 1990ies 'flexible' man and the 'risk taking society' became sociological buzzwords -- both euphemisms for more precarity. cf Medosch 2007.
7. 7. I have looked into this link more deeply in "Piratology", cf. Medosch 2003.
8. 8. cf Dyne:bolic website, available from http://dyne.org/ last accessed August 2007.
9. 9. cf. Pure Data website, available from http://puredata.info/ last accessed August 2007.
10. 10. cf. xxxxx website, available from http://1010.co.uk/ last accessed August 2007.
11. 11. cf. website of the live streaming network r23.cc, available from http://r23.cc/interface/ last accessed August 2007.
12. 12. cf. Mongrel website available from http://www.mongrel.org.uk/ last accessed August 2007.
13. 13. cf. the Interrupt Symposium by i-Dat, Plymouth 2003, project description available online from http://interrupt.org.uk/symposia/engineer/ last accessed August 2007.
14. 14. I have pointed at some of those possibilities in: Society in Ad-hoc mode, Medosch 2004.
15. 15. I give an overview of those movements in: On Free Wavelength. cf. Medosch 2006.

Conclusions

We live in an extraordinary time when the democratic cornucopia of media is very close to becoming reality and where there are hardly any technical barriers, and if there are the free software community will be capable of solving them. Yet the power elites have already found ways of either subverting that and subverting the creative impulse and the desire of the people, or they are simply moving the goalposts by reminding us that they have naked force on their side.

Regarding radio, the interesting effect is that after 100 years the medium is now in the process of dissolution. Radio can now be produced through software suites such as dyne:bolic by a 15 year old kid alone at home in Ramallah or Bangalore. The apparatic form and radio as a social imaginary signification are drifting apart again. The assemblage of studio-transmitter-receiver is, while still existing, a technically highly obsolescent model. While the technically overdeveloped countries switch to Digital Audio Broadcast (notable the absence of radio in that acronym) old fashioned radio is still relevant in underdeveloped countries and for cash poor community radio activists. However, 'radio' can now have so many different appearances, it can be sent and received on the internet as a live-stream, it can be downloaded as a podcast and listened to on an MP3 player, on the mobile phone or via digital radio in the car. In particular the ubiquituousness of mobile phones, where each mobile is actually a full blown computer plus two-way radio transceiver, and the eagerness of mobile phone companies to open new revenue streams can be expected to generate new formats of distribution of audio 'content'. The use of the word radio in this context is increasingly feeling nostalgic. However, I am not predicting the imminent death of radio either. As we all know media and art forms pronounced dead live longer. All that I am saying is that the social imaginary signification of radio is opening up and separating itself from a fixed association with any given apparatic form. What radio is or will be is completely up for grabs. It is quite unlikely that radio will be in the future like what some private commercial stations have become (and what unfortunately is imitated by public radio) -- an audio jukebox which plays a continuous stream of music. With blogging, audio blogging, live streaming projects blossoming around the world, it is also unclear if radio will have a future as a top down journalistic news medium. Through the net and the general process of convergence, corrosion and dissolution of media a lot of hybrid interactive and participative forms can be realized, in principle.

As we have reached a stage where technically everything seems possible, it is once more time for artists to formulate an utopian potential of radio which goes beyond the status quo. The big problem that we have politically is that of the technologically developed mass society which is characterised by a high dependency on large buerocratic and technological systems which can neither be easily changed nor turned off. (Marcuse 1964) Those life support systems sustain biological life now without being sustainable in the long term. However, the functioning of the system and the possibility of leading a relatively easy life for the majority of people in highly developed countries have made real politics in those countries almost impossible. Politics has been replaced by biopolitics. (Agamben 2002) Thus, the old idea that the public domain is a political battleground about people's support for competing systems is dead, as there are no competing systems (or the differences are quite marginal). Meanwhile the masses enjoy oscillations of 'individuality' along the axis of a very wide and deep reaching conformity. The idea that counter-cultural or subcultural media can alter people's consciousness and so lead out of that dilemma is not an answer anymore. What progressive artists maybe can do is to abandon that battle field that was traditionally seen as content and focus on unravelling the system from within by conducting a more rigorous analysis of those systems and finding ways of using their properties against them. While the focus on new tools and instruments that dominated the first decade of the internet was a necessary step, now it is maybe time for more radical DIY strategies which do not only focus on the advanced tools and concepts of the free software scene but on the ways those tools are socially embedded and collectively used. New 'grow your own' strategies must not approach media and communication technology in an isolated way but in connection to other systems including energy, food, learning, health and what Nick Dyer-Witheford calls in relation to the early Marx conviviality.1 Translated onto radio this could mean that it becomes even more important that artists claim the right to make their own signals and transmissions and create polymorphic as well as autonomous media structures, online, offline, cabled-bound and wireless. My personal conclusion is that I am going back to the childhood days and become again a listener to voices in the aether. I belief that one particular quality of radio which could give it longevity as a medium beyond the lifespan of its apparatic form is voice -- that what lies between the meaning of biologically having a voice and finding a political voice, the aural qualities of human voices and their relationship to mental faculties and the project of emancipation which is still waiting to be fulfilled.

1. 1. cf. Dyer-Witheford 2006

Babylon by Bus - Jaromil, the lyrical programmer activist

Denis 'Jaromil' Roio is the main author of the GNU/Linux Live CD Dyne:bolic as well as of a number of audiovisual tools. He is also an artist who has been part of international exhibitions such as CODeDOC II by the Whitney Museum Artport and speaker on conferences such as Ars Electronica. Inspired by Richard Stallman's "free as in free speech" approach as well as liberatory politics, Jaromil seeks to transgress borders between art and code, social activism and research and development. This text is an introduction and overview about Jaromil's life and ideas, based on an interview conducted in June 2006 in Amsterdam. At the taxi-to-praxi research workshop on 21st of April he talked about Solid Knowledge.

Biographic Background

Denis 'Jaromil' Roio grew up in Pescara in Italy. His family roots go back to Napoli and he is happy to explain everybody how to dance the Tarantella. His parents had a computer shop and he started his career, like so many, by playing games, and then by trying to remove the copy protection from games and last not least by trying to write his own games. At a quite early age he acquired significant computer skills and was participating in the Italian anarchist BBS scene through Cybernet which was particularly active in the early nineties, before the Italian mailbox crackdown1. Although not personally affected by the police raids which shut down dozens of BBS's, this incident may have been of an early formative quality. A newly introduced copyright law made public domain software illegal and gave the pretext for shutting down BBS systems which often circulated absolutely legitimate information -- concerns of civil society about violence against migrants for instance - things which were supressed in the right wing Italian media landscape which was already in the grip of Berlusconi.2

Audio Link: Jaromil: My Parents had a computer shop

Through a friend, Tony Mobily, a very colourful character, programmer, novelist and classic dancer, he was introduced to the GNU/Linux operating system at a time when GNU/Linux was still very difficult to install and run on computers. Like in similar instances3, his first impression was of an aesthetic quality4: he noticed the "funky fonts" which you could not have with DOS. Jaromil switched to GNU/Linux and enjoyed, amongst other things, the networking functions of GNU/Linux which were by far superior to Windows at the time when frequent error messages about "Winsock.dll" made networking life a misery for everybody. Jaromil went to a Lyceum which taught classical literature. He got interested in antique philosophers and authors and is generally a quite well read person with influences ranging from Pynchon to Debord and Ovid. At the same time he was politicised early on. His 'slightly hippie' politics, he said, were developed before he got deeper into computers. At that time, somehow between end of school and university, there may have been a kind of double crisis, a financial situation affecting his parents, as well as a personal crisis, so that he spent some time on the countryside with a Commune. Then, to solve his financial problems he got a programming job at a bank. Through this job he realised that his computing skills were 'worth something' and he began to put them to a social use.5

Audio Link: Jaromil: This is not DOS

Audio Link: Jaromil: Programming for a political purpose

"Injustice is the country of the rebel"

Audio Link: Jaromil I am a revolutionary

Jaromil is driven by a deep egalitarian ethos. His motivation to start a programming project is triggered often by the perception of social injustice: "I see an injustice and I feel the need to do something". From the very early days onwards his goal was to develop tools for people to express themselves. This is also explicitely motivated by the distortions which according to Jaromil media "czars" such as Berlusconi cause to the democratic system. As is well established in normative literature about the functioning of democracy, media freedom is important for democracy in a number of ways; it allows citizens to form an opinion based on facts about the social political systems and it allows, in principle, everybody to have a voice and contribute to the public debate. Through the concentration of media ownership in a few hands in liberal democracies, the multitude gets excluded from the public debate and only the voice of a very few gets heard, amplified through a thousand channels (cf. Chomsky, etc.).

When Jaromil got involved in programming, he wanted to create tools for people to express themselves. Through his adoption of GNU/Linux he learned about the particular notion of free software as proposed by Richard Stallman who says that the "free" in free software is not about the software being made available gratis but about "freedom of speech".

At that time, in the mid to late nineties the internet offered already many good ways of communicating by text - services such as listserv, usenet, web pages and web based forums -, but the possibilities for audiovisual expression were still quite minimal. The main software for live streaming of audio at the time was Real Audio. While the client software for the user was free, the server software had to be paid for according to a licence system which charged higher fees for higher numbers of users, which effectively put a cost barrier on live internet audio for financially weak individuals and institutions. Jaromil started to work on a software that would allow everybody to create a radio station on the internet, which would become MuSE (http://muse.dyne.org/). He also created a command line VJ tool called FreeJ (http://freej.dyne.org/); and he wrote a software which transcoded live video into ascii-video, called Hasciicam (http://ascii.dyne.org/). The Hasciicam became an instant hit in GNU/Linux circles and was integrated in standard GNU/Linux distributions. Then Jaromil had to leave Italy because he got a draft letter from the military and as a conscientious objector he did not want to serve. He found a home and support in Austria for a number of years, first in Linz through Servus.at, later in Vienna.

Dyne:bolic or "A rose is a rose is a rose"

There, at about the turn of the millennium, he started to develop Dyne:bolic (http://dynebolic.org/). The website "dyne.org" (http://dyne.org/) started initially as a way to stay in contact with an international network of hacker friends. "It showed a changing Moebius strip and an animated text banner saying a rose is a rose is a rose". At a hackmeeting in Italy he had learned about the Bolic1 software, one of the first GNU/Linux Live CD's created by LOA, a hacker group from Milan . A Live CD is a bootable disk - a whole operating system on a compact disk. When inserted into a computer and the computer gets restarted, it will run the GNU/Linux based operating system without the need to install it. This is an excellent way for people to get in contact with GNU/Linux. For a long time GNU/Linux had the image (and probably not just that) of being really difficult to install. To start working with GNU/Linux people needed to embark on a very steep learning curve because the biggest problems offered themeselves right at the start. Live CD's such as Dnye:bolic or the more widely known Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/) remove this barrier, there is no need to install anything and people can still enjoy the advantages of GNU/Linux. Jaromil started to develop a Live CD which would have all his audiovisual production tools pre-installed. He called it Dyne:bolic combining the name of his website (which was inspired by his love of ancient Greek philosophy in general and Heraclitus in particular) and the name of the Bolic1 Live CD which had inspired his project. Any standard PC could be turned into an audiovisual production suite within minutes by slotting Dyne:bolic into the disk drive and rebooting the machine.

A particular feature of Dyne:bolic is that it has been created to work well on old computers. By avoiding the usual GNU/Linux Desktops such as Gnome or KDE Dyne:bolic is very fast and efficient and can devote all the resources to rendering a live signal, for instance. It also uses available network bandwidth very effectively and can adapt to poor connectivity and still send a stream. Last not least Dyne:bolic is capable of clustering to combine the computing power of a number of machines. On a local network segment it detects other machines running Dyne:bolic and connects to them to effectively combine processor power. The weaker machines will then more or less just serve as 'thin clients' while the better machines do the audiovisual rendering jobs. Since Dyne:bolic 1.0 came out it has seen a complete rewrite over one and a half year. One of the most important improvements since version 2.0 ist that it now contains the production tools, so that other people can make versions of Dyne:bolic. This has actually happened through, amongst others, the Puredyne distribution (https://devel.goto10.org/puredyne), which, if one wants to say so, is a clone based one Dyne:bolic which is even more "audiovisual" by including tools such as Pure Data and other specialist producer and composer software.

Audio Link, Jaromil: the making of dyne 2

Creative Strategies: Trains in India

Jaromil at NID in Ahmedabad

Audio Link, Jaromil: Trains in India

Features of Dyne:bolic such as those described above are the result of Jaromil's political and creative development philosophy. Jaromil's explicit goal when writing a software such as Dyne:bolic can be summarised by the term "empowerment" although he himself would probably not use such a strong term which originally was connected in a very particular way with the Black American civil rights movement but has now been hijacked by much less noble causes. In order to be able to give people the chance to empower themselves Jaromil needs to find out their actual needs. The philosophy and concept behind Dyne:bolic has been developed through extensive travelling in India and Palestine. "Crossing borders" and allowing himself to be thrown off balance by actual events in real life are an important source of inspiration for Jaromil. As much as anybody else he would like to be surrounded by beautiful country side and nothing else to be able to fully concentrate on the creative task, he recognises that this would not necessarily bring the best results. Therefore he goes to zones of urban struggle and decides to live in an active squat in Amsterdam (there are squats which are just places to live cheaply and other squats which participate actively in a politicised squatter scene). This goes right to the heart of Jaromil's political philosophy. He sees the need to find out about "the dirty fights in Babylon". Although he devotes a significant time of his life to writing code, he always thinks outside the box and is equally concerned with real spaces, real situations, real people. As this keeps his sensibility sharp he is aware that "software" first and foremost, "changes the world of software." Thus, while it is his explicit goal to write software which in the long term changes the world, he is aware of the limitations of what software can do. For those reasons he also opposes the notion of the 'lab'. "There are already enough labs in the world," according to Jaromil. He takes his inspiration from those people whom he would like to see use his software and he tries to develop it and make it available in such a way that he can give something back to those communities. There is also a particular economics involved in this. As Jaromil lives in a squat he needs very little money to survive. By being an active squatter he seeks to make free living spaces available for other people as well. And by writing free software he seeks to create free spaces for expression, spaces in which a gift economy can blossom.6,7

GCC saved my life - The Political Economy

Audio Link, Jaromil GCC Saved my Life

The creative philosophy is also underpinned by an explicit political thinking informed by Marx. Jaromil links free software with Marx' concept of the ownership of the means of production. He defines himself as "an artisan, who is not paid but who is free to do what he thinks is right," and who is also "free to give away his intellectual production." His breakthrough moment came when he realised that with GNU/Linux he had not only a free operating system but also a free compiler. Up until then he had to use cracked versions of commercial compiler software. Programming languages such as C need to be 'compiled' into machine readable zeros and ones in order to work on a machine. Having had to use a pirated copy of the expensive industry standard C compilers of the past was a serious impediment for the dissemination of his software. Even though the software was one hundred percent his brainchild, he could not distribute it because of the compiler bottleneck. Richard Stallmans GNU project had created the GNU C Compiler, GCC, a formidable tool which was a real breakthrough for free software. From that moment onward artisan programmers such as Jaromil are able to own as individuals everything that they need to do their work.

Another important aspect of that is also the availability of cheap or free internet bandwidth and free server hosting facilities. Creative hacker communities and sometimes also partly publicly funded small netculture initiatives have since the early nineties worked hard to keep free and independent hosting facilities open which are neither under corporate nor government control. On such small server farms free software projects can run their version control systems, repositories for code which allow programmers to share development tasks and keep the development threads in an orderly manner. GNU/Linux, the gcc compiler and free hosting platforms give independent developers 100% control over their projects.

Audio Link, Jaromil I am an Artisan

Historically, the development of significant new technologies was only possible by huge initial investments. In the world of software a real "revolution" has happened insofar as those entry barriers have been removed and through free software a free space for creativity has been established. This free space is constantly threatened through the misguided policies of governments whose only aim is to protect the oligarchy of industry incumbents. The sad irony is that while most governments will publicly proclaim that it is their highest goal to support the "creative industry" they stick to restrictive intellectual property policies which threaten the creative freedom which has already been established through free software and the internet.

The political 'program' which is inscribed in Jaromil's development philosophy devolves power from dominant market forces and creates new non-markets in which a creative gift economy can happen. Insofar Jaromil is exemplary for many politicised free software programmers who do not just write any software - for instance also the US military supports 'open source' software - but who explicitely engage in software projects which increase the freedom of creative nonmarket spaces (cf. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks). Significant projects of a similar kind are for example the content management systems Drupal and Joomla. Written collectively by thousands of programmers, they give work to tens of thousands of internet developers who make hundreds of thousands of websites for small businesses, arts organisations, civil society organisations. The code itself is free also as in gratis but it is the basis for a significant economy to evolve which gives many people paid work. While the 'poetics' of Jaromils free software projects may reach and be fully understandable and usable only to a free software elite (at least that is a criticism which I often hear but do not actually share), he is in the process of becoming an iconic figure who inspires many others who set out on a similar path.

Interestingly, from a theoretic point, while industrialisation killed the jobs of many free artisans in the phase of primitive accummulation (when small artisanal production was turned into large scale industrial production) the new mode of commons based peer production on the nonmarket allows artisans such as Jaromil to be independent and yet create works which are of cultural and industrial significance. This may signal a true paradigm shift in the political economy of highly developed (or rather "newly de-industrialised"?) countries. A further important point in that regard is that while in the past the direction of future technological development was taken behind closed doors by the Power Elites (cf. C.W. Mills) now independent developers without any significant financial capital base can decide which turn technological development can take in a key economic area such as ITC. While the speed of development in this area is unprecedent - software projects such as Drupal or the GNU/Linux based operating system Ubuntu have 6 monthly update cycle - it may also hint that the strong intellectual property protection policies adapted across other industries are in fact crippling and only help to stay old fashioned business models and a compromised system of non-representational pseudo democracy in power.

All Audio excerpts from Jaromil

1. 1. Peter Ludlow, 1996. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace.MIT Press
2. 2. A detailed account of the Italian BBS and hacker scene can be found in Phrack Magazine and in the book Italian Crackdown by Carlo Gubitoso
3. 3. With similar instances I refer to interviews with other free software developers which I have been recording since spring 2006, where this aesthetic side of love-at-first-sight with GNU/Linux was also mentioned by the interviewees
4. 4. cf. Interview with Ian Morrison, unpublished, part of the same series of interviews
5. 5. Both Tony Mobily and Jaromil were part of Metro Olografix; Jaromil later joined Freaknet. The Italian hacker scene, similar to the Spanish scene, is very differently configured than the Northern and Western European scene with a much closer proximity between hackers and social movements and issues ranging from migration to queer and gender politics. The Italian book, Spaghetti Hacker, by Stefano Chiccarelli gives detailed insight into the subject area.
6. 6. cf. my essay Roots Culture (2004) deals already with some of the political and cultural issues which Jaromil links with free software writing.
7. 7. Medosch A . 
   2005.  Roots Culture: Free Software Vibrations "inna Babylon".
   How Open is the Future? Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios inspired by Free and Open Source Software..

Meerkat Economies and Bare Markets

thoughts to come...

ONE LOVE: How FLOSS Can Make True All the Promises of the Avantgarde (yet would kill 'art' by doing so)

In his essay All problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses, Simon Yuill claims that the emergent practice of livecoding 'most directly embodies the key principles of FLOSS production into the creation and experience of the work itself.' Unfortunately this claim is supportet by an argumentation which is elitist, draws on the criterium of virtuosity and thereby stands in stark contrast to the culture of particpation that FLOSS has engendered. While his central argument is not supported, the piece offers enough food for thought to be considered interesting reading.

On re-reading Umberto Eco on the openness of artworks1 and while thinking about the problem of the relationship between media art and Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) as I had it outlined in my original text The Next Layer it suddenly became clear to me that FLOSS makes true all the promises of the avantgarde yet kills art by doing so.

FLOSS has already realised some of the most important demands of the avant-garde of high modernity: it killed the author, or better, replaced him or her with a collaborative model of collective authorship - thereby making true the utopian demand by Isidore Ducasse and the Surrealists that 'poetry should be made by all'; it realised the demand by Walter Benjamin, who was himself inspired by the Russian Productivist Tretiakov, that the author should create the conditions for others to become authors as well, by creating a culture of particpation on a massive scale. (please note the difference between 'participation on massive scale' and 'the masses'; this is not about the 'masses', a derogatory term used by the bourgeoisie, but about the people.)

Seen from any possible angle FLOSS comes close to ideally representing key demands that have been raised about the ideal of artistic production by avant-garde movements in high modernity and the 1960ies. Yet at the same time the vast majority of the output of the FLOSS community is not art. The FLOSS community does not reference its products as art. FLOSS production is not linked to the canon of modern and contemporary art as it emerged from the artistic movements of high modernity; it is not part of the art system of museums and festivals. (On a more philosophical level I postulate that the full realisation of the demand of the avant-garde that 'poetry should be made by all' would automatically spell the end of art as we know it. More about that towards the end of the article.)

In recent years a small part of the art world tries to find ways to enlist FLOSS into the service of fine arts. Usually they get it very wrong as there are unresolvable differences between the ways FLOSS communities think and work and how the art world thinks and functions. Sometimes seemingly more convincing arguments are made about connections between FLOSS and art.

One such example has been the award winning essay All problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill. Although it is generally a very knowledgeable piece which contains some very important insights about both FLOSS and art, Yuill gets it all wrong in one central point: he bases his argument on elitism and virtuosity. As I will show, although FLOSS culture contains elements of both, elitism and virtuosity, those criteria stand in stark contrast to the central tenets of FLOSS culture: to foster a culture of enabling, facilitation and participation on a massive scale.

Under paragraph one of his text Yuill states:

"Of all the artforms supported and enabled through FLOSS, ‘livecoding’ has emerged as the one which most directly embodies the key principles of FLOSS production into the creation and experience of the work itself." (page 2)

Livecoding is an emergent practice whereby performers on stage type code into a computer which gets executed as they type it and produces sound and / or images. Main proponents of the practice are the group with, among others, Alex McLean, Amy Alexander and xxxxx. It is a very interesting practice and I have a lot of respect for the skill of the artists involved. It may also be true that livecoding shares some characteristics with forms of avant-garde music involving improvisation and open notation schemes. But what I find highly disagreeable is that livecoding ideally embodies the key characteristics of FLOSS and the way that this argument is made.

Simon Yuill claims that 'the fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs.[footnote 64]' 2 However, in FLOSS culture code is not just shared between 'friends'. FLOSS has spawned a mass participatory culture which is based on a very clear set of rules embodied in the GPL. The central tenet of FLOSS, if there is such a thing, is that code is not just shared between friends but between millions of strangers who in the vast majority never ever meet face-to-face. The main motivation for sharing is not friendship but a whole set of different motivations which are in the majority non-altruistic3

Schoenberg vs Sid Vicious

Another area in which Yuill's thesis leads itself ad absurdum is that he links livecoding with virtuosity. Indeed, when I heard first about this practice some years ago, I found just the thought of it intimitating. Programming is something very difficult, to do it live on stage and generate aesthetically interesting results surely is something that only a small minority of elite hackers can do. Drawing on Paulo Virno, Yuill states that 'improvisation exemplifies virtuosity'.4 Yet virtuosity is generally linked with an obsolete bourgeois concept of art. The key characteristic of emancipatory forms of art and culture in the 20th century has not been the focus on virtuosity but on the contrary, on the inspired dilettante: from Duchamp's signing of industrially produced objects to Warhol's reproduction of mass media images to the three chords of Punk music. The same with hacking. You can enter hacker culture at all levels as I have shown above. It is something that does not just benefit and give gratification to the virtuoso but also to the bloodiest newbie struggling to install Ubuntu5

At the core of Yuill's thesis is the idea that software is a form of notation (which is something that itself can be disputed, but maybe at another time). He places livecoding in the proximity of Post-Webernian composers who use 'open' notation schemes. In those works the notation does not determine the final output, it leaves a lot of space for interpretation. I am not saying this in any denunciatory way, it is a matter of factly statement that at the time when those experimental techniques first came up, they were recognized, practiced and appreciated by an elite only. They came from a background of 'serious' music in the Western tradition. This sort of elitism is deeply embedded in the Eurocentric system of art. In his text Yuill offers the best (or worst) example of what happens when aesthetic avantgarde-elitism becomes politicised. His most important British example is the Scratch Orchestra founded by Cornelius Cardew. Yuill writes:

"It was through the Scratch Orchestra that Cardew was to acquire a profound political self-awareness, applying an explicit Maoist perspective to his own practice, and leading to his involvement in founding the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). "
(Yuill 2008, page 9)

By 1970 (when Cardew got so politicised) the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism were well known in Britain. It is unfortunate that, following his elitist instinct, Cardew would openly associated himself with politicians who promoted and practiced the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (i.e. genocide of peasants and workers) whereby with proletariat they did not refer to 'the people' but to the party. The sad end of the Scratch Orchestra as told by Simon Yuill is just another illustration what an elitist mindset leads to.(pages 13, 14, 15)

Yuill gets himself even deeper into an elitist quagmire by slightly misquoting Adorno when he writes:

"The performance may simply become the regurgitation of old cliches and formulas like that of the amateur jazz musician described by Adorno, unable to stray from the existing models to which he has adapted and subordinated himself.[53]"6

In the passage that Yuill refers to Adorno does not talk about an 'amateur' jazz musician but dismisses the whole genre of Jazz because it was, in his understanding, tainted by the fact that it emerged from a commercial culture industry and therefore engendered a fetishisation of music accompanied by a regression of listening. Adorno's critique of Jazz can at best be considerd that of a Eurocentric art snob, yet actually it may be outright racist. I can only utter surprise by seeing Adorno being quoted in this way. The economic conditions of the creation of an art form do not necessarily determine the artistic qualities of an art form.

Livecoding as practice and the virtue ethics

If everything until so far sounds like I am out to do a hatchet job on Yuill's essay I must clearly state this is not my intention. It is really unfortunate that he gets it wrong in that most central point regarding elitism and vistuosity. There are also some very good points. What Yuill says about the practice of livecoding can be extended to a statement about many participatory practices:

"The notion of practice that they exhibit is one which is consciously linked to, and helps define, particular practitioner communities. They are groups defined not by a common aesthetic, style, nor even in some cases common collection of cultural references, but significantly by commitments to shared practices." (page 8)

I also find very useful for my own FLOSS research and can subscribe to the notion of the virtue-ethic:

"In contrast to an ethics of duty based on obligation to a set of external standards to which the individual must aspire, virtue ethics arise from and are directed towards forms of practice. They are defined and realised through action rather than regulation or law and aim towards a general ethic of self-actualisation.[footnote 61] " (page 9)

It is really unfortunate that, rather than following those clues about practice and a 'virtue ethic', Yuill falls into the trap of various elitisms.7

Avantgarde groups and social context

Sometimes the references in Yuill's essay just do not go together well, maybe because everything is explained from a viewpoint of artistic immanence and not via sober and cool social analysis. An example: The proposed proximity between the Sun Ra Arkestra and MIT hackerdom in the 1960ies, is a very doubtful connection, as by all means Sun Ra's 'science' was a caricature of and directed against Pentagon supported Yankee WASP egg-head culture. Yet Yuill uses the trick of writing about those without any separation of paragraph, through this stylistic trick implying they are closely related practices. The free jazz of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Colemen and other was/is important not just because of the use of dissonant tonalities and the method of free improvisation but also because of the social context of black consciousness and the radicalisation of the civil rights movement. It was also the first time that African American jazz musicians started their own labels and created independent distribution channels. The virtuosity of free improvisation alone without black consciousness and empowerment can create really dire results. I have been exposed to so many 'free improvisation sessions' in my student yeras in the late 1970ies and early 1980ies, that this drove me directly into the arms of punk, disco, rap and reggae. To claim any similarity between livecoding and the high point of free jazz is a bit far fetched indeed. What the world maybe needs is not to find the next John Coltrane of FLOSS (or more clones of RSM) but rather a Bob Marley of Open Source.

Another good point in Simon Yuill's essay is the recognition that FLOSS is an 'endless' project:

"Whereas commercial software production emphasises the creation of distinct software products, hacking emphasises code as part of a ongoing dialogue between practitioners."

and

"Free Software is an ‘activity-without-end-product’ not in the sense of having no output, but rather in the sense of constantly creating the capacity for production elsewhere." (both quotations page 11)

This relates to Umberto Eco's definitions of openness about the never ending art work. While the notion of the artwork as a somehow open, aleatory and auto-poietic system, a work which keeps being recreated and recreated and thereby changes, is a beautiful one, the reality is that this does not go well with the current art market. The success of the commercial art market as exemplified by the growth of art fairs in recent years has been based on a regression towards ever more commercial forms of art placed firmly on the notion of the sellable object with discrete forms.

At the same time digital artists have a more fundamental and philosophic al problem exactly because of the openendedness of the world of FLOSS. Any work based on FLOSS by its very nature has no beginning and no end and no single author. This becomes most obvious in the case of internet based artworks, such as the participatory work 9Nine by Mongrel/Harwood. "How can you cope with a situation where nothing every stays the same," the artist Harwood sighed in an interview with me8, where, paraphrasing him now, everything changes all the time and nothing is ever fixed? This is the world of FLOSS and how would anyone claim that this has anything to do with art as we know it? The artist can at best ride on a wave created by the multitude of FLOSS developers and make comments on the current state of the art and society, but this is not art as we knew it, based on a clear distinction between the 'work' and the 'author'.

Conclusions

The demand that 'poetry should be made by all' is in the process of being realised by open source culture. The desire of the most interesting elements within the Western art world that art should leave behind the bourgeois phase of aestheticism and become part of the praxis of life (Bürger 1974), that art should become radically democratic, that the barriers between producers and consumers should be removed and that all humans should have the chance to fully realize their potential by being engaged in creating beauty has never been come closer to than at the beginning of the 21st century with the rise of a huge wave of participatory cultures in music, in writing, in software, in hardware. Within those areas, FLOSS is in my opinion a priviliged area as it is not only another form of expression but also an enabler of DIY cultures. The fear that this gets turned into a 'spectacle of participation' through Web 2.0 is justified. However, the mass media success of venture capital supported 'social software' platforms should not obscure the fact that there is still a thriving and rapidly growing FLOSS culture which exists separately from that and which gives millions of people a chance to learn and educate and express themselves. As Simon Yuill rightly says in his opening remarks, there has been a disillusionment regarding 'openness' but not with Open Source Culture but the way some parts of the art system have tried to claim it and recuperate for an artistic praxis which adheres to bourgeois values. Yuill writes:

"Not all artists working with FLOSS and livecoding necessarily share the politics of the hacklabs scene, nor do all hacklab participants necessarily look upon their own activities as art-related, and some are, sometimes rightly, sceptical of artistic involvement in what they do."

Unfortunately he does not elaborate on those differences because that would lead to a very fundamental aporia. Artists who now claim to be working on the basis of FLOSS principles do so within an art system which works inside the capitalist system. Their success as artists and the economic viability of their careers is based on them gathering symbolic capital as individual artist geniuses. If the demand that poetry should be made by all would be fully realised that would mean almost by necessity that all people would have to be freed from the slavery of work to be able to fully devote themselves to the making of art. However, only a utopian society can support such a situation where everybody truly 'is an artist' and in such a society the word 'art' has no separate meaning anymore. Until that society is realised we will always be partly unfree and areas of freedom such as FLOSS will have to exist as islands - however vast and growing - in an ocean of unfreedom. Under current conditions, if FLOSS realises the demand that poetry is produced by all, it does so by an act of devaluation says Peter Bürger9p 52. Bürger then suggests to step back from the avantgardistic demand that art should become part of the praxis of life and stay 'autonomous' in the classical sense - as a distinct system within the existing society with its own values. This sudden turn is hard to follow. Instead, if we still believe in any form of progress, then we can join FLOSS with a non-elitist ethos of art. One Love.

1. 1. Eco U . 
   2006.  The Poetics of the Open Work.
   Participation. :20-41.
2. 2. page 9 quoting Richard Stallman in: Richard Stallman, ‘The GNU Manifesto’, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd edition, GNU Press: Boston, 2004, p.35.
3. 3. this has been well researched and evidenced by magazines such as First Monday; cf for instance Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? The structure of motivation in Open Source software by Andrea Bonaccorsi and Cristina Rossi. First Monday, volume 9, number 1 (January 2004), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_1/bonaccorsi/index.html.
4. 4. page 10 quote from: Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2004.
5. 5. a Linux based operating system which is said to be very easy to install). Part of the attraction is that there are seemingly no rules and that you can start through try and error.
6. 6. page 7 misquoted from Theodor Adorno, ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Cuture, edited by J.M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 48. I am not exactly sure what Yuill refers to on page 48, but those pages belong to the most problematic what Adorno has written; for instance: "mass music [...] not only turned them away from important music but confirmed them in neurotic stupidity" page 47. it goes on and on inn that style)
7. 7. To an extent, that same criticism can be applied to one of Simon's own works, Spring Alpha. Although in principle, conceptually and aesthetically, thjs is a perfect FLOSS art work, a game whose rules can be changed by the players, it limits participation to people who can code in PHP. If participation is so technically defined, it becomes the opposite, a method of exclusion. The audience can only stand in awe about the virtuosity of the live-coders whose performance turns into a spectacle.
8. 8. published, in an unedited format, here Interview with Harwood / Mongrel: Between Social Software and the Poetic
9. 9. Bürger in Citekey 585 not found