Abstract

LIVEMEDIA is an artists’ project based in Barcelona that collaborates with cultural and academic centres in Spain and Latin America. Its aim is to exploit the platform of the Internet as a live environment for transcultural and interdisciplinarian artistic collaborations.

The digital technologies of the Internet signal the opportunity to both see and communicate in new ways. They permit an inquiry of new aesthetic paradigms for new kinds of artistic interactions, in both “online” and “offline” environments.

Central to this presentation is Felix Guattari’s observation, “But how, with […] this fragmentation of interfaces, can we still speak of Universes of value?”

The importance attached to Guattari’s sentence resides in two factors: the constant redefining of the Internet’s online<->offline interface, and the perpetually transformative space of the Internet (manifested by the ever changing W3C standard for HTML), where “value” is fragmented by infinite streams of emergences, manipulations and assemblages.

LIVEMEDIA investigates the Internet’s emergent “live topologies”, where communication is subject to advanced techniques of control, where experiences complexify and disperse, where assemblages populate and differentiate processes. Following the theorist of network culture Geert Lovink, and his call for a “distributed aesthetics”, the presentation will propose that live electronic art is itself being transformed from the “new” and “formal” to the “distributive” and “situated”.

Implicit to this change is the need for a heterogeneous conceptualisation of networks, one that rejects the cartographic tradition of “mapping networks”, for a potential architecture of “strategic transmissions”: where protocols, operative connections and nodes are at one moment, conditionally distributed on diachronic time, and on the other, situated within an “intensive space of depth”. From the theses of Gilles Deleuze [Difference and Repetition] and Manuel DeLanda [Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy], LIVEMEDIA’s network for distributive media will be presented as an Intensive Spatium.

• Andrew Colquhoun & María de Marías (Spain), lab-livemedia.net

Full text (PDF) p.  116-117