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the international conference ‘Espionage Technologies and Art’, held at Liepaja Karosta. The next year, 2008, the study and the cooperation between artists and scientists was continued, resulting in another large-scale international exhibition called ‘Spectropia’101 and a scientific collection of articles ‘Acoustic Space Nr 7: Spectropia’ dedicated to scientific and artistic explorations in the electromagnetic spectrum. In the following years RIXC continued solving social and ecological issues related to technologies, which lead to a new field of interests, sustainability, where another new translocal creative network was initiated and developed: Renewable102. The 1990s network culture focused all the attention to information, however the issue of energy gradually gained equal significance. Energy and information were already the topics of the 20th century, but it seems as if they are becoming even more important in the 21st century. Participants of the Renewable network discuss, view, address and interpret in an artistic way such issues as the relations between information and energy, peer-to-peer networks, collaborations between artists and scientists in the quest for alternative energy, etc. All this makes much sense since working with computers and other electronic media technologies, requires everyone, including media artists and researchers likewise, to use electricity. The result of the ever-new information and communication technology development is an increasing consumption of energy, a growing density of electromagnetic emissions in our environment and pollution of nature caused by outdated devices. Therefore new media artists, who once were among the first to use information technologies in a creative way, nowadays want to view these technologies in a broader sense – in the context of a sustainable in society. The Renewable network was developed in 2009 as a result of several events organized by RIXC. In the summer of 2009, RIXC organized a symposium in artist residency center Serde in the city of Aizpute: ‘Art and Renewable Technologies’103 gathering around thirty participants from multiple fields – artists, architects, computer engineers, theorists, patricians, new scientists and researchers, in order to share ideas and research results in relation to renewable energy resources, alternative and ecological uses of information technologies and other issues connected to sustainability. The Renewable mailing list was launched in relation to the symposium, which makes it one of those creative network cases where meetings in real life precede virtual communication on mailing lists and carry out new cooperation projects. In autumn 2009, RIXC gathered the participants of the Renewable network once more for an onsite meeting at the festival ‘Art+Communication’ which was dedicated to the theme of ‘Energy’104. Scientific and artistic, utopian and critical ideas in relation to Earth’s energy in the future were presented at the festival exhibition, while the conference was looking for overlapping fields between art and science. In order to develop models of sustainable translocal collaboration structures for the new Renewable network, RIXC invited the participants of the new network to take part in the seminar ‘Organized Networks’105 at the end of 2009. Conceptually, it was based on the idea put forward by Australian media theorist Ned Rossiter, to view networks as new types of institutions. The seminar also analyzed the experience of Renewable network participants in organizing translocal and local networks on a practical level, so as to have a fundament for discovering those aspects that are at the basis of network
101. Project ‘Spectropia’ (2008) http://rixc.lv/08 (Viewed on13.05.2009). 102. Renewable Network i san abbreviation from Network for Art and Renewable Energy Technologies. 103. http://renewable.rixc.lv. 104. http://rixc.lv/09. 105. http://orgnet.rixc.lv.