<nettime> Nettime Listening Post

[David Garcia via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Time Passed and Something Happened
A Brief Report from the Nettime Listening Post-

This is an informal report from the nettime meeting in Berlin of two 
weeks ago. As it turns out I reluctantly found myself organising and 
moderating the final stages of the meeting. So this report will miss a 
great deal out and get some stuff wrong. Anyone who knows better please 
don’t hesitate to chip in.

1.	The idea of Nettime Listening Post (NLP) is to begin re-visiting 
‘real-life’ gatherings as a way of re-vitalising the list. Inspired by 
how such meetings were the basis from which Nettime (and other related 
mailing lists) sprung up as a means of keeping discussions moving once 
participants had gone their separate ways. One could even imagine key 
concepts such as ‘collaborative text filtering’ as serendipitous 
by-products of shuttling between these different communicative 
modalities. For many of us nettime was the moment the internet suddenly 
made the right kind of sense. Like those early meetings NLP sought to 
benefit from partnering with a larger public event, in this case we were 
an independently ticketed ‘partner event’ of Transmediale, Berlin’s 
annual Media Art festival.

2.	There is no way of not talking about the Gaza war and its effect- 
Like the rest of Transmediale the meeting took place against this dark 
backdrop.  As it should The war overshadowed the festival. It was 
sobering to witness Transmediale itself undergoing a kind of collective 
“nervous breakdown” as scheduled artists withdrew as part of the 
“strike” against state funded cultural institutions, leaving a number of 
empty spaces whilst festival organisers and even panellists were being 
subjected to pressure from all sides. On one side there were what can 
only be described as McCarthyite tactics to force the festival to 
refrain from criticising Israel whilst from the other side the pressure 
was on organisers to simply cancel, sacrificing its power as a 
progressive platform. Its hard for those of us who don’t live in Germany 
to imagine the extent to which the post-war German state perceives 
itself as existentially defined by its support for the state of Israel. 
As a non-German speaker, I have probably already said too much. 
Hopefully others on the list far better qualified than I can speak to 
the local situation. The horror of Gaza changes everything in ways we 
are still struggling to understand.

3.	The workshop venue was Panke Gallery and the event was listed as 
‘sold out’, but perhaps owing to the distance of the Gallery from the 
main venue and its obscure location and minimal signage we had far fewer 
participants than expected. The late change of date was also part of the 
problem. But those who made it were highly engaged. Panke Gallery and 
the space’s director Sarkowski (who joined the discussion) represent the 
best of Berlin's alternative cultural scene. A graffiti festooned and 
somewhat punk space, intimate without being cramped, informal but also 
professional when it needed to be. Paradise lost!

4.	It was reassuring that as well as men “of a certain age” there were a 
clearly active bunch of lurkers some of them quite young and all of whom 
were well versed in classic nettime tropes and questions, but who only 
very occasionally intervened on the list. Fortunately, this gathering 
was not all male or all white.

5.	Its surprising just how many people present declared themselves too 
intimidated to join the on-line discussions but were articulate and 
insightful in the meeting. One important proposal was to invite and 
support a number of guest editors from different demographics who might 
introduce new threads and different voices. One woman volunteered and 
took my details… She has not yet got back to me. I hope she is reading 
this. I should have taken her details but as I said I was a ‘sole 
trader’ so you know.

6.	A number of the women present got stuck in to addressing the question 
of limited inclusivity head on and events took a humorous turn by 
suggesting that the old boys (some of whom they were quite fond of) 
might be quietly shuffled off to some nettime equivalent of ‘sheltered 
accommodation’.

7.	It was great that one of Nettime’s founder members Pit Schultz was 
present and made characteristically vivid and passionate interventions. 
He was also very positive about the meeting (not always a given). Pit's 
main point was that nettime had been as much in the thrall of a kind of 
“complacent fin de siècle globalisation” as any branch of the 
neo-liberal consensus and was still struggling to transcend its starting 
point of critical media culture’s resistance to whatever is today’s 
version is of the Californian Ideology. And that this transatlantic 
dialectic has long ago unravelled and a spent force. He is currently 
working with a group of activists in Vietnam.. watch this space

8.	Researcher Alexandra Barancova was present as one of the organisers 
of the Tactical Archives conference in Rotterdam (with Eric Kluitenberg) 
and she suggested that a follow up to the ‘nettime listening post’ 
meeting could be hosted in Amsterdam in September this year as the 
concluding symposium for the exhibition 'Knowledge Wars' at the  
Framer/Framed gallery.

9.	Sarkowski was also positive about another nettime meeting at Panke 
same time next year

10.	Speaking of ‘Tactical Archives’ we were keen to discuss how better 
use could be made of the extensive and rich nettime archive. And in that 
regard we were joined on-line by Michael Dieter, Mark Tuters and David 
Gauthier all three researchers had written a significant journal article 
on the importance of mailing lists based on dialogues with list editors 
at the time including Melinda Rackham for empyre and Andreas Broeckmann 
for Spectre... Their declared aim is “ to both introduce these lists to 
the emerging field of internet history and scope out medium-specific 
methods that take the measure of concepts, discourses, cohorts, and 
events that have taken place through them over time. “ (quote from the 
abstract)

11.	In the meantime here is a link to the pre-publication version in the 
Warwick archive: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/133705/

12.	The zoom link to all three worked very well. They gave a great tour 
of the data-base application that David developed some years ago to make 
nettime and a number of other text based list archives more 'legible' 
and able to reveal historical patterns and shifting trends and generally 
make list archives more usable. I don't feel competent to represent the 
discussion that followed but it became clear that there is a landscape 
of new tools for transforming list archives into more accessible forms 
of database and it would be great if the current moderators could 
connect with David, Marc and Michael and take this to the next level.

13.	I was worried that in setting aside 3 hours for the meeting we were 
biting off more that we could chew. I needn't have worried the 
conversation never flagged. And like all the best meetings “time passed 
and something happened.” See you in Amsterdam.

David Garcia



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