Readers
0.1. Introduction
0.1. Introduction
by Jonas Andersson and Adnan Hadzi
Deptford.TV is an online media database documenting the urban change of Deptford, in south-east London. It operates through the use of free and open source software, which ensures the users continued control over the production and distribution infrastructure. It also aims at enabling its participants in the technical aspects of developing an on-line distribution infrastructure that they themselves can operate and control, empowering them to share and distribute production work both locally and internationally.
This book continues the debate raised in the Next 5 Minutes media conference (Amsterdam, 2003) regarding ‘tactical media in crisis’; a conference which in many ways marked the “crash” of an online activism based on a merely tactical approach. As McKenzie Wark and others stated during the conference: ‘can tactical media anticipate, rather than be merely reactive?’
The aim of a strategy is to generate a form of social contract; not only by enunciation or discursive agreements, but by actual practice. Existing networks, applications, artefacts and organisations like The Pirate Bay, Steal This Film, Deptford.TV, the Transmission.cc network etc. in effect constitute strategic entities that re-write the rules of engagement with digital media on an everyday basis. The problem being, that many of these entities become deemed illegal, quasi-legal or illegitimate by the current copyright legislation, something which can only really be addressed through finding new ethical frameworks which can appropriate what is already happening but in terms which do not frame it in the old dichotomy of ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’.
As Michel de Certeau makes us aware of, strategies differ from tactics in that they are not reactive to an oppressor or enemy. Rather, strategies are self-maintained, autonomous, and – more specifically – spatially situated. If the ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (Bey 1991) of pirates, nomads and vagabonds is characterised not by permanence but by transience, still it might be seen as a means to generate short intermissions of stability; the establishment of momentary connectors, stable points, islands in the stream. The establishment of such islands is dependent on location and manual effort: different types of strategies that will become apparent throughout this reader.
The reader thus takes as a starting point the local strategies that make apparent the geographic specificity of Deptford. Neil Gordon-Orr’s historical trajectory of cinema theatres and spot locations for cinema production in Deptford and New Cross apprises us to the urbanism, technological progressivism and cosmopolitanism of the area since early modernity; similarly, Ben Gidley’s account of the apparent drive towards regeneration makes an argument for authentic, already-existing forms of creativity and cosmopolitanism which are never-fully seized upon by property investors and marketing agencies, who proffer a view of the area which feeds on an imaginary notion of ‘pacification by cappuccino’. The middle class aspirations of urban developers somewhat fall between the always-already upper/middle class consensus of Greenwich and the much more agonising mix of working class and “creative class” that is Deptford. This whole dilemma of regeneration will become even more apparent in the coming years, given the extensive investment climate surrounding the 2012 Olympic bid, something which is mirrored in the parallel history of Stratford, north of the river. Hence the inclusion also of an account of ‘the Olympic sacrifice zone’ by the University of Openness: a psychogeographic reappropriation of an area that is set to see some tumultuous change.
The dialectic of Greenwich versus Deptford is interesting in itself, as historically it has never been one of pure opposites: it has always been class-based, sibling-like rather than polar. Think of the dock workers of Deptford depending on the patrons of Greenwich and vice versa; take the long-running heritage of Deptford rag pickers ultimately supplying the select boutiques along the richer fringes of the Park; or take what is essentially the cathedral of Greenwich’s royal naval quarters versus the bazaar of Deptford’s docks and markets (cf. Raymond 1999), where hierarchical, official society never fully closed in on itself since it thrived on the much more loosely organised labour of privateers, slave traders and entrepreneurs. This dialectic can easily be transferred to the contemporary situation and its peripheral, creative “free agents” providing the cultural industry with fresh ideas and sometimes even dissent, yet without fundamentally rocking the status quo.
Brianne Selman’s exploration of different conceptions of spatiality can here serve to open up for a renewed notion of politics, where the pirate (or the nomad in Deleuze & Guattari’s accounts) is seen to operate on the fringes of the sovereign domain of the state. His/her labour is occasionally employed, and at other times ostracised: ‘governments were perpetually at risk of attack from the same privateers they supposedly employed’ (Selman, p. 28). This reverberates what Armin Medosch concludes in his chapter (2.2) – namely, that the ‘free culture’ of the anarcho-libertarian Internet pioneers has been usurped by corporate and governmental interests to foster a kind of deregulated and depreciated mode of employment.
Where the debate relating to Medosch’s article in section 2 is in somewhat broad, abstract terms, andrea rota’s as well as Alison Rooke’s and Gesche Würfel’s articles help to substantiate the ideals of sustainability and inclusion in more manageable, organisational settings. Rooke and Würfel talk about the growing invisibility of the ageing population and outline how local projects like Deptford.TV can be employed to address this invisibility, whereas rota presents a viable ethos of ‘agile projects’ and the vanquishing of the old offline/online divide this entails.
Similarly, the technological strategies presented should be read not as entirely ‘online’ ventures but as projects that address everyday, concrete issues of access, privacy, and both political and creative mobilisation. The contributions of Jo Walsh and Rufus Pollock as well as the ones by Platoniq, Zoe Young and Mick Fuzz address the infrastructural problems of getting locally produced content “out there,” by means of better metadata and better tools for collective distribution, whereas the enigmatic Jaromil presents a case for upholding individual privacy as a means to retain an autonomous media consumption, production and distribution in the face of an oppressive copyright regime. Download Finished by Mediengruppe Bitnik and Who Wants to Be? by The People Speak constitute examples of fascinating new projects in the intersection of net.art and community involvement, where the boundaries of what is sanctioned and/or intentional are questioned: Is the manipulation of copyrighted content more tolerable when done by a machine, as an upshot of automated algorithms processing any material fed into the loop? How does the nature of the ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ format change when being executed in a fully collaborative fashion?
The final section of the book sees a return to more general issues pertaining to the Deptford.TV project: in short, an overarching issue for this entire volume has been the concept of ‘data spheres’ and of strategies aiming to build, uphold and defend these generative spheres. Adnan Hadzi presents a case for the strategic use of copyleft licenses within the datascapes of peer-to-peer networks by establishing data spheres: basically, acknowledging the need for a social contract which can uphold an ethical viability for those data spheres that have already emerged, but are currently branded illegitimate or at least non-sanctioned.
If this book constitutes the theoretical underpinnings of Deptford.TV, the filmwiki.org toolkit constitutes the practical side of the project. For those aspiring or aiming to put their media production into more strategic practice, look up http://filmwiki.org/ in which the toolkit for how to use Deptford.TV is further elaborated. For those interested in continuing some of the more theoretical debates presented in this reader, Armin Medosch’s site http://www.thenextlayer.org is intended to continue some loose threads. Additionally, the overall development of the project can be followed at http://www.deptford.tv.
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