Re: ttip: digital respect and resistance
Dear Felix, Olia, Susanne and all, Thanks for your thoughtful responses. Picking up on Susanne Gerbers last point: > Is it not possible, that digital culture, or at least parts of it, in > the meantime has switched sides and belongs already more to the TTIP > creators? Then we have to rethink the whole context > and 'Berührungsangst' would mean something else. Maybe I should first clarify that this was a quickly written statement for a presentation of transmediale as a partner in the EMARE, media art residency exchange programme set up by Werkleitz, a fantastic long running media art organisation in Halle (and the village of Werkleitz). This exchange programme has shifting geographical focus but this year the partners came from Germany, Canada and Australia. So in this context, my aim was not to say that this type of exchange shares the same set of values underwriting agreements like TTIP but because of its international structure could have potential to form an important enclave in the resistance against this and the other agreements. It would of course be only one among many initiatives and not the most significant one, but I do see a lack of transnational coalitions opposing TTIP in the cultural sector as the debates at least when it relates to Germany and France seem to follow the usual protectionist lines of argument, where protecting cultural diversity (in the UNESCO sense) is foremost about protecting national cultures or European cultural heritage. I am not arguing against safeguarding particularities, but it seems to me that what has especially been built up in parts of the net culture / digital art spheres, perhaps through tele-presence in a positive sense, are transversal forms of thinking and practice, that yes, might seem simply to be contingent with the exploitative planetary networks of the "Three Big T's", but which are eventually underwritten by completely different values and goals. This is where Felix rightly points to the key issue of the feeling of powerlessness of the individual and specialized settings towards these immense meta-frameworks that seem to challenges everything at once. And yet we have known for a long time that even without these agreements, this is where the world is going and maybe it is time to accentuate the conflicts and differences within what seems to be one big picture or one big collect it all scheme. As I am pretty sure that even if as Olia pointed out, it's "Drones yesterday, Snowden today" (or rather the other way around), the engagement with these topics is not just a capitalisation from culture professionals of trending social and economic agendas, but also stemming from a genuine, however at times misinformed or naive, intention to change our perception, knowledge and agency in such issues. Many times, this is also a question of developing new vocabularies instead of trying to bridge the differences or find the common points of understanding, I think it is now far more relevant to find ways of making the different positions clear which would amount to an understanding of the meta-levels - this is what is needed to at all adress something like the regulation of the regulation and not become lost in the echo-chambers or opinion against opinion bubbles. best, Kristoffer # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: ttip: digital respect and resistance
On 10.10.2015 00:48, Kristoffer Gansing wrote: But as I hinted at in the beginning, part of the problem is that we are always busy somewhere else. This might be both the biggest asset and curse of media art and digital culture : that it is always moving on. The next place, the next site, the next discourse, the next big trend. When is digital art and culture going to really grow up and deal with the here and now? How can you formulate a real alternative in the present when you are always too busy being tele-present? Dear Kristoffer, I maybe misreading you, but I think there is sort of contradiction in what you say. Or rather, the answer to your own question is in the preceding sentence. This state of being tele-present (great alteration of the meaning of the term, by the way!) is the outcome of this constant urge or drive of new media art (artists, curators and events) to deal with "here and now", with the next big "hear and now". Drones yesterday, Snowden today, TTIP tomorrow... and then it's already time again for the next round of the Internet of Things. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: ttip: digital respect and resistance
On 2015-10-10 00:48, Kristoffer Gansing wrote: > I am just curious to see what kind of response it will evoke! > Especially I am curious if the nettime community has anything to say > about the supposed fear of dealing with TTIP within digital art and > culture, well knowing of course that there is an assumed "field" > here that might already be declared obsolete or for which there are > many names and definitions. Hi Kristoffer, > These questions haunts me on a daily basis as I try to balance my > intensive working life of being the artistic director of a big > digital art and culture festival such as transmediale with also > being an engaged citizen I think this is the key issue. Things like TTIP challenge everyone as a citizen, as basic democratic rights are being undermined and extreme forms of corporate governance are being enshirned in hard-to-change international law. Everyone is affected by this, artists in particular through the intellectual property provisions. WIKILEAKS published yesterday the respective section of the comparable TPP agreement where negotiations have been concluded. (see below) But intellectual property which affects many of us in our professional lifes is only a small aspect of the type of deep rule setting that is taking place on a scale almost too big to comprehend, certainly from the vantage point of art. So, how do we align our narrow and specialized identities as "artists", "researchers" and so on and with more broadly shared identities such as "citizen" or, in case of climate change, "living being". In types of hyper-specialization it seems almost impossible to acknowledge that in may respects, each of us is not uniquely special, but, that tiny peaks of specialization grow out of oceans of commonality . Felix TPP Treaty: Intellectual Property Rights Chapter - 5 October 2015 https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip3/press.html Today, 9 October, 2015 WikiLeaks releases the final negotiated text for the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. The TPP encompasses 12 nations representing more than 40 per cent of global GDP. Despite a final agreement, the text is still being withheld from the public, notably until after the Canadian election on October 19. The document is dated four days ago, October 5th, or last Monday, the same day it was announced in Atlanta, Georgia that the 12 member states to the treaty had reached an accord after five and a half years of negotiations. The IP Chapter of the TPP has perhaps been the most controversial chapter due to its wide-ranging effects on internet services, medicines, publishers, civil liberties and biological patents. “If TPP is ratified, people in the Pacific-Rim countries would have to live by the rules in this leaked text,” said Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program Director. “The new monopoly rights for big pharmaceutical firms would compromise access to medicines in TPP countries. The TPP would cost lives.” Hundreds of representatives from large corporations had direct access to the negotiations whereas elected officials had limited or no access. Political opposition to the TPP in the United States, the dominant member of the 12 negotiating nations, has increased over time as details have emerged through previous WikiLeaks disclosures. Notably, the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton, came out against the TPP on Wednesday saying: “Based on what I know so far, I can´t support this agreement.” This is a populist reversal by Hillary Clinton as earlier she has hailed the TPP as “the gold standard in trade agreements”. In June the House of Representatives of the US Congress narrowly approved to “fast-track” the TPP, preventing the Congressmen from discussing or amending any parts of the treaty, only vote for or against it. 218 voted for the “fast-track” measure and 208 against. Only 28 House Democrats backed it. TPP is the first of a trinity of US backed economic treaties, the "Three Big T’s", to be finalized. The other two being Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) which covers 52 countries and TTIP, the EU-US version of TPP. Read the document. https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip3/ | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
ttip: digital respect and resistance
Dear old nettimers, I am not a particularly regular contributor here, but as long time lurker, occasional event announcer and artistic director of transmediale in Berlin, I would like to share with you a short statement that I prepared for my presentation at the Werkleitz Festival 2015 ".move ON" in Halle on October 10. As this day coincides with a big anti-TTIP demo in Berlin, I choose not to prepare the usual festival presentation but to offer some reflections on the troubling relation between the digital art and culture field to this and other free trade agreements currently in negotiation. My apologies for the somewhat raw, underresearched, possibly naive and spoken word like form of this text - I am just curious to see what kind of response it will evoke! Especially I am curious if the nettime community has anything to say about the supposed fear of dealing with TTIP within digital art and culture, well knowing of course that there is an assumed "field" here that might already be declared obsolete or for which there are many names and definitions. best, Kristoffer Gansing First of all I would like to say that I am extremely happy to be here among many respected colleagues and to enjoy the impressive programme of this year's move.on werkleitz festival. I and transmediale are very happy to have occasionally taken part in the different cross-border exchanges that Peter Zorn and his team have so impressively set up over the years. And I am very happy to have hosted the work of the artist Robyn Moody at the transmediale festival earlier this year and to see its finished iteration later here today. This said, I am painfully aware of the fact that while we are gathering here we are missing out on a manifestation going on in Berlin that deals critically with a completely different kind of cross-border exchange. I am talking about today's big demonstration against the TTIP ??? The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. And I am saying that I am painfully aware since I was really planning to join this demo and if not possible physically then at least by publishing a critical article that asks why it is that the digital art and culture scene has so far shown so little engagement in the debate of TTIP. This is paradoxical since it seems as if the area of digital culture is highly implicated in the scarce info we have on the ongoing secret negotiations. The little I have been able to read up on TTIP and similar current trade deals has led me to assume that digital art and culture has what one in German calls a ???ber??hrungsangst??? that is a kind of fearful respect towards critically engaging with this topic precisely because it is steeped in rhetorics and strategies of border-crossing, access, digital freedom and innovation. It would not be a new critique of our field that it exploits hype waves of technological development that are intimately connected to neoliberal agendas. But I think we are also all in agreement that we are trying to change such schemes from within and provide the space for artists, activists and other critical thinkers to formulate alternatives. The recent drive of media art to capitalise on the EU's interest in promoting innovation through funding collaboration between the technology sector and artists is a case in point ??? and it is yet to be seen if projects formulated in this framework will really be able to break out of the bubble of quantification and profit oriented conditions of production that are now being established. So where do actors in digital art and culture stand in relation TTIP? A cynical interpretation could be that in this field, we are already so accustomed to simultaneously adapt and bending the rules of changing economic and political agendas that there is a kind laissez-fair attitude ??? come whatever come and we will use it to our gain somehow. And especially regarding transnational trade agreements there seems to be a language at play that comes close to the border-crossing ideals of digital art and culture ??? BUT, I would argue that the actual practice associated with these ideals in the end are among the ones that could be most endangered by TTIP and that there is now an urgent need within digital culture to drop the ???ber??hrungsangst??? and formulate a critique of these free trade agreements and their post-digital brand of neoliberalism. But as I hinted at in the beginning, part of the problem is that we are always busy somewhere else. This might be both the biggest asset and curse of media art and digital culture : that it is always moving on. The next place, the next site, the next discourse, the next big trend. When is digital art and culture going to really grow up and deal with the here and now? How can you formulate a real alternative in the present when you are always too busy being tele-present? These questions haunts me on a daily basis as I try to balance my intensive working life of being the artistic director of a big
