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Following an invitation to represent V2_Organisation at the Third Reality Forum in St. Petersburg, I went to Russia from September 28 to October 5,1995. The trip was financially supported by the City of Rotterdam. For a lot of what I have seen, heard and experienced during that week, I don't really have a frame of reference. The situation in Russia is historically, culturally and politically so complex that it is difficult to get a grasp on what is happening there at the moment. However, it is important to realise that what may appear like a situation of general chaos, disability and poverty, often has qualities that escape the Western observer. ('Western' refers rather imprecisely, but usefully, to the dominant cultural strands of the NATO world.) One of the strongest impressions I had was that the situation there is so different in terms of mentality and historical experience that, even though things look familiar on the surface, the actual content of conversations, of presentations, of artistic productions often remains rather obscure. The reality of that difference asks very important questions about the cultural developments of the twentieth century. There is, I believe, a lot to be learned from a looking the East European mirror.
The Third Reality Forum
The second International Forum for New Technologies in Art, "Third Reality", which took place from September 29 - October 2, 1995, was organised by Marina N. Baskakova and Nikolai V. Makarov of the Centre for Visual and Computer Arts. The Forum brought together artists, film directors and people from many academic institutions. Most of them came from Russia, esp. from St. Petersburg and Moscow, but there were also some guests from Austria, Finland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. In different forums, presentations were given about the use of new technologies in cinema, electronic music, and in media and electronic art. There were daily screenings and a competition of recent Russian video productions, presentations of international programmes, centres and festivals, and a small exhibition of Russian and Finnish videoart. (I myself gave two presentations. The first, "Interfacing Realities", in a session entitled, "The Nature of Image", was a 15 minute lecture about some theoretical aspects of our work at V2_Organisation, while the second was a half-hour talk about the history, current projects and future plans of V2. Both lectures were accompanied by a video screening of past projects realised at V2. They were held in English and translated simultaneously into Russian.) The organization of the Forum was good, and the tight schedule of the four-day event was realised entirely and on time. The technical equipment that was available was good, the translation satisfactory, as far as I can judge. The Forum was held in the conference hall of the Planetarium on Petrogradskij Island, a building that now houses a club and various entertainment venues besides the actual planetarium.
General Impressions on the Situation of Art and Media Technology
The works that were presented during the Forum, whether in the fields of cinema, video or music, instilled a strong feeling of datelines - colours, sounds, the whole aesthetics often seemed to derive from the early twentieth century. Yet, there seemed to be no critical or historical sense of this. For instance, the people from various institutes for electronic music (esp. from Kazan, from the St Petersburg conservatory, and from the Termen-Centre, Studio of Electronic Music, in Moscow) presented their recent work which sounded to my not very experienced ears like the kind of tracks done for experimental films in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. The Termen Vox, an instrument developed in 1920, was presented side by side with contemporary productions. It seemed as though there was no clear sense of the historical stages that have been passed through in this century, which is why artists now have top lough through the whole of the twentieth century again to acquire new aesthetic standards and a new sense of chronology which has been disrupted by having been largely cut off from international developments. This may highlight the fetishism of the New which often rules Western art production, but it also indicates the difficulty of contemporary Russian artists to conceptualise the work from the West which they get to know about. The same is true of the theoretical and critical discourse about art. The strict Western system of genres, of new and traditional art forms and the place they have within the chronology of modernity, has no post-Soviet equivalent - other than perhaps the chronologies of persecution and temporary thaw periods of the last sixty years. This results in the widespread absence of a coherent discourse about art, of art criticism and of discussion. Somebody at the conference explained to me that there was no tradition of public discussion, i.e. public demonstrations of dissent, which is why I couldn't expect any critical questions immediately after my presentations. Some people did come afterwards to ask questions, but others waited until I went up to talk to them, in which case one of them said, "oh, I'm happy that you come and talk to me, I wanted to ask you something," as though there was some kind of inhibition or threshold which they weren't supposed to pass. There were other peculiarities which fell outside Western conventions and which indicated to me that people were operating within quite a different mindframe: In one instance I was approached by one of the organising team members, saying that I could now come and ask some questions to the director of an animation film which we had just seen. I hadn't requested this opportunity, nor did I have a particular question, so I was lucky that somebody more important came to talk to her and I could sneak away, but it seems that there was some hidden economy of doing either me or her a favour which somebody was engineering from behind a screen, because the person who approached me clearly didn't exactly know what was going on either. At the end of the Forum, the organisers invited only the foreign guests upon the stage where we were put on display for a quarter of an hour and asked to say a few final words to the audience. Again, there seemed to be a subtext or convention to this scene which I didn't understand. For no apparent reason, the Forum was not presented as an event that would display and outline recent developments in the uses of new media in art, but as a search for what the Third Reality might actually be. (The idea being that, while our natural environment forms the first, and its fictional, mimetic representations the second reality, the new digital media have opened up the possibility of a third reality.) At the final ceremony, the organisers admitted that they were still uncertain what the Third Reality might actually be, and that we would have to come back together again at the third Forum in order to further explore the question. It was not clear whether there was some strategy behind this display of naivety, or whether it was a sincere expression of uncertainty about the actual/virtual content of the discussions of the previous days. A particularly weird experience was the encounter with a man who approached me on one of the last days of the Forum and requested my address because he wanted to write to me about a project about Hegel's Logic he had been working on. Slightly confused by this unexpected offer I wrote down my coordinates, including the e-mail address. He pointed to it and asked what it was, and after two attempts I had to realise that he had no conception of what electronic mail is. I was rather shocked by this, because this man had been sitting in the Forum for three days and had listened to presentations about the Internet and World Wide Web, about Cyberculture and computer animations. But what did he understand if the very concept of international computer networks escaped him? The crucial question for future collaborations that follows from this incident is once again the question of communication across cultural differences, and about the possibility of sharing and exchanging experiences. Another reason for the lack of discussion mentioned earlier may be a particular conception of what constitutes art production in relation to everyday life. There seems to be no clear distinction between the two spheres, as one person explained to me: the entire existence in Russia has been a stage play for such a long time, people have acted out certain personas and have performed their lives as works of art, that there is no art critical framework other than an existential questioning of somebody's very way of life. The notion of 'life as a performance' has brought some artists to the conclusion that the most exciting and most challenging stage at the moment is politics, and that it is with the Nationalists that they can do the most radical performances. This is not so much a political or ethical question, but one of radical aesthetics. For others, the conduct of their life as an artwork implies that there is no real necessity to ever finish things, to be on time, or to produce at all, which can make it difficult for people who try to organise events. Instead, the safest way of doing art projects is to let them happen spontaneously and evolve in due course - one thing that one should certainly bring to Russia is time and patience. Thus, what sometimes appeared to me as a lack of a discursive framework within which it would be possible to place productions and enunciations, makes for an anarchic situation in which some people replicate what they pick up from the West, while others use the temporary freedom to explore the possibilities of an unfunded and thus unregulated contemporary cultural environment. The latter are in the minority, but they exist, and I guess it is from these people that we can learn most. As one might guess, it is the young ravers and techno-dj's who are the first to merge with the current International Life Style. They are young people, both men and women, who go to clubs, listen to music, maybe use drugs, who are angry, anarchic, and who live on the internet as much as in the metropolis. Their trendy magazine is a new monthly publication from Moscow called Ptjuch, and their tastes and desires probably don't differ much from those of urban youths in Berlin, London or New York, even if their spending power may be limited. The music clips from the Moscow companies Signal and Coronado which were shown during the screenings for the Russian video competition were hardly distinguishable from the equivalent productions done in Rotterdam or Manchester.
A strong notion of art and of the human individual as the central cultural agent seem to prevail in many discussions. The experience in the West of pop art and of postmodernism, as well as the crude commercialisation of art in the last 25 years, have largely unrooted the myth of the autonomous, intending and creating artist, which has been replaced by the models of the entrepreneur and the engineer who are much less romantic about their work, even if sometime the attitude is part of their business plan. This important experience has no counterpart in Russia, where a modernist notion of the artist as a creative, sometimes priest-like outsider continues to exist. On the other hand, there is a very strong claim for interactivity proper for the participating audience of electronic artworks: if the artwork is not a painting that is open for the interpretation of the viewer, but a machine that facilitates a certain kind of experience, that experience must be as unregulated as possible, and open to the creative input of the users. People seem to be very perceptive when it comes to noticing structural constraints and the lack of personal freedom. The State hardly supports contemporary arts projects; talking to Andrei Zonin, director of the municipal Institute of Cultural Programmes, an agency that collects and distributes information about cultural activities in the city and publishes them in a monthly dossier of which 300 copies are printed, I learned that the city of St. Petersburg currently spends almost all of its cultural budget on maintaining the cultural heritage, and that Zonin's institute seeks to help making the connection between art initiatives and businesses, as this seems to be the most realistic way of tapping new resources for the arts. The art community therefore heavily relies on international foundations, especially the Soros Foundation which is the only institution that regularly funds local art projects; this means that every year hundreds if not thousands of people apply for grants with the Soros Foundation which can only support a small number of these projects. (Interestingly, the Soros Foundation has, through its activities over the past five to ten years, probably built up the largest archive of cultural activities in Eastern Europe, including realised and unrealised project proposals, visual material of individual artists and their activities, CVs of many artists, intellectuals and writers, their past and current affiliations; all of this material has been provided freely by the applying parties themselves.) A widely held notion is that nothing is to be expected of the State. A dominant feature of the old bureaucrats was that they constantly said 'no' to things. And even now what comes from the State is highly dubious, because it is believed that the same structures are simply cloaked in an ideologically less charged framework, while the mechanisms of nepotism, of profiteering, of bribery and blackmail are still in place, the main difference being a stronger flow of cash and a higher degree of physical violence at the lower level. One of the features of the contemporary situation is the search for referential frameworks for artistic and cultural work, as well as for the reconstruction of personal identities. I mentioned earlier that one of the effects of this search is the rather unsystematic approach to the productions of the twentieth century which seem to have equal currency, whether they come from the 1920s, the 50s or the 90s. In a similar fashion, reference is made to the pre-revolutionary past, which in some instances results in staunchly nationalist and fascist opinions about the motherland, but in other instances in the discovery of Russia's multi-ethnic origins, and even in the questioning of a genuine Russian culture as a whole. Like many of the other European nation states and their (post-)colonial satellites, Russia was conceived as a result of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperialism, uniting a host of different ethnic and cultural groups into what became the Russian and later the Soviet empire. A critical view, for instance, at the Russian language which was standardised in the nineteenth century reveals its composite nature, with roots in the Finnish, Turkish, French, German, and other linguistic families. In the widespread absence of the wish to continue the imposed homogenisation within the old empire, and given the apparent lack of a strong communal sense in Russian society, the realisation of the fragmentary nature of the very notion of what 'Russia' actually denotes may lead to more dramatic attempts at breaking free from a concept that has passed its sell-by date. The continuation of the heavy-handed, imperialist approach taken by the State is currently still containing a potentially anarchic situation. Unlike some of the other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, the Russian State structure has experienced neither a revolution nor significant democratic change since the mid-1980s. Conspiracy theories about the Mafia, about the old apparatus and about the KGB are rife, due mainly to a continuation of the politics of secrecy and opacity which assures people only of one thing, i.e. that they don't get to see the actual structures of power. The ensuing absence of respect for the State might, but I am aware that I'm treading thin ice here, have its correlate in a widespread lack of respect for other people and their work, and ultimately also for oneself. I may be exaggerating, but many people seem to be standing with their backs right up the wall, without security and without much trust in their environment, a situation which can result in blatant rejection, open hostility, the lack of critique, all of which are performed passionately. Many of these are highly educated people with a great cultural heritage, and very unstable contemporary cultural and everyday living circumstances. One of the dominant features of the West European social democracies is their communitarian ideology which affirms the existence of a strong, quasi-natural bond between the members of these societies. (It also makes for the smoothness with which the strategies of exclusion work in relation to those who are, for some reason or other, deemed not to belong to these societies.) In Russia there seems to be no such sense of community, and only unconnected fragments of a civil society. It has to be said that there are a few communitarian projects which are more positive in their outlook and which are intended as social and cultural provocations, trying to break the deadlock of the status quo. The qualification of certain phenomena in negative terms, as has been prevalent in the preceeding remarks, might be a mistake which, more than anything, reflects my own uncertainty about how to understand the current situation, and the wish to evaluate phenomena which are in flux and cannot really be anchored in a critical language. While trying to develop collaborations with different people and initiatives in Russia, it will for some time remain a precondition to actively accept the difference in approach and mentality, to allow for time to pass, for conversations to unfold, for exchange to happen, trying to understand the dynamics of the renewal which is underway. Some people have described the present situation as a cultural anarchy which actually has liberating effects for them. It might be that, in order for us to get in tune with this situation, we have to unlearn some of the debilitating securities which are the great social and cultural achievements of the Western democracies of the past twenty-five odd years.
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