<eyebeam><blast> dissenting voices

[ursula biemann <biemann@access.ch>]

Jordan Crandall asked:
>I know that in one instance in Just Watch you employed the format of
>the world newscast, with a backdrop that signified a global sattellite
>transmission, as a platform for endorsed speech.  Is this one of the
>cross-platforms that somehow helped to coordinate the diverging terms
>of discourse -- the different languages, positions, and histories? I'm
>wondering what operative formats arose.

No Jordan,
Unfortunately we cannot conclude that the global satellite dish can
stand for a platform of endosed speech. The image was taken from a
Nigerian newscast and they don't exactly congure up notions of free
speech. The image also resembles a tv spot of the BBC Business Channel.
Satellite channels promised to open up possibilities of a greater
variety of voices to be heard when in fact the opposite is happening.
State tv channels at least can be sued for not including certain
representations whereas satellite channels don't uplink from the
receiving national territory anymore, they are out of reach.
What did provide a certain platform for the discussion around identity
politics in the media was the connection made between media strategies
and the political, socio-cultural and economic conditions of that
particular geography. Media producers find themselves precisely at the
interface between transnational territory of a the global civil society,
as Saskia Sassen says, and the work conditions defined by the local
media landscape and political climate of their site of production. So
questions of locality become vital. That's not to say that I endorse the
maintenance of national
boundaries.
There is always the danger of art being severed from the social context,
the internet will be yet another space where this will tend to happen.
Now that art/museum and the cultural industry have formed some kind of
homogenous totality of the capitalist organisation of symbolic
production, we might soon lack any type of specificity and have to find
other fields of activity that could open up spaces of resistance and
contestation. What could those other strategies be if not relentlessly
inserting dissenting voices to complicate the discussion and to
critically deconstruct a fake unanimity?

ursula biemann



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