Xchange tikla makslinieku kopiena akustiskaja kibertelpa

• Authors: Rasa Smite

Title variants

EN

THE XCHANGE NETWORK COMMUNITY OF ARTISTS IN ACOUSTIC CYBERSPACE

• Languages of publication: LV

Abstracts

EN

The article examines the collective Internet experiments with sound and online transmission possibilities by young artists in the 1990s. In the theoretical context, the Internet is considered as a new space for art whose virtual and non-material nature inspired and brought together those artists who thought it more important to ‘make connections’ than to create objects. In other words, the idea of what this new medium - Internet - is or could be, coincided with the artistic ideals that preferred process to result, communication instead of representation and collective actions as opposed to individual experiments. Forms of collaboration on the Internet have a particular social dynamic generated by the most specific characteristic of the Internet as an online medium - its simultaneity that enables being present regardless of the actual distance. The creation of the sense of presence together with sound, one of the most abstract forms of expression that too is simultaneous, inspired the E-Lab laboratory of electronic art to launch the creative Internet radio network Xchange from Riga in 1997. Sound was treated as both material and context, thus audio streaming created by the Xchange network could be considered a continuation of the tradition started in the 1970s when sound was also considered to be an element of fine art. The article is based on a study of the Xchange case; it is examined as a search for innovative artistic forms as well as the global widening of the local E-Lab artists’ community and as an example of expression of a collective personality. Artistic and sociological research methods have been used in the study, mostly qualitative methods such as interviews and document analysis (various online sources, publications of the 1990s from the archives of RIXC / the former E-Lab and the press, etc.). The author’s personal reflections, an ‘insider’s view’, reveal the scholar’s position and more than fifteen years of experience in the sphere of new media art, Internet culture and translocal communication networks. The conclusions were that the electronic media network environment, by providing a global space of communication and interdisciplinary potential, endows artists’ collective activities with a much greater social dimension in comparison with earlier times, thus often undermining the commonly held ideas on the artist as an outsider.

Keywords

EN

INTERNET RADIO; ONLINE TRANSMISSIONS; ARTISTS’ COMMUNITIES; XCHANGE; COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

• Publisher: Publishing House 'Neputns', Terbatas iela 49/51-8, Riga LV-1011, Latvia; www.neputns.lv
• Journal: Materiali Latvijas makslas vesturei
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 8
• Pages: 226-236

Contributors

author

Rasa Smite

• The Center for New Media Culture RIXC, 35 11 Novembra Krastmala, Riga LV-1050, Latvia