Free Your Collaboration
by Trebor Scholz
A variety of new tools for collective cultural practices emerged over the past few years. The Internet has become increasingly interwoven in the fabric of everyday life through mailing lists, chat rooms, collaborative weblogs and wikis. From Murray Bookchin to Buckminster Fuller there is thesearch for radically different configurations of society itself: a society that is based on a new ethics based on sharing and cooperation. How do contemporary forms of cultural production make use of newly available collaborative tools to subvert corporate models of forced cooperation and foster selforganized, independent modes of cultural production and dissemination? Collaboration means, “to work together to achieve the same goal that we could not achieve as individuals.” Cooperation suggests people assist each other, walk in parallels; but in creative industries, collaborations are often forced. In Gleicher als Andere, the German critic Christoph Spehr emphasizes that in Free Cooperation anybody can leave the cooperation at any time, taking with them what they had put in.
Free Cooperation needs to pay off; even if there are disagreements,
the
cooperation needs to remain workable. There is no ideal cooperation in which
nobody is taken advantage of—there are always elements of compromise.
Examples of cooperative group models in the urban United States include Reclaim
the Streets and Critical Mass. During the anti-war protests of 2003,
cyclists in San Francisco, California, blocked major urban intersections and
highways with hundreds of bicycles as part of Critical Mass. This was initiated
by a leafleting campaign advertising times and dates of such actions, yet
the campaign took place without any central leadership. Similarly, Reclaim
the Streets is an equally decentralized model of taking back the public sphere.
Other examples of community-organizing efforts include: broadcasting free
radio, graffiti, and street parties. Jeff Ferrell highlights Radio Free ACTUP,
The Micro-Radio Empowerment Coalition, and Slave Revolt Radio. The green movement
exemplifies a type of temporary alliance that chooses no one particular subject
position (e.g. class, gender, race) in pursuit of a shared goal (Laclau/ Mouffe).
Founded in 1981, Paper Tiger TV presents a different consequential model of
collaboration because it creates and distributes collectively produced activist
video works that critique the media. The New York Citybased chamber orchestra,
Orpheus, works without a conductor and rotates all of its functions among
the musicians.
Recent history provides many examples of collaborations, including: Bureau
d’Etudes, Twenteenth Century, 010010111010101.org, Las Agencias, Luther
Blissett, A-Clip, REPOhistory, Dorkbot, Art Workers Coalition, Critical Art
Ensemble, Rtmark, and Group Material. Thinking of collaboration the most important
art historical association is the Fluxus movement, which includes artists
George Maciunas and Alan Kaprov. In 1961 Kaprov wrote the influential essay
“Happenings in the New York Scene,” presenting his ideas about
interaction. For Kaprov, a happening simply meant that “something happens”
and that visitors get something to do— artist and spectator interact.
Today, the obsession with objects as described by Walter Benjamin is replaced
with the obsession for simulation and interaction (Nichols).
Artists have taken the Internet on as a context for their work since its emergence,
de-emphasizing individual authorship and answering Bertolt Brecht’s
demand for an apparatus that goes beyond distribution and allows communication
(1932). Early projects aiming at collaborative authorship include
Robert Adrian X’s Die Welt in 24 Stunden (1983), Roy Ascott’s
project La Plissure du texte (1983), Norman White’s Hearsay (1984),
Douglas Davis’ The
World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994) and the project Épreuves
d’ecritures as part of the exhibition Les Immatrieux that was conceived
by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1985). In the early 1990s projects like “De
Digitale Stad” (Amsterdam) and “Internationale Stadt” (Berlin)
established urban cooperative communities grouped around the idea of affordable
access to the Internet for all.
Art institutions are neither interested in, nor supportive of Free Cooperation. The artist is desired as exemplary sufferer and genius, not as somebody who is in control of her work. The logic of the art world and that of technology-based art are opposed to each other. The art world focuses on the romanticized idea of an author who creates an art object that can be distributed by many institutions. Technology-based art is variable, often ephemeral, discursive, conceptbased, existent in many copies, collaboratively authored, and can be distributed online. Over the past number of years, communication tools like video conferencing, live chats, web cams, instant messaging, wikis and collaborative weblogs have become inexpensive and readily available. These outlets pose an alternative to the costly and less flexible structure of universities. Collaborative weblogs have better chances to accommodate differences in communication styles than classroom situations.
Consequentially, teachers may become primarily linkers to knowledge. Ted Nelson demands, “everybody must understand computers now!,” to take the power from the “computer high-ups.” This corresponds with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who compares repressive uses of media with emancipatory applications. In these decentralized settings each receiver is a potential transmitter. The cooperative sound-experiment by the Xchange network (1997) exemplifies a resistance to the commercialization of the medium.
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