Panel 3. /2nd part: Grow your own: Start and sustain an artserver.

Chair: Richard Barbrook (HyperMedia Research Centre of Westminster University, Cyber.Salon)
Speakers: Vuk Cosic, Konrad Becker, Sandra Fauconnier, Frederic Madre, Klaas Glenewinkel.

__________________________ Micz Flor: I am from 'yourserver' near Manchester. I was invited to this conference as part of an original panel about setting up new servers, which doesn't mean that yourserver UK is not running. It is running as a virtual server, located somewhere in London, and the idea is to move it to Salford University. For me this is an important difference, because you can register domaine names and then you create an institution or a project, where you want to present that logo in the jungle of domaine names. You can't have all control anyhow, but if you want to have a certain control, you really need to have roots access to a lot of the functions running on the server.

The question was why yourserver is alternative? Because this is not up and running, I can't really give you examples, why this is alternative. So I just asked myself, what is alternative in the first place. I think that inbuilt in the idea of being alternative is of course the idea of the centre, the mainstream, of something which represents the kind of cultural heritage that can be marketed and sold. You then have to argue why you are deviating from that mainstream. To rephrase that question, currently the Arts Council is writing policies about cultural diversity as opposed to very 80s ideas of funding. The idea of diversity is very interesting, ideally this means, that you would not necessarily assume that there is a centre as such.
So the question would not be 'why are you alternative', the question would either come down to 'do you have enough members to call yourself a big channel?', which certainly I cannot answer at this moment. And the other question is 'do you aesthetically deviate from what is assumed to be good taste to be called alternative?'. Again it is a problem to answer that, right now the web page is really ugly because it's just a temporary web page.

But what it comes down to is to really concentrate on the idea of yourserver. This for me is really the next step that followed a lot of ways that representation on the internet has been thought about. And as we talked about Kulturserver, and I think we would be very vital in the Northwest as a kind of database for projects, I think for too long the internet has been mainly thought about as an archive model for regions or communities. I think the potential lies mainly in the possibility to archive material and not falling in the trap of saying 'This is Manchester on-line'. If you include any city metaphor, you are actually including a lot of urban hierarchies and structures. Basically you are following a lot of architecturally and nationally determined power structures.
So the role of yourserver is basically being a benevolent facilitator towards cultural projects of people, who themselves don't have the knowledge or the capacity or donŒt get the funding together to get projects on-line themselves.

And that links to the idea of how is it being funded and the curatorial policy. The idea of redundant technology made me think about what I think is a good way of setting up a server, because originally they were all mainly rooted in the idea of the hacker. The idea of the hacker for me is linked to partly the idea of gift economy, but partly also to the idea of not wanting state funding. In terms of the cost you will face with setting up a server that doesn't run as a virtual server on another bigger server, you are actually facing administrative costs, upgrading costs and so on that make it quite unrealistic to start on a big independent scale. Independence for me is always a relative term, and the idea of redundant technology made me think that I would be interested in redundant resources.
If you look at University bodies or already publicly funded bodies there is a lot of equipment and a lot of people with skills who are keen to apply these skills in the real world. There are also a lot of administrators already operating on huge university networks, most of them are very skilled and most of them are quite interested in doing something which they don't see as a challenge technically, but possibly as enriching socially or just as an interest. So I am currently trying to identify redundant resources in already existing huge administrative bodies, which makes me quite unpopular in the kind of terminology of 'no state involvement in internet projects'.
Also I have to say that there will be arts funding, 4000 £ for a project to produce a series of works which will be sitting on yourserver. That money is needed to pay artists, which is a very vital part in the budget plan. Form then on I am looking forward to working collaboratively in terms of getting students and their energy, possibly for free, possibly even as a part of some course objective of computer studies or design or even literature, working with artist on projects in that environment.
Secondly yourserver is very much the possibilities how disenfranchised communities in the Northwest, who otherwise don't have any access, can present themselves, their culture and their work in the media. I am not even saying that the people who might put their work on there have neighbours who might be able to see it, because being disenfranchised means that you don't have your computer next door, but it's still a motivation to at least know that something is maintained and looked after in a way.

Richard Barbrook: Now that everybody has presented a summary of their projects it would be good to open the discussion. Just to come back to one of the main questions we have been focusing on, which is, in what ways can we say these are alternative or mainstream organisations. We have heard that actually their relationship is often very ambivalent and are often piggy-backing on this larger institutions.
We have also been talking about their curatorial policy and I think what is interesting is that no one seems to have a curatorial policy apart from the enforcement through friendship networks of particular social and cultural viewpoints. And lastly, we talked about money and how everybody is participating in the gift economy, but also looking for money elsewhere. It would be good to hear other people's comments and opinions.

Daniel Molnar /audience: Much of what you have talked about is about infrastructure, about providing access, web space. If I have my crisis and am a bit sick of titles and identities, so if I don't want my www.daniel.org domaine, I can get a lot of things for free. I can get free e-mail addresses and web space, free operation systems, lots of things. I feel there is a need to collect this knowledge how to express yourself if you want to, and how to put it on the net or free. I don't want to say that your efforts are not needed, they are needed, but perhaps this kind of knowledge should be collected in one place? If you want to have your own server we should provide information, how you can buy a used computer for low prices, how you can start your own server, because this knowledge is necessary to do your thing, and you can buy it in very expensive books right now.

Richard Barbrook: Are there any comments on the panel on the idea that you are just providing infrastructure and you can get that from everywhere for free, like hotmail and so on.

Frederic Madre: No, not at all. We are not providing free space at all, we are presenting what we [-and nobody else-] do on the internet. I have seen numerous French sites, which are offering space for whatever and what they are offering is in fact a place on the internet for people who are not from the internet and who, for some reason, don't understand what is happening there. It is not by providing space, that you will learn and those people who fill that space will not learn anything. Our approach was to do things ourselves [for ourselves].

Vuk Cosic: Partially it is a branding thing. People want to be with a server, because there is other good stuff there they want to be related to. It is sort of like publishing in a good magazine. People just want to go along, they don't want to have their own server name. Visibility.

Daniel Molnar / audience: One thing is visibility, but another thing is that I don't really need that kind of thing if I know what I want to do and I want to know how.

Micz Flor: Don't you think that the idea of the art server is very much about the culture, rather than the art object? I think, that is something which, at least for what I want to do, is very crucial, especially for very unspectacular, low key, community based work. I think that is why the Kulturserver unrightly said, that it is not typical for the internet, I think the opposite is true of the internet right now. There is a lot of interest in community driven work, and it is very important to realize that these smaller projects that amplify each other by sitting on one location, which might even be geographically mirroring to an extent. That actually creates a culture rather than a series of individual objects, that is were the potential lies. Also regarding funding, it is still easier to get funding, if you have your own domaine name, than saying 'I need money to survive and they give me space for free'. It is harder to get the project funded.

Q: You are sitting there saying you are art servers, that is not enough. I want you to specify what that means and what it is about. Regarding this, I have questions about the aspects of community building or the network of trusts.
Vuk, you were giving the reference regarding the question, what your server is providing, saying that this community network is giving a sort of net credibility, that as an art server as a paratext, where you find the links and the contextualisation of art works, and this is when you talk about funding and aspects of the transfer of the symbolic value and then the social capital directly into the economic capital. You said that there is the social, the community connection, you are giving the right links, which means you are giving the credibility. This seems to be an aspect of the strategy of one strain of art servers. This is the same thing Klaas was saying on a completely different level, because he was giving the reference to the real community, but you also want to make this commercial value out of it by providing the links and the contextualisation of the artist or the art works.

So I wanted to know, - and Micz was saying this a bit now at the end -, if this community link structure, the paratext among the artists, is linked to the funding structure and to the justifications why art servers should exist? Beside the other idea that there can be art projects, - to which you also gave the reference, Micz, and where I donŒt agree completely - if it is really necessary to have a big infrastructure and much money, but that's another question.

Richard Barbrook: So art servers are a conspiracy to construct cultural capital...

Vuk Cosic: Actually I would like to pick up were Daniel started to criticise this whole operation. We came about when there was no free access, no free disc space, no free e-mail accounts, or mailing lists available online and we did it in 1995. Other than providing this stuff, we are now also giving an interesting context to everybody, as I already said it, the visibility and brand names, people want to be seen in such contexts.
Of course, there are people who don't want anything to do with us, we are not going to cry our eyes out about that. The rules are simple, you do whatever you want as long as it is not commercial and don't ask for the impossible, and we'll do business. And the cultural capital and the other stuff that is coming out of it, well somehow our particular group does not exploit these assets very much.

Klaas Glenewinkel: In this project, we are trying to focus on groups, that otherwise would not have any relationship to the internet, not even in the future. The market in Germany is somehow saturated, so the big boom of people entering the market regarding age and gender is not really changing, that's at least my experience.

--- Tape interrupted ---

Pit Schultz/ audience: Why don't you set up a server in East Germany, because Lower Saxony is in terms of media very well funded and over-represented. A lot of things are going on there already. How would an art server go on in a rural area in East Germany, where there is no cultural infrastructure anymore with the big problems with right wing groups and racism?

And this leads to the question of locality, if you localise your server it is good to know why, with which strategies and for what reason. What I mean is that there is a problem of territorialisation of data, everyone has there little data gardens, often it's just temporary blossoming and disappearing again. This whole fetishization of your own little virtual territory is often a little bit bourgeois.
On the other hand, there may be a need to territorialise servers when they have a clear connection to the local cultural expressions like the server in Riga, which brings in contents, which are not available in other ways. The question, how to territorialise data is always difficult and I sometimes ask myself, why the art servers don't get together, one big server with really high bandwidth and the whole question of technological facility is then solved and you could then territorialise on the virtual level. If local identity is the question, the question is, if this has to be represented on your own server standing in your own little office. I think there is this fetishization of the physicality of data.

Richard Barbrook: So instead of being cultural capitalists they are feudal potentates.

Klaas Glenewinkel: We are doing a lot of fieldwork, calling people who are doing interesting stuff. It happens quite a bit, that we are talking to someone who lives completely remote, doing fine art exhibitions in the garden or so and sometimes, when we offer them free web space, they say 'You are the third one today offering me some free web space'. There is a big content hunt going on in Germany right now, I really think in a year everyone who can fart can make a CD.

Micz Flor: I completely understand and expected that question. I can't generally answer it, but I can give an example, when locality in the European context would make sense. There is one project that is not on the net yet, but it will be, it's in Liverpool area, which is an opportunity 1 development area and gets a lot of European funding. There are the Liverpool Black Sisters, a local group of black women, who are very politically motivated and work on their culture. They are struggling with urban structures, but quite interestingly also with European structures. They would be in a situation where their place gets mapped out somewhere in the European parliament to get money. So the question for them is, European money is coming in, they experience where the money is going. They are using it on the back of the poor people who live there and somebody will build a facade of shopping arcades around the poor area, so nobody will see it anymore.

Out of that experience they started working on the Black Woman's Guide to Europe, which was basically a local project, but the experience of Europe is all happening within that little community. We started to think about ways of developing this project as a local activity and then by doing that it is very locally linked with their experience of politics in their front garden. But the actual power of having it locally bound is by linking it sideways and using information that comes from similar situations, as they happen all over the place to identify your own position within the bigger network, within the bigger reality, but also identify your very local position by learning from other ups and downs as things are going along.

Of course the idea of developing local networks is never supposed an isolated letter, photocopies are much more superior to internet, also because most of the people like the Liverpool Black Sisters have one computer for the whole community. The potential still lies in combining these things laterally, I think that is were local projects do make sense.

Frederic Madre: We had to move our site somewhere, and we chose an American server, because it was the cheapest way to do it. We donŒt care, if the server is in America or anywhere else, it doesn't mean anything on the internet, if our domain name is "in" America. Sometimes, it was a difficult topic to discuss in our group to [go and] put it up in America, so [it remains] as a [private] joke [that] we put this old song ["existential"] by a punk band on our previous free homepage. We say that we spit in the face of the free market, but we also like to use it. So if it is the cheapest to go to the USA, we go there.

Armin Medosch /audience: I have a specific question to Vuk, what are you going to do if there is no more money from Soros coming in?

Vuk Cosic: Right now, the money is there and we are doing our best to use it in a good way. Then we will see, right now we have started some PR. We know that we will get some money for next year, much less than this year, so we will be able to eat. But in this time we will have to become sort of independent, register independently. We have to fight to maintain the equipment. And we have to see, whether we want to do this when we grow up, how long do we want to stay in the business, and what is the future of the area?

Armin Medosch: Is charging the hosted project on your server an option in the future?

Vuk Cosic: No that's just petty money. Slovenia is a very small country, you can't live on the volume. You can't charge two pounds and expect to get rich.

Q/ audience: What's this massive preoccupation with offering free services to everybody in the pursuit of independence, it's just not practical.

Vuk Cosic: That's easy, that means nothing, I agree.

Micz Flor: I feel strongly, that the idea of a server space is to an extent a very public space and it is similar to charging people for walking on the street.

Vuk Cosic: There is this whole idea of spreading the truth about creating independent networks of people, but it's hard to do that. It's impossible to impose this on people and say 'we give you free server space, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, whatever', but it will not automatically mean that people will be aware that they could benefit from a higher level of organisation, that they might be more mobile. There is no way to react to this, but there is this reality of big players and small players as well and we are part of this. Art Servers Unlimited and United is an option, but if there is no real awareness that it might be useful and for what it might be useful, then it wont happen.

Richard Barbrook: Do you think everyone who puts out stuff on your server should contribute financially?

Konrad Becker: Actually I do think that public space should be free and the whole communication network systems where originally financed by tax money. And if in America, they finance the industrial military complex through that, it is kind of dubious how the public has to pay for all the expenses again when the profits come in. It's not for free anymore. That's a very strange balance, that's politically relevant in may ways, like the social dynamics and economics as such. Yes, I think it should be for free, unfortunately we can't afford to give it for free.

Richard Barbrook: I think we should wrap up here. Thank the participants and thank you for coming along.