|
part
2 - FREQUENTLY GIVEN ANSWERS
katastro.fi
was founded in the year of 1998….
Well,
actually it wasn’t founded. katastro.fi
just happened. A bunch of people who knew each other from
a global phenomenon called the demo
scene (a network of 14-20 year old kids sharing games
and self-made multimedia productions called "demos"
in the beginning of the 90’s), though that maybe they
should do something together again.
katastro.fi
was named…
Well,
actually it wasn’t named after anything or for a reason.
Somebody just thought that it would be cool to register a
Finnish domain playing with the word katastrofi. (That’s
catastrophe in English).
katastro.fi
is a non profit organisation…
Well,
actually it wasn’t meant be a registered organisation.
We just found out that you have to register one to get an
.fi-domain.
katastro.fi
soon opened a web gallery…
Well,
it wasn’t meant be a gallery, just a public place to
put your stuff into... anything from weird manifestos to computer
programs.
katastro.fi
is a media art collective…
Well,
OK... here we go. The current trend among anybody writing
about the world wide web or the
dream society or the new economy is to describe yourself
as an natural organism instead of an organisation. Flexible
and intelligent organism is considered to be the universal
structure for a successful organisation living in a skill-based
economy or in this case - in the brand new art world.
katastro.fi
has sometimes compared itself to an amoeba.
“Amoebas
are known to have no definite shape but they are not just
shapeless sacs of protoplasm since it has a permanent hind
end and tends to form its false foot in a characteristic pattern
according to its species.” But the
species in this case is hard to define. It might be art or
anything else.
The question
now is does the birth and/or the development and/or the outcome
of our organisation/organism/amoeba follow a plan and if so,
who’s behind it? God? Darwin? Us? Definitely not us.
Evolutionary
biologist Stephen
Jay Gould put it down beautifully: “… our
species [human], far from being the pinnacle of some inevitable
trend in nature toward greater complexity, is simply a tiny
accident occurring on a minor side-branch of the evolutionary
tree.” Don’t know if that’s the case with
the human species, but it could be the case with katastro.fi.
Are we disappointed sitting in our "minor side-branch"?
Don't think so, inevitable trends tend to kill people's creativity.
Philosopher
Daniel C. Dennett
once noticed an interesting thing in nature. He asked:
“What do animals do besides fulfilling
their need to gather and eat food plus reproduce?” And
he answered: “They sleep for the most of the time”.
As a philosopher of consciousness he came to a conclusion
that maybe originally we were not meant to be awake, but to
sleep and dream. Maybe being awake or conscious is not the
natural state for a human or a society, it is just needed
for surviving as we need to be awake to eat and have sex.
But after that we have overrated being awake and thus made
it too complex and organised.
So, let's
take this idea in to the organisational level:
After
we have fed (or funded) our organism (or organisation) and
reproduced (or produced) enough successors (or success), we
should go to sleep and dream instead of questioning and analysing
our existence. We are here by an accident, the current form
doesn’t follow any plan and the most of the things that
we do are for surviving.
Instead
of organising ourselves into more and more complex or widespread
forms, we should go to sleep. Meaning: create a state or an
environment where our plans and efforts are not focused on
growth or development of our organisation, but on a free growth
of ideas and them infecting other people and their ideas.
The unorganised
cyberspace, in a way providing similar environments and laws
as the ecosystem and the evolution, has given birth to new
(or in this case very old) kinds of organisations. Some of
the most successful organisations in Internet are based
on the free growth of ideas, not on a growing organisation.
But...
giving up growing is not easy (a reversed Peter
Pan Syndrome). As we do more and more things or just exist
longer than the others, little by little we get more publicity,
more relations, more experience. The doors open in front of
us, it's easier to get the funding, easier to handle bigger
and bigger projects, people, money etc...
We should
stop the growth and the development - planning and pursuing
- and try to create an environment where ideas and works can
spread freely. This doesn't mean stopping the change - vice
versa.
Good
ideas are like bad diseases, they spread fast and infect masses
of people. Maybe good organisations are like bad epidemics
- uncontrolled and spreading...
That
didn't work for the dot.com companies...
open the cell structure
comments?:
large
|
