Nettime

Nettime is an internet mailing list that was founded in June 1995 during the second meeting of the Medien Zentral Kommittee as a part of the Club Berlin event at the Venice Biennale, organised by Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz and Nils Roeller [1]. Since 1998, it has been moderated by Ted Byfield and Felix Stalder.

After the Venice meeting, a mailing list was made (fall 2005) where the writings by nettime members were published [2]. The list was meant to provide a space for a new form of critical discourse on and with the nets. For the meetings in Amsterdam, Madrid and Budapest, the postings to the mailing list were selected and xeroxed in 200 pages volumes entitled ZKP1, 2 and 3; this happened in January (at the Next 5 Minutes 2), June (Cyberconf5) and October (MetaForum 3) 1996. ZKP3.2.1 filtered the nettime postings all over again and was published in Ljubljana in November 1996. The list organized its own conference in Ljubljana in May 1997, called Beauty and the East (there ZKP4). ZKP5 was published by Autonomedia in February 1999. Additional Nettime meetings were held during events like HackIt (Amsterdam), the Chaos Communication Congress (Berlin), ISEA, the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), the MetaForum conference 95 (Budapest). The Hybrid Workspace drew heavily from Nettime during the Documenta X in Kassel.

Often understood as a European "on-line" salon, Nettime was initially a pre-publishing platform for international critical thinkers. Originally a mainly English language mailing list, other lists have been created for other languages. Nettime has been recognized for building up the discourse of Netzkritik or net critique (then named net.criticism), providing a backdrop and context for the emergence of net.art and influencing critical net culture in general.

Venice meeting, 1995

"The net.time meeting was organized by Pit Schultz, Nils Röller, and Geert Lovink. Involved in the organization of Club Berlin were, among others, Mercedes Bunz, Daniel Pflumm, and Micz Flor. One of the curators was Klaus Biesenbach. On the participant list were David Garcia, Heath Bunting, David D’Heilly, Paolo Azuri, Claudia Cataldi, Vuk Cosic, Hans-Christian Dany, Camillo De Marco, Paul Garrin, Carlos Leite de Souza, Alessandro Ludovico, Siegfried Zielinski, Diana McCarty, Suzana Milevska, Roberto Paci Dalo, Katja Reinert, Gereon Schmitz, and Tommazo Tozzi. The email invitation and some of the correspondence related to the Venice meeting were posted on the nettime list a few years later for archival purposes. A one-hour radio program produced by Geert Lovink for the Dutch VPRO radio and containing interviews with Garrin, Dany, Cosic, Bunting, Schmitz, and Schultz can be found at [3]." (from Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p 110)

Name

"The name <net.time> was chosen by Pit Schultz, who, known for his critique of the space metaphor within electronic media, was drawn to the idea of a network-specific time as a possible common experience. 'The time of nettime is a social time, it is subjective and intensive, with condensation and extractions, segmented by social events like conferences and little meetings, and text gatherings for export into the paper world. Most people still like to read a text printed on wooden paper, more then transmitted via waves of light. Nettime is not the same time like geotime, or the time clocks go. Everyone who programs or often sits in front of a screen knows about the phenomena of being out of time, time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, bandwidth, the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as a asynchronous network of synchronized time zones.' From the Archives: Introduction to nettime (draft by Pit Schultz for ZKP 3), nettime, April 8, 1998 (original from October 9, 1996)." (from Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p 110)

Publications

• ZK Proceedings 95: Net Criticism. Amsterdam, Jan 1996. [4] [5]
• ZKP2, Madrid, Jun 1996. [6] [7] [8] [9]
• ZKP3, Budapest, Oct 1996. [10] [11]
• ZKP3.2.1, Ljubljana, Nov 1996. [12]
• (ZKP4) The Beauty and the East, eds. Pit Schultz, Diana McCarty, Geert Lovink, and Vuk Cosic, Ljubljana, May 1997.
• Netzkritik: Materialien zur Internet-Debatte, eds. Pit Schultz and Geert Lovink, trans. Bettina Seifried, Florian Rötzer and Thomas Atzert, Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997, 220 pp. [13] (German)
• (ZKP5) ReadMe! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime, eds. Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Pit Schultz, Felix Stadler, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding, New York: Autonomedia, Feb 1999, 556 pp.
• (NKP6) Net.art Per Me. Catalogue of the Slovenian Pavillion, Venice Biennale, 2001. [14]

Literature

• Inke Arns, "Translokale Netzwerke: Mailinglisten", in Arns, Netzkulturen, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002. (German)
• Ted Byfield, "nettime— Fortsetzung folgt...", in Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, eds. Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, pp 39-46. (German)
• "Interview mit Pit Schultz", in Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, eds. Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, pp 75-79. (German)
• McKenzie Wark, "The Silver Age of Social Media: Nettime.org and the Avant-Garde of the '90s", in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul, Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp 400-412.

Links

• http://www.nettime.org
• http://www.nettime.org/pub.html
• Nettime press conference, Vienna, May 1997 [15] [16]
• Geert Lovink, "Overview of Nettime Lists and Activities", 3 Mar 2002.
• "nottime: the end of nettime" discussion thread, April 2015.