Pit Schultz (co-founder) — Nettime mailing list — net-theory infrastructure

1995

Artists: Pit Schultz (co-founder), Geert Lovink (co-founder) · Year: 1995 · Medium: Mailing-list theoretical infrastructure — primary discussion forum for net-art, media theory, and digital politics from 1995 onward · Substrate: Email list servers; archived web access; thousands of subscribers at peak · Place: Berlin / Amsterdam · Institution: Nettime (self-organized mailing list) Nettime was founded in June 1995 at a meeting in the Venice Biennale gardens by Pit Schultz (Berlin) and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), with a rotating cast of collaborators including Heath Bunting, Vuk Ćosić, Alexei Shulgin, David Garcia, and others who had gathered in Venice for a side-event on "net criticism." The proposition was simple and, in retrospect, absolutely consequential: a moderated mailing list, in English, for extended critical writing on the emerging condition of the internet. Not a forum. Not a chat. A mailing list, moderated, for essays. Over the next decade, nettime became the central venue for European net-critical theory. The list published — and in many cases commissioned — essays by Geert Lovink, Saskia Sassen, Matthew Fuller, Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, Hakim Bey, McKenzie Wark, Tiziana Terranova, Florian Cramer, and the full mid-decade European cyber-theory community. Its archives are now the single most important documentary resource for understanding what "net criticism" meant in its formative years. In 1997, Nettime published the first Nettime anthology, Netzkritik, and in 1999 the English-language ZKP4 volume, which collected the most important 1995–1999 list postings. Nettime matters in this archive for a specific operational reason that is often missed. It was not a venue for net art — net art had its own venues (Rhizome, 7-11, the various artist-run mailing lists). Nettime was a venue for thinking about the internet as a cultural and political condition. The critics who wrote there were reading the artists who were making the work. The artists were reading the critics. The specifically European moves in net-art — the tactical-media orientation, the institutional-critique sensibility, the hostility to American cyber-libertarianism — are in large part products of the cross-pollination that nettime made possible. The list still runs, though with reduced traffic; its archives remain accessible. Geert Lovink continues to run the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Lore The original nettime founding meeting in Venice was not a conference event but an informal gathering in a cafe near the Giardini; the decision to start the list was made, in a detail Lovink has recounted several times, after several hours of arguing and several bottles of wine. The list's first subscriber was David Garcia, the Amsterdam tactical-media theorist; subscriber #10 was Vuk Ćosić. By 1997 the subscriber list had reached several hundred and included most of the major European net-theorists of the period. Schultz and Lovink moderated the list jointly, in a deliberately low-handed way, with a stated editorial policy that long essays were preferred to short rapid posts — a counterintuitive choice in the 1990s internet that made nettime's archives readable in a way that most 1990s mailing lists' aren't. Sources • Lovink, Geert — Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (MIT Press, 2002). • Bosma, Josephine — Nettitudes: Let's Talk Net Art (NAi Publishers, 2011). • nettime archives — https://nettime.org/