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GL: Let's go back to Californian dreaming. What about the specificities of Southern California? Is there a critical mass of new media theorists, artists and critics in LA-San Diego region? If so, how are they supporting themselves, is it mainly through institutions? PL: Southern California has a tremendous wealth of resources for both the creation and the investigation of visual culture, especially as that visual culture becomes more involved with electronic, digital and networked technologies. Southern California has three of the top five film schools in North America (USC, UCLA, AFI); three of the top five places to study animation (Cal Arts, UCLA and USC); three top rated architecture departments (UCLA, USC, Cal Poly Pomona); the best independent architectural school in North America (SCI-ARC); and North America's most concentrated high quality training in design and the fine arts (including Art Center, UCLA, CalArts, UCSD, UCI, Otis, and UCSB). All these institutions are within driving distance of each other. There is, therefore, already a body of visual intellectuals here – people making, thinking about, and writing on visual culture. Even more, these institutions and those who work in them are engaging ever more seriously with the relationship between the technologies of media production and their aesthetics. I founded mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group back in '95 to enable theorists -- Lev Manovich, Norman Klein, Phil Agre, Steve Mamber, Vivian Sobcheck and N. Katherine Hayles – to come together with scientists –Ken Goldberg, Danny Hillis, Paul Haeberli, and Mike Noll; architects -- Tim Durfee and Marcos Novak – mixed it up with curators like Carole Ann Klonarides; and graphic designers – including Rebeca Mendez and Somi Kim – shared a space with industrial designers like Lisa Krohn and artists ranging from Bruce Yonemoto to Jennifer Steinkamp to Diana Thater. LA is a place where you have to plan spontaneous events, so it's both more complex and more rewarding to spark such interactions. GL: In the context of discussing digital media, could we then speak of a renaissance in Southern California? PL: Naissance, rather than renaissance, perhaps. When Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote "The Californian Ideology," it was a bang-up analyses of a certain brand of Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism and the mush of ideologies offered up in the pages of WIRED (remember when that magazine mattered?). But for some of us who were working here, the tone of the article rankled: "So far, the Californians have proved to be better at making virtual machines than social analyses." This is a typical European attitude – the New World makes, the Old World thinks. This is as ridiculous coming from London as it would be from Paris (though I always felt that Barbrook and Cameron had a better sense of humor about their characterizations than did many of their readers, both in Europe and the US). GL: You've talked in the past about the emergence of a SoftTheory in Southern California. Can you explain what you meant by that? PL: SoftTheory attempts to build a methodology that critiques and explicates the present and that grounds its insights in the limitations as well as the potentials of these technologies. SoftTheory is the product of and producer of a high electronic culture. It engages with popular culture in all its forms, but does not attempt to become popular culture. It builds a fluid discourse about visual culture that is broad but rigorous, that has shared concerns but no totalitarian central meta-discourse. On the other side, this is not a high electronic culture built entirely around renunciation. SoftTheory lives in, with and through these technologies in a particularly immersive Californian way. We are not deluded into thinking that 19th century analyses of industrial capitalism are sufficiently supple to engage with the post-industrial, interconnected world. GL: How exactly is SoftTheory particularly appropriate for the West Coast. PL: Let's go through the stereotypes again. If Paris thinks and New York does (the French equation going back at least to de Touqueville), and New York characterizes itself as hard charging while demeaning LA as laid back (the popular image of SoCal crystallized by Woody Allen in Annie Hall), then SoftTheory is a pointedly ironic term for what we are doing. It allows us to preempt both the European criticisms of theoreticism and the East Coast's condescension towards us as entertainment-addled victims of the spectacle. I 'm hoping that a few years down the line, people realize how remarkable the body of work coming out of Southern California is. In addition to Heim's prodigious thinking on VR, Agre's monumental Red Rock Eater news service, and Hayles's already renowned How We Became Post Human, look for Sobchack's collection Metamorphing, and forthcoming volumes from Manovich on the language of new media and Klein on scripted spaces. GL: We've been talking about institutions in general, but how would you program a digital Bauhaus today, what would it look like if you were to open such a school? PL: I hope it would look like the department I'm already in. The Graduate Program in Media Design at Art Center College of Design develops professional design practice in the context of diverse media technologies. We investigate interactive design theory, tools, user experience, and cultural context. While developing core design competencies, we try to be flexible enough so that the curriculum responds to evolution in the field and prepares students for careers of continuing innovation. It is a two year program. During the first year, students engage with the history and theory of new media in seminars, hone their production skills in studios, learn directly from visiting designers and artists, and devote a large percentage of their time to the Super Studio, a team-oriented group project. During the second year, the seminars and studios are devoted to more specific issues that dovetail with the students' own research interests. The Super Studio serves as both preparation and model for the student's individual master's project, facilitating a connection between group and personal work. I'd like to think that the students will be able to distinguish themselves as practitioners, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and even design intellectuals. That's what we've been building towards for the past five years, in fits and starts. One of my contributions is to try to keep the enthusiasm flowing. GL: How would you summarize your approach, then? PL: In the end, what I try to do in my classes, in writings like S2G, and through public discourses like mediawork, is to combine the object and artist specific discourses we inherit from the criticism and history of art with the more systemic analyses that developed in the study of media like film and television. When I was a kid, I read a series of tall tales about a small town boy named Homer Price. In one story, a nefarious con man came to Centerburg to sell an invisible powder that when sprinkled on anything made it "ever so much more so" whatever you liked about it. Donuts would taste ever so much more so like donuts, bikes would ride ever so much more so like bikes, etc. (I was too young at the time to think about its immediate application to sex, but that's another story). I always loved that powder, even though, or perhaps precisely because, it was bogus. Paul Foss, the publisher of art/text, has said that there is an underlying theme of faith to my "User" columns – faith in art, faith in faith, faith in something, even if as ineffable as the invisible powder. Overall, my work runs counter to the nostalgia of both left and right. I prefer to spend my critical capital figuring out what makes right now so compelling. I am forever in search of the strategies, media and artists who will make what I think of as our future/present "ever so much more so." Geert Lovink is a media theorist and Internet critic. He has worked as an independent critic, producer, publisher, editor and radio-broadcaster. He has organized conferences, online forums, publications and projects such as community Internet providers, mailinglists and temporary media laboratories. Over the last two decades he has lived and worked in Berlin, Budapest, throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Japan, teaching media theory and supporting independent media and new media culture. Increasingly he is also working in the United States and Asia. He was an editor of the new media arts magazine Mediamatic (1989-1994) and a member of the theory association Adilkno, from which two books have appeared in English translation: Cracking the Movement (1994) and The Media Archive (1998). In 1995, he co-founded the international mailinglist Nettime, from which material was brought together in the Readme! anthology (1999). Recently he has done research on the relationship between culture and the 'New Economy.' His decade long collaboration with Dutch designer Mieke Gerritzen is documented in Catalogue of Strategies (2001). In 2002 MIT Press will publish two of his books: Uncanny Networks, collected interviews with media theorists and artists and Dark Fiber, a study on critical Internet culture. Since 2000 Geert Lovink is based in Sydney, Australia.
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