Nettime is an internet
mailing list proposed in 1995 by
Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink (born 1959, Amsterdam) is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open ...
and
Pit Schultz (then half-jokingly called "the nettime brothers") at the second meeting of the "
Medien Zentral Kommittee" during the
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...
. Since 1998,
Ted Byfield and
Felix Stalder have moderated the main list, coordinated moderation of other lists in the nettime "family," and maintained the site as their nexus.
The name nettime was chosen as a statement against space metaphors such as
cyberspace, dominant at the time.
The time of nettime is a social time, it is subjective and intensive, with condensation and extractions, segmented by social events like conferences and little meetings, and text gatherings for export into the paper world. Most people still like to read a text printed on wooden paper, more than transmitted via waves of light. Nettime is not the same time like geotime, or the time clocks go. Everyone who programs or often sits in front of a screen knows about the phenomena of being out of time, time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, bandwidth, the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as a asynchronous network of synchronized time zones.
Nettime has been widely recognized for its seminal role stimulating and disseminating ideas about
Netzkritik or
Net Critique,
net.art
net.art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. Some of the early adopters and main members of this movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting, Daniel Gar ...
, and
tactical media and pioneered practices such as "collaborative filtering". For example, in 2004 nettime was nominated for an
Ars Electronica Golden Nica award. However, the moderators refuse to speak or act as representatives of an organization, preferring instead to serve inasmuch as possible as coordinators of a loose or "headless" collective.
The list and related meetings were a strong influence on
Bruce Sterling's 1996 science fiction novel ''Holy Fire''.
Initially, it was both part of an early wave of, and served as an inspiration for, a number of related efforts such as Blast (1995–1998),
Rhizome (1996–present), Fibreculture (2001–present), Faces-l and -empyre- (2002–present). Unlike these other efforts, which typically sought to affiliate themselves with institutions in order to become institutionalized, nettime has remained independent — at times fiercely so. Thus, unusually for a mailing list, the family of lists has successfully migrated across a series of hosts — many of them culturally significant in their own right — including in-berlin.de, desk.nl, material.net,
thing.net, De Waag kein.org, and bitnik.org.
From the beginning, the aim has been to provide a space for a new form of critical discourse on and with the nets, focussing on longer, substantive, yet non-academic writings and discussions. Nettime served early on as a pre-publishing and discussion platform to give critical thinkers and writers an international reach. Due to its particular political style, it was often seen as a European online salon, even though it had from the beginning strong non-European, mainly North-American participation.
The list, once called "the world's most world list" by Bruce Sterling, has been characterized by pragmatic approach with relatively little change to its format over the years, which has proven to be resilient and durable. The expansive projects of building a web-based platforms, reacting to and generating growing controversies, were unsustainable. The original, mainly English-language mailing list (nettime-l) has spawned several other, more local lists better suited to specific regional and or linguistic contexts, including nettiime-ann (announcements), nettime-fr (French), nettime-lat (Spanish and Portuguese), nettime-nl (Dutch), nettime-ro (Romanian), nettime-see (southeastern Europe), and nettime-zh (Chinese).
Meetings
Additional Nettime meetings were held during events like HackIt, (Amsterdam) the Chaos Computer Congress (Berlin), ISEA, the
Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), The MetaForum Conferences (95-96) in Budapest. Nettime's one unique event was the Nettime May Conference - Beauty and the East, organized by
Ljudmila (Ljubljana). The Hybrid Workspace
drew heavily from Nettime during the
Documenta X in Kassel.
Publications
Proceedings of the mailing list were periodically collected in print form, with limited editions of xerox copies and in connection with a related conference or event. In 1999, nettime contributions were anthologized in a book form published by Autonomedia.
ZKP1
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban are ...
, January 1996
ZKP2
Madrid, Spain
Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...
, June 1996
ZKP3
Budapest, Hungary, October 1996
ZKP3.2.1
ZKP4The Beauty and the East
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Ljubljana (also known by other Ljubljana#Name, historical names) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Slovenia. It is the country's cultural, educational, economic, political and administrative center.
During antiquity, a Roman city ...
, May 1997
*''ZKP5: ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge''. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999. 556pp.
Online Version
ZKP6
Catalogue of the Slovenian Pavilion, Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...
2001.
Notes
References
*
*
Byfield, Ted (2012). "nettime— Fortsetzung folgt...," in Clemens Apprich and
Felix Stalder, eds. ''Vergessene Zukunft: Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa''. transcript Verlag. pp. 39–46. .
*{{cite book
, last = Bosma
, first = Josephine
, title = Nettitudes: Let's Talk Net Art
, publisher = NAi/INC
, year = 2011
, location = Rotterdam
, pages = 133–136
, isbn = 978-90-5662-800-0
External links
Nettime mailing list
Electronic mailing lists
Internet properties established in 1995
Internet culture