An artist friend tells the story of attending the 1967 Montreal Worlds Fair nearly every day during the summer he was 12 years old. It was an eye opening experience, where he first saw Josef Svobodas theater, Buckminster Fullers Geodesic Dome (the American Pavilion), Kino Automat, an early interactive cinema, and a great 360 degree film with a cliff sequence, which you almost fell over with the car.
Today we have learned to understand World Fairs as exercises in nationalist diplomacy, in multinational marketing, in techno-utopian visions of an uncontestable future. They are events one would only visit like an anthropologist or with an out of town guest, who is distantly related by blood.
In either case, fairs assemble a public or publics and that is the goal of Fair Assembly, which uses the reach of the Internet to assemble a public beyond the time and space of the Making Things Public exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany, and to assemble a set of projects, which is beyond the reach of a single curator.1
Participatory Assembly
Assemblies have traditionally been forums for disputation, where decisions are made but not necessarily where the knowledge on which the decisions rely is formulated. Making Things Public not only brings the idea of the Assembly to sites of knowledge production but insists that the means, tools, tropes, tricks and knacks, which are integral tools for assembling knowledge, are also useful to the Assembly. In this sense, Fair Assembly is a participatory platform to which anyone can submit a web-based project, which relates to the thematics of the exhibition, and have it be part of Making Things Public. Artists curate in their own work. The public, not only the curator, decides what is most useful.
Bulletin boards, Usenet groups, blogs, email lists, web sites, even spam. Each of these Internet-enabled technologies allow for two-way communication, at least conceptually, at an unprecedented scale. They are a new form of assembly. Yet they have none of the traditional cues of so-called face-to-face conversations. Nor do they have governmental regulation or Nielsen and Arbitron ratings for that matter. Some of the projects in Fair Assembly tackle this problem directly. How do we measure, understand, influence the very large-scale conversation? Can any of these techniques be applied in other realms?
Protocols of Democracy
Understanding the content of the very large-scale conversation is one thing; understanding how it works is another, and in some ways more critical issue. Most of the information in the world today is not understandable or even readable by humans. The majority of worldwide communications is the tip of a pyramid of machine-to-machine data transmissions. These transmissions are governed by a protocol layer between the physical means of transmission computers, Ethernet, faxes, telephones and the application layer that encodes the message for transmission. For example, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is used to make text (and images) readable on the World Wide Web, sits on top of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which sits on top of Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). How these protocols function may seem like an arcane and nerdy issue, but in the virtual world, protocols are not just niceties. They are actual architectures that control and enable what and how messages can be sent; what and how data can be visualized. To what extent does this protocol layer, largely unseen, unknown, unrecognized, affect not only our ability to assemble in very large conversations but to assemble at all?
Res Data
This latter question, how the virtual becomes actual; how the virtual becomes material is really a question about whether virtual things raw data are or can be matters of concern res data. In the telematic world, data crosses over from what is resident in our computers, and in our communications protocols, to become indistinguishable and integral to what matters in our scientific, technical, economic, ecological, artistic, and political assemblies.
Open the Database
We are used to being to being the objects of databases. We get marketing telephone calls from computers when were trying to have supper. We are or we are not on terrorist watch lists (output from a database) when we arrive at the airport. The right or the left knows to ask us for support. Our homes are considered to be in polluted territory when the addresses are in a certain cell of an environmental database. We are spammed indiscriminately. What we are not so used to is being able to contribute to a database.
Artists and other interested parties are invited to submit projects to the Fair Assembly database, which can then become part of the exhibition Making Things Public.
No Representation Without Mediation
The open database of Fair Assembly is not about transparency, however. Not only is this impossible its protocols and machine-readable languages are literally meaningless to humans unless mediated but it is undesirable. Not everything will be accepted into the database but only some things projects that are matters of concern for Making Things Public. The following questions are asked:
Is your project or was it an innovation?
Does it lie at the intersection of information gathering and opinion making?
Does it make a difference, no matter how small, to the question of democracy?
Can it be "exported," at least conceptually, for use or comparison in other domains other than the one for which it is currently designed?
Means, Tools, Tropes, Tricks and Knacks
The answers to these questions do not lie in the content or philosophy of a project, regardless of how virtuous it is. What matters are the means by which the project makes its ideas public. How do the protocols and applications of the Internet suggest protocols and tools for democracy? For making things public?
Assembling the Fair
Fair Assembly is an experiment not just on exhibit but in exhibiting. It is an online fair at a very large scale, which is, as Bruno Latour suggested in early discussions about Making Things Public:
accessible to all the institutions, activists, teachers, political parties, artists who would have a wish to present, not so much their views on contested topics but the practical mechanisms to try to solve them.
1.Fair Assembly is not unique in this regard, and I would in particular like to acknowledge the example of runme.org, a software art repository, in conceptualizing this project. 2. The term very large scale conversation was coined by Warren Sack. See Discourse Architecture and Very Large-Scale Conversations, http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/SocialComputingLab/Publications/wsack-discourse-paper.doc, in: Digital Formations, Editors: Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press / Social Science Research Council (forthcoming).
