Strategies for New Media Culture
By Geert Lovink

The Chinese Artists' Association held its Fourth Representative Meeting in Ji'nan from the 6th to the 11th of May 1985. The Chinese Artists' Association is supposed to be an unofficial organisation of artists but in reality acts as a mouthpiece and consensus-forming unit for the Ministry of Culture. This meeting brought together 468 artists out of the 543 representatives to review the association's work since 1979, the occasion of the 3rd Representative meeting, and to discuss the possible directions for art. Wu Zuoren made the inaugural speech. This was later followed by a five-year progress report delivered by Hua Junwu (b.1915), a vice-chairman of the Artists' Association.

As twenty five million Taiwanese where in a state of shock, international rescue teams rushed to their aid. Chip production in the 'science parks' remained largely undamaged. Hard-disc factories had, anyway, already moved to the mainland.

Over two thousand people died under the rubble.

After a short whole hardware manufacturing continued to soar again, whiping away any last signs of the '97 Asian financial crisis in Taiwan.Ê Two and a half months after '921', the quake zone was no longer on the front pages, and will disappear from the news after March, for sure.

When I got in at Chang Kaichek airport, late November 1999 I could see only bits and pieces of the global Asian making news. /p>

It was two years earlier that I had met Ilya Lee , a lively and gifted humanities' student, and one of Taiwans Internet activists.

Tokyo scholar/raver Toshiya Ueno had arranged a weekend trip, in collaboration with cultural studies professor Kuan-Hsing Chen (see interview in the nettime archive). In a backroom of a cafe, during a small meeting it was Ilya who showed the most interest in critical issues in new media.

The others participants were more into gay and lesbian gender bending, using multi-user environments such as MUDs and MOOs. At that time Ilya was involved in a rural area Internet project, training NGOs to set up websites. We have maintained contact ever since and managed to get him to attend the tactical media conference Next Five Minutes, in March 1999. There Ilya heard of the Belgrade radio B92. Immediately after returning to Taiwan, in the first weeks of the NATO bombings, he opened the Chinese version of the Help B92 campaign.

What at first seemed an exotic, let's say, futuristic gesture, turned out to be one of few independant, non-commercial, non-governmental web sources in Chinese.

Next to Ilya, waiting for me at the airport, was art critic and curator Manray Hsu, a fellow pragmatist and collaborator of 'Cities on the Move', a touring exhibition dealing with Asian metropolitan conditions. Together with a few others, they had hastely set up the 'Aftershock' group, and were about to establish the www.restoration.org.tw server, meant to coordinate communication between the numerous NGOs in the widespread zone of destruction. The aim of restoration.org.tw is to build both a social and technical network.

A Xerox reader in 250 copies with translations of texts on tactical media, starting from the B92 case, had been produced (mail manray@tpts1.seed.net.tw for copies). My planned trip to Taiwan before the catastrophe struck the island, spontaneously turned into a promotional tour for the 'Restoration' server. I found myself in the middle of a dense eight day tour, with seven public lectures, each time with different topics and audiences, and meetings with activists on the structure of Restoration.

My first stop after driving south of Taipei was Shihgang, a village in an agricultural area which suffered substantial damage. Abandoned, crashed high-rises along the road were the first sign of what had happened.

A two storey school had survived and was now used as office and meeting place, and storage for shrines and personal belongings. For the first time some 15 NGOs from the quake region came together and presented their projects. The meeting was hosted by the New Homeland Foundation.

Some of the groups dealt with social issues such as the sudden rise of unemployment, community work, while others worked on long term environmental problems, for example a broken dam. An oral history group had started recording personal witnesses in order to create a collective memory, whether a web site or monument. Although the Taiwanese army had now withdrawn, civic support was still there, from Kobe (Japan) for example, the city that got seriously hit in 1995 (the group is called response:www.1.meshnet.or.jp/~response/index.htm ).

Where is the money? people started wondering. Who is accountable for decisions now being made over the architecture of schools and other public buildings? Will small farmers survive? What would be their take on modernization?, or even selling through the Internet? as has already happened in some cases. It seemed that these NGOs, with some having web pages, and all using e-mail, were now in the process of building up their own social and technical network. A lose decentralized civic net which would allow a variety of opinions, proposals and forms of expression, unlike the model of a hierarchical National Organization.

Perhaps Ilya's presentation of Restoration here in Shihkang was going to make a difference. The new social movements in Taiwan, originating in the late eighties, were now at a cross-roads. Will the earthquake with the help of computer networks, generate new forms, or fall back into top-down forms of organization.

Next stop Puli, the town in the mountainous center of Taiwan most seriously hit, with 50% of housing now to be taken down, a number which could easily grow to 80%. At the offices of the New Homeland Foundation, where Ilya had been busy installing a linux network during the previous weeks, we discussed possible telecommunication (and media) infrastructure. Some web space on the popular Taiwanese Yahoo server seemed a nice offer, but the problems concerning education, urban planning, work, care for the elderly, were so big that seemed more appropriate to think on a completely different scale. A fiber-optic network for Puli, together with community media, did not seem to contradict needs foremost for housing. The tent villages in the parks were about to be closed, and with it was coming a growing fear of isolation in remote metal barracks, away from neighborhoods. You cannot live in a cable, but then, what could be a debate about the future of Puli without a digital public domain?

Full Shot Studiois one of late 1980's video activist collectives, producing documentary films about social topics, memory and pain, ecology, including Taiwan's culture of Aboriginals and other minorities. Full Shot has specialized itself in regional video training programs. Their work was presented at the 1999 Yamagata Festival of Documentary Film, which produced a brochure in both English, Japanese and Chinese . One week before our arrival, the entire Full Shot crew had moved to a temporary house/studio in Taichung, the biggest city near the quake zone. From there 11 video workers, in 4 teams, have started to document the process of reconstruction - for a least one, perhaps two years. Looking at their promo., Full Shot has a straight forward, old school approach. This became even more apparent after the presentation of an ambitious project of four women designers and a photographer, called the 'So Studio' group who brought out a well designed, four color magazine, produced for a mountain village.

Their particular interest was in recording people's stories, printing their pictures, and recording landslide sites, to find out what the possible impact of the coming rainy season on the 'shaven' mountain sites will be. A discussion broke out over the question of representation and the need of locals for such a glossy magazine. The group emphasized that solidarity does not imply you are becoming a 'mister total solution'.

Full Shot insisted on speaking for the people, where as So Studio were more interested in developing their own aesthetics, with the aim of handing over the production to the villagers as soon as possible. So Studio's web site: http://voice.abbeyroad.com.tw

The next day we left the quake zone and drove further south, into the mountains, to Meinung, a town of 50.000 inhabitants. They were mainly members of the Hakka minority, living in an area of tobacco plantations, mango, banana, and bin-lang, the stimulus chewing gum, sold along the highways by so-called 'spice girls'.

In 1993 a campaign started in the town to rescue the Yellow Butterfly Valley, situated on the outskirts. The government is intending to build a dam which will destroy one of the last pockets of nature, now symbolically preserved in a park, run by environmental groups. The dam is meant to provide water to chemical plants and steel works on the industrialized West coast.

Through the years the Meinung Peoples Association has proven to be a successful social movement, with substantial support within the local population. The topic of the meeting that Thursday night was Internet activism.The campaign has a web site for some years (www.nsysu.edu.tw/sccid/mpa), and is associated with various groups and networks, worldwide, which fight against the construction of dams as well.

How, one might ask, can new media be used, starting from this advanced level, with such a motivated and experienced group of activists? The crucial, perhaps final media campaign starts soon. RTMark, etoy, mcspotlight, any suggestions? Please mail to Chang Cheng-Yang.

The second gathering took place in Taipei, and started with a press conference, a meeting with representatives of twenty 'new' social movements, of which most were made active through the use of e-mail, mailing-lists and web sites. Taiwan, known for its computer hardware manufacturing, is hardly visible on the Internet map, mainly because of a language problem on the Western side (namely, not understanding Mandarin).

Needless to say the Internet is growing at such a rate, with e-commerce, in its US-American form, as the dominant rhetoric. In this climate, with a relative weak net.culture, media companies can easily dominate this new medium. Some examples: A list called 'South', run by two editors has a readership of 35.000, with little or no back channels. A business newsletter even has over 300.000 e-mail subscribers. As in Japan, the more intimate communication happens through (telnet) bulletin board systems. Web sites are simply too public.

Having changed identity, and being able express one self anonymously, Taiwanese net.culture suddenly awakes.

The screening of a video, full of hardcore European realities (war, drugs, pop), ''Victims of Geography" , is causing a healthy dose of cultural confusion. What is this gay nihilism, fighting for independent media without any social or political agenda? Digital existentialism, made in Yugoland.

Attention is now shifting from contemporary media activism to convergence, mergers of telcos and the media industry, IPOs and the e-goldrush - global trends also happening in Taiwan. The island seems to be more international, even compared to a few years ago. More and more speakers, curators and artists are coming to visit, and work. This weekend we attended a lecture by the French theorist of new social movements Alain Touraine, and a mass performance by the somewhat sad, melancholic, yet extremely successful Peter Eisenman, who is now building a museum in Hsinchu. Our discovery of an unused new media arts lab at the National Arts Institute on a hill, overlooking Taipei, packed with high-tech, including video and audio studios, without any students, hidden away amidst traditional and classical modern arts, gives an indication of the problems and hopefully potentials of new media.

This view on technology equipment is seen as mere tools to serve other disciplines, such as graphic design, theater, performance, music and film. In an over-politicized climate, where the arts have been instrumentalized for ideological causes, the computer user is seen as an engineer, assisting and programming other people's concepts. The artist him or herself is trained in a traditional manner, using old media, from calligraphy to sculpture.

In some cases the artist can call in the help of new forms of expression, for example to document or amplify the work.

In this traditionalist view, the computer does not have to develop its own language. It is enough to learn the software manual. This instrumental approach of new media culture ignores the issue of esthetics because neither the computer operator nor the artists seriously engage with the possibilities and limits of the machines. Technology is used in the way manufacturers have configured them, which in this case for example results in boring realistic 3D computer graphics, or, at, best, fractal art.

Computers are good for making money, and shipping chunks of data from here there, and everywhere, but do not automatically produce distributed, pluralistic structure, nor interesting art. What is neglected here is the collaborative nature of technology, in which multi-disciplinary approaches are not just a good idea but an absolute necessity.

A technological culture is as complex as any other form of creative or industrial work, therefore it needs medialabs, schools, festivals, exhibitions, and public debates not only on its content and direction, but on its funding bodies and above all a (hopefully critical) discourse which is trying to make sense of why we need these media.

Taiwan is about to develop a rich, diverse third sector, on the Internet, and the 921 quake has certainly acted as a catalyst. But networks are not build overnight. They sometimes grow fast and at times unpredictable yet their impact, by their very nature, remain invisible.

So do not wonder if networks in Taiwan are forgotten about for a while.

(An interview between Manray Hsue and Geert Lovink can be seen at one of first independent web TV sites of Taiwan, www.etat.com).