It seems harrowing, after 15 or 16 years of work in the UK to establish the claims of the black arts and black film/video sectors, since the days of the Greater London Council's anti-racist campaigns in the arts and media, to be facing the same arguments again. My heart sank, I have to say, at the closing plenary of ISEA96, to hear the passionate voices of Dispersed Data raise arguments that I first heard a decade and a half ago, and to realise that they still had the ring of truth.
You get complacent. I spent a few months in the University of Chicago in 95, and when I got back to London, I was suddenly at ease. The virtual apartheid that operates around the U of C campus, an island of wealth and prestige in the middle of the immense South Chicago ghetto, seemed utterly distant from the mix of faces and accents in the streets and pubs of North London. I don't mean to be naive: I recognise that racism is an institutional and psychological structure deeply built into the British, especially perhaps the English psyche. But the extraordinary work performed by groups like the Association of Black Workshops and Third Text in the 80s seemed to have moved us on from the victimology which seemed to be being voiced in Rotterdam.
In the work of artists and intellectuals in the UK, perhaps it was possible for a white intellectual to believe he could spy a departure from the stranglehold of a dialectic between victims and positive images. The film work of Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, the art promoted the Drum in Birmingham and by the Institute for the New International Visual Arts, the writings of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, all seemed to point towards a far more open and diverse culture. Though London is in the stranglehold of the tourist trade of a world city, and addicted to the blockbuster art show and big names in the commercial galleries, the regional arts scene felt far more international, multicultural and generally alive.
But the advent of a self-organising global art scene has changed the parochial certainties, and we have to thank Displaced Data for forcing us out of celebration. Globalisation is only distinguishable from imperialism by the relative weighting of military, political and commercial factors. The preponderance of English, the universality of the QWERTY keyboard, the omnipresent individualised monitor, the hegemony of Cartesian perspective are telling examples of the familiarity that we now assume with the trappings of a Western view of what the digital media are and may become. The recent shift that allows us to refer to the Christian calendar as the 'Common Era' is a further entrenching of the same globalising tendency.
The most effective digital artists are those who not only access the existing machinery, but alter it. 'The author who does not teach other authors teaches no-one' said walter Benjamin. It is not enough to promote access to the existing system. I believe we need to invite a broad debate about what the apparatus might become, a debate conducted not only verbally (or in English) but in the practical philosophy of creation, an act, to take the theme of ISEA98, of permanent re/evolution.
My small immediate contribution will be to build a website for Third Text in the new year (I will post the address here as soon as there is something to look at: Third text is also actively looking to promote critical writing and reviewing in the digital arts - you can contact them via me or directly in London , phone/fax +44 (0)171 372 0826) which I hope also to be able to hotlink to individual artistsŐ and other websites - please forward URLs.
Two sites I will be linking to straight away, and which you may care to visit,
are the ERaM (Ethnicity, Racism and the Media) pages maintained by Apurba Kundu
at the University of Bradford :
http://www.brad.ac.uk/research/eram/wwwsites.html
and a new site developed by Ziauddin Sardar, editor of Futures and editor of the
excellent collection Cyberfutures published this year by Pluto Press. This
e-zine, Others, bristles with antagonism, and has some remarkable hotlinks: you
can find it at :
http://www.others.com/
What strikes me most about such work is their intense openness, the radical
unbuilding of disciplinary boundaries. In relation to Lily Diaz' post about the
names monopoly, you can see the disciplinary structure of the West in the very
categories of the basic library cataloguing devices which function now globally
via search engines. The knowledge architectures of the capitalist powers are
still intensively ingrained in the structures of cyberspace. These works begin
the long task of disassembling them. I hope that in ISEA we can make our
contribution.
Regards
Sean
Sean Cubitt
Liverpool John Moores University
Dean Walters Building
St James Road
Liverpool L1 7BR
UK
44 (0)151 231 5030
Fax
44 (0)151 231 5049