Hybrid Space @ Springerin Magazine

RIXC, the center of new media culture in Riga (formerly E-lab), is known for its wide-ranging interest in the latest communication technologies.

As a kind of experimental polygon, it works on the constant shifting of boundaries in relation to artistic tools, the subject and even language.

One of the first Art + Communication festivals put Net-Radio at the center of extensive international discussions as a form of production, but also of distribution of art content.

Even more astonishing, however, was the fact that a creative network of its own emerged on the basis of the most diverse – and often collaborative – experiments and concepts of the artists and lives on as a widespread, unpredictable, open media group.

Publication Hybrid Space, Tatiana Goryuchevace @ Springerin magazine for criticism and theory of contemporary culture, Austria, 16-17 May 2003

Media
Architecture
after the
VR quake

The sixth edition of the festival, entitled ‘Media Architecture’, reached newcomers as well as those who had previously been active in community initiatives throughout Europe – such as the Network Interface for Cultural Exhange [NICE], which was launched in Riga in 1999. The widespread discomfort with virtual escapism and increasingly frightening ‘problems at home’ (political, economic, social, ecological) have already provoked a wide variety of creative debates on the question of how the model of a globally deterritorialised ‘information society’ can be effectively implemented in local community networks. This general main concern of numerous festival participants – mostly representatives of local initiatives in the field of new media culture – was to a certain extent the determining background of the presentations and discussions. These revolved around the following core themes: possible interrelations between media networks and physical, urban and social environments; media art and cultural activities in relation to current problems of public space development; the potential of media (mobile/localizing) for art and social geography. In all these topics, architecture, as a concept and phenomenon, was ascribed a multidimensional role, whether through experimental-theoretical, social, technological, artistic, political or psychogeographical approaches.

Most of the presentations consisted of projects. A few of these were realized as installations as part of the exhibition or as performances – in the new RIXC space, which has yet to be designed. But the people at RIXC were not satisfied with the mere idea of ‘finally having a space available’ and so a project proposal was developed by a special international group of architects in a five-day workshop. The manifestation of an architecture with increased requirements in terms of its functions and socio-cultural program was found, for example, in the work of architect Tuomas Toivonen (Finland). Its core is a responsible architecture that reacts to current social dynamics, plays an active role in modelling situations and remains open to influences from other serious disciplines.

Media and mediation in the perspective proposed by the festival are seen as the key moment, or at least one of them, in urban design and environmental design. For example, the visionary project ‘Idensity®’ by Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar (Netherlands) was presented, in which a hybrid public space is to be opened up in which media and physical places enter into a connection with each other.

Their design of such an interface for social interaction integrates various functional concepts, such as ‘Media Babies’ (facilities for so-called narrowcasting), ‘Bridge Clubs’ (spaces for public events and larger broadcasting facilities) or ‘Mobile Containers’ (all means of transport equipped with transmitters/receivers and interactive life jackets). All under the slogan ‘Replace the right to vote with the right to broadcast’.

Francesca Ferguson‘s Berlin Urban Drift Festival was also presented, which directly addresses the local urban context and confronts socio-economic crises and the dramatic transformations of the present. Its multidisciplinary focus is aimed at the lowest levels of urban life and natural dynamics of social and material activities by ‘reintroducing spontaneity, chance and experimentation into the architectural discourse’ and ‘reactivating negative space’, i.e. unused areas.

Hybridity today is a condition of any logic of intermedial and spatial communication relations, says Eric Kluitenberg in his essay ‘Constructing the Digital Commons: A Venture into Hybridisation’. The ‘digital commons’ is a strategic concept for repositioning the idea of publicly shared, non-material resources (information, knowledge, ideas), which emphasizes their active significance and, consequently, people should take responsibility for their products and their sustainability. Nevertheless, access to these spaces of resource accumulation remains crucial. Some of the projects presented referred to the idea of a socio-symbolic and mental reconstruction of space and were linked in one way or another to the field of psychogeography. Among them was Esther Polak‘s (Netherlands) ‘Real Time Riga’ (production: De Waag, Amsterdam, co-production: RIXC): a visualisation of mental city maps on a screen in public space, created by tracing the routes taken by the inhabitants using individual GPS transmissions. In line with the logic and tactics of the situationists, however, psychogeography cannot be limited to visual representation alone. The performance by Marko Peljhan and others entitled ‘Project Atol – Signal Server’ collects, processes, mixes, transforms and distributes signals, sounds and visuals to create compositions in real time.

In contrast, ‘radioqualia’ by Honor Harger & Adam Hyde (Australia, New Zealand/UK) is not only an art initiative for ‘experiments with artistic broadcasting’, but also a kind of technological pool that recommends specific software and hardware that can be produced by other artists themselves in order to The idea of rediscovering and reactivating spaces and places was also the starting point for enabling streaming media projects. Her credo is ‘to celebrate those hidden places where an alchemical marriage between intention and error takes place.’

For the project ‘[RT-32] Acoustic.Spacelab’: a symposium and work-shop held in 2001 and a collective multimedia exploration of the VIRAC radio telescope, a 32 metre high antenna in Irbene (Latvia), formerly owned by the Soviet military.

The DVD of the project was presented at the end of the festival – directly in the telescope, to which all participants and guests were taken by bus. A broad spectrum of creative, investigative, critical and challenging ideas were presented at this festival, all of which attempt to develop new spaces and forms of the most diverse, unrestricted socio-cultural and communicative practices. The question is whether their producers and organisers will be able to maintain their will to disenchant reality.

ART + COMMUNICATION 2003 The 6th International Festival for New Media Culture Riga, 15 to 18 May 2003 http://rixc.1v/03/info.html
More details in: Acoustic Space: Media Architecture, Reader no. 4, Riga, 2003

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