Having recently embarked on a trip through the digital landscape, vast and at times overwhelming, I have decided to focus on the current digital “Underground” which, by virtue of the nature of the medium could more properly be termed “oversky” rather than “underground”. Specifically, I am interested in exploring the connections established by users of digital media on various levels; individuals, communities and cultures, to see if there is an underlying Ideology that connects them and their separately evolving ideas about art, technology and the contemporary world at large. Given the broadness of these topics, the following pages will most likely only scratch the surface of the proposed endeavor. I hope, however, that the material I’ve researched and the people I have spoken to will have slightly opened a small door in my own head that will eventually be flung open to a whole new virtual universe.

My two main sources for research have been a weekly event occurring in New York City called Share, and Guy Debord’s book, Society of the Spectacle. In the first case, the community that forms Share became my practical source for people’s thoughts on whether there is or isn’t an Ideology in the digital underground, while the Debord book was instrumental in helping to define the term Ideology itself, as well as providing a deep analysis of how our world has been saturated by media and how “the Media” has created a “spectacular society” which has well surpassed the alienation of mankind as predicted by the theories of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in their Communist Manifesto.

In view of the above, the question becomes: can a community now be formed through digital technology which can in some way reverse or completely break with this alienation and, if so, does there need to be a common Ideology connecting such a community or is the very idea of Ideology part of the mechanism of alienation. Can a society that hopes to engage in some form of Revolution against the current Capitalist economic system dispense with the established definition of Ideology? According to Debord, “The Spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in it’s full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.” (Debord, 1995, p. 151). And how has technology contributed or resisted the progression of the current status of the State? I put out a call for ideas to see what people in the current digital underground community had to say. It was somewhat revelatory that, though many expressed interest in the paper and in the topics I put forth, only four people actually replied and only two actually had specific comments on one of the topics proposed. Following is an excerpt from the call I put out: “As some of you know, I am in the process of researching and writing a paper on the digital arts and new media… Below, I have listed some specific topics on which I will be expounding, specifically with respect to contemporary digital art. If any of them inspire you to comment, please do so, using whichever reasoning method you prefer (stream of consciousness, deconstruction, gibberish, whatever), also in relation to the digital underground specifically.

Topics:

The weekly "Share" event
Copyright & Trademark
Plunderphonics/Appropriation/Culture Jamming
Sampling & Mash-ups
Dissidence/Anarchy/Disobedience/Subversion/Sabotage
Revolution & Evolution
Morality & Ethics/Justice
Marxism/Socialism/Democracy
Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle/Detournement
Medium & Message
Free Exchange of Ideas & Free Trade/Global Exchange
Propaganda vs. Entertainment
The term "Underground"
"Happenings"
Love
War

And anything else that the above topics might inspire in you.”

This request was made with the understanding that everyone is, of course, free to comment or not comment in keeping with the idea of freedom to collaborate and participate on a voluntary basis.

The various people I questioned in person on the proposed thesis all had a general sense of there being no such thing as an Ideology in the digital underground, so is the alternative a form of Anarchy or is Anarchy itself still constrained within the confines of ideological definition? In attempting to find a concise definition of Anarchy I came across an essay by someone named Jason Justice on the Anarchy Watch website (http://www.zmag.org/AWatch/awatch.htm). According to Jason:

“Anarchism fully blossomed as a defined theory when Russian anarchists Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) started to write and speak. Bakunin had a major influence in the world and introduced anarchism to many people. Kropotkin was one of the many people inspired by Bakunin. Kropotkin wrote many books on anarchism, including Mutual Aid, Fields Factories and Workshops, and The Conquest of Bread, and greatly aided in the evolution of the theory of anarchism. Kropotkin wrote the first adept encyclopedia definition of anarchism in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1910. His definition was fifteen pages long. He started the definition by introducing the word anarchism as: the name given to a principle of theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of the needs and aspirations of a civilized being, In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state of its functions.”

As an added bonus for my purposes, at the bottom of his essay, Mr. Justice writes the following: “PLEASE REPRINT AND DISTRIBUTE”. The free exchange of ideas is still, for the moment, alive and well on the Internet.

Perhaps one answer to the question of structure in today’s digital Underground can be found in the form of Happenings, a type of event whose emergence is credited to John Cage. But firstly, what are we talking about here when we refer to an “Underground” as applied to the arts in general and to the new digital “Revolution” specifically? At first used to describe subversive political and military operations, the term seems to have emerged with regards to art in the late 1950’s in order to describe what was then becoming a trend in independent and experimental film. “Underground Film” as a phrase was fully co-opted by Parker Tyler as the title of his book on experimental and avant-garde cinema to describe a type of clandestine, anti-establishment film that questioned not only the accepted content in film up to then, but also the very form in which it was presented. In all senses, it is used to describe a “clandestine” movement whose aim it is to subvert the status quo. Tyler himself elegantly summarizes this concept when he writes in his book:

“If one ethical trait is characteristic of the twentieth century, it is that social theory - rooted in political revolutions from that of France to that of Russia – has tended to prohibit the very psychology of Establishments. Many objective ironies are meshed with this supposed prohibition, not the least being the existence of Establishment forms – political bureaucracies – in socialist as well as fascist states. Nevertheless, a dominant tendency of popular thinking in our time is anti-Establishment, not merely in opposing existent establishment orders, but by negating the very concept of Establishment. The forces in avant-garde films which have been named Underground conspicuously if tacitly support a code that would outlaw Establishments -–that is, destroy forever the political validity of the Establishment idea. Curiously enough, the Underground film movement, regarded in this light, can be identified as having traits of both Anarchist and Communist philosophy.” (Tyler, 2995, p.33-34)

Though Tyler was referring specifically to the medium of film when he wrote the above, and though he was writing in 1969, the entire paragraph could just as well be applied to what I consider is a growing movement within the digital community at large and the digital Underground art community specifically; the tendency towards free-form, volunteer-based events which pretty much run themselves (Share, for example).

In this context, the question of Ideology with a big “I” seems to be at the center of a growing dissatisfaction in the Underground with what is happening in our world at large today, especially with regards to the media and how it informs the content of our daily lives. As mentioned previously, my main source for research on the “idea of Ideology” is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967. In the October, 2003 edition of The Brooklyn Rail Express, Andy Merrifield wrote that, “When the book first hit the stores in late 1967, …Capitalism was tapping the parts nobody – Marx included – could have ever imagined: one hundred-odd years on from The Communist Manifesto, the system was more rampant and expansive than ever before…” (Merrifield, 2003, p. 7). In a fitting epilogue to her husband’s book, Alice Debord tells Merrifield: “The toughest and most honorable players make rules for themselves; and they stick by them always.” (ibid. p.9) In other words, it is up to the individual to create his/her own set of ethics by which to live. The next question is then, how can one come up with a set of honorable rules for oneself in a time when there seem to be no guidelines for rules by which to live, only images with which to compare oneself to? This is one of the questions I believe the current digital Underground is attempting to answer. There seems to be an absence of formalized protocol within the community itself which may or may not be filled in the future, but the nature of the structure (or lack of one) of these events points to a consistent movement towards more freedom and less “oppression.”

In the preface to the English Edition of 1888 of the Communist Manifesto, Frederick Engels writes that the fundamental proposition of the manifesto is:

“…That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organisation necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.” (Marx and Engels, 1975, p.13)

What Engels and Marx did not anticipate was a society in which the media is able to falsely abolish class distinctions by making the luxury commodity accessible to anyone in possession of an active credit card, or at least create the illusion of accessibility making it seem as if those distinctions do not really exist. The “bling-bling” cult of today makes it desirable (and seemingly attainable) for anyone of any class to have furs and diamonds and Hummers and champagne on a regular basis. The alienation of the Individual has now taken on the form of abolishing the idea of class struggle in favor of a superficial and material appearance of class equality. It’s not about how actually rich and powerful one is, but how rich and powerful one appears to be. It’s not what you do for a living that really matters anymore, it’s what you wear at the end of the day and where you go on the weekend that is foremost in the mass mind. As long as one can get into the right club on a given night, then one feels “a part of” for that moment in time. The problem is, once that moment in time is gone, life becomes a series of battles for the next right moment in time and space. If one night the next aspiring Jessica Simpson does not get into the right club because the bouncer has decided she is not “worthy”, then that is cause enough for her boyfriend to whip out his “glock” and put a cap in the bouncer’s ass as well as anyone’s ass who might be nearby. We have become a society of no consequences. When one’s soul and humanity has been completely abolished in favor of the right commodity, then the thought of spending the rest of one’s life in jail becomes secondary to the need to save face and maintain one’s status in the “spectacle”. Even if the 15 minutes of fame we have been so craving our whole lives is finally concretized in the news as a result of one’s criminal activity, the important thing is that we are recognized and not forgotten in the annals of history and in the spectacular media event that is our 21st century western society.

For my "on the field" investigating, I spent quite a bit of time picking the brains of the participants in a local event called Share. This weekly free and open audio and video jam takes place in New York City every Sunday night in the East Village. It is one of a plethora of currently recurring "Happenings" but it is unique in a couple of ways.
Firstly, there is no stage area so the recurring jam consists of people sitting around the room playing with their laptops and or whatever other technical gear they choose to bring with them. In other words, you never really know who is doing what unless you poke your head behind their screen to spy their programs. I use the word spy very ironically, given the fact that the vibe around Share is one of openness: open-source; open information in general. Everyone seems eager to share whatever information there is to be had, and there is plenty. Another unique aspect to it is the fact that it takes place on a Sunday night, normally the time and day reserved for the masses to rest. This in itself places this event in the Underground arena, but what makes it a truly Revolutionary event is its openness and connection to digital arts movements and events throughout the world. Anyone can participate in Share as long as
they own or have access to some type of Internet connection. Some weeks there are visitors that perform individual live sets and they come from as far away as Japan, San Francisco, Europe, you name it. All you need to do to play at Share is to let them know you'd like to, and when you'll be in town. That's it. No screening process, no voting on whether this one is good and that one is bad, no politics and no hierarchy involved. Conversely, Share has also left its milieu a few times in order to bring their event to places outside New York, as for example with their participation in the ClubTransmediale festival in Berlin.

In his book Haunted Weather, David Toop describes a similar scene he witnessed in Japan at an event called "Noise As Silence" at the Gendai Heights gallery in the year 2000. As he describes the scene, "the physical organisation, along with the musical structure, was more like a web
of distributed consciousness than a pyramid." (Merrifield, 2004, p. 16)
And that brings us back to the question: is this type of environment and unorganized organization the model for some type of new fermenting Ideology? Perhaps but if so it is not clear what that Ideology would be. It seems as if everyone is still just allowing the movement to grow and define itself. In a sense, it is the technology that is defining how humans interact with each other.

“Inspired by Eastern aesthetics as well as Surrealism, Duchamp's work and Abstract Expressionism, John Cage developed, over the forties and fifties, the idea (derived from Edgar Varese) of treating all forms of noise, as well as silence, as sound to be used by the composer, not as effects, but as musical instruments. From Zen philosophy, he gained a reverence for non-intention and elaborated a method of composition based on chance operations and indeterminacy thereby eliminating creative choice. He combined these ideas with aspects of painting and sculpture in stage performances. Influenced by Artaud, Cage came to think of theater as a territory of time and space inhabited by unrelated but coexisting events beyond narrative. From the early 50's his work blurred the distinctions between music, dance, literature, art and everyday life and is considered to be at the origin of "happenings". He believed that art need not be created from art materials, and advocated "trying anything", which led to the intense experimentation in the art of the sixties and seventies and to the evolution of new forms such as Performance Art, Assemblage, Combines, Environments and Installations. Cage's multidimensional vision has inspired,in a much more direct way than Artaud, an idea of intertextuality which has led to an aesthetic of nonlinearity, or non-sequentiality, that is not only at the root of postmodern thought but also of the research and development of current computer hardware and software. The "random access" philosophy of today's multimedia and hypermedia works, or net-art and web-art, which have no physical beginning, middle or end, seems to stem directly from Cage's ideas about accident and chance which "require the artist to avoid rational creation of hierarchies, and points of climax, in favor of repetition and a kind of all-relatedness". In addition, Cage's emphasis on chance has suggested a spirit of game or play which has become an integral part of many recent art experiments, especially in the realm of digital and media arts.” (See Contributors)

Though this description very clearly gives an idea of how these events arose and are structured, how can one then apply these concepts to the current digital underground from a “revolutionary” ideological perspective? There is perhaps no one historical figure more identified with the idea of Revolution than Che Guevara. But what distinguishes him from other guerrilla and freedom fighters is not simply his historical accomplishments but his own personal ethics and Ideology on which he based the entirety of his life and actions. He personified the evolving human being, attempting to fulfill what he termed the “New Consciousness”. He believed that this new consciousness would be: “…translated concretely into the reconquering of one’s true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one’s own human condition through culture and art.” (Guevara, 2002, p. 38) He further believed that it was the development of technology together with voluntary work that would produce this new consciousness. So, in a sense, an event revolving around technology, which comes together purely on a volunteer basis, somewhat fulfills Che’s vision on a microcosmic level. He did, however, also insist that in order for technology to adequately meet the new human being’s needs, it must be complemented by ideological education. His was not; however, an Ideology based on dogmatism but rather on love. In his book Global Justice, he puts it thus:

“…the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love…he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching…one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes…so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.” (Guevara, 2002, p.44)

In other words, Che’s “Ideology” was a humanist one, based on ethics and morality, not on the conquest of objective power. The main struggle of his new man (and woman) is not one against the institutionalized powers regulating societal structures, but a “struggle with himself against the ‘defects’ inherited from education and from the controls of the world we live in; in a relationship of ‘mastery of self’”(Guevara,2002, p. 27) allowing him to “cultivate his will with an artist’s delight’ and in that act of creating himself, to create freedom at the same time.”(ibid.) The revolutionary thus becomes capable of “’ruling himself’ as a moral subject” (ibid.) From this perspective, it becomes difficult to even pose the question of whether there is an Ideology in the digital arts underground community, as it becomes first a personal and only secondarily a collective issue. On the other hand, if you have a group of individuals all working to transcend their own boundaries within a community of like-minded individuals, also working to transcend their own boundaries, then a common Ideology begins to slowly take shape, increasing the resolution of the Revolution (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

So, is there an Ideology in the digital underground today? Yes and no. There seems to be no consistent group view, but there does seem to be a very definite unifying energy focused on the idea of freedom; freedom from established legal and political constraints, free exchange of ideas, free participation and contribution, and the freedom to be oneself within the group as one struggles to become free of one’s own bullshit. Still, some have expressed concern as to the shape of things to come. In an article for Computer Music Journal, Stephen Travis Pope concludes that: “…along with the new dimensions of freedom that are given to us by the technologies of the 20th century, there are an equal number of new duties-the duties being that we concern ourselves more with the sociological aspects…and with the manner in which [our music] is disseminated and consumed.” (Pope, 1999, p. 55) Or, as Daniel Smith, one of the founders of Share, put it:

“I think it's important to keep an open mind regarding the future…the decentralized nature of the new popular movement gives it its greatest strength but still a blow to a single pole like Share does affect the few who have a vested interest and can take the wind out of them…we must be uncompromising at this time. I don't worry about the particular outcomes and won't be destroyed if Share is no more. The important thing is to keep our individual spirits true and the intent strong, then the energies will keep us moving in the right direction.” (See Contributors)

My own conclusion is that this seems to be a time in flux; a good time to tap into what is happening both artistically and politically on a global level. The fact that we have the technology to do so on a broader level than ever before has simply also broadened the parameters of the ongoing conversation between humans. I am guessing that, as with many historical movements, only time will tell what the results of this conversation will be.

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Contributors

Alo Allik
Contributed various articles from Computer Music Journal and engaged in several enlightening and thought-provoking conversations.

Katherine Liberovskaya/Experimental Intermedia (www.experimentalintermedia.be)
Contributed an excerpt from an article written in 2000 entitled 'Multimedia of the Machine Age' on the history of digitalmultimedia (which was the first chapter of her M.A. Thesis in Media Studies called 'Multimedia Then and Now: Inspiration, Innovation and Imagination at the Intersection of New Media and Art', 2000)

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
(http://www.asa-art.com/edmp.html)
Provided, via his website, access to numerous articles on the subject.

The Share Community
(www.share.dj)
Everyone graciously contributed their time and energy to answering questions, demonstrating programs and illustrating through their individual and collective actions how an anarchic bunch of people can really make something happen.

Daniel Smith
Has been more than generous and patient in contributing his knowledge and energies to teaching me not only about technology but about the Share world as well. He’s also put in a lot of time helping me complete some of my own projects. Thanks Daniel.

Special Thanks: To Jim Supanick, teacher par excellence and source of infinite inspiration.

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Bibliography

Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York, 1995

Guevara, Che, Global Justice: Liberation and Socialism, Ocean Press, Melbourne, 2002

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Foreign
Language Press, Peking, 1975

Merrifield, Andy, “Searching for Guy Debord”, The Brooklyn Rail, New York, October 2003

Pope, Stephen Travis, “Web.La.Radia: Social, Economic, and Political Aspects of Music and Digital Media”, Computer Music Journal, 23:1, pp. 49-56, MIT, Spring, 1999

Sotolongo, Pedro Luis, Ernesto Che Guevara: Ethics and Aesthetics of an Existence, Editorial Jose Marti, Habana, 2002

Toop, David, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory, Serpent’s Tail, London, 2004

Tyler, Parker, Underground Film: A Critical History, First Da Capo Press Edition, New York, 1995