Sovereign Media

"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 world citizens to constantly adapt their own image of the world and 
put technological innovations into practice puts them 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 no longer 
stimuli to interest, but an inimical barrage constituting a physical 
threat. From exchange to effacement: communication is preying on naked 
existence.

Sovereign media insulate themselves against 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 do-it-yourselfers shut themselves up inside a 
self-built monad, an "indivisible unit" of introverted technologies 
which, like a room 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 waste 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 audio/video collection to the next. The autonomously 
multiplying connections generate a sensory space which is relaxing as 
well as nerve-racking. This tangle can never be exploited as a 
trend-sensitive genre again. All the data in the world alternately make 
up one lovely big amusement park and a five-star 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, 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 anti-information 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 
individuals aware of their behavior as well as opinions. 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 the 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 liberal-leftist 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 people 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 so-called "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 shattered. 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 restrictions 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 space-time continuum.

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 no-profile. 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 is the reason they need not be 
noticed as an avant-garde 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 do not 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 to 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. High-tech 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 artwork. Disbelief in the total engagement of the senses and 
technically perfect representation is too great for that. The required 
energy is simply generated by short-circuits, confusion of tongues, 
atmospheric disturbances and clashing cultures. Only when computer-driven 
networks begin to break their own connections, and scare off their 
potential users, will it be time for the sovereigns to log in.
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