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recordings from the summer’s most relevant network culture and new media art events – Internet radio experiment broadcasts from the creative media art workshop Polar Circuit (which took place in Tornio, Finnish Lapland) and radio programmes from the media laboratory project Hybrid Workspace (the project was carried out as part of Documenta X in Kassel, Germany). The third compilation in September 1997 was published on the Ars Electronica Center server AEC.at in Linz in relation to the Ars Electronica festival where we – Raitis Smits and myself – together with other Internet artists were invited to participate in the net art group project ‘Remote C’. The compilation series was finished off with the October/November edition of 1997 on the server of media center V2_ (V2.nl) in Rotterdam and it was presented on the conference ‘From Practice to Policy’ dedicated to new media culture policy. These editions gathered even more new participants and new content (Junglejuice, Radio TNC, Pseudo, Luxus content, KZSU Stanford, etc.).
Xchange Compilations, 1997. Collaborative net art project initiated by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits / E-Lab.
Step by step, through its Xchange Compilation project, E-Lab created a base for a new translocal creative network community of ‘creative audio content providers’, whose interests included live audio broadcasts, radio art experiments, production of alternative radio shows and the development of socially dynamic communication within the space of electronic networked media. In December 1997 E-Lab launched the Xchange mailing list, open ‘for alternative, non-commercial online broadcasters and individual audio content contributors’ with the aim to establish ‘a creative net.audio network community’90. The main function of Xchange was to exchange information – who would be broadcasting when and what, to spread new creative Internet radio site addresses amongst network participants and to provide a platform for collaborative broadcast experiments on the Internet, to announce and to coordinate the collaborative Internet radio sessions. In the 1990s, the Internet in terms of its visual capacity was greatly limited due to low bit rate. Also its source material – information bits and bites – was more suitable for a textual instead of a visual mode of expression. Conceivably, that was one of the reasons why sound entered E-Lab’s sphere of interests. Also – artistically speaking it was one of the most abstract forms of expression, but from a social perspective – one of the most common communication forms. With the Xchange project E-Lab attempted to use sound to construe and define new outlooks for investigating the acoustic dimensions of digital networks. The conceptual guidelines of Xchange were based on the idea of an ‘acoustic cyberspace’, which was introduced to
90. http://xchange.re-lab.net – information on project Xchange (Viewed on 02.06.2010).