Art Servers Unlimited 2, Labin, Croatia ( Round table talks for art server service providers)

Lina Dzuverovic-Russell on the ASU2 Conference, Labin, Croatia, September 2001

For one week this September, a group of people involved in running independent media initiatives met in a disused space in a small Croatian coastal town of Labin for the Art Servers Unlimited 2 Conference. Organised jointly by media labs from Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Slovenia the event was led by the Zagreb-based MAMA team who took a temporary residency in Labin.

Following on from the ART SERVERS UNLIMITED conference held at London's ICA in the Summer of 1998, ASU2 was intended to examine the independent media landscape four years on. Four years is a long time in the lives of net-related communities and since '98 the structures that surround, support and enable independent media practice have developed and matured generating a wider and more complex web of participants than the '98 conferece. Consequently, the ASU2 organisers found themselves faced with an event for which an agenda was difficult to set. Groups that might have had much to discuss during the first conference struggled to define what it was that they all had in common today.

The 'ART' in the title of the first conference instantly felt inappropriate for the follow up gathering. During the very first hours of ASU2 it became clear that the common denominator for all present could not have been art. Very few people had come to discuss art, and most were more interested in discussing economies of independent practice, strategies for (better) survival and establishing collaborations and links. The organisers did address this by incorporating 'activism' and 'autonomous' into the 'A' in an attempt to embrace a wider agenda.

ASU 2 brought together over 70 participants ranging from the 'old-timers' including Rhizome, Ljudmila, Irational.org and V2 to newer initiatives such as CandidaTV, Novi Sad's Kuda.org and Ljubljana's Cyberpipe. Gathering so many groups with such a wide range of organisational structures and economic models as well as interests meant that in theory there was much to discuss but in practice we spent far too much time discussing what we should be talking about and disagreeing about what format to do it in.

Originally, the programme was intended as a combination of formal and informal presentations and workshops, but soon the original schedule started to feel too rigid, as discussions took unexpected turns. By the second day of the conference most of us wanted to follow up on specific points of conversations we'd started, but felt obliged to take part in the pre-planned sessions.

Considering the fact that the event was held near the beach, it was perfectly predictable that participants would go off in small groups for informal chats in restaurants and bars by the sea, which is exactly what hapenned towards the end of the week.

Those who came with a clear idea of what they wanted to get out of the week, seemed to do best. I kept coming across people involved in what looked like very focused working sessions and from what I gather, they were the ones to have had the most productive week. I came to Croatia with a slightly (!) overambitious agenda of discussing the mute/metamute developments, getting answers to some practical questions (Manu Luksch and I kept trying to organise SMIL workshops, but never got round to it in the end), learning how to use the Campsite content management system and getting interviews with as many participants as I could for Metamute. In retrospect, I did get a lot out of ASU2, but didn't get anywhere near SMIL nor Campsite.

There is no doubt that the gathering was useful to all involved. Much information was exchanged and even those who might not have got what they came for found something amongst the wide range of approaches and discussion topics.

Sadly, half way through the conference September the 11th happened. We heard the news while sitting by the sea half way through our lunch, in the middle of a heated discussion about the session we were about to go into. Obviously, the conference took a different turn after this and any attempts at sticking to the original schedule were promptly abandoned as we all packed into a small room around a TV in an attempt to get some sense of what had just happened.

Links:Participate in the discussion about ASU2 - Forum ASU2 participants

Read Armin Medosch's report on the European Cultural Backbone site

Lina Dzuverovic-Russell <lina@metamute.com>