José Luis Brea: La era Postmedia: Acción comunicativa, prácticas(post)artísiticas y dispositivos neomediales (2002) [Spanish]

Acaso uno de los sueños programáticos de las vanguardias que más ha quedado en suspenso, con el transcurso del siglo 20, sea el de generar “comunidades de productores de medios”, para utilizar la conocida expresión de Bertold Brecht. Su experimentación con la radio, la de los artistas soviéticos con el cine, la de las neovanguardias sesentayochistas con el vídeo, la tele-guerrila o el cine expandido, todas ellas han fijado un sueño nunca realizado (pero tampoco nunca abandonado): el de desarrollar -a través de la propia práctica artística, concibiendo ésta por tanto como activismo a la vez político y medial- esferas públicas autónomas, dispositivos de interacción social capaces de inducir entre los ciudadanos modos de comunicación directa, no mediada por el interés de las industrias o los aparatos de estado.

La aparición de la red internet ha venido a renovar y actualizar la virtualidad de ese sueño. Cabe incluso afirmar que la aproximación del mundo del arte al de la red ha estado marcada por la cautivadora fantasmagoría de ese programa, revisitado. Entre tanto, han surgido maneras y lenguajes artísticos entregados a experimentar las potencialidades formales del nuevo soporte, dando lugar a eso que ya es habitual denominar net.art. Pero al mismo tiempo, cabe reconocer un espíritu de activismo que concentra sus esfuerzos justamente en el desarrollo de tales “comunidades de productores de medios”. En este caso se trata de “comunidades web”, que se encuentran e intercambian sus producciones generando sus propios dispositivos de interacción pública, sus propios “medios”, en un ámbito independiente de comunicación capilar. En un dominio postmedial en el que la circulación pública de la información ya no esté exhaustivamente sometida a la regulación jerarquizada característica de los tradicionales medios de comunicación, estructuralmente orientados a la producción social del consenso (a la organización de “masa” antes que a la articulación comunicacional del “público”).

La era postmedia es un ensayo cuyo objetivo es proporcionar los más diversos materiales para abordar críticamente la aparición de ese nuevo escenario de la acción creadora y comunicativa que es internet, analizando desde los más diversos aspectos las relaciones entre arte y nuevas tecnologías comunicativas: desde el análisis más puramente teórico a la guía práctica para familiarizarse con los sites dedicados a net.art, desde el seguimiento de las relaciones entre net.artistas, activistas y hackers hasta la propuesta irónica de un antiglosario con el que orientarse en el conocimiento de este nuevo panorama del arte electrónico y su impacto transformador de la experiencia de lo artístico.

Publisher Consorcio Salamanca, 2002
Volume 1 of Argumentos/Centro de Arte de Salamanca Series
ISBN 8495719053, 9788495719058
186 pages

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Sarai Readers 01-07 (2001-2007)

Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers, 2007

Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversations, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half forgotten agendas. we hope our text this year sets the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the boundaries, parameters and verges of our times.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, 2006

Sarai Reader 06 uses ‘Turbulence’ as a conceptual vantage point from which to interrogate all that is in the throes of terminal crisis, and to invoke all that is as yet unborn. It seek to examine ‘turbulence’ as a global phenomenon, unbounded by the arbitrary lines that denote national and state boundaries in a ‘political’ map of the world. It wants to see areas of low and high pressure in politics, economy and culture that transcend borders, to investigate the flow of information and processes between downstream and upstream sites in societies and cultures globally.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan + Geert Lovink
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 2005

‘Bare Acts’ looks at ‘Acts’- at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of doing things in society and culture. The Reader foregrounds explorations of borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the legal regulation of sexuality and trespasses of various kinds.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi + Geert Lovink
Guest Editor: Lawrence Liang
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 04: Crisis / Media, 2004

The 2004 Reader produced by Sarai, is devoted to the dual themes of crisis reporting in the media, and the crisis within the media when it comes to the reportage of violence. Crisis pervades the times we live, and becomes palpable entity in itself. To acknowledge the pervasiveness of the crisis in our times, is also to engage with the media through which crisis, and the representation of crisis, become the ‘substance of our morning’s meditations’.

Editorial collective: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi & Awadhendra Sharan [Sarai] + Geert Lovink

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Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, 2003

“Shaping Technologies ” sets out to ratchet our engagement with the contemporary moment a notch higher, in directions that are sober, exhilarating and discomfiting, all at once. The book brings to the fore a series of situations and predicaments that mark the encounter between people and machines, between nature and culture, and between knowledge and power.

Editorial collective: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai], Geert Lovink, Marleen Stikker [Waag]

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Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, 2002

This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world.

Editors: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta

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Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, 2001

Sarai Reader 01, (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a sovereign entity that comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope of the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor.

Editors: Raqs Media Collective (Sarai) + Geert Lovink (Waag)

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Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi

Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (1996/2002)

“In this book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?

As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.”

First published as Echographies de la télévision – Entretiens filmés, Galilée, Paris, 1996.

Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
174 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-19)