http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/desire.txt

"THE DESIRE TO BE WIRED" 
A pre-view paper for the Next 5 min. conference

1. Desire. I come from a social and cultural 
context which has its language taboos, and 
among them a strong one refers to the libido. 
Desire is, therefore, something rather 
personal, and connecting it to the public 
sphere might personalize the approach in a 
naive sense I learned to avoid. But since the 
same topic has been voiced last year in the 
calling papers of the Enschede Photo Biennial, 
we might be dealing here with a common place, 
therefore with a language defensive reflex, and 
this is something useful to talk about.
If I look back to my experiences with language, 
the first strong moment of automatic defense I 
can remember is the "anti-" frenzy of the 60s. 
At that time, at least in Romania, every 
concept was refreshed by becoming an "anti" 
concept. In a society where Art was seen both 
as an instrument of personal salvation and a 
resource for political compromise, everybody 
was secretly hoping to succeed in experiencing 
that ultimate oxymoron - the anti-art 
acknowledged as the supreme art form. This is 
the target of the defensive language - to keep 
its users both beyond and within the power 
structures - as accepted outlaws, or as a 
neutral accomplices.
A similar experience was the clash with the 
media culture, which started for the Romanians 
in the spectacular way everybody witnessed by 
December '89. What struck me ever since is the 
way this specific segment transforms its 
reflexive discourse in a surface of common 
places. 
First, by the stylistic option of the English 
language itself, transformed into a somehow 
baroque mutant, as if the translations of 
Baudrillard and Virillo brought with them a new 
kind of infatuation. This way, la France should 
be no more paranoiac about losses in the fight 
for cultural imperialism since she survives 
pretty well as a virus hosted in some 
structures of the lingua franca.
Secondly, by the self reproducing metaphors: in 
a system of mirroring processes, the living 
environment replicates in media symbols, while 
the media environment is described as a living 
structure. More one tries to cope with the 
media meta-discourse, more shis dragged into a 
stream of reiterated rhetoric loosing value at 
high speed. 
The metaphor launched for the purpose of our 
gathering - I mean the "wired desire" - is a 
bias recognition of the fact that originality 
was killed by its underdog - the libido. Being 
part of a scene is less a moral emergency than 
a normal sexual impulse, like the dream of 
having money, fancy cars, trendy clothes, fast 
modems, or any other totems. Which is only 
moral, anyway.
2. Wired. The phenomena I sketched previously 
belong to a level deeper than the elaborated 
promotional strategies. They are imprinted at 
the instinctual level of behavior as a part of 
survival techniques. Therefore, as far as 
artists are concerned, they do not want to 
change radically the art system (they never 
wanted it, over ages), but just to adapt their 
specificity to the new masks of power. 
The whole trick lies in the ability to cover 
your killing instincts (the artist is  a 
suppressed killer of the "otherness" in the 
name of his own "difference") in a new model of 
tolerance. 
The scary part of this model is that it has no 
obvious oppressive sides. That it looks so 
rigorously different from our daily top-down 
experience. Which brings the defensive response 
of metaphors by which the old language doesn't 
necessarily deny the new media, but just 
diminish it, as people try to do by making 
conversation to a mad dog.
After 1989 my writing adopted the modesty of 
sampling from a ready made database of 
metaphors. And my work got also quite easily 
into the common place of modesty by operating 
with an archive of photographs, under the cover 
of a project called "The Art History Archive" 
(A.H.A.). 
"Hacking through history", "living in a data 
room", "the artist as a virus" are the captions 
underlining an image of anonymous activism that 
I was integrating full heartily. The new aim 
was to recombine the tridimensional oppressive 
discourse within the horizontal massification 
of a web project. 
And since I worked previously with Geert 
Lovink, as soon as I moved to Berlin I met Pit 
Schulz and the Internationale Stadt people. 
They were all happy to help me building and 
hosting A.H.A. So, my connectivity was good, 
although I never thought if I had or not a 
desire to be wired.
Significantly enough for this unclear libido 
matter, the A.H.A web site remained 
unfulfilled, and it will stay like this, at 
least for a while. The web is for the moment a 
very demanding site, because it combines the 
electronic sophistication with a rudimentary 
interface. It reflects actually pretty well the 
Jurassic Park atmosphere of the whole media 
industry, with generations who replace each 
other in a catastrophic rhythm. 
This survival effort involves also old media 
people, and that makes the web an interesting 
critical tool. At the same time, the web is 
forcing the artist into a promoter of essential 
expression, being therefore an ethnographic 
carrier, more than a museum space. More form 
you put in your discourse, less communication 
you can expect. A synthetic Nigerian sculpture 
contains less data than a Bernini and it trades 
faster in the net. So, if you want to be cyber-
Bernini, don't go there! 
What the web needs at the present stage of its 
development is to invent a substitute for the 
archetypal village, where cyber-peasants 
happily curve ritual sculptures in their spare 
time; or it will be forced to adapt the 
policies of MTV and other media lobbies who 
play cool but stay hot.
3. Datadildo. The A.H.A is  a sort of an 
ethnographic study on the survival of art as a 
document. The first web project related to 
A.H.A. was to design an interactive site, with 
funny stories about Corneliu & Augustin, two 
freaks who travel through art history and have 
conflicts with it. But people don't read funny 
stories on the web, so why do it? Another 
project was to throw photographs on the web, as 
a kind of virusing flood, and then watch the 
reactions; but photos are sometimes long to 
down load, and there is a lot of them out 
there. 
Having an archive is a dangerous starting point 
anyway, for the simple reason that archives are 
just another item in the libidinal discourse of 
the 90s. They mean "I am in control, but I am 
un-oppressive. What oppresses you is the data 
which accumulates anyhow, and I just point this 
thing out to you. Take it or leave it." 
In the old "anti-" times, people were making 
anthologies, or were building collections. It 
was the period of the post-modern willingness. 
In the cyber time artists dig out old archives 
- modestly slicing down pieces of passive 
history. Or they start new archives, sucking 
fresh data provided by others, in a kind of 
media-supported vampirism.
There is in Berlin a fellow who calls himself 
the Dildo artist. He is a cautious graffitist, 
never attacking buildings but only posters, 
using a very basic language, adapted to the 
context of a town where the street is still 
impressive in its visual codes. The Dildo 
artist is a user of the city data as a part of 
his sexual obsessions, which are very 
conceptual, very remote and very strait. As a 
failed shrink I can say that he is a solitary 
person, with a libido oppressed for aesthetic 
reasons; he is a misogyne, a traditionalist, a 
nature lover, an ironic spirit, criticizing 
star systems, consumerist tourism, Chirac and 
his nuclear erection, Christo's Reichstag 
paranoia a.s.o. a.s.f.
What he suggests to me is that, less than true 
lust, the desire to be wired expresses a 
dildoic need. A fetish attitude towards media, 
as much as towards sex, is converting the 
participation in the data stream into an 
excited expectative. What a dildo or a web 
artist can hope at the best, is to be 
discovered by another artist and used in his 
project, as it happens with the Dildo artist 
from Berlin. 
We - the artists - are having a trip with art, 
and we do not want to lose it on the altar of 
connectivity. But will it be lost there? It is 
an unclear question, therefore it won't get at 
this time anything more than another metaphor 
for answer.
This is the metaphor of the DJ. We are all 
familiar with the culture of techno clubs and 
parties. That is the place where people are 
completely autonomous and yet still connected 
by the flow of sounds. The lights and the other 
environmental tricks make everybody look good 
ad move well. In this designed technoscape, the 
DJ is a remote god of the moment, hidden under 
a cryptic name as all of us hide under our e-
mail addresses, sampling metaphors and 
manipulating the atmosphere as all good artists 
do nowadays, humbly but effectively. All this 
lasts for a few hours. Than we go somewhere 
else. To another party mainly. To another site.  


				Cãlin Dan






---
# distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body
# URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de