On Personal Cinema, Media, and Homo Ludens (the man of Play)

 Personal cinema[1] is a group of media artists, theorists, programmers and curators. We use the word media to describe ourselves - instead of new media- firstly because of the rapidity that the changes in media taking place and secondly because we prefer to focus on narrative forms and the interface of media like TV and video games. The ‘newness’ of the media is not our concern.   

Fragmentation, Neutralisation and Bare Life  

 We formed a group in order to address balkanisation as a global not as a local phenomenon that can be easily marginalised in the media and/or the art scene. The group, constituted by ‘people in crisis’, examines the fragmentation of the media and art discourse.. Our concerns are the isolation of disciplines and languages, the lack of common discourse between old, not very old and new media. We address the lack of dialectics between periphery and centre, between the “other” and the “same”; we ask if such distinctions exist to see if the bipolar periphery and centre or the “same” and the “other” are still active.
 
  After September the 11th the progressive discourses have been neutralised to a great extent by the media and politicians. Judith Butler realised that after that tragic day, the characterisation of the Humanities as an unholy, unnecessary discipline found roots even in the academy itself. [2]For us this discursive battle is one of the biggest challenges to be faced by artists. Our group explores how to communicate with an audience in a battle which has already been lost.
  
The self-referential methodology of arts and humanities is a target that can be easily silenced by anyone claiming to know, the truth, anyone claiming to have realised democracy[3] and anyone dictating “proper” ethics. It is much more difficult to introduce the notion of a constant transformation of ‘truth’, ‘ethics’ and ‘democracy’ than claiming to know what ‘truth’, ‘ethics’ and ‘democracy’ is. This is the challenge that the arts and humanities have been facing once again during the war on terror. However the instant neutralisation of progressive thought in favour of various militaristic interests, results in a reaction, in a more communicative philosophical and artistic approach It is this extremely precarious political situation that demands progressive political thinkers, artists and theoreticians to communicate with a broader audience in different languages and ‘terrain’.  As an oxymoron the war on terror seems to redeem discourse in a way beyond what seemed to be possible a few years ago; Somewhere there in that trajectory Personal Cinema has been formed.    

 Another point that galvanised our group-in crisis was our misunderstanding of the term ‘bare life’ coined by Giorgio Agamben. Bare life in my misreading means a diligent body, a citizen determined to obey illegal legislation which, in his understanding, is embedded in the essence of politics. Bare life exists in a ‘polis’ (the city) where politics is defined by the ‘ban’ and formulated by the exclusion of the citizen from the ‘polis’ itself. Bare life is isolated from any kind of power and it forms the contemporary biopolitics.[4] It is a life which is not so far away from what Foucault called a product of power.[5]  Even if Agamben ’s reading of politics and capitalism is in some points questionable, it is important for us, not only for the Balkans, where we face a precarious neo-liberal present, but in the balkanised world as well.

Vesna Goldsworthy, the writer of ‘Inventing Ruritania’ and ‘Chernobyl Strawberries’, said that ‘everything and everywhere seems to be in danger of becoming “balkanised,” with only a tiny proportion of these cases taking place in the Balkans themselves.’ [6] It is the ‘locative’ element referring to the area of the Balkans that we want to address, outside of the generalisation of a global political and art scene.  The transformation of the post-socialist world in combination with the transformation of the ‘poor cousins’ of capitalism called Greece and Turkey was and still is a point of reference for the exploration of media, politics, identities and metaphysics. The issue becomes even more interesting if we claim that every analysis concerning the Balkans is as ‘’Balkanised’’ as the Balkans themselves.

 In 2001 the group Personal Cinema was formed and we made “The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game”. It focused on the abuse of the Balkans as framed in the media, Hollywood and video games.  Personal Cinema wanted to reveal what the media means from the inside, and to play a ‘dirty game’. So, in the project, we created a video game which was a virtual space hosting artworks by 52 artists who wanted to say something about the Balkans, the media, identities and war. After a lot of discussions we decided not to use any form of curating and to accept all submitted artworks.

 The Balkans during the process of transformation from ‘socialism’ to ‘democracy’ had about 700.000 victims in the last decades in Ex-Yugoslavia -although the numbers are always a matter of contestation - and an unknown number of poor people who were temporarily without a state and any form of social care in the rest of the Balkan countries.  The struggle for identity as a form of identity branding combined with the notion of ‘revolutionary capitalism’ after the collapse of the hegemony of the USSR created the platform to examine the post-post-colonial strategies of the over-developed world.  These exact post-post colonial structures made the Balkans appear more homogenous than ever and justify why Personal Cinema use the term Balkan Wars in our title. On this point we disagree with Todorova ’s Balkanism [7] in which she criticises the generalisation of the use of the term Balkans and the homogeneous approach of the European Union to Eastern Europe in general. Although we also criticise the tactics of generalisation, in 2006 we perceive the Balkans more as Texas  and less as a distinctive case. The homogenized ‘unexotic other’ which means the ‘same’ is a much more clear scheme. In other words this homogenisation, that Todorova in between others tried to avoid, dominated the area in the last decades based especially on the dynamics of Europeanization of the broader area of Eastern Europe. Today it is much easier to find similarities than differences. That doesn’t mean that the initial schism between Muslims and Christians doesn’t exist but that in the meantime the whole post socialist world found ‘intriguing aspirations’ in the open market. The scheme of de-Ottomanisation[8], which is the backbone of  the ongoing ‘Balkan’ desire to join European Union, has been succeeded by de-Communisation which found its final destination in Europeanisation, a ‘revolutionary capitalistic state’. The de-Ottomanisation, which started at the first half of the 19th century, had as main objective the ‘unification’ with central Europe and the depreciation of the eastern exotic identity. Today in the post-socialist era the gaze that most of the ‘Balkan’ countries look at Europe has the same characteristics. And in the amalgam of the two, the post-Ottoman and the post-socialist, someone can examine the current ‘revolutionary capitalistic state’. A state(s) which is endanger to become very conservative and commodified, and to unfasten any bonds with social care in a manner that seems even more radical than what actually happens in the core of central Europe. The dynamic of those two post-‘traumatic’ experiences could create a brand new one.              

The interpretation of new liberal policies in the (east) of Europe, as Marina Grzinic accurately describes the area, results in realities that the West is afraid to hear about. The free market established in the area combined with new, for the post-socialist world, sublime hedonistic images of western design and advertising produced societies less free from propaganda and more perceived as a collective depression for workers who are obliged to remain at the borders of Europe for reasons of competition. The mafia, drugs and prostitution trafficking, are not the only elements which characterise the Balkans as ‘black’ as they seem to be. The collective depression, the visa barrier in ghost countries exploited by the sovereign power is far more realistic than the cinematic approach of terrorists and pimps. We shouldn’t forget that the Balkan mentality has been one of the most exploited myths in popular discourse and an operative term in many scholarly studies.

Amongst this field of research the rhetorical question “What is the Balkans?” is directly related to another question “Can we separate what we know as the essence of “the Balkans” from how we know it?” Can we separate what we know about a place full of mountains that has been exploited by the Greeks, the Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, Europe, Churches, USSR, USA and any available empire, from how we know it? The Balkanians are not the innocent victims. We are a trained army of victims trapped between the space of the political potential and the potential space of terror which is something that happens in the exactly same way in the United States or Lebanon, where the ontology of politics and the spectre of the notion of democracy as a solution for the inclusion in ‘polis’, still pretends that it expresses the ideology of the weak. In the process of becoming of a ‘democracy to come’ the “Vlackanians”[9], I mean the global “Stupidlanders”, us, are the ones who still resist to the revelation of the global slavery by remaining the inexistent opposition in a terrain kidnapped by the strong ‘other’.     
                  
Personal Cinema in crisis or the Secure Personal Cinema emerged from that realm of thought and even if this paper is a personal - personal cinema, the main ideas and problems are in parallel with those set out above.

 What we did was worse than curating a big Balkan show like “In the Gorges of the Balkans” or“Blood and Honey”. We created the ‘interface of innocence’. The artist Colin Dan from Romania who created the “Happy Doomsday” video game in 1998 said “…an interface is also a sculpture, and the social body you aim to work with is fluid material that can be modelled.“[10]    For us it wasn’t just a sculpture, we made a human computer interface that was a story by itself. An interface of a video game seems to be the equivalent of the theatre hall with all its blackness, the seats, the stage etc, however not including the action itself. For example in Microsoft Word the interface consists of menus, the spell corrector, the templates of letters etc. but probably[11] not the writing itself. The writing, the action, the content itself is directly related to the interface and the horizon that the interface creates. Lev Manovich said that ‘The human computer interface is a cultural language that offers its own ways of representing human memory and human experience.’ [12] 

 So instead of a corporate “innocent” interface we created a dominant narrative of a temporary museum, not a museum created by architects but by artists and writers. It is a space existing far beyond neutrality. An “identity factory”, “a Balkan Zoo” are just two examples of our “neutrality”. The reason for doing this was not only to challenge the artists, the audience and ourselves but also the system of art and media. We wanted to question the meaning of an interface, or of the platform which hosts arts. Even if this platform is a museum, an institution, or television.

Tactics of warfare

 Our provocative simulation was presented in other provocative simulations with analogue ‘interfaces’, the museums. Within that frame we presented the project in Media lab Madrid during Arco, Mondevideo in Amsterdam, and at a preview in Kassel in the context of the exhibition ‘In the Gorges of Balkans’. In the Balkans, we presented it in Cluz (Romania), Belgrade, Skopje (Macedonia) and finally Athens at the Art Faire.  This is not exactly a situationist approach to art and it could better refer to what is called “tactical media” in a reading related to corporate strategies. 

 Geert Lovink and David Garcias inspired by  Krzysztof Wodiczko  (director of the center of Arts, Culture and Technology (A.C.T) at M.I.T) expanded the idea of tactical media suggesting: 
“Like other migrant media tacticians, Wodiczko has studied the techniques by which the weak become stronger than the oppressors by scattering, by becoming centre less, by moving fast across the physical or media and virtual landscapes. The hunted must discover the ways to become the hunter."[13]

That form of “tactical media” seems to be quite popular in the last years with the formation of soft groups, flexible media companies and other fragmented organisations for politics, arts and humanities.  What is most interesting is how during the last decades these almost immaterial organisations formed different corporate strategies and structures. Personal Cinema collective functioned in that way as well, finding extremely helpful the gathering of people under the scope of the production of image and discourse. 

 Presenting the project doesn’t mean that we weren’t aware of the political context we function within the museum. In fact most of the exhibitions have been used as a way to stabilise the area and to create a dialogue based on the guru artists who constituted the mini discursive space and provided the platform for the Europeanisation of the Balkans.  Europeanisation for my personal Personal Cinema means selling cars and creating nested colonial states. Greece for example, for the first time after many centuries, undertook the establishment of a mini scale post-post-colonial colonisation. It is a state with citizens of the second speed (Greeks) who took advantage of the citizens of the third speed (some parts of the Balkans).
 So in practise, ‘Balkan’ art as part of the newborn political situation indirectly promoted the European facade of the area   etc… “The making of Balkan wars: The game” was a critique on the big exhibitions like “Blood and Honey” and “In the Gorges of Balkans” but in the long term it couldn’t do anything else than being part of the unconditional Europeanisation of the area. It didn’t have only the role of an artistic exchange with or without political context but it also had a second interface which functions politically in a bigger political scheme than art itself. Art in that context represents freedom of expression, the political correct face of an inexistent democracy which is the core of the spectacle that ‘rich’ Europe has to offer. The spectacle of inexistent democracy is not only a desire created for the ‘east of Europe” but most importantly it is an identity factory for the core of inexistent democracy itself. What our project, in between our failures, managed to do via pretension and scattering was to establish a network of cautious people, who still believe that narrative and participation have a role to play in the ongoing process of democratisation.      
  
 Anyhow our double pretension as a scheme is not only applicable to the structure of politics and art, but to the bipolar of audience/media as well. Ilias Marmaras from Personal Cinema argued:
“Perceiving and interpreting images and their messages is a socially and politically defined activity where the viewer, him/herself, believes that s/he determines the disposition towards spectacle in a form of a bidirectional fraud.”[14] In other words the viewer gets the necessary disposition in order to watch her/his myth even if the myth is called information, and the TV producer pretends that s/he creates the dilemmas of the truth. It is the action of watching the myth and not the ‘already sunk in nihilism’ “dialectics” of the content that matters today.
In that point we have to disagree with Boris Groys, Professor of Media theory and Philosophy in Karlsruhe Germany, who in disagreement with his own book “Under Suspicion”, said:   
“…[I have to] confess that I have been severely criticized by almost all its reviewers precisely for “concealing the fact” that the public already knows very well what the inner core of the media looks like  - because it has all the technical instructions to use the computer and internet, etc.”[15]
It is neither the tools of the media nor the phenomenology of broadcasting that are of major importance if someone wants to reveal the inner core of the media to the public; what is crucial is to be aware of the state of power that the media offer to those who use them as desire machines or as a machine that could conceal the ‘dangerous forms’ of critical thinking.
 
Mythologies and Similarity

One fragmented mythology of new media is the notion of avant-garde.
Innovation, novelty, new, newer, newness, revolution and so on. Here I will quote the Californian Peter Lunenfeld, Director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics who said:

“ I am very careful using the term avant-garde, even as I spend a great deal of time looking at what other generations did indeed term avant- garde art and media. The very phrase avant-garde needs to be given a rest, like a good horse that has been ridden too hard for too long. When stylistic and technical “advances” come from all spectra of digital media production commercial, artistic, scientific academic etc – the notion we have inherited of a singular, oppositional avant-garde serves little purpose anymore. If our software, music videos, computer games, and WAPs are all to be termed avant-garde, then that phrase has indeed been reduced to a marketing phrase like “revolution”. I do not see the digital artist as being an avant-gardist in any classical sense of solidarity or shared artistic destiny; and, in fact, too many mediocre talents have hung on to just such exhausted tropes to support their own, weak brands of practice.”[16]

The ongoing need for novelties and avant-garde is based mostly on the structure of the media. The media themselves are a ‘forget’ mechanism and their supposedly qualitative characterisation of information is not only a portal to the definition of the ‘important’ but also a definition of what to forget. On this exact point lies the problematic of the analysis of simulation which raises rhetorical questions like is the Kyoto treaty still active? Does the war in Iraq still play? Is creating a virtual environment still sexy?     

 On that precise point we decided as a group to introduce the permanent news. To resist to the frenzy consumerism of ‘infotainment’ and establish a critical approach towards the motto “the message is the velocity”. No avant-gardism, just rereading what is necessary and creating political tactical media which raise questions that some times, if we are lucky, they can give answers as well.

 In addition to the telesthetic forget mechanism we have to take into consideration the new media scene in arts which constantly change platforms against any form of writing. We face a situation of ‘commodified gadget art’ dealing directly with the market. It seems that in most of the cases of narrative, writing or thought is not of major importance. What is important is to use the latest device available and create a barrier of technical know-how. With Personal Cinema we preferred to be “boring” and explore the forms of narrative in an established medium. As Boris Groys says
“This faith in technical know-how is produced in people’s minds by combination of a very naïve interpretation of McLuhan’s “the media is the message” and a very naïve interpretation of Ferdinard de Saussure’s “the language precedes every individual speech act. “ [17]

In other words, I am not able to understand the message (or massage) by establishing a communication with a chicken in an augmented reality through Bluetooth. This kind of a constantly moving medium in technology is just a headache for the linguistic structure. The exploration of a programmable visual language is qualitative and based on discourse and not on branding and gadgets. Personalised real-time communication and applications are very appealing for the field of art and media but they don’t change the way that a story is being told; if the authors are more than one or if a piece of art is in constant change the problem remains the same. How to tell a story? Even in Big Brother and MMORPG’s and Blogs the performer still have the problem of performativity which is not different from what Dostoyevsky was thinking while he was creating a character, or what Becket had in mind for a monologue. There is no need to mention, that some people are much more skilled at presenting a story and themselves than others. In that context, we are not technophiles, and because the new media justify the “newness” of the media we say that we use just media.[18]. Even on radio, walkman or iPod the work of the musician still remains the same.

If we approve the post-media era as Marcel Broodthaers dictated with his art,[19] it is because we see a similarity in the different media and not because media have disappeared in their “newness”.    
That doesn’t mean that the media themselves don’t dictate ways of expression and viewing but that the role of art as a narrative directed to ‘polis’ (the city) still has to include these features as elements that belong to a broader plane. It is the plane of action within the ‘polis’ which is a very old story.   

Author

Let’s take a minute to think about what Sid Meier said. Sid Meier is one of the most successful game developers of strategy video games and one of the key figures of the Californian Video game industry. In the context of creation of video games he examines what options or ‘choices’ a developer has to offer to the user. He summarizes the rules for user’s choice in virtual environments in three points:
1. No single option should be the best.
2. The option should not be equally good
3. The player must be able to make an informed choice. [20]
 We could observe here the similarity between the games and TV news.  At the same time we need to reposition the question of the author, behind the obvious narration.  
 At this point we could raise the question, is there any author behind hypertext, hypernarrative, mass media, essays, articles and any kind of let’s say “dialectic”, interactive or active media?
Does Homo Ludens (the man of play), the one who belongs to the audience, have any kind of choice? In Hypertext, on the Internet, most of the time we look for specific information and then we see an interesting keyword and we jump to another page, most probably after we’ve finished with what we want. There is not any “body without organs” that jumps from topic to topic without realising what he reads or what he sees.  My favourite button is called “back”. In other words, we have an already determined position towards linear stories and consequently towards reading authors. Another common case is the nested narratives like the two different endings in a DVD, or a hypertext novel with multiple stories nested in one where obviously the author is present and dominant. The same goes to the video games dilemmas in which most of the times you have a lot of parametric choices. Of course the author is there again and even if s/he is not a writer in the traditional sense, s/he is the author of the rules. We should not fall in the trap of the technophiles who believe that we experience the era of the democratic medium.  As it happens with a book where you can visualise the surroundings or the expressions of the heroes, in the same democratic way you can choose what to think in between two scenes of a film, or to make your choice among others in a video game.  The common misconception is that the algorithmic parameters such as creating your character in a video game with thousand of options such us colour, hair etc, consist in a form that works against the author. No, again, the fact is that you have to create a character for a video game in a world created by authors. It is a “more democratic” medium which expands the role of the author from creating the narration to creating the narration and the rules. The rules themselves are narrative.  

The phrase ‘more democratic medium’ is what we have to keep in mind. A ‘more democratic medium’ that didn’t change the long Aristotelian tradition as the new media mythology suggests. The newness of the media is mostly related to the ability of the users to participate in the creation process. This form of expression in moo’s, mods, chat rooms, mmorpg and blogs is directly related to the ongoing battle of democracy. But do these forms resist to the content provided by CNN, BBC, Aljazeera, Sony, Warner Bros and Electronic Arts or do they just create a recycling tank for exactly that content? It is impossible for a group like Personal Cinema to provide an alternative to the ‘American Army’ video game or for a blog to be as interesting as the real time simulation of the war in Lebanon.         
 
 In this context of ‘permanent news’ or ‘permanent democratic media’ I would finally like to refer to the Balkans under the scope of telesthesia. The Balkans is an interesting and at the same time dramatic field of exploration of the stereotypes reproduced by the media. This field, not only dictates with which ways populations deal with their existence and of course with their neighbours (the un-exotic other) but also forms the understanding of their position in the shaping of the global map. That’s all. This was our motivation and the main subject we wanted to address in our project.

Homo Ludens 

I will start by quoting Johan Huizinga:  “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them playing…” [21]

 We don’t have to go towards this structuralist approach but it is for sure that Play, beyond any biological approach, is embodied in society from the beginning.[22]  As Johan Huingas and Roger Caillois suggest in their studies on Homo Ludens and the definition of play we can see play in kids and savages. Rituals, Liturgy [23], Spectacle, Metaphors, any kind of imaginary constructions or myths, and at the extreme end even the creation of language is a form of play. Of course we can fall into the trap of reading play as a form of abstraction that defines the whole world, like the capital and the capital is for Marx and Deleuze, or simulation and the real for Baudrillard or information and the capital and the capital for McKenzie Wark, love and hate for the Pope and so on. In Ferdinard de Saussure’s metaphor of chess pieces and language he described the value of the chess pieces as related to their position on the board “…just as in the language each term has its value through its contrast with all other terms therefore, the meaning of a chess piece stems from its relation to other pieces in the game, and is independent of its shape or makeup.”[24] 
In exactly the same way play is related to other ‘games’… like Grand Theft Auto. Insert the note in the text and explain the analogy.[25] 

  The point here is that play and Homo Ludens doesn’t define the whole world but, on the other hand, is more than just a search for fun.  Play is involved in more things in our lives than what we usually believe. An action that is simultaneously ‘pointless and significant.’ [26] Play is directly related to the construction and obedience to rules and consequently to ideology, doctrines and most importantly ethics. A state where a set of rules, usually created by the authorities, makes the participant act in a simulacrum that hypothetically defies inner impulses like violence and produces great joy for the winner and his/her friends. There is fun, as much fun as we can find in Zizek’s jokes concerning those issues, or as much fun we can discover in Bergson’s ‘smiles’ after a century of philosophical research:
And yet I rather fancy the correct answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinary cabby, who applied the expression "unwashed" to the ‘negro’ fare he was driving. Unwashed! Does not this mean that a black face, in our imagination, is one daubed over with ink or soot? If so, then a red nose can only be one which has received a coating of vermilion. And so we see that the notion of disguise has passed on something of its comic quality to instances in which there is actually no disguise, though there might be.[27]

Homo Ludens doesn’t reveal what happened in the Balkans, but it makes us reread what an imaginary construction like the Balkans means and at the same time reveals that the author of the rules of the game participates in the narration of the story, a story about politics which is the ultimate form of play where the user has the goal to learn how to behave and act within the city, as Bergson did.

On Behalf of Personal Cinema
Alexandros Spyropoulos