molly wright steenson: July 2008 Archives

When I met Anne Galloway in 2003, I had just begun my professorship at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She was one of the first people I would meet working on a Ph.D. that dealt with design in some way: she pursued it from a sociological and anthropological perspective. Meeting Anne was a revelation: she's been a great source of inspiration for me as I've moved from the world of designing into the world of architectural academia, and as I've begun pursuing my own Ph.D. Over the course of five years, we've had countless conversations online (and far too few face-to-face). I count her as a dear friend.

Yesterday, Anne defended her dissertation. Not only was it accepted with no revisions, but she was recommended for an outstanding academic achievement award. Dr. Galloway, CONGRATULATIONS!

In the early 1970s, video was radical software. I mean this literally. In the 1970s, Radical Software was a video collective. Video was not only software, it was a generative system of the sort that Jonathan Zittrain defines today.  Let me put these two ideas together.

The first edition of Radical Software.

Around 1970, video collectives such as Raindance (a parody on the Rand Corporation's name), VideoFreex and People's Video Theater abounded in New York, thanks to arts funding that supported the emerging medium. They enjoyed a relationship to the Fluxus movement that preceded it, in particular to the work of Nam June Paik.  Raindance, founded in 1969, sought to serve as an "alternative media think tank," according to a history of the group by Davidson Giliotti [http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/history.html]. Its founders and leadership included Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Louis Jaffe and Marco Vassi and were later joined by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny. As they sought to create the Center for Decentralized Television, they wanted a new form of video.

It was the notion of software that saved Raindance. Specifically, the group founded a zine called Radical Software, in 1970 that celebrated video as a a generative medium. Their first print run of 2000 encouraged sharing and copying, creating a new copyright symbol of a circle with an X within that meant "please copy." Its members used the post to trade tapes with an international network. The concept of radical software solidified under the rubric of  the zine by the same name, published in 11 issues between 1970 and 1973, by founder and Raindance members Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny and Ira Schneider. Over the course of its issues, Radical Software offered information on pirate TV transmission, lobbying efforts, arts funding and video workshops and video theory, to name a few. The editorial in the first issue proclaimed:

"Power is no longer measured in land, labour, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it... Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.

Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology - but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their own lives."

Radical Software shows that media like video in its early life were generative systems, ala Zittrain. What made them that way was the means with which they offered access to its creators -- and to the different directions creators could take when working with video. Radical software? Absolutely.

It was time for a change in scenery. I've decamped to Berlin, where I'm based for much of the summer. This is an opportunity to relax, enjoy the city and do some research at the Bauhaus and Luftwaffe archives. This base of operations enables side trips: to Reboot in Copenhagen last week (more on that and my talk soon), to my adopted sister's wedding at Schloß Moyland, to my German host family's apartment in Düsseldorf -- and also, to Paris and Hamburg for research and pleasure. Berlin isn't foreign to me, as most people know. I speak German fluently and have been in Berlin at least every year since 1990 (excepting 1992 and 1995), but never for more than a week or two at a time. This is a chance to live here for a little bit, just to see what it's like.

The weather in Berlin is warm and sunny, the city's full of crazy little bars, cafes and galleries that take advantage of the cheap rent and copious space. It's a place where things happen and converge, where people develop something wonderful in industrial place, only to have it be developed in glass and concrete by developers (whereupon they often go broke and don't complete the projects). So the cycles begin again. Berlin makes things feel possible -- it's like a platform for cool stuff. Consider the Investorenjubeln that happened yesterday: Bar25, one of the awesome urban, industrial beach bars decided to greet its latest crowd of developers this afternoon with a raucous beach party.

One of the things I love about Berlin is the fantastic network of people. My experiences with it started more than 10 years ago, when I came to know the MetaDesign Berlin office. I became friends with Vicky Tiegelkamp and Sabine Fischer, both of whom ran a pop culture feminist webzine not unlike Maxi, the one I had cofounded in 1997 with three other women. I am living with Vicky, who for 8 years has run Playframe with her partner, Patrick. My first love, Martin Nachbar, lives here this summer and may actually be in town: as a dancer and choreographer of note, he's usually on the go. Another friend, Lulu LaMer (a games producer) is based here for the summer; my dear friend David Hudson has lived here for decades. And there's the latest happy technology success story, Felix Petersen. He founded Plazes, newly acquired by Nokia.

Other people are attracted to it as a place to make things happen. Some examples: Constantin Peyfuss and Florian Weber are two of the founders of Unlike, a beautiful and very hip guide to the city (with a particularly nice iPhone interface).  Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlfross founded Soundcloud, a platform that professional musicians can use to share music. I've also just met the founders of Program, an architecture gallery that confronts that very notion. Its founders, Carson Chan and Fontini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, graduated from Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 2005 and opened their gallery here in 2006. Next month, they'll be offering a residence to my dear friend Bryan Boyer. Perhaps I'll be here to see the fruits of the collaboration he's doing with his cousin.

On my leisure map: sunsets (at 10 p.m.!) at Kiki Blofeld, my favorite industrial beach bar, hipster free wifi and latte macchiato at Sankt Oberholz, the spiffy late night bars on my street in Prenzlauer Berg, my continued interrogations of the Palast der Republik, and time with the people I've mentioned, friendly visitors, and people I've not yet met. Oh yeah -- and expanding my knowledge of minimal techno: Anita says it encompasses everything. This should be easy enough. There's a party tomorrow, after a barbecue and an opening, and another party Friday.


Palast der Republik, masquerading as the Fun Palace

In the time that I've written this, Florian and Carson have each happened into Sankt Oberholz. This place is more connective than even San Francisco's Ritual! Berlin: a fine summer nexus.