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SYNDICATE
/ BALKANIA
October 16-23
This workshop 'Designing the Future State of Balkania', which will
be held in Helsinki between 16 and 23 October 1999. The workshop
can be seen as a follow-up of an initiative developed during the
Syndicate meeting in Budapest in April this year <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/index_frames.html>.
The critical situation in Yugoslavia/Kosovo inspired the founding
of a virtual state, a state of mind called the Future State of Balkania.
In Budapest an exploration of the concept took place, and this exploration
was continued on a mailing list, established after the meeting.
The workshop in Helsinki will gather together about 15 artists,
writers and cultural practitioners and will aim at actually designing
such a virtual state. During the last 2 days of the Balkania component
of TEMP a small group will prepare a small publication as a description
of the workshop's process and additional outcome of the workshop.
During a nightly meeting preceding the Dayton agreement, Holbrooke
and Milosovic, consuming lots of alcohol, were playing around with
an American army computer simulation of the Yugoslavian landscape.
Was it the drinks or the technology that created that birds eye
sensation in which suddenly an agreement seemed within reach?
Among the many experiments with virtual communities that, particularly,
the Internet gave rise to, virtual states are a regular phenomenon,
ranging from exercises in political wishful thinking, to refugee
republics, to game-like utopias. The virtual state offers possibilities
to comment and criticise on real world situations, to fantasise
and experiment. Parallel to the rise of the Internet, the situation
of national states in Europe changed drastically. We witnessed both
the ongoing European integration as well as the disintegration of
the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
In 1993 the Yugoslavian disintegration lead the Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Zizek to argue:
"The authority of the state is being eroded from the top
by the trans-European regulations from Brussels and the international
economic ties and from the bottom by local and ethnic interests,
while none of these elements are strong enough to fully replace
state authority ... utopian energy is no longer directed towards
a stateless community, but towards a state without a nation, a state
which would no longer be founded on an ethnic community and its
territory, therefore simultaneously towards a state without territory,
towards a purely artificial structure of principles and authority.
"As far as art, according to definition, is subversive in relation
to the existing establishment, any art which today wants to be up
to the level of its assignment must be a state art in the service
of a still-non-existent country."
("There is no State in Europe", Slavoj Zizek)
The workshop, "Designing the Future State of Balkania",
is an attempt to take up this challenge.
Artists and thinkers from the area are invited to construct a thought
provoking parallel reality that, although deriving its meaning from
the history and problems of the Balkans needs to be crucially different.
Either utopian or pragmatic, it will add a virtual layer to the
layered map of the Balkans and investigate what would be needed
to form a synthesis of conflicting historic views and colliding
identities. The virtuality of Balkania offers numerous options to
obtain such a synthesis. To name a few directions: manipulation
of the time-factor, developing a semantic machinery that produces
consensus, working out new decision making algorithms or altering
the concept of identity through switches and merges.
The participation of the workshop consists of a more or less equal
representation of the several Balkan-countries. Participants will
also cover a broad range of expertise. They are invited to bring
their own material (artworks, software, texts) that can inspire
and contribute to the concept.
Using techniques like VRML, linguistic tools like thesauri and translation
software, and media like the Internet, during a week of creative
effort, Balkania will be designed as a multimediamatic state of
mind, that will continue to exist after the workshop as a dynamic,
populated place.
http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/index_frames.html
LINKS
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