intro/essays/artists/credits

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If the Internet (with its www) is a specific community--where millions are wired, searching for new information, desires & sites, or trying to discover possible interfaces, new shifts and paths--
One of the questions we have to pose (as artists, social activists and cyborg-political entities) is:  How can we define the basic elements of this wired condition?  How is it possible today to construct a new individual responsible activism and action through the "net" without a superficial morality and pathos? The question is:  Are we servicing the ART, or serving the (POLITICAL) concept?

The idea of the Internet seems to be the idea of losing territory, transposing borders, and being constantly in a fluid state.  Is "fluidity" a synonym for the Internet?  No, different art projects and activists groups tell an opposing story.  In the Internet, from the point of the activists or ludicrous hackers, all is about (re-)location and territorialisation; all is about activism from the real space in the virtual domain, and therefore connected with questions of censorship, naming, accessibility, visibility. The hijacking of sites that were not accessible to everybody, and are therefore illegally copied and mirrored by activists put forward exactly the idea of re-location; the same can be stated about the main concept of the Zapatista movement, which became famous because of the Internet and its www activism.

The Internet, which is marked by the ideology of being a pure communication tool, without restrictions, is therefore deeply marked with questions, such as: who can communicate, and what kind of information, data, etc., is possible to freely distribute through the www today?
One of the basic thesis is that the existence of the coined and artificial world of server-space allows for the re-examination of some old issues of human and social real existence.  Issues such as who is permitted to redefine the confines of the space, and what are the strategies of actions within new media and technologies are crucial. It is important to emphasize the constructed character of the discourse of serverspace, as the space paradigm of the server
seems to be never grounded in space, but is always ex-(space), or non-(space).

A non-space can be understood here and now, not as a form of u-topic space, but above all, as a conceptual matrix that forces server-activists to locate it, to give to it the character of a vector. Server-space is a vector! Anything that transmits a disease-producing organism is named a vector. Vectors are carriers.  Mass, speed and acceleration are typical vector dimensions that are characterized by orientation, path and sum. In server-space, space gains the absolute sum of intensity. The intensity is a process of (re)location of the server and its art and politics.
What becomes apparent here is that the relation of the subject, with her/his body, history, geography, space, etc., in front of the computer console, takes on a kind of paradoxical communication which is not direct, but a communication with the excrescence behind
her/him, mediated by the third gaze: that of the computer-machine.

What is at stake here is the temporal loss of the subject's symbolic identity: s/he is forced to perceive that s/he or it is not what s/he thought s/he / it to be. This somebody-something else that can be perceived as body, geographical and organizational politics, and may
also be attached to the rhetoric and logistics of server-space. BEWARE: We can be taken else-where and no-where! The concept of the repoliticization of the server-space, and
especially of the Internet and of the real and the virtual space that I am proposing here, is not grounded in the simple game of identity politics - it is rather a militant response to this constant process of fragmentation, particularization and fluidity. What is lost through this process is the gesture of real politicization. The concept is rooted in a much deeper universal demand for politics, strategy and tactics of action, theorization, emancipation and uselessness.

EVERYTHING IS TERRITORY AND ALL IS PART OF THE SERVER'S ARCHIVE

It is not really a question of going to some distant geopolitical spaces, such as Africa, or Eastern Europe, or even Asia, but it is rather about the capitalization of ideas and concepts becoming
territory itself, also because of the server. Theory is such territory, and the Internet and the WWW (World Wide Web) have the same position. They are huge new territories, expanded, evolved on numerous servers, allowing Capital, the most internal vehicle of Capitalism at its purest, an even faster triplication. Theory, art and culture are huge archives, and it is the same with our bodies. That everything is becoming, is transformed to be a territory for the expansion of Capital is something that is fundamental to capitalism.

In this way the idea of territory itself changes - radically.  The year 2000 displays a completely different idea of what we think about territory. Territory as a pure geopolitical space is gone.
Territory is a much broader concept. Our intellectual concepts, our books, our works and, last but not least, all our archives are the new territories. Giving, contributing concepts and ideas for the server, in the name of the server is, therefore, a gesture of expanding and broadening the concept of territory itself.

IN THE NAME OF THE SERVER

HACKER'S ART SERVERS: all about Impression, Repression, Suppression
The archive can offer the possibility of repetition, reproduction, of relocation. And again and again, with Derrida, of course, I can say that the archive is always connected with what is destined for destruction. Impression, repression, suppression (Derrida) - this is the destiny of the archive, and this is the way of the hacker's understanding of art and actions in the end for the server. Hijacking in the Internet "in the name of the server" is all about impression, repression, suppression.

ACTIVIST'S ART SERVERS: Hypermnemic and Hypomnemic Missing frames, raw materials ready for a garbage can, errors in taking visual notes, blurred sex from the underground. To store, to accumulate, to capitalize, that is the basic aim of the archive and as well of the activist's understanding of the server. This is why the archive is, at the same time, according to Derrida, hypermnemic (too much) and hypomnemic (too little). And this is why the activists' servers constantly lack data and/or provide too many facts for our actions. The same goes for the archive: it lacks data and offers too many facts for our actions.  In the server-archive, something is always missing. Living in the server-archive, with the server-archive, is not only a question of
visibility; it is a cerebral act. The total visibility of the server-archive is not enough; the connections between the materials are important, the intersections and levels, and moreover, its blind spots. As always, I will be malicious and will ask what the art and media world is trying to hide by displaying a fictitious total visibility of some archives?

TO BE VISIBLE IS NOT ENOUGH ANY MORE: @2000 IT IS A QUESTION OF
(DISCURSIVE) RE-ARTICULATION

The second crucial change that has an effect on EAST and WEST, SOUTH and NORTH is that in the eighties, it was enough to be VISIBLE; [at] @2000 it is a question of re-articulation, and moreover, re-location, much more than pure visibility. The following questions or synthetic
moments are crucial for the server-art agents: "Which spaces do they cross when they communicate? What do they call themselves? Are they subjects, cyborgs, monsters, scum, nomads or simply hackers?" (Yvonne Volkart)

I called them Western European Scum and Eastern European Monsters! We need to reconsider the public space, the new media space and the actors, agents and subjects in it in their processes of transformation. We have to ask ourselves what space, which actors, whose agents and what subjects? What would be the history of theory, media practice and a new political activism without the Internet and its servers, e-mail, multimedia and CD-ROM's? Our future will be something completely different in terms of action and information - although not all of us
have the possibility to use these technologies!

--Marina Grzinic 2000

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