From "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", 5 Nov 1999

The World, How Stubborn It Is!

Thoughts at Mikro Lounge

by Nicolas Siepen

New technologies are frequently packed with ideological baggage they can't hold. Since the Internet has developed from a small circle of mutually linked university computers into the World Wide Web, it has been associated with every all-promising salvation myth imaginable. When he recently appeared at Sabine Christian tv show, Bill Gates named all the ingredients of the conceptual cocktail: Internet, information, communication, creativity, youth, future. He silenced, of course, how the Internet can be built into existing capitalist power structures as their prolonged arm.

"Mikro", a non-profit group "in support of media culture" founded in 1998 in Berlin, stands for a different approach. An association of cultural workers from divergent areas, it engages with electronic media and their critical reflection as being expressed in international networks. In the documentation of Mikro's first year of existence, which just appeared in print, the organization locates itself beneath commercial structures and in a "gift economy" sought to produce fragile webs of social interaction. For this purpose, Mikro organizes "mikro.lounges" every once in a month to discuss issues of media culture, loosely-knit talks in an ambient atmosphere.

Most remarkable however in the recent "mikro.lounge 19" - which took place on occasion of Tilman Baumgärtel's new book "net.art" - were technical problems. A flickery video showed a woman swimming or riding a boat and a bicycle with a laptop. A lecture of Debra Solomon accompanying the display cluttered the room with such notions as mobility in suspiciously fetishizing fashion. It was an artist duo from Italy, which didn't want to tell more about its identity than a series of zero-and-one digits, who managed to somewhat loose up the sticky discourse. Accompanied by a Web site they projected onto the wall, they demonstrated their own concept of how to subversively deal with the Internet and with art form to engage with its most genuine features. At the end, the audience was left with the feeling that even with the WWW and the potentials of electronic media, the world will remain as stubborn as always and no virtual space freed from the laws of gravity.