LS: Here we have two lines of thought and realize they could become interrelated. Firstly, we should observe that our whole conception of form has been inverted. Physical form, biological form, the mathematics of form, how order emerges, how stability emerges, these have now all been structured in time, where form has become part of time. Fractal geometry, order on the edge of chaos, self-organization, catastrophe theory, finally concepts of geometry have emerged in which time itself has become essential, where the accident has become substantial, where form and order have become pattern, interference, iteration, rhythm, something created in time, and only to be understood in time. Secondly - as you mention Virilio's constant returning to the accident - media as the continuous accident of architecture. Of course, this dichotomy is omnipresent in theory, and I oppose it vigorously. I don't see media as the dark side of architecture at all. Why? Because I'd like to propose an architectural view of media, and vice versa. First of all, media comes in waves, in tides, and it deals with space as a medium, as a field, that is a soft substance through which events are transported by waves, and become interrelated as a result of interference, amplification and decay ... Media are a way to inhabit time as it were, a movement connected with our own movements, something far more sensitive and responsive than an architecture of frames, crystals and solids that is only capable of returning always the same answers to an experiential body. I think we should keep in mind that architecture was the first machine, the first medium to connect behavior and action to time, to place it under the revolving light of the sun, but now, on the other hand, we should not mix up the old history of architecture, its Euclidean mathematics with its new potentials. I just cannot see why architecture, because it is old, should stay old.

AR: The French word for real estate is "immobilier," which is the opposite of "mobilier" which means furniture. These two notions seem to indicate architecture's maximum radius of action: from absolute immobility (the building mass defining the invariable envelope) to total mobility (the furniture which could be placed anywhere inside). In other words, architecture actually has a whole set of varieties to choose from in order to "situate" itself in the variable relationship of form and movement. Nevertheless, throughout its (occidental) history architecture has displayed a clear tendency to opt for the immobile element as its definition. The challenging potential of furniture as the imminently destabilizing force of architecture is left aside, if not also embraced by the disciplining regime of order. In the plans of his single family houses, Mies van der Rohe used to place the furniture elements as precisely as the indeed unmovable elements like walls and columns. There is an anecdote about the Tugendhat House: a couple of months after the completion Mies came back to Brno unannounced to check if everything was in order. And Mrs. Tugendhat had indeed dared to arrange the chairs in a slightly different way. So Mies emphatically asked her to put them back in their proper position, pointing to the plan of the house he had discreetly brought along. What would an architecture be like which goes the opposite way, that is an architecture that would approach real estate with a furniture logic?

LS: We should resist Mies. We should resist this preservation of the old Aristotelian split of matter and time, substance and accident, tectonics and textile. Architecture as tectonics, media as textile. Architecture as a passive and neutral carrier, media as (inter)active image. That is: architecture as urbanism, as tectonics, as (infra)structure, as "bigness" - as Koolhaas has titled his agenda - and media as life, the changing, the ephemeral, whatever. Instead of moving architecture into bigness, I would suggest to move it into textile, into furniture, into media ... We should never mix up architecture and building. Just because our buildings can't move, it doesn't mean our architecture can't. As our buildings are hard and intransigent, our architecture could be active and liquid. This obviously does not mean the Miesian and Koolhaasian retreat into neutrality, into the hall, the empty envelope. It's an old misunderstanding in architecture that when you create the greatest common denominator of all possible movements, an architecture that gets out of the way, it will induce movement and vitality in the actual building. It is exactly the other way around, one just creates stillness, with that kind of generic neutrality one neutralizes action. That means they don't appreciate that architecture is media, that architecture is an event in itself, an event that, in their case, passes its tectonics onto the body. I opt for a geometry of the mobile, where the geometry has become part of the furniture, the moveable - nothing neutral, nor passive.

AR: Generally, Siegfried Giedion is seen as the theoretical advocate for a new space conception based on the notion of time. But if he indeed pointed to the new importance of the dynamic user moving freely through the building, he never got beyond the opposition of a static space and a mobile subject. He in fact kept the hierarchical distinction of space as substans and body as accidens, never realizing the transfer of movement from the subject onto the space. Curiously enough this transfer of movement was a major theme in the early experimental cinema and was also poignantly analyzed at the time by various scholars. In a seminal essay, German art historian Erwin Panofsky concluded that "as movable as the spectator is, as movable is, for the same reason, the space presented to him. Not only bodies move in space, but space itself does, approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it appears through the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and through the cutting and editing of the various shots."

LS: Can I start answering this with a classic study of Held and Hein, mentioned in Francisco Varela's book "The Embodied Mind"? They did this amazing experiment. They had a number of kittens with a carriage attached to each of them. Each carriage contained a basket with another kitten in it. So there were two groups of kittens sharing the same visual experience, but with one group active, the other stayed entirely passive. After a few weeks they were released and studied again as individual cats. The first group was okay and behaved normally, the second behaved as if they were blind, they bumped into everything. Obviously our whole idea of perception and action being unrelated bodily functions, the whole Cartesian distinction between eyes and feet is incarnated in architecture in the dichotomy of walls and floors, esthetics and program, elevation and plan. Simple as that. This also means the relation between space, movement and body has always been misunderstood, or at least, been related in the wrong order. There just is no movement apart from image, no image apart from movement. The way we construct images within our bodies is a million times more complicated than the cognitive concept of printing reality on light-sensitive gray matter. The sensory charges the motor, and the other way around, they are intertwined and connected. In this sense we should even resist thinking in terms of "space" - I never mention space actually - we have to conceptualize the body first, not the proportional Vitruvian body as the architectural center of the constructed world, no, the experiential body, the excited, vital body, where millions of processes go on at the same time. Therefore we should always remember the body is a clock, not the Huygens clock, but a manifold patterning trying to gain stability through action. Bodies try to transgress themselves in time by action, throwing themselves into time, that is: connect to other bodies, other rhythms, other actions. In this sense, you can really only talk about "space" as a result of an experiential body timing its actions. Space is never a given. There can be space in time, but not the other way round. Perspective was nothing else than leaving out the movement in experience and having the image as a residue - and it is: the image is what's left over when everything has dried out, like at the bottom of a cup of coffee. Pure recollection, and recollection only.

AR: But even if you refuse to use the word "space," you do seem to have a concept of it: one which is derived from radical constructivism. According to this theory, space does not exist per se, or in other words, where everything around us is only unstructured information which becomes only structured as soon as we interfere and interact with it.
This idea implies the dissolution of the inside/outside opposition; conceptually, body and architecture merge to one synthetic action space. But does not this opposition reappear in the real experience of a building?

LS: Well, no, because there is no "real" experience of the building. You're right to refer to radical constructivism, or even Varela's concept of enaction, which is even more radical. His idea of embodied action goes absolutely against cognitivist representation, where the so-called outer world is only recorded by the brain - and simultaneously absolutely against idealism where this outer world is only a subjective projection of an inner one. He, and Maturana, only refer to "structural coupling" in which body and world are interrelated and interactively transform each other. The "true" experience doesn't take place anywhere, neither in the body, nor in the world. Only in the coupling. This is the point where the distinction between inner knowledge and outer world ceases to exist. I'll try to give a better explanation of what a "real" experience is, especially vis à vis machines and technology. What we call reality, what we call our sense of reality, is nothing but an effect of synchronization, the synchronization of our own bodily rhythms with processes going on in the world around us. Our sense of reality is created by our sense of timing, trying to be "in phase" with the world, to live with the rhythm of the light. I don't mean this metaphorically; "in phase" is a direct and physical connection. That is why seeing-machines like film and television - and now computing - should be seen as a motorization of reality, as a speeding up of reality itself. They speed up our sense of timing. This also explains why we suffer from jet lag. Now, what has been disturbed by the speed of the plane can be undone by (sun)light - remember the sun is our first clock, we're created by it. Light is not only stored in the form of motor-images, but it is also the main indication for setting our own clock, the bio-rhythm. We are made of light. We long for a seamless stream of actions, carried by light, not the derealization and parkinsonian stuttering we experience during a jet lag. Actually, doctors nowadays prescribe melatonine, a neuro-hormone that influences the pigment in the skin, as a cure for jet lags ...

AR: All classical definitions of architecture contain the idea of fixing the movement which vibrates in the world outside architecture - in Vitruvius' famous definition it is called "firmitas." Any concern about dynamics and fluidity is avoided like a bad germ. It seems like architecture feels strangely endangered by movement, maybe simply for not knowing how to handle it. To a certain degree this might be caused by "timeless" condition of the drawing systems architecture has traditionally used: plan, section, elevation - all static modes of graphic inscription which can comprise three dimensions at the most, but certainly not time as the dimension of unfolding and change. Architecture has never developed a notation system for movement like choreography developed in dance.

LS: First we have to understand what an experiencing body is. How the body shifts between habit and action. Of course, in architecture, they've very often tried to combine them, but it proved difficult and they mostly came up with either/or concepts. The standard architectural program consists of habits, routines and work. This is viewed as the mechanistic repetition of certain acts - the program only takes into account actions that are considered repeatable. On the other hand, there is the desire for free action, play, experiment, as in Constant's "New Babylon." For me, it is not a question of either/or, it is not work-or-play, life is just the complication of these, the one is always hidden in the other. Sure, we habituate, we develop cycles of behavior. Why? Because it is hardly possible for humans to carry the whole act, to - as a Cartesian Machine - steer themselves continuously into intentions. We create our own rhythms, and make them stronger than ourselves, we create an internal music that gets us going. Our rhythms create us, we are an actual product of them. On the other hand we do not program ourselves, human software is much softer than computer software, we do not repeat the same actions over and over again, they change, they differ, they vary from each other, enabling us to change, to renew or to move smoothly into other acts.
That's why I would be in favor of separating work from dance, and after doing so, would try to merge them immediately. The whole set up of "firmitas," standing upright, habituation and routines, and opposing these with dance, play and experiment relating to the twisting of this posture fixed through gravity should be set aside for being too simple. We should not make the same mistakes as in the sixties. We would be marginalized. We should find a way in architecture to complicate habit, to multiply routines in action. It is the "winding up" of the soft clock of the body with motor geometry. Obviously, this geometry is not a geometry of section, elevation and plan, but one that tries to envisage these three - construction, perception and action - within one conceptual continuum.

AR: Doesn't space get lost somewhere?

LS: The way we act is similar to that of a skateboarder. We have a sense of direction, we have a sense of intentionality. We throw ourselves into time by movement. But then it is not a road or path we walk down. Our roads may be straight, but our tracks certainly are not. It is a vector with a point of action, and in that sense every act is an act of faith. Once underway we adapt, change our minds, engage other forces, but we do not just see these as resistance, no, they are like the curbs and obstacles for the skater. We use them as push offs, as points of inflection in the curve. That's it: a straight line goes from A to B, but while it leaves A it curves, trying to reach B. Architects have always misunderstood this position of B as something in space, instead of time. We humans complicate movement, we make movement from movement. Our moves are truly labyrinthine, like Nietzsches Dionysian dance, because we are our own alcohol, our own music - to quote Oliver Sacks. Every act has to be carried by this complication, this tilting of the horizon, where the act is carried by itself, and is orientated on its own need for gaining strength and stability. I must end here by quoting once more, now Baudelaire, who said: "Mentally and bodily I've always had this feeling of falling. The abyss not only of sleep, but also the abyss of acting, of dreaming, memories, desires, sorrow, the many, et cetera ... I'm in a permanent state of vertigo."

AR: Do you think that new notation systems provided by computer animation modeling techniques like the ones you use finally account for the body as an active part of architecture?

LS: Yes I do. On all kinds of levels. Both in conceptualization and building. As I've written in The Motorization of Reality - a Virilio piece without the Virilio hesitations - media should invade all aspects of architecture, both in diagramming and in programming. Let's not forget that all seeing-machines became drawing-machines (in architecture), and went from the static towards the kinetic. From perspective towards films and trains and television and cars (all with their own architectural styles), moving eyes constructing spaces. Now - with computing - this step is not metaphorical anymore, now we not only incorporate and embody the conceptuality of a machine in design, we can now actually step inside the screen and create reality from there. The design itself has become motorized, liquid, unstable, charged - the accelerating power of the computer is truly enormous, and is itself like a skateboard. But it is in the motor geometry, the geometry of the liquid that this machine becomes instrumental. What I try to oppose as much as I can is the dichotomy of floors and walls, action and perception, we have to create one from the other. So, I'm neither animating the floor and later on covering it in a tectonic envelope, nor am I animating the volume and later on stacking it with floors. It might be better though to animate the programmatic fluxes to animate the building. But after some time you would see that this hasn't lead you anywhere either, except for the smoothing of the already planned movement within the program. The aim is not just replacing program as military or Jesuit disciplining by free choreographies of movement, and then superimposing them, as if program is dance, which it is clearly not! It is not the fixation of the movement in the program, nor is it is the fixation of motion in the form. Either way, it's not only motion capture. You would end up with the so-called "stopping problem" - the question where to freeze the animation - while the real question is how to pass the movement on, from the machine to the architecture, from the architecture to the body, and from the body to the machine. First of all the movement should be going from floor to wall and vice versa. That is: in the architecture itself. The movement itself creates three-dimensionality, what Kiesler would have called the endless, which is always vectorial, as in Zeno's arrow. This would deframe architecture and here the looping of perception and action, the optic and the haptic would never stop. So, it's about creating tension and suspense in the program. This is very important. We deal - on the one hand - with the desire to cool down behavior, to structure and separate actions, in short with the instrumentality of the program - on the other hand, we vitalize action through animation, by replacing fixed points and fixed geometries by moving geometries, going from points to knots to springs, and we vitalize action through suspense, by shifting B from space to time, by multiplicationof action.

AR: In dance, space does not exist as a given entity (except the physical space of the stage, but that exists only as a precondition for the performance of the dance). Dance creates space out of movement. The shape of a form only exists in time, you can never grasp it in one moment but you have to commit its forms to memory. In all of these aspects, dance seems to be the art form that is furthest removed from architecture. Nevertheless I have the impression that it describes the most exactly what interests you in architecture?!

LS: Architecture and dance are generally but wrongfully separated by this notion of either-time-or-space, and rightfully connected by music. The great thing in architecture though, is that there's no audience and there's no sound. The beauty of dance is the thinking of movement as a movement within itself, a gesture, a closed thing. When one would consider the program in gestures and actions, you would have to organize them both in time and in space, not only sequentially as in dance but also simultaneously - in that way one gesture wouldn't be followed by the prescribed next gesture, but one could study them in different relationships and interactions.
Let us consider the notion of tension again. Tension can only be created by elasticity and springs, by lines that can be stretched or lines that are connected by "flexible points." In the concept of the spring the point is an inseparable part of the line, a twist in the line that can both expand and shrink. I used a non-abstract machine built out of lines and springs to animate the design for the V2_Lab. It's an office, a matrix of tasks and work. Quite rigid, most of the time. I would like to focus on a detail here. The programmatic set-up was quite clear - the position of the lab, next to the audio room, video room and storage, and in between a corridor, slightly raised from the existing floor. And located at the beginning of the corridor is the table for the manager of the Lab. I did not superimpose this scheme over another animated one. Everything would have stayed as it was. I animated a diagram of springs and snares through the organizational diagram. What happened? At one point, the snares moved up so high we couldn't interpret them as part of the raised corridor anymore but only as part of the table. Suddenly we had a corridor that morphed, that moved into a table ... So at one point I'm sure one should call this a corridor, at another spot, three, four meters further on, I'm sure to call it a table, but what is it in between? There is program, there is the rhythm of moving in the corridor, there is also a rhythm of working at the table, and there is the vector in between. This vector is always charging the others, that's the music, the silent music of the snares, so to say, that moves work into action. And back again, of course. Normally one would separate table and corridor by space, now they are connected by movement. And where does the movement go? The tension in the snares goes directly into the muscles and tendons of the body - the motor geometry relates to the "virtual motion," as Merleau-Ponty has called it, the background tension in the body, enabling an act to release itself from neurological anonymity and take shape. Now people sometimes lie down there as if on a beach, or just walk up the table ...

Coming up next:

• Kasia Molga with Oil Compass;
• Olav Huizer & Jelle Valk (WERC) with Moving Mapping;
• Anja Hertenberger, Meg Grant, Leonie Urff and Ricardo O'Nascimento (eTextile Workspace) with TK 730;
• Xiaowen Zhu with Wearable Urban Routine.

A scan of the article is here.

Anouk Wipprecht: The idea for Intimacy 2.0 came up in a brainstorming session after Vienna Fashion Week. Although the fashion world responded enthusiastically to the 1.0 version of the project (Intimacy Black and Intimacy White), there was also a lot of confusion. Maybe that’s a logical consequence of working at the cutting edge of art, technology and fashion. Either way, the fashion world didn’t always understand our approach. Was it fashion? Or was it art, or a prototype? Those were the kinds of questions I got. I don’t make designs that follow trends or can be developed into a collection. My designs are more of a look into the future, and so I deviate from the usual way of working. To move Intimacy more in the direction of fashion, I decided to make a version that was more wearable and to combine the e-foil with leather. There’s also more emphasis placed on the top part now. And we’ve hidden the sensor in a matching envelope bag carried by the model. But there’s still so much work in this design that’s been done by hand that large-scale production would be impossible. I’d rather concentrate on making custom versions.

And you hear the art world criticizing fashion for being vacuous.

AW: Yeah, you’re trapped between two worlds. Whether or not fashion has substance I can’t say. Should a design have substance or should it communicate a message? I see my work as a formal investigation of the human body. For example, shoulders are interesting; they have an architectural quality. The combination of that with the fragile e-foil, which is sometimes transparent and then not, has a poetic quality. I think Intimacy and works like DareDroid are about control, too. Who has the power – the wearer, the audience or the technology?

Media art is often produced by teams of specialists. Can you tell us about your role in that process as a fashion designer?

AW: We worked on Intimacy 2.0 for more than two months. Of course, I already knew the Studio Roosegaarde team (Peter & Christiaan) from Intimacy Black, so it went really smoothly. I developed the designs and ideas in my own studio, and I spent one or two days a week with the team. We tested various forms and materials in the studio. The models are also really important in projects like this one, which stand or fall on a good performance. For Intimacy, we worked with two regular models. Lara’s my main model, who I often use as a persona; we get each other. And Aleide also has exactly the right bearing and knows how to get the feeling we want Intimacy to project across to the audience. The same is true of Robert Lunak’s photography. It’s all about getting the right balance. 

Intimacy 2.0 is on view at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, November 2011.

http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl

http://www.studioroosegaarde.net

Here the artists Carolien Teunisse and Bram Snijders talk about their work that uses mapping projection in a transparent form, where hardware, medium and concept relate.

From the reflection on AR to a focus on the medium to an audio-visual installation:

also on: http://www.youtube.com/v/n4ExHH6_KFk?fs=1

JB: What do you do in daily life? Are you a teacher?
N. Katherine Hayles: I teach in the English department at UCLA, and I have a background in both science and literature.

JB: I was already suspecting you were some kind of mediator. You are deep into more then one discipline and you were talking from one to an other. Am I right you are trying to do this?
NKH: Yes, I am. I am very interested in new media for two reasons. One is because I think it is drastically affecting literary texts: how they are read, how they are taught... Also in the contemporary period it affects forms of literature as it moves into computer narratives. Hypertext and such. So I have this interest from the literary side, but then thinking of it as a technology I also have much interest in it as a new mode of being in the world, that is changing how we experience our own subjectivities.

JB: Would that also be your subjectivity as a woman?
NKH: I think gender issues are deeply bound up with this technology from its beginnings on. In my forthcoming book "How we became posthuman" I trace the history of cybernetics from the immediate post worldwar two period to the present in the American context, and part of what I see in that history of cybernetics is a gradual realisation that the cybernetic paradigm challenges traditional liberal humanist ideas of the subject. The idea of the feedback loop, the idea that the bounderies of the subject cannot be kept secure and autonomous begins to occur almost as soon as the technology really takes of the ground with people like John van Neumann and Norbert Wiener. They react often with panic at this idea that the autonomous self is being dissolved in the cybernetic paradigm. Of course part of this are genderissues of masculinity, issues of femininity and so forth, because especially in the american context the construction of masculinity is often deeply bound up with the notion of the independent autonomous subject: that is the guarantee of masculinity in the American context.
So when the subject begins to be dissolved, partly it is a gender panic, which sets in for these male scientists who were involved in developing this new paradigm.

JB: So they are kind of battling with their own technology..
NKH: Yes, very much battling with their own technology, and you see this very much in a figure like Norbert Wiener, who is a real defender of liberal values. There is much that is admirable in this, but at the same time he is also, quote, "the father of cybernetics", and so there is this conflict in his writing between naturally wanting this paradigm he has invented to spread as far as possible, while at the same time beginning to realise it has very subversive implications for how one thinks about the construction of the subject, and consequently: the construction of gender.

JB: You said you teach English, so I am sure that construction of gender in language must be something that interest you also. Can you say something about the relation between the construction of gender in language and cultural meaning?
NKH: In my book I trace cybernetics through three different kind of peroids or fases. For each period I also look at important literary texts, that explore the philosophical and psychological issues in a literary context. Speaking about the Norbert Wiener: the writer that I pair with Wiener is a writer from the 1950's, Bernard Woolf, who wrote a very strange book called Limbo. The premis of Limbo is a postworldwar society, and in the aftermath of the holocaust of the war a pacifist movement has grown up that sort of is the other side of Napoleons dictum: "the capacity for war is the capacity for movement". This movement has decided that if people can't move, they can't make war. Its followers has voluntary amputations, and the amputations become a sign of social privilege. A genator might be for instance a uno-amp, but an executive might be a quadro-amp. But since quadro-amps get bored with lying around with nothing to do, very soon a prosthetic industry grows up. Then there comes a debate in the movement whether one should or should not use prosthesies. Those who think it is allright to use prosthesies are the pro-pro's and those who think it is not allright are the anti-pro's. Using this kind of bizarre social topology Limbo really then begins to investigate how all those formations bound up with our usual assumptions of society begin to change. Part of that is very much concerned with the genderpolitics of what happens under the ideology of the 'immob', as it is called.

JB: But now you are talking about texts that have a very normal story line, or do not really play with the text itself, with grammar and ..
NKH: That is not true, because what happens in Limbo is that the text itself begins to fragment into a trunk, which is the body of the text, and into prosthesies, which are lines scrolled down the page, cartoons that appear on the page that the text itself does not recognise, and other kinds of symbiotic signifiers. Part of what is an issue in the text is how this interface between the trunk and the prosthesies is to be managed. It turns out that the prosthesies have a much more subversive message to convey then the trunk of the text itself.

JB: When was this written?
NKH: This was written in 1952, at the height of the McCarthy period in the United States.

JB: Let me get to my notes a little bit, which of course I can't make much of.. I tried to really follow your talk, and it was very hard for me. At some point I just dropped it, because you said something which sounded very much to me like (and I have to apologies if this sounds rude) what I call 'drugtalk'. This which said something like 'nothing really matters because in the end all we see is a kind of processing, and without the processing there is nothing'. It had this same feeling that you get when you are listening to somebody who has been taking too many trips or smoked too much marihuana, and who then talks about how everything is just dissolving into molecules, and how every molecule is a universe etc...
NKH (laughing a lot): It is really funny to me that you should think of this as drugtalk, because what I was actually aluding to were very profound debates within the scientific and philosophical community about epistimological issues. I was thinking of people like Humberto Maturana, Ponte, Bruno Latour..

JB: Maybe then that is my judgement about them (joke), but can you shortly explain what this discourse, this debate about epistimology is about?
NKH: Maturana's point is that no information from the outside world reaches the inside of the organism as such. His point is that any information coming from the inside bounces of an interface, and as it bounces of that interface there is a trigger or a reaction inside the organism, but that perceptual apparatus is not just like a filter through which information is passing, rather it is an active construction of the world in response to what is happening in the environment. This may sound like it is quibling, whether you talk about information passing through a filter or active construction, but in fact epistomologically it makes all the difference. It is pointing up the fact that there is no world for us without an active construction through our perceptual processes, which always constitute of perspective or a standpoint from which we experience reality. So it goes from a model from where you would say: "the world exists and we see the world" (that is the old model), but in this new model you would say: " we have an active engagement with an unmediated flux which we can never see in itself, but what we do see is our experience of that flux.
Epistomologically it emphasises the active construction of the world out of sensory processes, through which we come in contact with something which we can never see from an Olympian viewpoint.

JB: It sounds like you completely agree with this statement.
NKH: I do agree with it. We do construct the world, and we construct it through all the sensory apparatusses that are particular to our culture, our species, our individual organism... And of course there is overlap with what other humans see for example. For me the important point is: one always experiences reality from a perspective. There is no such thing as seeing reality without a perspective. As Maturana says: "Everything that is said is said by an observer".

JB: What does that mean to you for discourses within new technologies?
NKH: If I can just make a slight detour through scientific epistomology: what it means in terms of scientific epistomology is that science is never about the world as such, science is always about our experience of the world. How this fits in with the new technologies is that the new technologies are providing us with new experiences of the world, new ways to experience the world and to connect with physical phenomena, with other human beings. Right now the field is very open. People are discussing actively and debating what it means to see the world in these ways. Because things are unsettled, because it is kind of a field in firment, it is a good point to intervene, to once again make the arguments about these active constructions of reality. In some ways these arguments which may sound obscure or unnecesarely technical when you are talking about just walking down the sidewalk become common sense when you are talking about the new media. This is because it is obvious that experience is now mediated and that these pathways of mediation have everything to do with the constructions of reality that resolve.

JB: Then of course now we are dealing with many, many layers of constructions. The personal construction of the world, the interface, then the hardware, the software and the network...
NKH: The constructions become multilayered just as you are saying. Therefore they provide a kind of wonderful new arena to rethink these questions of the interface.

JB: I suppose that one then has to make a choice as to from which perspective one wants to start discussions then. I think that people allready are kind of aware that there is such a thing as personal construction of the world, that there is no objective view of the world (not really anyway) as we thought there was once. Then you have to choose what you want people to be aware of when they construct the world. What would your choice be?
NKH: I am very interested in ideas of subjectivity that are not rooted in classical, traditional, liberal ideas. The liberal tradition really grows out of the notion that one owns oneself. First of all one owns ones body and from this ownership of ones body grow all the social institutions like marketrelations and so forth. I am thinking here of people like Hobbs and Locke (?), who make this argument. So this construction of the subject is bound up from the beginning with capitalist social and economic structure. There may be other ways to think about the subject that don't found themselves first and foremost on this notion of ownership. New technologies open up possibilities for rethinking other ways to begin to construct the subject.

From the Nettime mailing list.

1980-1986

In V2_'s early years our own work and the activities of V2_ as an organization tended to become rather mixed-up. The themes of our own work were also the basis of the activities we initiated as V2_. In the late seventies art had become so institutionalized and so self-referential that we started looking for openings through which we could confront the 'outside world'. For instance, in 1980 some young curators asked us to do an exhibition at the University of Nijmegen. We drove up with a truckload of paintings and hung up large banners that said: "The university is occupied". This rather alarmed them, as they felt that only students could occupy a university, not artists. The entrance hall of the building was covered in paintings that were either absurd or politically orientated. When the Head of the Faculty came to take a look, his first words were: "This is not art!". He went on to say, on camera: "My idea of art is a painting of thirty by forty centimeters". We edited the tape using the university's audiovisual department and then played it continuously on a monitor: this man crying "This is not art! My idea of art is...". Well, the audiovisual department was declared off-limits to us and the tape was destroyed.

Of course we then cut all of our works down to this 'art size' and hung them all over the building. Things then quickly got out of hand and so within two weeks the structures within the university were neatly exposed. The activists from the sixties had established a tentative foothold and now wanted to start a petition on our behalf, as long as it didn't offend the Head of Faculty because they depended on him for their research funds. The foreign students there, most of them from Third World countries, had a keen sense of what was going on and immediately declared their solidarity. Anyone who had something to say could come to us. We had duplicators and could make our own pamphlets on the spot. After a few weeks the Head of Faculty brought in a cleaning crew over the weekend and had everything torn off the walls. This was rather more radical than we had imagined. The next Monday we held speeches through bull-horns and the police arrived, as did a growing number of students. Tension was definitely mounting. Then the University Rector had a room cleared out and ordered sandwiches and soft drinks, so we could negotiate peacefully. In the end we went to court over it and the university had to pay for all the damaged art works. In an interview with the university paper the Head of the Faculty was quoted as saying: "This was about power. Who is in charge here?" So, there you are.

We went looking for a 'free port', a place to explore what we could do with art, culture and music. We found it at Vughterstraat 234 (abbreviated to V2) in Den Bosch, a large building that we squatted in September 1981. We called it a multimedia center. There was a space where bands could perform, a large space for performance-like things in combination with murals, paintings and installations and yet another room for installation-like things. The building was situated at a square that gave us room for more 'explosive' stuff. There was a pirate radio station as well. Bands like Einstuerzende Neubauten, Test Department, Vivenza and Laibach did gigs there. At first we didn't work interdisciplinary but rather multidisciplinary. All kinds of things were happening at the same time and were overlapping each other. We painted, made Super-8 movies and wrote. And we played in five different bands. Some were rock bands, others were less easily defined. We played in Berlin, with Pere Ubu and DAF, and Cabaret Voltaire as well. Like us, they were visual artists that were also active in music.

In the early eighties V2_ was regarded as one of the so-called artists' initiatives, of which there were quite a few in the Netherlands. These were seen as stepping stones to the real work: mainstream art. We considered ourselves quite mainstream enough already, because our work was not isolated from everyday experience; on the contrary, it was very much a part of it. It was the so-called mainstream that was peripheral because it did isolate itself. Yet the conflict we had with the visual arts was initially not all that dramatic. We were tolerated because we fitted in with the tradition of avant-garde art. Our work was reminiscent of Dada and Fluxus. To us, however, Fluxus was typical of an avant-garde that had been suckered in with their eyes wide open because they had continued to produce art objects: all that was left of it in the end was a handful of relics in a museum. This was not how we wanted to end up. All this had not really been expressed in a theory at the time. It was mainly a 'do'- period.

1987-1993

The mid-eighties brought a turning point, not only for V2_, but for a lot of artists' initiatives in the Netherlands. It was a time for reflection: what are we doing, where is it coming from and how do we go on? That was the period when we drew the conclusions from our personal interests and motivations: (media) technology became our main theme, both in our own work and in V2_. So the development of V2_ was then still strongly influenced by personal choices. We wondered how art could take part in a general social development that heavily favored technology. In our view art would have to position itself right in the center of this development and not withdraw to an island called Art. In exploring the impact of technology on society - quite a wasteland in terms of research -the question automatically popped up as to the conditions under which politics, culture and society had been shaped in the past centuries, and how this was taking place now. If, like now with the advent of computers, vast transformations took place in society, this would also be true of art. Art can play an important role in this transformation, especially in countering the far-reaching economization already taking place in many areas.

A computer - and of this we were aware very early on - is a machine of control. You can store images and sounds in it, hook it up to sensors. This allowed us to do a number of things we hadn't been able to do before. We built our own hardware but of course we quickly ran into our limits, especially in programming, so we sought help from all sorts of people: designers, architects, hackers. We got to know the weirdest people. The fact that V2_ is still involved with cross-over fields is strongly related to computers. On a computer you can do graphics and make music at the same time, you can do typing, anything. You can abuse the software, design a building with animation software, make music with a design package. There are no more separate disciplines, these cross-over areas keep emerging. That's where the exciting things happen, caused by computers.

In 1987 we wrote the 'Manifesto for Unstable Media'. It was intended to really ruffle the feathers of the visual arts. We could have maybe spent another two years or so to further orientate ourselves but we wanted to put our cards on the table and really force the issue. There is this paradox in form and content: the manifesto appears to state something definitive but is purely about dynamics, complexity, change. The consequences of that for the thinking about visual art was diametrically opposed to the prevailing views at the time. From that moment on we have deliberately distanced ourselves from mainstream art and culture. And vice versa. From the mid-eighties until the early nineties any dialogue with art institutes about media and technology was out of the question. "It's all just toys-for-boys", they would say, and other worn-out cliches. It was like that for five years.

It did give us ample opportunity to find out what we were doing, both within V2_ and together with others in the field. Those who were active in electronic art in the late eighties, early nineties were, on the one hand, people who had done performances and expanded cinema and such in the sixties and seventies and on the other hand a younger generation of artists who were politically involved. Quite soon an international network emerged of people seeking each other out to discuss the wide field which electronic art addresses and the question as to what were the specific qualities and 'disqualities' of media technology. There were only a few places in the world where this discourse took place and where electronic art was shown. V2_ was one of them. We pulled the world in.

1994 - the present

The advent of communication media in the early nineties brought with it another revolution that more or les coincided with our move to Rotterdam. We even stopped making art and concentrated fully on the further development of V2_. We felt V2_ was a much better vehicle to express our ideas than our own art was. The outside pressure was mounting steadily. If you explore a field that is completely new, as we did, you automatically become an 'expert'. Over the past six years the interest for the social and cultural aspects of media technology and therefore for electronic art as well has grown enormously and many of the questions this raises seem to end up with us almost automatically. Where at first we sat on this island, now we find ourselves at the center of a worldwide network of individuals and organizations working with media. And the pressure just keeps mounting. So we recruited new people - currently our organization has a staff of around twenty people - and that has had major consequences for the choice of V2_'s themes and presentations and for the way we work within the organization. Both internally and externally we have organized ourselves via online networks. Actually, only for the past six years have we been working truly interdisciplinary, with art disciplines and science, education et cetera.

Since the beginning of the nineties we have reopened the dialogue with the art world. The social transformations of the years before had not left the traditionally organized art institutes undisturbed either. The question of the legitimacy of art and the museums, the question of who or what these institutes were actually representing, was raised again. Not only because of the multi-cultural society and the aging museum public, but also because of the question of how our national heritage can be made accessible by digital media. It is quite characteristic of V2_ that it originated in the world of art and that it positions itself emphatically within the field of art. At the same time, however, it thinks that the answers to the questions it asks may not necessarily be found within the realm of art and culture. V2_ continues to navigate the intersection of, on the one hand, art and culture and, on the other hand, (media) technology. And rightly so, as the question of how network technology influences the arts keeps yielding surprising answers.

An example. In 1996 Andreas Broeckmann initiated V2_East, because there were hardly any online platforms for artists, organizations and theorists from Eastern Europe to exchange information about what had been going on in the field of media in their part of Europe over the past fifty years, but also to discuss the region's current problematic issues. Together with the Ars Electronica Centre (Austria) and some thirty artists, V2_ then built a network where individuals and organizations could exchange information, work together and combine archives. This network also functioned as an independent news station during the war in Kosovo. At the same time we have pulled in people from Eastern Europe, and our way of looking at things is influenced by them. Projects which originated over there are brought to Rotterdam and people from Western Europe have the opportunity of meeting people from Eastern Europe here. Often several participants in this network are collaborating on projects.

Another example. V2_Lab was founded in 1997 and has developed into an international media lab for the production of electronic art. Artists and institutes from Rotterdam, the Netherlands and from abroad use it. We do not see V2_Lab as just a place that offers technical facilities to artists, as basically that is something many other organizations could do just as well. To us it is much more a place where interdisciplinary collaboration is organized through V2_'s local, national and international network of contacts.

An example of a theme: the programme 'The Art of the Accident', 1998. The idea was that computers contain errors and cause them as well, and that these errors are inherent in technology. The question then was: can we take these 'accidents' into account in the development of new technologies instead of fooling ourselves by thinking everything will just become ever simpler and easier to use? Processes can be unpredictable and take unexpected turns but these may eventually prove to be valuable in themselves. How can these accidents be understood in a positive sense when initiating processes? The computer itself, as a medium, presents the theme of 'the art of the accident'. Non-functionality, moments of friction, the creation of experiential moments, these are all recurrent topics in art. The corporate world, however, prefers to focus on comfort, functionality, smoothness, ease of use. That is a wonderful field of tension.

Initially everyone, including the government, felt that it would be best if V2_ organized its activities in collaboration with the business community. We do not agree with that. We want to financially secure V2_'s continuity - and with it the discourse on media in the public domain - on the basis of public funding. That should be about seventy percent of our budget and then we can fund the rest of the budget by collaborating with businesses and other parties on a project basis. Public funding means we focus on a public interest. We see ourselves as a laboratory, in a literal sense, as a workshop for empirical-scientific and/or technical research and experiment. And this not for the sake of experiment but in order to initiate processes and present these to an audience or rather: to make the audience part of these processes.

If you look at developments in society ith hindsight, it was inevitable that something like V2_ would emerge,. All the same it is of course a cultural act by a number of individuals. Our productive attitude and perhaps a certain commitment have resulted in the creation of V2_ as it is. We want to go on prodding at prevailing attitudes toward (digital) art. By constantly questioning everything, you force yourself to keep reinventing and refining yourself.

Geert Lovink: What happened within the Albanian arts right after the changes in the early nineties?

Eduard Muka: In 1992, the Soros Foundation organized an exhibition of paintings, because that was the only known medium at the time. This was the first moment where you could see some different tendencies (let's not call them new). There was this huge gap of information since the mid-fifties between Albania and what was going on elsewhere in the world. All these people were raised according to the socialist realist methods. Artists, which are supposed to be a rebel, having suffered a lot under this cruel regime, scarcely dared to take the ship and get to Italy. So in 1992, in this first exihibition, artists tried to escape reality. No escape from the country (because they did not have the courage), but an escape from the known schemes into formalism. It was a revival of abstract painting, looking outmoded, if you put it out of it's context.

Nobody thought of concepts and ideas, everybody fought against them. Take for example Edi Hila, one of the greatest Albanian artists and the former dean of the Fine Art Academy, who had a series of abstract paintings. Nobody could get out of this revolt against conceptuality and realism. But Hila's work was to a certain extent influenced by the Tirana environment, which in the early nineties was completely destroyed. Or Vladimir Myrtezai, an artist in his mid-thirties, who has recently made some installations. But he also comes from a painting background. He has been one of the first formal artists, using pure geometrical, abstract forms. Gazmend Leka is also a painter, who produced around 1992 a series of abstract graphics with some figurative elements. Now he is dealing in the paintings with religious characters, even though it is abstract.

At that time, being in Italy, I had to make my living as a painter, making portraits and landscapes. Besides this, I began making researches into conceptuality. When I came back after a year, I had a personal show, which included conceptual paintings and installations. It had good reactions from the public, but some very bad ones from the conservative side, which, unfortunately, is in power in Albania nowadays. The controversy started in the newspapers, they are not open- minded, they want everything to remain within the tradition of painting as a craft. Students have to become craftmen, they are not interested in the artistic process. We just want to make the students able to analyse the situation in a visual way, with the medium he or she wants to choose. But this controversy does not take place as an artistic debate, it is just a matter of power. You are not given the right to defend your ideas. In this respect, the help from foundations or other organizations is vital.

Even if we lose one battle, we are going to win the war. Religious art is not involved, that is at least one good thing. What the current power promotes is the ability of the artist to move the brush in a certain way and create the surface. It is a very superficial, formalistic demand. They don't want to offer the students something they themselves do not even know, which is bad, because the school is the right place to do experiments. You better direct the students in an unknown territory, and let them discover, even by making mistakes.

G.L.: Under which circumstances does media art have to make a start?

E.M.: The isolation is still having its impact. The information we receive about alternative media, including media art, is very limited. I share all the material I get with my collegues and students. Only freedom is changing things. Media art has only just started. I can mention a young artist, his name is Anri Sala, he used to come from a painting background, shifted to installations, worked with photography and has just produced two videos, a 20 minutes long piece called 'The Tongue', which I showed here at DEAF. He also produced a computer show recently. A problem here is the difficulty to link up with history. Regarding experimental film, it is impossible, there wasn't anything. But there is a famous dynasty of photographers in Shkodra, which is in the North of Albania. There is a phototheque in this city with marvelous material, now being restored. It contains mostly documentary photos, done in an artistic way, landscapes, family portraits. The first Albanian artistic photo show was held in april 1996, in the Ernst Museum in Budapest. I worked together with Katalin Timar on this show and was amazed by the conceptual quality, despite all the technical problems that still exist. The students of the fine arts academy also did a first photo exihibit with the same conceptual cargo. In 1995 we were able to establish a photo lab in the academy, with the help of the Soros Foundation and the British Council. This year the school will open a computer atelier and a designers program. But the school broke all the programs we had prepared, due to the political changes after the elections in May. There will be no room for research. But they only want to teach the students the craft, not the artistic, creative process. A new project concerns building up an archive of Albanian art of the last fifty years, because it does not exist at all. We would like to interview and document the works and lives of older and younger artists, not only to conserve it, but also to build up our new experience, whatever our past experience is. We just cannot and must not deny it and make profit of it. Making it accessible through the Internet could be a first step of showing what media communication is.

We inherited a sort of hatred towards the media. There were a lot of lies, nothing was exact, there was only propaganda. Still there is only one state television channel and it is even worse than it used to be. The distrust towards media could be a good starting point for artists to make their critical approach in regards to media. I look at media as the highest degree of manipulation humanity has ever invented. In this sense, this could be really used, to fit the works of artists, raising social or individual imperatives. Nobody has any idea how it came to post modernism and contemporary art. Everbody thinks that modernism is just abstraction, the fugitive way from the real image. We are working on a book with translations to clear such basic misunderstandings and we work with catalogues I brought from abroad.

In Albania there are no rich people with access and the poor who cannot get to the information or technologies. Perhaps 5% made money in recents years. 0.5% is middle class, the rest is all the same. To share information now is not so much the problem. What matters is how to fit the media psychology into the Albanian mentality of the artistic audiences. The controversy is not between the media and the audience, but between media and the arts. We have to force our way into the scene and to show what the possiblities are.

"About the things behind the mirror..."

Zsolt Kozma: Do your work and your thinking about the media follow a consistent line of thought? Is it possible to discern how you made the progression from film and video to computer art?

EIKE: Looking back, I can see that there was a process; each phase building upon the previous one. My work process is very slow - it can take one or two years, or more, for it to crystalise out the many tiny elements of my thinking process, and eventually there comes a point when it´s possible to say that the piece is finished. As I've already said, I occupy myself with a great many different things. I find, in retrospect, that structures have always been important to me: structures of thought, physical structures, or the structure of the space; one could refer rather romantically to the "things behind the mirror". In my computer art, I place importance on thinking within the medium. Of course, I´m interested in a contemporary way of thinking as well, by which I mean, for example, the notion that in order to achieve the same effect that an art work did one hundred years ago, it´s necessary to work with new structures which reflect contemporary conditions, or through a modern handling of the structures of old media.

After working with many different kinds of artistic forms (literature, music, drawing, etc.), I eventually came to the conclusion that film was my ideal medium, because it contains everything: pictures, word, sound, stories and so on. later, however, I came to miss the concrete presence of something that I would describe as "being", a thing that the viewer can grab on to; the tangible presence of energy; the existence of things; this is how I came to the installation. I had often made use of lighting and video effects, but always as one element of the work, because the balance between all the objects as well as the relationship to the space of the installation is important.

In 1994, I produced my first computer piece, Landing Place. With this first work, the possibilities for "endlessness" that the computer processes and the notion that it can harbour an art piece that transforms itself constantly, came to fascinate me. I think about virtual space in the same way I think about real space. I´m interested in the properties, the parameters, the structure and how virtual space influences the viewer´s perception. The term "virtual space" is actually nothing new. It has always existed in arts, in other form, of course. An example would be the "space" in which a fairytale takes place: This is a space that we cannot enter because of the physical nature of our bodies, but which we can create and influence, in terms of what happens there, and into which we can look.

The Virtuality Machine, one of my works which demonstrate this pronciple, consists of a half-mirrored cube which contains a pulsating lamp. It is part of the series that I call Computer Art without Computer. Video is also a virtual world, but not a limitless one, or to say it better, one that can't be adjusted anymore once completed. With the pulsating light in Virtuality Machine and the use of video, I can bring rhythm - time, so to speak - into the installation and show a number of perspectives at the same time.

INCREmental bursts this framework, in that the work changes constantly and never returns to any given state. This makes it a metaphor for computer art, because it wouldn´t be possible in any other medium.

(Mûertõ, Budapest, April 2000)

This text was used for an article about the Live Coding Test-lab, published in the Italian magazine Digicult: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1106.