54 minute read
AI ANARCHIES
The ethical challenges of “intelligent” machines were predicted and discussed by artists long before the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Amidst today’s technological boom, the questions of “good” or “bad” AI have become more acute – but also more complex – than ever. Under the title of “AI Anarchies”, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste is supporting six artists in their development of new works on the subject of AI and ethics in connection with a six-month residency programme at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) in Berlin. But what, in fact, is at stake? Clara Herrmann, Director of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, outlines AI scenarios and presents artists’ (counter-)strategies.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE DREAM OF NON-CONFORMIST ALTERNATIVES
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Clara Herrmann
FONGWILKE, Memorial Matter Archival Footage, 2022.
FONGWILKE, Memorial Matter Archival Footage, 2022.
In 2020, Google sacked its co-head of ethics in the AI department, Timnit Gebru, who was concerned with the ethical issues of large-scale self-learning language models. The company had refused to publish research showing how, among other things, such models facilitate disinformation about elections and appropriate racist and sexist language from the data that feeds them. This was not the first case in which the industry’s efforts to develop “ethical AI” – trustworthy, unprejudiced, and responsible – were exhausted in vague, if not empty promises and, more importantly, continued to sideline the rights, viewpoints, and visibility of minorities.1
The dangers of AI in terms of discrimination, data misuse, surveillance, the asymmetries of power, manipulation of public opinion, climate justice, and so on are being broadly discussed in science, business, politics, art, and culture. A familiar example is facial recognition software. In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist Joy Buolamwini revealed that the programs used for diagnoses in the healthcare industry and for sentiment (emotion) analysis in marketing delivered distorted or faulty results: her own face as a Black woman was not recognised. The developers had not taught the algorithms to recognise a wide range of skin tones and facial features. Commissioned by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, the programs identified white men without difficulty but yielded flawed results when it came to recognising the faces of women and minorities.2 Further, let us not forget the incident in 2015 when Google’s image recognition software classified people with dark skin as gorillas. The expansion of mass surveillance, the weaponisation of AI – think the state’s use of identification software following the recent student protests in Hong Kong3 – and discrimination in the law enforcement sector – where Black people are more readily criminalised – all find a basis in facial recognition technology.4
The use of AI has long been established in the European Union too: in 2021, the application of AI-controlled lie detectors and interview bots at the Greek–Turkish border was reported as part of a large battery of new digital barriers that the EU is using to prevent illegal immigration.5 This reveals how unchecked “techno-solutionism” – the belief that the solution to social, economic, and political problems lies in technology – is used to circumvent moral concerns in the complex field of migration. The fact that such AI-based approaches criminalise and dehumanise migrants and use them as subjects in experimentation is simply ignored.6
“Algorithmic violence” already exists within the threshold of war in the form of drone warfare, with people being killed on the basis of metadata and algorithmic calculation designed to overcome human “weaknesses”. There is no longer any place here for empathy. As the artist Mimi Onuoha puts it, this form of violence combines “all of the things that we have experienced (particularly in the last five to ten years) as we’ve seen the availability of huge datasets, advances in computational power, leaps in fields like artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the subsequent incorporation and leveraging of all these things into a hierarchical and unequal society”.7 This includes aggressive referral marketing, AI-recommended credit scores, and the rejection of job seekers on the basis of systems that check their applications for the right key words.
To boost profits, to wage cyber warfare, and to sustain and expand autocratic systems: like any technology, AI can be misused. When human abilities and responsibilities are replaced and when self-determination is restricted, the dignity of the individual is up for grabs. Questions of liability arise when damage is caused by a self-driving car or a machine in a factory: questions of transparency derive from concerns about how the technology really works, whose interests are behind it, and whether it can be controlled at all; questions of security and privacy; and finally, the question of human–machine interaction via sensors and interfaces. Many companies have now adopted ethical principles and guidelines and entered into voluntary agreements. However, big tech industries and start-ups remain profit-oriented in their motivations, feeding the hype surrounding the aforementioned techno-solutionism and AI in general. Used to augment, improve, predict, and measure just about anything, a handful of tech companies even use AI on a global scale. And yet, at the same time as being undermined, the debate about “ethical AI” is being appropriated.
It is only through the work of researchers addressing discrimination against marginalised groups that ethical awareness of AI has been more widely established at all. For some years now, artists and activists have also been developing counteroffensives against such trends, for example by utilising patterns in clothing, make-up, and hair that confuse the algorithms. In their artistic
, 2022. Sahej Rahal, Black Origin
research, they also examine the structures and effects of AI, for example in the German migration author-ities’ use of so-called dialect recognition software to ascertain the origin of undocumented asylum seekers since 2017. Researcher and sound artist Pedro Oliveira (an “AI Anarchies” fellow) asks what is at stake when states use mathematical listening models to regiment the movement of migrants and asylum seekers.
The visions underlying these technologies are shaped by the ideas and perspectives of a very small, homogeneous, and mainly white, male group located in the few global cities in which capital is also concentrated. Their systems are hailed as being comparable to, or even superior to, human intelligence. They intervene in the world in ways that primarily benefit the nation-states, the institutions, and the companies for which they are built.8 At the same time, they do the most harm to those who are least able to protect themselves, whose voices, stories, and perspectives of AI ethics are heard seldom or not at all. In this context, artist and “AI Anarchies” fellow Sarah Ciston has created an intersectional AI toolkit to enable greater inclusivity. It draws on the work and methodologies of marginalised scholars and practitioners, such as Black feminists and queer and disability theorists, who have been identifying the ethical issues for some time so that the development and use of AI can be reframed.
As Kate Crawford writes in Atlas of AI, one of the biggest myths in the field is that intelligence is something that exists independently of social, cultural, historical, or political forces, despite the fact that the concept of superior intelligence has been doing immense damage for centuries.9 AI is neither “artificial” nor “intelligent”, she writes, but “both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications”.10 In this sense, AI is not to be regarded as a purely technical domain. Nor is it about opening the one black box. Rather, it is about making visible a multitude of nested systems of colonial power with which AI is interwoven. “Artificial Intelligence, then, is an idea, an infrastructure, an industry, a form of exercising power, a way of seeing; it’s also a manifestation of highly organized capital backed by vast systems of extraction and logistics, with supply chains that wrap around the entire planet.”11 For this reason, no simple answers can be found to the question of AI ethics.
How ethical can an AI based on the radical exploitation of natural and human resources be? Crawford compellingly describes the “landscapes of computation” abandoned by the resource consumption of digital technology, which requires lithium, oil, and water in vast quantities and irreversibly damages the environment and vulnerable communities around the world. These complex interdependencies of the economic, cultural, and political network in which AI operates are the starting point for the art of “AI Anarchies” fellow Aarti Sunder. She examines the infrastructure of submarine cables that carry the world’s data and the life forms that surround them as historical channels of power. In doing so, she addresses questions of resource distribution, forms of precarious labour, and levels of the invisibility of AI.
It takes an anarchic force to articulate the unease within the debate on AI, dominated as it is by analytical philosophy and universalism and taking place in a space directly and indirectly occupied by corporations. What
Aarti Sunder, Nodal Narratives of the Deep Sea, Work in Progress, 2022–23.
and whose ethics and morals are we talking about? What can or should artists contribute? What do they want to contribute? What values do they bring with them? What languages and aesthetics are still left? Such discussions should be less concerned with the relationship between humans and AI – a relationship heavily influenced by Hollywood metaphors – and instead consist of artistic research into an AI that is fair, moral, and transparent. Contrary to a purely solution-oriented approach, the focus must be on speculative and/or technical artistic practices as well as interventions that articulate and question the handling of power and ethics in the context of the emergence of AI. Artists’ resistance requires subjective and political action as well as creative acts. What wild, alternative, and anarchic AIs can we imagine together?
1 Dylan Baker and Alex Hanna, “AI Ethics Are in Danger. Funding Independent Research Could Help”, Stanford Social Innovation Review (published online 7 June 2022), https:// ssir.org/articles/entry/ai_ethics_are_in_danger_funding_ independent_research_could_help#; Timnit Gebru has meanwhile founded a new institute, the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Alex Hanna, who left Google together with Gebru, works there as a researcher. Hanna spoke with artist and Academy member Hito Steyerl at the opening evening of the “AI Anarchies” Autumn School. 2 See Shalini Kantayya (dir.), Coded Bias (USA/UK/CN: 7th Empire Media, Ford Foundation – Just Films, and Chicken And Egg Pictures, 2020), 85 min 3 Paul Mozur, “In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons”, the New York Times (published online 26 July 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/technology/hong-kong-protests-facial-recognition-surveillance.html 4 See Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner, “Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks”, ProPublica (published online 23 May 2016), https://www.propublica.org/article/machinebias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing. 5 Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira, “To Become Undone”, Ding
Magazine, 4: Correspondences from the Edges (2022), https://dingdingding.org/issue-4/to-become-undone/ 6 See Ella Jakubowska, quoted from Derek Gatopoulos and Costas Kantouris, “AI-powered lie detectors, interview bots: migrants to face digital fortress at Europe,s border”, The Sydney Morning Herald (published online 1 June 2021), https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/aipowered-lie-detectors-interview-bots-migrants-toface-digital-fortress-at-europe-s-border20210601-p57www.html 7 Mimi Onuoha, “Notes on Algorithmic Violence”, GitHub (published online 2 August 2018), https://github.com/ MimiOnuoha/On-Algorithmic-Violence 8 Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 211. 9 Ibid., p. 5. 10 Ibid., p. 8. 11 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
“AI Anarchies” consists of a fellowship programme for six artists, a transdisciplinary Autumn School, and a final exhibition that will open on 1 June 2023. In autumn/winter 2021, an international artistic and academic advisory board explored the fundamental issues of art, AI, and ethics. Six artists and collectives who explore AI in the broadest sense and in the most diverse ways were selected by a jury of experts: D’Andrade and Walla Capelobo, Sarah Ciston, Pedro Oliveira, Sara Culmann, SONDER (Peter Behrbohm and Anton Steenbock), and Aarti Sunder. The scholarship holders exhibit their works together with the artists of the Junge Akademie’s Human-Machine Fellowship. These are: Petja Ivanova, Sahej Rahal, Natasha Tontey, and the artist duo FONGWILKE.
For the Autumn School this October, author and curator Nora N. Khan and scholar Maya Indira Ganesh have been invited to formulate and design a new space for the discussion of AI and ethics, bringing together global communities of artists, scholars, and cultural producers along with cultural hackers, technologists, and activists. The focus of their approach is on new forms of collaborative thinking and the development of alternative knowledge networks in dealing with AI and ethics using methods of “non-conformist learning”. Further details can be found at: https:// junge-akademie.adk.de/en/articles/die-ai-anarchiesherbstakademie/
The programme is accompanied by an international board of trustees consisting of academics and artists who provide insights into the debate by issuing various statements on the following pages.
Aarti Sunder, Nodal Narratives of the Deep Sea, Work in Progress, 2022–23.
Aarti Sunder, Nodal Narratives of the Deep Sea, Work in Progress, 2022–23.
When I was 7 years old, I got my first toy kaleidoscope. A black tube that one could look through at one end, and which, when rotated at the other, generated mesmerising, geometric patterns. The patterns were made by the light reflecting off pieces of coloured glass encircled by mirrors placed at angles to each other. There was the sound of glass tinkling, as if breaking, every time the tube was rotated for a new pattern to emerge. I was enchanted by the mystery of the patterns. And, unlike the cosmos that was also beautiful and awe-inspiring but distant, here was something mysterious and beautiful that I held in my hands.
Vladan Joler and Matteo Pasquinelli think of AI as a “nooscope”, a device of knowledge-making. For me, the kaleidoscope captures AI as multivalent, as simultaneously media technology, data infrastructure, and sociotechnical imaginaries: both know-able and un-knowable. Like the kaleidoscope, AI is also “in our hands”. Its applications generate digital delights and are often the means for artists and cultural practitioners. But industrial AI seeks to replicate human skills like playing chess, curating music, and driving cars. One ethical dimension here relates to the direction of the AI industry having gone so terribly wrong in following a narrow conception of “human” to replicate – usually in the image of a Northern, able-bodied, cis-man. Which humans, what skills, have we shunned in this process?
The internet has always generated complicated questions about our bodies, spaces, and relationships to information; AI is no different. And this is where the kaleidoscope metaphor reaches its limit. Contemporary, industrial AI is still a fixed, tubular container generating patterns. Art may be how we work through the complications that AI generates, and it is perhaps where we will encounter new complications too. I think of it as a space for making new metaphors, orienting towards alternate desires, and resituating the delights and patterns of human life.
MAYA INDIRA GANESH is Co-leader of the Master programme “AI, Ethics and Society” at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge. In my current research preoccupations I have been struck by how, when it comes to Art, AI, and Ethics, the contemporary discourse is exploding the myth of universality that has often been associated with all of them. Be it the idea of site-specific and community-engaged artistic practice, localised and legible “small AI” deployments, or the ethical considerations that change based on sovereignty and regulation of technology usage, we seem to have entered the realm where we need to let go of the framework of the universal in dealing with any of these fields individually, but particularly at their intersections.
The turn away from the universal is not new, but what we turn towards is till up for grabs, and torturously being debated. Images and Imaginaries of technologies around weaponised digital practices of harm, neurotic technologies, fascist networks, autonomous decision-making machines, and rogue algorithms that overturn human will and agency, are all examples of this quest for the common grounds. There is a slow and growing recognition that the eschewing of the universal, unless followed up by a new intersectional commons, will devolve quickly into the posttruth moral relativism that is gaining popularity.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges that we have in turning away from the universal is that of imagination and speculation. The intersections of Art, AI, and Ethics have been so entrenched in the tyranny of realism, that the space for fantasy, fiction, and divination has been eroded. The idea of evidence is defined solely by the empiricist interventions shaped by the very technologies and processes of exploitative value generation that we often seek to resist and fight against. The myth of universality was championed by the erasure of the affective, the embodied, and the imaginative dimensions of human-scale engagements, replacing intensity with scale.
When I think of the new calibrations of Art, AI, and Ethics, I hope for engineering intensities, making space for fictions, and creating possibility horizons that have the creative velocity to escape the gravitational pull of Realism and propel us into thinking about restructuring new worlds rather than just repairing and healing the current confluences that continue to fail locally, in their quest for succeeding universally.
NISHANT SHAH is Director of Research & Outreach and Professor of Aesthetics and Culture of Technologies at ArtEZ University of the Arts, the Netherlands.
AT THE MUSEUM OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGY
• It was observed that the distinguished Japanese professor of robotics interviewed on the video display did, in fact, himself look like a robot. • It was something to do with the hair. • The hair looked like expensive velvet. The hair looked like it grew in black, and then was dyed black. Just to be sure. • It was noted that the first robot created by the distinguished professor of robotics featured an approximation of the human secondary sex characteristics associated with the female gender. • This robot was referred to as “she”. • This robot wore a skirt and sleeveless jacket combo which brought to mind the fashion choices of women in religious cults in America. • It was decided unanimously to refer to this robot as “Karen”. • I don’t know. She just LOOKED like a Karen. • It was observed that Karen’s function is to sit, nodding and murmuring affirmatively at whatever her conversational partner is saying. It was observed that to be Karen is to be trapped, for eternity, on the worst Internet date in the history of the universe. • It was related that multiple experiments have demonstrated that men and women typically overestimate how much women talk in conversation. Scientists have demonstrated how in conversations where a woman talks exactly as much as a man, the woman will be regarded as talked over 50 per cent of the time. • The team concurred that this is fuuuuucked. • It was observed that Karen’s voice came out of a speaker on the wall and that this was a) disorienting but more importantly, b) unintentionally hilarious. • The team paused in their deliberations as a group of teenagers approached Karen. Several male members of the team Facebook Lived Karen’s responses as they asked her “do you want it in the azzzz” and demanded that Karen “show us your robo-tits”. • It was noted that a lot of people are saying sex stuff to Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants. A LOT. Over 300 times a day. • It was observed that someone in the world is masturbating right now to the voice of Siri, Google Now, Cortana, etcetera. • The prevalence of virtual assistants with female voices was noted. Whether they are considered to speak too much was not considered.
JENNIFER WALSHE, composer and musician, is a member of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste. In his short text “The Golem of Prague and the Golem of Rehovot”, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) uses a story to make what he sees as the central epistemic point regarding an intelligence generated by the little man with the big brain. “Man can assemble the forces of nature […] and combine them into a semblance of the human pattern. But there is one thing he cannot give to his product: speech, which to the Biblical mind is identical with reason and intuition.” Then Scholem tells a little story from the Talmud: “Rabha created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zera. The Rabbi spoke to him but he did not answer. Whereupon the Rabbi said: You must have been made by my colleagues from the academy; return to your dust.”
There can be no understanding between opposing worldviews without intensive dialogue! No dialogue without a common language! These principles hold true especially when it comes to belief systems that follow the word and scripture – as do the major monotheistic religions of the West and the Middle East. The Catalan philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) grasped this with radical clarity towards the end of Europe’s Middle Ages. At a time of bitter fighting in the region between the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, he created his Ars magna, a brilliant method to facilitate communication between different religions and cultures. He incidentally also invented small speech machines made of paper that could be used for communication. These were media in the original sense of the word. They can also be called archaic cognitive machines, or computers.
The gesture that should carry our current technical extelligence is as clear, simple, and compelling as the Ars magna was over 700 years ago. Unconditional dialogue is the only effective alternative to destruction and persecution. Poetry, art, and science are excellent fields in which to practice this alternative. We have no reason to fall behind the ideas of the Middle Ages.
SIEGFRIED ZIELINSKI, media theorist, curator, and author, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste since 2000.
Natasha Tontey, Wa’anak Witu Watu / Beranak Dalam Batu, 2021.
Natasha Tontey, Wa’anak Witu Watu / Beranak Dalam Batu, 2021.
SWR Funkhaus Stuttgart (SWR broadcasting centre Stuttgart), Architect: Rolf Gutbrod.
Kathrin Röggla in conversation with Andres Veiel and Oliver Sturm
Everyone’s talking about public broadcasting. And so are we. While the heated debates in the media often revolve purely around management issues, the acceptance of favours, nepotism, and compliance violations, not infrequently with the ulterior motive of abolishing broadcasting altogether, we want to hold a more nuanced conversation, from the perspective of art, that is, in the interests of a democratic society. At the end of August, the Academie’s Vice-President Kathrin Röggla spoke with our members Oliver Sturm and Andres Veiel about digitisation, the changing public sphere, algorithm-based thinking, and the issue of who decides what over broadcasting; in other words, about the challenges and pitfalls of the current state of public broadcasting. Both have many years’ experience of the subject. The film and theatre director and author Andres Veiel actively represents the Academy on the Broadcasting Council, and the radio play director, dramaturge, and author Oliver Sturm has for years been promoting radio plays in many ways, also as a member of the society Hans-FleschGesellschaft.
MDR Landesfunkhaus Sachsen-Anhalt (MDR state broadcasting centre Saxony-Anhalt), Magdeburg, Gerber Architekten.
KATHRIN RÖGGLA We are having this conversation during a time of deep crisis. The change that has led up to this current situation, however, is a process that has been under way for years. Andres, you represent the Akademie der Künste on the Broadcasting Council – how would you describe regional public broadcaster rbb’s situation right now? What’s going on there? ANDRES VEIEL The crisis is unfolding there on at least four different levels. At the first level, there is the clear failure of the directorship and the regulatory body, the board of directors. The crisis was triggered by reports of the lax handling of conflicts of interest when consulting contracts were awarded by the ex-director and chair of the board of directors. The Broadcasting Council met in late June, a week after publication of the report about a Springer online news platform. I had no knowledge of the allegations, the report was not quoted in the media review that was sent out to members, and the head of the Broadcasting Council had not put the topic on the agenda. To me, this revealed the second level of the crisis – that of the regulatory bodies. Why hadn’t we received such essential information? This also pertained to the flow of information from the board of directors. While the Broadcasting Council regularly received a report from the chair of the board of directors, it was always very brief and formulated in relatively vague terms. What could we have known, had we wanted to know?
From the outside, the impression was that we were nothing but a rubber-stamp organisation. And, unfortunately, until recently there was some truth to that. The conference rooms were sometimes warm and stuffy, and a lot of people were just happy to get to the end of the meetings. And the head of the board insisted that we as members intervene as little as possible. When I asked a question, I would sometimes get a sideway glance as if to say: is that entirely necessary? There was also a kind of sleepwalking routine among some of the members who were not sufficiently prepared to face the thorough presentations of the directors. There was a lack of expertise – perhaps courage also – so that the glossy brochures being presented were not questioned. Without a properly functioning regulatory body, the crisis very quickly spread to the rest of the rbb. KR How so? AV Because there was no control over the directorship and the management! And none of the protests and grievances brought forward by employees reached the Broadcasting Council. The council couldn’t rely on trust among the employees in any measure. Their objections simply went unheard.
All this has suddenly changed in the past weeks, with each passing day bringing another allegation against the directorship. The employees were leaking stories straight to the press, by-passing the Broadcasting Council. For example, the allegations revealed how wastefully broadcasting licence fees were managed during renovations of the directors’ offices – while at the same time cuts to budgets were happening in the cultural department! Like many others on the Broadcasting Council, I was stunned. That’s when I started asking questions: were these decisions indeed made in a coordinated one-to-one between the chair of the board of directors and the director without the participation of the rest of the board? Who kept quiet about the situation, only to then give a very wordy admission of something that was already well-known? This reveals a third fundamental level of the crisis that has affected the entire rbb right down to middle management: a crisis of trust between virtually the entire staff and the leadership level comprising some fifty people. This crisis has been amplified by the disclosure of a system of bonus payments. Did managers receive bonus payments if they pushed to get the desired budget cuts passed? All this must now be investigated.
Then, last but no means least, is the fourth level of the crisis: the allegations are not limited to rbb; by now they affect the joint organisation of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters, the ARD, as a whole. Even if the other broadcasters did not have a bonus system, the directors still need to ask themselves how it can be that they earn twice as much as the Minister President of the federal states. These allegations, as justified as they may well be, are of course being exploited by Springer and others to finally take down an undesired competitor. The BILD newspaper has published polls claiming that “86% of those surveyed reject the compulsory system of broadcast fees”. This is basically about whipping up emotions with the aim to abolish a unique broadcasting system that is not state-run. No doubt many of the structures are outdated; of course we need a critical rethinking of both the decision-making mechanisms and the programme mandate itself. But it’s too simple to now call for the abolition of the system of public broadcasting in its entirety. Towards answering to these allegations, there must be
Haus des Rundfunks (Broadcasting centre), Berlin-Charlottenburg, Architect: Hans Poelzig.
complete transparency in investigating each of them. Only then can we start to rethink the public broadcasting system. KR So what should be done? AV I studied psychology, and here there is this rule of three: diagnosis – indication – healing process. In the case of rbb, the diagnosis is already more than challenging, because on the Broadcasting Council we still hear about many of the allegations via the press first. The existing management only admits to things in a piecemeal way. We’re still trying to catch up with the revelations, and we’re working hard as a regulatory body to proactively take the initiative: for example, by setting up an interim directorship – albeit a controversial one. That’s the first step. In terms of indication, right now, the opportunity is there to improve the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty in order to rule out a similar structural failure on the part of the management and the regulatory bodies in the future. The new State Media Treaty gives the Broadcasting Council real leeway: we can actively help to shape the programming mandate – in other words, we can play a role in decision-making and make sure that decisions are properly implemented. This presents an actual opportunity to lay the groundwork for creating a cultural programme that would bring culture back from its marginalised fringe position, and once again make it the focus of the programme. I would put that into the third part, the healing process. That’s why the next six to twelve months are so incredibly important – crucial, even. If we get it right this time around, we can do a lot of good. Crisis and Kairos are and will always be Siamese twins. KR Oliver you – as a member, also as a co-founder of the Hans-Flesch-Gesellschaft, artistic director of festivals such as “Radio Zukunft” [“Radio future”], but also as a radio drama creator – in all these different functions, in editorial departments, but also from the outside, you’ve had a long involvement at all levels of radio and TV broadcasting. As we just heard, this crisis isn’t just a matter of personnel, but it is structural in nature. It has been developing over years, if not decades. In the past ten years, real problems have been brewing behind such buzzwords as “digital first”, “expanding our reach”, or even “austerity measures”. Is this now the historical moment that should be seized to bring about change? OLIVER STURM I agree with Andres, this is the kairos moment – the moment that matters. We’re seeing the culmination of a misguided development that has been under way for some time now. Put into context, the public broadcasting institution, as an organ of a liberal civil society, in a way stands between the audience and the state. This means that it’s a medium of self-reflection for that civil society. And it’s also an instrument of democracy. At the same time, however, it is an institution that exists in the context of the media industry, and must therefore be seen against the background of a larger social development, namely the ongoing crisis of democracy. And it is becoming increasingly difficult for the institution to adequately respond to this crisis. Our democracy is becoming ever more caught up in the wake of economisation. The political scientist Colin Crouch speaks of a post-democ-racy, in which parties behave like corporations and treat citizens like customers; conversely, citizens see “those at the top” as service providers. Since the introduction of the dual system [of public and private broadcasters], public broadcasting has found itself in direct competition with private media, which in turn have entered into a close alliance with the sound recording industry. But public broadcasting, having always been financed through fees, has never been a market economy player. And that was also its freedom, its inner freedom. But in this crisis of democracy, many segments of society now perceive public broadcasting, in its current form, to be a representative of power. What you can hear at demonstrations, in part, is this criticism of “those at the top”: a rejection of the institution of public broadcasting, of “state broadcasting”, of the “lying press”. And it is in the context of this radical social upheaval we’re currently witnessing, that public broadcasting is increasingly facing problems of legitimacy. On the one hand it was brought about by the change in the broadcasting licence fees, on the other hand by the representation of certain liberal opinions, and ultimately also because of its concrete power. Internally, however, public broadcasting has not managed to revolutionise or democratise itself accordingly, with the effect that it has consolidated its structures and responded with a paradoxical internal feudalisation. In the thirty years that I have been involved in public broadcasting, that is, since the mid1980s, the internal hierarchies have become increasingly vertical. To put it poignantly, one might say that the inner apparatus of public broadcasting has become a quasi-feudal apparatus within a surrounding democracy.
And that’s why you see quite clearly this helpless reaction to certain developments. In terms of the Internet, public broadcasting has only made a pretence of adopting the new forms of public communication via Twitter, Instagram, etcetera. In fact, the internal structure is still very hierarchical. In the case of rbb, this is blindingly obvious. Once the leadership begins to erode, there are repercussions all the way down to the lowest departments. From various departments of the broadcaster, I’m hearing how discussions are taking place now about all kinds of misguided developments. This shows the degree to which a larger exchange of opinion within the institution of public broadcasting has been impeded over all these years. Now you can say: the mice are at play. Of course, it’s also a sign of weakness that the editorial staff had previously been prevented from talking, from defending themselves against these problems that they themselves had already perceived and even identified. Sure, they are constrained by orders, but the degree to which one feels bound by orders is also related to the level of fear that prevails within the apparatus. The other development that has engulfed public broadcasting is the idea coming from management that we have to adapt to the new online digital world according to the rules and principles of the media industry. For some years now, public broadcasting has been heavily influenced by managers from the private media industry and by broadcasting consultancy firms that have taken control of both distribution management and production management. The guiding principle is economisation – in other words, they are thinking in terms of viewership or target-group analysis. These days, every radio drama department is bound to carry out a target-group analysis for everything they produce and must then specify what the target group is for each radio drama that is produced. It’s an almost antiartistic notion. The click-number analysis creates the tendency to produce what the market reflects as click numbers – which ultimately leads to a societal dissociation: if all you’re doing is catering precisely to target groups, the integrative idea of public broadcasting is lost. The other thing that is lost is the guiding function of public broadcasting. You can see this in the lack of self-confidence evident at the management level of public broadcasting, that seem unable to set cultural parameters. They defer to media management, saying: what the audience reflects in terms of click numbers is what the audience wants. KR Wasn’t it the journalist Tom Buhrow who said: “Everyone is their own director”? OS And [the journalist and former head of ARD] Patricia Schlesinger too. Sure, we all want public broadcasting to be heard by a lot of people, but market compatibility shouldn’t be the only criterion. That runs completely counter to the idea of public broadcasting as an instrument of democracy. Public broadcasting is a precious resource, and while our focus in this conversation – based on the given situation – is on the misguided developments, it’s important to emphasise our high esteem for this institution. Not only the archives, but also the wide range of formats that public broadcasting has helped to create, and the larger aspect of cultural memory, all of which makes it an asset worth protecting, something befitting of world cultural heritage status. Unfortunately, those in charge have had less and less success in conveying this to the licence fee-paying public. AV The crisis of legitimacy that you’re addressing basically started twenty or thirty years ago, and it’s still evident today, in the deep-seated insecurity of the programme directors. Acceptance gradually waned, and in the 1990s many younger viewers turned their backs on public broadcasting in favour of private stations. Public broadcasting reacted by assimilating and taking on tabloid qualities, which led to a continuing loss of acceptance. Right now, I believe that the average viewing age for the entire ARD is 59. A few years ago, we were at 55. If things continue like this, in ten years we’ll be at an average viewing age of 72. And in twenty years it will be 85. Younger audiences have completely turned away from linear TV, at most they are still using the Mediathek online library, or are on streaming platforms like Netflix and other services. My son would never voluntarily watch a film of mine on a public broadcasting channel. Twenty years ago, the 30 to 50-year-olds were saying, “All I watch is ARTE and 3SAT, if at all, and only after 10 p.m.” But now even this group has more or less taken their leave. I realise this when films of mine are shown on public television. Where do I get any feedback at all? Who’s reacting? It’s the 60-plus generation. KR As a filmmaker, you’ve already experienced several waves of restructuring, initially more in the audiovisual medium, on TV. AV The ratings were all that counted. As a kind of preemptive compliance, anything that was too complex or challenging was banished into the night, where it was “broadcast into oblivion”. In the early 1990s, my first film was shown on ZDF at 10.15 p.m., my next film at 11 p.m.; then, for my next film, I crossed the dateline, with my film slotted for 12.15 a.m. It’s changing now with the online media libraries, which are not particularly appealing, how-
Funkhaus Nalepastraße (Broadcasting centre Nalepastraße), Oberschöneweide, Berlin, Architect: Franz Ehrlich.
NDR Landesfunkhaus (NDR state broadcasting centre), Hanover, Architects: Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer, Gerd Lichtenhahn, Dieter Oesterlen.
ever. Cinematic features are available on the ARD public broadcasting Mediathek for a full seven days, documentaries for four weeks, while films are available for one or two years on Netflix.
This all adds to the crisis of legitimacy. Wherever there is uncertainty, people aren’t really thinking creatively, which occasionally requires risks to be taken. Instead, the editorial staff looks at things like: what’s successful elsewhere, at the BBC or Netflix for instance? Then there’s a reaction to that in a close examination of the format, German producers are contacted – all of which takes a long, long time. After two or three years, they try to implant the new format. By then, however, things have long since evolved, and everyone is surprised when the intended success doesn’t materialise. Another thing is that the budgets are much smaller than at Netflix and the like. Many of the programme managers in public broadcasting are driven by fear. I know numerous editorial staff members who are really given a dressing down the day after a show is aired: “All that money, for ratings like this!” The vertical power structures often destroy any and every willingness to take risks. Many editorial staff, who may have started out with a certain amount of backbone, eventually experience a déformation professionnelle. If I get slapped on the neck five times, I either quit, leave the institution, or I try to identify with the institutional instructions enough to be able to carry them out. There are always exceptions, however: there are always those great people who resist giving in to these assimilation strategies. It’s them we definitely should support. They are like the yeast for a new rising! OS A critic once told me that ARD stands for “Angst Regiert Dich” [“Fear rules you”]. KR Great. OS You mention how at some point the editorial staff is resigned to the situation. After many years observing the apparatus, I see it like this: an editor experiences the first programme reform, followed by a second one a few years later, and a third a few years after that. Their experience with all these reforms is that they are not even being consulted on how the reform should take place. Funnily enough, during the last programme reform at rbbKultur Radio, which was simply intended to save a million euros in the programming budget, there were so-called openspace meetings held over the course of an entire year. It’s called open space because the employees of a department meet weekly or twice a month to consider how to reform their own department, where they can achieve savings, but also where there is room for improvement. Right, so for a year they hold these open-space meetings, only to find out in the end that all the reform measures had already been decided beforehand. KR The question is the answer. OS Yes, what they punched out was just “occupational therapy” or pseudo-democracy, if you will. And after all those meetings that were being held the whole time. I experienced this myself with the merger of SWF BadenBaden and SDR Stuttgart: the meetings have a strong disciplinary function. They appear to be democratic, but by sitting together in these many meetings participants are disciplining each other. KR That’s interesting. AV Yes, and to make things worse – Oliver, you mentioned the key word “economisation” – there is the corporate consultancy firm Kienbaum introducing bonuses at rbb, which are known by the management as “variable salary components”. And these were not only being paid to executives, the main department heads were getting them too. This is a point that most definitely needs to become less opaque. Not only the fact that this system exists, but above all: what were the criteria that enabled someone to receive a supplemental payment? KR Meaning, what had to be achieved? AV Yes, the prescribed targets! To what degree was this about content, and to what degree about budget? In addition to the crisis of legitimacy just mentioned, this also amplifies a crisis of credibility. If a head of department receives a bonus of 20,000 euros because he pushed through some budget cuts, I can understand if the employees who suffer under these cuts feel frustration, mistrust, and anger. But the core question is: how do we find our way out of this situation? We are seeing a start: like how rbb is trying from the inside to translate the grievances into a wave of substantive fact-finding. I was quite impressed by that. More shocking was how the management reacted to it, basically by trying to intimidate the research teams. The colleagues from the editorial committee were supposed to seek permission from the press department before doing any research. That shows the immediate pushback: the new leeway for clearing things up comes up against the old entrenched forces, that, while claiming outwardly they “are going to relentlessly uncover what’s going on”, then threaten that there will be legal consequences when it actually happens. In this way, they are essentially defending the status quo. So, even more important it is then that the regulatory bodies systematically disclose their own role in this mess as well. OS You can’t switch from this hierarchical personnel structure, with the huge number of employees, to grass-
roots democracy with one click. KR In the new State Media Treaty, the supervisory bodies are to be strengthened. Would you say that this is a good step? AV Absolutely. Culture is included in a prominent position in the order: “The public service offerings must serve culture, education, information, and advice.” Not only budgeting, but also the value of culture in programming can be derived from this upgrading in the future. Is a story going to be broadcast from the niche of a cultural radio station or in the main programme, where it has a much greater reach? The Broadcasting Council could then decide, for example, that certain cuts should be made in the areas of entertainment or sports coverage, or elsewhere. Of course, someone sitting on the council, who works for the Deutscher Sportbund [German Sports Federation] would say that football is culture too. It’s going to be a very exciting discussion, because this is where things could start to come to blows. What’s also at stake is the constellation of the broadcasting family as a whole: will one programme be cancelled in order to strengthen another? Which programmes will continue to be accessible through linear broadcast? What role will the media libraries play? KR Thinking specifically about the rbb Broadcasting Council, I recall that the field of art only had one vote, which was us. The thirty people on the other side came from the church, sports, from other areas, like people who work as volunteers. Will they even be interested in implementing this? AV As a matter of principal, the cultural mandate has now been clearly established. If it is not implemented, legal action is a possible avenue of recourse. With that implicit threat, I would then work on persuasion. We can no longer have a “business as usual” rubber-stamp organisation. In the medium term, of course, work must be put into shaping the structures of the Broadcasting Council. The way the council is set up now will make it hard to fulfil its expanded mandate due to the collective lack of expertise. That’s not because of the individuals on the board, but more the fact that membership is on a voluntary basis. Few members have a fixed salary, but many of them, like myself, are self-employed. This means there are limits as to how much time they can put in. Nobody can get by on 400 euros a month. That’s why we need readily available access to consultation on legal, programme planning, and budgetary matters. Qualified experts should be available to us, to explain a business plan in a transparent and understandable way, for example. Any decision requires corresponding knowledge. Such accompanying support could help us to meet the increased scope of implementing the changes at hand. OS That would mean an in-depth reform of the Broadcasting Council, because for decades now all concepts and action have centred around directorship and programme management, in coordination with the administration. But in this case, the Broadcasting Council would gain much greater power as a vanguard and conceptual leader. And for that, like you say, a certain expertise and cultural agenda is necessary. KR Perhaps a change in the membership as well? I thought it was crazy that the Akademie der Künste was the only party representing the arts. OS Almost three years ago, when we expressed our concerns about how culture was being understood in the context of the programme reform at rbbKultur, a representative of the journalists’ association – at least as far as I can remember – accused us of representing an art-centred, ivory-tower mentality. That was very disconcerting. AV It will certainly be a challenge, because it’s more than possible that those who don’t share our affinity to culture will form an alliance with the more conservative circles. This is not just an attack on culture – the aim is more fundamentalist than that – it’s about the dismantling of public broadcasting. You hear the argument, even from within the CDU, that we don’t need it at all anymore, and that if it must be kept, then at the very most it should remain as a main programme in which the ARD and ZDF are merged. The line of thinking behind this animosity is that a small elite wants to retain their left-wing privilege of “educational broadcasting”, ignoring the wishes and needs of the “real” people in the rural hinterland. To counter that argument, I would be open to incorporating an advisory council of viewers or users into the Broadcasting Council, in which listeners, users, and viewers can take part through a lottery process. You could reach out to 1,000 people across all social classes, age groups, etcetera. If there is interest, a curatorial introduction could be provided. Something like President Macron’s climate change initiative in France, which was also done by random selection where 1,000 people were contacted through a lottery, and in the end had 200 participants. KR That sounds like the lay-judge model. AV Yes. You take 200 people willing to give up their time. They are briefed accordingly about programme variety, and what a cultural mandate means. The ideal outcome would be to get very specific proposals on how to solve this crisis of acceptance. I see this crisis of democracy as a boomerang that is coming back to hit public broadcasting. That seems obvious when over 50 per cent of people are saying things like: “I don’t tune in to public broadcasting anymore, so I don’t want to pay for it either.” As uncomfortable as it may be, it’s these people we must appeal to. We need to be open, listen to their suggestions, and take them seriously. As creative artists who were able to realise our work through the public broadcasting system, we are part of this system. And this is precisely why we must be careful not to cater to the accusation that we only want to preserve the structures to defend our ivory tower. In this respect, we must preemptively go on the offensive by saying that we are of course ready to be open. We can’t possibly speak of a crisis of democracy if we don’t at the same time provide a democratic body that incorporates the participation of users, listeners, and viewers. OS I agree wholeheartedly. I think that what Andres has described with his proposal for a listeners’ or viewers’ advisory board is an approach that should be applied to all broadcasting programming authorities. In the 1970s and ’80s when television and radio broadcasting were still working well, the hierarchies were not as steeply vertical. A department – whether radio drama or feature – was awarded its annual budget and, so long as the content was not something overly sensitive or controversial, it was almost autonomous; there was an inherent trust in their collective departmental expertise and specialist qualifications. Then, due to the federal concept and a much higher staffing level, there was a much greater dynamic in terms of topics, of fringe and not-so-fringe content, and with that there was an incredible diversity of directions, opinions, etcetera. This scope has now narrowed considerably. Today, each project must be approved by the programme director and the marketing department: click-count management. A department’s autonomy was a great strength, because it sometimes allowed people who may have been slightly peculiar to pull off interesting things. If there was a one-sidedness in certain areas, that was balanced out by another institution focusing on creating different things. The system of content transfer and repetitions resulted in a quite interesting mixed bag. This diversity has suffered enormously since then. These days, in the attempt to reconnect with audiences, we aim to mobilise the collective intelligence of listeners and viewers. That is today’s mode of communication. But it’s only possible with a strong leadership that knows how to implement what it wants. Certain formats just work – take the youth format FUNK for example. People are listening to those podcasts. KR Younger people too, I’ve found. And it’s a mistake to say that now radio only works online, and only as space for content. People still want to be up to date, which is why the immediacy of the medium plays such a big role. The danger lies in the disconnect between the daily content on the one hand and art and culture on the other, which only takes place in the content box, detached from everyday life. In the theatre it’s precisely the opposite, you’re always in the flow. OS Take Berlin and rbb, for example: for several years now, the programme management has propagated the line that only Berlin and Brandenburg-related topics are allowable in the culture section. And no content is brought in from other broadcasters either – they just isolate themselves in their Brandenburg-Berlin bubble. It will only work the other way around: it shouldn’t be about limiting the topics to Berlin-Brandenburg; it should be about involving the people and institutions of Berlin-Brandenburg more closely in shaping broadcasting. We’re in Berlin, the cultural heart of Germany, and the city is awash with artists of all kinds, with institutions that work with arts and culture in the broadest sense – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Radialsystem, Sophiensaele, all the theatres. These cultural forces theoretically could be activated for radio and television broadcasting, as sources of inspiration and as input beyond show culture. If there were less self-isolation and more of a fluid dialogue taking place with the institutions and creators of culture that this city and the state of Brandenburg have to offer, then we could harness an incredible dynamic for our system of radio and television broadcasting. AV Yes, it’s not just about reporting on this or that premiere, book launch, or concert performance, in the sense of providing a “service”. Instead, we should be looking deeper, not shying away from controversy, grappling with everything going on here day-to-day. Then translating the whole thing into its own form and language. This amounts to an artistic shaping of culture in the truest sense. KR In other words, art as... AV ...a space for dispute, in the formal sense as well. Taking more risks is a must. What’s happening with rbbKultur right now is alarming. Take rbbKultur Radio, for instance: looking at the listener numbers over the past year, the number of people in the capital who tune in to Kulturradio has declined by 50 per cent – fifty per cent! OS Despite, or precisely because of the programme reform. AV That is a disaster. The damage is partly being contained for now, because things are working better in the
countryside, in Brandenburg, that is. This reveals a core problem of this dual-state institution. In Prenzlau, nobody is interested in the fiasco that’s going on at Berlin’s Volksbühne. Which is why it’s even more important to create an overarching space for discourse and dispute. But in any case, if we think in regional terms, there are real possibilities to make something of this. OS Exactly. AV Doing good cultural radio means contextualisation, which in turn means picking up on ideas about this or that premiere, and delving deeper, or expanding on those ideas over the course of a one-hour talk show. Or linking it with other aspects in a programme, creating an opener and saying: in keeping with the topic we’ve established, we have this piece, or inviting a certain discussion panel, while online we’ll provide this and that. KR But something like that only happens if there is internal discussion. AV Exactly. I’m experiencing this myself, because I’m doing the “Question of the Day” column every fourteen days on rbbKultur. It’s a fixed format of three and a half minutes, so I can present topics in a poignant and hyperbolic way. It all has its own rationale – a wake-up call at 08:08 a.m. But it would be nice to be able to explore the deeper connections – in very different formats. The slogan of rbb is “nothing boring” – but just because something is longer doesn’t make it boring. Going in-depth, but without the opinionated hysterics of the talk show – that’s the point. One of the most exciting things for me is always this search for positions, the grappling with the truth, with the essence of an argument. It’s always a process. Even I don’t yet know where it’s going. Of course, such open spaces always mean taking risks, because it’s not simply about exchanging blows – one person yelling louder than the other, being the first to interrupt. The follow-up work is always important: what are the needs behind an opinion or an argument? It shouldn’t just be about a battle of opinions, rather, it should be about the underlying needs behind that opinion. Why do I arrive at this conclusion, and what are the real-life experiences that flow into it? But that also means questioning the argument, making it visible in whatever form it has taken on, which takes time. OS In its larger development, radio and television broadcasting is going in the complete opposite direction. It sees itself purely as a content machine, producing individual units of content that are dumped on the Internet without context. There are findability departments to deal with generating online attention. But the pieces themselves are like alienated individual content islands that get poured into the ocean that is the Internet. Everything that constitutes communication and social friction is lost. KR That’s exactly what I wanted to address with digitisation: what is public space in the digital realm? What can public broadcasting achieve in that space, in terms of contextualisation? OS I think the live format is something that shouldn’t be lost. The medium of TV and radio broadcasting has always held a central function: to keep people company. For someone at home, the device, whether it’s a digital notebook or an old valve radio, keeps them company. And it’s a form of social communication. This form of communication needs to be preserved. That is the central task of radio and television broadcasting. AV And it is this that is most lacking, namely creating connections like this. It requires the knowledge and recognition that it isn’t just a space for opinions or arguments, but a space where I can connect what I hear or see with my own experiences: “Oh, I’ve never looked at it from that perspective, or in that context before.” It’s about giving visibility to an ever-growing complexity. To exacerbate things even more, we are living in a time when there is extreme pressure to act. KR So there’s both pressure resulting from the complexity, and there is the pressure to act. AV Yes, both of those things. That’s why public broadcasting is so essential, because it is tasked with attempting to deal with this problem: on the one hand, we find ourselves in a pressure chamber in the face of a dramatically worsening climate catastrophe, and know we are running out of time. On the other hand, we need to grasp climate change as a social issue, not just in Germany, but all over the world. First and foremost, it’s a question of distributive justice: who is paying how much for the urgently needed environmental protection? Why is so little happening at policy level, even though in scientific terms we know precisely how dramatic the challenges are? In a situation like this, public broadcasting can and must also be partisan. Being balanced cannot mean giving airtime to climate-change deniers from the AFD. We need to always think about how to get away from the excitement of the daily headlines and get back to the root. By the way, that’s also why I have issues with the current rbb debate, when people point to Mrs. Schlesinger, saying that she failed, or that a certain person was also involved, and he or she was paid bonuses, or that confidant X was shut up with 700,000 euros in hush money. While I understand how important such matters are, if you consider the real issues behind it... KR ...the structural questions. AV That’s what we need to delve into! The big problem is that when these emotional topics are quickly whipped up in a media cooker – where there’s a lot of steam but little fire – then we’re preoccupied with dealing with all these allegations. One problem down, and our attention is already turned to the next scandal. There’s hardly any public attention left over for what needs to be tackled – the structures themselves – because that doesn’t generate the headlines. OS You’re addressing something that I think is very important: this incredible pressure to act that society is subject to. The context in which television and radio broadcasting operates is a market-driven capitalist system that extends into every tiny fibre of society. It’s a system geared towards exploitation of resources, optimisation, and increased efficiency. You can see how everyone ticks when it comes to natural resources, but also in terms of our inner resources. What the media industry is doing is ultimately a kind of industrialisation of consciousness. In a negative sense this means that you have an exploitation of consciousness going on, but in a positive sense it means also an expansion of consciousness. This precariously exhausted system is the context in which broadcasting takes place. And, as part of the media industry, broadcasting is itself approaching a state of exhaustion. The real trick is to assert one’s position in a corrective way. It is to be hoped that the discussions currently taking place in the rbb departments, which the employees perceive as very productive, will continue and not come to a standstill again with the election of a new director. AV There is a real necessity in allowing for a space in which public broadcasting protects ambivalence and ambiguities. The media-fed agitation factor increases in this collective competition for the currency of “attention”. The more agitation, the more clicks and the higher the ratings. The only way I get invited to a talk show is if I take an extreme position. KR But not too extreme. AV If I say I’m still grappling with myself, I’m in the process of figuring out my position, I’ll be disinvited rather quickly. That’s too unpredictable, or it’s simply uninteresting. Nowadays you can hardly find a space that allows for a protected process of soul searching and introspection, one where it’s not about the proclamation of glaring, exaggerated opinions that can be readily recited. If I’m aware of the environment and the experiences that have produced an opposing argument, I find it extremely interesting when someone contradicts me. From the context of someone’s biographical experience, I may understand how they have arrived at their position. Then no longer are we just arguing at the surface of a phenomena, but touching upon a deeper level of longings, needs, and fears. We talked earlier about the fear factor that drives the broadcaster, which is also reflected in society generally. If we succeed in transforming a culture of fear into a culture of reflection and listening, where ambivalence and ambiguities have a place, and if we find the appropriate formats for that, we will win back a lot of people – I’m careful not to say “pick up a lot of people” – who have closed themselves off as a result of this fear. If I understand what has led a person to argue one way and not another, then I can say: I can’t stand your opinions, but at least I understand where they’re coming from; to me your opinions are poisonous weeds, but I understand the soil that they’re emerging from. The fear is growing, and, I believe, so is the polarisation. That’s why public broadcasting has an increasingly important role to play. Who else is supposed to take on this task? Somehow, we must get this gigantic, mushrooming fear potential under control and moderate it. And in doing so, we need to translate it into an artistic form, in other words into spaces that philosopher Oskar Negt once called “rest areas of reflection”.
Funkhaus Nalepastraße (Broadcasting centre Nalepastraße), Oberschöneweide, Berlin, Architect: Franz Ehrlich.
Funkhaus Nalepastraße (Broadcasting centre Nalepastraße), Oberschöneweide, Berlin, Architect: Franz Ehrlich.
