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recombinant territoriesa r t a n d t e c n o l o g y | d e b a t e s a n d l a b o r a t o r i e s

camila duprat mart ins | daniela castro e s ilva | ren ata mot ta (orgs.)


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Organization: Camila Duprat Martins, Daniela Castro e Silva e Renata Motta

Editorial Coordination: Camila Duprat Martins

Editorial Production: Aline Gambin

Texts:Andr Lemos, Camila Duprat Martins, Daniela Castro e Silva, lida Tessler, Gisele

Ribeiro, Helga Stein, Lucas Bambozzi, Luiz Duva, Marcus Bastos, Raquel GarbelottiImages: Adenor Godim, Anderson da Silva, Bruno Zorzal, Diego Scarparo, Ding Musa,

Fabiano Andrade, Fabrcio Noronha, Gilbertinho, Itamar Aguiar, Janaina Sterir, Ja-

nete Kriger, Lucas Mariano, Penha Schirmer, Thamile Vidiz, Thommy Lacerda Sossai.

We thank all artists, who have kindly provided the images of their work.

Revision: Alice Raskin

Translation into English: Camila Barreiros

Version: Gavin Adams

Graphic Design Project: Paula Astiz DesignDesign: ngela Mendes

ISBN 978-85-60824-01-4

CTP, Printing and Finishing: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de So Paulo

Print Run: 1,500 copies (Portuguese) | 1,000 copies (English)

So Paulo, Brazil, 2007

sergio motta institute

President: Luiz Carlos Mendona de Barros

Vice-President (Deliberative Council): Wilma Motta

General Secretary: Maria Jos Tenrio de Paiva

Trav. Dorothy Poli Zioni, 7 | So Paulo-SP | 05016-070 | Brazil

Telephone (5511) 3873-0279 | [email protected]

sergio motta art and technology prize

Institutional Relations: Wilma Motta

General Coordination: Renata Motta

Curator: Vitria Daniela Bousso

Project Coordination: Camila Duprat Martins

Production Coordination: Luciana Dacar

Production: Aline Gambin

Administration: Sadao Kitagawa

www.premiosergiomotta.org.br


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contents

recombinant territories :art and technology 05Camila Duprat Martins

debates 19Recombinant Territories: Deviating Borders 21Daniela Castro e Silva

Remix as Polyphony and Collective Agency 27Marcus Bastos

salvador | Cyberculture as Recombinant Territory 35Andr Lemos

vitria | Appropriation and Politics in the Territory of Art 49Gisele Ribeiro

vitria | Soundscape Rainy Day in Vitria 43 61Raquel Garbelotti

goinia | Behaviours or On The Forms of Identity Building in

Network Environment65

Helga Stein

porto alegre | The Wireless Telephone and OtherMicrolessons of Things 69

lida Tessler

project laboratories 83Account-Hiatus 85

Lucas BambozziProject Laboratories 87Luiz Duva

Testemonies 89-110


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recombinant territories :art and technology

Camila Duprat Martins

Recombinant Territories is part of Sergio Motta Art and TechnologyAwards strategy of diffusion and reflection on the impact of technol-ogy on contemporaneity.

From 2006 onwards, with the establishment of a biennial calendar,beyond the award fomentation actions, others activities, centred on thediffusion and reflection were formulated to the further deepening ofthe issues that permeate contemporary artistic production in the field

of new technologies. The project was conceived by the general coor-dinator of Sergio Motta Award, Renata Motta, and by the artist and re-searcher in new medias, Daniela Castro e Silva.

The impact of the digital era, of globalization, of information in realtime directly affecting daily life implies the formulation of new theo-ries and new concepts of being in the world. In the same way, artisticproduction in the interface with new technologies cannot go withoutthe debate that permeates the very ethics of new languages.

Establishing networks between creators from different regions,activating connections and widening the democratization to accessand participation in the countrys contemporary cultural production,Recombinant Territories seeks to neutralise possible hierarchies thatcharacterise the knowledge production in Brazil. At the same timeit seeks as well to strengthen the exercise of citizenship by means ofdigital inclusion.

The displacement of Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award

into new territories, in the North (Bahia), Central (Gois), South-east


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(Espirto Santo) and South (Rio Grande do Sul) regions, previouslystarted off with exhibitions in Goinia and Porto Alegre, stressesfurther its aims of contributing to the discussion, the diffusion andincentive to contemporary artistic production in the interface withnew technologies.

the project

The detailing of the project and of the subsequent phases for its execu-tion have relied, on the constitution of a team, composed both by mem-bers of the Award and by artists who had received prizes in previouseditions. This team has outlined the general working structure of the

itinerant workshops and has prospected interlocutors in each of theplaces, for the carrying out of partnerships with cultural and universityinstitutions.

Once a local interlocutor was defined as well as an adequateplace to receive the project, the proposal was discussed afresh so asto meet the local specificity and expectations. The outcome was thedefinition of a similar structure in each of the cities contemplatingtheoretical discussions, on Saturdays open to the general public, and

Laboratories for the presentation and discussion of pre-selected work,on Sundays. The opening of all four debates, focused on a general ex-planation of the whole project was carried by myself, as institutionalcoordinator of the project, together with the representative partnerof each institution. The Debates counted with the permanent partici-pation of Daniela Castro e Silva and Marcus Bastos. Luiz Duva andLucas Bambozzi coordinated the Laboratories. Local theoreticiansand artists were also incorporated. This format has secured in each of

the four places a particular physiognomy, with its own nuances andvaried approaches. Finally, the partnerships were completed in theproduction of the event coordinated by Aline Gambin and producersindicated in each city.

The projects main issue the extended territorial space, in a widesense, grounded on the changes brought about by the massive diffusionof new technological media has featured particular characteristicsin each discussion. From this central guideline, aspects have emerged,

where the territories were, indeed recombined, grounded on several


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recombinant territories | 7

propositions: as geographic, political, temporal, reappropriated andtransformed space, remixed.

The projects original concept the change in the territorial notionwith the advent of new communication media, was introduced by theproject co-idealizer, Daniela Castro e Silva. Marcus Bastos, Ph.D. in Com-munications and Semiotics, professor at So Paulo Catholic University(PUC-SP) and author of experimental projects in graphic, audio-visualand digital media, highlighted in his presentation the discussion aboutmixing and new combinations, through the presentation of some art-work examples.

The coordination of the laboratories was in charge of Lucas Bam-

bozzi and Luiz Duva. Lucas is an artist and has developed, from the endof the 1980s, studies and artistic work around the expressiveness of au-dio-visual language with emphasis on electronic media and its conflu-ences. Duva is an experimental creator in the field of video art, havingdeveloped personal narratives in video, as well as a series of experimentswith video installations and immersive audio-visual projects and thedevelopment of specific content and environments for new media.

new territoriesSalvador | Bahia was the first displacement. The event was carried outin partnership with the Goethe-Institut Salvador ICBA, on the 12thand 13th of August 2006. Andr Lemos, professor at the Bahia FederalUniversity (UFBA) Communications Faculty and director of the Ad-vanced Studies Cyber research and Cyberculture Research Interna-tional Centre, was the guest debater.

The second trip, on the 25th and 26th of August, was South-eastward

bound in Vitria. In partnership with the Esprito Santo Federal Universi-ty Arts Centre (UFES), through its director, Professor Jos Cirillo, Recom-binant Territories brought together for the Saturday discussion RaquelGarbelotti and Gisele Ribeiro, visual artists and both professors at UFES.

The third displacement was realized on the 12th and 13th of Septem-ber to Central Brazil, in Goinias intense heat, in partnership with theVisual Arts Faculty of Gois Federal University (FAV-UFG) and Profes-sor Carlos Sena, director of the FAV-UFG Art Gallery as an interlocutor.

The invited debater was Helga Stein, professor at Anhembi-Morumbi


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University and new media artist. Helga was one of the winners of the 3rdSergio Motta Art and Technology Award Scholarship.

Finally, on the 23rd and 24th of September, the last trip, into the cool-er Porto Alegre temperatures, in partnership with Santander Culturaland the Rio Grande do Sul Federal University (UFGRS). Debating withDaniela Castro and Marcus Bastos, was artist lida Tessler, professor andresearcher at the Visual Arts Department of UFGRS. And also coordina-tor of Torreo, a production and research space in contemporary art inPorto Alegre.

Recombinant Territories could establish an important exchangebetween theoreticians and artists. By the retaking discussions and en-

abling consequent reflections on the impact of the new communica-tion media on the universe of daily life as well as in personal and artis-tic relationships, it has unveiled new possibilities for the understandingand the formulation of poetics. For the team of the Sergio Motta Artand Technology Award Renata Motta, Camila Duprat, Daniela Castro,Aline Gambin and guests Marcus Bastos, Luiz Duva and Lucas Bambozzi

the project has underlined the need for constant interlocution, of ap-proximation and of the establishment of partnerships within the scope

of its line of action.The present publication seeks to constitute a report of this expe-rience, which was characterised by exchange, dynamism and by theopening up of these new territories. This is why one does not stickto the simple transcription of the debates and to the list of partici-pants. Instead of a documental edition, within a standard languageand style, organized in chronological form, we sought a format thatwould mirror, in part, the unfolding of events. The lecturers texts,

edited from the papers sent by the authors or through edited tran-scriptions, express, precisely, the variations in discourse and in thevery profile of the lecturers of a more artistic or academic bias. Theaim was of including, further, directly or indirectly, all of the partici-pants for their indispensable contribution to the development of theproposal.

To the partners, to the interlocutors, to the local producers, to theartists and participants in the project in each of these cities, our sincere

thanks for the warm welcomes, for the exchanges and the energy spent.


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New territories will be visited in 2008. After all, Brazil is a territoryof continental dimensions! And it will be precisely in this exchange andwidening of frontiers that the Sergio Motta Art and Technology Awardwill be reinforcing its aims of contributing to contemporary artisticproduction in the interface with new technological media.

recombinant territories

Organization: Sergio Motta Institute | Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award

Idealization: Daniela Castro e Silva and Renata Motta

Project Coordinator: Camila Duprat Martins

Debates Coordinators: Daniela Castro e Silva and Marcus Bastos

Projects Laboratory Coordinators: Lucas Bambozzi and Luiz DuvaProduction Coordination: Aline Gambin

Production Team: ngela Santos, Mnica Koester (Goethe-Institut Salvador) and

Wellington Pereira (Arts Center, Vitria)

Partners: Goethe-Institut Salvador ICBA | Elizabeth Lataro

Arts Center Esprito Santo Federal University (UFES) | Jos Cyrillo

Visual Arts College Gois Federal University (UFG) | Luis Edegar Costa

Santander Cultural | Liliana Magalhes

Sponsors: Odebrecht, Prince Claus Fund and TBE


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debates

The advent of new communication technologies and of connectivity cul-

ture is characterised by a territory crisis both the political territory and

the territory of subjectivity. Grounded on the texts by Daniela Castro e

Silva, Marcus Bastos and by the guest participants in each one of the ci-

ties, the debates touched on diverse issues, involving the complexity and

the reconfigurations of connectivity culture, the artistic production in itsinterfaces with new technologies and the very individual in the face of

these new territories.

salvador | Goethe-Institut Salvador ICBA | Andr Lemos

vitria | Arts Center Esprito Santo Federal University (UFES) | Gisele Ribeiro

and Raquel Garbelotti

goinia | Visual Arts College Gois Federal University (UFG) | Helga Stein

porto alegre | Santander Cultural | lida Tessler


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recombinant territories :deviating borders

Daniela Castro e Silva

The conception of the event that has yielded the title Recombinant Ter-ritories: art and technology was triggered by the realisation that the ad-vent of new communication technologies and the culture of connec-tivity signals, above all, a territory crisis. On one hand we live today inthe political territory of nations that, the more globalising, the moredelimited and fixed seem to be their borders; where the flux of productsand people is ever more effectively controlled and watched by means

of biometric technologies and the RFID (radio frequency identificationtechnology). This territory is extremely (and violently) defended withthe use of war technologies whence video and network technologiesemerged; it is the territory of urban spaces where the corporate lawsdwell and present the development of technology as a progressive idealof a better and more connected life.

On the other hand, there is the territory of subjectivity, the placein which those fixed borders are de-territorialized. This place transits

between diminished distances, between monitored privacies, in imme-diatist times, between sensations and the creation of new possibilitiesfor artistic representation and identitary manifestations, by means ofthe unexpected use of technological instruments and languages. Thatis, a shared territory where parallel and transversal spaces co-exist in theexperience of movements in constant deviation (detour).

For French philosopher Bernard Stiegler1, contained within every1. BARNET, Belinda. Infomobility and Technics: Some Travel Notes. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=492 (accessed in 23/01/2007).


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technology is the mnemonic function, that of the construction andmapping of subjective memory. Today, pervasive technologies and theubiquity of digital networks create a tension both from the phenom-enological point of view as we perceive every day lifes events andfrom the technical point of view the technological artefacts that medi-ate and/or serve as a surface of inscription for these events.

From the uprooting of the individual as a sympto(so)matic result ofwhat we call digital culture to the embracing of new technological arte-facts in the cultural specificity of each place, what we witness emergingis a reproducibility of places. This territorial dilation is the result ofthe intervention and constant reinvention of the subjective territory in

the daily use of such apparatuses, and, in the political territory, of theinsistence on the vital need of these apparatuses so as to justify the mar-ket rush and military thrusts. Brian Holmes signals that the globalisedeconomy is the brain of contemporary capitalism and the optical fibres

the cyberspace highways its nervous system.2Thus, these kinds of territory are not in opposite ends. They inter-

cept each other in a relationship of interdependence. At the same timethat new digital and connectivity technologies watch and control our

individualities, as they establish networks of the most diverse types,they stimulate new forms of collective agency. At the same time thatthe new technologies market and culture engender new hierarchies,new centres and margins are configured.

Deleuze has described the diagram of power, based on Foucaultsstudies on the microphysics of power as highly unstable and fluid, con-stituted of points of emergence and creativity. That is, this diagram isrevealed both by means of the solid lines with which it is outlined as

well as the holes the intervention points that permeate each and everypower structure that engender it.About this accidented territory, Drew Hemmet recalls that the ba-

sis of the Panoptic was that we did not know if we were being watchedor not, and thus we would act as if we were always being watched. Withthe network technologies, there is a new group of variables that govern

2. HOLMES, Brian. Flowmaps, The Imaginaries of Global Integration. https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhflowmaps(accessed in 23/01/2007).


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this scenario, but completely new issues emerge, such as the fact thatnow we leave traces of information behind us. 3

Here one notices the detour: a spatial and temporal detour that com-plicates the individuals position in contemporaneity. Before, the feelingwas one of internalisation of perpetual watch and disciplinary controlwithin a continuous present. Now, the fact that we leave informationtraces behind us for an indeterminate amount of time (and that will beanalysed to configure new consumers profiles) creates a tension charac-terised more as a future of the past, or the realisation of the present asan anterior future, where space-time relations are compressed withinan imminent and contingent present.

This new map of the individuals relationships with the usabilityof new technologies, above all the mobile technologies, intertwines thecyberspace with the physical space, and the placing of the individualbecomes a plane of technological inscription: the subject, in transit ornot, becomes a series of simultaneous location zones.

What takes place on this plane of crossing is that from the possibili-ties of new de-territorialisation that this new cyber/spatial map propiti-ates, new re-territorialisation mechanisms are potentialised. Returning

to Hemment, he adds that because of these parallel fields and intersec-tions, the world of surveillance and control becomes in many ways verydifficult to be declared as a neutral space or one without engagement.Inversely (and for the same reason), there emerges an ambiguity, whichart is equipped to face.4

The so-called technological art also figures as an inscription surfacefor our lives events, as it reflects the ambiguities that characterize thecontext where it is produced. However, due to the complex and laby-

rinthine relationships that involve the architecture of techno scienceand communication and the transnational economys legal structure,it is no longer sufficient to declare the conscious use of these technolo-gies as a subversive manifestation against its genealogy and regulatoryimplications. In a reality where information becomes algorithms and

3. HEMMENT, Drew. Traces of a Moving Trajectory. http://www.artemov.net/page/revista01_p3.php(accessed in 23/01/2007).4. Ibid.


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software are turned into bits, a horizon is created beyond that of theappropriation and mere juxtaposition of old techniques for the adventof the next one. What happens is that an intertwining of techniquescreates not the new, or the post, but the recombined, remixed, sampled,or still, the hybrid.5

This hybrid is different from the hybridisation that featured thepost-modern discourse, rendered by means of the idea of the pasticheor of the euphemistic multiculturalism. This hybrid refers to a funda-mental change in the conduction of technique and its diverse use, andin many cases the recreation (remix) of new technologies. As examplesof inverted practices of the technology, we have the smart mobs, where

WAPs (Wireless Applications Protocol) mobile phones work as a mech-anism of control and surveillance in the part of activist/artist over thosewho watch and control with the endorsement of the government; andthe enormous proliferation and creation of softwares among VJ artistspersonalise the artistic activity with corporate technologies.

Keeping in mind that there is a wide relationship between knowl-edge and power, the remixed media become metamedia6 created/ma-nipulated/produced/distributed both by the information industry and

the individual. At the least, this hybrid territory implies a reconfigura-tion of art as social interstice, an opening point for endless discussions;a point that fits in more or less harmoniously in the dominant system,but that suggests possibilities for exchange other than those in forcewithin this very system. This opening point is by no means a fixed point;in fact, it figures itself as an attentive detour.

The intention of the Recombinant Territories is precisely to engen-der spaces for the possibilities of other exchanges. Academics and art-

ists from four Brazilian capital cities were invited to debate the possiblerecombinations within this unstable territory of digital culture in itspolitical, subjective and artistic spheres.

Andr Lemos, in Salvador Bahia, has spoken on the three fun-damental principles for the understanding of the impacts of what he

5. MANOVICH, Lev. Deep Remixability (2006). http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/manovichessay (accessed in 23/01/2007).6. BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. From Relational Aesthetics (1998). www.creativityandcognition.com/blogs/legart/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/bourriaud.pdf (accessed in 04/02/2007).


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calls the digital informational territory. The broadcast of informationcoupled with the principle of generalised connection and the diffusionof the personal information reconfigure the notions of access and con-trol as given in mass culture. In the post-mass culture, the mobile accessto and production of information in the intertwining realms of physicaland cyberspace have imprinted a polysemic notion to the definition ofterritory, which begins to unfold in its juridical, economic, cultural andartistic spheres.

In the city of Vitria Esprito Santo, Raquel Garbelotti presentedher sound installation project Rainy Day in Vitria 43(2006) and dis-cussed the possible displacements of the individual within the physi-

cal space of the gallery and the suggested soundscape, by means of themobile use of the Discman apparatus. In the same city, Gisele Ribeirosketched out a critical panorama of the history of art from the advent ofthe analogical up to the digital technologies, considering the relation-ships between art and language as technology not the use of technol-ogies in these areas, but technology as art. In this reflection, Ribeiropoints at some of the frailties of the discourse that permeates new me-dia art under the sign of appropriation and remix and its inherent

risks of favouring the instrumentalisation of culture.In the context of the society of spectacle, as formulated by GuyDebord, Helga Stein, in Goinia Gois, spoke about her own artisticpractice regarding the unfolding and representations of ambiguousidentities that emerge in the inscription of the physical world throughtechnological devices. A series of digitally manipulated self-portraitscirculate in the proliferation of sites that serve as platform for the orga-nization of social networks, such as Orkut, Flickr, Multiply, among oth-

ers. As a counterpoint to Debord, Helga understands that the networkculture is not a spectacle mediated by images, but it is transformed intoa spectacle when it becomes social relations mediated by people.7

Wireless Telephone and Other Microlessons of Things, the text-poembylida Tessler, who presented her work in Porto Alegre Rio Grande doSul, offered a re-signification of the artists time in face of deviations

7. Giselle Beiguelman, in a text about her work published in Bravo! magazine, Sociedade do Espe-tculo 2.0, nr. 109, September 2006.


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remix as polyphony andcollective agency

Marcus Bastos

Contemporary culture is impregnated by practices in which the produc-tion of meaning results from the combination of fragments. The best-known procedure has emerged in music. It is the remix, a process thathas become popular with the emergence of the sampler (an instrumentthat stores sounds and music sequences in its memory, so as to reproduceand alter them1). The remix can be understood as a form analogous tothe electro acoustic music practices, but it emerges in the Pop universe

a few decades later. The remission is important, for the 20th

Century ex-perimental music anticipates the collapse of discrete syntaxes. Electroacoustic compositions abandon traditional sound syntax, as they exploresound qualities instead of the articulation between notes (in which, bythe way, it dialogues with concrete music). The binary code consolidatesthe process, as it converts all languages into numeric sequences, whichallows most of its characteristics to be easily modified.

In part, the use of fragments of sounds and music to create new com-

positions is similar to appropriation and collage. Suffice to remember thebetter-known works of Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art. There are, in ad-dition, likenesses with parody, pastiche and quotation, to stick to a fewof the many types of intertextuality typical of literature. It is especiallyrelevant to the subject of this article the similitude with processes such asthe cut up. Still, it is not possible to indistinctly bring all of these process-

1. For further information, see the definition for sampler in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampler_%28musical_instrument%29.


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es close together. They are similar from the point of view of the reuse ofmaterials and of the flux of ideas, but different in the form they take place.The remix is the most contemporary form of polyphony and, because it isa process possible only in digital electronic media, it is more fluid.

The most evident difference between the processes described aboveis that, in the case of music, it is easy to alter qualities such as pitch, vol-ume and duration of the sound fragments.

In the visual arts, in their turn, such procedures are more restricted.It is more difficult to operate changes in the quality of analogical im-ages. And, in the case of writing, the diverse forms of intertextuality, inwhich the process of recuperating a previous text takes place chiefly on

the logic plane, are more common than the physical practices such asthe cut up. Therefore, the issue is deployed in a particular manner inthe case of writing. One concludes that the proximity of these practiceswith the remix needs to be examined with due care, for there are aspectsthat go beyond the immediate similitude between them.2

Another aspect of the issue is the wide understanding of the remix,possible due to the fact that the computer itself is, in part, a multimediasampler. In this context, the connection between the remix and cultural

practices become even more insufficient. The analogy does not describein a satisfactory manner the workings of the digital language, since itdoes not take into consideration characteristics such as programmabil-ity, its connectivity and its growing ubiquity. Therefore, one needs toinvestigate what is beyond the remix, so as to understand the limits ofthe comprehension that the digital language is a language that alwaysengenders from previously given fragments.3 This is not to belittle re-

2. The proximity between the practices of collage and appropriation in the visual arts and remix is the ob-ject of Sara Diamonds articles (Quintessence. Art History Skake & Bake, http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?is=8&file=1&tlang=0 and DJ Spooky (Loops of Perception. Sampling, Memory, and theSemantic Web, http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?is=8&file=3&tlang=0), among others.3. This hypothesis, which needs to be better examined, in view of the relatively consensual under-standing that language is a polyphonic mesh in which the signs always echo other signs, and soon. There are evident differences in the form as this happens within the scope of digital culture,in view of the new reticularity and fluidity. But it is not clear yet how the range of possibilities inwhich digital culture offers will be absorbed. The most solid example up to now is the online musicdistribution. The emergence of equipment such as Ipod, the iTunes virtual shop, communities suchas MySpace and of streaming sites such as Last.Fm ease the initial impact of archive sharing prac-tices by means of softwares such as Napster, e-Mule, KaZaA, SoulSeeker e Limewire.


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mix practices, even less not recognise its importance in digital culture.Instead, one should recognise that digital language is not restricted tothe aspect related to the traffic of media that it stimulates.

A useful metaphor to discuss the difference between the remix andpractices that explore the fluidity of digital language is the fruit saladand the shake. To make a fruit salad one needs to cut and mix the piecesof (for instance) apple, banana and papaya. The fruit are re-contextu-alised, but it is still possible to recognise the flavour of each one andeven eat each piece separately. In order to make a shake, fruit pieces arealso used, which are also mixed together. The difference is that, mixedto pulp in the food processor, it not possible to distinguish each one

anymore. The binary code converts all languages into one. Neverthe-less, it is not always the case that it is deployed so as to jointly articulateits components.

To stick to the universe discussed in this article, suffice to observehow the most common forms of remix are like the fruit salad, a mixtureof parts that mix by means of physical grouping (but keeping their qual-ities intact, considering that displacement has been sufficient to modifyits meaning). One example is Rebirth of a Nation, by DJ Spooky. This is a

remix of the film Birth of a Nation (1915), by D.W. Griffith. The new art-work denounces the racist gaze (indeed, the original film has been usedas a recruiting instrument for the Ku Klux Klan), using images from thefilm itself as material to build its audiovisual sequences.

Less common are instances in which the liquidity of digital lan-

DJ

Spooky,inaperformanceof

Rebir-

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ofaNationatChicagoConte

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raryArtMuseum,inNovember2004.

http://www.djspooky.com/photos/djspooky_rebirth

.html.


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guage involves a mixture of qualities that fuse into a whole in whichthe parts become inseparable. One such example is CodeUp, by GiselleBeiguelman. The piece also starts off from a film (Antonionis Blow-Up). But, instead of using its sequences as material, the piece trans-lates the procedures of enlarging photographs, which is one of theleading plots within the story of a photographer that conducts a kindof mediatised investigation of a possible crime. In the first implemen-tation of the piece, the audience was invited to insert images in thethree screens opposite, with the help of a bluetooth mobile phone.Then, it was possible to navigate through the three-dimensionalcompositions generated by the processing the programme used to

develop the//**CodeUp), infinitely enlarging and revolving the float-ing compositions.4Several recent artworks that emerge within the scope of an increas-

ingly wide network culture, dialogue with this universe that oscillatesbetween remixability5and programmability, usually built from an aes-thetics of placing fragments in relation. Leaving behind for a while thedimension of the traffic between the languages discussed above, it is pos-sible to relate works such as the essay, understood as a practice that ranges

from literature to photography and to cinema. The likeness with WalterBenjamins The Arcades Project, or Here and There, by Jean-Luc Godard tostick to two expressive representatives of the practice (deliberate or casu-al) of approximating parts not necessarily belonging to the same whole,as a way of finding crevices between ossified thoughts it is not complete,but serves as a starting point to think the aspects of digital language thatare not linked to the dimension of remixability.

Besides the relative proximity with the essay already pointed

out by Arlindo Machado in Essays in Hypermedia6 , it is possible to

4. For a deeper analysis of Giselle Beiguelmans work, see the article Uma arte do no-espectculoe de vestgios dispersos por telas pequenas, mdias e grandes, in the on-line magazine Arte.Mov,http://www.artemov.net/page/revista03_p1.php.5. The term remixability was used by Lev Manovich, in the text Remixability and Modularity, http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc, in which the author describes remixability as aprocedure typical of the 20th century culture, which is generalised in digital culture.6. ARLINDO, Machado. Ensaios em Hipermdia. In: O Quarto Iconoclasmo. Rio de Janeiro: RiosAmbiciosos, 2001.


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detect, especially in some applicatives that explore the unfoldings ofaudiovisual in digital media, a return to the report (in part due to theportability of the equipment, which renders them media of easy trans-port). A good such example is the interactive documentary 13ter Stock,by Florian Talhofer and Kolja Mensing, which records the daily life ofa degraded Berlin neighbourhood, with the aim of revealing how thestereotypes attributed to the its dwellers are groundless7. In this sense,the applicative in question are experiences close to that of the narratordescribed by Walter Benjamin in his essay about Nikolai Leskov, as theyrecord a kind of experience that passes on from person to person, of-ten recuperating practices that do not circulate through the medium, in

which they place themselves in the margins of the supposed informa-tion society that is in a process of consolidation.

In13terStockthe

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In digital applicatives, it is the user who establishes the relation-ships between the parts. And this procedure involves unusual links, of-ten unpredictable. Specialists denominate this performance of the useron the applicatives as agency after all, more important than the higheror lower performance of the machines, that so worries the IT industry. Tooffer the audience the possibility of acting on a field of possibilities pre-

7. Florian, Talhofer and Kolja Mensing. 13ter Stock. Interactive documentary [DVD].


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32 | debates

viously established is the common merit of the best works that emergesin the increasingly consolidated universe of digital media. According toJanet Murray, agency is the satisfactory power of significantly actingand seeing the result of our decisions and choices. She sustains thatthere is an expectation for this process of action, when we double-clickon an archive and it opens up before our eyes or when we insert figuresin a spreadsheet and we see the total sum being readjusted8. Agencystimulates the performative dimension, which integrates the user tothe experience of meaning production.

In A narrativa: metfora e liberdade, Olgria Mattos explains that theexperience, memory and narration belong, to Benjamin, to the same

semantic field (...) for these do not constitute concurrent discourses buttwo manners of living in community, two diverse planes of life in a giv-en culture. Narration demands a listener, information aims a market.Many of these characteristics of narration appear today in artwork thatexplores the uses of video in digital interfaces, as Valetes em Slow Motion,by Kiko Goifman, Somewhere Between Here and There, by Alicia Felber-baum and the already mentioned 13ter Stock, by Talhofer and Mensing.Curiously, there is a etymological ground for this proximity, as Olgria

Mattos herself indicates, in footnote 3 of her work: From Greek, histori,this term remits to histr: judge or witness. Its Greek root is id, whichcorresponds to Latin vid-, both indicating the act of seeing. The rela-tionship is questionable, or is at least partial. In digital media, the actof transmission is more important that the act of seeing (and, after all,than the acts of sound making, writing, etc.).

Digital language depends on this agency in order to make sense.This is why Sean Cubbits observation is very precise that in its digital

format, spreadsheets, databanks and geographic information systemsare central components of new media. For Cubbit, this importance isunderlined by what they mean to the business computation. Besides, theconvergence of these three systems in popular packages, such as MicrosoftOfficeand Apple Works, indicates the degree of even greater integration thatthe one claimed by sound, image and text in communication media in net-

8. MURRAY, Janet. Agency. In: Hamlet on the Hollodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, p. 126.


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debates | 33

work.9 In New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative, Martien Rieser and An-drea Zapp state that we live the beginning of an era of narrative chaos, inwhich traditional frames are being superseded by experimental and radicalattempts of redrawing the art of story telling in emergent technologies.10

Riesers and Zapps diagnosis is correct, when we take into consid-eration pieces such as The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, by Bill Seaman,Ambient Machines, by Marc Lafia or Flora Petrinsularis, by Jean-Louis Bois-sier, to stick to but a few examples. In the best websites and CD-ROMs,there is a range of meaning not only on the plane of fruition, as is usualin literature, in cinema and the visual arts, among others. It takes place,also, on the plane of functioning, shared with the user by means of in-

terfaces in which the producer builds the context in which he or sheis going to act. These are processes in which the polyphony typical ofthe remix emerges, revealing to the public the workings of digital lan-guage. It is a powerful process, as it can be explored for the constructionof tools for the stimulus to critical exercise and the plurality of views.Its importance is proportional and inverse to the unfoldings of the net-work cultures, increasingly bridled to corporate protocols.

9. CUBBIT, Sean, Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines. Why Narrative is Marginal to Mul-timedia and Networked Communication, and Why Marginality is More Vital than Universality.In: RIESER, Martin; ZAPP, Andrea. New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative. London: British FilmInstitute, 2002.10. RIESER, Martin; ZAPP, Andrea. An Age of Narrative Chaos?. In: New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

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cyberculture asrecombinant territory

Andr Lemos

avant prop os

For a better understanding of the way in which the recombination ofthe diverse elements at play in contemporary culture operate whichsome call the information society, post-industrial society, cybercultureor knowledge society I shall establish three basic principles, or threelaws for this information society, specially with regards to the culturalpractices that I will bring in again at the end of this conference. The

three guideline principles allow, generally, the understanding of theemergence of the diverse social, communicational and productive prac-tices that create multiple and unusual recombinations in contemporaryculture. Cyberculture is, so to speak, a recombinant territory. We shallexplore the cyberculture remix, the information societys principlesand the notion of territory in order to reach, at the end, the hypothesisof the creation of informational territories, today in full expansion withthe wireless technologies and with communication. These will foment

new recombinant practices in contemporary cities.

principles of recombinant cyberculture

Lets be direct: to recombine, copy, appropriate or mix the most diverseelements is no novelty in the field of culture. All of culture is, aboveall, hybrid; the formation of habits, uses and socio-technical-semioticprocesses always take place grounded on the embracing of differencesand on dealing with other cultures. The recombination of diverse ele-

ments be them productive, religious or artistic, is always a constitutive


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36 | debates | salvador

trace in all cultural formation. On the other hand, all closure attemptsin themselves result in impoverishment, homogeneity and death. Cul-ture needs, in order to keep vibrant, strong and dynamic, to accept thefact that it is, in some way, permeable to other cultural forms. This pro-cess is on the march from the most primitive cultures to the most con-temporary culture, cyberculture. Thus, it is not recombination in itselfthe great novelty, but the manner, the speed and the global reach of thismovement.

The new communication and information technologies are vectorsof social aggregation, of communicational bonds and of informationalrecombinations, involving the most diverse information embodied in

various formats: text, still or animated images, and sounds. The post-massive network cultures, in its expansion with the sites, blogs, rela-tionship networks such as Orkut, the exchange of photographs, videosand music in systems such as Flickr, YouTube and P2P network, showsvery well this movement of cultural recombination within an electron-ic territory in planetary growth.

In order to understand this recombinatory process we should try tofind the principles that guide such movements. We could say, as a hy-

pothesis, that there are three laws that are on the basis of cyberculturespresent day cultural process: the liberation of the broadcasting pole, theprinciple of network connection and consequent socio-cultural recon-figuration grounded on new productive and recombinatory practices.

As stated above, contemporary culture is a recombinant territoryand the novelty is not so much recombination in itself, but its reach.Recombination, which has dominated Western culture from at least thesecond half of the 20th Century, gains planetary aspects from the begin-

ning of the 21st Century.Cyberculture installs a peerless mediatic structure (a post-massivestructure, as we shall see below) in the history of humanity, where, forthe first time, any individual can produce and publish information inreal time, under diverse formats and modulations, can add and collabo-rate in network with others, reconfiguring (massive) cultural industry.The examples are numerous, planetary, and in geometric growth: blogs,podasts, peer to peer systems, free softwares, social softwares, electronic

art It is a growing exchange and sharing processes of diverse cultural


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salvador | debates | 37

elements grounded on the possibilities opened by electronic-digitaltechnologies and by contemporary telematic networks.

broadcast and produce!

The first principle is liberation of the broadcasting pole. This principle is atthe basis of everything, and it is different from the times of massive cul-ture or the way in which information and communication was accessedthen. This is the first characteristic of this post-massive digital culture.What we see today are countless social phenomena in which the oldreceptor comes to produce and broadcast his or her own information,in a free, multimode (many mediatic formats) and planetary way, which

symptom is sometimes confused with the excess of information. TheInternets socio-communicational practices are here to show that peo-ple are producing videos, photographs, music, writing blogs, creatingforums and communities, developing the software and the tools of theWeb 2.0, exchanging music etc.

These practices reflect the potency welled-up by the massive com-munication media, which have always controlled the broadcasting pole.Publishing houses, television companies, newspapers and magazines,

music and film industries, control the broadcast in the much-studiedmass communication culture. In the massive cultural industry, thereis an information broadcaster that directs its production to a mass ofreceptors, who are transformed, with some luck, into public. This doesnot mean that there were no possibilities to access and production ofunderground information: fanzines, pirate radio and television etc.,have always existed, but in a very limited scale range. The evolutionof electronic-digital technology creates an effervescence, an excess of

information by the possibility that each one is also a content producerand broadcaster. Exception made, of course, to the totalitarian/authori-tarian regimes, of countries who seek to control and filter the Net, tolimit the production, circulation and consumption of information, as isthe case in China.

In the post-massive culture that constitutes the present day cyber-culture, to produce, circulate and access increasingly more informationbecomes a daily, trivial, banal action. To give more concrete examples,

we can say that blogs and podcasts have become the new manners of


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text, image and sound broadcasting, where each user makes up his orher own vehicle. Blogs are today a world phenomenon of free soundbroadcasting on diverse formats (personal, journalistic, entrepreneur-ial, academic, community.). Podcasts are, in their turn, free forms ofsound broadcasting where each user is able to create his or her ownprogramme and disseminate it the Net. The forms of collaborative elec-tronic art show diverse collective, participative and recombinatory ac-tions, where people and groups cooperate through the telematic path-way. The same happens with the development of free softwares, todaya powerful system that is also part of this liberation of broadcasting.Here the codes are altered and made available for further modification

by means of developers scattered around the globe.We could say the same of the information production practice (lib-eration of broadcasting) from mobile devices. Much of the informationand images that we received at the time of the tsunamis, or the Madridand London bombings were disseminated by people by means of cam-eras embedded in mobile telephones. In the same way, the late urbanguerrillas that took place in Paris were not only documented, but also,in some way, driven by the testimonial use of mobile telephony, such

as the case of an individual who has filmed, from his homes window,through a mobile phone, the police beating up young people in the out-skirts. This video, disseminated in the Net, in blogs, has increased therevolt. Thus, with the liberation of broadcasting we have witnesses whocan produce and broadcast in a planetary scale the most diverse typesof information. These examples are proof of the potency of liberation ofbroadcasting in present day recombinant cyberculture. This leads us tothe second principle: connection.

produce, broadcast and. . . connect!

It is not enough to broadcast without connecting, sharing. One mustbroadcast in network, to enter connection with the others, produce syn-ergies, exchange bits of information, circulate, distribute. This secondprinciple, connection in telematic networks, seems to be a fundamen-tal characteristic of cyberculture. The Internet, from its beginnings, hasconfigured itself as a place of connection and sharing. Thus the first dis-

cussion lists were born, the email exchanges, the ftp, the chats, muds


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and this from the first BBSs in the 1970s. We must not forget the TCP-IP protocol, produced to integrate the operational systems (a technicallanguage for the exchange of data between computers) and put it to theservice of humanity in a freely way. Since then, the production formsand informational consumption has grown through free production,through circulation and collaborative processes. A new political econ-omy seems to take shape: production is the liberation of broadcasting,whereas consumption is connection, circulation, distribution. Cyber-cultural recombination takes place by information modulation and bythe circulation in telematic networks.

Diverse social phenomena that we have mentioned, such as blogs,

podcasts, peer-to-peer networks (networks for the exchange of filessuch as for instance music, which makes the phonographic industrieshair stand on end, with their questioning of copyright), the Web 2.0and its social softwares such as Orkut, Flickr or YouTube, free softwaredevelopers networks, mobile phone users and their text messages,their photos and videos etc., fulfill well this connection function, thiscommunity and of social bond functions by means of electronic-digi-tal technologies. This is indeed a characteristic feature of cyberculture:

the use of networks and information and communication technolo-gies for the creation of social, local, community and even planetarybonds. The principle of broadcasting will be thus linked to the prin-ciple of information exchange generalized connection. And this willbe rich in consequences.

produce, broadcast, connec t and. . .transf orm!

It is not just a matter of broadcasting, as we have seen, but also one of

connecting. Every time there is free broadcasting (freedom of voices, ofopinion, of ideas) and connection (between people and groups) thereis always change, movement, lines of flight. It is not by chance that re-pression of the free word and of free connection is always a prerogativeused by totalitarian regimes, be it the oppression of a small group, of acity or of a country. Thus, to broadcast and to connect produces a thirdprinciple in vogue today in contemporary culture: the reconfiguration(of practices and institutions) of mass cultural industry and of the in-

dustrial societys sociability networks. Several analysts today show that


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there is a crisis in the mass industrys economic and productive model,though this does not necessarily mean its annihilation.

Regarding the reconfigurations of mass culture, one of the greatissues that presently emerge is that of authorship and the protectionof work for reproduction, use and copy. Some systems are emerging asan option for the creation of the legal mechanisms of recombination,known as open licenses, or copyleft. A success example is the CreativeCommons a use license that allows the modification, copy and distri-bution of work, with diverse modulation for the protection of the au-thors rights. It is, indeed, a crisis of cultural, legal and economic systemsdue to the reconfiguration of classic mass cultural industry.

There is, therefore, reconfiguration and remediation. Newspapersmaking use of blogs (a reconfiguration regarding both blogs and news-papers) and of podcasts. Podcasts emulate radio programmes and Radiosedit their broadcasts in podcasts. Television makes reference to the In-ternet and the Internet remits to television. American authors Bolterand Grusin call this reconfiguration of remediation. Remediations in-deed in the sphere of media, and reconfigurations of social practices andinstitutions (organizations, laws, regulations). We can say that, pres-

ently, we are immersed in a double audiovisual landscape, where twowide communicational systems, sometimes antagonist, coexist, offer-ing a greater info-communicational plurality: the massive model of 19thand 20th Centuries mass culture industry and the post-massive model,characterised by the digital media, telematic networks and recombina-tory processes of informational content emerging from the 1970s.

Post-massive digital culture does not mean the end of mass cultureindustry. In its turn, mass industry will not absorb and massify post-

massive digital culture. Cyberculture is this configuration where mas-sive and post-massive processes alternate, in the network or outside it.Will radio die out with the diffusion of podasts? Will the Web finish offtelevision? There is no evidence for that. What there is in recombinantcyberculture is an info-communicational reconfiguration. Not the endof mass culture, but its transformation, embracing bi-directional, openprocesses where the liberation of broadcasting prevails under diverseformats and modulations, as well as a generalised and planetary con-

nection by means of telematic networks.


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These are the three basic principles for an understanding of the re-combinations that are at play in contemporary culture: broadcasting,connection, reconfiguration. Recombinations that originate from theliberation of broadcasting, from the connection principle. It is a cultur-al, artistic, imaginary, subjective, productive, economic, juridical recon-figuration on the go. The understanding of these principles will allowfor the understanding of what we shall call the informational digitalterritory and the social cultural impacts of present day mobile commu-nication and information technologies.

recombinant informational territories

The idea of globalization, a strong feature of contemporary culture, re-mits to the sensation of loss of territory, of the erasing of borders. Glo-balization remits us to several border problems (cultural, political, geo-graphic, subjective...). What is the limit of an individual and his or hersubjectivity today? What is contemporary subjectivity with regards tomodern subjectivity but its collapse? What is the border between thephysical body in the midst of so many technological prosthesis? Whatis the limit of the economy of a Nation-State? Up to what point does our

government, for instance, is autonomous to freely decide over the fate ofour economy? Would it not depend on supranational organizations suchas the IMF, GATT and the World Bank, which lay down the guidelines, ina certain way, of our national economy? Isnt Europe a continent and alsoa community, a zone that brings together countries that have to adapt tothe European Constitution, often waiving their own sovereignty?

This cultural, political de-territorialisation is also economic. Moneycirculates around world cities seeking greater returns, indifferent to ter-

ritorial frontiers. In the cultural sphere, frontiers have also been erasedby what is called multiculturalism. Today, by means of the Internet, itis possible to listen to a Russian radio station, read a Korean newspa-per and visit a site in Finland. We do that daily, with great ease. We canchat to someone in Sri Lanka via Messenger unaware that we are livinga generalised process of de-territorialisation. We participate in severalevents, we have access to several cultures and much information thatare not necessarily part of our territory. Sociologist Anthony Giddens

calls this phenomenon of unhinging.


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Mass media certainly create de-territorialising processes with worldinformation, live. However, television could only be watched locally,the same taking place with radio and newspapers that always refer toour local spaces, to our territory, to our city. With digital culture of post-massive media, and specially with the mobile technologies, we will ag-gravate our de-territorialisation processes. But, at the same time, we alsocreate new territorialisations.

We have developed in the Cybercity Research Group (GPC)1over thelast few years, work geared towards the interface between the electronicspace and the urban millieu, research on the relationship between newtechnologies and the cities. Recently, the work has been directed to the

analysis of mobile technologies, specially the processes that result fromtechnologies such as mobile phone networks, Bluetooth networks,RFID labels, and Wi-Fi connection areas. These technologies create de-territorialising processes and also territorialising ones from the flux ofinformation exchanges in digital informational territories.

Mobile phones are today a world phenomenon and Brazil has re-cently reached the 100 million mark. It is a piece of equipment in whichdiverse functions converge, a kind of tele-all-in-one, able to connect

voice, data, still and animated images, videos, music, text messages Net-work technology via Bluetooth chips allows for the creation of small-scale networks between diverse pieces of equipment. These technologiesare already available in some mobile phones, computers, photographiccameras, among other devices. The radio frequency labels, RFID, are la-bels that are today replacing the old bar codes, broadcasting informationabout the product/object within a small perimeter. The Internet connec-tion wireless forms by means of equipment such as laptops, palmtops

and smart phones is known as the Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) protocol,wireless Internet access networks of a range up to 100 m (Wi-Max, whichis a prolongation of the Wi-Fi technology of a 50 km range).

Such technologies, or locative media, are reconfiguring social andcommunicational practices in contemporary cities grounded on actions

1. GPC is part of Cyberresearch: International Study and Research Centre in Cyberculture, of theContemporary Culture and Communication Post-Graduation Programme at UFBas Communica-tions Faculty. Cf. http://www.facom.ufba.br/ciberpesquisa/gpc.


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that are developed in what we shall here call informational territories.The interface between the electronic space and the urban space createsthe informational digital territories. These are formed in the broadcastingand reception of digital information in hybrid, informational and physi-cal spaces, by means of the mobile devices mentioned above. The infor-mational territories are characterised differently with regards to mass me-dia information space, such as television, radio and the printed media.

The issue of territory, as defined by some geographers, bears directrelationship with control. The notion of territory as control comes fromethology, showing how the behaviour of animals establishes effectivezones of control. All the notion of territory bears a relationship to ac-

cess and control within borders. These words, accessand control, are ex-tremely important to the understanding of contemporary technologi-cal society. The access to the informational universe is given by meansof passwords. And there is today, in the Web, a greater control over whatwe broadcast and receive, different from the practice of consumption ofinformation in the massive culture.

In mass culture the possibility of control rests only on received in-formation: the choice of newspapers, of television broadcast companies,

of radio stations etc. But does not rest on broadcast. If there is no totalcontrol over the informative flux by the user, there is no informationalterritory. Today, with post-massive media, this freedom exists, as wehave seen in the examples of the principles of broadcasting, connectionand reconfiguration. We can state that in present day cyberculture, wecan hold greater informational control, since we enjoy more choices ofwhat we consume as information, and we can also broadcast our owninformation. The control locus of this informative flux is the informa-

tional territory, where the user controls what goes in and out of his or herinformational border. These informational territories are configured bymeans of mobile telephone, mobile access to wi-fi networks, bluetoothand RFID labels. It is an invisible territory, constituted in the intersec-tion of the physical and electronic spaces. We propose here a polysemicidea of territory, going beyond the physical space, the juridical frontierof the states, where notions such as subjective, cultural and artistic ter-ritory fits in... The informational territory is a heterotopy (Foucault) of

control and access to digital information.


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The Internet and contemporary digital technologies, from the fixedInternet to present-day mobile technologies, allow, effectively, the expe-rience of de-territorializing processes, but, at the same time, of informa-tional control, that is, the creation of territories. We can see de-territori-alising processes in total immobility (the act of thinking is, for Deleuze,de-territorialization par excellence), as well as territorialising processesin mobility, such as the mapping of territories by GPS or mobile phones.An individual can be, for instance, still in his or her own house, but de-territorialized, as he or she experience events that are not necessarilypart of his or her culture (via television or today via the Internet). Onthe other hand, an executive who travels with a laptop is in mobility,

but, at the same time, he is controlled, and thus territorialized by theinformational monitoring exerted by the entrepreneurial structure.These two notions are very complex and we have no time to developthem here.2

Effectively, mass media (newspapers, television, radio) create de-territorializing processes. Cyberspace also creates de-territorialisingprocesses as it allows multicultural consumption. A Chinese activist,for instance, can obtain information and disseminate it, trying to escape

the police and political control of his country, creating a line of flight, ade-territorialisation act via the Internet. The same can be said of the PCC(a Brazilian criminal organization)s informational coordination in therecent attacks to the city and the State of So Paulo. Territorialized bythe judicial power within a prison system, the PCC leaders are able to,with the use of mobile technologies, mobilise and hit diverse points notonly of the capital but also of other cities in the state. We are witnesseshere to de-territorializing processes by means of telematic, computers

and, mainly, mobile telephones.Authors describe cyberspace as an unlimited space constituted byplanetary informational networks, allowing unrestrained circulationoutside. This space would be pure, without fiction, ethereal and virtual.In cyberspace, the granulated and resistant space is erased, being re-

2. Cf. LEMOS, Andr. Ciberespao e Tecnologias Mveis: Processos de Territorializao e Desterri-torializao na Cibercultura and LEMOS, Andr. Mdia Locativa e Territrios Informacionais. http://www.facom.ufba.br/ciberpesquisa/lemos/artigos.html.


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placed by a fluid space, made for circulation. However, although it effec-tively allows this type of circulation, cyberspace is also a striated space,institutionalised, controlled, made up by access protocols grounded oninformational passwords, organized by technological patterns that aremanaged by the ICANN, an institution of the American Trade Depart-ment. Cyberspace is not only a smooth territory; it is also a territory ofcontrol and of surveillance, that is, a place of territorialisation.

Thus, for instance, my sites, blogs, podacsts, my community, my re-lationship network, are forms of territorialisation in global cyberspace. Icreate my informational control zones amidst a planetary flux of de-ter-ritorialisng possibilities, A process does not exist without the other. In-

formational technology such as the mobile telephone, palms of laptopsare devices through which we exert informational control. This placeof control constitutes my digital informational territory, constituted bythe telematic space, by means of access passwords and physical spacesconnection . However, though territorialized, I can effectively carry outflight movements, of de-territorialisation. Which processes are at staketoday with the informational territory?

Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has created a polarity between

what he callsflux space, which is cyberspace, and the place space streets,monuments, squares, a citys physical places. Castells brings our atten-tion to the synergy of these two space modalities. The flux space is notethereal, but is anchored in the place spaces instead. It is the interlinkedcomputers, satellite networks, optical fibre cables, servers etc., creatinga concrete infrastructure for the constitution of the telematic networks.In this fusion of place space and flux space we witness the constitutionof informational territories: beyond the physical territory, of symbolic,

corporals and cultural controls, we witness the emergence of a new di-mension of a territory that we can call of information control territory,the informational digital territory.

These informational territories are constituted, in their turn, in-creasingly, not only by presence points (access via cables, attachedto a specific place space) where it is possible to access information onthe move in the interface between the cities electronic space and thephysical space. Some American and European cities offer free Wi-Fi ac-

cess zones in the city centres and strategic points. In this place, in the


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intersection of the informational flux with the physical space, where itis possible to control broadcast and reception, widening the spectrumof communication and of social information, is a digital territory. Butwhat is the relationship between these informational territories and therecombinant cyberculture?

Massive media television, newspapers, radio, printed media areinformative media used in the private sphere, devoid of any broadcast-ing possibility. These products of massive media are, erroneously, calledmass communication media. They effectively play a communicationalrole, but only in their informative role. Thus, television, radio, maga-zines and newspapers are mass informative media that do not allow for

the establishment of deeper and wider communicative processes, withtwo-way communicational formats and the effective exchange betweenconsciences. In fact, they are information media that allow no interac-tion, except, indirectly, by the interpretation and other symbolic pro-cesses of reception and formation of public opinion.

Post-massive culture establishes two-way processes, increasing theeffective possibilities of communicative phenomena. The differenceregarding massive media is that in massive media territory is, most of

times, a private space (or semi-private) and the consumption of infor-mation takes place in an unidirectional way, only as reception, andwithout mobility. Today, digital territory creates a zone within otherterritories where it is possible to access, produce and distribute informa-tion, in an autonomous manner, establishing collaborative networksand more complex communicative processes. Thus, any individual cantake pictures or shoot a video by mobile phone and rapidly send it to hisor her community at YouTube, Orkut or blog. This flux management is

a prioriuncontrollable by the physical territory where the connectiontakes place.For instance, from this theatre, I can send photos, films or text mes-

sages so that those who control this physical, legal, symbolic territoryknow or even could do anything to prevent it (unless they block accessto the Web stopping the creation of my informational territory). Herewe have an imbrication between the diverse territories that composethis experience of mine: the physical territory (ICBA, Salvador, Brazil...),

my corporeal and subjective territory, the economic, juridical, cultural


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of content, connecting, in collective and collaborative processes, pro-ducing collective intelligences and changing life conditions, reconfig-uring culture and social life. This must not be very difficult since we un-derstand recombination and remixing, as we are results of such process.We were born inside mix, in syncretism and cultural pluralism. So itmakes sense to make use of this inborn and corporeal knowledge to beable to actively participate in cyberculture and create new recombinantterritories.


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appropriation and polit icsin the territory of art

Gisele Ribeiro

In view of the events title, Recombinant Territories, one needs to ex-plain, before anything else, from whence, from which territory, spaceor field, this discourse will be voiced over. We shall take the territoryof art as place, considering not obvious that, as we speak of digital me-dia, we will necessarily be speaking of art. That is, it is of interest hereto think in which way art (including art as technology) can help us tothink problems related to digital media.

This is the reason why the need of this explicitation. And, perhaps asa provocation, instead of a de-territorialisation, this text may propose are-territorialisation1. Which doesnt mean that this territory is taken asa refuge for specific issues, such as defended by part of Modern Art.

What we will examine here, then, is the relationship between art andtechnology, from the point of view of art as technology. It is not so muchthe use of technology that is the starting point for this discussion, but artbeing technology. As Jean-Luc Nancy would say, art is technology, but a

technology without an end. But, after all, technology has no end.2It has been known for a long time that art has ceased to be defined andthought of grounded on the use of materials and techniques.3 Instead, it

1. DELEUZE, Gilles and GUATTARI, Flix. Mil plats, capitalismo e esquizofrenia, vol. 1. Rio de Ja-neiro: 34, 1995.2. NANCY, Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc Nancy e Chantal Pontbrian, Uma Entrevista. Arte&Ensaio maga-zine. Rio de Janeiro, nr. 8, yearly, November, 2001, p. 150.3. Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth, Rosalind Krauss, Ronaldo Brito, Thierry De Duve, etc.


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50 | debates | vitria

is defined as a field of interest where anything can be posed as art. Thismeans that from the contemporary point of view there is no materialityor medium that, on featuring more or less advanced technology (or moreor less traditional) has a prioriits guaranteed access to this field.

But is also indicates that this access does not require a gift or specialmanufacture, genius or any special funding.

According to Belgian critic and theoretician Thierry De Duve inKant after Duchamp:

In face of a readymade, there is no technical difference whatsoever betweenmaking and enjoying art. Once this difference is erased, the artist has waived anytechnical privilege regarding the layman. The artists profession has been emptied

of all itsmtier, and, if access to it is not limited by any barrier be it institutional,social or financial one deduces that anyone can be an artist if so desired. 4The procedure attributed to Marcel Duchamp, derived from his art-

work gathered under the title ready-mades, widens thus the limits ofart through the logic of appropriation. We shall take, then, appropria-tion as the interest focus, since it is the ground for one of the currentdiscussions about the potency of digital media as artistic media.

Of course, as it can be realised in the preceding phrases, one does

not believe that there are means or media more or less potent for thearticulation of artistic problems, and we intend to establish, indeed, acounterpoint to this idea, from the discussion around appropriation.We sustain, then, that regarding the political aspect, appropriation doesnot guarantee a critical point of view or even a reflexive one. We shalltry to explicit, then, the subtle differences between a critical appropria-tion and the one we consider acritical, indicating also the ethical-politi-cal consequences of these differences.

If we consider the logic of appropriation in a wide sense, despitethe fact that it has become evident and extremely sharp in the Ducham-pian readymade procedure, it is possible to take it (from the very ready-mades) as something that also belongs to the logic of photography andof the phonograph, both technical reproduction devices invented in the

4. DE DUVE, Thierry.Kant Depois de Duchamp.In: FERREIRA, Glria, VENNCIO FILHO, Paulo.(ed.).Arte & Ensaios magazine, nr 5. Rio de Janeiro: Master dissertation in History of Art/Escola deBelas Artes, UFRJ, 1998, p. 128.


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If in Duchamps piece Fountain(Fontaine, 1917) the appropriation ofthe porcelain urinal bears the signature R. Mutt, 1917, added to the in-dustrial object, stressing the importance of the signature as inseparablepart of the meaning attributed to a work of art, at the same time as itquestions the idea of authorship as expression of an individual subject,is it not the case that we should step back and ask about what takesplace with photographic appropriations including the beginnings ofits experiences?

In the case of William Henry Fox Talbots photographs, in which heuses lace in contact with the paper, could we not ask, what is the differ-ence, in the end, between the lacework proper and the lacework taken

by him?8

If, on the one hand, we take that photograph as document, whichwould indicate its transparent feature, should we not investigatesomething about this lace? Who has designed the appropriated image?Some unknown lacewoman? Some will say that it does not matter whoor how the lace was made: the photograph is what matters.

So, on the other hand, if we take the photograph as an object, byits opaque character, should we not have to investigate the context in

which the photograph is being received, its distribution, circulation andconventions system? The here and now of its reception and in whichway this photograph places a critical focus on this system?

If we take the problem of the documentary today, we find two po-litical perspectives: some can state that Talbot has appropriated thelacewomans work, exploiting her and taking personal advantage, aswell as financial, since it masks the relationship with previous work inthe defence of photographys potentiality as specific medium; other can

argue that Talbot has given the lace visibility, valuing it and inserting itinto the system of valuable objects (a more Benjaminian position).

8. This kind of photography is interesting because it is so flat, separating positive and negativeareas, thus generating a relationship between the structure of the lacework and that of the pho-tograph. According to Douglas Crimp, the lacework and the photograph share the same problemof the positive and negative; and according to Geoffrey Batchen, it also shares the problem of thedigital: bit: 1/0. Cf. CRIMP, Douglas. Introduo: As Fotografias no Final do Modernismo. In: CRIMP,Douglas; LAWLER, Louise. Sobre as Runas do Museu. So Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005.


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From the point of ethical-political point of view, another importantconsequence of the Duchampian and photographic procedures is also ofinterest. According to Walter Benjamin, the techniques of reproductionallow a lowering (or even destruction) of the work of arts aura, groundedon a redistribution and horizontalisation of the power that involves thefigures of the artist/author and of the spectator/reader, which would bal-ance out these two forces. Benjamins project as well as Duchamps andhis Creative Act, Lygia Clarks and the notion of the participator, H-lio Oiticica and his semantic participation, as well as John Cage withthe absence of a distinction between the composer, player and audience

invest in the de-hierarchisation of these roles, causing a change in the

politics of art, where the spectator (or the mass) would gain power equalto those of the artist (or ruling class, who detains the production means).The appropriation as reproduction would thus serve to a diminu-

tion of the cult value of what is put forward by the artist, causing theartwork to be close to its receptor both in human terms and spatially

However, the difference that we consider problematic here, betweenthe Benjamins propositions and of the other artists quoted (Duchamp,Lygia Clark, Hlio Oiticica and John Cage), it is Benjamin who places

the responsibility chiefly on the mechanised hands of the technicalreproductions. Thus, he seems to consider that the mere use of thesereproduction techniques (for him: photography, cinema, the phono-graph, radio; and after him: television, video, digital media etc.) wouldalready provoke this political emancipation of the spectator/reader. Al-though Benjamins contradictions in his classic text The Work of Art inthe Age of its Mechanical Reproduction9 have already been pointed outby many, few have done so grounded on the confrontation of artistic

strategies that deal with the politics of art.Although he defends in a progressive way the pertinence of thepolitical potency of cinema regarding the traditional forms such as the-atre and painting, in the distinction that he makes between capitalisticand soviet cinemas of the time, it is possible to notice that it is not the

9. BENJAMIN, Walter. A Obra de Arte na poca de suas Tcnicas de Reproduo. In: BENJAMIN,Walter; ADORNO, T. W; VELHO, G. (orgs.). Sociologia da Arte IV. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1969.


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cinema or even the notion of appropriation that it bears that is goingto necessarily transfer this power to the spectator.

For Benjamin, the reproduction techniques allow not only a wideraccess to images and representation by the masses, in the role of the ob-server, but also that this access would also generate the insertion of thismass into these representations, as the observed. We see then that theappropriation includes one more element in the power game between art-ist, spectator and institution, which is the appropriated subject/object,the observed, which for Benjamin will divide its role with the spectator.

Of course, then, the articulation between these characters and theirroles becomes more complex, rendering appropriation as agency be-

tween the artist/author/producer, spectator/reader/audience, appropriatedsubject/object, institution/contextand means/instrument. The political work-ings of this agency cannot logically depend only on the instrument oftechnical reproduction. (Again, many new discussions about documen-tary cinema today seem to deal precisely with this issue).

In a few further points in this text, Benjamin gives us clues of whathappens with his own discourse in the course of the 20th Century lead-ing up to this day. When, in Chapter XI he compares the painter to the

filmmaker, relating the first with the healer, or magician, and the secondto the surgeon, he indicates that the painter relates in a magic mannerto reality, whereas the cinematographist penetrates in depth in thevery structure of the given. According to him, the image of the realfurnished by cinema is infinitely more significant [] it only succeedsbecause it uses the instruments geared to penetrate, in the most inten-sive way, the heart of reality. We notice that magic, previously depositedin the space between the painter and reality, rests today exactly on what

is interposed between the cinematographist and reality, the medium/instrument. That is, the aura that Benjamin so much would liked tosee destroyed concentrates today in a more emphatic way in what heconsidered capable of destroying it, the techniques of reproduction, orbetter said, in the rhetoric about them (according to Phillipe Dubois10,always the new technologies). It is not a coincidence that Hollywood

10. DUBOIS, Philippe. Cinema, Vdeo, Godard. So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004.


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cinema, for instance, will only waive the star system to replace it withspecial effects.

In this way, instead of an equalisation aiming the balance betweenartist/author/producer, spectator/reader/audience, appropriated subject/object,institution/context and means/medium we have a rhetoric that transfersthe power of the artist, not to the spectator, but to the means/medium,leaving the spectator/reader/audienceand also the appropriated subject/ob-

ject(which can be the one and same) in similar conditions to the previ-ous system (of the Fine Arts). In this case, the discourse legitimatesthe digital media as instruments that carry out the creative act, evenkeeping a large part of the laurels, keeping as passive extras, the specta-

tor/reader/audience, appropriated subject/objectand now also the artist/au-thor/producer.But attention is needed, for this apparent passivity of the artist can

obscure an even bigger return of power, for isnt he, who tries to maskhis power, more authoritarian than he who renders visible, and ques-tionable, his position within the system of forces?

The celebrative appropriations, which consider appropriation onits own, a priori, politically democratizing, often incur in the danger of

once again invoking magic and aura, but now taking advantage of a po-litical discourse that would place them as responsible for the breakingof authorship, thus masking the power system in which they are im-mersed.

It is interesting and even ironic that, more than the political will tore-dimension the artists and the work of arts power, there is also, in thesights of most of contemporary strategies, a need for the equalisation ofthe powers of the art institutions system. However, the valuing of the in-

termediate means/instrument by the practices that speak through thenew media seems simply to replace the institution as a great distribu-tor of art with technology as distributor, as is the case in the passageof economic power from the hands of the record companies to the CDand DVD burners. That is, once again, there seems to be a masking ofthe power that the products and companies linked to digital technolo-gies gain in the process. The acritical appropriation, valuing simply thismeans/instrument, operates through the logic of the distributor, which

in the capitalistic system is the one that gains in the end. (Cultural cen-


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tres linked to banks and telephony enterprises that invest heavily inthis art niche know very well what they do).

Thus, we can agree with American critic Douglas Crimp, when he states:the appropriation strategy is no longer a certificate of a specific attitude in

the face of contemporary culture conditions. [] Appropriation, pastiche, quota-tion these methods extend into virtually all aspects of our culture, ranging

from the most cynically calculated products of our fashion and entertainmentindustries to the more committed critical activities of artist [] If all aspects ofculture make use of this new process, then the very process cannot be an indica-tor of a specific reflection about our culture.11

In this sense, Sherrie Levines work in which, an exact or similar

reproduction of Walker Evans photographs are presented, for example,is very incisive as it deals with appropriation and its relationship withphotography to focus, in a critical way, on the very procedure. After all,what records all, also records itself. In the same way, what appropriatesall appropriates also itself. Photography turns against itself. It is the verysubject/appropriatedobject now.

The problem of the relationship between appropriation and rep-resentation (or exploitation and representativity) returns again here,

but in a very ironic way, since it does so in a double manner: the doubtrests not only on Sherries procedure, but also on Walker Evans photo-graphs. The artist does not construct for herself an immaculate place,neither alienated nor passive, but a place of visibility that allows forquestionings:

As she unashamedly steals existing images, Levine does not make anyconcessions to the conventional notions of artistic creativity. She makes use ofimages, but not to constitute a style of her own. Her appropriations only hold

functional value for the specific historical discourses in which they are inserted.[] Levines appropriation reflects the very appropriation strategy

ant territories- art and techonology

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