[resource-net] reflections towards the next monthly meeting

[Tatiana Bazzichelli]

Dear all,

Happy New Year! I hope you passed great holidays! Sorry for my recent 
silence but I have been traveling in December, and then some festival 
deadlines and the holidays made me be a bit out of reach.

I enjoyed very much reading the last mail threads and it looks that a 
very the interesting discussion is developing. I also feel to make my 
big compliments for the very accurate meeting report by Michelle, it 
helped me a lot to understand what the discussions were about and I am 
sure it helped many other absents. I take also the opportunity to thank 
a lot Supermarkt for the hospitality and thanks to LEAP for the next one.

Somehow I feel to say also my personal vision about the "dilemma" 
between having meetings about building up a specific platform or more 
general meeting of the reSource network.
The people that know me well know also that I usually do not like to 
think it terms of dualistic oppositions. I think that the strength of 
creating a community is in its own capacity of being plural. Therefore, 
I do not actually see as a big problem that during the meetings some 
discourses are inter-crossing. In the past meetings some people came 
because they were interested in getting to know each other and perceive 
that they were not "alone" in the field. Others came because they felt 
the need of being more visible in the so called "media-art" scene, being 
actually conscious that such scene needs to be refreshed - and maybe it 
also needs to be called in a different way.
Many times we said that what is missing in the city right now - for the 
many projects/people that are in this list - is a hybrid space of 
confrontation, which goes beyond specific clusters of activity and the 
several project islands that characterize Berlin.

The way I see the reSource in general is actually as a trans-genre 
context of inter-connection in which many diverse people can join, but 
what bring them together is an "attitude" related to social, cultural 
and political practices that I was describing here time ago. Of course 
this "attitude" is probably not enough as a definition, but I think that 
the "selection of interests" is actually already coming by itself via 
this mailing list: in this list there are people that share a specific 
approach to art & (digital) culture, technology and politics, and I 
think that the third reSource event - P2P Vorspiel - will be a clear 
example of such "networked" approach.

Coming back to the original question, I think that being part of these 
"affinities" should make us already part of a "network", so I do not 
think we need to create a new one, since it exists already. What we need 
is perhaps to think about a common perspective, and be clear on what we 
want to bring out of it - as Diana pointed out.
To my point of view, this mailing list is contributing in strengthening 
a network that potentially already exists, but that probably still needs 
to get to know itself better. I think that the monthly meetings we are 
having will make such work very well.
At the moment we are calling this network "resource-net", then it will 
be up to us to understand where this network will go - and which 
projects will come out of it.

Beside this, one of the needs of creating such monthly meetings came 
directly from some specific project spaces (initially Art Laboratory 
Berlin and Panke), who proposed to create a platform for more visibility 
of art & technology / media art local spaces.
I think that this is a wonderful initiative as well, and I do not see 
why one should exclude the other. However, I have the impression that 
some new people that joined recently the meetings do not feel to work 
towards this objective and would like instead to participate in a more 
general network discussion.
I believe that such objectives might inter-cross in several occasions, 
and it would be a pity to create such separation in a network that is 
just starting. But at the same time I understand that the objectives can 
be different for many people.

My advice could be that there could be a practical working group to 
create such platform - with all the technicalities that this needs - but 
then the same people could meet the others at the monthly meetings, to 
refer what is happening and also to share contents and ideas, which I 
believe are very important activities to make both for the network and 
the platform.
Pod proposed to divide the meetings in 2 parts, and this might also be a 
possibility. But to my experience, I think people would need more than a 
monthly meeting to create a platform, so maybe the idea above of 
specific in-depth meetings is more reasonable.
Of course this is just a proposal.

About the question if actually such platform should be part of the 
reSource, or even the reSource itself, I think it is an important 
question. I feel that the project spaces that want to create that 
platform, probably would not like to be under the transmediale umbrella 
for obvious political and economical reason - and I do not think that it 
would be right from our side to "impose" that.
However, I think it would be a benefit for the whole community if such 
platform might become a project connected to the reSource, and of course 
at transmediale we will be glad to promote it and push it as much as 
possible.

My hope is that the reSource network will develop as an opportunity and 
a point of connection for the people that are thinking to create such 
platform, since in the way I see it, it came also along with the 
reSource itself.
So just to be clear: we could imagine that from the reSource network 
/resource-net (formed by people that meet every month and create some 
events in network) a platform will be generated, which belong to the 
local spaces that want to make it. This could proceed autonomously, and 
then we could meet all together again during more general oriented 
resource-net meetings to share results, ideas, perspectives, etc.
In syntheses, I would not see such projects as dualistic or opposing, 
but as complementing each other - formed by and sharing the same people 
and the "attitude" that I mentioned above.

--- In the next monthly meeting I would like to mention to you also the 
future plans of the reSource after the festival (maybe I'll manage to 
write some words before we meet as well). We are still in the process of 
conceptualizing them, since they will be connected with the future plans 
for transmediale 2014, but I have already some conceptual & logistic 
ideas that I would like to share with you.

I look forward to your comments!

Tatiana

-- 
Tatiana Bazzichelli // programme curator
reSource transmedial culture berlin // http://www.transmediale.de/resource
BWPWAP - transmediale 2013
29.01 – 03.02, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin // 
http://www.transmediale.de
http://twitter.com/transmediale

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