Spoek Mathambo: Throughout school, I was always into rapping and my idea was to do an album. First, I started a hip hop magazine called Levitation, one of the first hip hop magazines in South Africa. I dropped out of mid school because I didn’t want to be a doctor anymore. I just wanted to do music. I started Sweat.X stuff, touring a lot. And then, doing Playdoe stuff, touring a lot more. I also worked on a secret project called Moleke Bembe. It was based on a an expedition in Congo which was trying to find out if there were dinosaurs living there. 60% of their jungle is unexplored and it’s possible this thing still lives in there. The Pygmy called that dinosaur MolekeBembe, the one that ‘stops the flow of the river’. I started making music under that name with Richard the 3^rd and that became the base of my solo project. Sweat.X and Playdoe are kind of fun, electronic stuff. Moleke Bembe was uncompromising dark shit, the way I wanted to do it, beautiful music.

You seem particularly interested in radical approaches, how does it come from ?

SM: When my father left South Africa and went to work in Australia, I had his huge music collection to myself. I could explore a lot of shit. Then, I got this avant-garde progressive jazz music, music that people were pushing. I was hearing a lot of concept albums for the first time, which work on a linear story, with different characters, different scenes. I am not such a fan of ragtime but avant-garde 60s or 70s. Same with hip hop, I like the weirdest like Anti Pop Consortium. When I was introduced to rock stuff, I would lean to whatever was the weirder, the better for me. All my heroes in music are musicians who have a bigger field to them. If you think about Sun Ra, he creates a big culture on him. It is manifested in making short films or his album covers, wearing these epic outfits. I was influenced by that when I was really young. The same with Prince, he is an amazing musician with a visual impact. I got my degree in Creative Communication, I see that as another one of my weapons in this war.

How do you use these communication skills in your work?

SM: Very simply, I never had to compromise to the mainstream industry. Because of the level of connectivity, I can do what I want and put it on the Internet. I had this idea from when I was 18, that some of my old heroes, like obscure jazz artists from the 60s, they would die and no one would never know how great they were. But at this point, if you can put something out into the world, it’s about attracting more views on the Internet, you can gain a lifetime amount of fans in a very short period of time. It’s just based on certain marketing skills.

What do you mean with the expression “post-apartheid glamour” ?

SM: I was born in ’85, was when there was a state of emergency and the army occupied the townships for about 5 years. We lived in a state of emergency with tear gas, riots, ethnic wars, etc.  After that, there was a huge period of hope, a lot of new energy, new stuff. I have grown up on different sides of time. The stuff that my parents went through, I did not have to go through. I have been really, really lucky. Then on top of that, there was the big information boom. When I was 9 or 10 years old, came the Internet. I have grown in a totally different time and generation. Because there was so much information, we never thought we had to be in one tribe.

Did you get the feeling that, as a musician, you had a duty for reshaping contemporary identities ?

SM: It’s not like you have to rethink a new identity. The situation is so new so fresh, we have our family and our cultures around us but you can’t fully relate to them, so it’s like a new space. People all over the world think of Africa as this thing that is dark, wild, old Africa. They don’t realize that, as much as African culture has also influenced a lot of European and American art and music culture, that influence has gone back. When I started school, it was still Apartheid’s time and Apartheid’s curriculum was pushing the white man’s story, Greece was the best and so was Rome. A lot of the time, as much as I am from South Africa, we don’t know our own stories and that pushes us to create alternate stories, to create futures and past and melt them into one. To get people some kind of pride. To tell the slave story in a totally different way and to give it pride as well. We lived through Industrial Revolution, Technological Revolution. We are affected by the globalization, the force of branding, cellphones, connectivity, etc. All that stuff had big effect on social situations.

This effect is particularly obvious with the vibrant club scene in South Africa ?

SM: South Africa is interesting right now. Because of the economy and the fact that it is pretty stable as far as war is concerned, a lot of people flooded from all over Africa. It’s this huge melting pot of language and culture. It is particular to South Africa that we have such a mix and it’s not in the West. House and Techno came into South Africa in a very strong way. That feeling of young urban kid with this great sense of pride in your history. After being colonized, you can’t have a sense of ‘we did this, we did that’ because in the last 400 years, we were fucked. So you are looking into the next four hundred years. This mood really influenced my album more than anything. I was touring other shit and doing electro stuff and I’d go back home and realized that there is a huge scene of music back in South Africa that I didn’t know about. It was always there but I was never interested, I was always looking outside. And then, the second I looked inside into South Africa…. I liked the crazy scientists cooking some amazing shit. That started me DJing around 2008. I put out these series of remixes for the generation that is post HIV pandemic. The mood that comes out of that, the dynamic of danger, sexuality, promiscuity, orphan-run families and how that influences the culture. There is new stuff cooking all the time, I constantly have to catch up.

Joël Vacheron

L’essor des réseaux sociaux et des blogs a permis à tout un chacun d’être potentiellement un créateur et un pourvoyeur de contenus. En se positionnant comme le canal de référence en matière d’information en temps réel, Twitter a provoqué une rupture capitale. Cette situation pléthorique à activement contribuer à rendre un peu plus complexe un univers de la communication qui semble s’être bloqué sur la touche “avance rapide”.

Publier un article sur un blog, envoyer des tweets, poster des commentaires ou des photographies, malgré les énormes changements causés par la massification et la surcharge d’informations, les modalités pour créer et partager des contenus s’exécute à travers une gamme d’opérations qui reste étonnamment inchangées. Comme le signal Yann Ringenberg de :ratio, une agence lausannoise spécialisée en expérience utilisateur, “cela fait près de cinq années que le Web 2.0 a démarré et il semble logique de fournir des outils qui permettent de publier des contenus complexes sans pour autant nécessiter de connaissances approfondies en HTML. Même si Facebook a transformé chaque utilisateur en créateur de contenu, il reste encore à inventer des outils de publication qui offrent des options d’expression plus riche et plus spécifique”.

Guidées par des visions et à des finalités différentes, deux startups lausannoises ont relevé de manière remarquable les défis qui touchent la gestion et la création de contenus Web. D’un côté, Webdoc propose une plateforme simple à partir de laquelle il est possible de produire des discussions  riches en quelques coups de drag & drop. Textes, vidéos, sons, tout l’inventaire des ressources disponible en ligne peut être mobilisé dans des posts qui accentuent une véritable richesse d’expression. De l’autre côté, Paper.li permet à quiconque d’éditer son propre journal grâce au filtrage et à l’agrégation des messages transitant à travers ses différents flux d’information. Grâce à leurs principes de curation éditoriale et de commentaires enrichis, ces plateformes se présentent comme des réponses particulièrement adaptées aux enjeux qualitatifs posés par des outils de communication toujours plus ubiquitaire.

Paper.li: de la surcharge à la curation

Développé par Small Rivers, une start-up romande basée à l’epfl, Paper.li se positionne à bien des égards comme le futur de l’édition en ligne. Le projet est parti du constat qu’une frange importante d’utilisateurs gravitant dans l’écosystème de la création et de la consommation de contenu reste aujourd’hui inactive. Une passivité due en grande partie à un manque de temps. Or, comme le souligne le CEO Édouard Lambelet, “lorsqu’on touche des thématiques précises, ces mêmes personnes ont plein de choses à dire. Nous estimons que c’est le bon moment pour démocratiser le concept du rédacteur en chef. Ceci en rendant l’édition d’un journal aussi simple que de poster un commentaire sous un article.” Twitter, Facebook, feeds RSS, sites ou mots-clés chaque utilisateur devient le rédacteur en chef en pouvant réorganiser et sélectionner sont les informations qu’il désire transmettre à ses lecteurs. Présentées sous la forme d’accroches sur un fac-similé de première page de quotidien, les entrées renvoient à la source d’où le document est publié. Colonnes, catégories et accroches, l’univers graphique évoque instantanément la presse traditionnelle.

Cependant, il en va tout autrement lorsqu’on touche à la gestion et à la publication des contenus. Tout d’abord, Paper.li repose sur l’idée de curation. Cet anglicisme difficilement traduisible est généralement associé aux activités propres au commissaire d’exposition. Dans le monde de l’art, le curateur est celui qui utilise son jugement et ses connaissances spécifiques afin de trier et d’arranger des oeuvres selon une logique qu’il définit lui-même. À mesure que les paysages numériques se complexifient et s’automatisent, il est de plus en plus nécessaire de compter sur cette capacité individuelle à sélectionner et regrouper des articles pertinents. Comme le souligne Erin Scime, l’activité des responsables de contenus d’un site s’apparente désormais  à celui d’un curateur numérique (digital curator) dont l’activité repose avant tout sur la recommandation et la transmission, non pas sur la création de contenus originaux.

On offrant la possibilité à quiconque de devenir un rédacteur en chef, cette plateforme exploite l’aptitude, foncièrement humaine, de trier des sources pertinentes sur un sujet qui lui est familier. « Nous avons tous un avis sur ce que nous souhaitons écouter ou communiquer. Cependant, à l’heure actuelle, c’est quelque chose qui reste très difficile à partager sur le web. On peut le faire sur Twitter ou Facebook, mais les informations se perdent instantanément dans la masse. C’est regrettable, car, globalement, tout cela permet de créer une réelle intelligence collective » Le tri de l’information s’effectue également grâce à une série d’algorithmes complexes permettent de produire des analyses sémantiques de contenus afin d’opérer leur répartition par catégories. Il y a près de vingt de critères à partir desquels une information peut-être définie. Nous regardons si ces informations ont été beaucoup retweetées, par qui, est-ce que les contributeurs sont dans leur domaine de compétence, est-ce qu’ils sont en contact les uns avec les autres, voir si l’info est fortement commentée, etc. En regard de ces critères, une info dans un journal pourra avoir plus de poids qu’une autre. Les infos ayant plus de poids ont ainsi plus de chance de se retrouver à la une. ». Cela multiplier par tous les utilisateurs de Tweeter, il est potentiellement possible d’obtenir les meilleurs contenus sur n’importe quel sujet. En fédérant ces éditeurs en chef entre eux, notamment grâce à cette possibilité de s’abonner ou de diffuser, Paper.li entend « donner naissance à une nation d’individus qui, en fonction de leurs domaines d’intérêts, pourront réorganiser la découverte de contenus spécifiques. »

L’adéquation de cette formule avec les habitudes actuelles en matière de consommation et de traitement de l’information n’a pas tardé à faire des émules. Lancé discrètement au printemps 2010 “sans grande attente”, le site a connu une croissancevirale, dépassant les 2 millions d’utilisateurs après quelques mois d’exploitation. On compte désormais environ 20’000 microéditeurs qui permettent de capturer près de 200 articles par secondes.  Parallèlement à ce succès populaire, l’ingéniosité de Paper.li n’a pas manqué de séduire quelques personnalités extrêmement influentes. Eric Hippeau et Guy Kawasaki, deux légendes de monde informatique, ont récemment rejoint le board ce qui permet à paper.li de se positionner de manière très avantageuse dans son créneau. Une autre source de nouvelles réjouissantes émane des échos très favorables de la presse traditionnelle. De nombreux quotidiens importants souhaiteraient profiter de cette opportunité pour approfondir des sujets. Cela s’applique aussi bien aux thèmes demandant des connaissances spécialisées ou pour seconder les industries culturelles. C’est le cas notamment du partenariat conclu avec HBO afin de permettre au fans de Game of Thrones de suivre toute l’actualité de la série.

Webdoc: My contenu is rich

L’origine de Webdoc se situe dans l’enseignement puisque les cofondateurs, Cyril Pavillard et Stelio Tzonis, sont à l’origine d’une sorte d’ersatz de tableau noir, développé en collaboration avec l’Université de Lausanne, qui permet de projeter et d’annoter toute forme de contenus dans des salles de classe. L’originalité pédagogique de cette méthode est encore accentuée grâce à la possibilité donnée aux enseignants d’archiver et de partager le matériel présenté durant leurs cours avec leurs étudiants. Chaque sujet peut ainsi potentiellement être enrichi ou débattu en fonction des apports de chacun. À certains égards, cette vision collaborative et cette volonté de simplifier l’échange de connaissances se retrouvent en filigrane dans Webdoc. Même s’il permet de faire très facilement des mises en page originale, cette plateforme n’a pas été pensée comme un outil d’édition pour le web. L’idée était plutôt d’offrir une alternative pour profiter du caractère spontané des discussions actuelles, tout en proposant de donner plus de consistances aux commentaires en ligne. Comme le souligne Olivier de Simone, “l’une des visions à l’origine du projet était d’offrir la possibilité de produire un contenu web riche aussi rapidement que d’envoyer un tweet.”

Comme le souligne Stelio Tzonis, “Webdoc est la première plateforme à proposer un Apps Store offrant une palette de services web tel que Flickr, Youtube, SoundCloud, google map pour s’exprimer de manière riche et spontanée.” Webdoc est actuellement la seule plateforme offrant un spectre aussi large de potentialités en quelques clics seulement. Ceci en offrant aux utilisateurs de créer des contenus riches grâce aux ressources les plus diverses offertes le web.  D’un côté, on trouve les réseaux sociaux tels que Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. et, de l’autre, on trouve des sites comme Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, ou Soundcloud qui offrent ce qu’on pourrait appeler du contenu social. “Notre  but est de se retrouver au centre afin de pouvoir mixer ces deux pôles tout en facilitant la création de discussions à la fois riches,” précise Olivier de Simone. “Webdoc permet en quelque sorte de remixer et d’amplifier le web aussi vite que l’on pense ». En offrant des outils très performants d’amplification, cette plateforme ambitionne de donner un nouveau souffle aux échanges sur le web en stimulant des discussions qui permettant des échanges entre individus allant au-delà du simple commentaire anonyme. Devenir une sorte de réseaux des réseaux, l’idée peut sembler ambitieuse de prime abord. Cela reste pourtant une option tout à fait réaliste, car l’énorme potentiel du projet tient dans l’intégration de prouesses technologiques impressionnantes dans une interface très simple d’usage. À l’heure actuelle, Webdoc est probablement le seul projet à être parvenu à intégrer une gamme aussi complexe de fonctionnalités dans une plateforme extrêmement conviviale. Cette configuration offre des alternatives d’expression originales qui permettent de stimuler la créativité des utilisateurs. De plus, chaque Webdoc peut être diffusé sur n’importe quel autre réseau social et quiconque peut potentiellement prendre par la discussion.

De plus, en favorisant l’apport de tels commentaires enrichis, les utilisateurs peuvent approfondir sur un mode collectif n’importe quel thème. “À l’heure actuelle, nous sommes encore dans un rapport aux réseaux sociaux qui est trop égocentré » remarque Olivier de Simone. « Nous essayons de favoriser des modes de discussion qui se concentrent plus sur un sujet particulier que sur un individu. C’est pour cette raison que nous envisageons les réseaux sociaux à partir de contextes ou d’évènements particuliers tels que des anniversaires, des concerts, des festivals, etc. » Du drame de Fukushima aux amateurs de Vespa ou de graffiti, les thèmes abordés sont extrêmement variés, mais   touchent encore principalement au divertissement. À ce titre, la musique joue un rôle particulier et les communautés de fans sont de plus en plus présentes. Le chanteur Jamiroquaï a d’ailleurs choisi la plateforme comme support privilégié pour communiquer avec ses fans ou distribuer des morceaux inédits. À terme, Webdoc envisage de succéder à MySpace en tant que plateforme de choix pour les musiciens.

Les modèles algorithmiques initiés par Google montrent de plus en plus leurs limites lorsqu’il s’agit d’approfondir un thème spécifique ou d’affiner une recherche sur une actualité en temps réel. Désormais, Twitter est devenu le pourvoyeur le plus fiable pour recueillir ce type d’informations. Comme le souligne Yann Ringgenberg, « bien que je continue à suivre mes flux RSS, je sais que les news, les articles, les articles, les vidéos du moment, etc. tout ce qui peut m’intéresser finira par transiter sur mon compte Twitter. On parvient ainsi à avoir un accès à la fois récursif et détaillé sur des sujets extrêmement variés.” En fonction de logique quasi systématique, les bons contenus finissent toujours par remonter d’eux-mêmes à la surface et cela implique un certain nombre de bouleversements dans notre rapport à l’information. À ce titre, les tweets enrichis de Webdoc ou les journaux curatés de paper.li offrent des visions prospectives très stimulantes. En plus d’offrir des outils d’expressions originaux, ces plateformes fonctionnent également comme des tamis particulièrement efficaces lorsqu’il s’agit de filtrer et d’archiver des informations. Grâce à leur fort potentiel agrégateur, elles constituent des radars indispensables dès qu’on touche à des thématiques très ciblées. Des collectionneurs de timbres postaux aux chercheurs en oncologie moléculaire, en passant par l’amateur éclairé ou les fans d’un boys band, il est devenu impératif de disposer d’outils toujours plus précis pour pouvoir suivre l’évolution des niches.  Cette dimension récursive engendre des transformations significatives dans notre capacité à communiquer et ces nouveaux supports démontrent qu’il est essentiel que l’humain reste la première instance lorsqu’il s’agit de produire, de trier ou de partager des données.

Joël Vacheron

Guest Speakers: Bruno Ceschel, Clive Phillpot, Joël Vacheron
With the hard copy. Editions 2011 artists and graphic designers:
Dorothée Baumann / Design Marc Hollenstein, Pleasure Arousal Dominance
Romain Legros / Design Nadja Zimmermann, Argelàs
Florent Meng / Design Marc Hollenstein (with éditions CPG), Préambule, Alinéa H
Maya Rochat / Design Jemery Shorderet, Ma tête a couper
Johanna Viprey / Design Anna Haas, J’aime bien à peu près la nature
Martina-Sofie Wildberger / Design B und R / Typeface Reto Moser, Mon Petit Alphabet

Editors: Delphine Bedel, Barbara Fedier / micro-édition HEAD – Genève
Publishers: HEAD – Genève / Monospace Press, Amsterdam

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A series of interviews (Rokfor, Roland Früh, The Café Society, Maximage, Moritz Schmid and Zimmermann & de Perrot)  and an essay (Eric Andersen) published in the catalogue of the “Swiss Federal Design Awards 2011″

Designed by Jonathan Hares and Guillaume Chuard

Federal Office for Culture (ed.)
Birkhäuser Verlag
ISBN 978-3-0346-0795-7
ISBN 978-3-0346-0796-4
D/F/E

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“MWWWXC : Adolescentia Aeternum” was published in the catalog published for the Bartholomew exhibition curated by JSBJ at 12 Mail Gallery. Paris (September 16 to November 17 . 2011).

Read the text

Designed : AA-JE
Curated : JSBJ
500 copies – Printed in London UK

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Daniel van der Velden: I am a Graphic Designer. I originally was trained at a time when Dutch design was really booming. After having worked for both cultural and commercial clients for about seven years, I became more interested in the idea of combining commissions with research. That is, to have a stronger role for your own agenda but, on the other hand, to keep working with clients. And that led to Metahaven that I founded with Vinca Kruk in 2006. We were doing research, being interested in society, political issues, trying to make a combination between commission and research. When we started it, some people looked at us as if we were half crazy. But since then, we have been ever very busy. Our first project started from a very unarticulated interest at the time in the relationship between design, sovereignty and politics. As a child, I was very interested in politics and I think that this interest was put on hold for many years but suddenly came back with Metahaven. We are also very interested in visual culture and not keeping politics as just politics and theory as just theory.

JV: What did motivate your interest for questioning the visual significance of political institutions ?

DV: At the time, there was no real reason to think that there was anything wrong but, actually, more people can see why it’s important. After the financial crisis, those topics become basically more mainstream, together with the rise of the transparency movements in politics, it is now much more of a common thing. At the same time, we have also tried to work around themes that are a little bit better known to people. Our first project was Sealand and the second one dealt with a Stalinist palace in Bucharest, Romania. We felt that at the time that we had to introduce a lot of people to these topics but now it feels like some topics are more or less common knowledge and you can work with them more easily. WikiLeaks for instance is really interesting because it became, in such a strange way, part of pop culture. There is a really under investigated idea of the whole Wikileaks phenomenon, the visual culture of WikiLeaks.

JV: Talking about Wikileaks, how did this whole saga started?

DV: In our case, we contacted them a year ago because we admired the way that they had dealt with the release of the ‘apache video’ which they titled Collateral Murder, where a Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed. The video was withheld and they managed to publish that or to help publish it. We thought this was very courageous and we decided to contact them. We recognized that their architecture, the fact that they use various servers in various countries, has a lot of similarities with the whole Sealand story, where they tried to put servers on the island outside of jurisdiction basically creating the equivalent of a tax haven. We thought that maybe we could make a proposal for their visual identity. Now that we are a bit further along, we are realizing that maybe that whole idea of a new WikiLeaks identity will simply never happen. It is much more of a project that should radically investigate the visual culture related to transparency issues.

JV: What is the main frame of reference you took into consideration for expressing these ideas ?

DV: We believe that the whole idea of the transparency movement, as we see it now, is trying to re-invent what an organization is. So WikiLeaks started as a hacker phenomenon, and it became a global phenomenon. But it was never designed to become this global phenomenon. So you could almost say that certain design issues that keep coming up could have been better treated in the beginning. On the other hand, you can expect that this whole transparency movement will expand and that maybe the organizations that follow it afterwards will benefit from a clearer design perspective from the start, instead of implementing it afterwards.

JV: That lead to innovative propositions, like the dismantled Multi-Jurisdictional Logo for instance ?

DV: The idea of the Multi-Jurisdictional Logo was that it would be a logo hosted in different jurisdictions. So you would have these organizations with different data servers all over the world reflected in the identity. If a government or corporation decided to shut down one of these servers, you would immediately see that in the identity. One part of the identity would basically disappear. One of the things that we are going to explore with our contribution at the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 in Korea is especially this kind of visual culture aspect which supersedes the traditional NGO image of chairperson, logo, advertising campaign. Those are usually the main components. But in this case, you have such an almost accidental piling of events, an incredible amount of faces and people. This is the aspects that will be explored in this project.

JV: The goal is to create a kind of fragmented identities that can not be reduced to any kind of symbols ?

DV: Yes, something that is rather psychedelic. There is a certain enthusiasm that people have about organizations like Wikileaks, not because they are willing to start reading all these cables but because it is something significant that is happening in the world, which they believe gives a voice to people normally without a voice in power.. Paradoxically, it is influencing visual culture almost only through text. Assange personifies the figure of someone who became a kind of celebrity almost against his own will. Although he seems to enjoy part of it, he is not Bono, nor Nelson Mandela. At the same time he is one of the most enigmatic figures imaginable, which is you could say almost transparency-as-camouflage  This exploration of hyper transparency should be a really important part of the project.

JV: How did you manage to render this idea of transparency in the other projects you lead that are related to politics?

DV: Of course the idea of transparency is an idea that is hostile to all government because, basically, government is about secrecy. Some exceptions notwithstanding, the basic paradigm is that matters of state are secret. So the design of a transparent government comes either from bottom up or it comes from top down. So you have these kinds of ‘e-governments’ or open government initiatives which are top down redesigning, let’s say, freedom of information, and you have bottom up redesign which consists of civil society movements, activists, intellectuals, and artists. I think that the issue of transparency is in itself an issue that partially fits within a libertarian model of politics where you have as little as possible executive power in the hands of the few, so that more people have freedom for themselves. On the other hand it is also partially an anarchist idea because it denies the fundament of power, that it is exclusive, that authority is exclusive. I think the Principality of Sealand, as a kind of pre-transparency thing, tied in with that because it was trying to restage authority as something fictional. It uses symbols and a visual language that is completely invented. At that point, we were also interested in the potential of Sealand to be this exception, so that if you wanted to do something different, you could do it on Sealand. It was very non-articulated, almost as if we were just basically having a lot of fantasies about global politics and putting these into these design examples.

JV: You are also examining critically how these principles of governance could be apply to social networks, in particularly with Facebook ?

DV: I am not anti-Facebook but I actually don’t believe it is making the world more transparent. I am concerned by the fact that the larger Facebook becomes, the more important it becomes that the users have a real voice about how it is governed. Right now, if you look at the terms and conditions, you wouldn’t accept these from anyone, but you accept them from Facebook because they give you a great service for free. You comply because it gives you a lot of assets and possibilities that you otherwise wouldn’t have. So few argue for a kind of rebalancing of the transparency of Facebook itself and the way that they govern themselves with their users and the fact that they are such a useful tool for many individuals. You could take that both ways: it seems that governments are trying to replace parts of the welfare state by civil society initiatives. This is happening in the UK coalition government, in a very stupid way. And also in China where the future of the state is really thought of as a kind of civil society initiative built on top of a super-authoritarian mainframe. In the UK you see that the real civil society movements, the protesters against the government, are ruthlessly persecuted. Universities even hand over to the police CCTV footage with their own students engaged in peaceful protest. On the other face of the social network, you could say that if social platforms like Facebook become so large, they become almost like states themselves, and the problems that they are facing with regard to their governance are becoming similar to those of states because they have citizens. Even though those citizens happen to live in different sovereign countries, they are all to some extent inhabitants of the same constituency when it comes to being a Facebook person. I think we are just beginning to scratch the surface of that whole thing. What if a global society is organized along these digital networks ? Should or can these networks be governed. Finally, it is also a little bit about trying to exploit the totalitarian aspect of Facebook. Actually, Facestate will be a little pocket book that we will be making with Actar in Barcelone, which grapples with these issues, just like Transparency, Inc.

JV: Could you tell present the contents of book of this book ?

DV: Sure. Transparency, Inc. is partially starting as a description of what has been talked about when we talked about transparency in the field of design and architecture. Because there is a lot of discourse about transparency already in modernism, such as in the use of glass,, and transparency being a quality of organization, of space. And then the first chapter goes into the relation between governments and secrecy, going back to the ancients. The second chapter explores the relation between network and architecture. We might have experienced our online world as a sort of cloud, but in fact the cloud is hosted somewhere on a server which lies within some government’s territory. So there is always a question of sovereignty related to the cloud. We try to bring ideas from a design and architecture perspective to this very legalistic discourse. Then the third chapter talks about the most prominent example: WikiLeaks. It describes what we think is one of the most interesting aspects of Wikileaks: that it has made science fiction a reality. There is an interesting but quite tense text that Bruce Sterling wrote about WikiLeaks. It outlines the fact that they have done in practice what science fiction writers only fictionally dreamed up. Of course there is an aspect of “don’t try this at home”. That is understandable. But the fact is that WikiLeaks has made many science-fiction writers superfluous because it has pursued a very radical technological and political frontier, for real. Then the last chapter moves into the design of new organizations. It discusses what should and what could a pro-transparency organization be now. In that respect, we are going to make our own proposals but we are also may have great thoughts in this respect. The enthusiasm for transparency is with people who have less to lose than to gain from it. We cover everyone from ultra leftist action groups to people who are working in design and process innovation, and who you could say are politically libertarian-conservative. We see what their thoughts are on this, we interview them and we integrate all that in a nice essay with lots of visuals. We hope that it can be a book that someone can read on a train ride or two. That’s the idea. Also because our latest book, Uncorporate Identity, is 608 pages and we need something lighter now although we’ve terribly enjoyed doing it.

JV: What are the shifts you are expecting with respect to the traditional ways to communicate political or humanitarian issues ?

DV: I hope that we can get rid of the advertising approach and that we get to a more viral approach, something that is more open source. That is the real essence of all these recent movements, basically they do not own their own identity, they don’t claim something from a central point. They follow a very permutable border between organization and movement. This is a really necessary step, now that advertising with humanitarian goals has become such a cynical thing. Showing all this distant suffering. And now, of course, there are all the populations that we were supposed to look at as humble people under dictatorship. These people communicate themselves so they take their image into their own hands. I think this is really positive and much more inspiring and operative than an advertising agency designing a brand for this. It might also maybe funnier strategies because you can try many more things at a much lesser cost. So I am really optimistic about that.

JV: Let’s talk a little bit more about the book “Uncorporate Identity”. What ideas did you have when you started this project ?

DV: When we started working on the book, it was only intended to be about Sealand but it made sense to do much more with it. So eventually the focus moved a little bit away from Sealand and became more related to branding and network society. In a way, it is a book against corporate identity, which describes what corporate identity really is now. Not so much along the lines of ‘No Logo’ but really describing how the reality of today is ‘No Logo’. It is not what Naomi Klein had in mind because nowadays organizations know very well how to be invisible. Naomi Klein is aware of this, too, of course. An example is the Starbucks coffee shop in San Francisco which is branded as something local. The reason being that if people see the Starbucks logo, they don’t want to go in. Same thing with Blackwater Security, which re-branded itself to become invisible or, to quote one of their representatives, to have “no meaning”. The main point of the book is to talk about identity and the state. In what ways have states use corporate design and branding strategies to make themselves either visible or invisible and in what ways are these strategies themselves political strategies instead of merely strategies of image. That is the loop that the book takes. It finishes in a somewhat open ended way with the idea of communication and networking standards becoming much more important than brand image. And of course the book has our visual projects in it.

JV: The book provides very impressive insights about the contemporary manifestation of power, could give some examples ?

DV: There is this interview with David Grewal. He who wrote this book called ‘Network Power’ in which he argues that the power of a network standard is that you don’t even need to like it in order to join it. So if you join Facebook, it is not because you like it, but because you get some benefits from joining it. If you don’t speak English, you need to learn it, not because you like it but because otherwise you can’t join the network. The whole idea of branding has always been about persuasion, seduction and having people influencing others’ subjectivity so that they might start to like you. And it now seems that the reality that lies under that sort of seduction is actually the idea of adopting a standard. So there is a power that is even stronger than the power of persuasion and seduction. That is something like: “Do you want to join the standard or not?” or “Do you want to face social isolation if you don’t join the standard?”. So this is what explains why all those state brands look the same, because they are only about joining a standard. And the belief — which may be completely irrational — that this would bring you certain benefits. But this has got nothing to do with how the brand looks. That is irrelevant.

Website: Metahaven.org

Read: MWWWXC : Adolescentia Aeternum

Joël Vacheron: When did UbuWeb start and how was it related to your artistic practices ?

Kenneth Goldsmith: UbuWeb began after a visit to the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami Beach, Florida. I was a text artist, they had bought one of my pieces and I went down there to install it in 1989. I discovered this whole other tradition of ways of using words in art that wasn’t Lawrence Wiener Lawrence Weiner nor Jenny Holzer, but was poetry. Pasting poetry, but using poetry in a visual way. And I learned that there was a movement called “concrete poetry” in the middle of last century where graphic design met poetry. Modernist graphic design, Bauhaus design met poetry, very highly stylized, very highly designed. I saw this kind of intersection between modernism and poetry and thought ’this is really very beautiful. I have never seen anything like this before’. So over the next five years, I began collecting books of this stuff. They were very cheap and you could get them everywhere, nobody knew about this and I had a big pile of them. Then, in January 1995, I saw the internet for the first time, the graphical internet, and the way that the forms looked on the internet were very much like the way these books were looking to me. Typography and modernism design all meeting on the computer. I then began scanning those books and putting them on the internet . This is the begin of UbuWeb which started in 1996. So for the first few years only visual and concrete poetry were there. Then we got the abilty of presenting sounds and I started to add “poésie sonore”, putting a lot of that on. Finally, when we got more band width I began doing videos. But there was a moment when UbuWeb did not know what it was, because we had the work of John Cage who is doing sound poetry but is also doing orchestral Avant-Garde work and also doing performances. It made me realize that UbuWeb had to be bigger than just concrete poetry. So I thought… “Well there is no place on the internet for Avant-Garde. I don’t even know what that means”. So, I decided I was actually going to build a home for the Avant-Garde on the internet and that’s really the story of how it happened.

JV: From the beginning you made this statement that you wanted to use the free form of the internet to diffuse artistic works. Going back to that stage, was it a logical decision ?

KG: Well it never had any value so it didn’t matter if you were stealing it because nobody could sell it. So I found this odd loophole, this place where you could give things away without getting into trouble. If I were to give Madonna’s songs away, I would be sued, because somebody else can sell that. But ephemeral Avant-Garde films, sound poetry or concrete poetry, I mean you can not sell it, you can not give it away. So it became a very interesting way of getting around copyright… Just give away that which you cannot sell.

JV: So you went round the problem of copyright, of authorization by just not using these kinds of procedures… ?

KG: Yes, again it is actually very easy because it is nothing anybody wanted anyway. People get offended and say ‘we don’t mind it’s there, we just wished you would have asked’. But if I had asked, then I would have had to begin a long conversation, a dialogue. And like I said, this is sort of a hobby, it’s not what I do full time. In fact, it’s pretty much just me, so it is too much work to have to start asking people. I wish I could do it, I wish I could do it right… But it’s all done wrong. Paradoxically, by doing it wrong, it is managed to become very important and very big and stay there for a long time. I could not do it right and that’s why there is no more project of this kind. There is only one because nowadays everybody is concerned about doing it right.

JV: You like to say you embody this kind of manic archivist.

KG: I have always been a collector. I have ten thousand LPs. I have been collecting those forever. I collect books, I collect all sorts of things… I am just a crazy collector! So Internet was also a way of getting my collection out there and sharing it with the world. A collector only wants to share what they have and this was a way of sharing my collection. Now I collect digitally. I go out and I find things that are in private file sharing places. I bring them back for sharing them with everybody. I think the internet is so much about sharing collections. If you can not share it, what’s the point to possess it? If you can not send somebody a link, then it doesn’t exist.

JV: Do you do any distinction between you collecting material artifacts and what you are doing with the MP3?

KG: A vinyl is always nicer than an MP3. It sounds better, it has a beautiful cover and I love it. But again it is not social. I own it. You’ve got to find your own copy of it. That was always the idea of record shopping. You go with a friend and they would find something and be like: “Ahahah… You did not get that! I got it!” Now everybody can share it. It’s not such a great object but the primary thing I am interested in is still the music. Not the object. So now we can share the music together, you can have the same thing I can have and I really think that is fantastic.

JV: You made your position clear about the companies  dealing with copyrights and the traditional market. Is the no fear approach a good way to deal with the power of these institutions ?

KG: I got hundreds of lawyers’ letters over the years. But if you are not selling anything… no one every sued me because it doesn’t seem to be worth money… where there is no money being exchanged. They do not understand it. It makes them crazy in a way when someone is doing this without looking for profit. They cannot understand that. Why would you not want to sell something? It really fucks them up. But the result is very simple : Why would they want to sue somebody and spend money to get some money from somebody who is not selling anything! Furthermore, companies understand it is from the heart. It is sincere and doesn’t mean any harm. It actually means that I am fans, I love what we do. We will not sell anythnig and if it should happen, they would have every right to come after us for breaking their copyrighting. I know that they are traditional markets out there and I admire them and respect them. I just happened not to be involved with them. I think if Madonna can sell her music, I would not give it away. But the recording of a Joseph Beuys giving a lecture or singing… People are much more concerned about his paintings or the valuable objects. These kind of recordings are not valuable, this is education. With a little bit of talking and hand holding and a lot of love, the lawyer will say: ‘it’s OK.’ Or they could also say: ‘it is not OK, please remove it’. At which point, I ‘ll answer: ‘OK, you don’t want it there, I remove it.’. Posts get removed all the time, I can not win everybody but I win a lot of them. It is very tricky playing it and it can be very scary. But I have learned how to deal with it over the years.

JV: On the other hand, you got a spectacular praise worldwide and you were even invited to the White House in May 2010. It is quite paradoxical for a notorious copyright infringers ?

KG: You must bootleg. Every artist just dreams of being bootlegged. Bootlegging is the most sincere form of flattery. If you are an artist and somebody else wants to bootleg you, it means on some level that you have made it. So now I am saying these things in front of Michelle Obama at the White House… But again it is meant for art, it is meant for non-commercial production. I am not saying: ‘Go ahead and bootleg Hollywood movies.’ I am saying: ‘Go out and bootleg poetry.” Rewrite poetry, there is no money in it. It’s OK to bootleg that. It’s a gift economy which is very open. “You want to bootleg my artist book? That’s cool.’ You are not taking any money out of my pocket because nobody who made an artist book ever got any money back from it. So there are these places left where you can practice an utopian idea about copy. But it’s very rare and it only happens in certain circumstances. Otherwise they have every right to protect their intellectual property. If there is money and somebody wants to pay for it, you shouldn’t be stealing it.

JV: You do not want to be listed on Google search engines. Why did you make this decision, what does it mean ?

KG: People write books about how to make your name higher on Google and we are trying to get off of Google. Anyway it doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t matter if three people come or three millions. There is no advertising, I don’t even look to see who comes, what do I care ? So why should I be easy to find? I do not have to show anybody reports  of the number of visitors. There is no benefit  to be there and it is very good in keeping the crazy copywriting people away. I do not have to show anybody anything. Nobody is going to get interested in that and the people who are, already know about the site. So there is only a very small amount of people that care about this shit. Nobody cares about artists or sound poetry. All the buzz in the world won’t get people interested in that, believe me. It’s very, very obscure. So what… Go away now!… You go underground. So it makes no difference to me, whether you are number one on Google or you do not appear at all. That is why I’d rather not appear. The internet is always being used in the same way. Why can’t we think about it in a completely different way? There’s a million ways to think about the internet.  If I was in a business or something, I had probably think more traditionally, but for me it is a hobby, it’s something I do at night when the kids go to sleep.

JV: Your non-profit stance and your dilettantism might trace a contemporary vesion of the obsolete figure of the “amateur éclairé” ?

KG: I do not know anything about what I am doing. I am not an expert, I do not  have a degree in curating, nor art history. I just know that this feels important. It should be done, it is just my sense of this, operating on intuition. I mean it is a terrible way of going ,but nobody else is doing it, so you are stuck with a bad version, an amateur version. If UbuWeb was done by the Museum of Modern Art, it would be amazing but it would never be so eclectic. It would not have the character that an amateur could bring to it. It would look like the MOMA website. It would be good but it would be very official. In UbuWeb, I try to think of the art world as the way that I wish it was, where William S. Burroughs is as important as Jasper Jones. I think they are. Or where Kenneth Anger is as important as Pablo Picasso. They are all there together, talking on some kind of level. Damien Hirst is of course part of the art world but on UbuWeb, we have him directing Samuel Beckett’s play. Damien Hirst had no money but the result is a beautiful one-minute film of Samuel Beckett. To me that’s where the magic comes and you will not find that film in MOMA. Or the video works of Richard Serra, which is very important. When he had his big retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, it was all big metal sculptures, there were no films. I am saying actually there is another story: All the things artists always do but they are not known for. The music of Jean Dubuffet for instance. It is a kind of inversion of history. If MOMA did it, you would see the paintings of John Dubuffet but at UbuWeb we do not have the paintings, we have his beautiful experimental music. Since it is available on the internet, I have younger people saying to me: “I love this musician on your site, John Dubuffet.” And they do not know he is a painter. In a weird way, UbuWeb works towards flipping the history on its ear. We have bank advertisements by Salvador Dali but we do not have any of his paintings! To me, this is much more interesting about Dali. If MOMA did it, you would see Dali’s persistence of time etc. By doing it as an amateur, you get a whole different idea of what the history of ‘Avant-Garde could be. This happens a lot on the web with amateur fan sites or amateur news site. The amateurs are taking over!

JV: How could all these synergies and dynamics impact the way we build our knowledge networks ?

KG: I think it is a mainly a folk movement. You have mainstream media which ignores all the folk archiving, and the folk requests of the web. They do not want to know about it, but if you go outside the main powerful media, you would find that most people live by the folk movement rather than by the mainstream movement. It is the internet culture versus old media. The New York Time or Liberation do not care too much about that, but once in a while, things come bubbling up and become means. Through Youtube or whatever, they blow up forcing the mainstream media to pay attention to them. But I think there is a whole other world out there of reinventing histories that is happening at a very grass root level. Just because people like myself can do it and some people are doing it.

JV: Regarding the idea of bootleg, how is it important to create something else with all the materials on there, to use the website as a source for potential new works ?

KG. Because UbuWeb has been doing what it’s doing for so long and never asking permission, it has become an institution. So now you have people who are very famous artists who are approaching UbuWeb and insisting on having their work on UbuWeb. Especially younger artists, they all want their work on ‘UbuWeb and think that the future is not the old Avant-Garde but rather the younger artists who want to be part of that history that has been constructed completely wrong. There is nobody else doing a site helping young video artists to do that. I can see this is the direction that UbuWeb is taking now. Working with young, living artists and integrating their work with the historical Avant-Garde. I guess I am with it and that’s the way it is going to be going now. I have enough old guys and always more coming so now we work with young, brilliant artists.

JV: You also insist about the fragility of the whole project. We always think that the Internet and its clouds are never-ending but we have to consider that UbuWeb could disappear at any time. How do you engage with this uncertainty ?

KG: It is very fragile. I mean it has no money and I could get sued or I could get bored or I could lose my server space or the University support with the hosting and bandwidth could be pulled. We were hacked and we went down for a couple of months. It’s a gift, it’s very fragile and I do my best to protect it. We have had a good run but really, by the time this interview is printed, it could be gone.

Interview published in Verities n°1

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« PSYOP : An Anthology » PLAYLIST by Joël Vacheron (download sleeve notes)

‘Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany’. Adolph Hitler, «Manual of German Radio», 1938

Nazareth, Hair of the Dog (1975)

Operation Nifty Package was the name of the 1989 US Navy SEALS plan to capture Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega who had taken refuge in the Vatican Embassy. The mission employed a range of psychological weapons. Unexpectedly, the building was surrounded by a bowl of loudspeakers blasting music in order to persuade Noriega to leave. The tracks were mainly chosen for their messages and the selection ranged from soul and r’n’b classics to a line up of high-pitched hard rock tracks. This choice seemed efficient in upsetting the fugitive and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. On January 3 1990, after ten days, Noriega finally surrendered himself.

David Koresh, The Lonely Man (unknown)

The FBI famously blasted music at the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993. Apparently, the cult leader David Koresh, himself a failed pop singer, began the high-decibel musical exchange by overwhelming the troops with his own recordings.

Nancy Sinatra, These Boots Are Made for Walking (1966)

When the FBI moved in and cut the power to the Waco compound, they retaliated with the fitting lyrics of Nancy Sinatra’s ballad. The rest of the selection was made up of a monotonous mix of Tibetan chants, cavalry bugle beats and 1950s-style Christmas carols and continued nonstop for nearly seven weeks. Other tactics included using loudspeakers to play sounds of animals being slaughtered, drilling noises and clips from talk shows about how much their leader, Koresh, was hated. The pitch of the songs and speech was often obviously accelerated or slowed down.

Deicide, Fuck Your God (2004)

The use of music to create fear and prolong capture shock was among a host of interrogation tactics authorised by Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, then a US commander in Iraq, in a memo dated September 14, 2003. From this date, it has been more and more common in US Military Prisons – especially in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan – to play, loudly and incessantly, songs that could be culturally offensive. These practices were part of a wider programme, which the US called the Psychological Operations Company (PSYOP), that aims to find tactics to break prisoners’ resistance. According to the «Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms»: Psychological operations are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

AC/DC, Hell’s Bells (1986)

The songs were deployed by the 361st PSYOP company trough a Long Range Acoustic Device. The LRAD is a weapon capable of projecting a strip of sound at an average of 120 dB that will be intelligible for 500 to 1,000 meters depending on which model is used. The LRAD is designed to hail ships, issue battlefield or crowd-control commands, or direct an alarming and highly irritating deterrent tone in order to modify behaviour. It was deployed during the siege of Falluja in November of 2004 where the device was first armed with AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells and Shoot to Thrill.

Metallica, Enter Sandman (1991)

One detainee in Abu Ghraib testified that Metallica’s Enter Sandman was among titles that were played very loud and repeatedly during interrogations. These interrogations took place inside shipping containers that were commonly called The Disco.

Boney M, Rivers of Babylon (1978)

Haj Ali Shalal, mayor of Abu Ghraib and known as the «man behind the hood» in the infamous photographs, was forced to listen loudly and constantly to the same loop of Psalm 137 taken from Boney M’s Rivers of Babylon: By the rivers of Babylon / there we sat down, yea / we wept, when we remembered Zion / For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song / How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land ?

Britney Spears, …Baby One More Time (1998)

Ruhal Ahmed remembers pop music being introduced as a tool for torture in Guantanamo Bay: I can bear being beaten up, it’s not a problem. Once you accept that you’re going to go into the interrogation room and be beaten up, it’s fine. You can prepare yourself mentally. But when you’re being psychologically tortured, you can’t. From the end of 2003 they introduced the music, and it became even worse. It makes you feel like you are going mad. You lose the plot, and it’s very scary to think that you might go crazy because of all the music, because of the loud noise, and because after a while you don’t hear the lyrics at all, all you hear is heavy banging.

Eminem, Slim Shady (1999)

Binyam Mohamed, also detained in Guantanamo Bay, described his unbearable experience: It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time. They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. There was loud music, Slim Shady (by Eminem and Dr Dre) for 20 days. Then they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. At one point, I was chained to the rails for a fortnight. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.

Barney & Friends, I Love You (1992)

It is absolutely ludicrous, said the composer Bob Singleton after he had learned that his track was regularly played in PSYOP schemes. A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional breaking point.

+ Studies for a catalogue / a study for an exhibition of violence in contemporary art (1964/2011)

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