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From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
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Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 10, Issue 11 (fwd) - read Mike Davis
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:24:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: nettime-l-request@kein.org Reply-To: nettime-l@kein.org To: nettime-l@kein.org Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 10, Issue 11 Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to nettime-l@kein.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to nettime-l-request@kein.org You can reach the person managing the list at nettime-l-owner@kein.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Mike Davis: Living on the Ice Shelf. Humanity's Meltdown (nettime's avid reader) 2. [nettime] New Media Art in Croatia (Klaudio Stefancic) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:15:48 -0100 From: nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org> Subject: <nettime> Mike Davis: Living on the Ice Shelf. Humanity's Meltdown To: nettime-l@kein.org Message-ID: <mailman.562.1215712298.85106.nettime-l@kein.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Living on the Ice Shelf. Humanity's Meltdown By Mike Davis 1. Farewell to the Holocene Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary. This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column. The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry. In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization. As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent. At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory. 2. Spontaneous Decarbonization? The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking. The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures. The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports. Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use. Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume. The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points. Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global warming" and slow the urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles." 3. Fin-du-Monde Boom What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops. As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades away from commercial viability." Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration's "marquee demonstration project," FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world's largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken. On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history. An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]." Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using "sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters. Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world. This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread. 4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor? Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use. In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism. And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation? Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict. As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely. And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet. Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth. 5. The North's Ecological Debt The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean? To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh? Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization. In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs. The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements. This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity. If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost. In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards. Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949/mike_davis_welcome_to_the_next_epoch Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change. ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:47:21 +0200 From: "Klaudio Stefancic" <kstefancic@gmail.com> Subject: <nettime> [nettime] New Media Art in Croatia To: nettime-l@kein.org Message-ID: <mailman.563.1215712298.85106.nettime-l@kein.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii dear nettimers, here i would like to contribute with my text 'new media new networks'. it is about new media art and culture in croatia from the late 1980's till 2005. the text is written last year and it was meant to be published in a reader dedicated to history of croatian art from 1940's to the 1990's and aimed to international audience. it was one of the reasons why i've decided to use a sociocentric approach in attempt to represent this period of media art in croatia and to combine it with the art theory of modernism and avantgarde. on the basis of my research i also made a small homonymous exhibtion in galzenica gallery in zagreb/velika gorica this year. the text is also available for download here http://www.galerijagalzenica.info/english.html) greetings --- New Media ??? New Networks [1] If you mention the term new media in the presence of one of the most prominent artists of the extremely popular virtual world of Second Life, Gazira Barbelli, you will automatically activate a programme script, which will blow away your avatar to a completely different, unwanted location. The script entitled Don't Say Tornado is her artwork, created to draw attention to inappropriate use of some terms of traditional new media theory in the context of a completely artificial world in which the artist herself (avatar) is nothing but a set of binary data. Although the Croatian new media art is far from being thoroughly virtual, the example of Second Life indicates the current process of redefining the new media culture in relation to the increase in the number of the Internet users, changes in the ways it is used, faster introduction of new media theory in traditional scientific fields etc. In a somewhat modified version of his early new media theory (The Language of New Media), Lev Manovich has raised a question whether there is any sense in talking about new media in the culture that has adopted digital production, processing and distribution of information. Therefore, he has developed eight theses for distinguishing new media from old ones, claiming that the list itself is a work in progress [2]. On the other hand, Geert Lovink has pointed out that new media are at a critical juncture. According to him, new media are facing the mass adoption of new technologies, fast Internetisation of a non-Western world, the increase in capacity of the Internet and its new uses known as Web 2.0. They are also caught in a dilemma about whether they will be used in art institutions or they will continue consolidation of their relatively independent cultural sector based on exhibitions, festivals and conferences [3]. Discursive instability has marked the new media art and culture in Croatia from its very beginnings. So far, they have been a heterogeneous cultural area where political, social and artistic clashes intertwine with coexistence and cooperation. In other words, governmental bodies for public communication have been corrected by the work of NGOs while the system of art institutions has alternated with flexible networks of individuals, projects and initiatives. This parallel opposition and negotiation among the dominant, unwilling-to-change culture and marginalized cultures based on promises of creative communication, citizens' participation in social processes and a particular form of freedom typical of cyber culture, have characterized new media in Croatia throughout 1990's [4]. The history of art is usually no more than the history of artists. Such method is applied even when it comes to a selection of the new media art [5]. However, new media art and culture in Croatia cannot be properly presented without a description of the institutions that have participated in the implementation of new technologies in society. Those institutions can be described as networks that, in case of need and depending on circumstances, mutually integrate, connect or disintegrate, thus forming dynamic and flexible cultural space suitable for various, not only artistic activities. In that sense, the history of new media in Croatia during 1990's should include the work of governmental and non-governmental institutions that were more less directly involved in political and cultural clashes of post-socialist society. Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, national independence and beginning of the Patriot war, several distinguishing social networks have marked the new media art and culture in Croatia. Anti-war Campaign, Zamir, Arkzin Chronologically speaking, the citizens' initiative "Anti-War Campaign" (1991-1995) came first. The efforts for reconstruction of disconnected phone lines among Croatia, Serbia and later Bosnia and Herzegovina developed into BBS (Bulletin Board System). BBS is computer software that enables users to connect by telephoning, to download or upload files to BBS network, read the news and exchange messages. After that, "Zamir Transnational Net" (abbr. "Zamir") was launched in Zagreb in 1992, with the initial help of the Dutch and German hackers, in order to connect citizens and peace activists across the war-thorn former Yugoslavia. The realization that public media have a political aspect as well was quite a shock in Croatia, unlike in other post-socialist countries [6]. In the state of war, the mass media and means of communication were tightly controlled in the newly founded country. Not only there was a problem of regulation of the Internet use, which was officially introduced by connecting university academic and research network (CARnet) to foreign servers in 1992, but the use of "old" media (TV, radio, newspapers) was also reduced. Under such circumstances, the non-governmental organization "Anti-War Campaign" with initial funds of "Open Society" launched two media: fanzine/ newspapers "Arkzin" in 1991 and BBS system in 1992 [7]. At first, "Arkzin" was a strictly political fanzine but after a while, editorial board widened the interest and included international members and topics [8]. It gradually changed from the political fanzine and political fortnightly to a hybrid magazine in which politics, culture, theory and art met, crossed and overlapped in a way that Croatian media scene had not been used to. Its hybrid quality was especially manifested in the field of new media, which has been continually recorded since 1995 [9]. It is important to say that "Arkzin" was for a long time the only magazine that systematically recorded events on the international scene of new media by their extensive definition, later adopted by Australian Cultural Council, which included the culture of DJ's, VJ's, electronic music created and distributed via computers, urban club culture etc [10]. In the art world context, "Arkzin" was connected with the international new media art scene on one hand and with the avant-garde art tradition on the other. In the first case, one of the editorial board members, Igor Markovi?? participated in the meeting that took place in Trieste in 1996, where the "net art" pioneers drew op principles of their activities and started a closer cooperation with new media festival "Next 5 Minutes" and other events on the Dutch culture scene [11]. Following the example of De Certeau's definition of citizens' tactics as opposed to state's strategy, the Dutch theoreticians Geert Lovink and David Garcia formulated a peculiar media theory, known as "tactical media" in 1997. Promoting this theory in the conditions of new media being implemented into Croatian society, affected by war, economic transition and deficit of democratic institutions, "Arkzin" constantly pointed out the public and art media's political dimension [12]. As said above, "Arkzin" also referred to avant-garde art tradition that always questioned the dominant social, political and art climate in Central and Eastern Europe [13]. When it came to "Arkzin", it challenged the establishment in several fields: in the field of politics (state of war, autocrat regime, economic privatization), in the field of culture (new ways of communication, new lifestyles, subculture etc.) and in the field of arts (art institutions' bureaucratic system as opposed to the freedom of the Internet etc.). In many aspects, "Arkzin" was a successor of "Zenit" [14]. It accepted new technologies based on digital data processing (computer, the Internet); made space for new media as alternative productional and distributive tools (web pages, net art); re-introduced the neglected media objects in the context of art and culture practices (fanzine, posters, leaflets); treated artistic and discursive practices of theory, philosophy, sociology on equal terms; reinterpreted high culture - pop culture relations (rave subculture, pornography); promoted team work (journalists published texts under collective or individual pseudonyms); worked hard on internationalisation of art and culture (on-line and off-line networking, new media festivals reports, interviews with foreign artists, theoreticians, activists); opposed and even Dadaistically made fun of dominant culture. In the 1992-1995 period, there were two ways of accessing the Internet: either with the help of academic and research network for those who actively participated in scientific institutes and faculties or with the help of Zamir's BBS network that, based on fragile telephone lines, was insufficient even for activists [15] . For these reasons, the basic activities of "Arkzin" were criticism of state's attitude towards new media and fight for free access to the Internet. However, the government did not have any media politics, only restrictions caused by war so that media activism of "Arkzin", similar to avant-garde art, sometimes reminded of Cervantes's Don Quixote tilting at windmills [16]. The concept of "tactical media", promoted by "Arkzin" throughout the 1990's, reveals a considerable influence of the Dutch culture on new media culture in Croatia. There are several reasons for this: a constant interest of the Dutch activists, artists and theoreticians in Croatia, residence and education of Croatian journalists, artists and theoreticians in the Netherlands and interpretation of media theory, made by the Dutch theoreticians gathered around "Adilkno" project, which Croatian intellectuals gladly accepted [17]. Seen form the new media perspective, "Arkzin" design was closely related to design of its web sites and designer Bla??enko Kare??in Karo, but the attention should be given to off-line edition as well. The innovation of publications' design lied in creative application of new media in the area of old media/ graphic design. Any changes in page layout were possible only with the help of computer technology. Being aware of new expressiveness resulting from new media used in graphic design, publication designers listed hardware components, software tools, font types next to the usual impressum information. It was quite common to design a page layout as interface (using characteristic Macintosh and Windows fonts, conversational windows, falling menus, e-mail models etc.) or timeline imitating aesthetics of hypertext. The publication's illustrator Bla??enko Kare??in used software and the Internet iconic quite often. On the other hand, designers created the web site by making old media the content of new media. They kept a traditional role of illustration as a dominant visual message; unlike publication, they simplified the web page layout, stressing hyperlink with the font size or simple colour change; they emphasized the "length" of web pages offering the option of long scrolls etc. The traditionality of web sites' design was moderated with the use of hyperlinks, animated GIFs etc.[18] In the context of only a few Croatian users of the Internet i.e. predominantly journalism/ television culture, these design methods were extremely important. They were tactical because they easily switched from one medium to another, combined old and new, and articulated quick and radical social changes that were part of every day life in Croatia of the 1990's. Multimedial Institute, Net-Club Mama During the depressed 1990's, "Arkzin" was a sole example when it came to media coverage of the issues that were a matter of Central and Eastern Europe governmental and non-governmental institutions' interest. The examples of Hungary, Latvia and Slovenia can serve for the comparison purposes: Budapest Fine Art Academy opened Department of Media Art in 1991, and several years later, in 1996, Centre for Culture and Communication (C3) was founded by Open Society Institute to support media artists. E-Lab was founded in Riga in 1996 and club "Ljudmila" in Ljubljana started to work one year earlier. On the other hand, a major part of the new media art and culture in Croatia promoted redactional policy of "Arkzin", a part of the wider citizens' campaign that was going on at the time. The first two, exclusively multimedial cultural spaces in Croatia were Multimedial Institute (Mi2), opened in 1999, and Net Club Mama opened in 2000 [19]. Like in many other post-socialist countries, The Open Society Institute financially supported the foundation of these institutions. On one side, activities of Multimedial Institute and Net Club Mama have been a continuation of "Zamir" and "Arkzin", and on the other side, they have been a specific adaptation of the new media art and culture to post-war society, determined by neo-liberal ideology and consumerism. The similarities between two models of NGO's cultural activism (Anti-war Campaign and "Arkzin" as opposed to Multimedial Institute and Mama) are the wide area of fight for civil society's standards, right to approach channels of public communication at reasonable prices, freedom of minorities' cultural forms etc. As far as the art area is concerned, Multimedial Institute and the Club have been the only constant public gathering places for artists, theoreticians, curators, hackers, programmers, critics and activists interested in various forms of media art. In addition to this, Multimedial Institute was one of the rare production centres for all the forms of new media art. By organizing various activities (lectures, presentations, publishing, exhibitions, festivals) it has shifted the public attention to the increasing importance of the Internet in everyday life, promoting various forms of net art, and supporting the idea of free software and need for reinterpretation of author's rights in the context of digital production and distribution of cultural assets. Due to Multimedial Institute's activity, a new model of cultural practice replaced a paradigmatic space of "Arkzin" redaction, functioning at three levels: at the level of organization of cultural festivals, including exhibitions, lectures, workshops, conferences; at the level of maintaining mailing lists and at the level of socializing in the club on daily basis [20]. In the period 2000-2005, Multimedial Institute organized exhibitions and festivals dedicated to net art ("I Am Still Alive", 2000), free software, media art and networking ("Becoming Digital", 2001/2003; "ASU2 ??? Art Servers Unlimited", 2001; "Critical Update ??? New Media Culture Week 2002"; "Next5Minutes", 2003; "Sloboda stvarala??tvu", 2005 etc.). The most relevant new media organizations, artists and theoreticians from Europe, North America, Australia and India were presented there. Just as "Arkzin" did in 1990's, Multimedial Institute has used "old" and "new" media for its activities: inside the "laboratory" it has been developing and maintaining "TamTam" software based on the Wiki technology, as well as translating and publishing books on philosophy, free software movement, sociology, politics and new media theory [21]. In occasional cooperation with Multimedial Institute, other NGOs have been formed that have also dedicated a part of their activities to new media art. Among these, the independent curators team "Kontejner" presented mostly works of the Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian and American artists [22] at festivals "Device Art" and "Touch Me" in the period 2004-2006; the independent curators team "WHW" organized a typical new media event "Project: Broadcasting" in 2001 [23]. Another important characteristic of Multimedial Institute is its principled openness towards hackers, one of the social layers who have been helping to build a contemporary Internet culture. Due to various forms of teamwork, free software programmers staying in Zagreb, art workshops and socializing in the club, the gap between humanistic (artistic) and technical culture on Zagreb new media scene has been considerably narrowed. Besides already mentioned Bla??enko Kare??in, the artists who have been more less influenced by the new media culture of "Arkzin" and Multimedial Institute are Ivan Maru??i?? Klif (https://boo.mi2.hr/~klif/), Darko Fritz (http://darkofritz.net/), Ana Hu??man (http://anahusman.net), Andreja Kulun??i?? (http://www.andreja.org/), Lina Kova??evi?? (http://www.linakovacevic.net/), and Nenad Romi?? a.k.a. Marcell Mars (http://ki.ber.kom.uni.st) [24]. A large majority of their artistic activities belong to post-conceptual, socially critical art practice. Generally speaking, the same can be said for their work what Manovich, analyzing the works of Alexei Shulgin and Dmitry Prigov, said about the Russian art scene. He said that due to a peculiar historical experience, the Eastern European artists were always more careful and distrustful to utopian promises of new technologies than the Western ones, and preferred black-humoured and dystopian aspects of new media, rather than long-term social and artistic projects [25]. Cathedral, Media Scape Any serious overview of new media art in Croatia would be incomplete without the institutions and artists that have perceived new media primarily as an artistic device used to point out or change existing art procedures. In the context of Manovich's description of new media, this network and its members see new media as a new representational machine rather than a new social and artistic practice resulting from their use [26]. This network was best presented by the exhibition/ project "Katedrala" (1988) and a series of exhibitions, lectures, presentations and symposiums held under the name Media Scape (http://www.mediascape.info/indexnovigrad.htm) in Zagreb from 1993 until 1999 [27]. "Katedrala" was a team project carried out by artists Darko Fritz, Stanko Juzba??i??, Boris Bakal, Ivan Maru??i?? Kilf and a programmer Goran Premec. It was conceived as a multimedial interactive gallery ambient, created and controlled by computers, various electronic devices, screens and other new media objects and it was dedicated to the major modernist artists [28]. The focus of the artists joined in this project was the two Manovich's new media paradigms: database and algorithm. Both refer to the medium of art production (image, sound, text) and the possibility of its control. Since one medium is often "translated" into another, these artists' works were usually multimedial and the process of remediation is performed through different and complex interactive protocols. The ambient installations prevailed and with the help of modern technology, it was possible for the visitors to participate in realization of an artwork. Due to their potential to generate and save a great amount of data and to interact, CD ROM, closed circuit, video and television installations were favourite new media genres among the artists gathered around this network. Once more, the artists Darko Fritz and Ivan Maru??i?? Klif should be mentioned because their works can be interpreted in both contexts. Due to their tendency to work with out-of-date technology (telefax machines, old instruments, LP records, gramophone etc.) and democratic, amateur do-it-yourself culture, they fit in the context of Multimedial Institute network, while due to their inclination to multimedial, interactive and gallery-situated works they fit in the context of Media Scape network [29]. Within the framework of the latter, we can also interpret the works of Sandro ??uki??, Magdalena Pederin, interactive video installations of Dalibor Martinis, Dan Oki, Simon Bogojevi?? Narath, Sandra Sterle, Kristina Leko and others. UMAS ??? Department of Visual Communication Design, International Festival of New Film The third network is located in the town of Split, thus being the only network of artists, theoreticians, curators and audience existing out of Zagreb. Some of the participants of this network have already been mentioned in the contexts of "Katedrala" and "Media Scape" but the true meaning of this network lies in the area of art education. In 1997, Academy of Fine Arts in Split opened Department of Visual Communication Design, which became the first high education programme in Croatia dedicated to the new media education [30]. Department of Visual Communication Design, and later Department of Film and Video, offered basic insights into the new media arts, whether digital film and video, photography or web design [31]. In other words, the Department's programme was based on the process of reinterpretation of the established art forms from the new media perspective, the process that Manovich called meta-media and Janos Sugar inter-media process [32]. A year earlier, International Festival of New Film had been established in Split, which has also been presenting new media art since 1997. The international jury has chosen and awarded new media artworks. Due to the Festival's programme and activities of Department of Visual Communication Design together with Department of Film and Video, a number of new media artists and theoreticians, such as Lev Manovich, Geert Lovink, Tamas Banovich, Nan Hoover, David Blair, Gisela Domschke and others, have presented their work in Split. Strategies and Tactics The media art in Croatia has had a long tradition. The earliest use of computers in art happened in 1969 when the electronic engineer and explorer Vladimir Bona??i?? began to collaborate with the art movement Nove tendencije. Throughout 1970's, when Nove tendencije stopped to exist and a decade of domination of conceptual, performing and activist art practices started, art referred to technologies in several ways. In the area of video art, particularly in the works of Dalibor Martinis and Sanja Ivekovi??, convergence of consuming electronics (portable cameras, TV set etc.) and art was happening in two ways. First, on the experimental level because the artists in almost gestalt-like manner tested characteristics of new medium and second, on the level where new media were seen as a platform for criticizing "society of spectacle". According to this rough classification of the media art, each of the two new-media models in Croatia during 1990's belonged to a different side of the tradition. "Katedrala" and "Media Scape" belonged to the side that facing the modernist dilemma ??? pure art or social activism ??? chose the autonomous art field in which experimenting with technology, with the purpose of broadening freedom of artistic expression, had more prominent role with the ending of 20th century. "Arkzin" and "Multimedial Institute" followed the line, which in a constant reminding of determinedness of every material, including art practice, saw the new media not only as a group of new technical protocols but also as a chance for new transgression of art, politics, high and popular culture etc. The sharp sensibility of "Arkzin" to the issue of media freedom is one of the most important factors in an attempt to differentiate these two new media paradigms. Another important factor is a political potential of popular culture, which is exactly what "Arkzin" was doing, according to some texts written by a long member of editorial board and designer of "Arkzin" Dejan Kr??i??. He claims that a true critical, corrective opposition to a bureaucratic socialist system of the late 1970's and 1980's was a particular practice of youth, usually popular culture that degraded with the introduction of parliamentary democration, since they lost the initial focus of interest, their raison d'etre [33]. It seems that the new media in Croatia of the 1990's should be seen as a revitalization of alternative, opposing potentials of pop culture that stood against a grey background of war, economic transition, autocrat government and xenophobia. Epilogue The first generation of artists formally educated in media art at Split and Zagreb Fine Art Academies was presented at the exhibition "Re:sources: New Media and Young Croatian Artists" at the Gal??enica Gallery in 2003. Only one of around 20 presented works did not belong to video or animation art [34]. It can only be speculated about a real popularity of film and video art among young Croatian artists. It seems there has been a long and respectable tradition of experimental film, video and animation, which has also determined the new media art in Croatia [35]. Still, Geert Lovink suggested in one of his essays on history of new media that the art tradition has always looked down on the Internet and "network computer" as devices for art practice [36]. Using definitions introduced in Croatian art history by Ljubo Karaman in the 1950's, Igor Markovi?? thinks the inability of so-called peripheral and provincial communities to creatively assimilate influences of topological, not geographical centre, is responsible for the omnipresent aversion to net art in Croatia. According to his interpretation, advertising aspects as well as traditional aspects of photography and video characterize Croatian artists' works on the Internet [37]. Nowadays, the access to the Internet in Croatia is completely opened to the market of the corporative capital. After more than a decade of monopole, T-Com had to allow the access to so-called last mile in 2006. Despite this, Croatian citizens are still paying one of the most expensive tariffs for the Internet access in Europe. It is still impossible to find out, within a reasonable period, the number of the Internet users in Croatia for the years 1996 and 2006. In addition, the Modern Gallery, the institution dedicated to the presentation of Croatian modern art, still does not have a web site. On the other side, a recent survey has shown that Croatia has the third-largest number of Fire fox users, following Finland and Slovenia. In addition, Multimedial Institute's activity of promoting Creative Commons licence is one of the most prominent in the region while slow but persistent lobbying for the governmental use of the free software is still going on. Finally, new media are becoming the only media in Croatia, too. (May 2007) Klaudio ??tefan??i?? (translation: Anita Kojund??i??) [1] The author would like to express his gratitude to Dejan Kr??i??, Marcell Mars, Igor Markovi??, Dan Oki and Sr??an Dvornik for their help with this text by providing necessary information and conversations. [2] Manovich, L., New Media from Borges to HTML in The New Media Reader; edited by N. Wardrip-Fruin and N. Montfort, Cambridge Massachusets&London, 2003: 13-25 [3] http://www.argosarts.org/articles.do?id=343 [4] The author borrows the terms opposition and negotiation from Stuart Hall's cultural theory. Hall Stuart (2006): "Coding/ Decoding", in Duda, D. (ed.): Politika teroije. Zbornik rasprava iz kulturalnih studijas. Zagreb, Dispute: 127-139 [5] For example, see Rachel Green's Internet Art (Thames&Hudson, 2004) or Darko Fritz's presentation of history of the Croatian media art on http://www.culturenet.hr/v1/english/panorama.asp?id=39 [6] For Janos Sugar's correspondence with Gaert Lovink about typical post-socialist experience of (inter) media artist, see http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint74/2/14 [7] In 1995, Zamir's network had 2000 members. Among others, Erich Bachman writes on the establishing the BBS system on http://balkansnet.org/MF-draft/MFF/zana-pr.htm [8] Until 1998, Arkzin's editor-in-chief was Vesna Jankovi??. However, the board found it important to establish the institution of collective, non-hierarchical editorship in which all the participants were equally included. Other members of editorial board were graphic designers Dejan Kr??i??, Dean Dragosavac Rutta, Bla??enko Kare??in, journalists, publicists and theoreticians Igor Markovi??, Boris Buden, Boris Mikuli??, Boris Trup??evi??, Geert Lovink and others. [9] "Arkzin" wrote about the Dutch group "Agentur Bilwet", cyber feminism theory, work of Slovenian net-clubs "Ljudmila" and "Kiberpipa", festivals such as "Next 5 Minutes", "Ars Electronica", Venice Biennale, art groups and artists such as Critical Art Ensemble, 01.org, Stelarc and Ivan Maru??i?? Klif. Furthermore, translations of texts written by theoreticians such as Geert Lovink, Andreas Broeckmann, Hakim Bey, Richard Dawkins, Peter Weibel, Mark Dery, Mark Terkessidis were published. [10] Lovink, G., "New Media Art & Science", 2005, 30th May 2007 http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129753681/ [11] Green, Rachel "Internet Art", London: Thames&Hudson, 2004: 54 [12] http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/garcia-lovinktext,html [13] ??uvakovi??, M., "Estetika apstraktnog slikarstva, Beograd: Narodna knjiga/ Alfa, 1998: 18 [14] "Zenit" was an avant-garde magazine, at first published in Zagreb (1921-1923) and later in Beograd (1923-1926). Ljubomir Mici??, whose intention was to introduce social and artistic principles of avant-garde period into Croatia and Serbia, launched it. Although pushed to the margins, "Zenit" enriched the Croatian art with many avant-garde features, in particular constructivism, futurism and Dadaism. [15] The commercial access to the Internet was extremely expensive when it first started in 1995. In the mean time, the national operator was sold to Deutsche Telekom. [16] Igor Markovi?? informed me about the surprising passivity of state institutions when it came to implementation of the Internet, claiming that governmental reaction to non-governmental organizations' criticism was ill-defined and chaotic, rather that preconceived and organized. [17] "Adilkno" or "Organization for improving illegal knowledge" ("Agentur Bilwet" in German) is informal group of intellectuals, researchers and theoreticians who started to work in Amsterdam in 1983. They have published several books such as: "Cracking the Movement", "Squatting beyond the Media" (1990) about subculture of squats in Amsterdam; "The Data Dandy" (1994), a collection of essays on cyber culture; "Media Archive" (1992) about repositioning mass media in relation to socialist project downfall (Croatian edition was published in 1998). Their theory was influenced by The French post structuralism, pop culture, media art and Marxist theory. [18] It is still possible to see "Arkzin" web page on http://mediafilter.org/MFF/AZbi1.html [19] Some of the founders were Nenad Romi?? a.k.a. Marcell Mars, Teodor Celakoski, Vedran Gulin, Tomislav Medak, ??eljko Bla??e, Petar Milat, Boris Buden and others. [20] A newspaper redaction had an important role in the society of former Yugoslavia due to a particular model called "socialism with human face". The turbulent 1990's kept a part of that symbolism. Among the most relevant "Arkzin" predecessors were youth magazines "Polet" and "Studentski list". [21] The following translations should be mentioned here: Lawrence Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace", McKenzie Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto", Marina Gr??ini??'s "Estetika kibersvijeta i u??inci derealizacije", Michael Hardt & Tony Negri's "Empire" etc. [22] These artists were presented: Vuk ??osi??, Luka Frelih, Ivan Maru??iu?? Klif, Magdalena Pederin, Dubravko Kuhta, Berislav ??imi??i??, Sa??o Sedla??ek, William Linn, Ines Krasi??, Nika Oblak, Primo?? Novak and others. [23] "Project: Broadcasting" was dedicated to Nikola Tesla. It was taking place for almost a year at different locations in Zagreb and was broadcasted on national radio. It consisted of exhibitions, lectures, discussions, performances, concerts etc. [24] One of the artists whose work has not been covered by any of the three new media networks is Igor Zlobec. In 2000, he started the web site "Zlobecsport". It soon transformed from a web page with a purpose of presenting off-line works to a typical net artwork. Another artist should be mentioned here, Antun Bo??i??evi??, whose interactive sound ambient "Va??no je sudjelovati" was exhibited in Osijek in 2004. A year earlier, Maja Kalogjera organized the international exhibition "Ground of My Studio" in the GRADEC Gallery with the works of Ruth Catlow, Agricola de Cologne, Marc Garret, Maya Kalogera, Jess Loseby, Eryk Salvaggio, Teo Spiller and Jody Zellen. [25] Manovich, L., "Behind the Screen Russian New Media" from Convergence 15 May 2007 http://con.sageoub.com/cgi/reprint/4/2/10 [26] Manovich 2003: 16 [27] Media Scape was an international manifestation, founded by Heiko Daxl, Ingeborg Fullep, Bojan Baleti?? and Malcolm LeGriece. [28] "Katedrala" was dedicated to Vasilij Kandinsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Marchel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. For further information see http://members.chello.nl/fritzd/projects/katedrala/text.html [29] The term "network computer" is used here to point out the cultural practices neglected in the theory of "early new media", determined by popularization of the Internet and its introduction in the world of mass media, increase of the wireless Internet access, new forms of artistic on-line networking based on Web 2.0, influence of open source, i.e. Creative Commons' cultural and artistic movement etc. In short, the term is a temporary methodological construction created for the purposes of this historic countdown, in accordance with Manovich's differentiation between new media and cyber culture. For further information, see Manovich 2003, 16 and "The Language of New Media" of the same author. [30] Some of the founders were Ivo Dekovi??, Tomislav Leroti??, Vlado Zrni??, Gorki ??uvela, Mirko Petri??, Slobodan Joki?? a.k.a. Dan Oki and others. [31] Himbele, ??. and ??tefan??i??, K. "Protiv pedago??ke atrofiranosti (interview with Slobodan Joki?? a.k.a. Dan Oki), "Zarez", 25 September 2003 http://www.zarez.hr/113/temabroja4.htm (15 June 2007) [32] Lovink, G. "Intermedia: The Dirty Digital Bauhaus, an e-mail Exchange with Janos Sugar" from "Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies", 5 March 2007 (http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1006074852/index.shtml?1182511765). In Sugar's conception "inter-media" stands for "inter-disciplinary" plus "media". [33] Kr??i??, D. "Alter/native" in "Communication Front 2000 Book", 18 April 2006 http://cfront.org/cf00book/en/dejan-alternative-en.html [34] It was Dunja Sabli??'s graduation work - CD ROM "Vila Velebita". [35] The hybrid area where film, video and "traditional" art of the early 1970's overlap can be presented by GEFF (Genre Film Festival), the work by Vladimir Petek and FAVIT (Film, audiovizualna istra??ivanja, televizija), Dalibor Martinis and Sanja Ivekovi??'s work, experimental films of Ladislav Galeta, Tomislav Gotovac and others. [36] Lovink, Geert: "New Media, Art and Science", 2005 30 May 2007 http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129753681/ [37] Markovi??, Igor: "Periphery vs. Province" from "Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies", 2 April 2007 http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/4/2/31 Literature: Castells, Manuel (2003): The Internet Galaxy. Reflections on Internet, Business, and Society, Zagreb, Jesenski&Turk Fritz, Darko: "Media Art". Culturenet.hr http://www.culturenet.hr/v1/english/panorama.asp?id=39 (15 June 2007) Green, Rachel (2004): Internet Art. London, Thames&Hudson Hall, Stuart (2006) "Coding/ Decoding" in Duda, D.; (ed.): Politika teorije. Zbornik rasprava iz kulturalnih studija. Zagreb: Dispute: 127-139 Himbele, ??eljka and ??tefan??i??, Klaudio "Protiv pedago??ke atrofiranosti (intervju sa Slobodanom Joki??em a.k.a Danom Okijem)", Zarez, 25 September 2003 http://www.zarez.hr/113/temabroja4.htm (15 June 2007) Kr??i??, Dejan (2000): "Alter/native". Communication Front Book http://www.cfront.org/cf00book/en/dejan-alternative-en.html (15 June 2007) Lovink, Geert (1998): "Intermedia: The Dirty Digital Bauhaus, an e-mail exchange with J??nos Sug??r" from Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/4/2/14 (15 June 2007) Lovink, Geert (2003): Dark Fiber. Cambridge ??? Massachusetts & London, MIT Press Lovink, Geert (2005): "New Media, Art and Science. Explorations beyond the Official Discourse" http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129753681/ (15 June 2007) Manovich, Lev (1998): "Behind the Screen Russian New Media" from Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/4/2/10 (15 June 2007) Manovich, Lev (2001): The Language of New Media, Cambridge ??? Massachusetts & London, MIT Press Manovich, Lev (2003) "New Media from Borges to HTML" in Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Montfort, N. (ed.): The New Media Reader. Cambridge-Massachusetts & London: MIT Press: 13-25 Markovi??, Igor (1998): "Periphery vs. Province "in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/4/2/31 (15 June 2007) ??uvakovi??, Mi??ko (1998): Estetika apstraktnog slikarstva, Beograd: Narodna knjiga/Alfa