Re: <nettime> Armin Medosch (1962-2017)

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

This is very sad news. The worrying started when Armin could not come to 
set up the Technopolitics Timeline exhibition at NGBK in Berlin last 
month - and it is now a shock to hear that he passed away so soon...

This thread on nettime has become, with its autobiographical 
reminiscences, somewhat of a collaborative portrait to which I also want 
to add. Armin will forgive me if, in the best, most friendly possible 
way, I start by saying that he was a charming pain in the ass. We first 
met in 1993 or early 1994 on the MS Stubnitz in Rostock and our 
acquaintance of over two decades has seen us quarrel more often than 
agree. When we were younger, we took ourselves very seriously and 
quarrelled in earnest, but later (particularly memorable was a dusk till 
dawn discussion we had at one of the RIXC festivals in Riga, maybe ten 
years ago) we understood that we had one of those very productive 
dissenting relationships that one should not take too emotionally. We 
first started arguing when in 1994 the report that I wrote for my future 
colleagues at V2 in Rotterdam, evaluating the possibilities and 
difficulties of potential collaborations with the Stubnitz project, 
turned out more critical (I thought: more realistic) than Armin could 
stomach at that moment. The ship went on its first big tour for the 
white nights of 1994 to St. Petersburg, a trip that Armin invited me to 
join and that I missed because I had a PhD thesis to finish at that 
moment. (A year or so later, the Stubnitz project was bankrupt and left 
the members of the group in debt, a burden that haunted Armin and his 
colleagues for many years afterwards; most of them, including Armin, 
left Rostock and the ship to do other things, while Urs Blaser and 
others stayed and still keep the ship afloat, currently in Hamburg.)

Armin's projects since, some of which have already been mentioned here, 
bridged in a unique way media activism and art, and for those of us who 
followed his work, the trajectory from his early TV activism days in 
Vienna with his own project Radio Subcom, through Stubnitz and the 
visionary art, science and technology exhibitions he curated with RIXC, 
to his book on the European 1960s New Tendencies movement - this 
trajectory is consistent and makes perfect sense, down to the fact that 
the latter book was also sort of a home-coming, dealing with an artist 
movement whose Croatian base in Zagreb was a mere three-hour drive from 
Armin's home town of Graz.

Our first direct contact that I remember after the 1994 conflict was 
when he invited me to contribute a text about Daniela Plewe's internet 
art project Muser's Service for an exhibition in the North East of 
Germany, very appropriately titled "Geben und Nehmen" (giving and 
taking). Collaboration, sharing and generosity are three of the big 
themes that I associate with Armin's professional practice. The earliest 
source that I can find at the moment is a booklet that was produced by 
Hans Ulrich Reck and others at the Angewandte in Vienna in 1994, 
entitled "Fernsehen der 3. Art" (television of the third kind). Armin's 
contribution argues for strategies for the integration of art into the 
mass media - with a focus on TV at the time, though he does say (without 
mentioning the word "Internet") that soon TV "will be transformed into 
an interactive meta-medium and a multi-facetted interface that will 
enable anything from private video-conferencing to video-shopping."

Coming from a provincial, punk and activist background, Armin was always 
very upfront and unafraid to pick an argument if there was one to pick. 
So in this forum of media activists meeting in Vienna in the aftermath 
of the first Next 5 Minutes conference, Armin said stuff like: "The 
so-called critics of the mass media, like the particularly fervent TV 
tribe of camcorder activists, the 3D-rendering species and other 
techno-heads, these are really the last true fans of TV."

He'd say things like this, partly because he knew that they would 
irritate people, and partly because he knew that they were true and 
needed saying. This is one of the character traits that made Armin 
special, and we can only hope that there will be more and other angry 
young people from the Central European borderlands, ready to throw a 
spanner in the works when a spanner needs to be thrown.

Farewell, Armin, and thanks.

-ab



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