Freedom of Creation

Kruno Jost

23 May 2005

Nenad Romic, one of the creators of Multimedia institute and club MAMA, is working on different cultural and technological projects. He is one of the leading stuff in Media lab, space for production and research.

Activities of the MI2 members take place also outside Croatia. Among other activities, the members of the organization participate in numerous international festivals and residence programmes. How are the activities abroad accepted by the institutionalized culture and the competent state institutions?

Nenad Romic - Marcel

We could hardly speak of any significant reflection of non-institutional by the institutional culture. That is almost a logical corollary of the possible definitions of institutional and non-institutional culture. In that sense, we could hardly say that we did uncover something strange and worth our attention when we noticed that lack of reflection. The feed-back and reflection are, once again, a logical conclusion of the definitions for institutional and non-institutional, but bringing up that issue is not the single answer to that question.
The criteria of relevance mostly observed in that game of accepting and paying attention to somebody's cultural activities are the size of the audience, and the word of the critics. In our case (new media culture and transfer of technology concepts in the social sphere) the local community of experts and critics is rather small, to the extent that we could say that the bulk of that community are people from our organization. In terms of the number of people coming to our programmes, we can't really compare to any numbers reached by showbiz, instantTV and classical �populist� popular culture. Regarding these criteria, our activities doesn't deserve much attention from the people interested in those criteria.
There is another criteria of relevance that gains importance in the cultural field � the level of innovation.
The relationship between the culture and the market has become a basic preoccupation of both the culture and the market over the past 50 years or so. We have seen that the market, especially the creative and marketing industries, easily adopts not only the language and the articulation of progressive culture, but also the modes of operation, organization and management of creative processes, and does it in a way that something that was only recently a mode of operation and articulation of inovative culture soon becomes a mainstream model of corporate action and language of marketing campaigns. The helplessness of culture to resist such assimilation practices employed by the market is visible today in the predominant forms of resistance and reflection: cynism and cynical esthetics.
We can call the experimental models of organization, action and management of creative processes that are not bases on cynism and cynical esthetization, that reflect the context of contemporary cultural production and are not easily perceived as being totally assimilated by the dominant market production, inovative models. These are modesl developed in our work and research, and we try to abstract them, and then describe them in a way that would make it able to apply them in a different context.
The articulation and implementation of these models met with significant recognition in the international community engaged in new media art, theory and cultural policies.
In the cases in which the state institutions and institutionalized culture were invited/forced to produce �innovation�, while their field of activity overlap with ours, it happens quite often that we are seen as important and interesting. Sometimes, that recognition results in interesting partnerships of non-institutional culture and state institutions, which are almost obligatory in order to make systemic changes.
We were lucky so far to be able to extract our models from concrete projects that we work on, that we have the chance to test and apply the models we have reached through research and contemplation on actual projects, so that the �elitist� lable we get is a more of a consequence of the application of the criteria of audience turnout and acceptance by the experts and critics, and less the criteria of inovation.

MI2 bring a lot of foreign artists and theoreticians to Croatia. What is the general intention?

Nenad Romic - Marcel

Our intention is to show and present the work and ideas of the people we believe are relevant and interesting in our local context. These are, in majority of cases, people that we cooperate with, or would like to cooperate in the future.

MI2 activities are related to the free software movement, the CreativeCommons license, etc. What cooperation do you have with the state institutions and universities in those activities?
So far, we have cooperated with CARNet on a series of lectures �Society of Knowledge and Free Exchange of Information�, with guest lectures such as Rishab Ayer Gosh (www.flossproject.org), Eben Moglen (www.fsf.org), Lawrence Lessig (www.otokultivator.org) and Jimmy Wales (wwww.wikipedia.org). We also plan to start a creativecommons.hr reppository of contents publices under the CC license in Croatia.

The freedom of expression and freedom of thought, freedom of action and creation are basic values of MI2 work. How does MI2 present its values to the users?
Above all, through the programmes and projects we organize. The projects such as EGOBOO.bits (www.egoboobits.net) and development of free software (TamTamDEV) are open for active participation of all interested individuals, while other projects, such as �Society of Knowledge and Free Exchange of Information�, the �Freedom of Creation� festival (www.slobodastvaralastva.net), and publishing of books like Lessig's �Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (www.kod-je-zakon.net) open public debate and raise the level of awareness of problems related to free exchange of information, knowledge society and possibilities for cooperation, which are representative of the values backed by the Multimedia Institution.

MAMA club is a gathering place for initiatives that are not related just to freedom of action and creation, but also human right, rights of animals, anarchist thought or environmental protection movements. MAMA also offers a rich cultural programme, for instance the film programmes that are hardly available anywhere else. How did you get to such a diverse field of activities and popularization of what you do?
The MAMA club was envisioned, from the very beginning, as a public space in which MI2 implements not only its own programmes and projects, but also projects of cooperation with other actors on cultural and civil scene. By securing the infrastructure and a model of cooperation, we managed to gather a whole lot of other initiatives that are active in the MAMA club.
In addition to the cooperation with related initiatives, MAMA is also open for presentation, workshop, debate and similar programmes of non-profit initiatives of the civil and cultural scene.
We got to the audience, recognition and credibility that MAMA enjoys today through cooperation and the five years of work by MI2 and many other actors of the contemporary independent cultural and civil scene. I use this opportunity to thank them all.