Symposium Curating new media art
Laurence Rassel 

>From a quote to embodied questions

9 years of practices in art and new media

 

1. At the beginning

telling a story, a path through what was then, what it is now, what  it will be

making an act of memory in front of you, to be able to show you our practices, begin by chance or not in a exhibtion called Selected Memories, produced by Constant, then Dirk De Wit and co-curated with Edwin Carels, showing mainly digital works done with found footage or family footage.

 

One of the 1st act i deliberately did working for Constant, was to put a note on the wall, better said a quote from 'Silent Movie', to be sure that the audience understand the work, see the beauty of it, and above all the empowering at work in it, the quote said:"" Perhaps this installation aims to be just that kind of altar: the sheer exposure to film magic, free from anecdote or direct emotions, where the viewer may hang around, pick something of the perpetual flame, brood over these adventures of black-and-white, change perhaps my images against his or hers, replace Catherine Belkhodja's beautiful face by a closer and dearer face, and go away with an imaginary picture unrolling within his/her deep inner screening room with that untranslatable feeling we Germans call Sehnsucht, and we Brazilians saudade, and the rest is silence."

 

My second act was to earn a bit of money as a guard, guide, telling to people the narratives  of the  works shown , the story of how and why the curators of this show chose to project this movie or to put in videolibrary that piece, what they could see in an hour or in five minutes, making them believe for one moment  they could indeed replace the images proposed by Marker, by their own memories of cinema. Inspired by Marker, i don't know, but this is part of the story i m telling you isn't it, because to be honest, if i remember well, but who said i remember well, i always saw myself in this new media world, or broadly in this cultural world as a bonimenteur, you know, cinema was rarely silent, but often accompanied by music, and people telling you stories. Today again i am telling a story, producing the voice over for some images, screen, side by a computer.

 

Constant is a non profit organisation, based in Brussels, active since 1997 , dealing with art and new media or better said dealing with art in new media, or better said active in between art and new media, dealing with new media in art, or better said Constant is non profit organisation dealing with cultural work/ers using among others and mainly using digital media.

 

What was i saying, oh yes, from these 2 gestures, some strategies  which are still at work  within our current practices, came along: we want to make sure the audience understand, we tell stories, we never let a computer alone without a bonimenteur, and we do hope that people make their own dreams, work, memories, paths from the use, the view, the attending of technology that Constant might provide them in different contexts.

 

2. Opening the tools/Deconstruction 1

-showing the inside of the digital work

(Roseware images)

Some of you might want to know what Constant does, is,  i hope browsing shortly some examples will give you an idea of our practices and of our history.

In1998, the same year we were questioning the relationships between the museum and the raise of digital art, we made another gesture that will change in a way Constant from an organisation promoting digital art to a tool of deconstruction of the cultural practices.

In 1998, during VJ2, we install the 1st internet line in Palais des Beaux-Arts, we empty a closet which turned to be a nice room, and transformed it into a working place, where the audience could see Equator website and participate to Roseware, Roseware was meant to be a comment to

Immemory, a way to understand the structure, the technology. It was also created to have another relationship to the works, to the audience in a fine arts museum, to stop the passer by.  From the beginning the idea with the cd-rom Immemory was that you could have an empty cd-rom that people

could fill themselves. For Roseware we wanted to start from an empty structure and what we did was to create this empty structure with hyperstudio which was the software available at the time. It was like an

empty book and people could fill it in themselves using this very easy software. In the museum we had Zapping Zone, we had Immemory and just nearby there was Roseware in a room with a computer, a camera, a slide projector, a digital camera... People could draw, could create images. In a way we created what could be the studio, not of Chris Marker, but of someone who was creating this type of work, with this type of software and this type of tools.

 

3. Opening the tools/Deconstruction 2

-showing the framework and the beings of the digital work

-> copy cult

-> cyberfeminist working days

 

At the beginning Constant was defined as a platform and network of production and exhibition of art and critical digital works in the fields of electronic music, video installations, cd-roms (if you remembered what is was), net art , and so on. 

 

Following on,

 - on the one hand, the evolution of the use and the exhibition of digital media  in Belgium: meaning that more and more media festivals, exhibitions were organised, focusing more on the spectacle of technology with the show of interactive installations, electronic music, and that web pages were brought in the collection of museums,

 - and on the other hand our own internal evolution: meaning that the members and founders of Constant, from curators were replaced by people with an artistic practice and use Constant as a "place" to raise questions, to experiment contexts, to open tools and ways of production, to question the tools and ways of work.

 

In short, people didn't come to work "with" Constant to produce a " work" anymore, but come to work "with/in" Constant to challenge, question one's condition of exhibition, distribution, production, access of work done with digital media.

These questions take the form in public of talks, seminars, workshops, softwares, actions, and sometimes of course of exhibitions, concerts, because we want to meet, learn from others, and sharing in public the exchange of knowledge, experience, technique, processes and so on.

 

In 2000, we organized silmutaneously 2 events meant to address the legal framework in which we were producing sounds, images, and the mere fact of who is producing these sounds and images.

These events were Copy Cult and Cyberfeminist Working Days.

Making the act of memory, now as I told you, made me think, why did we got interested in the matter of the alternatives to copyright, that was before the success of the Creative Commons, the now regular  an dpopular "Open source and culture" events ? Well it I was the time of the Napster case (if some of you forgot  that Napster was once an alternative peer to peer practice, the ancestor of now hype Itunes on your pink Ipod), and also it was mere curiosity: what was the legal framework of the artists we were showing in Selected Memories, Jonctions, and Mille plateaux, that was the time of the reign of sampling videos, sounds, copy-paste was as simple as common as a brush. We thougth our concern, responsibility to understand this legal framework and share our questions: how can we maintain the freedom to be inspired, to comment on other's images, sounds, how can we maintain the freedom to tell our stories made of sounds and images.

I am screening you here as example the work of Mouchette

This website was created in 1997, and prohibited by the French authority in 2002, when the artist had the opportunity to host for free her work on a French institutional server.The French Society of Authors' Rights (SACD) following a request from Robert Bresson's widow, has forbidden Mouchette of the site http://mouchette.org to show one of her works related to the film called "Mouchette" created by Robert Bresson in 1967. This interdiction unfortunately censors a work which is an homage celebrating the source of its inspiration. The narrow-mindedness of the heir of the copyright is the only cause for this interdiction. As a protest, Constant along with artlibre.org and drivedrive.com launched a campaign of mirroring. Several websites are still presenting today copies of this quiz which is no longer allowed to be shown on mouchette.org. This was also the beginning of the Copy.cult news service (see http://www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult/mirror/filmxx/) It now provides news and pointers towards various aspects of the culture of the copy. We especially would like to relay relevant information about the relationship between censorship and copyright, surveillance and intellectual property. And also hopefully to highlight the initiatives who create alternatives to these coercitive models.

The event Copy.cult turns into a regular practice of thinking, awareness, repsonsability confronting  the licences and the author rights.

 

As I mentioned it this event was going with another event, because if again we thought of our concerns the legal framework, our questions went also to who has access to the technology needed to do digital art? And who is in the picture, and how? Who is in the audience? Who are the artists, the producers, the curators, why was it then mainly a male (gaze) world?

We organized then the Cyberfeminist working days, and if this first event, which turned also into a regular practice and thinking, was addressed mainly to art and theory producers, it evolved thourgh years into working with feminist studies networks, with training centres for unemployed women and addresssing feminist questions  to the conditions of work of the cultural workers, to the free software programmers community.

 

As Florian Cramer points out, the word "licence" comes from the verb licere meaning to authorise. In order to authorise the additional uses of a production, one needs to be its owner. And in the field of intellectual property, this means being the author (or possessing rights equivalent to those of the author). These additional rights are attributed with one sole condition: that the same freedom is guaranteed with copyleft for any work deriving from it. One cannot place a work under copyleft if one does not own the rights (a work cannot be "laundered") and one cannot restrict the usage authorisations which have been awarded to a free work, either for that specific work or for the consequent works.

That which is free is condemned to live on the basis of this paradox, because it is based on the author's right to transform the practice. In effect, this danger/temptation is always present given that the users of the GPL must recreate, from original materials, creations that stand at the beginning of a chain. The GPL takes to heart the idea of a new genealogy of works, encouraging the re-appropriation and transformation of free materials. Copyleft obliges the user to maintain the genealogy of these creations. Copyleft has not arisen out of the paradigm of copyright, it reinterprets it.

 

Whatever as artists we chose, we are responsible for the choice,  even if it is limited  because the moment i am producing a discourse, an image, i become the author, i have no choice here, i don' allow myself to put it directly in the public domain, i could choose for anonymity you might say, but as a feminist the body of the author matters, and I guess as an artist, genealogy matters, what the next person will do with your work, you feel like you don't want to limit the connection to you author, but you don't want to loose this link, you just want to loosen it.

 

In short, what we try to address is as the copyleft, copyright is based on the author's right law, we have in the same double gesture, be aware of the attacks to the european exceptions of the auhtor's right law, and not be memory blind  towards the western history of what is an author and to remember that as women or as any "other" we were excluded during a long time, and that now that we have it finally doesnt prevent us to renegotiate it, to discuss it, to transform it. To be an author is not essential, is not natural, it is adquired, conquered, let s be sure that the work to acquire it teaches us  a certain distance, critique, experiment, a feeling of displacement and not a passivity, a surrender without conditions.

 

We usually say that Constant situates itself in the copyleft and feminist practices.

But -how can we promote the free licences baesd on the author right and at the same time question the prevalence of the author, a patriarchal and commercial invention?

 

 

4. Producing tools, frameworks, digital art users

I am going now to concrete practices, I won't have time to show everything

-> rollmops

As i told you we were not only aware of the legal context within we produce our work but also of the technological tools we were using. It seemed then normal there is a link between our desire  to maintain and develop a culture of transmission, of open archiving, of public knowledge and creation, and the tools we are using to create, to archive, and we know that the legal exceptions to author rights do not guarantee the tranmission, public and open archive etc. So again it looks normal, necessary to develop open tools as open culture together, and open them in a same gesture.

 

The exemple: Rollmops  is live cd distribution dedicated  to the creation and distribution of web content.  It can be used to create and manipulate images, sound, video works or to write and edit html, to publish content on line using a local server or a media streamer. We published it under GPL, and it was conceived within a collaboration between free software programmers and artists, and we all know how difficult it is to bring together these communities and make tem work together because they think

of each other as differents with different needs and skills and expectations. But we know and believe the importance of collaboration between them to propagate free software principles and cultural uses.

(images of rollmops, distributions available here, part of publication from an event where we discuss the archiving of interdisciplinary, media projects, by interdisciplinary we mean events gathering people from different fields of technology and culture, not only  different fields of culture)

 

->digitales

Objectives
Finding a common language to provoke thoughts and to work out a practice which will stimulate women's action in contemporary society and bring awareness of the concept of gender to the debates on new technologies through:
- technological and creative initiation
- understanding of the work tool
- the critical analysis of new technologies
- the discovery and the construction of new images and interactions
- constructing history, means of transmitting experience
Bringing together those who:
- have or want to use technologies to earn their living and to provide for the needs of a family
- have professional and technical skills on the cutting edge of information and communication technology and alternative systems
- undertake university research in various disciplines and in various countries,
- create their artistic work by using 'traditional' or 'new' media (film, video, Internet, digital support)
- are interested by feminist thought on contemporary society.

 

-> cuisine interne

"Five years after the birth of my feminist consciousness, I still have to question every assumption, every reaction I have in order to examine them for signs of preconditioning. Some changes came across fast. In the winter of 1970, I went to a great many women's studios and my preconceptions were jolted daily. I thought serious artists had to have big, professional-looking spaces. I found women in corners of men's studios, in bedrooms and children's rooms, even in kitchens, working away. I thought important art was large. I found women working small, both out of inclination and necessity." Lucy Lippard

 

Cuisine Interne Keuken started out of the desire to render visible the internal organisation of the cultural world we work in, with its written and unwritten laws, decision making processes and value systems. In our thinking about interdisciplinary cultural practices, we did not want to leave out the question of economy.

 

We started out by simply interviewing each guest to the Jonction/Verbindingen festival but after a while we found ourselves branching out to other contacts or people we met at conferences and lectures. The list of people interviewed therefore forms in a way the internal kitchen of the organisation Constant itself, and continues to expand and change.

 

Using the same set of questions over and over again helped us to focus a series of intimate conversations, and allowed a chain of interviewers in different settings and in multiple languages to bring their own background to the discussions. As a result in some cases answers were combined, questions not asked, or questions not answered but these 'flaws' actually became a marker of a rich and multi-layered process of research.

 

We are still with that question : -is there a link between all the people working within the domestic space: domestic workers, artists, free software programmers, do they all work for the love of?

 

5. Where and how  do we work?

We consider Constant as a tool of deconstruction of the cultural practices.

Define cultural practices: interstices, in betweens, community building, relationships between one's traditions and other's, places of memories, objects of memories, collections, contexts, processes, devices, tools)

 

We consider it as vehicle to enter places

Other principles still active in Constant work: we work site specific could be a museum, a training center, a empty bar or a squat. We use spaces not to be used that way, with the hope they might stay culturally active, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. We open questions or

formats We propose different access or participation to the people: one can choose to be a passer by, a spectator, a participant...

We comment works by workshops, lectures.

 

 

We never stopped: we question contexts, ways of production, software, legal frameworks, gender, race of the users, the creators, the public. We always did the link between media art and non media practices: drawings, performances

Between disciplines, i do not mean between theater and video, we did to, but between, software developers and feminists, unionists and academics, the commons grounds and the creative commons, the domestic workers and the open source economy, etc

 

I was about to say  that we never worked outside of our own context, even if we enter a museum, a festival as guest, we create our room, our tools, our archives, and we are there or we transfer the conditions of work to other people

We work  on and in the  city, the museum, the conditions of labour, the radio, the  free softwares, science fiction

 

We consider as spaces to be crossed, transformed, opened: the law, the gender, other people texts, magazines, the computer, the software code

images of: rollmops, zehar, ...

 

We work in the insterstices of culture and technology, using all the positions allowed: technicians, activists, secretaries, curators, designers, programmers, artists, scientists

Never dematerialized, we use our bodies as interfaces within the context.
So what you  seeing now is a fake, I cannot be alone talking here, I guess this why I suffered so much to write this talk, because Constant  is different people, nodes, following different threats of questions, experiments. We experiment in live questions, intuitions, this multiplicity is visible on the website, on the image gallery, following the different active weblogs

Conclusion

 

Do you ask yourselves the question if this an artistic practice, a curatorial job, does it matter?

 

La fuite hors du temps, Hugo Ball écrit : «On peut dire que pour nous l'art n'est pas un but en soi ­ cela demanderait une naïveté moins écorchée ­ mais nous y voyons l'occasion de formuler des critiques à l'égard de notre temps et de développer une véritable sensibilité pour cette époque, conditions préalables pour un style anodin et typique. (...). Pour cela, l'art ne nous fournit qu'une occasion, qu'une méthode.»

 

Author: Laurence Rassel (Constant: www.constantvzw.com )
Type: paper presented during the symposium 'Curating new media art'
Date: 16 october 2005
Place: Nadine Brussels
Organisation: Digitaal Platform (IAK/IBK) in the context of the argos festival, with the support of Nadine
Summary: From a quotation to embodied questions, 9 years of practices in the interstices of culture and technology.* This talk will trace \"my\" to \"our\" experiences in the fields of so-called art and new media, inside of a non profit organization named Constant.Constant is a Brussels organization for art and media. We organize events, lectures and workshops in the field of art and new media.(1) Our interests range from gender and feminist technology, (2) alternatives for copyright (3) to the combination of art, activism and creative use of the web. We organize an annual multidisciplinary festival called Verbindingen / Jonctions.(4)
References: Dirk De Wit, Edwin Carels, Florian Cramer, Constant, Verbindingen/Jonctions, Cyberfeminist Working Days, 'Silent Movie' and 'Immemory' by Chris Marker, Roseware, Mouchette, Catherine Belkhodja, Digitales, Rollmpos, Cuisine Interne/Interne Keuken, Stitch and Split
Keywords: copycult, cyberfeminism, copyleft, licence, workspace, work, sharing, gender, race, software, user, intersections