Finally, the pundits of Creative Economies and all that malarkey will be forced to confront their own bastard child: SportArt. Despite the eagerness to strip mine 'creativity' and 'leisure' in an effort to stave off economic doom, the consensual hallucination of a Creative Economy on which it rests is turning more psychedelic than value-producing. While erstwhile 'industry leaders' like super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist subject themselves to marathon public mea culpas (cf. his forthcoming 24hr talk on Art + Finance at the Serpentine) others, such as the SportArtists, are quietly turning the distinctions between sport and art into spaghetti shapes. As they so provocatively ask, who will sponsor this aberration? What does it mean for audience participation? What does it mean when the Arts Council starts sponsoring people to go to holiday resorts and roll pebbles? And will the media start asking 'but is it sport?'

Calla d'Or, Majorca
12th-16th October 2006

Inclusive registration fee (travel, accommodation, registration) is £250

This thesis examines site-specific art on the Internet from the popularisation of the World Wide Web in 1994 until 2001. The artists studied here are those primarily associated with the term 'net.art', although other artists not associated with this term have also been considered wherever relevant. The generic term I use to designate all these artists is thus 'net art'. The central aim of this thesis is to understand how Internet technology has been used by artists to extend certain avant-garde tendencies in the context of a globalised and networked society. Setting artwork in the busy multi-media 'information superhighway' also used for economic and commercial transactions, media production, private communication, cultural projects, political debate and organisation, creates new proximities and relationships between art and other forms of communication and action. Indeed it can be said of the Net in general that it produces a whole series of new proximities and relationships, including those between geographically disparate communities, the space of the public and private and between the corporate and cultural spheres.

Whatever happened to tactical media? David Garcia, one of the genre’s early formulators, takes C6’s recent publication DIY Survival as an opportunity to reflect on the general state of cultural politics after its net propelled reinvention in the `90s. Concerned with the commercial cannibalisation of tactical media, he identifies a need to connect its ‘hit and run’ ephemerality with more permanent stuctures of resistance

WSFII LIMEHOUSE TOWNHALL 2005

The most recent of a series of World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures, took place between the 1st and 3rd October 2005 at Limehouse Town hall in London. This gathering of free infrastructure developers of all kinds sought to create not only a convivial and 'open' space to represent practices and validate knowledge, but also effect its locality with some of the possibilities of free infrastructure practice.

In April 2004, the seventh Italian Hackmeeting (AKA HackIt) took place in Milano. Here, members of the Milan Hacklab reload and activist information networks ECN and Autistici give an overview of the changing experiences of Hacklabs and the Italian hacktivist scene

Hacking might be about ‘the act of understanding the functioning of complex machines in order to deconstruct them and reconstruct them in a non conventional manner’, but the hacker’s interest does not end at computing machinery. Hacklabs are a growing medium for new forms of networked organising, a social space in which people attempt to self-organise along the principles of practicality, participation, openness and creativity that have inspired and strengthened the hackers’ movement since its beginning.

Agnese Trocchi looks at the history of pirate television in Italy and sees the rise of a new organisation in the TeleStreet network

Today’s ‘self-managed’ or sociological type has been shaped overwhelmingly by the impact of ‘60s counter-culture. Jettisoning the disciplinary schemas of modernity, capitalist production models – of goods and subjects – have taken on board the anti-authoritarian demands of the flower power generation. But, argues Brian Holmes, our newfound flexibility, mobility and interactivity is both repressive and liberatory by turns. It is able to create both the extreme individualisation of cybernetic market research and the anti-individualism of the multiple name – two polarities which define and open a new space of struggle


>> Jordan Crandall, Drive, 2000. Installation view, Neue Gallerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz

The media interest that surrounded dotcom mania was perhaps as short-lived and skin deep as the supposed economic miracle itself. Shortly after the bubble burst in March 2000 and the media interest had started to wane, American journalist Paulina Borsook brought out her book Cyberselfish which examines the deeper roots of libertarianism – the ideology that fuelled the boom – as well as the deep social and environmental impact it has had in California’s Bay Area. Geert Lovink – co-founder of the media politics and culture mailing list Nettime – tracked Borsook down in San Francisco to talk about cyberselfishness past and present

Amendsen Walter on The Documenta's ongoing project

The Hybrid Workspace is 'a temporary laboratory' taking place this summer at the Orangerie in Kassel, Germany as a semi-independent component of the Documenta - a four-yearly exhibition on an epic scale. The ambitious scope of the WorkSpace becomes clear on reading the truly 'hybrid' list of its participating groups (9 of them) who will work in consecutive 'slots' (10 days per group) to produce a cornucopia of content. The WorkSpace will provide the proverbial 'bedspace' to be shared by feminists, media tacticians, sound theorists, lobbyists for issues such as the democratisation of bandwidth distribution and the opening up of geo-political boundaries within Europe as well as analysts of technoscience and urban spaces.

The Next 5 Minutes Conference in Amsterdam (January 18-21 1996) brought together a mix of political activists, on the edge practitioners and just pure nutters from all over the planet for three days of debate, planning, exhibition and anarchy in Amsterdam and Rotterdam contemporaneously and at the same time.

In attempting to pitch at a point where art meets politics, access meets excess, activism meets academia and community media meets TVland madness it managed to hit a nerve which we in the UK can only contemplate. There is no equivalent forum in the UK and not the slightest hope in hell of anything like it in the next three years.

People were there from all over the world. In the space of a morning I renewed acquaintance with people from five Continents. More a global living room than a global village. Described as "proudly non-academic" by one of the organisers David Garcia it indeed proved an excellent balance between structure and chaos, organic design and technical efficiency.