Hybrid WorkSpace a temporary laboratory in the Orangerie

[...]

The Orangerie will be transformed into an open media studio to collect, select, connect, record, and distribute information and content. It will deal with current social, political and cultural issues. Hybrid WorkSpace will provide possibilities to comment, interview, discuss and present the resulting data objects and will forge connections with material brought in from outside. Distribution beyond the Orangerie will be realised via selected zones on the Internet as well as through print media and radio broadcasting. A subsequent publication will allow the content flow produced throughout the documenta X to be widely accessible.

Hybrid WorkSpace can best be described as a temporary laboratory that produces its own type of content. It also condenses the viewpoints and positions brought to Kassel by the '100 days - 100 guests' program into streams of subjective approaches, represented in digital data. Most importantly, it allows remote participants to directly access the developments and debates in the Orangerie. This includes input from external areas into the physical setting of the Orangerie.

The architecture itself reflects a non-hierarchical perception of different functions, zones, images and situations. Similar to icons on a screen, the different elements of the set can be decomposed and rearranged. Projection columns, pedestals, and tables create an interface between the real and the virtual. The polymorphous and movable architectural elements precipitate a playful dialogue among themselves, including the hosts and guests. Furthermore the chosen interior appears useful as a laboratory and workshop for programmed and spontaneous interactions and presentations. Multifunctional video and audio facilities are included into the movable projection columns that structure and serve the space. The visitor can expect Hybrid WorkSpace to appear dark or light, full or empty, full of images or sound, noisy or completely silent. Hybrid WorkSpace is an ambient space and document store; it is a pin-board and a global newspaper; and it is both a local and a world wide radio channel. Out of this heterogeneity, the project constitutes itself professionally improvised as a media laboratory involving both transparent and opaque fields of activities. In this way, it becomes simultaneously a dynamic system - open and closed, private and public.

Hybrid WorkSpace mixes old and new media, connecting data streams of different sources. The polymorphous structure allows spontaneous rearrangements to suit the demands imposed on the space by discourse, presentations, events, and guests working in the Orangerie. This could be interviews, dialogues, group discussions and informal gatherings.

It is a zone of critical thought and productive conflict, a social space to manufacture consent, initialise dissent, a place where distribution, reception and production compress and expand. Within the social context the relation between senders and receivers make things happen. Meanwhile traditional broadcasting media like radio, video or journals become technical metaphors to put information onto the Internet. The organisation of time, the scheduling, and the architecture of a collaborative archive as an arena of memory will be modeled in space as in software. We strongly encourage collaborations with radio producers, virtual communities, video makers, magazines, etc. to provide the technical facilities to easily produce vivid net content.

In addition to the co-ordinators of the space there will be temporary teams of 2 to 4 editors who will be in Kassel for a 10-14 days period. After the preparation and realisation in Kassel, the WorkSpace will be realised Berlin as a part of the first Berlin Biennial scheduled for summer 1998 in various locations throughout the city.

location: An der Karlsaue 20c, 34117 Kassel

phone: 0561 - 108 88 90

Fax: 0561 - 108 88 91
WWW: http://www.documenta.de/workspace
e-mail: workspace@documenta.de


slot 1
Wed, 18. 6. - Fri, 27. 6.
Social Spaces - Berlin

During the first week, Hybrid WorkSpace presents different activities from Berlin, which put their focus on the changing situation in the city.

SCHEINSCHLAG - a group of young Berlin journalists, editing a non-profit, independent magazine for the "Mitte" of Berlin with a critical view on architectural and social development in Mitte as well as a view on cultural events. The June issue is focussing on "INNENSTADT-AKTIONSTAGE", several events organized by a network of groups from 2 - 8 June in Berlin as well as in Kassel, Vienna, Zürich and other cities, questioning the concept of the "New InnerCity" with its image campaigns like "Berlin stays clean". Among other events, a discussion on "What is Urbanism" will be organized in the Hybrid WorkSpace.

FAKTOR ARBEIT - a project of the NGBK Berlin, discussing the changing meaning of "labour", with focus on unemployment in Berlin and Brandenburg and a short view on the history and future of labour.

PAVILLON der Volksbühne, Berlin - a free space vor interdisciplinary projects in which young artists and culturally productive individuals and groups create a social communicational forum beyond the established art world. Visiting the Pavillon one will encounter openness and transparency which adds to setting the space alive. The connection of event and experience of the visitor is central. The every-day, public life, and social discourse are being transformed and opened up by art events.

(Berlin) Salon - a project of young architects organises discussion evenings. The topics ar meant to expand the conventional architecture discussion. It emphasises on the dialogue between 'experts' and audience. The salons are semi public events, with their guests getting informed by invitation or by word of mouth.

MAK-MAO-STORY-PRODUCTION-BERLIN will make a video-documentation on the first days of the project in Kassel.

In the further programme of the Hybrid WorkSpace the BARACKE AM DEUTSCHEN THEATER and the VOLKSBÜHNE AM ROSA-LUXEMBURG-PLATZ with a Schlingensief production are invited to work in the Orangerie.


slot 2

Sat, 28.6. - Mon, 7.7.
[cross the border]
contributions to flight and migration beyond the state's control

telephones are cellular, computers are portable and the quickly moving bytes are invisible. the easier money and goods flow across the territories of nations, the more western europe and north america close their doors to migration. "we don't want you, we only want to take everything you've got!". this could be a description of the interrelations of postcolonial exploitation. people who try to enter the so called first world - as refugees in order to escape prosecution or simply looking for some luck - are forced into illegality. One of the central political struggles is to combat the hegemony of borders and migration, to support migrants and refugees, documented or undocumented, in their fights for the right to live, where they like and how they like.

n.s.i.a.m.p.

in cooperation with antiracial groups from germany and other european states

f.i.:
office for antiracial initiatives (bari) / kassel
bundestreffen der antirassistischen gruppen / brd
coordination nationale des sans papiers / frankreich
and many international artists, filmmakers and photographers


slot 3

Tue 8.7. - Thu, 17.7.
We want bandwidth!
De Waag / Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam

The Society for More and More Media demands bandwidth:

In the networked society the kind of bandwidth of your connection will determine whether you're in the game or out. It's not just about being flushed by the data-pipes, it's about setting your own trash against the data-stream. It's about the vision of wired citizens as passive consumers of virtual corporate waste, versus the active prosumer, the critical consumer and producer of digitised content.

There are still a lot of questions to be resolved. First of all, who will own the backbones of the digital freeways of the mind, and will we have enough space to cast our own content on its tracks? What effect will the virtual monopolies have on the equal share in the data drive for everyone who cares enough to bother about it.

On the other hand we might be just a reactionary phantom from a technologically outdated past, and soon we might be flooded by bit bearing media. So what are we going to do with unlimited bandwidth? Is the fetish phantasy of full feed, full speed communication just another screen on which to project the utopia of an universal understanding between people? If everybody is a broadcaster, who will shut up and listen ?

Keywords:

Bandwidth / Equal Access Rights / Broadcast for All


slot 4

Fri, 18.7. - Sun, 27. 7.
Recycling the Future
KUNSTRADIO (Vienna)
On Air- On Line - On Site

RECYCLING THE FUTURE
Technology is evolving so rapidly in these last years of the 20th Century that it has become necessary to continually update - or recycle - our notions and images of the future: which means, of course, that the "future" has been robbed of its utopian fascination. But, ironically, it was precisely an enthusiastic belief in "the future" that inspired the early artists of the avantgarde to develop the methods (collage, the readymade etc.) that have now become the basis for the "recombinant culture" that dominates our era. What was once the "future" of the early avantgarde is now merely material for recycling by contemporary artists - especially artists who are working at the interface of the new and old media and technologies.

KUNSTRADIO
In the 10 years since KUNSTRADIO began producing and broadcasting artworks for radio the notions of both "radio" and "art" have been completely changed by the speed and energy of the new digital communication technologies. In response to these changes KUNSTRADIO became a platform for the development of a wide range of telematic-simultaneous projects by artists of all disciplines. These projects connected the spaces of public radio, independent (free) radio and electronic networks with other sites and nodes to form dispersed interactive environments that transformed audiences into participants.

HYBRID WORK SPACE
KUNSTRADIO's continual confrontation with the - largely unresearched - production, communication and distribution context resulting from the combination of different virtual and real spaces provides the basis for the contribution of the KUNSTRADIO team to Hybrid Workspace:
- ON AIR: live radio broadcasts including 'processed' material from the Orangerie, the lecture series "100 days - 100 guests" etc.as well as material/impulses from the internet.
- ON LINE: live webcasts including both improvised and programmed network projects, e.g. with remote locations in Berlin, Vienna, Linz, Graz, Rimini, Arles, and Quebec City.
- ON SITE: partially improvised interventions and appearances by various groups and performers (musicians, artists, radio makers etc.). These appearances/performances will also take place in the communication space of radio, internet and telephone which permits remote influences from the communication space.


slot 5

Mon, 28.7. - Wed, 6.8.
deep europe
V2_East/Syndicate workshop

Take the title 'Deep Europe' with a pinch of salt. The V2_East/Syndicate is a network of people and institutions who are involved in media culture and media art in Europe and who want to create contacts and an infrastructure for projects and cooperations. The network started out as an 'East-West initiative' almost two years ago, but has since reached a stage where those symbolically laden terms mean less and less. With its mailing list, website <http://www.v2.nl/east> and regular meetings, the Syndicate is becoming an important tool for fostering ties within the media art community and a platform for discussing the changing role of media culture in the 'new Europe'.

Kassel is both a former outpost of the pseudo-Western world and a hallmark of a post-war modernism. Even eight years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the cultural maps of Europe are shifting heavily. There are still many things to be seen, learnt and donne, and conversations to be held, before we will be able to make sense of the new distances between Berlin and Warsaw, Paris and Moscow, Vienna and Belgrade, Kassel and Eisenach.

The new lines that run through Europe are historical, political, cultural, artistic, technological, military. The role of the EU and its institutions, the notion of Mitteleuropa, old and new ideologies, messianic NGOs and
late-capitalist profiteers contribute to a cultural environment in which we have to define new strategies and new tools, whether as artists, activists, writers or organisers.

'Deep Europe' will offer an opportunity to further develop ideas which have emerged around the V2_East/Syndicate initiative over the last 18 months, to discuss them among the Syndicalists and with the dX public. There will be ample opportunitys to represent in video, slide and WWW presentations of what we have in mind when we say 'European media art and culture', and to concentrate on some of these issues in texts and audio-visual productions.


slot 6

Thu, 7.8. - Sat, 16.8.
tactical media
Media Filter, New York and Tactical Media Network, Amsterdam

The Tactical Media Network will use the documenta platform to present the works of various media activists. This project arises out of a number of conferences like <The Next 5 Minutes> and initiatives like <name.space>.

This will be programmed in the context of a series of discussions which will among other things examine the viability of The People's Communication Charter, a project seeking to give the rights of media access and literacy the same status as other human or civil rights. Over the ten days in Hybrid WorkSpace these and related topics will be explored in depth through a series of screenings, presentations and public and private discussions with specially invited guests.

Taken together this project provides a survey of those who use electronic media to resist the abuse of state or corporate power and the ravages of un-restrained global capital. These tactical media are characterized by mobility and a willingness to cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring avariety of disciplines and technologies. Their defining aesthetic is 'quick and dirty' and is often based on the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made available through the revolution in consumer electronics and new forms of distribution.


slot 7

Sun, 17.8. - Tue, 26.8.
Technoscience. Vocabulary, Politics, Practice
mute, London

During its stay in the Hybrid WorkSpace, mute will discuss the notion of technoscience. Technoscience is constituted by the fundamentally interrelated worlds of medical and biological research (often financed by private corporations but housed in academic institutions), corporate property or patenting law, technologised work, networked finance and global communication, as well as the international physical and agricultural resources that help to keep these systems (or realities) afloat.

Technoscience, as historian of science Donna Haraway has defined it, holds both promises and omens. In her eyes, the dependence of human health on that of non-human life forms (e.g. breast cancer sufferers' relationships to the patented OncoMouse, which automatically forms breast cancer cells) creates fundamentally new relationships critical to technoscientific societies. In addition, she theorises how hybrid life-forms and non-human agency challenge the Western, Judaeo-Christian belief systems that have been oppressive to all those Other than the white male.

mute will focus on both the promises and the omens, but aims to place special emphasis on contingent political issues. The increasing commodification of gene technology (manifest most clearly in the huge industry surrounding IVF treatment and sperm bank maintenance) is but one of many problematic issues central to technoscience. Others mute will look at are the labour market, agriculture and the hallowed status of biology in the academy/research institutes.

mute is a quarterly journal begun in the winter of 1994. The publication deals with the impact of digital technologies on culture and society. It participates with a community of artists, programmers and theorists who contribute essays, reviews, polemical shorts and fiction.


slot 8

Wed, 27.8. - Mon, 1.9.
'theme follows function'
luxus cont.

luxus cont. was formed in 1995 in Berlin by theorists, artists, writers, and filmmakers from mainly European countries. Since then invited groups and artists engaging in different fields of analogue and digital art, music and theory have produced talks, performances and small art-shows. Such events take place in consciously semi-public spaces but with conceptually wide open doors. Since February 1997 luxus cont. has been editing an electronic magazine named 'contd' [www.b.shuttle.de/art-bag/contd]. Issue 1 focused on 'contemporary cartographies' and includes contributions in three languages from four continents, attempting to embrace global matter as well as local meaning.

In Hybrid WorkSpace luxus cont. aims to intensify its excursions into the organisation, mediation, and function of the technical and social construct 'sound'. Theme will be cultural economy and sound together with the technical constitution of sounds as 'data objects'. How can sound be valued following the possible distinction of digitally versus analogue mediated interaction? More questions arise: How does sound constitute social spaces? How does sound function as a strategy for acoustic communication/production? How is sound technically and aesthetically visualised? What does authentication imply? How do cultural agreements correspond with gadget design?

Additionally producers from Berlin 'convex tv.' radio will be invited to provide their in-depth devotion to culture and broadcasting, oscillating between contemporary discourse, sounds, and theory to add memorable audio content to the Hybrid WorkSpace.


slot 9

Tue, 2.9. - Thu, 11.9.
SOCIALIZING

Under the temporary group-name "Socializing", five unscrupulousself-thinkers from Berlin, Frankfurt and London will explore the myth ofclassless society in the realms of art und cultural production: can youshake off socialization? Which psycho-classes populate the bars andexhibition halls? After eight days of intensive handling of loud thinking and silent scribbling, the pseudo-editorial board will convoke a panel. All of this will be basis for a publication due to come out in 1998. Stay tuned.

[editor's note: this was the first plan, it soon made place to the invitation to Ramon Haze from Leipzig and the group “no-name-cologne”. see the project sites on this cd-rom -th]


slot 10

Fri, 12.9. - Fri, 19.9.
off line publishing
the making of the nettime bible

nettime is a semi-public collaborative text filter for net criticism, cultural politics of new media. It coordinates conferences, meetings and publishing projects. Nettime started in june 1995 at the Venice Bienniale and functions as an exchange channel between media activists, artists, theorists, philosophers, journalists, technicians and researchers from this planet.

inversive publishing: slowing down the electric overdrive on the databahn. The nettime movement is not about speeding up but about rematerialization of e-text. During its stay in WorkSpace, a group of editors will put together a comprehensive anthology based on the nettime archive and previous small publications. We named the project 'The Nettime Bible' as a reference to the thick computer software manuals. It will be published and distributed by a network of small media.

Besides this we will invite guests for round table discussions on the current issues of net criticism and net.art: the new role of the NGOs, the political economy of telecommunications, the need for free content, the redefinition of the public sphere, social interfaces, non-propriatary groupware standards and the theory of gift economy.


slot 11

Sat, 20.9. - Sun, 28.9.
cyberfeminism
Old Boys' Network
International Cyberfeminist Organisation

There are countries, where Cyberfeminism has had a long life and there are countries where Cyberfeminism has never had a life. Germany belongs to the latter...

Cyber and Feminism - two terms coined through recent history, ideology and evangelism. What happens when these two words collide? Cyberfeminism is a new and promising term. It suggests a fresh ideology, embracing the notions of "cyber" and "feminism" and all they signify. It creates a space for women to invent, dissect and alter the trajectories of the new technological and information era.

Cyberfeminism...

Fresh ideology?
New code of behaviour?
Artistic playground?
Semiotic straightjacket?

The Old Boys' Network CONTENT strategy will be:
- collect material from literature, art and the media
- analyse and select the material
- connect people, ideas and machines
- connect the past and future
- produce new material in a variety of media
- distribute information utilising all available networks

For these purposes the Old Boys' Network will be temporarily expanded to include eXXperts from all over the world.


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