These 0.
“What do I think of Wikileaks? I think it would be a good idea!” (after Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quip on ‘Western Civilisation’)

These 1.
Disclosures and leaks have been of all times, but never before has a non state- or non- corporate affiliated group done this at the scale Wikileaks managed to with the ‘Afghan War Logs’. But nonetheless we believe that this is more something of a quantitative leap than of a qualitative one. In a certain sense, these ‘colossal’ Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets – never mind private ones – has become rather difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Wikileaks here becomes symbolic for a transformation in the ‘information society’ at large, and holds up a mirror of future things to come. So while one can look at Wikileaks as a (political) project, and criticize it for its modus operandi, or for other reasons, it can also be seen as a ‘pilot’ phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.

These 2.
For better or for worse, Wikileaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, Wikileaks has briefly become a full-blown player both on the world scene, as well as in the national sphere of some countries. By virtue of its disclosures, Wikileaks, small as it is, appears to carry the same weight as government or big corporations – in the domain of information gathering and publicizing at least. But at same time it is unclear whether this is a permanent feature or a hype-induced temporary phenomenon – Wikileaks appears to believe the former, but only time will tell. Nonetheless Wikileaks, by word of its best known representative Julian Assange, think that, as a puny non-state and non-corporate actor, it is boxing in the same weight-class as the Pentagon – and starts to behave accordingly. One could call this the ‘Talibanization’ stage of postmodern – “Flat World” – theory where scales, times, and places have been declared largely irrelevant. What counts is the celebrity momentum and the amount of media attention. Wikileaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organizations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. Wikileaks genially puts to use the ‘escape velocity’ of IT – using IT to leave IT behind and irrupt into the realm of real-world politics.

These 3.
In the ongoing saga termed “The Decline of the US Empire”, Wikileaks enters the stage as the slayer of a soft target. It would be difficult to imagine it doing quite the same to the Russian or Chinese government, or even to that of Singapore – not to speak of their … err … ‘corporate’ affiliates. Here distinct, and huge, cultural and linguistic barriers are at work, not to speak of purely power-related ones, that would need to be surmounted. Also vastly different constituencies obtain there, even if we speak about the more limited (and allegedly more globally shared) cultures and agendas of hackers, info-activists and investigative journalists. In that sense Wikileaks in its present manifestation remains a typically ‘Western’ product and cannot claim to be a truly universal or global undertaking.

These 4.
One of the main difficulty with explaining Wikileaks arises from the fact it is unclear – and also unclear to the Wikileaks people themselves – whether it sees itself and operates as a content provider or as a simple carrier of leaked data (whichever one, as predicated by context and circumstances, is the impression). This, by the way, has been a common problem ever since media went massively online and publishing and communications became a service rather than a product. Julian Assenge cringes every time he is portrayed as the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, yet on the other hand, Wikileaks says it edits material before publication and claims it checks documents for authenticity with the help of hundreds of volunteer analysts. This kind of content vs. carrier debates have been going on for a number of decades amongst media activists with no clear outcome. Therefore, instead of trying to resolve this inconsistency, it might be better to look for fresh approaches and develop new, critical, concepts for what has become a hybrid publishing practice involving actors far beyond the traditional domain of professional news media.

These 5.
The steady decline of investigative journalism due to diminishing support and funding is an undeniable fact. The ever-ongoing acceleration and over-crowding in the so-called attention economy makes that there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are also less and less inclined to see the working of the neo-liberal globalized economy and its politics detailled and discussed at length. The shift of information towards infotainment demanded by the public and media-owners has unfortunately also been embraced as a working style by journalists themselves making it difficult to publish complex stories. Wikileaks erupts in this state of affairs as an outsider within the steamy ambiance of ‘citizen journalism’ and DIY news reporting in the blogosphere. What Wikileaks anticipates, but so far has not been able to organize, is the ‘crowd sourcing’ of the actual interpretation of its leaked documents.

Traditional investigative journalism consisted of three phases: unearthing facts, cross-checking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. Wikileaks does the first, claims to do the second, but leaves the issue of the third completely blank. This is symptomatic of a particular brand of the open access ideology, whereby the economy of content production itself is externalized to unknown entities ‘out there’. The crisis in investigative journalism is neither understood nor recognized. How the productive entities are supposed to sustain themselves is left in the dark. It is simply presumed that the analysis and interpretation will be taken up by the traditional news media but this is not happening automatically. The saga of the Afghan War Logs demonstrates that Wikileaks has to approach and negotiate with well-established traditional media to secure sufficient credibility. But at the same time these also prove unable to fully process the material.

These 6.
Wikileaks is a typical SPO (Single Person Organization). This means that initiative-taking, decision making, and the execution process is largely centralized in the hands of one single person. Much like small and medium-size businesses the founder cannot be voted out and unlike many collectives leadership is not rotating. This is not an uncommon feature within organizations, indifferent whether they operate in the realm of politics, culture or the ‘civil society’ sector. SPOs are recognizable, exciting, inspiring, and easy to feature in the media. Their sustainability, however is largely dependent on the actions of their charismatic leader, and their functioning is difficult to reconcile with democratic values. This is also why they are difficult to replicate and do not scale up easily. Sovereign hacker Julian Assange is the identifying figurehead of Wikileaks, whose notoriety and reputation very much merges with his own, blurring the distinction between what it does and stands for and Assange’s (rather agitated) private life and (somewhat unpolished) political opinions.

These 7.
Wikileaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism which emerged in the 1990s. The fact that Wikileaks has been founded, and is still to a large extent run by hard core geeks, forms an essential frame of reference to understand its values and moves. This, unfortunately, comes together with a good dose of the somewhat less savory aspects of hacker culture. Not that idealism, the desire to contribute to making the world a better place, could be denied to Wikileaks, quite on the contrary. But this idealism is paired with a preference for conspiracies, an elitist attitude and a cult of secrecy (never mind condescending manners) which is not conducive to collaboration with like minded people and groups – reduced to the position of simple consumers of Wikileaks outcomes.

These 8.
Lack of commonality with congenial ‘another world is possible’ movements forces Wikileaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular – and risky – disclosures, while gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic, but totally passive supporters. Following the nature and quantity of Wikileaks exposures from its inception up to the present day is eerily reminiscent of watching a firework display, and that includes a ‘grand finale’ in the form of the doomsday-machine pitched, waiting-to-be-unleashed, ‘Insurance’ document. This raises serious doubts about the long-term sustainability of Wikileaks itself, but possibly also, that of the Wikileaks model. Wikileaks operates on a ridiculously small size (probably no more than a dozen of people form the core of its operation). While the extent and savviness of Wikileaks’ tech support is proved by its very existence, Wikileaks’ claim to several hundreds, or even more, volunteer analysts and experts is unverifiable, and to be frank, barely credible. This is clearly Wikileaks Achilles’ heel, not only from a risks and/or sustainability standpoint, but politically as well – which is what matters to us here.

These 9.
Wikileaks displays a stunning lack of transparancy in its internal organization. Its excuse that “Wikileaks needs to be completely opaque in order to force others to be totally transparent.” amounts to little more than Mad Magazine’s famous Spy vs Spy cartoons. You win from the opposition but in a way that makes you undistinguishable from it. And claiming the moral high ground afterwards is not really helpful – Tony Blair too excelled in that exercise. As Wikileaks is neither a political collective nor an NGO in the legal sense, and not a company or part of social movement for that matter, we need first of all discuss what type of organization it is that we deal with. Is it a virtual project? After all, it does exist as a hosted website with a domain name, which is the bottom line. But does it have a goal beyond the personal ambition of its founder(s)? Is Wikileaks reproducible and will we see the rise of national or local chapters that keep the name Wikileaks? And according to which playing rules will they operate? Or should we rather see it as a concept that travels from context to context and that, like a meme, transforms itself in time and space?

Maybe Wikileaks will organize itself around an own version of the IETF’s slogan ‘rough consensus and running code’? Projects like Wikipedia and Indymedia have both resolved this issue in their own ways, but not without crises, forks and disruptive conflicts. A critique like the one voiced here does not aim to force Wikileaks into a traditional format but on the contrary to explore whether Wikileaks (and its future clones, associates, avatars and assorted family members) could stand model for new forms of organizations and collaborations. Elsewhere the term ‘organized network’ has been coined as a possible term for this formats. In the past there was talked of ‘tactical media’. Others have used the generic term ‘internet activism’. Perhaps Wikileaks has other ideas in what direction it wants to take this organizational debate. But where? It is of course up to Wikileaks to decide for itself but up to now we have seen very little by way of an answer, leaving others, like the Wall Street Journal, to raise questions, e.g., about Wikileaks’ financial bona fides.

These 10.
We do not think that taking a stand in favor or against Wikileaks is what matters most. Wikileaks is there, and there to stay till it either scuttles itself or is destroyed by the forces opposing its operation. Our point is rather to (try to) pragmatically assess and ascertain what Wikileaks can, could – and maybe even, who knows, should – do, and help formulate how ‘we’ could relate to and interact with Wikileaks. Despite all its drawbacks, and against all odds, Wikileaks has rendered a sterling service to the cause of transparency, democracy and openness. We might wish it to be different, but, as the French would say, if something like it did not exist, it would have to be invented. The ‘quantitative turn’ of information overload is a fact of present life. One can only expect the glut of disclosable information to grow further – and exponentially so. To organize and interpret this Himalaya of data is a collective challenge that is out there, whether we give it the name ‘Wikileaks’ or not.

Amsterdam, late August 2010

Andreas Hirsch: In your book “Dark Fiber” (2002) you wrote: “Changes in technological paradigms take years. It’s questionable whether human nature, with all its fatal flaws and charming defects, will ever change. It is therefore good to distinguish between true excitement during ruptures and long reality waves.” This casts a rather grim look on the perspective – that Ars Electronica with “Open Source Life” somehow postulates – that an emerging new form of life oriented towards principles from Open Source Software or at least from the ideas of Openness might help bringing about changes in mindsets required to survive. How do you view the chances for change of human behaviour in this context?

Geert Lovink: The term ’survival’ is not suitable in the context of new media and is best reserved for the bottom one billion that have to live on less than one dollar a day. We do not have to survive, and that’s exactly why can have discussions like this. I also do not favour the use of biological metaphors, in particular if they are used in a ‘cool’ and slightly prescriptive context like arts and culture. I grew up in the shadows of World War II and have, from early on, seen liberation as liberation from the terror of biology over society. Anti-fascism for me meant being alert for the use of bio metaphors in any possible context. I am not questioning good intentions, but the harmless and subversive bio metaphors are contagious and can show up in contexts that you don’t like. This is why I am not a big fan of Michel Foucault’s term bio politics. If used within the correct theoretical context the term can be meaningful but outside academia it can start to lead a whole different life. Another example would be Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’ and the associated term ‘bare life’. It is odd to see how this terrifying image, derived from extreme situations like Nazi extermination camps is showing up in art catalogues. The state of exception indeed lies with the legal arsenal of those who rule but what is more urgent is to get an understanding of the invisible (software) architectures that steer the lives of billions. In other words, the unexceptional.

What we should study, and fight, is the dull everyday life under neo-liberal capitalism, its privatization of public facilities and preoccupation with shareholder value. We should question their rules: low pay, no or expensive health care, bureaucratic nonsense, tough migration laws. Precarious labour is exactly not bio politics, it’s a social condition of low wages under bad work conditions and has little to do with nature, biology or ecology. It is obvious that certain aspects are indeed linked to life, like reproductive technologies or the manipulation of genes, but I would question these in relation to race or gender. For me those are cultural terms and should be dealt with as such. We are now too much preoccupied with the exception that happens elsewhere. This might be legacy of the outgoing Freudian century that studied the exception as a ‘mirror’. Sickness, in this theory, would tell us something about the general condition of society as a whole. In the context that I work in, (critical) internet culture, this approach is not utilized. What we instead should focus on is the global unconscious: daily routines in terms of communication and mobility and related bodily conditions that cultural studies is unable to read because of its preoccupation with the (tele)visual spectacle. In theoretical terms this would mean to make steps beyond the notions of Foucault and Deleuze on surveillance and control. The latest issue of the magazine Open entitled Beyond Privacy is a successful example in this direction.

Let’s clean up the term ‘open’ or forget about it all together. I am with Richard Stallman in his historical fight against ‘open source’, which started back in 1998. He didn’t win this fight, but ‘in defense of lost causes’ (Zizek) we should not give up so easily and support the spirit of ‘free software’. In the end, both open and free are legal terms that regulate ownership. We have to keep that in mind, and this includes Stallman’s GNU GPL. As soon as you are talking about ‘open’ you bring the conversation into the realm of legal arrangements and ’social contracts’. We cannot just talk about open source life in a transcendental way as if it were some lifestyle proposal. Open source life is a legal arrangement that has to be positioned inside the life sciences and its obsession with patents.

Let’s not forget that ‘open source’ is the commerce-friendly recuperation of Stallman’s project. Open source is the explicitly depoliticized version of free software. As is commonly noted, open source is ‘not a movement, it’s a development method’. There is a history to this term that is easily washed away, but must be faced head on. We must also look at the practical reality: Google, IBM, Sun and Cisco – these are the main players in the open source game. Google has written more open source code than anyone. In this light, the ‘principles of ‘open source’ seem conservative, and fit easily into the rent-based methods of value extraction of neo-liberal capitalism. What exactly are these principles of open source? Metaphors of cathedrals and bazaars won’t help us. The infrastructural distinction between utopian networks and ugly hierarchies/centres is important, but should not be seen as the end game of politics.

If not open source principles, then what about more general ‘ideas of openness’? One of the problems with openness, as Chris Kelty has written, is that everyone agrees open is the way to go and the thing to do. Nobody wants to be closed minded, closed to the world, closed off. At the same time, its meaning is obfuscated, and this obfuscation might be the necessary condition of its proliferation. Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, for example, make use of it in Multitude but it is just as easily taken up by Obama’s strategists in their Open Government initiative. Let’s also not forget that the biggest political treatise on political openness (Popper) was a defense of one version of capitalism. What seems urgent and missing in the openness discourse is specificity. What do you mean when you talk about openness? What are the details? Can you point to this better world?

AH: Could the idea of an ‘open source life’ have emancipatory potential and amplify emerging forms of activism and dissident lifestyle that might be helpful in bringing about changes in mindsets required for the massive behavioural changes needed for humanity to survive the current situation of the ecosphere brought about by human action?

GL: I am with Slavoj Zizek here. Nature is violent. It is one huge catastrophe. There is no ‘harmonious’ equilibrium that we need to restore. We are not in danger as a species. Having said that, we can of course save energy but even there I would say that it’s better to use a language that stresses the abundant nature of alternative sources. Let’s stress the violent excess of wind, sun and tidal energy. The last thing we should is promote sustainable ecology with a calvinistic ’savings’ mentality. It’s not a shame that we exist. Excess and plenty are as (un)natural as scarcity. The alarmist rhetoric often has conservative if not racist undertones and refuses to speak of the underlying capitalist mode of production, which, in my view, is the main source of pollution because it socialises costs and privatizes benefits. In my view, it is a mistake to put all your eggs in the ‘climate change’ basket. Poisonous materials make you sick and nuclear waste poses great immediate danger for you and your environment (in the case you happened to live near Tjernobyl in 1986). But climate change is much more abstract, and the political strategies have, in my view, made themselves way too dependent on scientific models. It has also been way too easy for the climate skeptics to question ‘data’. The environmental movement should be de-institutionalized and dismantled, if you like, because now it is becoming complicit. The whole debacle around the Copenhagen summit is a good example, as are ‘emissions trading’ schemes.

Renewable energy should be introduced at a large scale regardless and uncoupled of the ‘climate change’ circus. Fossil fuels will eventually run out and if you are against nuclear energy, like I am, renewable energy is the way to go. One doesn’t need the alarmist ideology for that. Apocalyptic warnings will only mobilize dark forces of fear. We need to understand that this is not an age of progressive forces and the collective metaphors and imagery that mobilize need to be adjusted accordingly. Warning of ‘endtimes’ will not bring us any closer to liberation. Social justice will be reached through our own imagination, for instance, by experimenting with new forms of institutional power. We need to tackle the question of organization.

AH: Is there sense after all in transporting ideas of Openness, or more specific: principles from Open Source Software, to different areas of life and business?

GL: We need to discuss in what context it makes sense, and where it might be a political or ethical failure to do so. There is a danger of ‘open’ becoming an empty signifier. If we want this term to play a role in shaping the commons, we need to discuss its consequences. A critique of ‘open’ doesn’t mean we are in favor of closed systems or secrets. Let’s look at a historical example of the open ideology, a 60s leftover phrase that dominated a good part of the 70s: the open kitchen in an open marriage. Thankfully, this image has been thoroughly deconstructed, we can even say destroyed, by feminists. This is my version: the open kitchen breaks open the spatial division between kitchen, living room and dining room. Taking away the walls made the domestic work in the kitchen visible, but also created an integrated space for the drama of the ‘open marriage’ to play itself out in spatial-psychological manner. Add the television set and the telephone to the mix and you have all the ingredients for the late 20th century reality soap as performed in millions of suburban family homes across the globe. In Cold Intimacies, written by Eva Illouz, we can read about the reasons behind this increasingly public nature of human relationships. Her thesis is that capitalism has fostered an intensely emotional culture. The therapy movement and television programs that feature people’s intimate problems laid the grounds for social networking sites like Facebook to exploit our will to self-disclosure.

What needs to come before transportation to other context is a clear statement. What is to be open? On what level and in relation to which people? Absolute openness, of course, would merely replicate the status quo (open to slavery, racism, wars). Here we bump up against the limits of a politics where all nuance is eventually reduced to a binary. Is this the best we can do?

AH: You promoted the “Slow Media Manifesto”. Which aspects of the idea of slow media make this interesting for you?

GL: We should not portray ourselves as victims of speed politics. We are not slaves of the availability economy. The idea is not simply to slow down, or have a break. Howard Rheingold calls it “mindful infotention.” What’s at stake is to take matters in our own hands and to turn what seems to be a private failure into a public affair. We need to be aware of what it means to depend on realtime media. There may be a multiplicity of voices but there is also zero time to reflect the constant stream of incoming news sources. The manifesto says: “Slow media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner.” Another aspect of the manifesto I like is the emphasis on ‘monotasking’. The emphasis here is on the quality of the conversation. Ned Rossiter put it well in an email correspondence, slow media is important inasmuch as it says ‘no way’ to the mono-temporality of real-time. To live in a media sociality of homogenous time is equivalent to flatlining.

AH: You recently quit Facebook. Do you see a relevant alternative emerging in the form of the Diaspora project? Is there a need for a different, user-owned, user-driven form of Facebook?

GL: Together with tens of thousands I joined the May 31 Quit Facebook day of action–not the first and also not the last initiative of this kind. It wasn’t so much because of the privacy concerns that I deleted my Facebook profile and related data. My motivation to join the ‘exodus’ movement was that it questions the growing role of centralized internet services that offered to us at no-cost in exchange for our data, profiles, music tastes, social behaviours and opinions. The question here is not so much that we have something to hide. I hope we all do. What we need to defend is the very principle of decentralized, distributed networks. This principle is under attack by both corporations such as Google and Facebook and national authorities that feel a need to control our communication and the data infrastructure at large.

There is a growing awareness that we need to take the architecture of social networking into our own hands. This trend started a while ago with Ning but that’s still a centralized commercial venture, initiated by Netscape’s Marc Andreessen. We now see the FLOSS community coming on board with initiatives like Diaspora, Crabgrass and GNU Social (July 2010 all still in beta). There are a number of political reasons to support such initiatives. I don’t want to overestimate the CIA’s role but it is well known that activists have to be very cautious using Facebook. For a while it was OK to spread the message for this or that campaign, but Facebook is becoming too dangerous as internal channel to coordinate civil disobedience. We cannot just warn youngsters to be careful uploading compromising party pictures onto social networking sites. We should all be more careful and think of what forms of political expressions are most effective these days. Let’s strengthen the self-determination of the nodes against the central authority of the data cloud and keep the Web decentralized.

(Thanks to Nate Tkacz for his valuable input and copy-editing)

By Geert Lovink

Much like the shifting relationship between social movements and NGOs 10-15 ago, we see a growing tension between the existing models of ‘cultural organizations’ that deal with new media culture and arts versus informal networks. Unlike a decade ago the cultural new media sector can no longer claim to embody the ‘avant-garde’ position because that has been taken over by the market. This situation leads to a void: neither truly innovative nor particularly critical, new media organizations in the non-profit sector are starting to float. They are not doing proper research either, or at least not what policy makers and academics consider useful. Should they then all just be closed now that the introductory phase of new media is coming to a close? The massive digitization of ‘cultural heritage’ has proven to be useless for the new media sector and has merely reproduced the existing, conservative cultural landscape that is dominated by museums, opera and concert halls.

Instead of aligning ourselves with the ‘creative industries’ agenda, the proposal here would be transform the current organizational model into facilitating hubs that empower ‘organized networks’. Over the past years, together with Ned Rossiter, I have done both theoretical and practical work to find out how we can develop ‘new institutional forms’. It is not enough to submerge in the bitter insider-outsider logic over ever diminishing budgets. It is time to invent our own sources of income. A first step for this would be to recognize the ideology of free and open, such as advocated by some in the ‘free culture’ movement as a trap. We also need a new notion of the public domain and public broadcasting in particular in which new media will have an equal status, next to film, public radio and television and (subsidized) print. Barcamps, unconferencing, booksprints, festivals, bricolabs and our recent Wintercamp event (Amsterdam, March 2009) are all manifestations of a thriving culture of temp media labs. Instead of asking how these emerging practices can contribute to ‘policy’ we should reverse this question: how can cultural policies strengthen networks?

The Rockbund Art Museum, situated on the Northern tip of the Shanghai Bund area, opened May 2010 in conjunction with the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (expected visitors 70 million). The museum is part of a redevelopment area and is housed in the 1932 art deco building of the Royal Asiatic Society, once location of a natural history museum. As part of larger real estate development, still under construction at the time of the opening, the museum will fit into a most exclusive part of the inner city. According to the brochure of the Rockbund Investment Corporation that also owns the new museum the “urban renaissance” at the birthplace of modern Shanghai celebrates “the glamour of heritage reborn.” The aim is “to create the most elite luxury area in Shanghai.” Rockbund will re-establish the northern tip of the Bund as a hub for arts and culture. Apartments are sold with the promise “to live in the lap of glamour.”

Shanghai is a classic example of creative industries’ marriage with real estate developers. There is no active cultural policy of the state, apart from the top-down decisions where to allocate so-called ‘creative clusters’. These areas throughout the city consist of former manufacturing facilities in order to boost the prices of these former textile buildings and create ‘cool’ neighbourhoods. It is unclear if these industries have been driven out of the metropolitan area because of rising prices or if they left because of delivery problems and low rent elsewhere. Cause and effect chains picked up speed and are impossible to distinguish. As it was explained to me, the creative clusters are mainly occupied by more or less traditional medium-size businesses. What co-workers initiatives like Xin Dan Wei do is facilitate office spaces for freelancers and small groups that just started their own firm.

I interviewed Hsiangling Lai who arrived in September 2009 from Taiwan to take up the job as the director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM). Director of marketing and development Shi Hantao accompanied her. Ms. Lia would like the museum to be a platform for issues in contemporary culture, a crossover approach of urban issues and visual arts that should also refer to the heritage of the original Shanghai Museum, which was located in the same building. International start curator Hou Hanru will do an exhibit, which asks the question what role a contemporary arts museum can play. Hanru will ask foreign artists to do site-specific projects. In constrast, the Shanghai Art Museum will not go beyond the milestones in art history like Picasso or Dali. How do art and life relate, Lai asks. “In Shanghai ordinary people do not visit contemporary museums that often and so far there are no plans from the municipality to build a contemporary arts museum. What they want are private developers to establish a school, an art district, theatre or museum. Galleries are seen as commercial entities that deal with Chinese contemporary arts.” Instead RAM intends to build international relationships and work with overseas curators and art exchange programs.

In conversations the curator/artist Shumin Lin, also Taiwanese, was mentioned. He was recently appointed CEO of the development of the Zendai Himalayas Centre real estate corporation. Lin, a “PhD-holding hypnotist” is known for his light boxes, video installations and holographic art. Lin is said to be “influenced by Buddhism, in particularly the concept of reincarnation and explore themes of rebirth, humanity, humility and universality.” The Himalayas Centre will include a lifestyle hotel, theatre, retail space and a modern art museum. The complex is located in front of the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, “an exclusive high-end residential area.” Before Shu-Min Lin became president of Zinnia Creative Development Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Zendai Himalayas Real Estate he was involved in the 2006 Shanghai Biennale and was on the jury of 2007 Ars Electronica competition.

In the case of RAM the board of the Rockbund still is the sole sponsor of the museum. I asked director Lin if she wasn’t worried in case of a recession or collapse of the real estate market, what was going to happen to RAM. The absence of a cultural policy by the government is greatly felt. The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on the 53^rd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower is mentioned as a model here. A few years ago a centre with artists studios was opened in a rural area, a one-hour drive by car outside of Shanghai. After an initial success artists moved out again because it was too far away. Audiences didn’t show up. Artists are drawn to the metropolitan atmosphere, even though rents are high there. The Shanghai visual arts centre M50 is often mentioned as a successful model how galleries and studios can cluster together. The Shangart gallery, famous for its early promotion of Chinese contemporary arts in the 1990s and that has been so successfully expanding throughout Shanghai and the world, is also part of M50. Another area would be Tianzifang, a few narrow streets with “boutiques and laid- back cafés that have been drawing crowds of yuppies, fashionistas, designers and expatriates.”

RAM intends to go beyond the exhibition hall and will emphasize the role of arts education. Because of the highly competitive entry examinations there is hardly any emphasis on the ‘liberal arts’ in China. There is simply no interest. In her previous jobs working for museums in Taiwan Lai treated education as a must. The issue is not so much the level of artists. Some of the art academies in China are raising interesting new generations of visual artists. RAM likes to work with the last years’ students, the ‘young talents’, and set up a program for them in a small space outside of the museum. Once a year RAM would like to dedicate an exhibition to the ‘creative arts’, be it architecture, fashion, graphic or industrial design.

In response to the creative cluster policy Ms. Lia recommends to put more emphasis on software, and not on the hardware. People, not buildings. There should be mechanisms developed to encourage talents. Ms. Lia doesn’t see the amateurs as a threat for the visual arts. Amateurs remain within the limits of the technical; they execute and because of their lack of time to do research rarely expand their talents in the direction of the creative arts. Having said that, RAM is open for interesting projects, be it from professionals or amateurs, like a video art competition in which the museum would like to showcase young work, also through its website.

Peasant Da Vincis is the opening exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum, curated by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The exhibit features dozens of ‘cultural readymades’, built by Chinese farmers. The objects on display are a mix of imaginary machines, model airplanes, mini submarines, flying saucers, wooden helicopters and mechanical robots, carefully curated by Cai Guo-Quiang who constructed a few of the objects himself. Around fifty tiny birds fly around in the space, embodying the spirit of the countryside tinkerers. The artworks are anthropological artefacts, collected on a return mission to the Chinese countryside. They lack both the playful imagination of Jean Tinguely and the post-industrial violence a la Survival Research Laboratories. The constructions and designs remain within the known shapes of the car, boat, kite, plane and robot. What’s on display is the pleasure of building, in this case, constructed by ordinary Chinese farmers. Their aesthetics of unlikely variation borders to techno-primitivism. Not so much unrealistic the machines are deeply conceptual, and this is what must have been the attraction to put them on display in the arts context: pop conceptualism. As so often with everyday objects they only become works of art because of the context created by the artist-curator, assisted by a team of exhibition builders, photographers, critics and transport workers. Cia’s Peasant Da Vincis utilizes art as a vehicle to reflect on the changes in the Chinese countryside and the gained freedom, the ‘anti gravity’ of the peasant imaginary. Bottom line: the exhibition is the artwork.

What is being played out here is possible futures for the ‘Chinese peasant’ beyond migration and poverty. What Cai Guo-Qiang has done here is a subtle play with the Shanghai 2010 World Expo “Better City, Better Life” slogan by bringing peasants ‘art works’ into the city. The larger question here is how the arts dreams up a newly constituted countryside in a prosperous China in which the promised redistribution of wealth from the cities to the peasants has, at least in part, materialized. Some hints in this direction can be found in the catalogue essay by Zhang Yiwu who talks about the “possibility of the emergence of the Chinese peasant. (..) What Cia Guo-Qiang has discovered here are self-taught peasants inventing out of their own ambition.” The peasant Da Vincis “attempt to use their strange inventions to break through the restrictions of habit and conventional wisdom, and show how free and open their minds are, how rich their inner worlds.”

A Shanghai artist I met called the exhibition “sad”. No doubt there are romantic overtones. Cai Guo-Qiang has been collecting these industrial folk objects since 2005 and clearly put a lot his own enthusiasm into the exhibition. His own installation, filling the first floor, is a room full of flying kites, held up in the air by tiny propellers. Elegant, nearly invisible pocket video projectors project the kites. The poetics of this massive modesty is caused through the hidden tech. The other Cia art piece is a purpose-build rusty screening space in the shape of an aircraft carrier, on display in the entrance hall of the neighbouring yet-to-be renovated 1930s bank building.

It is not the simplicity and hardship of the peasant life that is celebrated here. What is striking is the absence of electronic equipment and ‘new media’. What we get to see is an early industrial aesthetic, a passion for speed and its flipside: the accident (as theorized in such a sublime way by Paul Virilio). The tinkering peasant is caught in the early to mid-20th century techno imaginary. Like in so many now classic Chinese contemporary art works of Cai Guo-Qiang’s generation (b. 1957) is the use of historical ingredients to create a deeply poetic atmosphere that is immediately understood and appreciated by the viewer. A visit to the countryside in order to recharge one’s creative batteries? The problem here is not one of brutal appropriation. All contributing rural artists are properly credited. In the exhibition, the video documentation and the catalogue we can find out a lot about their personal lives and backgrounds. It is also pleasant that there were no references whathowever to Mao’s reforging of the Communist Party towards the peasants culminating in the peasant cult during the ‘cultural revolution’. However, there is no doubt a grown interest in ‘the countryside’. Perhaps we could say that China’s wild phase of urbanization and related hyper growth is coming to a close. As designer Lou Yongqi of Tektao Urban Design Consulting explained me, there is no future anymore for farmers in the Netherlands. That chapter is closed. What we have in this part of Western Europe are large-scale agricultural industries, operated by a tiny workforce. In countries like China with hundreds of millions of farmers there is still a good chance to introduce sustainable, profitable models for modern farming. Yongqi’s Design Havests project, situated on the Shanghai island Chongming is a design & innovation pilot with a remarkable global involvement to “revitalize rural villages in China by improving quality of life through the environment, communication, local business, public and domestic infrastructure. By creating links to an urban and rural network of social and economic exchange, communities are supported to foster everyday sustainability.”

Peasant Da Vincis transmits a strong sense of personal dedication of the artist-curator. There is no hint of any exploitation. Yet, what remains is a strong sense of joy mixed with melancholy. In his catalogue essay David A. Ross writes “the museum has to find ways to the expanded notion of the creative.” Peasant Da Vincis achieves this goal, but it would be a true challenge to position this project in the midst of our global, digital, networked reality, which is—and we all know this—precisely Made in China. What is our craftsmanship? How do the lightness and indifference of the digital buzz weight against the ‘longevity’ of agricultural life? Is the intensity of the real-time presence making us blind and deaf for the poetic qualities of our contemporary condition? Will the overkill of recording devices forcing us to the small towns and villages of our ancestors in order to regain the capacity to tell a story, in this case to recast the central role of the Chinese peasants into downtown Shanghai?

Why these characters are labelled Da Vinci remains unclear as they do not even pretend to be inventors. Obviously Cai Gou-Qiang admires and celebrates his hobby inventors—but that doesn’t turn them into Leonardo Da Vincis. Defying ‘basic engineering principles’ alone does not turn passionate builders into visionaries. What lacks here is exactly the futuristic element, and this is what turns the exhibit into a romantic exercise. It is homage to the Chinese peasant and their transformation, and sacrifices, to make possible the incredible urbanization (under the guidance of the neo-liberal Communist Party). It is the peasant who made the cities—and this is simple yet strong message amidst the hundreds of Shanghai skyscrapers, on this symbolic place of the Bund, in this historic year of the Shanghai World Expo.

I just got back from a long day Amsterdam-Gent-Amsterdam on the train (the ‘very fast’ Thalys (TGV) train had a delay of 55 minutes–such a joke!) where I attended an excellent one day conference curated by Stoffel Debuysere. The event examined the role of memory within a digital culture. Even though it was organized by the Belgian Archipel research project was not an academic event in the narrow sense. The wider agenda was to create a critical agenda for an ambitious new media start-ups/city library/audio-visual archive area situated next to the socialist-heroic Vooruit hall where the conference took place.  Early June 2010 Gent city officials announced the winner of the architecture for the so-called Waalse Krook area.

I closed the event with an on-stage dialogue with the Australian/US STS theorist Geoffrey Bowker. I was very excited about this because I have long been reading his work and looked forward meeting him. In his opening speech Geoffrey emphasized the role of visual language and material in the way we organize our collective memory. What we need to do is not just create databases but try to capture the aura of a place or a situation (a la Benjamin). The conclusion of his intense work on protocols and standards was that we should understand our responsibility for the very architectures of technology. This are the founding years and we are configuring the future of memory–and it better be experimental! We both urged to work in multi-disciplinary teams in which artists and designers should play a pivotal role. As Geoffrey Bowker says: this the epoch of potential memory. Digitizing cultural heritage alone will me meaningless unless develop new ways to explore them, visualize and navigate these datasets–and new vocabularies to talk about them (Geoffrey showed the multimedia scholarly online journal Vectors to illustrate this). The difference of storage and memory is crucial here. Memory gets activated by thinking, when we actively utilize information in a our own life.

I am not a fan of the ‘forgetting’ approach. I am interested in the politics and aesthetics of remembering. I recently read Delete–The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Victor Mayer-Schönberger. He was the next presenter after Bowker. The problem of discussing ‘Google’ in the context of archives and remembering, as Mayer-Schönberger was doing is that the short-term technological data organization Google-style is not done in the name of the public benefit. What is not being taken into account here is why search queries produce certain links, and why this service is for free. Never forget that Google collects data for a commercial purpose. It is not a public archive. Besides this, the Google search engine is getting more and more ‘polluted’, coming up with useless and predictable search outcomes. It is very unlikely that most Web 2.0 application that we now so frantically use, will not be around anymore in the next decade. Nothing is as fragile and temporary as large commercial databases.

We do not need to remember to forget. Regulatory regimes, market forces and History will all too soon wipe out the world’s data centres. We do not need digital abstinence to get there. It’s a banal observation that we not delete enough. An expiration date for information could be useful. It is indeed interesting to design information decay, or rusting, as Mayer-Schönberger proposes. But let’s not get attracted to the romantic politics of ‘let us remember to forget’. How we shape and organize our memory is determined by cultural politics and education. Instead of focusing on forgetting it’s much better to practice (and study) new shapes of memory.