<eyebeam><blast> Grzinic a solution

[yshikata@crpg.canon.co.jp (Yukiko Shikata)]

Here I am posting the comment of Marina Grzinic, as she failed to post
it to eyebeam by herself;

Yukiko Shikata

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Subject: Grzinic a solution

I was invited to this forum through Yukiko Shikata who informed me about
the details and about the access to the archive of the forum. There I
went through the e-mails and found interesting some questions posed by
Saskia Sassen. Follows some comments on the topic of territory and
public/net spaces:

What is happening on the Internet is increasingly seen and utilised as
the new public space. The Internet and World Wide Web are becoming the
space which is not only parallel to the public one, but is increasingly
substituting it. It is the gradual process of substituting the 'res
publica' with random information, and public opinion with communication.
'So called' public opinion is being formulated via the Internet and is
perhaps substituting the actual.

Every day the Internet and the WWW  seems to come closer to attaining
the position of the prime media and ideological communication force of
the 'so called' new world order named post-democracy. "Post-democracy is
a system in which democracy is thought of as a simple conjunction
between a state of the social (democratic 'individualism', and so forth)
and constitutional forms." (in 'Post-democracy, Politics and
Philosophy', an interview with Jacques Ranciere', Angelaki, 1 : 3,
London 1994.)

We need to reconsider both the public space and the new media space as
ideological, and as well their processes of transformation. This
mise-en-scene of the space can be viewed in today's terms as
ideological, precisely because it is so invisible and taken for granted.
Wehave to ask ourselves, in the manner of  Fredric Jameson: what space?

In the beginning of 1997 the opposition forces and students protested in
Belgrade because the party in power (lead by Slobodan Milosevic) refused
to recognize the victory of the opposition forces in the city elections
of Belgrade. The first hand information transmitted first via e-mails
and than spread through the WWW, but without additional analysis and
reflection  (i.e. about what is really going on in Belgrade and who is
all taking part in the protests) seemed to be enough to lead some of the
inhabitants of the WWW to proclaim that they were also taking part in
the 'Serbian' revolution because they were obtaining first hand and eye
witness information through the web. The community on the web and its
opinion were the sum total of read and forwarded messages and
informations obtained on the Internet.

An important question today concerning the Internet is still to identify
/following the decade of the fall of the Berlin wall/ who are the old
and new actors in the construction of this 'Brave New World', which is
possible to rename as the 'World Wide Web', and also who and how is
allowed  develop  a criticism of the Internet /The case od the
Kosovo'Albanians reports on the net/.

Marina Grzinic, Tokyo/Ljubljana  grzinic@img.t-kougei.ac.jp

Yukiko Shikata
postal address: Canon ARTLAB, 106-0032 Japan
Tel: 81-3-5410-3611 Fax: 3615 http://www.canon.co.jp/cast/
next exhibition by ARTLAB: May 10-21[at Spiral, Tokyo]
"LOVERS"(Teiji Furuhashi)+"frost frames"(Shiro Takatani)
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