sustainable digital communities

One of the key features of our weak attempts to devise a conscious and and tactical programme to establish and maintain our digital communities, is to think about the role of certain types of art, including post-autonomous art, and what we are doing in e-space lab, is to see how we can make everyday life visible. This includes artists amongst the everyday life of people everywhere. The Wikipedia page on The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau explains how in this work "he examines the ways in which people individualise mass culture, altering things, from utilitarian objects to street plans to rituals, laws and language, in order to make them their own." It also points out that his crucial observation is that;

While social science possesses the ability to study the traditions, language, symbols, art and articles of exchange that make up a culture, it lacks a formal means by which to examine the ways in which people reappropriate them in everyday situations.

This is a dangerous omission, Certeau argues, because in the activity of re-use lies an abundance of opportunities for ordinary people to subvert the rituals and representations that institutions seek to impose upon them.

With no clear understanding of such activity, social science is bound to create nothing other than a picture of people who are non-artists (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and heavily subject to received culture. Indeed, such a misinterpretation is borne out in the term "consumer". In the book, the word "user" is offered instead; the concept of "consumption" is expanded in the phrase "procedures of consumption" which then further transforms to "tactics of consumption".

The artist describing, mapping, representing and, with us, presenting aspects of life now, explores the capability of new spaces through noticing or deliberately constructing juxtapositions, electric shocks, that help us wake up to the world as it is.

Photography, when it entered the social and cultural communication field was accepted, or rejected, as a new way to represent reality, but in fact photography substitutes itself for reality. And now, as TV blurs into the digital screen environment, we will encounter, and work with, new forms of substituted reality.

New forms of communication afford us opportunities to discover and/or represent realities, as well as providing us with new ways of experiencing and approaching these realities. Affirmation in this context is integral to discovering how to see things as we find them. This “yes” is not necessarily celebratory, because the primary aim is to support the effort and achievement of finding out what is actually happening in the world, especially at the local level, the level of place.

Place is heterogeneous, and the task of representing the heterogeneous is always a creative challenge. It is about taking on the difficulty, and a sense of the ‘lack’ in representing the way things are, even where the process of documentation is handled creatively and reflectively. The material generated by this process will have qualities that need constant evaluation. So, e-space lab, as a research project, proposes to explore how it is that an art process becomes a viable research process, generating content in a particular and productive way.

Actor-network theory also informs of us the necessity to look to the fact that the way the heterogeneous reality that the world is, can be understood as a series of acts of 'heterogenous engineering', by which is meant that the world is made up of diverse networks of association which are constituted by that association - by the links rather than the nodes of the network and, more than this, by the traffic through the links.