[iDC] Re: Interactive City: irrelevant mobile

[mollybh at netspace.net.au]

Dear list, 

I would encourage anyone who was at or involved with ISEA/ZeroOne and who saw 
or participated in the projects which Steve Dietz outlined as efforts to be 
inclusive, and to engage a multicultural urbanism, in particular, to write 
about them and the kinds of positive and negatives, achievements and failures, 
of attempting to work in this way, the hardship, or pleasures, or obstacles 
and to publish this writing where possible. 

Global arts culture really should not slip back 50 years to the point where 
exclusionary practices limited the creative acceptance and potential of anyone 
who was not white and male - and, in reactionary times, we need to support 
wholeheartedly the presence of these "other" ideas, espcially,imho, ideas of 
inclusion, to win against the tyranny of the unfortunate hegemony and erasure 
of cultural and political difference which we are up against. Maybe we are 
experiencing self-censorship and devaluation of art and humanity as a result 
of war and reaction and the fear to speak out?  

This recent thread has lost much of its power as a set of ideas, and 
typically, in such a debate, many of the best, because critical, comments, 
imho, have been pushed aside.  Questions of multicultural urbanisms and 
involvement and participation in a global festival by minority and ethnic 
communities and their subcultures with themes such as 'interactive city' 
and 'community domain' at its forefront, are impossibly important. Otherwise 
there is no multiplicity and no democracy and no potential for democratic 
participation at a meaningful level - let's hope at least we can propose it in 
theory.   

I am only one art writer, but I would like to congratulate Anna Munster for 
her candid comments, as an Australian visiting the US, about the diffused 
and dislocating space of the festival; and about the disturbing absence of 
social and political critique in a national, governmental time of war, 
slandering of migrant communities, dismissal of international law, 
militarization of space, etc. etc. To me this opens a space for discussion and 
debate, regardless of ISEA's role or ZeroOne's future. Art certainly does not 
rely on the prestige of arts organizations to annoint it with meaning.  


Ironically, as much of this lists' discussion has circulated around the 
dominant high-tech new media and industry culture of San Jose, map-wise, there 
is another history which speaks, and named after Cesar Chavez, too - 



Molly



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