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THEORY ON DEMAND
GLOBAL NETWORK AS AN EXTENSION OF A LOCAL COMMUNITY - THE CASE OF XCHANGE
DATA can be LOCATED ANYWHERE. Broadcasting from Riga (Parks.LV), Berlin (Radio International Stadt server), Amsterdam (XS4ALL.nl), and coming up soon – from SOMEWHERE else. CONNECTION in progress. We invite you to JOIN in – to interconnect in the Internet radio NETWORK. (Xchange Compilation)87 Following up on the ‘acoustic space’ explorations initiated by Ozone Internet radio, E-Lab set out on a quest for new forms of translocal communication, and in 1997 launched the creative Internet radio project Xchange. It united more than half a hundred creative small-scale initiatives not only from Europe, but also from other locations around the world that were interested in online streaming possibilities. As the participants of the network were dispersed globally, Xchange can be regarded as an example of a translocal creative network, similar to Nettime and Syndicate. At the same time, due to the fact that the core of Xchange was the E-Lab Internet radio Ozone with artists and musicians broadcasting from Riga, Xchange may just as well be considered as a global extension of the local E-Lab community network. In yet another perspective, Xchange can be viewed as a case of ‘counter-geography’ in virtual space – due to the decentralized character of digital networks it was not important anymore from which location an artists was coming (at least not in the early period of the Internet). The networking activity could be just as good from the periphery as from a metropolis. In other words, the possibility of becoming ‘the epicenter’ with the most ‘visible’ participants was open to artists geographically located at more remote areas, outside the officially acknowledged dominating centers of conventional art institution authorities.
Xchange network web site. Designed by Raitis Smits, 1998. http://xchange.rE-Lab.net
87. From the idea of the Xchange compilation project, July-October, 1997.