coMpUTE

Better Slack Than Wack

As the rise and rise of international electronic art
festivals continues unabated, a desire is growing for
parallel events that bring people together in a more
informal way, both socially and thematically. Recently in
Bath DIGITAL CHAOS was organised to go some way toward
providing such a meeting in the UK. Organised by Heath
Bunting together with the Hub Interc@fŽ in Bath and Stuart
Taylor of FStop Media Station, Digital Chaos was instigated
in part to provide a UK counterpart to events going on in
Europe (mainland that is) such as Next5Minutes, the
Metaforum in Hungary and the V2 East/West meetings, where
emphasis rests squarely on information sharing through
workshops, small discussion groups and a loose(r) agenda. In
a symptomatic bout of pro-uncertainty zeal, Digital Chaos
was dubbed the Slacker Cyberconference.

Heath Bunting sits happily on his now firmly established
seat; a first try media pit stop for questions to do with
interactive technologies and the internet. Familiar from
endless magazine articles portraying him as the slacker
generation's media guru, you wonder what he did so...
differently. Putting it down to the fact that other
candidates might not always be prepared to talk, he relishes
opportunities to take Esquire to the beach to talk about
ecology or .net to his technology recycling skip in London,
seeing them as chances to introduce ideas in unexpected
contexts. Dissing strict definitions of what constitutes
"underground" and mainstream activity - maybe fictional and
real too - he has kept his original cybercafŽ model (and
URL) active as a catalytic, fast-spurting, always-incomplete
stream of event descriptions and reports, questionnaires,
split mono-media and re-routed messages. And whereas his
early ideas for a UK cybercafe never became concrete
reality, his current activities with organisers of
Obsolete's BACKSPACE (www.backspace.org) look like they will
prove to be a worthy substitute. Together, they are
currently planning a 12 month series of talks which are to
be based, like many of his ideas, on the adoption of a
flexible but simple rule set: events are to be kept small,
costs low, with no more than 2 speakers per event. Well
known and unknown speakers are to be invited together, with
local and international ones combined. Publicity is
entrusted to word of mouth and e-mail.

Both Heath Bunting's internet sites (www.irational.org and
www.cybercafe.org) will provide you with ample illustration
of his approach. Grand theoretical analysis will definitely
not, in fact this seems to be one of the only things he
actively dislikes (and flashy technicolour websites, I
imagine). Don't theorize about the future of the internet.
Do something. Put a new coms structure in place by
recombining those that already exist. See what happens etc.
Through all this runs the idea that one communications
medium should never be worshipped over another and that they
are mutually supportive rather than exclusive. Most
hilariously, there is the utterly consistent overall will to
concrete-virtual/analogue-digital link up. Best examples of
this are the (apparently succesful) project to make a LAN
with tin cans and pieces of string or, more ambitiously, the
exhaustive list of countries ready and pulsing with desire
to become an international database of public phones.
Individual dialing foibles are to be kept updated by those
who know them and favourite boxes put forward for others to
seek out and appreciate.

Bunting, a clear advocate of emotional computing, picks his
metaphors from the digital bureaucracy of data processing,
compression and consumption and his aesthetics from the grey
school of html. Yet the result is a multi-tasking manual of
human-machine help kernels too good to miss.

"When the external can not be understood we DESIRE its
transformation into our internal form"

if you have anything you can not cope with (e.g.
ideas/people/cultures) please send them to the cybercafe and
we will restructure them for your pleasant CONSUMPTION"

the basics: http://www.irational.org/pain (pain of existence)
http://www.irational.org/cybercafe/chaos/ (digital chaos)
http://www.cybercafe.org (cybercafe) heathbunting@irational.org 

coMpUTE - metamute