Carnival in the Eye of the Storm - Critical Essay

In U.S. public discourse, the Albanian side was rarely heard. Newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post interviewed Albanians, but there was little active outpouring of text and image from Albania without mediation by the Western media. In the "democratic" public sphere of the Internet, one came across relatively few Albanians. Most online art and reporting about the war was dominated by the Serbs, who were on the privileged side of the on-/offline divide. Many of these online artworks illustrate a Serbian identity based on victimization and the threat of loss.

How were new communication technologies used during the events in Kosov@? Did alternative media play an important role in this process? There was the Kosovar Albanian reporting in real-time on his cell phone about Serbs marching into his village. The Kosovar woman who received a call from her friend in the Netherlands on her cell phone at the moment she faced a group of Serbian paramilitaries who demanded two hundred deutsche mark for her life. The online diaries of the Kosovar activist Sevdie Ahmeti describing the war zone. And then there was Warn Kat, who published his daily diary from Tirana, Albania, online. Many journalists called this the first Internet war.

While we were caught up with Kosov@, the United States kept its sanctions against Iraq in place. The reporting on the Gulf War was similar to that of the Kosov@ War in that the actual battlefield was never shown on television. TV war reporting as flashy video game. The depoliticized news reports of the Western media became instrumental in mediating the war on behalf of the United States and NATO. The media failed as information providers. It came as no surprise that CIA officers had moved into CNN's editorial office as advisers during the war.

It becomes clear that today everything, even art, exists in a political situation. ... ZIt becomes a matter of artist's power, of artists achieving enough solidarity so they aren't at the mercy of a society that doesn't understand what they are doing. I guess that's where the other culture, or alternative network, comes in.

--Lucy Lippard, "Interview with Ursula Meyer" (1973)

How was this war impacted by the existence of Internet communities such as Nettime (www.nettime.org) and Syndicate (www.v2.nl/syndicate)? How did it internationalize these political communities? How can a program about war create a discursive community thousands of miles away from the storm, away from the flames of war? The threefold structure of the project (exhibition, conference, and film and video series) and its placement in an educational context tried to invent a new forum for debate. The discussions became more engaged as we diverged from the traditional conference setting to an informal roundtable debate.

The works included in the exhibition took the form of single-channel videos, sculptures, satellite computer prints, paintings, installations, photographs, net.art, postcards, political cartoons, and sound works. The artists acted neither as exemplary sufferers, nor as self-absorbed individualists. Sislej Xhafa, for example, contributed a grid of snapshots of a few hundred Albanians, who were not portrayed as victims, but were laughing with hope for Kosov@. This mode of critique succeeds in going beyond black-and-white polarities to look at Kosov@ from many sides.