In 1995 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the phrase “The Californian Ideology” in an essay by the same title which provided a genealogy of the concept of the internet as a placeless and universalizing utopia: “This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” A lot of forces were at play in the mid-nineties, but Wired Magazine with editor Kevin Kelly were especially influential in promoting information technologies as emancipatory, limitless and beyond geography.
Although the internet has the power to build communities and bring together diverse geographic places, it has also emerged as a very local and geographically situated place. Geert Lovink has articulated this point nicely by highlighting statistical figures of internet use: in August 2008 China surpassed the United States in internet use, with users being overwhelmingly non-Californian – Asia has 578.5 million users, Europe has 384.5 million, North America has 248.2 million, and Latin America/Caribbean has 139.0 million. (For an excellent overview of a lecture Lovink gave in February 2009 at UC Irvine, see Liz Losh’s insightful “The Empirical Turn.”) Within these statistics, a Californian Ideology doesn’t hold up. It’s grown to be an incredibly diverse place linguistically, with highly localized and geographically situated practices.
As Lovink has humorously pointed out through a drawing from the webcomic xkcd, even our concepts of digital space are localized:
(Enlarge “Map of Online Communities” by xkcd)
Today our concept of the internet has more similarity to political balkanization of physical geography than universalizing dreams of VRML, for example.
(View Balkanization animation)
In terms of my own experiences, many things change with a change in physical location. This includes art scenes, and living in Southern California for the past six years has significantly impacted my work. Creating the work still consists of sitting down, building, soldering, and producing it, but the community that it enters into and circulates in is considerably different. It’s not the “Californian Ideology” that makes a difference, though: it’s the local that has the greatest impact.
We are very happy to feature our next conversation between Kate Armstrong, Vancouver multi-media artist and scholar, Garnet Hertz, a Canadian artist and scholar based in California, and Michelle Teran, Canadian multi-media artist based in Berlin. All three artists deal explicitly with contemporary ways of mapping space, or in some cases, a contemporary poetics of space. We’re drawing them together from three very different parts of the world to discuss their newest projects as well as the ideas driving them.
Below I’ve included bios taken directly from their websites.
Kate Armstrong:
Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences to create work that examines process and accumulation.
Her exhibitions include the Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, Canada), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), Western Front (Vancouver), Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), ISEA 2006 (San Jose, California), ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge (San Jose, California), Yerba Buena Centre (San Francisco, California), Interactive Futures: The New Screen (Victoria, Canada), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, Alberta), and Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey).
She has lectured and held workshops at venues including the Tate Britain, Banff New Media Institute, the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies (Iowa City, Iowa), and Time’s Up (Linz, Austria). . . . more
Garnet Hertz:
Garnet Hertz is an interdisciplinary artist, Fulbright Scholar and doctoral candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He also holds an MFA from the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, has completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis and is currently an affiliate of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction in the Department of Informatics. His dissertation research explores the creative, historical and cultural advantages of reusing obsolete information technologies in the media arts, and uses these examples to construct a critical theory of a cluster of related activities: circuit bending, D.I.Y., critical design and media archaeology. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotics. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture and workshop series on electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.
(updated May 2009)
Michelle Teran:
Michelle Teran (Canada) explores the interplay between social and media networks within urban environments, She uses performative action, many times involving public participation, to articulate the relation of media to the body and architecture by staging urban interventions such as tours, walks, outdoor projections, participatory installations and happenings. These projects involve working within different locations, social and cultural contexts and are the direct results of occupying spaces and cultivating exchanges.
She has talked, performed, exhibited at events and venues throughout North America, Europe, Australia and Asia such as the Transmediale Festival, Ars Electronica, ISEA, BEAP, V2, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Medialab Prado, Theater der Welt, Impakt Festival, CCCB/MACBA, SONAR, ARCO International Art Fair, Vooruit, HAU2, Nabi, Performance Space, Waag Society for Old and New Media and the World Wide Web. She has completed residencies and commissions with several cultural institutions including Tesla (Berlin), Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam), Mobile Digital Commons Network (Montreal) , La Chambre Blanche (Quebec City) and The Interactive Institute (Stockholm). She has lectured and led workshops on topics such as the relation of artist, performer and audience to networked space and the urban topologies of space, place and non-place at several educational institutions including Bauhaus Universität (Weimar), Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Dance Unlimited (Amsterdam), Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam) and Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen (Bergen).
She has received numerous grants and awards for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention within the interactive art category and 2nd prize in the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition, sponsored by Fundacion Telefonica (Madrid).
She currently lives and works in Berlin.
