ELECTROPERA?

Electropera as a concept has matured through years of long-time cooperation between artists and cultural workers, joining us in a research relationship inside a variety of intertwined fields of engagement. As researchers dealing with profound questions, we have been working on the edge by definition. The edge in this sense refers mainly to a field of endeavour in relation to already established activities; but an edge also often refers to the topographical area - the location enabling an effective survival and a functional service which simply distinguishes the edge from the center. As much as living in the center (urban center of the country/state, representative and cultural center of a given activity) is faster and more expensive, living within appropriate distance, or even somewhere over the border, can render life cheaper and more moderate, and at least offer a somewhat less hectic pathology of the everyday routine. A researcher then, that does not substantiate their devotion to what is still intangible merely by digging for the treasure the discovery and revelation which will lead them to the next step in their careers, and accordingly to a better position in the center, but who is led by the sheer passion for research into constantly attempting to overstep the edge, regardless of how they may expand or shift it on their way, will try for that reason alone to work as effectively as they can. Efficiency can simply stand for the highest amount of time granted to spend in a commitment, and, at the same time, with as little costs and errands, which are of secondary importance to the researcher. Whoever recognizes in the illustration an established and well-sold writer, peacefully creating inside a cabin in an idyllic countryside environment, from where they occasionally have to contact their agent and only every now and then travel to accompany a release of their works to prominent book fairs or literary festivals, will need for a better distinction - a further description of the criteria that regulate the life and ways of researchers at the edge. Besides working on the edge, we are fundamentally defined by the kind of production, which needs to be adjustable and additionally inventive, according to the changing circumstances. To the unholy, it is hard to understand the extent to which the customary production systems are setting achievements in advance, created in the line of typified procedures. In this way, working at the edges is becoming itself an edge of working with familiar procedures. The results of the research are conditioned by the ways of working and living. New achievements require appropriate production procedures, and often also production relationships inventions in the mutual exchange of knowledge, services, equipment, coexistences and cooperation. In such an outline of micro economy, set by the manner of organization itself, persistent edge researchers are faced with minimum conditions as a type of reality, in which they need to acquire mastery. Access to ateliers, laboratories, studios, facilities, services, assistants, students; accessibility of mediators and consumer interest can no longer be

considered as a principal criterion. How to remain as unburdened as possible? How not to settle in a particular cultural environment at the cost of constant presence and forced belonging? How to function without a secretary, a cultural manager, an organizer, a producer, a curator? By applying less and less to predetermined public calls and notices, by enduring a proper working tempo and presenting achievements in a time and space best suited to them? But, at the same time, preserving the ability to integrate into the fixed relations around the center, which defines referentially the importance of activeness and the researcher status? A successful solution to such conflicting demands may seem impossible at the first sight, but facts speak differently. There are respectable creators in Europe, who are working independently and have learnt to develop cooperation with other sovereign partakers. On this occasion, as we are celebrating a twenty-fifth anniversary with the Egon March Institute, which is also an anniversary of a specific way of artist self-organization that has lasted for twenty-five years, and meets most of the above listed edge-oriented criteria, I feel I must shed some light on the Electropera in this deeper context, to allow for a higher-quality reflection at the end of a three-year long project. A group of creators and edge researchers that have responded to my appeal to synchronize with the project - supported by culture means from the central European funds - represents the external sphere, in the outer-most scope of the institutions, but not viceversa for I am referring to mostly well-established, institutionally celebrated, or even individuals working inside some of the bigger institutions. Nonetheless, this creative force will continue to avoid the settled procedures at the cost of dealing with something familiar, and search for new ways to create prototypes beyond borders that separate us from the future. "We design the future!", rang the slogan of Media Lab, a fresh, post-modern Bauhaus for the research of technological future, born at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in America, in the middle of the nineteen-eighties. Only in accordance with the generally accepted belief that technology is what most crucially defines our future. Multimedia, later known as digital, and in this day called intermedia art, is a form of art created in Europe as the child of a massive boom. This took by hand the electronic and machine-experimenters, as well as sound- and video-artists, who have already expressed their manifestos and concepts before the end of the eighties. Supported by new technologies and digital machinery, the nineties saw the creation of new art centers, labs, and their academic branches. And in this very spot, at the core of the new movement, we can distinguish the first difference. It was perhaps most strikingly enacted by the project of the Van Gogh TV group and their collaborators, with an accompanying program to the Kassel Documenti 92, called Piazza Virtuale. A hundred days of interactive television, with over twenty production centers cooperating on long-distance, throughout the European continent and with subsidiaries reaching all the way to Moscow and Tokyo in the East, and the USA and Canada in the West it was undeniably a technological miracle, interactiveness in image, word and sound, a kind of 'internet before internet', fueled by

a broader social background. Certain parts of the program were created by viewers themselves, through the use of available communication resources. By participating, the viewers were transformed to collaborators, co-creators of the content. Instantly, technology was reflected in a different manner. Surrounded by social and political envelopes, as well as by general technological communication standards, it had to itself become the object of deconstruction in the first place. The more accessible it grew precisely because of the standardization, the mass consumption and production, the more it needed to be understood, to yield to a process of reverse engineering, and to be used in alternative ways, so that deeper potentials could be achieved on the technological, social and also political level. To sustain the link to Electropera, separated from the Piazza Virtuale for another sixteen years, let me mention the names of Gerard Couty and Christian Vanderborght, participants of Electropera Act 1, in January 2009 in Berlin, as the protagonists whom I met in the closest circle of Van Gogh TV, at a studio meeting on Koppel 66 in Hamburg in 1991. It is them that I am mentioning first among all the others because they were the pillars of projects Frigo and Radio Bellevue in Lyon, at least a decade earlier. Frigo was perhaps the first European scene, where interdisciplinary and multimedia productions were being created, while their radio is undoubtedly the longest, decade-long continuously working pirate radio station in the old continent, with the broadest regular audience including the far background of Lyon. The experience of technology, around which we socialize, not because of technology itself, but because of the reflection on relationships, has shifted the focus radically into a demand for an instrument for improvement and innovation of richer interpersonal spaces. Thus, a very special form of celebrating technology was born, a predecessor to morally responsible hackers, but with a genie that has already escaped from a merely digital bottle, and became embodied through real, higher-quality human relations. The social sculpture, fuelled by the innovative use of technology, has thus come face to face with her orthodox sister: art who has intended to flee from the true topos into virtual space, to escape gravity and the confinement to the physical, and inhabit cyber-space. It was much easier to move in this direction, and much more impressive, as it responded to an increasingly wealthy industry of digital devices, prosthesis and gadgets; and the elite of the propagandists and designers of the technological future was more and more eager to show off with the new renaissance and support the artists who reflected their own ideals. And so did the two sisters, though one barely distinguishable and in the shadow of the other, march hand in hand through the nineties. Parahouse had to happen at the last of the Ostranenie festival series (Bauhaus, Dessau), fuelled from his wholesome engagement by Stephen Kovats in 1993, '95 and '97, with Couty and Vanderborgh back again, and with Stephen Kovats twelve years later as director of Transmediale in Berlin. On the night before the opening of Transmediale 2009, Electropera Act 1 hosted the entire Parahouse team from twelve years ago. Electropera Act 1: Parahouse_12. How are we

functioning twelve years later? The original Parahouse of 1997 brought together twelve co-workers; two locals, two creators from Serbia and Moscow, one from the USA, three Slovenians, three Frenchmen and another three living in Berlin, and another native Berlin citizen. With technological support from Paris and the Steim Institute from Amsterdam, we set up three differently operating interactive environments, each adapted to the social use defined by the purpose of space in the daily operational cultural center, and an additional communication node on the second floor. In a months time we wired miles of cables and connected the bar, the theater and the staircase to twenty cameras, through which workers and visitors of the center generated an ambient video live program, projected to a number of screens all over the cultural center and to the faade itself. With the help of pick-ups on panels, installed on the theater stage, the infra-red sensors on the staircase, and the ultra-sound sensors at the bar. Until, in the time of the festival, a choreographer performed with a keeper of the interactive system on the balcony; changing between cameras and co-deciding about the creation of sound accompaniment with her decisions and movement. The visitors walking the staircase were automatically sampling their movements on different locations of the staircase, and the collected measurements comprised an instant ambient video remix, showing in one of the upstairs rooms. Dancers and guests of the bar influenced another video remix; this time refined by video samples of their occurrences, and, with their behavior, also influenced the program from a pre-set digital graphics, as well as a selection of live-created dance techno music. The mere description of how the system functioned is chaotic; imagine trying to purify the understanding of self-production in the social core, the behavior, the self-observation through digital media? And truly, the riddle of how to simultaneously generate from the everyday life and actions an auto-poetic audio-visual ambient was at the heart of our research. How to turn around the pyramid of professional relations around the classic transmission media that drain the energy and the time of many co-workers into a centralized, connectively functioning program, from a single antenna to everybody at the same time, into an automatically functioning technological environment, in which the protagonists of the action are at the same time also the heroes from the other side of the digital mirror, which can be animated by a diversity of decisions by individuals from this the analogue side of the world, hoping that the digital sphere remains a restricted, but nonetheless desirable partner for space awareness enhancement, right here and right now. Can digital enhancements improve our awareness of the presence, not just the absence from the here-and-now? This special ratio between the two worlds, the installed electronic and the connective analogue space, has set the essential criterion of Electropera: a social network that is more than just a presentation portal for individuals, but foremost a stock-market for the distribution of productions and post-productions. A portal, on which the organizers, as well as producers and artists can announce event dates and a desired course of events up to the next presentation. Just - an orchestration of individual, group and project movements; of a synchronized caravan of creators travelling between time- and space-successive and subsequent events. Efficiency, but not such that defines the making of productions and their content, but mostly the persistence and the magnitude of the produc-

tion range in space and time. More presentations on more locations with the same invested means? In this case, the sole financial reference becomes too bleak and too narrow, because financial support and measurable results which it conditions are mostly objects of discussion in the paperwork headed back to the center. For a creative decentralization, the reference point from the heart of the arena needs to be multiplied, calibrated, and dispersed towards the edges, all the way until the criterion of means investment becomes human effort, individuals creative energy, their lifes time and meaning. Space, Time, Energy, it is after all human energy, and meaning. We find ourselves back to multi-tasking, the ability of individuals to free-climb the cliffs high up in the institutional walls; parallel specializations growing into interdisciplinarities (Specialization for a despecialization - as Dr. Otto Roesller puts it). The solution? In the first two years of the EU project, researchers geared toward the edges will be collecting data about the events and locations in Europe, with which we have had the best experiences, distribute them on the map, and make out a combination of paths that would most smoothly and most successively connect neighboring destinations of a tour-route. A path that we would in the second year reinforce with a survey of the inter-spaces between the selected locations and by establishing contacts with the unfamiliar event locations and festivals. In all this time, we would adapt the newly-forming projects, co-financing them with European funds in the producton- and post-production phase. Before us lays a prototype of a pilgrimage between neighboring towns, villages, historical and natural sights, which would all, through the use of social network technology for coordination and synchronization on one side, and an optimization of travel and operational expenses, especially the organization investments, on the other side, create a synergy. Like Creative Industries, learning instantly to walk alone, leaving behind the city smog and replacing steam and gasfuelled engines with solar-powered ones. The result, in simple terms, would be a greater efficiency in production accessibility, longer life-span of projects, more travelling artists, groups and events, a broader regular program in the periphery and background all this with the same invested means. The formula: we cannot create energy, but we can save it the energy saved by employing self-organization based on a higher-quality reflection, must be able to express itself over a longer period of time, through a greater number of creators, on more paths, over extensive vast areas, with more time to experience real contacts in diverse cultural communities, and mostly in concrete climate biosocial spheres. It should also be expressed in a greater number of more thorough experiences by numerous protagonists. A prototype, just one prototype, for at least one such synchronization of creators and organizers to come alive, even temporarily, to experience itself and gain enough material evidence to argument the transcendence of its existence. Something which some of us have already been doing for over two decades, but as though less and less noticeable, and not too surprisingly more and more over the edge. And so, in the third year, twenty researchers one after another, would travel around 12 to 15 successive locations, bringing a minimum of that number of events for the organizers, while each of the travelers would be kept on an on-going two to three-months' tour. Anybody acquainted with this appeal

has shown their support, quickly understanding the possibility of synergy, and if possible, joining the project. When Peter Toma Dobrila expressed the wish to attend the internal symposium, to which Christiane Koszka, Helmut Holzapfel, Andreas Findeisn and I were invited by Tom Fuerstner, he immediately announced the possibility of connecting the energies into a Europesupported project, and invited us to Maribor. John Grzinich too, who started working in Slovenia nine years ago, out of which eight months as a coordinator for the preparations and the accomplishment of the Hexpo festival (Maribor, Ljubljana, Koper, 2000), has responded to the invitation and travelled from Moost, Estonia, where he has been insisting since 2003 together with Evelyn Mursepp as the driving force behind the Moks center. The guest from Istanbul, Serra Ozhan, was so enthusiastic in Maribor, that she invited us together with the entire Transforming freedom team from Vienna to the following spring meeting in Istanbul. And as we met in August 2007 in Mooste, in the woods on the Eastern brink of Estonia, a years work was behind us, of meetings and preparations, and an additional three months time to submit the application for the EACEA Call for tenders. In Estonia, Terro and Isse joined the discussions, and only two weeks later, at the Mediascape festival in Istrian Novigrad, the debate reached Jerica Ziherel, who was at the time, with the Lapidarij Museum, the host of Mediascape festival, organized for the second year in a role by Inge and Heiko. One year later, on the third Mediascape in Novigrad, Peter known for his constant simultaneous work on the laptop suddenly interrupted a lecture, shouting out: we won the tender! X-OP won European support! In October, as we were starting out with the X-OP project in Maribor, the Electropera came to an end. The staff in Kibla followed the interpretations explained by representatives of Cianto from Prague and the Polytechnical University from Tomar, Portugal, experienced in previous European projects: all dates and venues for a period of three years had to be set in advance with possible later adjustments, even individual delays, but nonetheless stated in the contract. A two-year preparation phase, which would eventually lead us to the execution of the festival caravan among the nearby locations across Europe, was washed away sadly on the day when we as artists started putting our boats in the water. It was no sensation for the overall efforts of the newcomers to meet each according to their own institution - the rules of the game that was on, seriously. Not to mention the micro economy that we were going to carry out within the Egon March Institute: twenty invited researchers would provide for their own investments, easily achieving the required fifty percent extra payments to the Brussels funding. Suddenly, the plan outlined in the contract left us with just locations and events of the other partners. For a moment it seemed the only thing to do was to leave the project. However, I decided to insist, regardless of the fact that the execution configuration had been changed completely. Perhaps, in the course of events, partial solutions would be found for the synchronizations of postproductions. Still, the planned micro-economic experiment could not be realized under new conditions. There was no way I could expect the parties involved to search for funds for productions, which were not in their line of interest. The idea behind the original concept was that everyone would act according to their own planning, and Electropera was the idea of synchroniz-

ing and temporarily coordinating these plans. Part of the team was able to adjust to the deadlines and locations set in advance, but the burden of acquiring fifty percent of the means rested on my shoulders. Resolving that required the strength of Goliath. I would have to perform seven own premiere works in three years time in Berlin, Istanbul, Tomar, Mooste, Helsinki, Vienna and Ljubljana, while providing the necessary funds would also grant part of the post-production costs for the remaining artists. Together we would perform on locations so scattered in time and space, that a line of successive performances was no longer an option. A connection between Helsinki and Mooste remained possible, around the Baltic coast, crossing St Petersburg. In June 2009, four months after the huge mouthful of Electropera Act 1 in Berlin, I set out on a two weeks tour between Finland and Estonia. After numerous encounters with representatives of big and small institutions on both sides, organized by the partners, we managed to pin down the common interests and possibilities, but the deadlines could not be delayed long enough to be able to start in Estonia, where Avamaa festival had to be carried out before the end of elementary school summer vacation; or to finish in Helsinki, where the art academy in Suomenlina had to wait for a late beginning of the university fall term. The planned route was excellent, the contacts in St Petersburg showed great interest, but the three months time gap was decisively too big between the two events located as close as five hundred kilometers apart, with around five possible stations. The last chance of preserving at least a taste of the original concept appeared in the final phase. The Viennese and Ljubljana events were close up on the time line, and after a few visits, the Transforming freedom agreed to postpone their term so that their event ended on Sunday, June 5h, leaving Monday for the trip to Ljubljana, where Electropera Act 7 started on Tuesday afternoon. After a lengthy discussion that was to set comparable themes and a common conceptual axis for the event, as well as a video bridge between Vienna and Ljubljana through which the art scenes of the neighboring capitals could maintain a mutual long-distance cooperation, with part of the participants also travelling from one event straight to the other, in January 2011 the preparations yielded to the concern about a successful execution of the entire X-OP saga; and Kibla decided that Vienna too should be the host of an obligatory partners meeting before the end of the project, which naturally directed part of the program into an official, internal direction. There was still the connection between Electropera Act 6 in Vienna with performers Margrit Rieben, Jaap Blonk and Michael Saup, so that Jaap and Michael travelled ahead to Ljubljana and were joined by the X-OP partners Andreas Findeisen, already booked for the Ljubljana performance, the X-OP observers Isse Karsten and Mikko Kourinki for the MAA academy, and Goncalo Velho as representative of Instituto Politecnico de Tomar. But Ljubljana, in co-production with Kapelica gallery, Kiberpipa, Metropol and K4, hosted a selection of participants in the best tradition of the Egon March Institute. Performances in two days included: Serra Ozhan (Turkey), Stephen Kovats (Canada Germany), Ben Patterson (USA - Germany), Irene Agrivine and Afiff Ferial (Indonesia), Michael Saup (Germany), Andreas Findeisen (Germany - Austria) and Jaap Blonk

(Netherlands), while Tom Fuerstner (Austria) stayed and worked in Ljubljana for a whole month, helping with project preparations, including giving two lectures. The so-called performance lectures were being live-remixed on several projection surfaces by maja Smrekar, Luka Prini and Botjan ade. In this way, Act 7 almost managed to mirror the first, opening act of the Electropera that was only realizable as an independent production in Berlin because of the hospitality of Joulia Strauss, who offered us a fantastic location, a newly rented and still empty atelier on one of the top floors of the historical Ullsteihaus skyscraper. A space of over 400 square meters of surface was equipped by the entire team for a week, and then, in a single night, there performed and exhibited Mateja Buar and Vadim Fishkin (DUM), Borut Savski (Trivia), Katarina Pejovi (Shadow Casters), Christian Graupner (Humatic), Gerard Couty, Christian Vanderborght, Jacques Bigot and Michel Pied (Club Automatic - Universcity TV), original participants of the Parahouse project in Dessau in 1997. Except for Oliver Schulblaum, who only attended a few hours, because of the next day opening at Transmediale. I conducted a fresh IEM production, prepared for the X-OP, together with Dirk Bruinsmoin and Barbara Tuhn (Operabil Para Berlin), and our program was joined by our host Joulia Strauss in a performance Cat Notation with Martin Carle, while her guest Hilary Knob Sassen (The Errorists) performed and exhibited Filletville. The guests joining us from the X-OP partners were John Grzinich and Evelyn Mursepp. What was left of the night was handled by DJ Bad. Reading the list of all these names doesnt make it clear what the links in content, ideas and concepts are. Is it really enough to explain that the question of repeating Parahouse within the Electropera was: what are the creators working on and what is still connecting them twelve years later? Is it perhaps any better in Act 7, two and a half years later, as I presented the concept shortly under the title Social programming? From here on, gaining a better understanding is only possible with a closer study, which reveals briefly the five interim acts of the Electropera. For the purpose of my own productions for Istanbul (Operabil Para Istanbul with Dirk Bruinsmo), in a monthly residence I have photographed 14 kilometers of the Turkish capital, all during walking, one photo every three steps. Then in the opposite direction as well. I shot 12.000 photos, compared to some 1200 frames in Macao in the spring of 2009 for a performance in Abrantes one year later (Operabil Tomar with Dirk Bruinsmo), while the portrait of Kibla I captured in 5000 frames (Ditopia Zaslon / Screen) for an interactive installation, and just as many in Rijeka for Ditopia Kaipot Rijeka. The Operabils and Ditopias were new productions for the Electroperas, that showed and/or presented parallel works of Dirk Bruinsma, Mia Makela and Monika Glahm in Abrantes (Act 3), with a joint performance and additional lectures and workshops for the Avamaa Festival in Mooste: Lara Dau Vieira, Monika Glahn, Michael Saup, Andreas Findeisen and Marko Konik (Act 4); Alexander Nikoli, Rodney Place and Leilla Andersen (Act 5) in Helsinki (it was here that I, for example, was animating live the photo sequences taken around the tables at the previous X-OP meetings, accompanied by a ten-voice choir, established by co-workers and guests for this occasion); and the already mentioned Viennese incarnation, Act 6. The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art from Rijeka and the installation at Kibla, as

well as the final post-production with Irena Tomain they were all extra-works, decided upon later along the way. Have we managed to resolve the sunken concept by all the recombination and incarnations of the Electropera? We have had great help from economic, meteorological and every other change that has taken place in the five years since the formation of the X-OP, especially in the final three years of its active life. Not only the emerging crisis invading the cradle of European culture, or Fukushima and Wikileaks; the state budget amendment is leaving me waiting for most of the funds, for which the contracts have been signed long ago, works have been performed and pending receipts delivered. The minister of culture decided, about a month before she resigned, to leave the contract, signed by me but not her, lying in the drawer. A month after her resignation, the contract was sent to me again, this time signed in advance by her deputy. It was the contract for additional support of a European project, after three years of hesitation the ministry decided to support it again, with a generous 5% of project value! The funds will be there someday, whenever, if ever. This time, our pockets turned inside out are not just a consequence of a researchers enthusiasm pushed over the edge, which is not of interest to the mainstream. Despite the possible financial fiasco of individuals working at the edge, the true victim is another European country, neck-deep in the red. The perspective is turning, gaining panopticum dimensions, but observing more and more from the outskirts towards the inside, not the other way around, while its becoming increasingly embarrassing for the center. Nothing new for the edge researchers, but perhaps a good therapy for the center. An attempt at synchronization and confrontation, a hand stretched out from the periphery of public interest all the way to the center, turned out to be more than a failure. Not that anybody would want it, but it seems that a new paradigm is threatening to emerge: lets support the creation of new jobs in Europe by just self-employing ourselves, and working independently, without any additional employees. It is perhaps one of the biggest problems for inventive, state of the art minds. How to help create new work-places without resorting to other than self-employment? How to save without cutting down on the support, but with increasing efficiency? Can we save more by spending more? If anywhere, the answers to these questions will have to be sought after in art and culture. It will be harder in other areas that have no regard for poetic self-questioning. The concepts that have slightly touched the ground as temporarily functioning prototypes, and then swam out of the interest of social-practice enactment, have been with us ever since the Van Gogh TV and the Universcity TV network socializing. Before Parahouse, we were certain that within a year or two we will have established an academic network, transmitting lectures from all European universities live on the internet, with a constant access to past events in the archives and a possibility of direct interaction with the lecturers. Whoever couldnt understand or imagine such an idea was considered oblivious to us. A decade later, when it seemed that if anyone was oblivious it was us, visionaries, the earthly axis began to swirl further and further from the center towards the edges. Until we realized, that the road to future is

through future only, despite the fact that the center demands the future through the past. One photo every three steps is of course a sort of performance. Its not just that the technique, which I called walk motion instead of stop motion, has become a metaphor for the pilgrimage that the artists never really set out to begin. Its mostly the way I twisted the way in which media production is employing people in real life, so that it can produce allegories that will excite and frighten them enough to persist obediently in the abyss of the daily routine. As I started out with the first major project of this kind for the first Mediascape in Novigrad, all I saw in the summer season were shocked tourists. They were trying hopelessly to avoid my camera, with which I relentlessly, regardless of the motive and in a routine tempo, progressed down the city streets. The first locals who found the courage to satisfy their curiosity and ask me about what it is that drives me with such persistence to be doing this peculiar task, have shared their concerns with me: they were afraid that I was a city office clerk, taking pictures to document the occasional illegal building. Fortunately, the walk motion allows for time gaps between shots, and the material will still be functioning as a linked animation in time and space, so I was able to talk freely to anyone showing interest. The small Istrian town, not as over-crowded with tourists as it used to be back in the day, has turned from a distrustful doubter into a friend. With morning hellos, looks of respect, encouraging smiles, and even a cup of coffee every now and then. The locals faced the camera with more and more ease, telling me stories that otherwise rarely leave the safe harbor of the local community. They knew they were the true heroes, together with the streets of their town; and that the interactive movie would celebrate their everyday routine that quiet routine on the edge that lives silently and invisibly beyond the perception threshold of the summer tourists - although in a real climate, inside a real space, these are more than often prisoners of a global outlook, brought to them by the high-calorie media constructs, densely radiating from the media centers. They are spending their holiday on the other side of Europe only because it makes them feel, for a brief time, like the heroes of the movies they watch at home. The farther the center reaches out to its backgrounds, and the more it can understand that the edge and what is beyond is not necessarily its opposite, the easier it will be for the independent creators from the edges to bring good news about the future. Even that of Europe. We can see it bright, sound and clear from here! Come and visit us sometimes, it's your turn now. Marko Konik, Primskovo pri Kranju, 29.9.2011