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12 April 2009
CONT3XT.NET

CONT3XT.NET — MEDIA/NET/ART

A PRACTICE WITHOUT DISCIPLINE | NETWORKED CULTURES

Franz Thalmair from CONT3XT.NET in conversation with Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer.

In 2005 Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer initiated the Networked Cultures project, a research platform on the potential of translocally networked spatial practices. Interviews, exhibitions, films and presentations are the many forms they collaborate on architecture, art and theory projects and investigate urban network processes, spaces of geocultural crises, and forms of cultural participation and self-determination. Networked Cultures investigates the cultural transformations in Europe through examining the potentials and effects of networked spatial practices.

The project interacts with art, architectural and urban practices across Europe and beyond to look at ways in which “contested spaces” allow for a multi-inhabitation of territories and narratives across cultural, social or geographic boundaries. Sites of alternative urban engagement are collected on a database which serves as a growing archive for research into emerging architectural cultures, including projects such as United We Stand - Europe has a mission, by Eva and Franco Mattes, the Trans European Picnic, organised by the New Media Center_kuda.org and V2_Institute of the Unstable Media, or projects like Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar by the Spanish collective Hackitectura. In the following interview Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer talk about the network as “the digital age’s ubiquitous object of desire”, the presentational form of socio-politically engaged creative projects and their own creative processes, defined as a “practice without discipline”.


Which are the smallest and the broadest networks you are engaged with?

Networks are highly complex assemblages that enmesh our feelings, thought and action with speculations about an ever-expanding elasticity in terms of cultural involvement, ranging from intimate exchanges to globally orchestrated forms of articulation. From one-on-one networks to the worldwide social movements of our time, each of these networks is presumed to be able to expand or retract in accordance with the urgencies of any given situation. So it is due to an inherent element of myth and fiction and due to the multiplication of such currencies by network actors that the absolute size of networks is indeterminable. In many respects, our research on relational structures and our own engagement in a variety of networked spatial practices has equally remained unconcerned about the empiricist doctrines of determinable quantity and scale. This disregard of determinate dimensions can be traced back to the very nature of the structures and the kind of practices that have been at the heart of our activities in the first place: emerging networks in the field of art and the wider cultural, political and intellectual ecologies they are embedded in.

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