Nettime<\/a> after Donald Trump\u2019s re-election: \u2018The issues that have driven this mailing list for more than 30 years lie shattered before us. The chance of a more open and just world, which we all believed in one way or another, has been swept away by a gigantic wrecking ball.\u2019<\/p>\nNettime<\/em> and springerin<\/em>, Buden writes, shared not just this idealism but also the experience of living in a \u2018common world and a common historical epoch\u2019. Central to both projects was an activist ethos that considered culture to be \u2018everywhere\u2019 and \u2018everything\u2019 to be culture \u2013 \u2018including history\u2019. Artists, theorists and activists had the sense of belonging to \u2018to an elite of historical progress, if not to an avant garde<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\nIn retrospect, writes Buden, this was simplistic progressivism, an ideological \u2018creature of its time\u2019 rooted in a belief in benevolent \u2018westernization\u2019. While art, theory and activism often succeeded in \u2018changing the world for the better\u2019, they could not prevent \u2018the world changing for the worst\u2019.<\/p>\n
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springerin 1\/2025<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
When the first issue of Springerin<\/em> appeared in 1995, the wars in the Balkans were raging a few hundred kilometres south of Vienna; in July, the Srebrenica massacre took place.<\/p>\nBut progressives, claims Buden, had a blind spot for ethnic cleansing and nationalist hatred; and so the wars were \u2018Balkanized\u2019 and \u2018cut off from western civilization\u2019. The figure of the \u2018benevolent westernizer\u2019 spawned a \u2018swarm of monstrous creatures\u2019 that thirty years later dominate the political stage.<\/p>\n
Altered landscapes<\/h2>\n
Critic Yvonne Volkart fondly recalls the tech-optimism of springerin<\/em>\u2019s early years and how she used to fax in her contributions, which were put online in the \u2018Net Section\u2019.<\/p>\n\u2018The editors, their authors and artists worked on an aesthetic of adequate forms and media: not in an art-historical, let alone formalistic manner, but from a post-feminist, media-ecological, interdisciplinary and curatorial leftwing perspective coming from cultural studies.\u2019<\/p>\n
While new political frontlines appear to be producing a similar collective feeling among \u2018artistic producers\u2019 today, the landscape has altered. The old protagonists of \u2018internet practices and online communities\u2019 have moved on, many into artistic research:<\/p>\n
\u2018Art is not just an artwork and criticism is not its afterthought, but both are jointly developed methods of searching, of wanting to know more precisely and sharing knowledge, of forming alliances \u2013 of being restless, of making restless. springerin<\/em> does the same.\u2019<\/p>\nSpaces of conflict<\/h2>\n
Art criticism has lost its combativeness, writes S\u00fcreyyya Evren in an article on pugnacious artistic practices. One example is a performance in which the artist Hiwa K. and philosopher Bakir Alo (both Iraqi-Kurdish) took part in a physical and verbal boxing match over the Kurdish question.<\/p>\n
\u2018What Hiwa K. wanted to question is whether it is possible to talk about politically and culturally sensitive issues without conflict. In his opinion, normal conversation proved inadequate, and so the transition to wrestling seemed quite natural.\u2019<\/p>\n
Another example is Dana Hoey, who organized Thai boxing and jiu-jitsu courses for citizens and policewo*men to highlight police violence in Detroit (2017). \u2018Her combat training for women\u2019, writes Evren, \u2018extends the metaphor of conflict to everyday problems and shows that art can actually empower disadvantaged people and need not be limited to criticizing institutional power dynamics.\u2019 Criticism, Evren proposes, \u2018should actively create spaces for today\u2019s conflicts, make voices audible, and facilitate sensible discourse that exceeds the status quo\u2019.<\/p>\n
Places of protest<\/h2>\n
Artist duo Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, professors at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, answer two questions posed by the editorial team: \u2018What spaces will be open to the advanced sectors of the contemporary art scene in the future? Where and in what narrower milieu was the springerin<\/em> project located three decades ago?\u2019<\/p>\nTwo instances of protest bracket their response: one early in 2025, when students of the Academy protested the imminent coalition in Austria between the conservative \u00d6VP and the far-right FP\u00d6; and the other 30 years ago, against the exhibition Deutschsein<\/em> at Kunsthalle D\u00fcsseldorf, which aimed to raise German self-confidence in a national climate characterized by Nazi rallies and attacks on migrants.<\/p>\nThe difference between the two lies in today\u2019s perpetual live commentary in social media and the pressure and paranoia it creates, write Creischer and Siekmann. Noting that the academy is no longer the place for unpoliced expression, due to fear of repression from the far right, they turn to springerin<\/em> to formulate another vision:<\/p>\n\u2018The editorial office could be a place where you practice being present, writing articles together, drinking coffee, making time, where you lose your smartphone, that is, where you learn to strike.\u2019<\/p>\n
Illusions of subjectivity<\/h2>\n
Hans-Christian Dany recalls his personal history with springerin<\/em> and adjacent online movements, at the same time charting how the ideals of the cultural left have increasingly converged with the far-right, identitarian politics of antisemitism.<\/p>\nHe chalks up this development to the critique of \u2018objective truths\u2019 formulated by thinkers like Donna Haraway, who coined the term \u2018divine trick\u2019 for illusions of objectivity. \u2018At the end of the last millennium, when Haraway wrote this, exaggerated counter-truth seemed a suitable means of breaking patriarchal hegemonies.\u2019 But in a decade of \u2018the politics of affect\u2019, it opens the door to what Adorno referred to as \u2018crypto-antisemitism\u2019 (Adorno).<\/p>\n
With the debate on Israel and Palestine reaching new dimensions, Dany invokes the responsibilities of media-literacy vis-\u00e0-vis online imagery, particularly from an editorial standpoint: \u2018Making magazines means writing the present\u2019 \u2013 but not just the present one wishes to see.<\/p>\n
Review by Kathrin Heinrich<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n[ad_2]
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