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Johannes Birringer
 

Little attention was given last year to a performance prototype,Project ATOL's Makrolab, which assumed a unique position in the spectrum of displays at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany (June-September, 1997) by remaining virtually invisible. It thus enacted a more poignant subversion of the material strategies of exhibition than most of the other didactic examples of critical and political are practices assembled by Documenta director Catherine David. Rather than parodying global networks or creating an aesthetic critique of them, Makrolab's scientific investigation of globalization took on a concrete political dimension that most of the visual and new media artworks lacked entirely. In the following, I will try to sketch this dimension.

The physical structure of the prototype is a futuristic-looking research lab designed by Slovene artist Marko Peljhan and his team Project Atol. It was installed for the first time at Documenta X. From afar Makrolab looked like a UFO that had landed on the edge of the Lutterberg forest, 15 miles outside of the city. Once I was able to locate its geographical position and the dirt roads leading to it, I recognized the functionalist design I had seen in the computer sketches on Peljhan's website. Erected on metallic stilts, the tent-like body of the ship housed two parts, one for sleeping, living, and personal hygiene, the other for technological and scientific research. A connection to the theatre or a stage set was not evident, although Peljhan, emerging from the local context of the collective avant-garde movement NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) in Ljubljana, had found his own voice in a series of unusual theatre projects he staged with his group in Slovenia and Eastern and Northern Europe since 1992. When I first saw the ATOL performances, they were accompanied by manifestos defining the work as long-term research into "evolutionary utopian conditions." The 28-year-old artist, who had developed an early passion for short-wave radio and techno-scientific scenographies, harbors a vivid interest in the futurist visions of the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922). His own performances, installations, films, lectures, and constructions are neither fantastical nor limited to Familiar conceptions of "theatre." Rather, Makrolab's theatre of operations is researchoriented and site-specific while neither modifying the site nor requiring an audience.

The team consists of nine persons, including the technical designers. During my first visit to Lutterberg after the completion of the lab construction, three were still present (Peljhan, Luka Frelih, and Brian Springer, a collaborator from the U.S.). Makrolab constitutes the fourth phase in a work cycle named Ladomir Faktura in reference to Khlebnikov's futurist poem "Ladomir" written at the beginning of the century. In the poem Khlebnikov describes a universal landscape of the future rising through wars and the destruction of the old world and the synthesis of the new. Imagined as a kind of synaesthesia of abstract scientific and tactile sensorial processes, the Khlebnikovian "science of the individual" is a training stage for sensory connections to the environment. According to the poet, wireless transmissions and communications play an important role in the exploration of new concepts of time and space on our planet. The individual needs to study the experience in new time-space and reflect scientifically on changing constellations of harmony ("lad") and peace ("mir").

Khlebnikov's projection of the future, at the end of a century of failed utopias and dismantled revolutions, may appear pathetic, yet Peljhan assures me that he finds the poetry of the projection inspiring, and above all he is concerned with creating a method and technique ("faktura") for individual, autonomous human beings. The performance dimension of the lab, then, requires learning the techniques of building isolated/insulated environments as a survival experiment in a narrow, concentrated workspace which at the same time functions as an independent communications organism designed to receive and transmit information.

The lab is envisioned as an autonomous modular communications and living environment, powered by sustainable sources of energy (solar and wind power) and designed for a long existence in isolation. Paradoxically, the opportunity to build and test the prototype arrived when Peljhan was invited to participate in Documenta X. He decided to place the lab outside of the Documenta exhibitions. Though invisible to the artworld, it remained linked to the world via hypermodern satellite, radio, and computer technologies which form the operational base for its "research and experience goal," a combination of various "scientific and technological logistics systems." Set up on a hill Peljhan chose from his maps of the area, Makrolab had its antennae and satellite dishes directed towards the equator. Soon it became a familiar sight to the nearby farmers and golf players who thought of it as a weather station. None of them associated the lab with an artwork, and the steady stream of Documenta visitors wouldn't have known of its existence unless they paused to examine the informational archive at a small console in Documenta-Halle. There one could find valuable insights into the construction, concept, background, financing, objectives, methods, and collaborative nature of Peljhan's project gathered on microfilm and also accessible through the ML website. Included in this rich archive were sensitive materials (e.g., the document "Command, Communicacions, and Control in Eastern Europe") examining military and logistical strategy in the post-communist East; others yielded translations of Khlebnikov's theory of time and the "skybooks."

As an art installation, the experimental arrangement was provocative: the ATOL seam secluded itself; there was no work of art exhibited. If the visitor looked at the console, s/he wouldn't actually see anything but a small, black metallic user platform, equipped with the microfilm device, two small video monitors for the microwave link to Makrolab and the Internet, and a radio telephone. One could establish communications with the crew via radio or e-mail if one took the time to read the instruction manual. Small metallic plates explain in a dozen languages the project's objectives, which operate entirely on the level of mediation. The console offered information and a place to work, a neutral site with the potential to function as an intercom link to the people in the lab. Only very few Documenta visitors seemed to take up the offer. After initial curiosity, many left quickly or clicked impatiently at the mouse for a while. Two days after the opening, someone broke the glass of the microfifm device-one of the metallic plates disappeared, and Peljhan told me he was dismayed by the apparent aggression triggered by the console. "I thought to create a tool that people who want to know more about the project could use. It turns out to be a tool that many people who don't speak English cannot use and a tool that is not set into the right context. It is still an exhibition, people look at it. They assume that the gaze will provide something to them, an experience, a feeling, a chought. But the console is of course a completely functional element, a definite tool." Besides being a toolbox, the console was also a transmitter, a modem. On the monitors one could clearly see a video live feed of two people at work in the lab, somewhere else. A second camera showed the lab from the outside, the wind moving gently across the corn field. For Peljhan, working in insulated/isolated environments is a progressive activity in time: the process of adaptation is a rehearsal and memorization of creative spiritual, social, and ecological relations to the universe. In another sense, the rehearsal in isolation is contradictory, since Makrolab is both an observatory that is scanning an emergent political economy of global transactions, and it is itself not private or unmonitored since it operates within the frequencies of telecommunications. It also cannot avoid being checked our by friends, Documenta staff, and chose whose stubborn curiosity drives them out to the hill. When I asked Peljhan why he allowed occasional visitors (like myself) to intrude into the lab, he explained that the Documenta context made it necessary to allow limited contact in order to facilitate feedback between console and lab. The funniest incident is reported in the ML bulletin 014: On Saturday the most amazing event and visit Makrolab has seen up to now-60 children from the summer camp Elke and her friends are organizing. We had to pretend we were excraterrestrials that have just landed on Lutterberg, donned the funny white radiation protection suits that Luka left. It's all on camera for the documentary, the kids seemed to enjoy it, we felt stupid but it was fun. Played some interesting modulations for them and measured them. Quite a surreal scene. . . . Today the last of the Makrolab news radio bulletins for hr2 was finished. We used intercepted communications and Khlebnikov's texts.

The time of a new "synthesis," Peljhan implies, has already begun with the implementation of vast global telecommunications networks and knowledge-based information industries. The open windows of analogue media like shortwave radio are dosing rapidly. As they are supplanted by the growing spread of digitized data transmission, "this is a unique opportunity," Peljhan argues, "to have one last glimpse at the curve of the analogue spectrum before it closes forever. A complete set of new knowledge is needed." For the exploration of evolutionary social conditions in a world of increasingly complex intelligence systems, the individual needs to make appropriate physical, psychic and material preparations for survival in postterritorial and perhaps ungovernable information societies. In the sense in which Peljhan understands the Makrolab process, ATOL's experimental research is not contingent upon the Documenta or the art market. The exhibition merely offered an occasion to initialize the laboratory construction in the Documenta framework of "manifestations" and, in a way, simulate the construction of the module as a performance.

Reminiscent of the Russian Constructivist avant-garde, ATOL understands its working and learning process to take place in real time and concrete living circumstances, enabling the creative communication of individual forces to converge into a scientific/psychic entity. In calling Makrolab an "autonomous communications and living environment" designed to be self-sufficient, Peljhan sees isolation/ insulation as a "vehicle to achieve independence from, and reflection of, the actual entropic social conditions." The lab thus constructs and monitors its own micro-social events in the communications module while testing the tools co monitor and observe the flow of data in the electro-magnetic spectrum.

The self-organization of the Makrolab team presents an effort to develop an empirical and operational training in the use of scientific/technological tools, knowledge and systems, but with the intention of projecting them into the social domain of art. The "system of art," Peljhan contends, is used to transcribe invisible and micro-environmental activities, to render and document found data which can be sensed in the abstract areas of the electro-magnetic spectrum only via suitable interfaces and specialized knowledge. At the same time, the electro-magnetic spectrum is of course part of the global social-political space. New forms of communicative actions between individuals and corporate bodies create altered parameters for our definitions of politics, public space, regulatory authority, and participatory democracy.

The construction of the process as "artistic training" is remarkable both for its consequences and its tactical subtlety, since Peljhan's declaration of Ladomir Fakcura as an artistic strategy meant that he had to invest considerable energy into its production and promotion as an independent work, especially as he sought to remain unaffiliated and to survive in the fledgling alternative scene in Ljubljana without signing on to private or industrial sponsorship. If one looks at the technical design of the module, it becomes clear that Makrolab has the contours of a scientific research lab, allowing the artists access to a wide spectrum of short wave, L-Band, and mobile radio frequencies, tele-printer and satellite telephone systems (INMARSAT), Internet and satellite video transmissions. They can communicate with radio amateurs around the world, but if their monitoring and decoding equipment gives them access to the electro-magnetic spectrum of transnational audio and data traffic, it means they can approximate the kind of surveillance and "intelligence gathering" ordinarily reserved to the military, the state, and large private corporations or media conglomerates. Makrolab thus harbors an emancipatory dimension that touches upon the electronic frontier as a new social space. Exploring autonomy and free access, the lab stakes its claim in the future of a decentralized nternet and open, uncontrolled user interfaces allowing the sharing of information. Peljhan's team has no illusions about the privileged institutional, governmental, and corporate interests competing for the reconfiguration of telecommunications infrastructures and staking their claims for relentless commodification, universal or restricted access, encryption and censorship. Launching an artistic process that yields knowledge and insight into the evolution of the electronic "public sphere," Makrolab intervenes into the radio and telecommunications circuits to test the conditions under which transmission technologies operate and under which the relations among communicating individuals can be empowered. Intervention, concretely, means observation and communication, but it can also mean interception, reproduction, recombination. In monitoring radio and satellite links; Peljhatis team moves on the borders of legality and the power lines that exist among the regulatory regimes of various public and private data transmission networks. The question who controls which telecommunications services within the global i nformation processing suggests a political minefield, and it is obvious that there will be countless disadvantaged users or off line citizens in the world without access to the network infrastructures of the so-called "cyber-community."

On its autonomous platform, Makrolab declares itself an observatory that uses suitable tools to monitor or "sense" the spectrum. It can gather information about valuable data concerning securiry, the environment, weather, health, economic and financial transactions, political conflicts, and scientific research. In doing the kind of observation and analysis generally conducted by institutional, private, and state monopolies, Makrolab takes on a counter-position, a heterotopic praxis of information gathering" that extracts valuable data from supra-individual, corporate, and transterritorial networks, making them available and also demonstrating how they can be shared. Brian Springer joined the team because of his concerns about "deregulation" and the "free market" of public transmissions. In his recent film Spin (1995), a montage of pirated satellite feeds (appropriated during commercial break or just before a television interview or teleconference), he created an extraordinary deconstruction of the routine manipulation of broadcast news and the collusion between U.S. politicians and the media.

Springer poses the question of legality differently: "Anyone with a home satellite dish, which is 4 million, can receive these unencrypted feeds," he argues, and the issue here is: what is a public broadcast and what is a common carrier. A broadcast is something that goes out to a mass public. A common carrier is something like letter. For example, one could find Philip Morris Television Network doing, or now and then, a corporate teleconference which, from their lawyers' point of is a private transmission. My point of view is that it is public since it is scrambled. What happens if a letter is broadcast across a whole continent, when not encrypted? Many contradictions arise over what is public and what is private. The satellite's broad beam pushes them to the surface."

Springer's background is in independent video production. Watching him work in the lab day and night with complicated decoding equipment makes me realize what extent older avant-garde production techniques (cut-up, collage, the readymade situationist drive, etc.) have been replaced by recombinant methods and transitions in the digital era of programming. Springer and Peljhan work at the interface of old and new media and technologies, but their operational reference points a longer art but political economies and new semi-public spheres, no longer museums but NGOs and "tactical media" networks such as nettime. Tinkering with toolbox of net technologies and opening alternative channels of interaction exchange (the "gift economy" of net activists), such tactical initiatives economic analysis of corporate logistics on one hand, and new forms of organisation, group-ware channelling, and non-profit models of decentralised public-access connectivity on the other. At the bottom level, for many of users work as freelance artists, lies the issue of economic survival outside the official corporate states. With a bemused smile, Springer cells me that his work-in-progress is "self deregulation."

Information infrastructures and inter-operable networks exist in a highly contented arena of private interests and governmental claims, especially since politically and global information infrastructures cannot be governed: there are too many different national regulatory and operational practices, currencies, and stages of telecommunications development in the world today. The stunning success of the Internet's decentralized communication system is a case in point, since its operational horizontal network disrupts familiar ideological conceptions of political authorised state security, data protection, and regulatory jurisdiction. Ironically, the origin of the Internet derive from the U.S. Defense Department's Cold War strategy decentralized computer networks (ARPANET), whereas recent attempts to immense restrictions to open communication and free content have been met with the counter-cultural resistance of programmers and hackers. The digital technology of instantaneous transmission and duplication operates in the borderlands of surveillance, encryption, and hacking. The Makrolab team knows it might be in between the protected and unprotected areas of the spectrum interactivities behaves as a para-site. This is where communication starts to get interesting, Peljhan believes, and where "the medium does what it does best, which is communicate. And where culture does what it does worst, which is communicate. We are investigating if the collision of these best and worst characteristics create an interesting stage for intervening in the transnational flow of information."

The "art" of monitoring the information flow, with independent status and limited resources, is a long-term project which requires mobility and the continuous accumulation of experience in the exchange and interpretation of data. Peljhan plans the successive transplantation of the module to Canada, Japan, England, and the Negev Desert, accepting invitations from other alternative artists or organizations. He was already invited to present film lectures on Makrolab at the South Africa Biennial and the "Code Red" conference in Australia, and he attended the HIP (Hacking in Progress) meeting in Holland to exchange information on decompression and decoding techniques. While computer users generally work out of their homes, the lab's position is transient. Its trajectory in time is in itself modular, and in this sense Makrolab does not position itself vis-a-vis geographically defined, juridicial or disciplinary territories, as much as it transcends common aesthetic categories of art. Its performance of a "weather station" is a brilliant parody of the now dysfunctional "panopticon" structure of immanent regulatory systems based on state authority or management control.

For the defence of decentralized networks, the appropriation of the means of production is vital for on-line participation in the new formations of political arenas. These arenas nowadays are constructed through electronically mediated communications-public speech and participation no longer characterize late capitalist, translocal spaces of communication without bodies. Peljhan's tactics respond to this shift: Makrolab becomes a mobile space station on our planet of networks, articulating what Michel Foucault described as "heterotopia"-an incongruous "site" in which "all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted." This symbolic play of revetberation echoes above all in transitory, temporal registers (like communication flows) and yet constitutes a break "with traditional time" through its discontinuous structuring of openings and closings. Makrolab resembles a space ship, a search engine that orbits around the spectrum of public and private data networks and telematic nervous systems, fishing and analyzing signals, mapping voices, intercepting transmissions. [An electronic music track Peljhan created out of intercepted messages, titled "Signal Territories," was aired on German radio in September 1997.]

It directs its antennae and satellite dishes at the increasingly virtual democratic "communities" of civil society and tests the new human-machine assemblages that operate in transnational networks no longer based on identifiable public goods. Increasingly, the shared experience in contemporary civil society is one of disaffiliation. Entrances to effective socio-political orders, like cultural identification and the historical solidarity between citizenship and nationality, begin to disappear as the older national topographies dissolve. It is conceivable that soon we won't speak of nation states anymore but of interconnected infrastructures.

The Makrolab crew performs a symbolic analysis of intelligent systems, but according to Foucaulc's metaphor of the heterotopic ship, it has built a floating piece of space, a "place without a place that exists by itself, closed in on itself and at the same time given over to the infinity of the sea." Peljhan and his collaborators are aware of the climate of risk in which they maneuver their counter-surveillance strategies, and the artistic challenge is to make this risk experienceable in the social and existential construction of their atoll.

JOHANNES BIRRINGER is an independent theatre and media artist who directs a digital dance studio in Houston. His new book, Media & Performance, is forthcoming (Johns Hopkins University Press/PAJ Books, 1998).