The Absolute Report Report Absolute The time space t i m s e p a c c e o d m e e m o r y The Absolute Report code ISBN 3-86588-288-9 memory The Absolute Report time 012 Time Out 012 Geert Lovink 014 Beograd 00.04 Mapping the Limits of New Media 020 Absolutely Temporary 014 Dejan Sretenović 032 Good Evening The Absolute Time Machine 038 TYME TRYETH TROTH 020 Stephen Kovats Apsolutno Report – The Utopia 044 Serbeiko Transcripts 032 C5 String (2000) space 048 News 049 Konrad Becker 054 Prelom Info Body Cult 054 Marina Gržinić 062 Azbuka Absolut in Wien Absolute Notingness 068 Press Actions 070 Inke Arns Dead Before Arrival 070 Absolutely Dead 076 Aleksandar Bošković Virtual Balkans 076 HUMAN 089 Florian Schneider 101 The Absolute Sale NO BORDER! 105 Medienfassade 101 Rossitza Daskalova Apsolutno Absolute Sale 1997 105 LeE Montgomery Apsolut Associations 110 Platform 1995-2000 and on... code 130 Warning! 131 Rtmark 132 UA!US Tactical Embarrassment 134 The Semiotics 143 Vuk Ćosić of Confusion A Generous Contribution 147 Instrumental 150 jodi ae-1,2 / bcd-1,2 154 Voyager 0004 155 Nina Czegledy 156 The Greatest Hits Connections: The Power of Convergence 166 In The Balkans 166 Lev Manovich 191 Pyrus Communis Generation Flash 181 Gebhard Sengmüller gebseng - tvpoetry - vergessen - vinylvideo - vsstv memory 194 198 Minja Smajić 196 Le Quattro Stagioni At the ruins of a Trademark 206 Intermezzo 201 Darko Fritz End Of The Message-Total 211 Chess.net Archives 213 We Must Accept 205 Andreas Broeckmann The Unacceptable Syndicate Album 214 a.trophy 211 Ken Goldberg Blindfold Chess and the War 217 Fuit hic in Serbia Contributors 220 Authors 226 Association APSOLUTNO The late 1990s were a time of intense within which the production of the activity, networking and East -West col- association was created. laboration in contemporary arts in the former Eastern Europe. Discovery of This book is an Absolute Report of the last new fields of art practice, redefinition five years of the 20. century from the of one’s position as an artist in a climate perspective of a specific artistic net- of changing social, political and cultural work that was active at that time. We contexts, the establishment of new sys- present the projects that APSOLUTNO tems of communication and collabora- created in that period as well as reports tion, and the emergence of new tech- by various artists, media thinkers and nologies in art practices all marked that other important personalities that period. Association APSOLUTNO was APSOLUTNO met within the same part of that wider scene, which was in East -West network in the sphere of stark contrast to the claustrophobic new art & media practices. In this book context of Serbia within which the we find parallels between our own members of APSOLUTNO lived and projects and those of others, by identi- introduction fying four important themes that run interventions, we turned the familiar, through the work created at that time: usual, or even marginal, which is often time, space, code, and memory. no longer even perceived, into some- thing unusual, out of the ordinary, and These themes arose in the work of worth further exploration. APSOLUTNO as a response to the immediate social surroundings in which Time, space, code and memory are also APSOLUTNO lived and worked. The present in the works by other partici- guiding principle of APSOLUTNO was pants represented in this book. Inspite search for the sites and situations with a of the variety of approaches, it is symbolic or metaphorical potential in evident that this activity, taken as relation to a wider social context. a whole, reflects the existence of a We refer to these found situations as specific epistemological community. absolutely real facts because of their hid- den interpretive quality. Taking absolute- association APSOLUTNO ly real facts as a starting point for our spring 2006 THE ABSOLUTE REPORT___INTRODUCTION I AM ABSOLUTELY EVERY MOMENT ABSOLUTELY HERE elements connected by intrinsic non-local ties. I AM ABSOLUTELY Einstein did not accept this theory; he carried EVERY MOMENT out conceptually the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky- Rosen) experiment in order to prove that non- ABSOLUTELY local ties did not exist and that there were hid- den variables which humankind was still not HERE capable of discovering. However, he proved precisely the opposite, paradoxically shaking This project was inspired by the theory of a his own understanding of quantum physics. group of physicists active at the beginning of The result of this experiment - which was later the 20th century which believed that compre- carried out by Bell - proved that two electrons hensive reality consisted of spatially discrete rotating in opposite directions present an indi- 8 The Absolute Report I AM ABSOLUTELY EVERY MOMENT ABSOLUTELY HERE visible whole connected by interdependent * Revised from Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics links into an absolute unity regardless of how distant they are from each other. The sculptur- al nature of such a system cannot be compre- hended in terms of discrete elements. Both Sad and so completed a circle functioning as a particles of the rotating electron connect by synonym of the absolute. By its cyclical form momentary non-local ties which surpass our and its contents this project, in a simple way, civilizational mental patterns*. formed the territory of the absolute construct- ed space and the absolute temporal span. The sentence - ‘I am absolutely every moment absolutely here’ - was sent from Sombor to The project was carried out in 1995 at the end Horn, thence to Vienna, and then on to Novi of November through to early December. The Absolute Report 9 time THE ABSOLUTE REPORT___TIME TIME OUT 1997 APSOLUTNO 0003 TIME OUT Place: Trinity Church, Sombor, Yugoslavia The inscription on the wall painting: One of these (hours) is your final one! APSOLUTNO responded to this warning by installing an awning above the sundial and eliminating time. culture was the early mid nineties, MAPPING THE before the rise of the World Wide Web. Theorists and artists jumped with great eagerness on the still non-existent and LIMITS OF inaccessible technologies such as virtual reality. Cyberspace generated a rich col- NEW MEDIA lection of mythologies. Issues of embod- iment and identity were fiercely debat- Geert Lovink ed. Only five years later, while Internet stocks were going through the roof, not To what extend have the ‘tech wreck’ much was left of the initial excitement and following scandals affected our in intellectual and artistic circles. understanding of new media? No doubt Experimental techno culture missed out there will also be cultural fall-out. on the funny money. Over the last few Critical new-media practices have been years there has been a steady stagnation slow to respond to both the rise and fall of new-media cultures, both in terms of of dot-com mania. The world of IT concepts and funding. With hundreds of firms and their volatile valuations on the millions of new users flocking onto the world’s stock markets seemed light-years Net, the arts could no longer keep up away from the new-media arts galaxy. and withdrew into their own little world The speculative heyday of new-media of festivals, mailing lists and workshops. 12 The Absolute Report MAPPING THE LIMITS OF NEW MEDIA GEERT LOVINK Whereas new-media arts institutions, A critical reassessment of the role of begging for goodwill, still portray artists arts and culture within today’s network as working at forefront of technological society seems necessary. Let’s go developments, collaborating with state- beyond the ‘tactical’ intentions of the of-the-art scientists, the reality is a dif- players involved. This is not a blame ferent one. Multi-disciplinary goodwill game. The artist-engineer, tinkering is at an all-time low. At best, the artistic with alternative human-machine inter- new media products are ‘demo design’, faces, social software, digital aesthetics as described by Peter Lunenfeld in Snap and more, has effectively been operat- to Grid. Often they do not even reach ing in a self-imposed vacuum. Over the that level. New-media arts, as defined last few decades both science and by the few institutions devoted to them, business have successfully ignored the rarely reach audiences outside of their creative community. Even worse, artists own subculture. What in positive terms have actively been sidelined in the could be described as the heroic fight name of ‘usability’. The backlash for the establishment of a self-referential movement against Web design, lead ‘new-media arts system’ through a fran- by IT-guru Jakob Nielsen, is a good tic differentiation of works, concepts example of this trend. Other contribut- and traditions may as well be classified ing factors may have been the corpo- as a dead-end street. The acceptance rate dominance of AOL and Microsoft. of new media by leading museums and Lawrence Lessig argues that innovation collectors will simply not happen. of the Internet as such is in danger. Why wait a few decades, anyway? In the meanwhile the younger The majority of the new-media art generation is turning its back on the works on display in ZKM, the Ars new-media arts questions and operates Electronica Center, ICC or Cinemedia as anti-corporate activists, if it gets are hopeless in their innocence, being involved at all. After the dot-com neither critical nor radically utopian in crash the Internet has rapidly lost its their approach. It is for this reason that imaginative attraction. File swapping the new-media arts sector, despite its and cell phones can only temporarily steady growth, is becoming increasingly fill up the vacuum.