Creative Networks, in the Rearview Mirror of Eastern European History

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THEORY ON DEMAND

a specific feature of Real Audio technology: even in real-time the listener received the signal with several seconds delay. During the first of these experiments, net radio artists at Backspace received the signal transmitted by Ozone, and they channelled the sound through their mixer and server sent and it back online. Returning several seconds later, the signal created this echo effect. The process of sending the same signal back and forth created layers of sound, leading to an illusion of a deep, multi-dimensional space. This was the first time we experienced what Davis described as the ‘acoustic cyberspace’ to a convincing extent. During the following year Xchange carried on with similar experiments, organizing collaborative streaming sessions with the title X-Open Channel where up to seven participants from different countries created loops. The more participants got involved in making the loop, the more difficult it became. It was difficult even in terms of the timing as the interested participants were from different time zones – from Europe, Canada and Australia. In a loop it is difficult to understand what is being transmitted and by whom as the signal very soon turns into noise. However, this was what captivated all the participants even more. Sometimes, we even succeeded to create something similar to a sound piece. But also when the loop did not resemble a composition at all, its circulation in the virtually physical layer (namely, on servers distributed geographically) and the echo effect on its return, always created an illusion of encountering other worlds, other dimensions we wanted to cross. Xchange had become ‘a global network of audionauts festivaly exploring virtual frontiers’ (Lovink 2004, 230). These collective sessions were not limited to sound loops on the Internet. They gradually transformed into real-life meetings for network audio stream providers (net.artists, musicians, DJs, community radios and electronic activists, etc.), and this manifested into ‘net.radio nights’. These live jam sessions of several hours long featured several dozens of onsite and even more online participants. These sessions had become an integral part of many translocal network culture conferences and new media art festivals in the late 1990s. Xchange net.radio nights brought an Open zone in these festivals where any onsite or online participant was welcome to contribute his or her own sound material. Adam Hyde, one of the most active Xchange members states that ‘ownership [in these collective sessions] was impossible to maintain and hence forgotten. Participation became the goal. The sharing of transmissions was more exciting than the simultaneous reception of the same transmission’ (Hyde 2007). Net.radio night events were also the point where Xchange network participants met for informal discussions, both onsite, online and on the IRC chat channel. Hence the Xchange net.radio nights not only provided the real presence but also the ‘virtual’ – Internet was a medium that connected real events with remote places, providing the possibility to join in the collaborative event also for those who were not able to attend. The content of these artistic online streaming events was not that important, the important thing was to do the streaming. The broadcasted signal could have been music, news, reports, interviews, poetry, literary readings, performances, sound art or audio experiments. Also, the quality of the signal did not matter – the transmissions were done in Real Audio / Real Media format, which compressed the sound to an extent where it became completely transformed – it turned really noisy – however, it was possible to transmit and to receive it using a relatively poor Internet connection. ‘Freed from the demands of usefulness, quality becomes an irrelevant criterion for these media signals. The signals exist, how they are interpreted, what the framework and the demands are projected upon them, is not a consideration in the process of their production. The signals can be beautiful and clear, or amateurish and oblique’ (Kluitenberg 2000, 7). Of importance was


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