LABZINE01 :: CCCB Lab, an overall view

CCCB LAB AN OVERALL VIEW

By Juan Insua With the collaboration of Maria Farràs, Lucia Calvo, Elisabet Goula, Eva Alonso, Lucia Lijtmaer & Sònia Aran.

WWW. CCCB.ORG /LAB A CCCB_LAB publication Centre de Cultura ContemporĂ nia de Barcelona (CCCB) Montalegre, 5 08001 Barcelona T. 93 306 41 00 Blog: www.cccb.org/lab Mail: lab@cccb.org Twitter: @cccblab

DECEMBER 2010

CCCB LAB AN OVERALL VIEW A review of the first year of life of the CCCB LAB allows for some in-depth reflections on the changes that are taking place in the cultural sphere. The panorama is too rich and complex to extract hasty conclusions, but an overall view of the situation may help us to see some of the challenges we are facing more clearly.

The launch of collaborative digital technologies is causing a large scale shake up in the forms of creation, production and dissemination of culture, in work methodologies, in the mutation of genres and formats and in programming styles. However, it would be a mistake to think that it all depends on our degree of adaptation to the digital revolution.

New technologies are a formidable instrument in the evolutionary change, but they cannot be considered to be the only way to face this challen颅ge. The reason is simple: it is a change, but the nature and paths of this change are not exclusively technological.

The review of the topics dealt with in the I+C+i (Reseach and Innovation in the Cultural Field) sessions over the last two years, and the launch of the CCCB LAB project, permit us to face this new scenario with questions that affect us all, with shared ideas and some provisional answers as a guide for an open, active and distributed horizon.

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DECEMBER 2010

CCCB_LAB AN OVERALL VIEW

WHAT DOES INNOVATION MEAN? The fact that the term innovation has become an omnipresent mantra in the information and knowledge society does not mean that it cannot be questioned. The lay sacralisations to which we are so prone to must not affect our critical capacity, or allow us to fall into the trap, among other things, of the temptation to self-delusion.

The interviews [01] carried out by the CCCB LAB with a large number of cultural agents reveal a variety of responses that range from the approval of innovation to the foreseeable boredom due to the overuse of the term.

The increasing disparity, multiplicity and frequency of use of the concept of innovation applied to the cultural sphere is a contrasted fact, as revealed in the investigation [02] carried out

by YProductions, presented in one of the I+C+i sessions [03] in 2008.

The chance to analyse different models of cultural innovation permits a critical approach to a debate which has only just begun. The move towards an emerging innovation, which puts into practice devices that permit the knowledge produced to permeate the social field, would find itself face to face with an innovating culture, which responds to a frivolous form of understanding culture and its social function, and also a culture of innovation promoted by political institutions and administrations in order to stimulate economic growth. It is true is that it is not always easy to discern which cultural manifestations respond to any of these categories. The contradictions generated by the daily praxis of cultural management are a factor that cannot be ignored.

Working with institutional resistance is a necessary path in order to test the reasons for emer颅 ging innovation. After all, as Niklas Luhmann [04] states, institutions are obliged to innovate, that is to say, to react in a planned way to internal and external changes. Otherwise, they will lose the opportunities that are offered to them and they will be subject to inevitable change and with no known direction.

But a commitment to innovation in its most sustained approach requires time, resources and a cultural ecosystem which incorporates it as a privileged value. Creative environments can be beneficial, but innovation is not predictable. It implies acceptance of error, failure and seren颅 dipity [05], the awareness of a complexity in

_ The chance to analyse different models of cultural innovation permits a critical approach to a debate which has only just begun.

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A commitment to innovation in its most sustained approach requires time, resources and a cultural ecosystem which incorporates it as a privileged value.

which everyone knows something, but nobody knows everything. The analysis of cultural innovations through modernity turns out to be a good antidote for easy answers to what innovation means. The history of modern art, saturated with radically new innovations, serves as a warning about the excessive enthusiasm of some widely agreed achievements. The great operation of “taxidermy” [06] to which the historical vanguards have been exposed to is a good example of this.

Notes: 01

What does innovation mean? [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, April 2010 [Search 17th December 2010].

Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/en/labzine/quevol-dir-innovar/

02

YPRODUCTIONS. Innovación en cultura. Una aproximación crítica a la genealogía y usos del concepto. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2009.

03

Sessió I+C+i: Genealogia de l’ I + D [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, November 2008 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/icionline/ici2008

04

LUHMANN, N. Organización y decisión. Autopoiesis, acción y entendimiento comunicativo. Anthropos editorial, 2005.

05

Serendipity [on line]. Barcelona: Wikipedia [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Serendipity

06

BOURRIAUD, N. Formas de vida. El arte moderno y la invención de sí. Cendeac, 2009.

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DECEMBER 2010

CCCB_LAB AN OVERALL VIEW

THE CULTURE OF PARTICIPATION If anything defines the end of the first decade of the 21st century in the cultural sphere, it is the urgent “call for participation” which can be observed in the most diverse contexts. Participating has become a categorical imperative of liquid modernity (Bauman), hypermodernity (Lipovetsky) or cognitive capitalism (Castells), according to whether you wish to adopt one or another role to define an era of vertiginous changes and interconnected crises.

The culture of participation is an increasing phenomenon as it already has an extensive biblio­ graphy: from management manuals to academic papers, to disseminated exegesis and programmatic manifestos. Figures such as the prosumer, the contributor and the bricoleur, analysed by Bernard Stiegler [07] and David de Ugarte [08], in the I+C+i sessions of 2009 [09], confirm the emergency of new social agents capable of issuing, receiving and distributing information and knowledge. In all of these, the presence of active leisure [10] aimed at participation and collaboration can be detected, including a range of values that attempt to conciliate the most varied­ community claims with the demands of indi­viduals who are increasingly more critical and demanding.

On the other hand, for the last five years, the transition from a web of static pages (Web.1.0) to a web based on “an architecture of participation” (Web.2.0), which provides the user with ability to control his data, has increased the available tools for the deployment, with all the

consequences, of the virtues and the dilemmas of an unstoppable process. Reductionist approaches, accompanied by technical explanations and business contents, do not prevent us from reflecting on the real consequences of this process. To conceive the 2.0 phenomena as a philosophy of social, economic and political transformation of unpredictable scope implies the study and the application of a theoretical body that ranges from network sciences to the concepts of collective intelligence, from P2P (peer to peer) ideology to the dilemmas posed by copyright; from transmedia narratives to the emergence of the semantic web.

Cultural institutions have been involved in this transformation, although there has been some resistance. Some intellectual and artistic elites consider these changes to be an attack on their privileges or a step further in the erosion of high culture, and it is obvious that the trading perversions of the 2.0 paradigm do not help in their in-depth implementation. And we must not forget that authors such as Jaron Lanier [11], one of the fathers of virtual reality, severely criticises this philosophy considering it to be a form of “digital maoism” or “cybernetic totalitaria­ nism”. This criticism also impregnated the I+C+i session Dear Public [12], in which the legitimate right to “not participate” was discussed.

Nevertheless, it would be an error not to admit the magnitude of what has been started. When the participation box is opened, regressive attitudes are more difficult. The 2.0 philosophy has · 06 ·

The 2.0 philosophy has entered into cultural institutions through press and communication departments, and in spite of being a recent phenomenon, all centres and museums have at least a presence in the social networks.

entered into cultural institutions through press and communication departments, and in spite of being a recent phenomenon, all centres and museums have at least a presence in the social networks. The proliferation of workshops, work sessions and debates on the topic has also intensified awareness of the importance of the phenomenon. The activation of blogs on the CCCB website, the virtual interaction devices with exhibitions, the new participative formats explored in the I+C+i sessions with the collaboration of Citilab [13], or the protocols for a more democratic reception of projects, are some indications of a transformation that affects work methodologies and prescription styles, and which inevitably requires us to have a clear point of view.

Participation lasts forever, warned Hans ­­Ulrich­ Obrist [14] a few years ago, defining a horizon where the processes of co-creation with users and the intensification of the interchange between professionals and amateurs constitute some of the most controversial and passionate challenges.

Notes: Sessió I+C+i: De l’amateur al contribuïdor [on line].

07

Barcelona: Icionline, January 2009 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/ icionline/ici2009/ 08

Sessió I+C+i: Bricolatge, significació i propietat intel·lectual [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, June 2009 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http:// www.cccb.org/icionline/ici2009/

09

Sessions I+C+i 2009 [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, 2009 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/icionline/ici2009/

10

INSUA, J. El desafío del ocio emergente [on line].

Bilbao: OcioGune. Instituto de estudios de Ocio, Universidad Deusto, 2009 [Search 17th December 2010].

Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/ociogune/ ociogune-definitiva-972003

11

LANIER, J. You are not a gadget. A Manifesto. Random House, 2010.

12

Sessió I+C+i: Estimat Públic [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, March 2009 [Search 17th December 2010].

Available at: http://www.cccb.org/icionline/ici2009/

13

Sessió I+C+i: Model Citilab [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, September 2009 [Search 17th December 2010].

Available at: http://www.cccb.org/icionline/ici2009/

14

¿Alguien dijo participar? Un atlas de prácticas espaciales. Editado por Markus Miessen y Shumon Basar.

Dpr, 2009.

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DECEMBER 2010

CCCB_LAB AN OVERALL VIEW

CREATING, ACTIVATING AND CONSOLIDATING NETWORKS The development of cultural organizations in­ a complex, mixed and changing world will largely depend on their capacity to create, activate and consolidate networks. One of the tasks of the CCCB LAB, as stated in the founding document [15], is precisely the activation of networks with those institutions, organizations and communities that support the I+C+i.

The reasons speak for themselves. If the scien­ ce of the 20th century is characterized by the triumph of reductionism (the study of parts or components), the new century presents an accu­ mulation of unexpected interconnections. We live in a small world where everything appears to be connected. Thus, the new science of the networks is becoming an interdisciplinary camp of the highest magnitude. The architecture of the complexity cannot be understood without the knowledge that everything is formed by networks; neurons, transport, energy, information, the markets, ecosystems… It is true that the understanding of how complex networks work has different degrees of difficulty and that the most advanced levels require mathematical studies at university level, but the effort to “translate” this to basic levels is also necessary in order to assume the exploration and the transformation of the world-network [16].

The seminar by David de Ugarte on The Power of Networks [17] and the excellent introduction

by Ricard Solé to Complex Networks [18] are two examples of how dissemination of science can guide us in the creation of new cultural

cartographies. Similarly, the scheme by Paul Baran [19] continues to be an optimum conceptual tool in order to understand the differences between centralized, decentralized and distri­ buted networks.

It is true that evolutionary cultural change is calculated in the creation of distributed networks, where each node can potentially connect to all other nodes –as is the case in the blogosphere.

– It is the job of top institutions to provide the conditions to continue to democratise cultural access in its three main forms: access to information, access to production equipment and access to reproduction.

_ The architecture of the complexity cannot be understood without the knowledge that everything is formed by networks; neurons, transport, energy, information, the markets, ecosystems… · 08 ·

Working in the contagious atmosphere of a new culture requires us to evaluate each node of a network and all its links, both explicit and implicit, without forgetting the importance of the weakest ties.

Projects such as the Anilla Cultural - Latinoamérica Europa [20], the website created for the Cerdà Year [21] or the initiative SLIC [22] have these premises as a background. It is urgent that we begin to think online, work online, create online. The interdependence between active institutions, organizations, groups and citizens is an emerging value that activates qualities that belong to complex network. To be really connected implies knowing our function in a cultural ecosystem which at the same time is local and global. We are nearer than what we think and further than what we imagine. Working in the contagious atmosphere of a new culture requires us to evaluate each node of a network and all its links, both explicit and implicit, without forgetting the importance of the weakest ties [23].

Cultural networks are born, grow, mutate, evolve and consolidate. They can integrate into other networks, dissolve or collapse. As with life networks, they constitute a cognitive challenge, the enigma of which is far from coming to an end, but we already know enough to accept their decisive role in the next decade.

Notes: 15

CCCB LAB’s Founding document [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, November 2009 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/wp-content/themes/default/docs/dossier_03_en.pdf

16

BARABÁSSI, A. Linked, the new science of Networks.

Plume, 2002.

17

UGARTE, D. El poder de las redes. Manual ilustrado para ciberactivistas. El Cobre, 2007.

18

Complex networks: from the genome to the Internet [on line]. Barcelona: NOW, March 2009 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/now/ en/activitat-xarxes_complexes_del_genoma_a_internet-34445

19

Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet [on line]. The Rand Corporation. [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html

20

Anilla Cultural – Latinoamérica Europa [on line]. [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.anillacultural.net

21

Any Cerdà [on line] Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.anycerda.org/eng/

22

Free culture and cultural institutions [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, June 2010 [Search 17th December 2010].

Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/en/escenaris-virtuals/cultura-lliure-i-institucions-culturals

23

Interpersonal ties [on line]. Barcelona: Wikipedia [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties

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DECEMBER 2010

CCCB_LAB AN OVERALL VIEW

VIRTUAL SCENARIOS The virtual positioning of cultural institutions will determine their future in the cybersphere and will affect the way in which they are socially perceived. The virtual-situational combination begins to become an indissoluble unit where what is virtual affects the situational and vice versa. None of the tendencies and processes previously mentioned can be conceived without a fluid interaction between both spheres.

Atoms and bites are not opposed realities. Virtual reality, increased reality and other realities created by technoscience are only useful if they complement and extend our physical reality.

work in progress, where the hegemonic media of the 20th century (press, radio, cinema, television) experiences a radical transformation and where the devices of the 21st century oscillate between success and expiry, depending on the context, the behaviour of internauts and the emerging innovations.

Evolution of the webs The increase in popularity and the use of Internet has resulted in cultural institutions beginning to take more care of its windows on the Internet: corporate websites.

The legacy left by paper and printed articles in the press and communications departments is eroding to make way for online communication which uses multimedia resources (audio, video, hypertext, images) to reach the public.

The websites from the first stage of Internet (web 1.0), in which textual, static and unidirectional information took precedence have evolved towards platforms of multimedia contents. The information which was offered in single format (text) is diversified into new formats and devices, which makes websites, initially designed only to be read, more complex.

The evolution of corporate websites towards contents portals or platforms seems evident.

The world’s main cultural institutions are taking­ on a process of virtualization, the future of which depends on the synchrony that may

Media convergence As Henry Jenkins [24] points out, in the immediate future, media convergence will be a temporary and imperfect solution, a solution which is still disjointed between different technologies. There is a clear dichotomy between convergent contents and a divergent hardware which multiplies the “black boxes” of the various technologies at play. Nobody knows for sure what will happen and how the cultural industries will reconcile their interests with those of growing participation and the contribution of social networks.

Faced with this panorama, thinking in terms of media or specific technologies is perhaps a mistake. What seems most sensible is to conceive the process of media convergence as a · 10 ·

The exhibition Global Screen programmed at the CCCB for 2011 may be a test bank to explore the changes required by a hyperactive environment.

be established between the renovation of the hardware required by the process and the type of software that it uses. Thus, the implementation of the virtual CCCB constitutes a choral learning, where the communicating vessels bet­ ween technology, design and planning require optimum fluidity.

happen with virtual exhibitions as with the first works of Hypertext literature in the eighties: the theory greatly exceeds the results, although in this case there are still few studies on the topic.

What type of virtual exhibition would be suita­ble to transcend the mere situational emulation? Is this autonomy possible and desirable or is it better to have, an as yet unpublished, interaction with the situational version? Is it ne­ cessary to modify work methodology in such a way that the processes of conception, creation, documentation, production, post-production, representation and archive are conceived as a group? How to access the resources to develop the engines that are required for virtual exhibitions and meta-exhibitions?

The exhibition Global Screen programmed at the CCCB for 2011 [28] may be a good opportunity to find an answer to these dilemmas.

The project includes the conditions necessary to apply the learning of recent years and it is a test bank to explore the changes required by a hyperactive environment.

Virtual exhibitions This is a relatively new field, where various conceptual and formal focuses coexist. And there is also a type of Gordian knot which affects the virtually unalterable conceptions in the exhibition genre, in spite of all the mutations taking place in recent years. It is not a simple debate, because it means revising codes, supports, languages, forms of exhibiting and narrating and even work methodologies. That is to say, it involves admitting a crisis of representation. As in the case of other disciplines –cinema, theatre or literature–, the exhibition genre is being affected by the crossover effect between the various arts and technologies.

The analysis of different virtual exhibition models in national and international museums [25] [26], together with the multimedia propo­ sals that have been successful in the CCCB since the exhibition The Jazz Century [27], permits a view of a horizon activated by challenges and questions that place us in the “childhood” of a fast transformation. Perhaps the same will

The future of archives Archive fever: this is how the symptom of mo­ dern western society has been described for the registration, documentation, classification and archiving in its attempt to safeguard memory from oblivion. The new technologies have permitted an unprecedented leap in this tendency, · 11 ·

as the volume of information that can be stored and disseminated has grown exponentially.

Cultural institutions have not remained on the sidelines of this process and, for some years, the possibility of opening their archives has been a key topic for debate.

In 2010, the CCCB has finished the digitalization of its document collection, which can be viewed isituationally, but the objective of this process has activated the debate on the future of archives [29]. If it is true that the archive has eroded library paper as the legitimate authority of a project of organization of our culture, the responsibility of the new archivists is decisive.

The debate has many angles: it includes the horizons opened by the web 3.0, the advances in the architecture of information and the visuali­ zation of data and also the restatement of an activity (archive) is not exempt from a radical unrest.

The gradual substitution of the library for the archive leads to a point of crisis, perhaps the most violent of our society. Miguel Morey [30], following the analysis of Michel Foucault, has lucidly summed up the challenge we are facing. What future does the archive hold for us? However, the threat of a pedagogical degradation of unforeseeable consequences does not prevent the future of archives from depending on their capacity to activate a series of events and freedoms that a new culture insistently calls for.

The availability of online archives conceived as an essential part of the public domain – that is to say, as goods and resources that belong to everyone– is perhaps one of the most urgent­ tasks. The management of a common knowledge­that assumes the risks of infoxication and that may define a new framework for copyright in the digital era responds to the meaning of the archives that we are creating and to their necessary capacity of resignification.

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The debate has many angles: it includes the horizons opened by the web 3.0, the advances in the architecture of information and the visualization of data and also the restatement of an activity (archive) is not exempt from a radical unrest.

Notes: 24

JENKINS, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

25 LIJTMAER, L. Exposiciones virtuales I [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, July 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/es/escenaris-virtuals/exposicions-virtuals-i/ 26 LIJTMAER, L. Virtual Exhibitions II [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, October 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/en/ general/exposicions-virtuals-ii/ 27 The Jazz Century [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB, July 2009 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/elsegledeljazz 28 Pantalla Global. Proceso Abierto [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, October 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/icionline/ pantalla-global-proces-obert/ 29 El Futuro de los archivos [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, July2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/icionline/el-futuro-delos-archivos/ 30 Registros imposibles: el mal de archivo. [XII Jornadas de Estudio de la Imagen: Madrid: 7-9 abril 2005].

Madrid: la Comunidad, 2006.

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DECEMBER 2010

CCCB_LAB AN OVERALL VIEW

PROVISIONAL SYNTHESIS • Participation, virtualization and return to materiality make up the emerging trinity [31] already analysed in the CCCB LAB blog. Each of the states or vectors of the new cultural trinity may lead to Byzantine discussions, but at the same time it is a process that has just begun. In this new complex, hybrid and open context, conciliation must replace councils, interdependence must replace autarchies and the self-organized flow must replace excluding dogmas.

• The classroom, the library and the museum are traditional areas of knowledge which are experiencing a radical transformation. And it is perhaps the laboratory, another emblematic area of modernity, that best resists the speed of the change, partly because it promotes it and also due to its specific functions; investigation, experimentation, innovation. Likewise, cultural labs may be conceived as activators of the new areas of knowledge that are emerging in the 21st century.

• The approval of the new digital tools cannot give precedence to the concern for contents and the meaning of the projects. There are analogical and digital vices [32]. The first consist in fantasizing about the omnipotence of certain genres, supports and formats thinking that all past times were better. The latter consists in fantasizing about the omnipresence of screens and thinking that all future times will be better.

• Situated in the middle of a whirlwind, we do not have sufficient perspective to know the nature of the transformation in which we immersed. The several gaps that we are facing dilate the creation of a critical mass [34], but no dystopic vision can stop the need to continue to broaden our knowledge of the democratization of culture. This is perhaps one of the most pertinent guides in order for us to view with serenity and enthusiasm the emergency of a distributed dawn [35].

• The need for a sustainable evolution [33] of the projects must be assumed in its real incompatibilities. A time of interconnected crises (economic, ecological, energetic crisis, etc.) requires responsible creativity, a new management of resources, ethics and aesthetics that incorporate the diagnosis of the crisis or crises and which at the same time are capable of finding­ innovating solutions to the challenge that an agreed­austeri­t y involves.

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Notas: 31

INSUA, J. The emerging trinity [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, June 2010 [Search 17th December 2010].

Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/en/general/latrinitat-emergent/

32

Alejandro Piscitelli. Oral Tweets [on line]. Barcelona: CCCB Lab, September 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/lab/en/ general/alejandro-piscitelli-twits-orals/

33

Sessió I+C+i: L’ecodisseny en l’àmbit cultural [on line]. Barcelona: Icionline, April 2008 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://www.cccb.org/ icionline/ici-2008

34

ZZZINC. #Masacritica [on line]. Barcelona: Zzzinc, 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://zzzinc.net/masacritica

35

Evento inaugural de la Anilla [on line]. Anilla Cultural Latinoamérica-Europa , 2010 [Search 17th December 2010]. Available at: http://anillacultural.net/eventoinaugural-de-la-anilla/

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