Armin Medosch (1962–2017)
Armin Medosch died yesterday, on the day two months after being diagnosed with cancer. I’m sure many people on nettime knew him very well. He was a long-time mover and shaker in the media arts and network culture scene in Europe. Indeed for much longer than even nettime exists.
I first learned of Armin not as a person, but a legend. In the early 1990s, he was one of a band of artists of an unqualifiable streak who roamed the Baltic sea on the Kunst-Raum-Schiff, MS Stubnitz. An 80m former freeze & transport vessel of the GDR high seas fishing fleet, they had re-purposed as a moving center for experimental electronic culture. He curated and organised exhibitions and symposia in Rostock, Hamburg, Malmö and St.Petersburg. The project was incredibly evocative, even for someone like me who had never seen the ship, because it fused many of the ideas that would come to define network culture, namely nomadism, a total disregard for established culture institutions, DIY and an exploration of the wild wastelands opened by the breakdown of the Soviet system, after 1989.
A few years later, when he was the co-founder and editor (1996 to 2002) of the groundbreaking online magazine Telepolis, he gave me the first change to publish regularly on network culture. Telepolis, which came out of exhibition on what was then called “interactive cities”, was the first European (or at least German) online publication that followed and understood the newly emerging phenomenon of the network culture. Together with Mute in London and nettime as list, Telepolis was a key node in establishing something like a European perspective on Internet culture, in clear opposition to WIRED and the Californian ideology.
In the early 2000s, Armin and I found ourselves living in Vienna. A collaborative working relationship turned into friendship. We still collaborated on a lot of projects, such as a Kingdom of Piracy, an exhibition project he initiated with Yukiko Shikata and Shu Lea Cheang, one of the first art projects that focused on the legal and illegal cultural practices of sharing digital materials. Over the last few years, we worked together in the framework of technopolitics, an independent research platform, he founded initially with Brian Holmes, aiming at developing a more martially grounded cultural critique, one which could relate cultural practices within deeper, more structure social transformation. A task we considered urgent after breakdown of the neo-liberal paradigm following the crisis that started 2008. All of these projects, and many more that I cannot account for personally – and need your help to fill in – where transdisciplinary, collaborative and exploratory, often ahead of their times. This is, however, something that the art and the academic system rarely appreciates.
Technopolitics continued this cross-disciplinary and collaborate work, but also reflected his new focus of work on developing a deep and sustained cultural theory and art history. His most recent publication, “New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978)” (MIT Press, 2016) was a first major achievement of this new direction. So was Technopolitics which we were able to present to overflow crowds at the transmediale late last month, an event which he could only witness via stream from his hospital bed. Quite recently, we even became neighbours and we would walk over to each other’s house for discussions, food a drinks. No more.
–Felix Stalder
via https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l–1702/msg00039.html
actually i avoid obituaries and funerals. they are more about the people who stay than the people who go.and they are about status and memory. how many people will show up, how many people will give a speech. damn it. in this case, i have to write, expecting that Armin Medosch would have done the same. get his grips together and go back in time. traverse the network of people, places, events. help to edit the pages on monoskop and maybe wikipedia. we never have been friends on facebook. i know that for the ones beeing very near it will be almost impossible to write more. recently i read the obituary of a comrade by another comrade and actually it was all about comradery as a self reflection of purpose, which can quite easily become a monologue in front of a mirror. when looking back and forth again, you acknowledge that time is linear, so i think what Armin did was looking around, quite early, have a lookout, and be there eagerly waiting, grudgingly dismissing those who were not ready yet. luckily we shared this perspective. it is a rather circular view in all directions, and a combination of all senses, which is needed, which opens up a plane of intrinsic qualities, which can only be experienced, and are therefore a product of social labor, as something which has to be realized together. with such opportunities, other forces and explorers are working hard to gain and claim ground. other seasons begin and other qualities are needed. remember the smile. you need a big heart, some humour, and a lot of anger to keep going. as travelling warriors it is not so much about the fight, or even the enemy, than the territory itself which determines the struggle. the potential is not the one of a native who claims spiritual ownership, but of a futurity as a multidimensional topology which must remain open in a good way, which keeps a flow going, and keeps coming back to pose new opportunities of struggle. retiring from resistance is impossible. the moment you ask what was in it for you, you’re just hurting yourself. in so far it is like a song, which you and anyone can sing again, a pattern of a track which repeats itself, a faint radio frequency to tune into. have a good flight.
https://monoskop.org/Armin_Medosch
–Pit Schultz
via https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l–1702/msg00056.html