Tester:
Nodes at Work
The Fundacíon Rodríguez,
Editor
Arteleku, Basque Government, Vitoria-Gautiez,
Spain, 2006
264 pp. Paper, with DVD, $40 Euros
ISBN: 84-7907-449-3 (book); ISBN: 84-7907-486-8
(DVD).
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
48710
mosher@svsu.edu
This collection of essays, visuals, and
involvements comes from the Basque country
of Spain. It is accompanied by a double
DVD containing 360 minutes of videosubtitled
in the viewer's choice of Castillian Spanish,
English, or the Basque people's language
Euskaraas well as texts written
in those three languages. There are six
primary "nodes", intellectuals who contribute
words and organization to the project,
and presumably contacted the other contributors.
In her essay "Capitalism, Democracy and
the Genetic Paradigm of Culture", Marina
Gaznic of Ljubljana reviews methodologies
of the organization of global art exhibitions,
in light of the art market, property rights,
economics, and hegemonic concepts. She
frames the world in pre-1989 terms, as
the First, Second (Soviet) and Third World.
She dialogues with Oliver Ressler of Vienna
on public "counter-globalization" manual,
the billboards and signage of resistance
<www.ressler.at> . Hito Steyerl
of Berlin examines the "Showdown in Seattle"
at the World Trade Organization meeting
in Seattle in 1999. Steyerl claims the
Seattle globalization protests were anticipated
in the public sphere in a 1970 film by
Godard and Mieville "Ici et Ailleurs",
the French filmmakers' statement on the
PLO.
Shulin Zhao writes on the utopian spirit
of new media, and on art in the cinema;
he asks "Who would happily refuse?" There
are reports on the New Media Center www.kuda.org
in Serbia, and on the Trinity Session
in Johannesburg, South Africa. Marcos
Neusteter of Johannesburg discusses several
African artists, recolonized black art,
and mobile subjects. Kien Nghi Ha finds
and celebrates "hybrid capitalism" in
the multiethnic international pop music
and culture that bounces around the world.
But isn't everybody, every place, multiethnic
in its tastes in 2007? A month ago this
reviewer was sitting in a taxi in Dakar,
Senegal, as the driver spun his Bob Marley
reggae tapes.
The accompanying DVD contains projects,
photographs, collages, texts, documentation
of collaborations and installations. Savants
discuss hyperpolitics, South American
artists, software interfaces and plug-in
metaphors. José Carlos Maríategui
muses on the meaning of the Tester project,
a testing grounds for electronic art in
the spheres of globalization and underdevelopment,
and as a developmental laboratory for
critical theory and contemporary education.