An action/reaction around the last DEAF07 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 2007) in Rotterdam, 10-29 April 2007
Résumé : En lieu d’une chronique londonienne pour le présent numéro de .dpi, nous vous offrons une chronique rotterdamoise alors que Sophie Le-Phat Ho a eu la chance de faire l’expérience du DEAF07 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 2007) ayant lieu aux deux ans à V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media (au Pays-Bas) qui fêtait ces 25 années d’existence. La chronique est à la fois une critique et une réflexion sur Interact or Die! – le thème de l’édition 2007 du festival.
Abstract : This time around, we offer you not a column from London but from Rotterdam where Sophie Le-Phat Ho had the chance of attending DEAF07 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 2007), happening every two years at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media (in the Netherlands) which celebrated its 25th anniversary. The column is both a review and a reflection on Interact or Die! – this year’s festival theme.
“Interact or Die! is about the way in which random behavior in networks creates strong but flexible structures and forms, without there being a central designing coordinator or code that pushes the process into a definite direction or form. It explores how interaction both forms and selects the effective, functioning parts of networks and leaves the noneffective parts to die. “ (Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, Interact or Die!)
DEAF (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival) happens every two years in Rotterdam (Netherlands) and is organised by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007. The international and interdisciplinary biennale focuses on art, technology and society and brings together artists, researchers, activists and academics around an ambitious program of seminars, workshops, performances, concerts, a symposium, and a large exhibition. The festival, organised around the theme of Interact or Die! , ran from April 10th to 29th 2007 but I had the opportunity to catch some of the many events, which took place between the 11th and 16th of April.
DEAF07 featured a series of seminars such as Critical Ecosystems, Not Everything is Interaction, Connected Archives and Transdisciplinary Innovation. Taking place at V2_ and accompanied by a reader, the seminars brought together artists, researchers, and industry in order to tackle the concept of interaction. In general, the wide-ranging mix of backgrounds brought about some interesting moments characterised by conflicting views mostly relating to the role of industry. The last day of seminars (on transdisciplinary innovation), for instance, juxtaposed a presentation by a representative of Philips Research and others by various ‘non-industry’ researchers (e.g., V2_’s Patchingzone, Culture Lab Newcastle). Judging from the group discussion that followed, the assumption was that researchers aiming to tap into diverse registers of knowledge to further ‘transdisciplinary innovation’ are ‘progressive’ whereas industry doing the same is ‘dangerous’. However, the presentation for Patchingzone was no different from a basic business plan, complete with the powerpoint presentation which included ‘motivations’, ‘products’ and ‘market’. To be sure, the links between industry, the ‘cultural industry’, electronic arts, the academy, and the military are very topical. The Interact or Die! seminars apparently set up the stage for self-criticism, but it seemed to me they did not take fully advantage of it.
In the more overtly political programming of events, an innovative strategy of presentation took the format of the DEAF07 Snack & Surge Brunches. Taking place in the V2_Studio, audience members entered the premises where they were offered a tray of guerrilla edible goodies out of a colourful van before taking a seat amongst fake flowers and astro turf (food art courtesy of Anders Eten, gewoonbob.com). Attempting to “create a performative and gastronomic theatre of operations addressing political, technological and artistic questions relating to the poetics of power”, the brunches featured a diverse menu of presenters, including some via webcam (but not without some technical difficulties). Focussing on media activism and tactical media, the brunches included projects of uneven quality and surprisingly did not favour much discussion or interaction with audience members or even between panellists, despite the conviviality. Minus the buffet, the fake garden and the vans, the brunches continued to embrace the ordinary panel format. However, notable projects of interest included urban walks connecting NYC/Baghdad and Tel-Aviv/Gaza via You Are Not Here.org (Thomas Duc, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Leila El-Haddad), the ongoing participatory film Muslims or Heretics (Naeem Mohaiemen, shobak.org), and the “rebel territory” serving as an exchange between Extramadura (Spain) and Latvia under the project Emergent Geographies (periferiae.net and hackitectura.net).
Another innovative peculiarity of DEAF07 was the space dedicated to China in presentations and exhibitions alike. Of course, this reminds me that there is generally no need to mention “American media arts”, “German media arts”, or “Dutch media arts” as the cultural divide between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ still prevails. Within the tension between striving for inclusiveness and reiterating exclusiveness, the programming of artworks and projects coming from China nevertheless successfully exposed the audience to a diversity of practices coming from China, also raising issues of precarity. For instance, the Global Bending Conferences introduced a number of projects with the potential for developing strategies of cultural exchange (including in Antarctica with I-TASC or the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation). Yet, their restricting globalization to four panels did not favour critical discussion of “globalization” in the rest of the festival, for globalization remains relevant at all levels.
Indeed, many ‘interactive’ artworks and installations by Chinese artists were featured in DEAF07’s large exhibition situated at Las Palmas Center of Culture, Image and Sound, a new venue in Rotterdam still in construction at the time of the festival. However, the exhibition was the most disappointing aspect of the festival. Its presentation seemed to have been the product of speed curating, with the stronger works having already been shown elsewhere. Most importantly, the exhibition left an impression that interactivity equals gadgets and big or noisy, manly machines. Surprisingly, the issue was addressed in the Interact or Die! catalogue via an interview with Brian Massumi on interactive art, “[t]he problem is: in what way is this different from a game? Is this doing something that mainstream informational capitalism isn’t already doing, ever so profitably, by generating the gaming paradigm?”[1]
On the other hand, some of the most intriguing artworks for me were the ones that highlighted physical and chemical types of interactions, such as Ondulation (2004) by Thomas McIntosh and Roots (2005-6) by Roman Kirschner, respectively. Another strong work was Surrounded (2004) by Yang Zhenzhong, a very clever 360 degrees installation with effective impacts on subjectivity and affect. With the exception of a few works, the exhibition felt indeed quite ‘masculine’. Furthermore, if it is a truism that every work of art is at some level ‘interactive’ since perception is action, then what is the relevance of “interactive art” and how does it inform or is informed by the dichotomy of non/interaction? Again, one can read in the catalogue:
Interactivity liberates us from the hundred of years of solitude of twentieth-century art. Interactive art makes the realization flash up that there is actually no “I” [...] Since interaction means changing each other, and only that which interacts with us is alive for us, we are changing everything around us as much as we are being changed by it – nature and technology, loved ones and strangers, room and city, bed and world. Interactive art is the art of the age of globalization. [2]
This brings us back to a fundamental question: what does it mean to organise a festival around the theme of Interact or Die! ? With such as wide-ranging and ambitious program, it is surprising that Interact or Die! failed to seriously address half of its theme – that is, the dying part. Or the political economy of interaction, so to speak. What is implied by death due to the lack of interaction? Should not one address the “non-effective parts” left to die?
The problem can be seen as being two-fold. First, Interact or Die! expresses an imperative, an ultimatum – it implies a sense of urgency, an obligation to interact in order to avoid death; interaction is thus presumed to be essentially positive. Second, it posits that death is the opposite of interaction, or at least, that the two cannot overlap – one either interacts or dies. There is no space for an alternative where one chooses to not interact in order to not die. Interact or Die! presents the issue in such a way that the question “Why interact at all?” becomes non-existant. Why would it be since the assumption is that any non-interactive element is dead, gone, nothing.
If one returns to the catalogue, it would seem that Interact or Die! might have emerged out of biological and philosophical conceptions of interaction, with several references to the work of philosopher Gilbert Simondon on top of a few contemporary biologists. Simondon’s philosophical intervention emerged out of a particular political climate: the 1950s technophobia. Although Simondon’s insights remain marginal or even ignored today in various circles when they could bring a better understanding of a more complex relation between technology and life, we now live in a slightly different age, filled with the pressures and dynamics emerging out of Facebook, Myspace and so on. For instance, ‘self-organization’ as a concept is not only a scientific one but very much a political one. Quoting Massumi again, “I think it’s important to remind ourselves that there can be a kind of tyranny to interaction. Interactivity is not neutral with respect to power.” [3]
The Interact or Die! program booklet mentions the ‘sloppiness’ and ‘messiness’ of interaction as being positive. That is, the need for flexible and temporary structures able to continually reorganize and adapt, as opposed to “rigid blueprints, that mostly understand interaction within a cause and effect process, [which] offer no solutions to today’s big social and ecological problems, such as global warming, immigration, multiculturalism, cultural dynamics and the effects of globalization.” Interestingly enough, the program lists immigration and multiculturalism as “problems” (hopefully a problem of translation from Dutch to English?). Again, Interact or Die! as an idea is extremely relevant today, but from my fragmented experience of DEAF07, it seemed that it was not addressed seriously enough in a way that would have been challenging to current conceptualisations of interaction and interactivity. As DEAF07 speaker, Saul Albert, comments:
DEAF really characterised what I find uninteresting about ‘interactivity’ in media art. For the last 10 years net culture and ‘media art’ have subsisted between institutions and traditional art markets, strung along by this kind of festival. What became apparent to me while visiting the exhibition and many of the panels, which – probably due to the insane pricing policies – were peopled almost entirely by other DEAF presenters and participants, was that this kind of art, and festival, and the discourses on offer are only really interesting to a niche of people who are already involved enough to participate.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I like participatory culture – it’s just that the routes into participation were often so limited, that the only ‘interaction’ required was really quite superficial.
My feeling was that the culture of DEAF – which I only glimpsed in very peripheral vision – was a stifled tumult of political, fiscal and institutional struggles. This didn’t leave much space or time for self-criticism or experimentation in terms of how far the ‘interactive’ element could be taken – structurally – into the festival itself.
Although DEAF07 raised the topical issues of interaction and interactivity, it lacked the venture of confronting what types of interaction are being referred to exactly. If interactive art is arguably the “art of the age of globalization”, and if self-organization and participation are being promoted as productive of diversity in structures, the idea of Interact or Die! becomes a highly political proposition and is infused with responsibility. For instance, DEAF07 even demonstrated simple “problems of access” to V2_’s 25th anniversary celebration evening, conforming to the elitist model of art gatherings. In the end, the irony is that, like in any large happening, the most interesting interaction happens outside of the event. As DEAF07 speaker, Naeem Mohaiemen, puts it:
[_The best interactions I had were all in real time, sitting in a sidewalk cafe with the Shift_Space crew — making fun of Rube Goldberg contraptions, mullets, and bomber jackets on Rotterdam streets. But there was a very well organized process set up for us to interact with others across borders and via webcam, audio linkup, skypechat, etc., what have you. Sometimes I get exhausted with all that machine process, that’s where spontaneous sidewalk combustion comes in handy. My father always says, “interaction”, that’s what we used to call “talking”._]
Footnotes
[1] Massumi, B (2007). “the thinking-Feeling of What Happens” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder (eds.) Interact or Die! Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, pp. 76-7.
[2] Mulder, A (2007). “the Exercise of Interactive Art” In Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder (eds.) Interact or Die! Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, p. 69.
[3]Op cit., p. 77.
Biography
Sophie Le-Phat Ho is a young researcher and cultural organiser. She was interim Programming Coordinator for Studio XX in 2005-06 and was the Editor-in-Chief for .dpi in 2006. She has also worked as Project Officer for terminus1525.ca at the Canada Council for the Arts. She is one of the organisers of Upgrade Montréal on politics, culture and technology, as part of Upgrade International. The co-founder of Artivistic (artivistic.org), she works at the intersection of art, science and activism. She is currently completing an MA in Anthropology of Health and the Body in the 21C at Goldsmiths College (University of London).
