CREATIVE NETWORKS
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to transform global contemporary ideas in local environments. Second, the translocal cooperation became possible with the help of the new communication technologies (the Internet). Third, Eastern Europe experienced a slight increase in economic growth – in order to participate in translocal cooperation network activities and to create individual local structures (media centers), you needed resources for traveling and a technical infrastructure (even if this meant just access to the Internet). In the 1990s, the Soros Open Society Foundation was the first one to support such activities. On the other side, there has to be an initiator (with a personal motivation) and some close-standing, like-minded people that make up the core of the network and have the motivation to create one in the first place. These are ‘key people’ in the network: they are capable of understanding and addressing the current situation and accordingly to work on a common goal. Also, the initiator or someone out of the key group has to put forward a goal – a local or global idea or shared issue. And one of the key people has to feel the responsibility to take up the role of a ‘connector’ – he or she has to be able to find like-minded people and to get them involved on an accordingly local, translocal or global level. The attempts to understand the meaning of social action and its explanations are found throughout the entire book, but there are few more significant factors and motivations that I would like to include in this final section. The meaning of a creative network’s social action is closely linked to the goal of the network itself. The goals of creative networks are meaningful, clearly definable and related to the activity field of the according network. For example, the goal of the Nettime network is related to the development of network culture and critical Internet discourse; Faces seeks to promote the visibility of women in the field of media art specifically and on the Internet in general; Syndicate attempted to create a cooperation platform between Eastern and Western European artists and media art organizations; 7-11 was a free space for net.art experiments; Xchange was an experimental and collaboration platform for exploring borders of ‘acoustic cyberspace’. Hence, the meaning of social action in translocal network cases is connected to the aim and the field of activity, whereas in cases of local community networks, the aims are more closely tied to the personal motivation of the founders and the specific outer (yet local) circumstances. For example, the founder of Open had the intent to ‘create an environment which would be interesting [for himself]’, therefore the Open initiators in the mid-1990s created new hybrid forms of contemporary culture, a mix of contemporary art, techno music, fashion show, DJ music, poetry readings, etc. thus filling an ‘empty space’ in culture and social life after the collapse of the Soviet system in Latvia. The motivation to create the E-Lab network was more radical – to resist the existing art system. We truly wanted to create an ‘alternative reality’ and ‘autonomous spaces’ where all we would do would be to experiment in the space of the new digital networks outside the borders of the then ruling (Soros Contemporary Art Center) or dysfunctioning (art ‘bastions’ of the earlier days, the Art Academy and the Artist Union) institutions. The avant-gardist aim of the new movement was equally important – to be able to work with the new Internet culture and the translocal networks of media art and to use this experience in creating an alternative and digital culture environment in Latvia. Hence, when personal motivations were transforming into meaningful goals and the outer circumstances were ‘favorable’ (the political situation, emergence of new information technologies, available grants for artists by the Soros Foundation and other), E-Lab finally could develop a new field of activity (digital culture) and experiment with new forms of social interaction and artistic expression (for instance, collaborative online streaming) alongside innovative network projects (such as Internet radio Ozone, the global Internet radio network Xchange).