WEATHER FORECAST FOR TOMORROW

The project “ The operator in Belgrade “ on the WWW site of Bojan Stokelj - technical realization by Aleksandra Memon )

The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 put into force the complete transientness of teritories; ever since, built walls and tanks, standing riveted to the spot, do not represent limitations to movement and fortresses of power anymore. Yet November 89, which on the symbolic level we beget if May 68 is turned upside down, is also the year of the massive enforcement of the techno subculture, which from a minimalistic and experimental music movement outgrew into the life style of the 90’s, with its new sociability ( raving society ) and with its many articulations ( especially in the form of parades ). The year 1989 was nonetheless the land-mark for the massive and popular making the way of two new media, that is, the technology of virtual reality and the global web communications ( especially the Internet ).

The present text came to light in February 1997, when the romantic era of both new media is only an irrevocable past. A large part of the anarchic, romantic, liberating and critical potential, linked to early cybercultural articulations, proudly shaping the theory which understood especially the medium of virtual reality as something similar to the epoch-making break of the Guttenberg innovation of the printed book, is yet exhaustet and exceeded to the day. Virtual reality and especially the web with its commuicative paths was in the beginning of the 90’s actually promising a possibility of alternative links and experiences which would make possible an opposition to the monopoly of traditional media, especially in the form of big national televisions ( broadcasting tv ), hollywood films and disneyfied MTV and CNN, yet today its main course is already fatefully defined by either national or transnational, global institutions ( political and transpolitical, military, police, media and especially economic dominion.

Cyberspace is being less and less in the sign of a messianic escape and off, it has become a colonized and macdonald-ized field for enforcing technototalitarianism, web fascism, sexism and tribalism of new, distinctively yuppified elits. With this it is extremely noticable the americanization of all the web’s tools and standards, so it appears that companies like Microsoft can already be classified in the ranks of global institutions, which also have strong social implications, such as MacDonalds, Disneyland, Hollywood, MTV and CNN.

The web and virtual reality that only yesterday were the scene of regular apologies, fascinations and eulogies by theories that, while apologising for the web’s and virtual metaphysics, were uncritically tying themselves to big names of European philosofy, using them as an apology for cybercultural technoplatonism, based on the kingdom of digital justice, hypostased over the evil in the hard, analogous reality, are to the day already those fields where harsh and radical criticism is constituting, aimed against the web as the apparatus of power and against the virtual class and its procedures of dominion. A It seems that after the era of evangelists and priests of the web is definitely over, critical thinkers such as Arthur Kroker, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Peter Schultz and Richard Barbrook are in the foreground. These are authors who frequently borrow from either the theoretical apparatus of the Frankfurt circle of neo Marxists or Michel Foucault, and are trying to throw a critical light upon new techologies of dominion that have subtly occupated the new media and the “traffic” on them.

This text is coming into being in Slovenia, and with that, at least conditionally, on a spot that belongs to the web of the so called ex-Yugoslavia, where a virtual class is already operating and there is a growing number of those who serve in the virtual economy business. Yet in this area the predominance goes to another class, that is, the class of nationalistic and ethnocommunist political elites which, in their actions for a spread reproductions of their substance at any cost, lean on the very national culture which they try to then integrate in their projects of ruthless dominion. Slovenia is no California and does not have its own Wired, therefore the yuppified bourgeoisie comes to terms and serves with the nationalliteralism and the oldcultural ethno. It is then of an extreme significance that the yuppified communists betrayed the interests of the left and, having dropped marxism, based their promotion on the institution of ethnocultural identity. It becomes almost superfluous to mention that the states which sprung out from the territory of the former Yugoslavia are also the regimes with big leaders, who in the end are caricatures of dictators like Causescu and Tito.

It would be pretending ignorance to write that in such milieus - new states of ethnofundamentalism, linked with the restauration of the old ( even feudal institutions ) and with the blooming of mafia, is functioning well the criticism of the web and mechanisms of dominion of the so-called virtual class. In Slovenia these views are seen as voices coming from far away and hardly having anything to do with us. The situation is reversed, therefore in such milieus of ethnofundamentalism and revival of the archaic of all types even globalism and transnationalsm act very refreshingly and productively; it gives opportunity for experiences and articulations that are marginal, as regards to the dominant ethno, integrated with the dominion of the yuppified old elites. The imperative “escape to web” which in the developed countries of Europe and the USA (and her satellites amongst the technologically developed countries of the Pacific rim ) actually functions as main stream and as a conformistic stylistic figure can for the population of Slovenia or Serbia still be an enough productive possibility for participating in the alternative sites of social. The very surfing from [tokelj’s and Memon’s website to the page of Belgrade’s Politika, that is to texts of an extremely regime-bound paper, published in Cyrillic characters, is, after all, illustrative enough. On the web the paper is written in Latin characters, in the virtual it is read as some worthless American daily, yet it is readable and not unbearable. Digitalized Serb language on the web functions much more neutrally; the web Politica is worth nothing, but nothing in worthnothing is better than ethno for those fed up with the big Serbian blutundboden. The alternative functioning of the web in the milieus of ethnofundamentalisms reminds us of the position that can be occupied by different underprivileged persons who can neverteless find something therapeutic and creative in the web communications. Let us mention only the physically handicapped subjects, invalids, elderly and sick people who can find across the web the Other, even if he is in a non material, digital and cloned shape. For them the web still is the space for spreading dreams and the hope connected with these dreams. They do not mind if the main mechanisms of the web are already being subordinated by the virtual class, turning them into shopping malls, for them the possibility of surfing and chatting with persons drawn closer, no matter how very far geographically they really are, is important. Even in everyday business in the world of work completely unsuccesful people can become very enterprising and penetrating, regular surfing gods and authors of interesting sites. Some luck, dreams and hope remain in the margins of the web, and the “critics of all, that belogs to the web” should take it into account.

The present text is stimulated by the project of Bojan [tokelj and Aleksandra Memon The operator in Belgrade/ RTV Srbija - Politics, Art, Tourism which in its core is an art project, timed on the web as a global tool of multilayered communications. It is about WWW site as a new artistic medium, which together with CD-ROMs and computer supported installation are a typical form of art in the era of global communications. Art in this era is actually as-if-art; we are dealing with classes of works that no loger are works in the sense of finished and authoritative works of art of the tradition, but are only instant articulations, as a rule aesthetically coded and classified in artistic archives. It is about works as aesthetic situations, events, web articulations and processes the exchange value of which is provided by their classification in the institution of art, still functioning as the field of prestige when the value is concerned (the history of art knows more aura and glamour thab the history of science, technology and the media put together).

Artistically designed WWW site is a typical form of as-if-art, for its very radical putting into question of the artistic ( the passage to the as-if-works situated in an area, a cross-section of art, techology, new media and art ) proves that in the present time art has its raison d’etre only if it explicitly puts into question and subverts its own procedures, if, like satellite escapes over the edges of the artistic system to the positions off and anti. It seems as-if-art is the only authentic form of art today, demonstrating the complex onthology of processual, time situations, placed on “social place of art”. Here we should remember Heidegger’s thought taken from the text Der Satz vom Grund which imaginatively anticipates the agony of the work of art as a finished, on material support leaning structure: “Strictly speaking, we may indeed be barely able, as we will see, to speak of objects any more. If we pay attention, we see we already move in a world where there are no more ob-jects.(...) That in such an age art becomes objectless testifies to its historical appropriatness, and this above all when nonrepresentational (ger. gegendstandlose) art conceives of its own productions as no longer being able to be works, rather as being something for which the suitable word is lacking.”1)

When a piece of art loses its material, objective authority, it loses to some extent the very identity that can be protected by the police and throug the judicial protection. It is hardly likely that an intervention by some other artist in some art site on the web could trigger off such a hostile trial towards the acts of freedom like the one that, while this text is being written, has started in the Netherlands against the artist Alexander Brenner. Works of art as non-art, as www sites, are more suitable for actions of direct democracy than those to which the dominion of gallery and museum’s capitalism is glued on.

What is to be written about the web project of Bojan Stokelj and Aleksandra Memon The operator in Belgrade for which the web nature makes it possible it is conceived as work in progress? Is is powerful above all for its actualistic effects, for its reference to politics, especially that kind of politics that can still be given sense through humour, graffiti and art. The site falls into those projects by Bojan Stokelj with which even in the past he quickly reacted to the energetically powerful places in the social reality. Such were his projects at the engine-drivers’ strike in Ljubljana and at the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the project From here they can hit you in the eye, available on the web
-http://www.ljudmila.org/bstokelj). Technically speaking, Operator in Belgrade is not set up in some sophisticated form, which would demand a broader knowledge from the user-surfer or would offer a more complex entering in this work, but it is above all relevant for its semantics, where [tokelj’s photographies shot during students’ and opposition’s demonstrations in Belgrade are completed with an interesting and provocative textual part, a collage of graffitis and statements of the participants of that mega performance (love parade) in Belgrade. The input of the textual part and the emphasis on it confirms the thesis of Hartmut Winkler that cyberspace is primarily the field of texts and documents, that the web is markedly more textual than filled with pictoiral and numerical data.

It is also important the part of this site that includes adresses of links with other timely informative sites ( the independent radio B 52, The University of Belgrade, the paper Politika). Artistic intentions at politics can become pertinent, actual and, especially, resounding only by leaving museums and intervening in the street itself; it is superfluous to mention the street is new media and therefore of the web. We are dealing with an orientation that meets the political on the paths of its production, reproduction and distribution, it touches the political yet it is estranged from it, retracts to the field of alternative forms of art which is in a tensional diversity either to the politics or the institutions of the elite art itself. Although such position is in many ways romantic and linked to the tradition of May 1968 it nevertheless works on the web; it makes possible expressing a No to politics integrated with fossile and fundamentalistic forms of ethno. In a word: Eth-NO.

1) M.Heidegger: The Principle of Reason, Indiana University Press, Bloomingston and Indianapolis, 1996, pp. 33,34