"I cue you" DFM
*
In this age of media overproduction, information immunity is a
question of life or death. When the defense mechanism fails and
the consumer is overwhelmed by strange impressions, doom seems
near. To call a halt to crippling indifference, a media diet is
prescribed. The pressure exerted on the world citizen to
continually adapt his own image of the world and put
technological innovations into practice puts him into a
permanent state of insecurity. The urge to create disappears, and
we are merely able to react to the overwhelming array of choices.
Data are then no longer stimuli to interest, but an inimical
barrage constituting a physical threat. From exchange to
effacement: communication is preying on naked existence. The
innocence of the media is no more. A period of stagnation will
follow the rampant growth of the 80s. This is being foreshadowed
by the propagation of a mentality of moderation. It is being made
clear to us from all sides that we must stop handling information
and images carelessly. Henceforth, the media and data traffic,
like other sectors of Western society, must submit in their
presentation to the diktat of ecology. The environment is more
than endangered plants and animals. It is a mentality which,
with abstract concepts like "conservation" and "recycling", sees
the constructed media sphere as a third or fourth nature.
Watchfulness prevails against all possible needless pollution and
senseless waste.
Aware media users find a "natural equilibrium" between receiving
and transmitting information. After the euphoria of getting
acquainted with the new technologies, they seek a balance between
the immaterial environment, which evokes imaginary worlds, and
the biographical one, where their own flesh lives. This balance
is considered necessary to protect the pioneers in dataland (who
are working at the "electronic frontier") from cold turkey.
After the ecstacy of the emancipation phase we see a
dissatisfaction in technoculture, and it may be seeking a
destructive way out. High expectations all too easily end in
great disappointment, which inspires hate for the machinery.
Deleuze and Guattari would simply call it "antiproduction"; the
sudden disgust that arises in those who have allowed themselves
to be swept away in the stream of signs. Could this be the "drama
of communication" (freely adapted from Alice Miller), that at the
moment we only receive and are sending no signals back? Or vice
versa: putting too much data into the world, without getting
anything back for it? Among data workers a feeling of emptiness
and senselessness is arising, which can only temporarily be
compensated for by the introduction of yet more new hard and
software.
*
The sovereign media insulate themselves against the hyperculture.
They seek no connection; they disconnect. This is their point of
departure we have a liftoff. They leave the media surface and
orbit the multimedia network as satellites. These doityourselfers shut themselves up inside a selfbuilt monad, an
"indivisible unit" of introverted technologies which, like a roomr
without doors or windows, wishes to deny the existence of the
world. This act is a denial of the maxim "I am connected,
therefore I am". It conceals no longing for a return to nature.
They do not criticize the baroque data environments or experience
them as threats, but consider them material, to use as they
please. They operate beyond clean and dirty, in the garbage
system ruled by chaos pur sang.
Their carefree rummaging in the universal media archive is not a
management strategy for jogging jammed creativity. These negative
media refuse to be positively defined and are good for nothing.
They demand no attention and constitute no enrichment of the
existing media landscape. Once detached from every meaningful
context, they switch over in fits and starts from one audiovideo
collection to the next. The autonomously multiplying connections
generate a sensory space, which is relaxing as well as nerveracking. This tangle can never be exploited as a trendsensitive
genre again. All the data in the world alternately make up one
lovely big amusement park and a fivestar survival trek in the
paranoid category, where humor descends on awkward moments like
an angel of salvation and lifts the program up out of the muck.
Unlike the "antimedia", which are based on a radical critique of
capitalist (art) production, the sovereign media have alienated
themselves from the entire business of politics and the art
scene. An advanced mutual disinterest hampers any interaction.
They move in parallel worlds which do not interfere with each
other. No antiinformation or criticism of politics or art is
given in order to start up a dialogue with the authorities. Once
sovereign, media are no longer attacked, but tolerated and, of
course, ignored. But this lack of interest is not a result of
disdain for the hobbyist amateur or political infantilism; it is
the contemporary attitude towards any image or sound that is
bestowed on the world anyway.
Sovereign media are equipped with their own starters and do not
need to push off from any possible predecessors or other media.
They are different from the post'68 concept of alternative media
and from the autonomous "inside" media of the 80s. The
alternative media work on the principle of "antipublicity" and
mirror the mainstream media, which they feel needs to be
corrected and supplemented. This strategy aims to make the
individual aware of his behavior as well as his opinion. This
process will ultimately be seen in a changed public opinion.
These little media have no general claims but work with a
positive variant of the cancer model, which assumes that in the
long term everyone, whether indirectly or through the big media,
will become informed about the problem being broached. They
presuppose a tight network stretched around and through society,
so that in the end the activism of a few will unleash a chain
reaction by many. Until that time, they direct themselves at a
relatively small group, in the certainty that their info will not
stay stuck in a ghetto or start feeding back in the form of
internal debates. This "megaphone model" aims in particular at
liberalleft opinion leaders, who have no time to accumulate
information or invent arguments and get politically motivated
specialists to do this thankless work. Movements in the 60s and
70s gave themes like feminism, the third world and the
environment a great range this way. Professionalization and
market conformism in those circles, however, have caused peopler
to switch to the "real" media. The laboratories where information
and argumentation get tested are currently an inseparable part of
the media manufacturing process, now that their movements have
become just as virtual as the media they figure in.
At the end of the 70s, radicals who had gotten tired of waiting
for the other's change of consciousness founded the socalled
"inside media". At precisely the moment that the official media
started emancipating themselves and terms like "press" and
"public opinion" vanished from the scene, a group of activists
gave up the belief in their deaf fellow citizens and got to work
themselves. Although to unknowing outsiders they seemed a
continuation of the alternative media activity, they let go of
the cancer model and, like the official media, went gliding. The
mirror of the alternative media was crushed. It had become
pointless to keep appealing to public responsibility; they needed
to look for a different imaginary quantity to concentrate on:
"the movement".
Although they were only locally available, they had no concern
for the regional restriction which the ascending local media
impose upon themselves. They no longer wanted to be alternative
city papers. In form as well as content they became
transnational, like their global peers. They wanted nothing to do
with growth. Their brilliant dilettancy turned out to be not a
childhood illness, but an essential component. As a leftover
product of vanished radical movements, which flare up every now
and then, their continuity and unchangingness remain breathtaking
to this day. It cannot be reduced to their dogma. They turn away
from the short media time and create their own spacetime
continuum.
*
The sovereign media are the cream of all the missionary work
performed in the media galaxy. They have cut all surviving
imaginary ties with truth, reality and representation. They no
longer concentrate on the wishes of a specific target group, as
the "inside" media still do. They have emancipated themselves
from any potential audience, and thus they do not approach their
audience as a moldable market segment, but offer it the "royal
space" the other deserves. Their goal and legitimacy lie not
outside the media, but in practicable "total decontrol". Their
apparently narcissistic behavior bears witness to their being
sure of themselves, which is not broadcast. The signal is there;
you only have to pick it up. Sovereign media invite us to hop
right onto the media bus. They have a secret pact with noise, the
father of all information. And time is not a problem there is
room for the extended version as well as the sampled quotation.
This is only possible through the grace of noprofile. Without
being otherwise secretive about their own existence, the
sovereigns remain unnoticed, since they stay in the blind spot
that the bright media radiation creates in the eye. And that's
the reason they need not be noticed as an avantgarde trend and
expected to provide art with a new impetus. The reason sovereign
media are difficult to distinguish as a separate category is
because the shape in which they appear can never shine in its
full lustre. The program producers don't show themselves; we see
only their masks, in the formats familiar to us. Every
successful experiment that can possibly be pointed to as an
artistic or political statement is immediately exposed tor
contamination. The mixers inherently do not provoke, but infect
chance passersby with corrupted banalities which present
themselves in all their friendly triviality. An inextricable
tangle of meaning and irony makes it impossible for the
experienced media reader to make sense of this.
The atmosphere inside the sealed cabin conflicts with the
ideology of networking. As a central coordination machine, the
computer subjects all old media to the digital regime. The
sovereign media, conversely, make their own kind of connections,
which are untranslatable into one universal code. Hightech is
put to the test and turned inside out. But this trip to the
interior of the machine does not result in a total multimedia art
work. Disbelief in the total engagement of the senses and
technically perfect representation is too great for that. The
required energy is simply generated by shortcircuits, confusion
of tongues, atmospheric disturbances and clashing cultures. Only
when computerdriven networks begin to break their own
connections, and scare off their potential users, will it be
time for the sovereigns to log in.