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MUSIC ELECTRONIC AND OTHERWISE ISSUE FIVE FALL 2005

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KAROSTA 63

Borderlands of the BlocThe fall of the Soviet Union ruptured the coordinates of the Eastern Bloc.During the uncertain 90s, the atmosphere hovered in-between a post-apocalyptic imaginarium and the ravages of neoliberalism. Half-forgotten army enclaves gathered particle dust, awaiting obsolescenceas remnants of the Cold War; formerly secretive zones became objects ofintrigue. In Latvia, artists and scientists moved quickly, for it tookborderline surreal interventions to resuscitate the past and its tensionfrom obscurity. Through the work of artists in the military compound ofKarosta, and scientists and artists at the RT-32 radio telescope,abandoned military bases became villages once again, and a former KGBeavesdropping dish that dotted the horizon with its invasive radiowavesis now center to both scientific and aesthetic protocols.

Latvia, perched on the Baltic Sea, with Estonia to the north,Russia to the east and Belarus and Lithuania to the south, has spentone hundred years under a turbulent array of regimes. Germany,Sweden, Poland and Lithuania have all held their hand over thisquadrant of Eastern Europe; the clandestine resonance lives on in themythical image of the region’s artists. Eastern Europe (or so thegeneralization goes) is the land of Net-art and politicized new media,in part because hybrid forms of the technology arts were faced withan early hurdle: isolation and the dustbin of history. The difficulty ofglobal travel, often lacking passports and without coveted EUmembership, forced the hand of the creative class to pursue theirefforts locally, with the establishment of artist-run centers andenclaves. Yet most inspiring were the varied uses of the Netthroughout the 90s to reach out and touch, if not confront, the dot-com assumptions of their Western counterparts.

Although recent commentaries dispel much of this utopiannarrative—the demise of the flowering 90s, but isn’t that everywherethe case?—it is true that, at least in the Western mind, Latvia is anautonomous magnet of the electronic arts, with conferences andinternational-level events puncturing the various pockets of the Balticregion—the West came to the East. The physical character of thelandscape and the comparative economic poverty of the areacontinues to haunt its expressions and impress those who expendtheir energies via microphones and videocameras, code and thought,sound and image.

Out of disused military spaces parched

by the sharp air of Latvia, a group of

sound artists and scientists look to

forge a new acoustic space of dreams.

Guided by Derek Holzer, these digital

interventionists are using an

abandoned KGB telescope array to

encode their own brand of subversive

telemetries. tobias c. van Veen reports

in from under the radar.

postcardsfrom

the zone

Ruins, Oeterotopias and Other Jetstream Dreams“Now, all stands in ruins,” writes sound-artist Derek Holster of the KaraOsta (“War Bay”) submarine hideout, penning the karosta.edworks.net blogthat marks his stay in Karosta over New Year’s 2001-2002 with video-artistSara Kolster. “Barracks, offices, workrooms, libraries, docks, traininggrounds, swimming pools, all stand empty, strewn with debris, ankle-deepwith snowmelt, sabotaged by departing militaries or half-demolished byLatvian workmen. Walking through this place which was the end-point ofthe Soviet war-machine, I am reminded of the war fever of my own formerhome country, the US. On the verge of economic disaster at home, on theverge of military atrocity abroad, I wonder if anyone there would find alesson in this place or not. What if, instead of finding old Soviet armysongbooks, painted slogans from Lenin, USSR rubles and scraps of 8mmpropaganda films, we found Big Mac wrappers, Pepsi cans, Magnavoxtelevisions and People magazines? Would the resonance of such a place,after the USA has gone the way of the USSR and dissolved into a collage ofeconomically unstable territories, still be the same? I think so...”

Given the circumstances, where else would one find Derek Holzer,renegade open-source sound-artist, co-organizer of the IMPACT festival inUtrecht, Netherlands, and ex-pat American (for various politicaltendencies)? Holster is drawn to these places like Hunter S. Thompson toLas Vegas, to scour the earth for fragile dreams. With binaural microphonesin hand, Holzer documents abstract field recordings to shape complexinterplays of frequencies using improvisational patches built in the open-source modular software Pure Data (PD). His conviction to DIY, non-corporate methodology is extensive, from open-source software tooutsider projects. Holzer’s work appears on respected labels—Sirr Records,Nexsound (with Oloolo) and soundscape-fm.net–with many of hisenvironment-influenced soundworks providing audio for video-artprojects by Kolster and Bas van Koolwijk. Unlike the wide-angle studies ofTouch artist Chris Watson, Holzer often delimits his radius to themicroscopic, focusing on the sounds of found objects when reprocessedand patch-improvised—around Karosta, it was unearthing unidentifiedbones that prompted his return with Kolster. In the use of historical andhaunted objects, Holzer operates on a psychogeographic as well as soniclevel. With projects utilizing handheld PD, as to produce psychoacousticadventures for mobile users such as the PanDev Psycho NavigationalDevice developed with Kolster, Marc Boon and Steim.org, Holzer extendssound beyond the experiential authenticity prized by the field recordistand into the realm of imagistic dreams.

Visions are perhaps somewhat de rigeur in this part of the world.Karosta “K@2” art center founders Carl Bjorsmark and Kristine Briedewhirlpooled the area while filming a documentary of liminal spaces,Borderlands, in the 90s (a longterm, uncompleted project). Briede, co-

founder of Latvian capital Riga’s RIXC new media and culture center, andBjorksmark, an ex-Swede, extended the city’s network to Karosta. Despite aperennial lack of funds, in 2003 they persisted in dreaming the next stage,a “Campus Karosta” slated for opening in fall 2005.

Skip to Western Latvia: imagine the scene in 1994 when, with theSoviet retreat, a group of scientists occupied and repaired the freshlyabandoned (yet sabotaged) RT-32 radio antenna. Come the new century,and suddenly this once-sealed military zone, like Karosta, becamerejuvenated towards the pursuits of creative, rather than destructive, ends.Since 2000, the 32-meter dish has been managed by ViRAC (VentspilsInternational Radio Astronomy Centre) with RIXC’s Acoustic Space Re.Lab.The 2003 gathering of art and science bore two audio releases. The RT-32Acoustic Space Lab Open Source Sampler CD features reworks from KimCascone, Stephan Mathieu, Holzer, reMI, Zina Kaye and Cornucopia (amongothers). Produced with open-source recordings from RT-32, disseminatedon the Net for sampling to artists worldwide, this uncanny collectionsurveys the the static of stars as well as the curious artifacts of satellite andcellphone transmissions. The Acoustic Space Lab DVD, which details theconstruction and design, history and uses of the telescope, includesarchives of the symposium and events as well as experimental video.

A triangle connects the topography of Latvia: K@2 in Karosta, asuburban district in the city of Liepaja on the west coast; RT-32 in westernIrbene and RIXC in northern Riga. While Riga’s new media scene may havefractured along with the 90s technoculture networks, Mara Traumanewrites that “In a strange way, the tie to the physical space, the geographicpoint, has generated a visionarism, characteristic of a whole chain ofinitiatives of the mature Riga ex-network.” This ex-network is internationaland broad: Holzer is one of the partners of Acoustic Space, which includesXChange radio-art networkers RadioQualia (UK/AU), Projekt Atol(Ljubljana) and L’audible (Sydney).

Ground Control calling Object KarostaDreamtime, somnabulent space, a time of repression and recollection, fitsthe esoteric explorations suitable for audio encounters. Holzer writes offinding an evocative nuclear submarine tank on the December 29th, 2002:“The single most astonishing structure left standing is the submarine tank.Twenty meters or so wide, and easily over a hundred meters long, thisconcrete tube was used to repair the Soviet submersible fleet and toprotect it from aerial surveillance at the same time…it was covered insnow, filled with greenish ice and quite dangerous due to large holes in theslippery walkway. In the summer, local children play there when notchased off by drunken security guards. The acoustics inside are sublime,spacious but resonant, unlike any other building I have been in…I hope tocapture some of this atmosphere by introducing new sounds into it.”

64 KAROSTA

Unfortunately this was not to be; one can only imagine thesepotential sounds given the precision of recordings titled “baltic.ice.hole.”As Holzer recounts in early January 2004: “My final trip to “The Zone,”during which acoustic research into the old submarine tubes would havetaken place, was intercepted immediately by camouflage-clad securityguards. They informed us that we were in a “border zone” and that we hadto leave immediately…unfortunately, the only thing that got across wasthat we were there to “record sounds from the nature.” Their superiorinformed them via radio that “there is no nature in Karosta” and theyshowed us the exit.”

The recordings that do exist from this “nature,” archived online atkarosta.edworks.net, are spectral and imbued with all the driftwork of time,even at their miniscule level; an atomic if not molecular invocation oftemporality as it sweeps across all of the histories and implications of Karosta,the different stories to be told crisscrossing their contrasting effects. Theserecordings demonstrate Holzer’s merger of his pirate radio aesthetics (runninga free radio station during the 2000 Prague demonstrations) with hispsychoacoustics. As he writes, “My lasting impressions of being involved inlarge-scale political movements are pretty mixed, but I still believe it isimpossible to make art which is unaffected by politics. To think otherwisewould be completely naïve. Or North American. So I started to look at thesmallest aspects of our world, instead of the most global, and to investigatethem in ways which made sense to me, without being didactic or dogmatic.Although in the end it is still ‘me’ who turns on the mic or makes the selection,I think that field recording is a way to share some of the “resonances” of placesin the world that many others will never go to.”

That many others won’t go is provocative of Holzer’s challenge to acommonplace acoustic tourism presented as authentic experience, orworse, artistic innovation. Although the thunderous processes of FranciscoLopez echo in contrast to Holzer’s miniaturistic approach, both upset alistener complacent to the digestible swaths of ambient or the cabals ofmetronomic predictability (the latter characterized by Holzer’s well-knowncritique of Ableton Live and other commercial, pre-packaged software).Immersive yet alienating, Holzer gestures sonically from Brecht (slappingabout the audience) to a punk DIY ethos (“after getting bored of drugs andpunk rock,” Holzer never finished his Bachelor’s in English Literature andCreative Writing at Portland State University, Oregon, USA, leaving the USfor good after 2000).

Digging into Karosta came about through a pinpoint into theunconscious of the (social) landscape. Holzer describes the genesiseloquently: “The Karosta Project started from this point, and from a pile ofbones I found on the beach. To look at them offered so many possibilties:dead human, dead animal, war martyr, pogrom victim, drowned refugee,slaughtered cow...I couldn’t decide, and instead of using “scientific” methods,Sara Kolster and I thought to work intuitively by making small samples of the

place where these were found, along with the bones themselves and manyother objects from the same places, and let all the individual voices comethrough. The project became more of a catalog of Karosta than aninvestigation of the bones, but that is where the process took us.”

Holzer himself provides a reality-frame in which to envision Karostaand our narrative of Latvia, buried in political histories, under occupyingforces for so long that it, at times, is even foreign to itself (“I saw plenty of“expats” in Prague. They were the scum of the earth. North American orwestern European kids with no direction and money to burn up in one ofthe last cheap but civilized places left”), and invested in the connectionsthat only “real life” can provide—and a critical real life at that, onededicated as much to open source as to aesthetic intervention. Holzer’s twomaxims are “that art is a social process” and “a continual process.” The twoare embodied in the term “hacker culture,” a moniker with broaderresonance in Europe than North America. Beyond the phone phreakers orscript kiddie, hacking is a cultural ethos akin to squatting and repurposing;in Holzer’s words, to “use every facet of the free software world as apolitical tool” but also to learn how to build and create one’s own tools.Karosta and the ViRAC dish dream, in this sense, of becoming an opensource geography, and they prod even the armchair reader to reinvigorateone’s local landscape with energies, that, despite mythical cloaking, runrampant in the Baltic. What the West can learn from the East is how toreality hack. And there are ways, writes Holzer, to begin right at home, backin the domain of electroniculture:

“This is probably the biggest reason I use Pure Data. It is a product ofhacker culture, or even of zen, where there are no presets. It opens to a bigwhite “nothing” which doesn’t presuppose that you will do anything withit. There is no imperative to make a song with beats, or any songwhatsoever, or even sound. You could also make image, run part of yourwebserver or even transform one type of data into another. It only worksby you bringing something of yourself into it, instead of deciding ahead oftime what the outcome will be. Yes, it is challenging, even difficult at first.But it is a language like any other. I can’t speak Portuguese very well rightnow, but if I practice and learn new words every day, soon I will speak likea child and later I will be able to make poems. It goes like that. SometimesI wonder whether this quest for instant gratification (in software as withlife) simply produces more garbage in the world. Fast-food software makesfor fast-food culture.”

And like wide-eyed children of a new universe, we tear through theMcWorld and seek out the Zones…

For more information, see karosta.lv, umatic.nl, rixc.lv, virac.lv — MaraTraumane: kpp.lv/en/culture/texts_mt_1.php.

KAROSTA 65