For cultural workers the Internet offers the potential for an entirely new mode of real-world engagement, communication and collaboration.

www.freecooperation.org
For cultural workers the Internet offers the potential for an entirely new mode of real-world engagement, communication and collaboration.

www.freecooperation.org
On the one hand, we have a virtual community of practitioners aiming for direct social engagement and, on the other, people who jump right into the golden cage of the commercial art world.

Over the past years Internet activism has seen a spectacular rise. From Seattle (December 99) to 911 responses, protests for a democratic globalization process and the rise of the biggest anti-war movement since the Vietnam war, global social movements have never done better. There is talk of a 'transnational civil society' in the making. Numerous models for global governance are circulating. Worldwide anti-war demonstrations showed that resistance in the streets is not obsolete as a form of productive dissent and accelerated their mobilizations through the use of a variety of 'tactical media'.

However, despite recession and growing discontent, the structure of mainstream media has not changed. Quite the opposite. The concentration of media power in fewer and fewer hands seems unstoppable. Is the world of alternative 'tactical media' growing into its own small parallel world? Web logging seems to suggest so. Never before has there been so much (interactive) commentary about what news media report about-with so little effect on the structures that fabricate 'public opinion.'

What are the long-term goals of artists, activists and critics? What is the use of critical discourses if they, in the end, do not reach wider audience? Can activists address fundamental political issues or will their protests be limited to riot carnival during summits? How affective is the wide spectrum of possible critical interventions for cultural producers online-- from facilitating online initiatives to web-based artwork to tech support for what is often called the movement?

For cultural workers the Internet offers the potential for an entirely new mode of real-world engagement, communication and collaboration. On the one hand, we have a virtual community of practitioners aiming for direct social engagement and, on the other, people who jump right into the golden cage of the commercial art world.

Today, web-based art with political intent is abundantly available on the Internet. Initially hopes were widespread that this is a non-capitalizable art form using alternative structures of dissemination. Techno-formalism and the institutionalization of web-based art with its racial undertones has, over the past years taken away from countless of these hopes. For many artists disenchanted with the gallery as primary site, the Internet remains the most promising locale for real-world engagement. Analogies and metaphors have become tactical devices forming counter-ideologies. What are useful models of radical cultural production online that have real potential for communication? What is the relationship of this work to concrete policy making, and the history of art?

As a general framework we haven chosen to look into the inner workings of collaboration. With or without technology, what dominates all cultural forms these days are intense forms of what the German theorist Christoph Spehr calls 'free cooperation.'

What do the 'smart mobs' experience when they interact? It is important here to state that collaboration has a tendency beyond good and evil and is almost unavoidably a product of increased network density, may it be in organizations, movements or cities. There is no way back to the 19th century individual-as-genius. Yet, in the same way we can see the end of the division of labor. Specializations exist, and remain a necessicity, but can only work if there is sufficient cross-cultural, inter-professional exchange.

Slaves let what happens happen, they have the freedom to obey. But how about today's artists ? People are free and equal in the context of free cooperation; the rules don't give anyone more rights. It is important to realize the collective capital of the cooperation. Who has the power? Those who contribute the most cultural capital or those with the right technical skills? How is this power relationship re-negotiated, Spehr asks. How do we figure out the spaces in which conflicts are secure and protected? Respect is based on conflict and working through things, not on bleak consensus. In a forced collaboration we are nobody, we are traumatized. Are the rules fair or self-serving and convenient for certain members of the cooperation? Some rules can be bent, others broken. It needs to be a fair exchange. "There are no rules but the 'old rules.'"(Gayatri Spivak) In a free cooperation the political person is not separated from the everyday person.

We expect that somebody in the group says what we have to do and then that. Without personal gain it does not work, it would be an unrealistic cooperation. Cooperations must pay. And they need be workable without consensus. Free cooperation is about loyalty to people but not to structures as a free cooperation is re-evaluated time and again. Don't stand others in the way. And: Be self-reflective.