88 Culture

By D.C. Elliott

Since the birth of primitive social networking technologies in the mid-’90s, the rise of modern equivalents such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace have permanently reconfigured the fundamental DNA of human communication. They have moved beyond the simple technological augmentation of existing communication paradigms, and now communication itself is technological.

For many users, especially those who don’t remember the world pre-Internet, organic forms of communication are firmly obsolete. They demand instantaneous, online communications suites that are easily configurable, and are able to capture their personalities, in the pursuit of living at least part of their lives in the digital world. There is a cost, though - these new developments in human socialisation are eroding the very foundations of traditional interpersonal relationships, and corroding our ideas of who we are, and what it means to be represented as a living, breathing, and yes, organic human.

From the BBS (Bulletin Board System) culture of the early ‘90s, to the wild, exciting new frontier of the World Wide Web and the shift towards user-friendly networking applications, an overriding obsession of programmers, IT specialists and enthusiasts of so-called ‘geek’ culture has been the opening up of new possibilities in human communication. The humble BBS message board gave way to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which in turn gave way to Microsoft Messenger and other real-time chat protocols.

GeoCities and Angelfire were online communities that sought to connect likeminded individuals through user-created webpages dedicated to music, or their favourite films, or - most tellingly - simply themselves. GeoCities was the first widely embraced networking endeavour that allowed users to mount their lives online - biographies, photo galleries, poetry and ‘guest-books’ were de rigueur for these early adopters of the internet’s potential for self-reflection, pointing the way to the Facebook and Twitter revolutions of the late ‘00s. We were entering the machine, and our lives were never going to be the same again.

Over a decade has passed since those embryonic days, where the Internet seemed like simply another tool. In the intervening years, it has proved to be our most profoundly impacting technological development since the television. A generation of young people who have never known a pre-Internet world are irreversibly entwined in the virtual environments of communications technologies and gaming arenas. For these boys and girls, provided that they achieve a certain level of technical competence in the use of new technology, there are no restrictions on the possibilities of human interaction - traditional blocks in communication such as shyness, distance, class and place in the adolescent social hierarchy have been stripped away.

Even the linguistic barriers that hindered many early adopters of online communications tools - their restricted language abilities, and the yoke of inarticulate written communication - have been eroded through new developments in improvised, culturally constructed languages built from symbols and images, rather than pure text. Relationships are born online and they die online. Early romantic/sexual experiences have their genesis in chat-rooms and networking protocols. Lifelong friendships and alliances are forged in an avalanche of constantly evolving electronic dialects. These are, without a doubt, exciting times to be young.

There is, however, an important element that is often forgotten when discussing this new form of communication - we are still human, even in the face of such overwhelming technological innovation and the lure to integrate oneself in a sea of electronic apparatus. A strong instinct that stems from this innate humanity is the desire to socialize - to love and be loved. To reach out beyond ourselves and find a warm hand to take hold of.

PLZ TXT ME

The Internet promises a safe environment through which one may accomplish these goals. And - better yet - they can be accomplished without leaving the house. In a world that is perceived by many as increasingly dangerous, with socialisation itself threatened by rising violence in public arenas, the fragmentation of unifying identities between individuals and the dehumanizing effects of rampant hyper-capitalism, modern humanity is a solitary figure, unsure of where - or how - to reach out. The underlying promise of Facebook and Twitter is that they present people in easily digestible, observable sets of information in which common attributes and interests can be spotted, and contact is easy to initiate.

The Facebook revolution’s historical moment is occurring at precisely the point at which humanity is prepared to accept its integration with technology, allowing technology to function as an everyday vehicle for social experiences. With 200 million active users worldwide, Facebook has eclipsed the status of being a popular online communications tool and has instead become an international phenomenon. For many users, it isn’t simply a tool through which to manage their social lives - it is their social life.

Constantly updated with their thoughts, their whereabouts, photographs of their friends, their families, their pets, Facebook and Twitter are a hub of information directly concerned with the individual. It represents a key moment in man’s evolution as a technological animal, for Facebook is - primarily - a text and image based medium that is replacing organic, verbal communication, and is forcing the essential components of humanity to be redrawn in exactly those terms: text and images. In this new world of interpersonal relationships, the body - and the physical nature of being - has been obliterated and replaced with the cold, impersonal reality of words and pictures.

These events have led to a war. A war between the desire to seize control of these networking technologies and use them to rejuvenate the crumbling social possibilities of modern life - or, at the very least, to augment our social potential - and the very dehumanizing effect that being literally one voice in a million can have. It is difficult enough to stand out from the millions of people who exist as individuals in our cultural sphere on an organic level - when the focus is expanded to a macrosocial environment spanning the entire globe, the task becomes almost completely impossible.

Consider the fact that in addition to the sheer volume of Facebook/Twitter users competing for attention in the globalised social environment, the limitations of the medium restrict the individual’s potential for self-definition. Our humanity, and our uniqueness as individuals, are very difficult things to capture in text. The subtlety of language, movement, and voice are wiped out in representations of the self on Facebook, and instead, we are reduced to presenting a grab-bag of facts surrounding ourselves.

Our pets. Schools we attended. People that we know. In order to enter the ‘information era’ as people, existing on Facebook requires one to turn ones life into information. Unfortunately, the fundamental commonality of human experience means that it becomes extremely difficult to make your information particularly different from a million other users.

The response to decaying avenues of self-expression came in the largely unsurprising explosion of Twitter. Twitter is Facebook’s polar opposite, in which users are encouraged to write 140 character ‘tweets’ that describe the minutiae of their daily lives. Twitter allows people to utterly indulge in the business of self-representation, with any potential thought being fair game for a ‘tweet’.

It is an insular world, in which minutiae is glorified, recorded, photographed and celebrated. Lacking even the narrative structure of a diary, Twitter is an unfiltered stream of information - self-reflection in its purest form. In the postmodern era, selfhood is already considered by many to be fragmented and unstable - Twitter directly reflects this idea by presenting the dissonant randomness of consciousness in an observable format.

Ultimately though, Twitter’s success is symptomatic of a wider condition of social malaise that runs through the heart of contemporary society. Twitter is a weight that counterbalances the ultimately dehumanizing connective tissue of Facebook, but it doesn’t truly address the problem at hand. Each ‘tweet’ is a scream in an ocean of screams. Other than celebrities, who are noticed and cherished on the network, Twitter gives little relief from the menacing onslaught of dehumanizing social technologies that are so eagerly swallowing up our organic communicative functions.

Twitter may attempt to reconstruct our identities from the wreckage of Facebook’s deconstructive properties - but in focusing almost completely on the intimacy of our thought processes, we become just that - little more than a collection of random ideas, which can barely be assembled into a cogent whole. The structures and narratives that frame our lives disintegrate to give way to endless, disconnected bites of information. Much like Facebook. This information, however, is purely personal, while Facebook’s is universal. And it is impossible to construct an organic identity without a seamless fusion of the two.

Both Twitter and Facebook are attempts to inject organic humanity into the cold, artificial realm of networking technologies. In order to do so, our humanity - the elusive qualities that make us who we are - does not survive the conversion process from something living and organic to our digital counterparts. The potential, though, is too great for many people to resist - and so, an inner war has erupted between our desire to exploit the possibilities of communications technology, and the dehumanizing process one must go through in the construction of an online persona.

It is a war with casualties - a generation will grow up with their ideas of selfhood fractured and destabilized. Robbed of traditional, organic pathways of socialization, this is a generation built out of images and snatches of information, with both unification and personalisation slowly melting away into the sea of globalised, macrosocial interaction.

We have entered the machine. Who are we, now?

So, Montreal inspired on multiple levels…as previously discussed here. One such way was on the fashion tip. 88 photographer Jessica Lidstrom decided what better way to catalogue Montreal and Mutek’s fashion sense than through an expose on foot wear. Behold!

One of the most inspiring aspects of Mutek this year was the opening night performance by Wolfgang Voigt as Gas. The show was appropriately presented at the Monument-National. I left the show bubbling, excited, inspired and enthused. A great, great way to kick off the week. Here’s my reflection post event:

Gas:
Droning bass leading into staticy long synth progressions, throbing in and out.
My mind raced more and more as Gas’s audio/visual performance progressed through each stanza.
Incredible camera work, slow-mo collages with filters and layers - solid, transparent, kaledescopic and dreamy. The sensory overload and all encompassing sound hit the heart and then the mind. How do they do that? What are they doing? What are they using? All of this as Wolfgang sits in the corner, in the dark

Droning bass leading into long, staticy synth progressions.
Throbbing in and out, around the room accompanied by a colorful haze of slow-mo HD camera work.
Layers upon layers, utilizing filters - transparent/solid, kaledescopic and dreamy.
The senses are overloaded from all sides, hitting the heart and soul - then the mind.
How do they do that? What are they using?
All of this as Wolfgang sits in the corner, in the dark.

21st Century Beauty.

And sequential video:

Ohhh Montreal, how I love thee. Despite your grey clouds and impending rain, you’re still beautiful.
Stylish people, tricked out bikes, large middle class, independent shopping, waterside attractions, hiking, cafe culture, french, sex, creative culture, pedestrian streets, human scale architecture, graffiti and a certain/special je ne se quois.

How can you not like this city, at least in spring, summer and fall? Its architecture and street presence feels like the US’s Brooklyn, with a little less hustle, little less expensive and perhaps more of a focus on living a good life than “the life”. Must be the European, socialist influence on the city. The stylish people are supported by an array of cultural institutions that one seems to be constantly presented with. Black box theaters, theaters, art museums, galleries, clubs. From a lay persons perspective it certainly seems that the city supports the arts and creativity. After talking with a local documentary film producer and promoter of electronic music it seems that Montreal goes both ways.

On the one hand, the documentarian noted that there is a lot of creative talent (Editors, producers, camera people) that are excited to work on projects with you - and truly embrace the creative, bigger concept notion of the work than simply the hours that they will get out of it. On the other hand, for those interested in probing and interesting electronic music - despite the fact that Montreal is the home of Mutek (more on that later) - there aren’t any good, regular electronic dance music nights that go beyond and deeper than commercial fluff. That and the fact that electronic musicians can make much more money in Europe is the main reason that the likes of Mike Shannon, Deadbeat and a slew of other Canadian producers have crossed the pond.

Having said that, what brought me to Montreal was the 10 year anniversary of Mutek, one of the main inspirations behind 88’s FORWARD. Mutek bills itself as an “International Festival of digital creativity and electronic music”. The event takes place over 5 days and while focused in a particular region of the city, had tentacles that stretched throughout.
This was quite intentional according to founder and art director Alain Mongeau who in an interview noted that nearly 60% of Mutek’s attendees are from outside Montreal and that while on the one hand this is good, on the other hand Mutek needed to do a better job of presenting its cause more directly with the local population. In part, this is because so much of Mutek’s nearly $1 million budget is from three tiers of Government sources. To that end, Mutek presented not only indoor performances at the two roomed mega club Metropolis, the Monument-National, Place des arts, Coeur des sciences and SAT but outdoor performances and projection art available to the public throughout the city.

Mutek is a well put together festival that not only puts on a good show, but provides attendees with the opportunity to dig deeper into digital culture through a series of workshops and panel discussions. The intimacy of the event also allows attendees the opportunity to easily mingle with most of the minds behind the performances and presentations. There is a certain seriousness about the event that is refreshing and different from most other festivals which seem to be all about the party. That is not to say that the party aspect isn’t at Mutek or that it’s not important, more so to say that the chin stroker quotient is simply a bit higher. Furthermore, the programming is quite diverse and appealing to a broad segment of digital culturalists. For example, musically, Mutek pass holders could experience a set from one of the undisputed creators of Dubstep Mala at the Metropolis, as well as an ambient audio/visual performance by Gas in a sit down theater and a techno romp served up outside in a park graced by a Calder sculpture by Ricardo Villalobos and Zip.

Outside of the clubs, projection work was presented throughout the city by:
ANTIVJ ; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer - an artist based in Montreal who’s piece consisted of a couple that would start “Making Out” when a viewer approaches it. They’d continue to make out until the viewer leaves; Dominique T Skoltz work of intermingling bodies/people was on the side of a building near where we were staying in La Plateau (great neighborhood!) ; finally Amuse presented The Good Conspiracy which is much like the recent club phenomenon here in DC, except they projected on a building interlaced with windows and asked for the messages to be about hope, encouragement and inspiration.

Other public works of art/performance were also presented - point being - this was/is a full on, all encompassing festival with over 75 artists participating at appx. 10 different venues over 5 days. There didn’t seem to be a single programming mistake (everything was mainly on time), sound and presentation were pretty much on point everywhere (to the degree that backup equipment was provided and available for artists) and Mutek staff was consistently beyond present, helpful and courteous.

Sneak, Villalobos and Zip at Mutek

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch everything, but of what I did catch, artistic festival disappointments included: Jahcoozi (despite the lead singer’s best efforts) and The Mole (Was expecting a Live Set) ; highlights for me included a series of interviews with: Mala, Appleblim, Moderat, Deadbeat and Alain Mongeau ; Performances by: Gas, Atom, Mala, Mike Shannon, Ernesto Ferreyra, Villalobos and Zip, Stephen Beaupre and Akufen; Visuals - The lighting guy at Metropolis and projections by - GPG + Julien Vallee, Cinetik, Guy during the Cynosure showcase.

I highly recommend that everyone visit Mutek’s website: www.mutek.org and check out everything that they did and accomplished. Well done lads and ladies! Thank you! Here’s to another 10 years

- David Fogel

Moderat at Mutek

More Moderat

Mala at Mutek

Jahcoozi at Mutek

Mike Shannon at Mutek

ATOM installation at Mutek

ATOM installation at Mutek

ATOM installation at Mutek

Thomas Fehlman at Mutek

Trus'me at Mutek

The Mole at Mutek

Sneak, Villalobos and Zip at Mutek

Villalobos at Mutek

Villalobos at Mutek

Villalobos and Zip

Calder overseeing the Electronic Picnic

These are a bunch of images I captured while cruising the streets of Barcelona, a city with a long history with Graffiti and rich with street art.

It’s 1am and I’ve just returned back from eating Tapas post drinking cocktails and wine on the roof of a German/Italian couple’s flat in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona. Techno beats played in the background as a traditional Catalan band played on the steps of City hall as a crowd of hand holding men and women danced a particular if not peculiar dance. It was a lovely mish-mash of traditional culture steeped in a rich/proud heritage, juxtaposed by an international immigrant community enthralled by and enjoying the atmosphere of a truly beautiful city.

It’s not hard to immediately understand Barcelona’s allure. Incredible architecture, boutique shops and cafe culture. It’s sexy and romantic especially in early summer. It’s tough to top 85 degrees, sipping Rioja wine on a roof top, chatting about Appleblim and looking at a building from the 17th century. Life is undoubtedly good in Barcelona.

How is the ‘creative infrastructure’?
+ Cool bars/cafes (check)
+ Underground artists studios/production houses (check)
+ Stencil and graffitti art (check)
+ Pedestrian roads (check)

On top of that you see a bunch of dreaded people, mingling on the same streets as high fashionistas, you can buy beer cans on the street at 3am and despite the ever present fear of pick pockets the overall feel is quite safe.

Dig a little deeper…

How’s the rent? A little cheaper than what one would expect in DC. A beer at a club? $9. How many art galleries have I seen in 2 days, 0. Shocking since this is the “home” of Picasso, Dali and Gaudi. Bars with DJ booths - a couple - live bands, 0. Theaters, 2. I checked the newspaper and flyer racks and for a City of Barcelona’s size and the hometown of Sonar, I guess I expected a bit more.

I was able to speak with a spanish speaking German movie producer who hasn’t been able to find work in Barcelona over the past year in part b/c of the Catalan nature of the art and the fact that when a movie is made, they are apparently more prone to hiring Catalan based talent - than foreign. He’s headed back to Germany to start working on his feature film. Similarly, a friend working on his doctorate mentioned that it makes a lot more sense for a visual artist to base oneself in Madrid where the variety of art is broad and there is a strong base and history of purchasing. Finally, I was told that it has become increasingly difficult to throw events, due to neighborhood complaints and a stepped up campaign by law enforcement to “crack down”.

It’s apparent that people move to Barcelona, like other top cities in the world, to simply be there amidst its glory, not necessarily because they have a job opportunity or other immediate reason. You move to Barcelona b/c it’s Barcelona, and you make your life work around existing there. Barcelona provides options for multiple living styles as I managed to meet a dumpster diving American skateboarder who spent a couple years living in a squat as well as real estate developers living in a penthouse apartment over looking the Santa Maria Cathedral in the Borno.

I found Barcelona inspiring. The sea, the architecture, the 11pm dining, the wine, the whimsy. I enjoyed seeing Soccer balls everywhere and drinking a beer on the beach. I had high expectations and while they weren’t necessarily met, is that the city’s fault or simply a lesson? Not to get all existentialist, but perhaps the perfect analogy came when walking through a park on the outskirts of the city. I was remarking on the beauty of a water feature, how it was overflowing and uncontained. My Catalan friend who’s flat we were staying at remarked, “ah yes, nothing in Spain is perfect.” Perhaps she’s right, and perhaps that’s a wonderful life lesson. Thank you Barcelona.

- David Fogel

This is a music video created by Veith Michel of Aligning Minds track - Barely Ignorant

Red Bull Music Academy Sub-Session: AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
THUR 4.30.09 | 6:30P

Every year, from across the globe the Red Bull Music Academy
selects 60 musicians, DJs and producers from diverse musical
and cultural backgrounds to exchange their ideas about music
through discussion, collaboration and inspiring dialog with
musical revolutionists like Just Blaze, ?uestlove, Bob Moog,
Bernard Purdie, and Gilles Peterson. The Red Bull Music Academy
Sub-Session is a glimpse into the Academy experience.

On Thursday, April 30th, The Red Bull Music Academy and
XM Satellite Radio’s Subsoniq kick off the ‘09 Sub-Session
series with an intimate look into the mind of a Legend,
a Godfather of Hip-Hop culture…Afrika Bambaataa.

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | 6:30p
XM Satellite Radio
1500 Eckington Place NE
Washington, D.C. 20002

RSVP ONLY! Space is Limited
accepted rsvps confirmed via email

RSVP: munch@redbullmusicacademy.com w/name, music skill/talent,
and your genre of music

- - - - - - - - -

RBMA AFTERPARTY: AFRIKA BAMBAATAA DJ Set w/DJ Bee (SiriusXM) @ Current
1215 Connecticut Ave NW WDC 20036
9P-2A

FREE w/RSVP B4 11p, $10 after
RSVP: email: munch@redbullmusicacademy or visit www.pookiesgallery.com