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The Data Dandy and Sovereign Media
An Introduction to the Media Theory of ADILKNO
Geert Lovink
E-mail: geert@xs4all.nl
Paper presented at the
Fifth International Symposium on Electronic
Art, Helsinki, Finland, 24 August 1994.
_________________________________________________
The alternative media strategies which I would like to
present here are related to developments in Amsterdam in
the last five years. This self-willed free state,
international home and operations base of hippies, queers,
the unemployed, artists and tourists, sits in the shadow of
great upheavals on the European continent. Since Amsterdam
has no noteworthy industry, is home to neither the
government nor the national media, and cannot be called a
high-tech center, there is enough space to experiment
without anyone breathing down one's neck. The oft-mentioned
tolerance which serves as the city's hallmark,
and
its flipside of noncommittalness and indifference, make it possible
for numerous media initiatives to build up a sound tradition
relatively independently of one another, without deteriorating into
a closed scene. In the fields of free radio, magazines, computer
communication, video and (live) cable television the experiments
exceed the character of one-time events. Certain patterns reveal
themselves, a few of which I would like to discuss here.
Theory and practice in Amsterdam are only indirectly connected.
The anti-intellectual attitude of the punks' and squatters'
movements, which have been important breeding grounds for many
media initivatives, embroiders on the general attitude that people
should not chatter, but get to work. Discussion, criticism and self-
reflection are lacking and this is not experienced as a deficiency.
The combination of practical tinkering with a healthy dose of
cockiness ensures that projects people elsewhere only dream about
are set up and continued without a lot of money from authorities or
businesses. The Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal
Knowledge (ADILKNO), founded in 1983, of which I am a member,
is one element of this phenomenon.
What many of the media experiments in Amsterdam have in
common
is their hybrid character, the mingling of high and low tech
through linking them together: records found on the street,
telephones, old computers, amplifiers, camcorders and ramshackle
cassette decks. There is great interest in the hype which rises
from the high-tech laboratories on the US west coast. Yet their
experiments are too clean, too healthy, too spiritual. We need not
lapse into antiAmericanism, but the pretense that American
technoculture would
lead the rest of the world should be refused. Their virtual reality is
not the only one and need not be copied. There are many cyberspaces.
The European variant will surely be polyglot and filled with a deep
melancholy. Amsterdammers enjoy polluting the concepts of others
by stirring in a portion of their brilliant dilettantism. Hardware
might well be global, but the connection of hard-, soft- and
wetware, on the contrary, is always tied to the regional
particularities of the culture. The techno-cultures on the various
continents cannot and need not move in synchrony. In techno-
culture
on a global scale there is no longer talk of an edge over others. From
the point of view of hybrid practice the differences among the US,
Europe and Asia are not so great. Differences exist only if one
assumes that only media experiments done with the latest high tech
are interesting. But high tech is also the waste product of the
military-industrial complex and its corporations. A select group of
electronic artists is allowed access only with their approval. The
mixers of high and low are not bootlickers, and they accept the
waste-character of technology.
The data dandy, who I wish to introduce here, falls under ADILKNO's
category of "potential media figures." In The Media Archive, which
ADILKNO published in Dutch in 1992 and in an expanded German
edition in
1993, a series of potential media and potential media figures
are
collected under the denominator of "Unidentified Theoretical
Objects," or UTOs. These compact texts are purely speculative.
ADILKNO does not practice media archaeology, hermeneutics,
media criticism or cultural studies. The genre of ADILKNO, the
media text, describes no reality or ideas outside the text. Its
material is the media itself -- not the equipment or programs, but
their possibilities. In the electro-sphere there exists a
multiplicity of potential media and media figures. Their present
or future existence is indefinite, though it can definitely be
tested. The insight the media text yields about them is
irresponsibly rash. The media text speculates with chance, danger,
dream and nightmare. It challenges
potential media to become real; in the first place, in the media text
itself. It provokes language into taking on these forms. Potential
media exist only as options, but once they are described you run
across them everywhere. This also holds for the data dandy.
Although ADILKNO members emphatically deny being data dandies,
or propagating any similar decadent, outmoded, postmodern
consumerism, many people claim to have data dandies in their
circles of friends, and this notion is difficult to counter.
ADILKNO's second book, 1990's Cracking the Movement: Squatting
beyond the Media, has recently been published in English by
Autonomedia (New York) following Dutch and German editions.
The book describes the squatters' movement in Amsterdam in the
1980s. It shows how the many big street riots in 1980 and 1981
turned into an advanced, subtle game with the media. It proposes
that in the beginning there were only overwhelming events. The
pattern that people discovered later was called a "movement." "In
the beginning was the event. Time was compressed, space
concentrated into one
point -- and a metamorphosis took place. Movement is born out of
this first impulse. It seeks a way to consolidate the last stage of
transformation, to give it substance." But a movement cannot
metamorphose; it can only go on: "It lacks the mobility to easily
become something else. It will endlessly branch off, get stuck,
scheme, resprout, be exploited, write about itself, see itself on
film."
Media are never just tools you can work with at will. The
transformation of an originary rage and subversion into
information is a painful process. The crystallization of a
movement is accompanied by fragmentation, selection and
exclusion. Once taken up into the media sphere, the now virtual
movement can never again return to street level, however hard it
tries to force its way back via the staging of spectacles. In
Cracking the Movement, ADILKNO speculatively divides the reaction
to the mediatization of the squatters' movement into three parts:
the antimedia movement, the extramedial, and sovereign media.
Anti, Extra, Sovereign
The antimedia movement is in a certain sense a UTO, which
doesn't exist but is nevertheless an evergrowing movement. "There
are individuals who have undergone the extramedial experience
and are left upon return with an immense anger. They experience
being turned into information as an assault on their lives. They go
on the offensive. The antimedia movement they unleash fights
hard, but wants nothing to do with powers that oppose the
freedom of the press. They demand that democracy breaks its ties
with the media. They do their part by literally cutting the
connections. Not out of fear of contact, but for the chance to meet
someone again. The antimedians wrestle with the problem of how
to meet others without bringing the media into play."
In the 1990s
many squatters have renounced belief in any media, their own
included. The realization that all information, including one's own, is
subject to media laws and is just one part of a gigantic selection, has
resulted in a healthy media-relativism. Autonomists no longer wish
to justify or express themselves. Squatters move from one
house to the next like nomads and no longer believe in defending a
place with words and bricks. Information as such has no healing or
subversive properties. People no longer harbor the expectation
that others will be "turned around" simply by reading a pamphlet
or manifesto. Although the radical refusal of new technologies as
instruments of control over humanity has largely disappeared,
skeptical pragmatism is widespread.
Hakim Bey writes about this in similar terms in his essay on
"Temporary Autonomous Zones." Opposite the Net he places the
Counter-Net and the Unofficial Web, which consists of "the
marginal zine network, the BBS networks, pirated software,
hacking, phone-phreaking, some influence in print and radio and
almost none in the big media." The TAZ exists in information
space
as well as in the "real world." But "the Web does not depend for its
existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth, mail, the
marginal zine network, 'phone trees' and the like are sufficient to
construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level
of tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the
structure."
The TAZ, according to Hakim Bey, is not out to simulate resistance
or to
resist spectacularly. "The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation,
to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the
affair is 'breast-to-breast,' as the Sufis say, or face-to-face." The
TAZ cannot be for or against technology; it does not wish to be
utopian or nostalgic. "Because TAZ is an intensification, a surplus,
an excess, a potlatch, life spending itself rather than merely
surviving, it cannot be defined either by Tech or antiTech." Hakim
Bey no longer believes in well-intentioned anti-information spread
via the radical networks. "Frankly, I already had plenty of data to
enrich my perception." What he wants is "marvelous secrets." "Most
of all I want computers to provide me with information linked to
real goods -- 'the good things in life.' "
ADILKNO's second alternative is an enigmatic category, about which
there is little to say: the extramedial. "Extramedial figures view
painful wrestling with the media issue with something like pity.
When asked to participate, they don't answer. They do not wish to
be
spoken to. They appear to live in another universe. They are occupied
with all kinds of things, but their purpose remains invisible through
the media lens. They seem never to know what they want. But this
dismissive attitude is not merely indifference. They are intently
concentrating on 'the right thing'; their silence comes from this.
They answer only unasked questions. Their attention is focused on
the approach of an event. And when the time comes, they are the
ones who move into action without hesitating. Then they are
together in extramedial space. Metamorphosis occurs."
The third alternative is that of sovereign media. Recognizing
and living with the media's omnipotence does not always lead
one to
happy destructivism. The laborious strategy of antipublicity or total
absence can be avoided. Instead of being employed in an alternative
way, the media can be raised to ecstatic heights. This, the media's
supreme self-experience, has passed the stage of information
absorption and transmission. The point is to cause media effects
without references to an outside world. This is achieved through
sovereign media.
Vague Media
Sovereign media make no clear statement; this is not their intention.
This they have in common with one of their colleagues: vague media,
another of ADILKNO's unidentified theoretical objects. Vague media
do not go in for success. They do not achieve their goals. They do not
follow the model of argument, but that of contamination. Once you
tune in to them you get the attitude. But that was never their
intention; vagueness is not an ideal; it is the ultimate degree of
abstraction. The ability to avoid concrete questions is combined
with the giving of answers which lack any depth of field. Thus vague
media still manage to appear diplomatic and polite.
Their social
critique is troubled by an unsteady image of the world. For them
crisis does not lead to a new beginning, but gradually ends in the
evaporation of the problem area. Doubt does not arise; it is a sixth
sense. The senselessness of existence renders everything a sensible
activity which can be stopped whenever desired; so nothing ever
gets finished. Here no one works; rather, one devotes oneself to
taking apart and putting back together undefined objects and
projects. The liquid Dasein of vague-media people never
crystallizes into definite forms. When beginning and endpoint
have disappeared from view, existence can be experienced in
peace.
The vague ones have obliterated the factor of time, and
distribute their concentration out over an x number of years; their
broadcasts only appear on a homeopathic frequency. They are no
less present for this. Vague media are not on a constructed
network in need of maintenance. The lines of the net are dissolved
in an astral mist. Instead of distribution, there is a random
selection, which gets eagerly snapped up. In this post-atomic
business culture, uncertainty is the foundation of efficiency. The
untrustworthiness
of agreements is not a result of other activities, but a sign of good
will. The field of possibilities is left open at every moment, in every
situation. There is a willingness to get caught up in anything: a
meeting, a party or an accident. Parallel to the transparent society
there unfolds a cloud of vague structures through which the subject
moves forward in a Brownian manner.
This nonlinearity defies the
rhizomatic dogma that prescribes endless switching. These hard-luck
pilots do not wander; they stumble from one discontinuity to
the next. In vague spheres one thing does not lead to another; after
one thing comes something totally different. Nor are trees or roots
visible here. A veiled belief in continuity is replaced in vague media
by steam on the window to eternity. Undirected recreational
activities form temporary compressions in the random distribution
of particles which roam about in the vague ether. No order anyone
discovers in this chaos will impress the insiders. The brilliant
conspiracy will be heard out for a while and then forgotten again.
Vague media are impossible to follow. Their fuzzy logic frustrates
meaning-makers in search of uni- or multivocality. The result is a
fluffy sign with an information value of 0,34 or 2,74. Nothing is
concealed or intentionally distorted. One simply doesn't exactly
know; and this is obvious.
In spite of everything, the other gets
plenty of room to voice her revolutionary message. There is no fear
of data here. The historical excursion is a heavy exertion which is
gladly undertaken, although the history of vagueness is still
waiting for its author. One can unearth a mass of shadowy Greek
philosophers and less obvious theologists who didn't quite get
around to making their statements, or brilliant Renaissance painters
who never came into their own. The B film rose above pulp and
started being taken seriously a long time ago, and there is no reason
this ought not to happen to B thinkers (i.e. Russell), B literature and
the rest of culture. Certain historical figures have found their
natural milieu in vague media: Mao, Gysin, Manson, Reich, Jesus,
Debord, Meinhof, Fromm, Hitler, Hendrix, Castaneda, Goldman, Marley
and Longstocking, but also cookbooks, weapons, children's drawings,
witches, blood, death's-heads and always animals. As long as it's cut
up, overloaded with text, full and dark, with illustrations heavy and
in black and white.
Vague media are not especially obsessive or passionate; but they
keep coming back to the same point. While sovereign media are on
a perpetual journey of discovery, the vague channels might pitch
their tents for an indefinite time or stick around forever. For
them the universe can be found anywhere; mobility is not
necessary. The biggest mystery for vague media is their own
functioning. Because of this existential moment, individual
expressions will take no definite and immutable form, though they
will always have some
point to make. The[se] travelers of the terrain vague can find their
way in wastelands where even the hot-spot tourists du moment get
lost. Vague media are not concerned with forms, but for the space
between the forms, and these are timeless. This is why they will
long outlive the rising and setting of other media.
Sovereign Media
Sovereign media insulate themselves against the hyperculture.
They
seek no connection; they disconnect. This is their point of departure.
They leave the media surface and orbit the multimedia network
as satellites. These do-it-yourselfers shut themselves up inside
a self-built monad, an "indivisible unit" of introverted
technologies which, like a room without doors or windows,
wishes to deny the existence of the world. This act is a denial of
the maxim "I am connected, therefore I am." It conceals no longing
for a return to nature. They do not criticize baroque data
environments or experience them as threats, but consider them
material to use as they please. They operate beyond clean and
dirty, in the garbage system ruled by chaos pur sang.
Their carefree rummaging in the universal media archive is
not a management strategy for jogging jammed creativity. These
negative media refuse to be positively defined and are good for
nothing. They demand no attention and constitute no enrichment of
the existing media landscape. Once detached from every
meaningful context, they switch over in fits and starts from one
audio-video collection to the next. The autonomously multiplying
connections generate a sensory space which is relaxing as well as
nerve-racking. This tangle can never be exploited as a trend-sensitive
genre again. All the data in the world alternately make
up one lovely big amusement park and earn five stars in the
paranoia category, where humor descends on awkward moments
like an angel of salvation and lifts the radio program up out of the
muck.
Unlike the "antimedia movement," which is based on a radical
critique of capitalist (art) production, the sovereign media have
alienated themselves from the entire business of politics and the
art scene. An advanced mutual disinterest hampers any
interaction. They move in parallel worlds which do not interfere
with each other. No anti-information or criticism, politics or art is produced in order
to start up a dialogue with the authorities. Once sovereign, media are
no longer attacked, but tolerated and, of course, ignored. But this lack
of interest is not a result of disdain for hobbyist amateurism or
political infantilism; it is the contemporary attitude towards any
image or sound that is bestowed on the world. Sovereign media are equipped with their own
starters
and do not need to push off from any possible predecessors or other media.
They are different from post-1968 alternative media and from
the autonomous "movement" media of the 1980s.
Alternative
media still
work with the priciple of "antipublicity" and mirror the
mainstream media, which they feel need to be corrected and
supplemented. This strategy aims to make the individual aware of
his behavior as well as his opinion. This process aims to change
public opinion. These corrective media have no general claims but
work with a positive variant of the cancer model, which assumes
that in the long term everyone, whether indirectly or through the
infected big media, will become informed about the problem. They
presuppose a tight network streched around and through society,
so that in the end the activism of a few will unleash a chain
reaction among many. Until that time, they direct themselves at a
relatively small group, in the certainty
that their info will not stay stuck in a ghetto or start feeding back
in the form of internal debates. This "megaphone model" aims in
particular at liberal-left opinion leaders, who have no time to
accumulate information or invent arguments and get politically
motivated specialists to do it for them. Movements in the 1960s and
1970s gave themes like feminism, the third world and the
environment a wide range this way. Professionalization and market
conformism
in those circles, however, have caused people to switch to the "real"
media. The laboratories where information and argumentation get
tested are currently an inseparable part of the process to
"manufacture consent," now that their movements have become just
as virtual as the media they figure in.
At the end of the 1970s, radicals who had gotten tired of
waiting for the other's change of consciousness founded so-called
"movement media." At precisely the moment that the official media
started emancipating themselves and terms like "press" and "public
opinion" vanished from the scene (together with the rise of
satellite-broadcasting and cablesystems), a group of activists gave up
believing in their deaf fellow citizens and got to work
themselves. Although to unknowing outsiders their work seemed
a continuation
of alternative media activity, they let go of the cancer model and,
like the official media, went floating. The mirror of the alternative
media was crushed. It had become pointless to keep appealing to
public responsibility; they
needed to look for a different imaginary quantity to concentrate on:
"the movement."
Although these media were only locally available, they had
no concern for the regional restriction which the ascending local media
impose upon themselves. They no longer wanted to be alternative
city papers. In form as well as content they became transnational,
like their global peers. They wanted nothing to do with growth.
Their brillant dilettancy turned out to be a childhood illness, but an
essential component. As a leftover product of vanished radical
movements, which flare up every now and then, their continuity and
staticness in design and content remain breathtaking to this day. It
cannot be reduced to dogma. They turn away from the brevity of
media time and create their own space-time continuum.
The sovereign media are the cream of all the missionary
work performed in the media galaxy. They have cut all surviving
imaginary ties with truth, reality and representation. They no
longer concentrate on the wishes of a specific target group, as the
"inside" media still do. They have emancipated themselves from any
potential audience, and thus they do not approach their audience as
a moldable market segment, but offer it the "sovereign space" it
deserves. Their goal and legitimacy lie not outside the media, but
in practicable "total decontrol." Their apparently narcissistic
behavior bears witness to their self-confidence, which is not
broadcast. The signal
is there; you only have to pick it up. Sovereign media invite us to hop
right onto the media bus. They have a secret pact with noise, the
father of all information. And time is no problem -- there is room for
extended versions as well as sampled quotations.
This is only possible through a lack of profile. Without
being otherwise secretive about their own existence, the sovereigns
remain unnoticed, since they stay in the blind spot that the bright
media radiation creates in the eye. And this is why they need not be
noticed as an avant-garde trend and expected to provide art or
social movements with a new impetus. The reason sovereign media
are difficult to distinguish as a seperate category is because the
shape in which they appear can never shine in its full lustre. The
program producers don't show themselves; we see only their masks,
in familiar formats. Every successful experiment that can possibly
be pointed to as an artistic or political statement, they
immediately expose to contamination. The mixers inherently do not
provoke, but infect chance passers-by with corrupted banalities
which present
themselves in all their friendly triviality. An inextricable tangle of
meaning and irony makes it impossible for the experienced media
reader to make sense of this.
The atmosphere inside the sealed cabin
conflicts with the ideology of networking. As a central coordination
machine, the computer subjects all old media to a digital regime.
The sovereign media, conversely, make their own kind of
connections, which are untranslatable into any universal code. High
tech is put to the test and turned inside out. But this trip into the
interior of the machine does not result in a total multimedia art
work. Disbelief in the total engagement of the senses and
technically perfect representation is too great for that. The required
energy is generated by short circuits, a confusion of tongues,
atmospheric disturbances and clashing cultures. Only when
computer-driven networks begin to break their own connections and
scare off potential users will it be time for the sovereigns to log
in.
Free Radio in Amsterdam
Since the early eighties, Amsterdam has boasted an extensive
collection of free radio stations. These pirates work
noncommercially out of squatted buildings and are grudgingly tolerated
by the authorities. Along with independent and world music, radio
plays and shows with drop-in guests, the mix shows provide the
most distinctive sound of the Amsterdam stations. The mixture is an
expedition to the innermost recesses of radio. Mixers create their
own universes of sound, infinite in length and breadth. They collect
and examine material for its alienation potential. Trash is taken along
on the trip and treated with a certain respect. Processing is not an act
of violence for them. The point is not to ritually drive out some
demon believed to reside inside the media. The mix shows us that we must travel
through an immense empty space before we arrive at a new
meaning. Sovereign media are hybrid through and through. Old
and new, popular and obscure, trivial and heavy, all is forged
together into a stunning total mix. The mixmasters connect
discarded tape recorders to high-tech samplers
and lace a cut-up Clinton speech with a language
course, an Italian TV show, barking dogs and a dance orchestra.
The punk and hardcore station Radio Death, with its credo "Listen or Die,"
was the forerunner of Radio Patapoe, on which I now
wish to focus. Patapoe's slogan is "Stand up better to a young world."
Unlike other radio stations, Patapoe likes to veil itself in mystery
about its existence and its intentions. But there is a manifesto, part of
which I would now like to read.
Radio Patapoe: Stand Up Better to a Young World
The media are unbearable. What to do? Some people express
their righteous democratic rage by interfering with the regular
media. They bring the lie machine to a halt. Others disappear behind
the curtain, conscious that the media mill will pervert their good
intentions. They leave behind no traces in the media; they simply
perform important works. Radio Patapoe is behind them all the way,
but would like to draw your attention to a third path.
Information incites a Pavlovian reaction in many. It has to be
passed on, actualized, commented on -- fast! The pace at which the
info streams in and the shock value of the latest report determines
the relative attention accorded the item. Remember Tiananmen and
Desert Storm. Because of the live requirement and the craving for
images, people are easily satisfied with dubious sources. The power of
a media event is that it pushes other items out. Every medium
automatically chases the ideal of the worldwide live report. No one
thus escapes selection and the multiplication of complex background
information. Only children can still make sense of it all. The more
coverage, the less truth content and practical usefulness.
Radio Patapoe is an obscure, illegal, homemade station which
doesn't wish to measure itself by adult criteria. There is enough
information that hasn't yet been spread. It might be 10 days or
15 years old and can be dished up with elan, with nary a
reference to "their" news. Information is always new and
surprisingly timely. It is never historical because next week it will be
the center of attention. And the cases never close; they keep
plodding along. There are already so many data recorded that one
needn't even have to look for them. They're there for the taking and
they're there to be distorted. Just selectively reading from a
newspaper (recent or not) rakes up so many mysterious details and
pronouncements that it can be more exciting than a professional
newsmagazine, which naturally never has quite the right
correspondent in the right place.
Patapoe rummages in others' audio and video archives and
makes amazing discoveries. Humanity is in the possession of a
universal archive that the officials maintain may be unpacked only
in an historically responsible way. Someone might pick out a pattern
and send it around one more time as a fashion. But you never get the
banal groundswell of foolishness dumped on you that a
comprehensive representation would entail. Old material is meant to
figure as a citation or an ornament in the contemporary scenery.
Documents are not sacred objects for the Doggie Patapoe; they're
there to be used.
Why the hankering for serious anti-information? So there you sit;
you're right about something, but no one's told you so yet. And the
chances of anyone doing so are exceedingly grim. So you scrape up all
your courage and bring the truth to the fore. Everyone ignores you;
but God records everything (including your program), so later your
integrity will be proven. You can speculate about the long-term
effect of information: in 6 years you meet someone who was really
happy with your message. Or maybe not. Patapoe isn't waiting. The
trouble gone to must be matched by the pleasure got from the
broadcast. When your show is going haywire and you've made a
mess of everything in sight and you can't hold back your laughter,
it is a delight to the ear.
And fun for the listeners as well. The dialectic of boredom and
fascination is ruptured for a moment. The desecration of Information,
to everyone's surprise, does not lead to disbelief. You can test your
rock-solid principles without having to sell them down the river.
Only those who are tired of thinking and have firmly determined
their values long ago will fear this.
At Patapoe information is corroded, thrown to the winds and
shaken out. Many see such an attack as a physical threat. You betray
comrades who feel that their position as information provider is
endangered, and you are either heralded as a decadent art
movement or dismissed as an amateur. The world situation is so
precarious that no static may be introduced. These voices mute
themselves at any overwhelming success. The approach ensures a
blurry listener profile. The shady format opens ears that had been
closed.
The theory of relativity applied to the phenomenon of
information is the supporting foundation of every sovereign medium.
The listener need not be served, and decides which medium he or
she will consume. When one news item has a lock on 20 channels,
there's no reason to become the twenty-first. You then run a great risk of
reiterating rubbish. It is impossible to give an objective view of the
world. To suggest otherwise is what prevents official as well as
alternative media from drawing their own conclusions. In our
business, opinions and facts freely intermingle. Sovereignty in the
ether means nothing more or less than daring to determine according
to your own taste what will be on the agenda. Without paying heed
to an imaginary (movement) audience, editorial board, ideology or
formula. This sounds logical, but is practiced nowhere. This rule
should be made part of the universal declaration of human rights!
Everyone is a broadcaster and a potential radio personality who can
communicate across the spectrum. Paternalistic media that know
what is of General Interest need to be shouted down and drowned in
an all-out din.
Patapoe and multirationality -- one future. People know what's in
their best interest. Multirationalism is a vote of confidence for the
listeners. After all, information can be filtered out of any sound. The
message might be unequivocal, but everyone will interpret it
differently regardless. One will hear a sloppy microphone technique,
a whiny voice, a detail that pricks up the ears. Another will hear only
the sensational highlights; a third fixates on the idea behind it all; the
next waits for something that never comes. How many fellow
creatures are listening in the way that the radiomaker imagines they
are? Precious few. Multirationality implies that the other cannot be
fathomed, or reduced to a submissive receiver.
A message generally consists of many layers of information
which affect interpretation. The Multirat medianaut is unfailingly
aware of the following laws and sees through every camouflage:
- The fact that there is air time for the message (or not). By scanning
other channels you can figure out which topics are neglected or fall
entirely out of the picture. A news story from two weeks ago turns
out to have no follow-up, though things have been in no way
resolved.
- The length of an item (the importance attached to it). The more
attention the better, one would think. The most important news of
the day takes the most time and squeezes out other topics. The
question is: did this cover story really belong on this day? Wasn't
squeezing out other things really the point of all the hot footage? Be
suspicious whenever there's a major event that may occupy public
opinion.
- The choice of words (the news provider's ideological freight). The
faster news travels over the world, the less deviation there will be
from the original wording. Live broadcasts cannot be
simultaneously stamped in an ideological mold. That can only be
done later. In fact things are copied out and parroted more and
more. The terms that the Turkish government uses for "the" Kurds
get universally adopted. For the "race riots" in Los Angeles the
phrase "multicultural bread riots" would have been much more
applicable. The German police call antifascists "leftist anarchists."
Behind every word hides an ideological universe.
Not once does a term get used by accident. Here is a job for
hermeneutic anarchism that will set a never-ending
analysis in motion (which will be interrupted by the
sampler resistance).
- The tone in which things are read. This determines believability.
Every report can be made ridiculous through the use of speaking
techniques. A scoffing intonation or the repeating of sentences is
almost demagogic and can make a story quite chilling. And then
there are the subliminal techniques for keeping the unconscious
busy.
No wonder information does not flow linearly from one brain to
the other. The usual channels treat information only as text to be
transmitted. Though the other layers of information are not
recognized, they definitely influence the listener nonetheless. Behind
the daily ration of de-formation one might suspect a conspiracy. You
could also see it as a ritual, or as helpless fumbling. Patapoe
researches these layers and plays with them; which is not to say
anyone can escape them. A good program is just as manipulative as a
bad one. How convincing a program is depends on the degree to
which you have knowledge of the laws. A well-meaning mistake on
one of the levels can be enough to undermine the whole thing.
Placing your own good name and the listeners' listening habits in
doubt is a rewarding business.
Another aspect of multirationality is excessive lies and promises.
The audience has no problem with this and is not offended if the
truth comes out or the promise is not fulfilled. The grand gesture is
valued, but no one really expects to get anything out of it, as is usual
in advertisement, love and politics. Lunatic radio, in contrast, does
not live for unmitigated appreciation. This turns most listeners off,
but the chance few extract fruitful information from it. Previous
knowledge or interest makes them able to appreciate the nonsense
for what it is. These eccentrics have nothing in common with each
other: when you put craziness on the air, you transgress boundaries
of age, scenes, ideologies, because the message is not put into the
familiar codes. This can deregulate group behavior quite a bit.
All the mechanisms of selection and distortion that are
unleashed on information also apply to music. Bands that are not
part of the music monopoly are not broadcast. Media attention is
directly related to sales figures, except when artists that sell well
start making critical noises, which results in structural neglect in
favor of their "safe" colleagues. In the economic system of composer,
lyricist, performing artist, record label, radio station and record store,
the record bigwigs hold the reins. Selling records will no longer make
any artist rich; only concerts make money. Composer and lyricist pay
dearly to protect their copyrights, but make nothing unless their
creations sell in astronomical numbers. Radio stations must pay
duties for music, but they can choose not to. Their copyrights are not
ours.
We have made friends with the invisible enemy named
technology. Playing with the knobs yourself (or even what's behind
them) during broadcasts gives insight into the possibilities of the
medium and the modus operandi of other media. Dependence on the
engineering department is surrounded with much liturgy for us,
while elsewhere technicians make their appearance only when
there's a disturbance. The do-it-yourselfers are in permanent contact
with the vague spheres that surround audio technology, since they
have one foot drifting in the air and one firmly on the ground.
Technology is not a holy place or a black box; it's an accessory to
recreation that nominally enlarges the freedom of what the Japanese
call the "convenient life of the new human people." The equipment is
fought and vanquished, and then used comfortably in versatile ways.
So it needn't figure in a performance concerning the destructiveness
and power of technology.
We expect that everyone will become multirational, at least
outside the range of Radio Patapoe. But within hearing range Patapoe
may only be understood through its transmitter. Publicity does not
solve problems; it merely gives you a false feeling of significance.
That would be a pity. You'd either get crapped on, or you'd be unable
to live up to your own hype. What's left is an alliance with
like-minded people. Patapoe does not seek connections or ask for
solidarity. This improves our cooperation with driven weirdos from
the multimedia mill. In our meeting-free work environment, where
the directors must slave away the hardest, consensus is dismissed as
imaginary and the free association of sovereigns is allowed to do its
work. The organizational model keeps pressure on the workers as
low as possible in the interest of good feelings. Multirationality helps
us stand up better to a young world.
The Data Dandy
The data dandy, whom I want to introduce here as my final topic, is
as a potential media figure a difficult character. Since this UTO was
brought into being by ADILKNO in 1993, it has been leading a life of
its own as a buzzword. Appropriately, the dandy gives umbrage and
can expect deep admiration as well as resolute revulsion and
contempt.
Although the dandy shows off his affinity for the wretched
and the criminal, his relationship to the underground, the
experimental media artists or the remnants of the autonomist
movement is absent at first glance. Data-dandyism does not strive
for media practice in the strict sense. It is a techno-mask that can be
put on and taken off within an information environment like the Net.
Information overload is the dandy's natural milieu,
and his counterpart is the
media ecologist, who cannot bear waste and wishes to prescribe a
media diet for the community. The dandy's hedonistic and frivolous
manner
of dealing with contemporary navigational problems disturbs
essentialists, who are in search of a truth or reality within the
networks.
The data dandy does not bring about any partial media connections,
but dedicates himself to an aesthetic attitude toward the
phenomenon of information. The motto of the "User as Artist" is, "La
toilette digitale est l'espression de la societe." A dandy always figures
in an ambiguous social situation, and in this fin de siecle that is the
state of profound confusion and boredom. In the face of an
overwhelming assortment of identities, the data dandy concerns
himself with the depth of devotion to computerized elegance. Like
the splendid heroes of the nineteenth century, he is solely dedicated to his
own perfection. Beyond hype or lifestyle, beyond criticizing the
corporate character of technoculture, the dandy tries on programs
one after the other, with Oscar Wilde's line, "The first duty of life is
to be as artificial as possible," as a guideline.
The masquerade in which the dandy takes part on the Net might be a
game, a MUD or a MOO, but he can also appear on a newsgroup or an
IRC channel or in a chic Electronic Grand Cafe. These spaces might be
filled with data dandies, but more probably they have merely been
designed by them. The data dandy is not a person, but rather a
program. This is not a identity or a role model you can take on at
will. The data dandy, like the cyberpunk, is the product of literary
fiction. These are not social constructions, as are the Otaku, the Zippie
and Generation X. Magic words like these prove to be strange
attractors. People quickly wonder what they might be, and how you
become one. But that only dulls the figure's shine. They are, at most,
digital spirits who suddenly, briefly flicker up on the screen and then
disappear again, or never appear at all. Their existence is
improbable, and their profile remains blurry and vague since they
are fluid phenomena. Only after a long time do these invented
figures acquire firm contours and disappear into fashion, where they
circulate in a fixed, crystallized form.
This law is easily observed through the example of cyberpunk,
which was brought into being by a number of science-fiction
writers. Cyberpunk appeared at the end of the 1980s as a
projection of the future and has now almost become history.
Thanks to Billy Idol and others, it has become an element of
popular culture. But cyberpunks will probably actually appear
only sometime in the next century. Or they existed only at the
beginning of the 80s, even before science fiction made reference to
their coming.
The same holds for the data dandy; it remains
uncertain whether he is a remnant of decadent 1980s
postmodernity or an unproductive troublemaker of the heyday of
the Net. In any case, this is impossible to think about outside
fashion and media. In the designing of techno-masks it is
important to carry negativity as far as possible. In times of well-
intentioned positivity, merciless effectivity and overpowering
pragmatism, it is important to remain as unclear as possible. Only
when the chaos of thought is optimal and complexity is no longer
surveyable, out of the gray mist of image fragments, the forgotten
discourses of heroic times and third-hand high-tech info will rise
the figure of the data dandy.
The data dandy collects information to show off and not to
transmit it. He is well-, too well-, or even exaggeratedly well-
informed. Pointed questions are met with unwanted answers. He
always comes up with something different. The phenotype of the
data dandy is as feared as his historical predecessor, whose
playground was the street and the salon. The elegant extravagance
with which he displays
the most detailed trivia shocks the practical media user. The data
dandy makes fun of the gauged consumption and the measured
intake of current news and amusement, and doesn't worry about an
excess or overload of specialized knowledge. His carefully assembled
information portfolio bespeaks no constructive motive. He goes to the
greatest effort to appear as arbitrary as possible. One wonders: why
did the data-head want to know all that stuff? He zaps not out of
boredom, but out of unwillingness to keep abreast of current events
and everyone else's latest worries.
In the era of multimedia mass information, one can no longer
differentiate between uni- and multiformity. Neither broad overview
nor clarifying detail can relieve the mental confusion. Against this
background, the data dandy proves what everyone knows: namely,
that information may be omnipresent, but it is not readily accessible.
Certain facts are very flattering, and one must develop a fine nose for
them. Unlike the data collector, the data dandy is concerned not with
the obsession of the complete file, but with the accumulation of as
many immaterial ornaments as possible. While the otaku withdraws
into himself and will never cross the boundaries of his solitary
cultivation, it is precisely the most extroverted newsgroups which
the data dandy searches out to launch his unproductive
contributions. What the data dandy skims off in order to present
elsewhere would be only of secondary importance, if the
presentation were not so indiscreet. His freakish wit distracts
attention from the run-of-the-mill items. The ingenuity of his bon
mots has a duration of 30 seconds, after which they disappear from
the screen as suddenly as they came. Our data dandy is a broker in
giga-wares, with the understanding that your garbage is his makeup,
and his substance your fluid.
The screen is the mirror at which he performs his toilet. The
buttoning and unbuttoning of textile-dandyism has found its
successor in the the channel-surfing of on/off decadence. Wrapped in
the finest facts and the most senseless gadgets, the new dandy
deregulates the [time-]economy of information/money-managers. He
spends most of his computing time on the luxurious decoration of his
hard disk and the creation of sophisticated circuits among thousands
of heterogeneous software trinkets. The PowerBook-as-jewelry is the
pride of many a salon digitalist. He derides with actuality, hype and
fashion: just for a second, a self appears that is its own anchorperson.
The data dandy considers his avatar in cyberspace the center of the
digital universe. He knows he can only assume this position through
the grace of the open structure of the network. His irksome
interventions are preconditioned by public access, which he does not
view as a means of changing the nonvirtual world. He recognizes the
Net as a space to display oneself, not to communicate. Simulation is
the fundament of his "General Principles of Digital Elegance," which is
dismissed by essentialists, who still believe in the real/unreal binary,
as "Lust am Untergang" or "Reinen Hedonismus." The data dandy is a
secret democrat waging a relaxed battle for the unbounded
expansion of digital human rights. Because if the plug is pulled on the
Net, his personality will evaporate.
The data dandy displays a disquieting kinship with the politician,
who also forces himself upon us with empty phrases and won't go
away. Now that the political classes in their death-struggle have
discovered the media, they are impossible to get away from, and
their fanatical attempts to solicit support are taking on dandyish
traits. The data dandy surfaces in the vacuum of politics which was
left behind once the oppositional culture neutralized itself in a
dialectical synthesis with the system. There he reveals himself as a
lovable as well as false opponent, to the great rage of politicians, who
consider their young pragmatic dandyism as a publicity tool and not
necessarily as a personal goal. They vent their rage on the
journalists, experts and personalities who make up the chance cast
on the studio floor, where who controls the direction is the only topic
of conversation. Yet they find the data dandy hopelessly difficult,
since he doesn't want to play the sporting opponent and neglects to
ask politely critical questions. Our bon vivant enjoys all display of
banality and takes absolutely no offense at pointless
dedication. It would have been useful to be malicious, but the
imperfect
subversive shows precisely his engaging side. His charm is
deadly.
While the no-talent underground goes in search of instruments to
cause the establishment trouble, the data dandy lets everything go
stylishly haywire. There is no longer any social movement,
opposition or undercurrent, nor can one suddenly appear out of
nowhere; it can only sink further into the individual. Once empty, the
media remain empty forever; no statement can compete with that.
Hackers and cyberpunks don't manifest themselves, simply because
they do not exist, just like the data dandy. These potential figures
can only be conjured up as ghosts. Calling upon fictitious social forces
is a desperate attempt at one more way to gauge the enemy. The
data dandy is taken for a proto-/neo-/retro-fascist when he briefly
appears as an illusory participant in the form of theory-skinhead
during the processing-debate about "the rise of the extreme right."
The absolute vacuity of the data dandy greatly resembles the exalted
laziness of Douglas Coupland's Generation X, Slackers, McJobbers,
Beavis and Butthead fans and vague types. They see themselves as
necessarily inextricable from the media and resist the historical
mission of being subjects of the technological revolution. They laugh
themselves sick over the idea that the mouse, remote control and
data glove are revolutionary tools, serving a new creative
productivity. The creative potential of the new media lies mainly in
their potential for auspicious deception, with which few can earn
money. These "cool" products are consumed by X'ers with few
illusions and much irony. Their pleasure at the self-referential
character of the media results in nothing. We see them, hardly full of
abandon, tinkering with the multiplicity of the techno. The garage
romanticism of the 80s has disappeared; tinkering with hardware
has made way for copying, pasting together, cleaning up and
reprogramming others' software. Digitalization in the 90s is taking
place at a sub-proletarian level, beyond the crumbling welfare state.
Machine-assemblage and data processing take place nowadays in a
global context and are displaced, telematically sent, to Asia, the
Caribbean, China, India and Eastern Europe. The Net as the nirvana of
lost jobs is above all an arena where one can delight in the pathetic,
wooden communication of others.
Unlike Generation X, the data dandy veils his cynicism about
speculation in the new media branch. The folly of interactivity need
not be unmasked as far as he's concerned. On the contrary,
carefully-tended negativity, full of paradoxical humor, should be stylishly
disseminated. The great Nothing, which is devalued in the yawning
digital abyss, should be kept covered. This is the most important
mainspring behind his will to illusion and deception. The deep
melancholy of the computer and the infinite emptiness of
cyber-spaces inspires extra-existential fantasies in the users,
which the data
dandy tries to exorcise with his humanoid artificiality. He admires
the prefab poverty cult of grunge, the hideously fresh and cheerful
colors of Swatch and Benetton (fluorescent as well as natural) and
the well-intentioned and healthy hallucinations offered by
cyberculture. In response to the computer-driven spectacle inside
the brain, with its endless navigation through data-masses, the data
dandy advances the gracious art of brilliant inspiration. He admires
all search systems, the know-bots, agents and other variants of
HyperCard philosophy. His seductive attractiveness is based on
conjuring up one-time knowledge. The heroic production of data
dumbfounds counseling clients and careerists, who begin to ask
themselves in aggravation where they can get hold of the
data-dandy manual. But they will drift away in frustration as soon as they
realize that the media and their theorists are praising hot air after all,
and that the chameleon-like data dandy can laugh freely about his
own inevitable death.
The Net is for the electronic dandy what the metropolitan street was
for the historical dandy. Strolling along the data boulevards cannot
be prohibited and ultimately jams the entire bandwidth. The
all-too-civilized conversation during a rendez-vous turns up a few
misplaced and objectionable data, but never results in dissidence.
The point of willfully wrong navigation and elegant joyriding inside
someone else's electro-environment is admiration, envy and
confusion, and consciously aims for stylized incomprehension. The
dandy measures the beauty of his virtual appearance by the moral
indignation and laughter of the plugged-in civilians. It is a natural
character of the parlor aristocrat to enjoy the shock of the artificial.
This is why he feels so at home in cyberspace with all its attributes.
Cologne and pink stockings have been replaced by precious Intel;
delicate data gloves and ruby-encrusted butterfly goggles and
sensors are attached to his brows and nostrils. Away with the crude
NASA-aesthetics of cybernauts! The data dandy has moved well
beyond the pioneer stage; the issue now is the grace of the medial
gesture.
The anonymous crowd in the streets was the audience of the
Passagen-dandy; the logged-in Net-users that of the Great Digital
Aesthete. He feels forced to employ the other users as the
anonymous mass, as the amorphous normality to which he is the
sharply outlined deviation. The info-dandy knows he is never more
than one of many crazies in the variability carnival of the
information circus. He will thus never present himself as the
umpteenth retro-identity, remnant of a twentieth-century fashion
such as hippie, fascist, punk, modernist or feminist, because he can
only play with the rules of the Net as a non-identity. What is
exclusivity in the age of differentation? The dandy is not interested
in ever more secret passwords for gaining entry into ever more
exclusive data salons; he needs virtual plazas for making his tragic
appearance. Data dandyism is born of an aversion to being exiled into
a subculture of one's own. The dandy's archenemies are camp and
cult, which, as opponents of lifestyle and design, need popular culture
as a source of tastelessness.
The data dandy, false prompter of the sentimentality of the day, does
not mourn apathy, conformism, disengagement, the blurring of
values, materialism, individualism, depoliticization and the
reappearance of the old left. On the contrary, he repeatedly launches
contentless Temporary Common Denominators (TADs), in which
every subculture believes it recognizes itself. He manages thus to
attract a remarkably large grey mass with which to stage his own
spectacles. He creates a fake publicness and tests conventions. Some
arbitrary examples of strong TADs with a high vagueness coefficient
are the Love Parade, candle and torch demos against the Gulf War
and Rostock, a candle in the window for Poland, Europride, a human
chain over the Bosporus and other mobilizations of public concern.
The data dandy surfs along on the waves of his Temporary Common
Denominators and enjoys the fact that so many think they have
found content in the signs of meaninglessness. This is why he is so
engaged, and does not sit at home cursing that nothing happens
anymore. He perks up at every mass display and enjoys the parade
of emotion. Hankering for a binding passion is already reason enough
to take to the street. The empty protest is a manifestation of
collective Anwesenheit which culminates in medial presentation.
Political resistance as advertisement for the latest lifestyle brings
thousands into turmoil.
On the Net, however, what shows the characteristics of a crowd is not
the users, but the information itself. As soon as a new field of
knowledge is found, it splits and branches off so that an infinite
amount of information flows in and out. Today's new theme is
tomorrow's 23 newsgroups. If the data dandy wishes to come across
as a real figure, he can only do so in the form of dandy data. These
are queer: while the heteroinformative data of the "normals" are
concerned with qualification, connection and reproduction, fanning
out and thus causing further disintegration, the dandies'
homoinformative data are eccentric but not special. Homodata
associate with others and are lost in themselves. Like TADs, they
attract roughly similar info and achieve a carefree concentration
within the information field, where the show can begin. There
appears to be an encounter or confrontation with the system, but the
contact yields no productive moment, no cause or effect. Dandy data
are purely situational, parasitic par excellence. What they leave us
with is legend, the fuel of all media and the hope of theory.
ADILKNO has published regularly in Mediamatic magazine since
1988. Cracking the
Movement: Squatting beyond the Media (New York: Autonomedia,
1994) is its first book to be published in English.
Available in German are Bewegungslehre (Berlin: Edition
ID-Archiv, 1991); Medien-Archiv (Bensheim: Bollmann Verlag, 1993);
and Der Datendandy (Bensheim: Bollmann Verlag, 1994). The
original Dutch texts are published by Ravijn
in Amsterdam.
ADILKNO can be reached at
Post Box 10591
1001 EN Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Telephone/Fax: 011-31-20-6203297
email: geert@xs4all.nl
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