Against Methods

Paul Feyerabend has stated that “the meaning of freedom is being understood in the course of its emergence through practice” (Reason & Bradbury 2008). Feyerabend's position is radical in the philosophy of science, because he states that philosophy can neither succeed in a description of science nor offer methods, hence his call Against Methods (1975). Feyerabend

demonstrates, through case studies of major scientific breakthroughs, such as Nicolas Copernicus's Revolution of Celestial Spheres (1543), how rules and methods have been violated in the academic evolution of contributions to knowledge. Feyerabend argues, by giving historical case studies, that without the violation of rigorous methods the scientific revolution would have been impossible. Uri Gordon's discussion in Practising Anarchist

Theory: Towards a Participatory Political Philosophy (2007) gives an idea of how one can

deal with methods from an anarchist perspective. He advocates employing Participatory Action Research as a technique that can inform debates on issues related to anarchist concerns, so as to generate new ideas on how to address those issues. Referring to Gramsci's idea of the organic intellectual, he argues that:

the process of generating anarchist theory itself has to be dialogical in the sense that both the people whose ideas and practices are examined and the people who are formulating theory and their basis must be involved in the process of theorising. Only from this dialogical connectedness can the anarchist philosopher draw the confidence to speak. (U. Gordon 2007, p.280)

Uri Gordon outlines three stages for a theoretical research undertaken within a participatory research environment. The first stage is one of 'immersion', where the researcher is or becomes part of the subject being researched. The second stage is 'absorption', where the researcher contextualises the practise which (s)he is engaging with. In the third stage, which Gordon refers to as 'integration', the researcher reflects on the 'absorption' stage to come to conclusions and feed those conclusions back into the research.

In such research strategies with a horizontal approach to the generation of knowledge, the rigid separation between researcher and researched is dissolved. These strategies emphasise the emancipatory potential of the collective generation of knowledge that legitimate and valorise a socially committed orientation in intellectual endeavours (U. Gordon 2007, p.283)

The Argentinian collective Colectivo Situationes exemplifies the notion of going 'against method' with their discussion around 'militant research' (2007). Colective Situationes argue that in contrast to a traditional academic researcher, who comes from the outside, the militant researcher goes into a situation which is being researched. In the case of Deptford.TV those research situations were represented by the workshops organised in collaboration with the !Mediengruppe Bitnik. For !Mediengruppe Bitnik it was always important to point out to the participants that these workshops were organised in a playful manner. This is why Colective Situaciones refer to Benedictus de Spinoza's “joyful passions” (1677). Furthermore Colective Situaciones argue that the playful state only becomes possible when one admits that

one does not have the answers. Research militancy resists predefined schemes.

I would argue that when participants are empowered to think of themselves as 'experts' within the collaboration then 'communication' can become playful 'composition', because participants are open to experiment, or in other words to 'hack' around with, and reflect upon, the media they use and how they use it. As the no

border activists put it: “Everybody is an expert” (AutorInnenkollektiv 2000). As a

result, the process of production and composition as experienced by the participants becomes the research method itself (Precarias a la Deriva 2003).

In a similar vein, I became a member of the !Mediengruppe Bitnik collective in 2008 (after having collaborated with them since 2005), experimenting with situations and workshops, as art practices and part of my wider FLOSSTV project.

I first met !Mediengruppe Bitnik during the CODE Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, in 2003. At that time !Mediengruppe Bitnik were taking part in a group exhibition from the University of the Arts Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung

Zurich. Mediengruppe Bitnik was originally founded in 2003 by students of the

University of the Arts Zurich. Their supervisors Knowbotic Research invited me to create a documentary entitled 'free the code' about the exhibition the university had organised for the Ars Electronica festival. Knowbotic Research themselves are an electronic art collective founded in 1991.

What caught my interest during the group exhibition was a project entitled

Teleklettergarten that !Mediengruppe Bitnik were involved in. It was a keyboard the

size of a house mounted on the outside of the University of the Arts Linz, in the form of a climbing wall, connected to a computer and the internet. Visitors were asked to climb the wall and to push the keys in order to collaborate with the programmers on the ground and to write code critical of forms of intellectual property, such as copyright and electronic patents:

We program codes, scripts and tools, and demonstrate functions. In times of software patenting, digital rights management and access controls, one is no longer guaranteed to be able to write and run a function without running the risk of committing illegal acts thereby. (FOK 2003)

Ever since Teleklettergarten, I have documented many of !Mediengruppe Bitnik's works over the last eight years, creating a long-term documentary (in the sense of this research as a FLOSSTV database documentary) of !Mediengruppe Bitnik. What drew my attention to Bitnik was their way of practising art. Changes to existing cultural systems are part of the artistic work of !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Bitnik uses the strategies of hacking that are available for a practice of conversion, reorientation and criticism of media systems. For Bitnik hacking is an artistic intervention into an existing system, to open it for other than its intended purpose. Bitnik is especially interested in multimedia systems, mediated realities and live media. Our interests converged in the exploring and opening up of questions around intellectual properties, rights issues, and the use of copyleft for media, arts and software productions.

In 2005 I started collaborating with !Mediengruppe Bitnik envisaging the use of their Copyfight! street television system for Deptford.TV. I invited !Mediengruppe Bitnik to take part in the Node.London season, March 2006, to run a TV hacking workshop and present their project Download Finished! during a Deptford.TV

Peer2Peer Cinema session on the Mindsweeper boat (fig. 5-13).

Download Finished [http://www.download- nished.com] transforms andfi re-publishes lms from p2p networks and online archives into newfi originals. For the transformation of the found footage Download Finished exploits a characteristic unique to online lms: Before lms are fed intofi fi

lesharing networks, they undergo a series of structural transformations fi

and their data structure is completely reshaped for the purpose of compression. Download Finished uses the new data structure for the transformation of the visual layer: What usually appears as a compression error becomes the aesthetic form of the new originals thus showing the underlying data structure of the lms on the surface of the screen. Thefi original images dissolve into pixels, making the usually hidden data structure visible. (!Mediengruppe Bitnik 2008c)

In 2007 I documented the project Opera Calling, which was an artistic intervention into the opera house of Zurich. !Mediengruppe Bitnik placed bugs in the auditorium of the opera house which retransmitted the performance over a call centre phone server individually to private households in Zurich. The numbers were randomly selected and anyone picking up the call could listen to the opera performance live.

In 2008 participants in the Deptford.TV workshops got interested in surveillance systems around Deptford and built a CCTV sniffer. At the same time Bitnik organised TV

hacking workshops around CCTV sniffing. My documentary practice and Bitnik's media arts practices joined and I became a member of !Mediengruppe Bitnik. In May 2009 we gave a TV hacking workshop entitled CCTV – A Trail of Images at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Deptford.TV project extended from being a collaborative documentary film project, around the urban change process of Deptford, to a database project which also applies and experiments with artistic practices. With the project The Parasite's Delight we looked into parasitical (Serres 2007) potentials within media systems, influenced by Bazon Brock's Ästhetik gegen erzwungene Unmittelbarkeit, Aesthetics against Forced

Immediacy (1986), Fernando Pessoa's The Anarchist Banker (1922), and Slavoj Ž ižek's

discussion around 'systematic violence' (2008; 2007). Through the notion of parasitical (2010b) use of media systems the collective is intervening not only into media systems such as radio, television (2008a; 2008b), file-sharing (2005), but also into classical performance institutions such as the opera house (2007).

!Mediengruppe Bitnik's latest art piece entitled Too Big To Fail, Too Small To

Succeed was exhibited at the same time in London and Zurich. It was an intervention

into the financial systems of these cities (Reichert 2009), calling audiences to survey bankers, follow them in public space and report their movements back to the call-server of !Mediengruppe Bitnik. These calls were subsequently also used as raw material in the Deptford.TV editing workshops. As part of the exhibition !Mediengruppe Bitnik used the billboard Space (see figure 4-1) in front of the Space Gallery in London to present the work (Stalder 2011). The work was a photograph of a street scene in which an investment banker stands in front of a USB bank branch, holding up a cardboard sign that has the word 'LIES' on it, a homage to a photograph of Peter Weibel from 1971, in which Weibel stands in front of a police station, holding up a cardboard sign that reads 'LIES' underneath the police sign.

The following statement was emailed to the Nettime mailinglist by Lennaart van Oldenborgh who witnessed the removal of the image the billboard at the night of the vernissage:

All the buzz on the night was about how the image was now surely going to go viral, and surely the Bitniks and the gallery were going to get lots of attention from this, but in the following days I didn't hear or see anything. Out of curiosity, I asked around people I'd met on the night and someone who didn't want to be named said that indeed the gallery had received a threatening letter from UBS and could not be

seen to publicise the case pending possible legal action (presumably a libel case, in which of course both the gallery, which is a non- commercial space, and the artists would be 'too small to succeed'). The image was taken down from the [Space ] gallery website. ... I think the whole incident throws up some interesting questions about the limits of freedom of (visual) speech, freedom of art, the difference between making a controversial gesture in public space vs doing the same inside the sanitised, screened-off space of the art gallery, etc. With its legal threats UBS is nicely illustrating what was the point of the work in the first place: in our time, it is corporate and financial entities that are 'too big to fail', that can use libel and copyright laws to repress freedom of speech, analogous to the way the police was used as a tool of state repression at the time of Peter Weibel's image from 1971. (2010b)

Fig. 4-1. Removal of the 'UBS lies' billboard. Photo Leela Axon. Free Art License 1.3