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Home / Intro / Let it RIP
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Let it RIP
Obituary of an Endless Myth: Public Netbase, 1994-2006
by Brian Holmes
Creating the truth of our post-democratic societies is a deceptively simple
affair. A thousand techniques lie ready at hand. Send out a mail-barrage of
glossy brochures that will land on every coffee-table.
Arrange for a headline in a best-selling local paper. Pre-empt a television
newscast during prime digestion time. Stage an astonishing event on a public
square. Organize an objective opinion poll proving the popularity of
whatever fact you've just invented. Every major corporation or political
party does such things at a snap of the fingers.
The American publicist Edward L. Bernays - who was born in old Vienna - put
it like this: "The engineer of consent must create news.... The
imaginatively managed event can compete successfully with other events for
attention. Newsworthy events, involving people, usually do not happen by
accident. They are planned deliberately to accomplish a purpose, to
influence our ideas and actions."
Bernays sought to quell any fears about such influence. "Freedom of
expression and its democratic corollary, a free press, have tacitly expanded
our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion." These expanded
rights were a result of technological advances: "All these media provide
open doors to the public mind. Any one of us through these media may
influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens."
Of course there's just one condition: you must somehow obtain the millions
of dollars that are required to get your favorite message through that
wide-open door.
Enter the Institute for New Culture Technology/t0 - better known by the name
of its physical installation, Public Netbase.
The project was launched by Konrad Becker and Francisco de Souza-Webber in
1994, in a bit of virtual space on the server of the General Hospital.
Public Netbase soon became an Internet-access provider in its own right, but
also a workshop organizer and exhibition/conference venue, offering a casual
"E-scape Lounge" for all kinds of reading and relaxing people. It shared a
location with the Depot discussion group before opening a full-fledged media
lab at the still-unreconstructed MuseumsQuartier in 1997. Its aim was to
create alternative culture, critical analysis and unpredictable urban
happenings, by experimenting with networked media-machines. After a few
years of development, the Netbase would be able to send an image into every
living room, to replace the daily paper as an information source, to rival
with the TV, to catalyze events in the city, to reveal shocking facts on
outdoor screens and even to orchestrate public opinion polls. All of this,
not through the expenditure of huge amounts of cash, but through the direct
cooperation of inventive people. As though the raging Leviathan of modern
mass communications could still be tamed by mischievous Lilliputians. This
was the tantalizing illusion - perhaps influenced by the goals of one of
Konrad Becker's more notorious performance-pieces, entitled "Resocializing
the Devil."
Worlds of Opportunity
Not everyday do you get the chance to squat a brand-new global
infrastructure, designed and perfected by the military-infotainment complex
of the planet's sole remaining superpower. Still it's strange how few were
there to seize the occasion. By filling a website with a free text-library,
and a physical location with radical artists and thinkers attracted by the
lack of bureaucratic control, Public Netbase became a north star or magnetic
pole in the still-uncharted realms of networked culture.
The American writer Peter Lamborn Wilson a.k.a. Hakim Bey, author of the
"Temporary Autonomous Zone," was there to inaugurate the media-space in
1997. Luther Blissett, the Italian activist movement that launched a
bewildering series of media hoaxes all "signed" by an obscure English
football player, was reincarnated at the Netbase for the Intergalactic
Conference of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. The Critical Art
Ensemble carried out their genexploitation project Fleshmachine. Group
exhibitions like Robotronika, Synworld or Interface Explorer opened pathways
through the latest technical and artistic possibilities, while conferences
and performance events like Infobody Attack, Information Terror (including a
container-module near the Statsoper) and Sex, Lies and the Internet took up
questions around the clashes between freedom and control in the emerging
social dreamscape of the networks. All that culminated in the exhibition and
conference series entitled World Information, which had various incarnations
in Brussels, Vienna, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Munich, Helsinki, Novi Sad,
Belgrade and finally Bangalore. Serious data mining was giving rise to
subversive and satirical cultural forms. The specialty of the Netbase could
be described as "the infosculpture of dissident mythologies."
On the international scene, Public Netbase will be remembered for some of
its later conferences, like "Dark Markets: Infopolitics, electronic media
and democracy in times of crisis," or "Open Cultures: Free flows of
information and the politics of the commons" - and perhaps best of all, for
the amazing exhibition stunts it staged on the Karlsplatz. One of the
masterpieces of tactical media, Nikeground - Rethinking Space, carried out
with the Italian group 0100101110101101.ORG, involved the semi-legal
installation of a bright red, split-level container weighing several tons,
with displays and information panels revealing the uncannily plausible hoax
of corporate plans to rebrand entire urban districts and replace traditional
monuments with brutally simplified logos exploded to massive scale.
System-77 Civil Counter-Reconnaissance, done in collaboration with the
Slovene artist Marko Peljhan, was a tent-like structure sporting a
high-performance communication antenna and filled inside with plans and
mock-ups of miniaturized, camera-equipped drone aircraft to be used by
civilians for counter-surveillance of the formidable snooping arsenals now
trained on all of us by the secret services and even the local police. S-77
CCR featured footage of police actions from the anti-Haider protests of the
year 2000, injecting a strictly Viennese reference into these complex
projects driven by sophisticated analysis of world-wide trends. But what
most people from abroad will never have realized it that the Karlsplatz
itself was the theater of a largely tacit conflict over what kind of city
people want to live in.
A large open space on the edge of the tourist-flooded first district, the
Karlsplatz was perceived by city managers as a zone of drug-addiction and
deviant behavior. Early plans involved transforming it into a bizarre sort
of surveillance park that would literally be called "Kontrolplatz." Finally
the underlying intention was cloaked in acceptable guise and the idea of
"Kunstplatz" emerged. When artists and alternative media-makers stage
occupations of a public space - as they did with the Free Media Camp on the
Karlsplatz, with events every night from June to October 2003 - what is at
stake are the real meanings of the word "art," and the possibility to have
ideas and expressions of your own in a society that tries very seriously,
with the use of very considerable technical means, to "engineer the consent"
of its unwitting citizens.
Going out Kicking
The Netbase is dead, and you're reading its obituary. The reasons for its
disappearance have everything to do with the continuing need for critique in
a networked, future-oriented technological society that has never managed to
rid itself of any of its old demons.
Public Netbase was celebrated by everyone in the social-democratic cultural
establishment of Austria during the year 2000, when it staged campaign after
campaign against the far-right Freedom Party government, lent logistic,
communicational and aesthetic support to the protests, and staged roundtable
conferences like "Der gläserne Mensch: Grundrechte im
Informationszeitalter," held under the auspices of the fake-official site,
http://government-austria.at. But in 2001 the same Public Netbase was
considered persona non grata at the remodeled MuseumsQuartier (which now
resembles a banking complex for pictures). The growing sophistication and
depth of its investigations and projects - including the online
election-polling tool www.wahlkabine.at, invented in collaboration with well
known political scientists - was apparently perceived as a threat by
municipal politicians and funding officials, unable to comprehend the
urgency of supporting a critical civil society at a time when control drives
are reappearing everywhere, with all their atavistic force. Faced with a
project that was overspilling conventional aesthetic and intellectual
limits, the establishment treated it exactly as they have traditionally
treated the avant-garde - by fearing and despising it, and forcing it back
to non-existence for want of the most minimal comprehension and support.
Public Netbase could have become a neutral and innocuous cultural
institution like hundreds of others, biting its tongue in order to keep the
funding-streams flowing. But the people who worked on its dissident
imaginaries preferred to take the mythical status of an exemplary
counter-institution, and to refuse the resignation of a failed adventure
that lives on after its own death, just as the ordinary vampires do.
True to the project's origins on a hospital server, they wanted to peel away
the soft gauze and bandages from a media-battered society's eyes - to tear
the veil of aesthetic complacency that covers up the hardware of engineered
consent.
Let it rip!
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2024 Netbase t0 | | |
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