Hybrid Workspace

Hybrid Workspace - Documenta X, Kassel
June-September 1997

The Hybrid Workspace was a temporary media lab which operated during the 100 days of Documenta X. For the more than 200 participants, this was the "Summer of Content." Fifteen groups consisting of artists, activists, critics and their guests presented their work, produced new concepts and started campaigns that developed and continued long after the gathering.
(src)

"In 1997, at the Documenta X art festival in Kassel, Germany, and the Berlin Biennale, the artists Pit Schultz and Geert Lovink initiated the Hybrid Workspace, a "temporary laboratory" at Berlin's Orangerie: host to "100 days of 100 guests", where artists, musicians, scholars, curators, and activists tirelessly presented performances, lectures, screenings, interviews, and exhibitions to a local and remote public - via internet broadcasts on the orang.orang.org radio Website and the Nettime email forum. This ongoing workshop acknowledged that in a networked culture, artistic production exists in constant flux, and cannot simply be presented in the static form of an exhibition. The nature of the artists' creative explorations implied a shift in the way their work was to be presented to an audience. The exhibition strategy was changed to one which maintained the simultaneity, fluidity, interdependence, and unresolved relationships that characterize the society in which the artists were creating their media-based work." (The Wire #214)

"Hybrid WorkSpace (HWS), which took place during the 1997 Documenta X in the Orangerie in Kassel, went on for a three-and-a-half-month period; it received an impressive share of the 620'000 visitors who came to the event. Fifteen groups stayed for a ten-day period each; among those groups were the German Innercities campaign, No One is Illegal, We Want Bandwidth (www.waag.org), some audio initiatives (which later turned into the Xchange real-audio/net.radio network: xchange.re-lab.net), loosely affiliated or unaffiliated tactical media practitioners involved in focussing on global media (www.n5m.org), the Deep Europe/Syndicate group from former Eastern Europe (www.v2.nl/east), a group preparing the nettime _README!_book, which has now been published (www.nettime.org), and finally the first Cyberfeminist International, which brought out their own documentation (www.obn.org). The documentation of the Workspace can be found at www.medialounge.net . Medialounge is a database of 250 small European media art labs, a result of Hybrid Workspace and other meetings in which bottom-up networks of European new media culture is being created." (Geert Lovink: The importance of meetspace)

Some participants:
Waag Society (block 3, July 8-17) "We Want Bandwidth!" (src)
Kunstradio (block 4, July 18-27)
Note: on 23 July, live radio intervention from Vienna, feat. Pita (Mego)
source: http://www.kunstradio.at/FUTURE/DX/
V2_East/Syndicate "Deep Europe" - July 28 - August 6
incl. "Deep Europe Visa Department" (src) and Xchange presentation.
source: http://east.projects.v2.nl/archive/deep_europe/hybrid.html
mute - a UK based magazine about technology and culture
"Technoscience. Vocabulary, Politics, Practice" (block 7, August 17-26)
source: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9708/msg00011.html
http://www.metamute.org/en/node/6912

Interviews conducted at Hybrid Workspace, mostly by Geert Lovink:
http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/workspace/interviews/

Workspace mailing-list archive:
http://www.documenta.de/archiv/dx/lists/workspace/

"Some of the openX participants were still under shock from their experience at the Documenta X that summer, where the Hybrid Workspace of the Berlin Biennale had offered Kassel's Orangerie as a 100-day media cultural workshop for different international groups. The Hybrid Workspace itself was a flexible, multi-functional working environment, and most of the dozen or so workshops were great successes with many good results. Yet, how do you deal with a thousand or more Documenta visitors who come in every day and who want to see the art? In Kassel, it was very difficult even to begin to communicate to the audience what the workshops were about, given the short attention span of the exhausted art show visitors."

Source: [Broeckmann1998]

Resources:
Communication Art

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