Sustaining Autonomous Media Networks - Part I

There have been several reality checking events this year in which independent media producers have got together to assess their efforts to build support networks aimed at nurturing autonomous media production – improving visibility, accessibility, knowledge sharing and participation – as commercial players make ever deeper inroads into the participatory power of the net. In Part 1 of Mute's double review, Emily Munro reports on the Mag.net (Magazine Network of Electronic Cultural Publishers) meeting which took place at Glasgow's CCA this April as part of the Work of Media Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction symposium organised by Street Level Photoworks

In the age of digital reproduction, Kevin Murray has suggested, the gallery plinth is on the brink of obsolescence. The objects which the plinth once supported, and held up more suggestively for admiration than for scrutiny, are evaporating from the white cube to be transposed into the black box of the projected installation. Plinth is superseded by screen, the modernist art object by shadowy avatars, and depth by surface. Murray is the director of Craft Victoria in Melbourne, an exhibition centre with its own online publication dedicated to ‘considering the role of the hand as a creative tool in contemporary society’. As such he is especially concerned with the materiality of the crafted object and the ways in which an object’s physical presence, tactility and contexts of (re)production and exhibition impinge upon the distinctions made between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Indeed, in addressing the issue of how one might come to terms with the craftsmanship of a supposed non-object, Murray reflects ‘[t]he challenge is now similar to one faced by Peter Pan – how to stitch the shadow back onto material form’.[1]

In this instance of debating craft and its manifestations, the shadow is an interesting metaphor because of its connotations of both presence and loss. It is not the shadow itself which causes perhaps the most profound of Peter’s many existential crises, but the broken relationship between shadow and experience, between reality and its impression. The problem of connectivity, though, is not confined to the realm of fairy stories and traditional ‘cottage industries’, as Murray demonstrates. It is an issue acutely felt now in a time of technological hyper-connectivity, not only by individuals but also by institutions and movements reliant on being ‘plugged in’ both to the public sphere and lines of direct and interactive communication. It is a complicated political issue because the facilitation of connectivity can imply either totalitarianism (‘Big Brother’) or participatory democracy (and in the case of the Endemol TV series, the illusion of both). The back-lit, ethereal universe of the internet, while hardly appearing shadowy, can nevertheless feel a world apart, offering us the imprimatur of what is ‘actually out there’ but never fully connecting us to solid people, institutions or objects and producing frustratingly idealistic conceptions of the net demos. The network: illusion. The forum: immaterial. And yet ironically, given its ghostly and shape-shifting properties, the shadow is a reminder of physicality, of our likeness to objects and to other living things, which although comparatively ‘inactive’ share in common with us a measurable presence between ground and sky; a reminder, then, that life, production and consumption do not just occur in the space of the mind but are materially located.

In the field of independent electronic publishing, particularly with specialist interest publications, recognition and connectivity (in terms of interactivity and the audience’s engagement with that invitation or obligation) are ever-present issues impacting upon the material sustainability of the project. In recent years an attempt to tackle the difficulty of potential isolation online, both from users and from like-minded organisations, emerged through Mag.net (Magazine Network of Electronic Cultural Publishers) which began operating around 2003 supported by the principle that collaboration amongst participants was preferable to competition.[2] Mag.net brought a range of small-scale cultural publishers from across Europe together at meetings and through email round-robins in order to discuss common experiences in independent publishing and, in particular, to address the relationship between online and offline content in their initiatives. Already in 2005 the network was sounding its own death-knell having reached something of an impasse following a largely unsuccessful attempt to set up a common subscription system.  Rather than crumpling under the strain of defeatism, however, the Mag.net members decided to publish a collection of essays on the network and its sympathies which could mark the passing of their publications into a new phase. This collection was launched on 29th April 2006 at the CCA in Glasgow following a day of presentations by some of those who had participated in the Mag.net venture. The publishers’ discussion was performed as one half of a two-day symposium on The Work of Media Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, an event which brought together artists, publishers, researchers and writers. As with the problem of reconnecting Peter’s shadow to his body, the symposium focused on a number of concerns arising from the separation of digital and ‘analogue’ production and consumption as well as their mutual reinforcement and confluence. Questions around the significance of print in a supposedly digital era and of the material contribution of paper as digital publishing’s analogue emerged alongside discussions on political and cultural activism in electronic cultural publishing, copyleft and creative commons.

Daniel Jewesbury – an artist, researcher, writer and co-editor of Variant magazine – who chaired the sessions began by noting the enabling function of networks. Participation in an internet-led network can dispense with hierarchy and, as has been said with respect to Indymedia, encourage a ‘radical democracy’ that is inclusive, plural and transparent.[3] At the same time, the sustainability of a network can be threatened by lack of consensus amongst members (not always a bad thing, of course) and, more damagingly, by ambivalence and passivity. One might suspect that these could have been Mag.net’s own viral adversaries in the end, but witnessing a generally convivial mood amongst the members present and a record in the shape of The Mag.net reader, indifference did not appear to have been the problem. Instead, it seemed to be the necessary investment of time and resources in the maintenance of the network for the independent publications involved which had collapsed the deck. The Mag.net members present articulated a common desire to increase their visibility as contemporary critical cultural publishers and to improve distribution of their publications. Miren Eraso describes these objectives in her contribution to The Mag.net reader and comments that although the seeming ‘accessibility’ of the internet purports to offer solutions for effective dissemination of information, it can, paradoxically, lower a magazine’s chances of visibility.[4] Several Mag.net members, then, embrace the Mute slogan ‘proud to be flesh’, publishing on paper while being acutely aware of the tension this choice invokes with respect to the commentary on digital culture integral to each magazine’s project.  

The dissemination of information using paper and ink can be interpreted as principled action in a context where dominant, commercial communications interests are driving the digital revolution. It appeared to be the case during the symposium that many of the Mag.net publishers have been working in the interstices, neither wholly adopting one medium or another but instead falling between, or filling up, the cracks. The material fact of this is not radical at all – many large publishers are currently feeling their way through the ‘transition’, if indeed it is that, from hard-copy to online publication. What I find interesting is that despite their strong and in some cases defining engagement with digital and net cultures, independent cultural publishers are resisting complete digitalisation and/or finding it politically and creatively ineffective. At the same time, the use of electronic media by marginalised groups is important for facilitating networked participation and resistance to the dominant orthodoxies. Slavo Krekovic, editor of the Slovak 3/4 magazine, explained during the symposium how the effort to sustain online publication was in itself an attempt to influence the policy of the Slovak government who overwhelmingly privilege print publications in their funding provision. Publishing independently in Slovak and online is also an act of cultural self-assertion given the dominance of the English language in net culture. Miren Eraso’s presentation further emphasised the importance of understanding expression as a political act. Her publication, Zehar, appears in three languages – Basque, Spanish and English – to solicit engagement from a wider variety of readers and also to state the value of expression through different (including marginal) languages. The translation of print into electronic culture and vice versa can be understood as such expressivity.

The alternation between freedom of choice and necessity involved in the search for appropriate media and modes of expression was a persistent underlying theme at the symposium. A balance between pragmatism and idealism that could be conceptually mapped to the relationship between copyright and expression. The enthusiasm of several Mag.net members for creative commons licenses, copyleft and hacktivism should be noted here. With these issues held in the background, questions around reach, dissemination and use, if not debated forthright, all the same came to the fore in the speakers’ descriptions of their publications. Christian Hoeller spoke, for instance, of the ‘interdisciplinary’ spread of his publication Springerin, which attempts to critically address cultural issues beyond a Eurocentric focus, and, in particular, to understand new media as operating in a globalised framework of cultural complexity. This, Hoeller said, involves the magazine's expansion beyond the ‘art world proper’ to consider other spheres of artistic engagement such as cyber, pop and academic cultures and to encourage the contextualisation of art production within intersecting (art) historical discourses. This and the descriptions of several other publications were evocative for me of problems around the production and conservation of cultural memory and of the difficulties involved in trying to engage critically with new technologies, their cultural and artistic use and significance. It was gratifying, then, to see that the problem of archiving was not entirely eschewed on this occasion. In an open discussion, the archiving issue was addressed with respect to Print on Demand, publishing to order, and the importance of being able to record how publications and their subsequent revisions have emerged from particular historical contexts. The archiving issue is, of course, also a material one, especially with regard to digital culture and the drive of technology towards seemingly immaterial forms (while at the same time resolutely ‘materialist’ in their capitalist orientation), taking us back to the difficulties of shadows, their maintenance, preservation and display.

To return to Murray’s plinth, we have met with a situation where there is pressure to put aside older forms of display in favour of new visual apparatuses with increased participatory functions. The carefully edited, unalterable print magazine could, some argue, sink into obsolescence with the rise of the flexible net mag, printed on demand or dipped into via Google – the ostensible monopoly of which could itself determine what becomes ‘available online’. By retaining print as part of the critical engagement with net culture, the Mag.net publishers presenting at the CCA in Glasgow demonstrate the limit as well as the inducements of technological determinism and, in particular, evolutionary points of view on the production and consumption of culture. The plinth, one might add, has not disappeared, even if its primary function in contemporary art galleries now appears to be holding up TV screens.

There is evident craft involved in designing and implementing the sorts of publishing projects initiated by the Mag.net members. In a radical interpretation, the art and politics of craft is not simply taking pride in the parochial. Rather, a politics of craft aims to make a seemingly insular form of expression resonate not only with those in the craft-worker’s immediate surroundings but also with others elsewhere who are concerned to assert locality and specificity in otherwise homogenising cultures. This politics of craft is at work (and play) in the negotiations made by the publishers, between on and offline activities and electronic and print production, in order to reach, and intervene in, the public sphere. The question as to what extent publishing actually constitutes the public sphere is, of course, a valid one to raise here. In thinking about the popularity of message boards and blogs as a form of self-publishing, it is interesting to bear in mind that what we refer to when we discuss ‘the public sphere’ is usually the materialisation of public debate. Making material is, after all, essentially what publishing does and it is for this reason that the Mag.net network was started (to aid the realisation and distribution of cultural debate through publishing) and, in the end, faltered precisely because of material difficulties.

At the Glasgow symposium, Alessandro Ludovico from Neural magazine was emphatic that the launch of The Mag.net reader be understood not as a testament to the memory of a group effort which had collapsed but as a new manifesto for the network. This is not to say that Mag.net as was has been, or should be, reborn, but rather that The Mag.net reader offers a proposal for the future of networks formed to assess and critique digital culture. The Documenta 12 art exhibition, to be held at Kassel next year and curated by Roger Buergel, will see the inclusion of ‘documenta 12 magazine’, a convergence of more than 70 print and online magazines and journals participating in debates on the Documenta exhibition. The objective is not simply to evaluate the exhibition but to trace and to comment on discursive practice itself in relation to art and culture. Its execution will be, in equal measure, an encouragement and a test of networking amongst cultural publishers and, like Mag.net also, a measure of the politics of craft involved in mapping material cultures onto digital shadows.

[1] Kevin Murray, ‘The Plinth in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, http://www.craftculture.org/archive/kmurray2.htm [accessed 14 June 2006]

[2] Andreas Broeckmann, ‘The Beauty of printing and the Glory of Networking’ in The Mag.net Reader, eds. Miren Eraso, Alessandro Ludovico & Slavo Krekovic, 2006: pp. 6-15, p.11

[3] Victor W. Pickard, ‘United Yet Autonomous: Indymedia and the Struggle to Sustain a Radical Democratic Network’, Media, Culture and Society Vol.28 No.3 (May 2006) pp315-36.

[4] Miren Eraso, ‘What Are We Doing Here?’ in The Mag.net Reader, pp52-7.

The Work of Media Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Street Level Photoworks, April 28-29, Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA): http://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/diary/diary406/symposium/symposium0406.html