Nettime

The Beauty and the East. Filtered by Nettime, 1997, HTML.

ReadMe! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime, 1999, Log, PDF.

Nettime-l is an internet mailing list for networked cultures, politics and tactics.

Nettime was founded in June 1995 during the second meeting of the Medien Zentral Kommittee as a part of the Club Berlin event at the Venice Biennale, organised by Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz and Nils Roeller [1]. From 1998, it was moderated by Ted Byfield and Felix Stalder. In November 2022, a dedicated Mastodon instance (tldr.nettime.org) was created [2] [3] [4]. In August 2023, Paul van der Walt, Jordan Crandall, Menno Grootveld and Christian Swertz took over as moderators of the list, while list hosting was moved from kein.org to servus.at [5] [6].

After the Venice meeting, a mailing list was made (fall 1995) where the writings by nettime members were published [7]. The list was meant to provide a space for a new form of critical discourse on and with the nets. For the meetings in Amsterdam, [8] Madrid and Budapest, the postings to the mailing list were selected and xeroxed in 200 pages volumes entitled ZKP1, 2 and 3; this happened in January (at the Next 5 Minutes 2), June (Cyberconf5) and October (MetaForum 3) 1996. ZKP3.2.1 filtered the nettime postings all over again and was published in Ljubljana in November 1996. The list organized its own conference in Ljubljana in May 1997, called Beauty and the East (there ZKP4). ZKP5 was published by Autonomedia in February 1999. Additional Nettime meetings were held during events like HackIt (Amsterdam), the Chaos Communication Congress (Berlin), ISEA, the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), the MetaForum conference 95 (Budapest). The Hybrid Workspace drew heavily from Nettime during the Documenta X in Kassel.

Often understood as a European "on-line" salon, Nettime was initially a pre-publishing platform for international critical thinkers. Originally a mainly English language mailing list, other lists have been created in other languages. Nettime has been recognized for building up the discourse of Netzkritik or net critique (then named net.criticism), providing a backdrop and context for the emergence of net.art and influencing critical net culture in general.

Venice meeting, 1995

"The net.time meeting was organized by Pit Schultz, Nils Röller, and Geert Lovink. Involved in the organization of Club Berlin were, among others, Mercedes Bunz, Daniel Pflumm, and Micz Flor. One of the curators was Klaus Biesenbach. On the participant list were David Garcia, Heath Bunting, David D’Heilly, Paolo Azuri, Claudia Cataldi, Vuk Cosic, Hans-Christian Dany, Camillo De Marco, Paul Garrin, Carlos Leite de Souza, Alessandro Ludovico, Siegfried Zielinski, Diana McCarty, Suzana Milevska, Roberto Paci Dalo, Katja Reinert, Gereon Schmitz, and Tommazo Tozzi. The email invitation and some of the correspondence related to the Venice meeting were posted on the nettime list a few years later for archival purposes. A one-hour radio program produced by Geert Lovink for the Dutch VPRO radio and containing interviews with Garrin, Dany, Cosic, Bunting, Schmitz, and Schultz can be found at [9]." (from Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p 110)

Name

"The name <net.time> was chosen by Pit Schultz, who, known for his critique of the space metaphor within electronic media, was drawn to the idea of a network-specific time as a possible common experience. '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 then 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.' From the Archives: Introduction to nettime (draft by Pit Schultz for ZKP 3), nettime, April 8, 1998 (original from October 9, 1996)." (from Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber, p 110)

Publications

• ZK Proceedings 95: Net Criticism, eds. Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz, Amsterdam, Jan 1996. Published on the occasion of Next 5 Minutes 2. [10] [11] [12] (English)

• ZKP2: A Portable Net Critique, eds. Diana Mc Carty, Pit Schultz, and Geert Lovink, Madrid, Jun 1996. Published on the occasion of 5Cyberconf. [13] [14] [15] [16] (English)

• ZKP3: The Metaforum III Historical Files, eds. Thomas Bass, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, and Pit Schulz, Budapest, Oct 1996. Published on the occasion of MetaForum 3. [17] [18] (English)

• ZKP3.2.1, ed. Vuk Cosic, Ljubljana: Ljudmila, Nov 1996. [19] (English)

• (ZKP4) The Beauty and the East. Filtered by Nettime, eds. Pit Schultz, Diana McCarty, Geert Lovink, and Vuk Cosic, Ljubljana, May 1997. Published on the occasion of Beauty and the East. See also "The Piran Nettime Manifesto", [20]. (English)

• Netzkritik. Materialien zur Internet-Debatte, eds. Pit Schultz and Geert Lovink, trans. Bettina Seifried, Florian Rötzer and Thomas Atzert, Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997, 220 pp. [21] (German)

• (ZKP5) ReadMe! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime, eds. Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Pit Schultz, Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding, New York: Autonomedia, Feb 1999, 556 pp. [22] (English)

• (NKP6) Net.art Per Me. Catalogue of the Slovenian Pavillion, Venice: Venice Biennale, 2001. [23] (English)

On Nettime

• Geert Lovink, "The Moderation Question: Nettime and the Boundaries of Mailing List Culture (2001)", in Lovink, Dark Fiber, Tracking Critical Internet Culture, MIT Press, 2002, pp 68-120; rev.version as "Nettime and the Moderation Question: Boundaries of Mailinglist Culture", in Lovink, Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture, 1994-2001, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009, pp 89-123.

• Inke Arns, "Translokale Netzwerke: Mailinglisten", in Arns, Netzkulturen, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002. (German)

• Ted Byfield, "nettime— Fortsetzung folgt...", in Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, eds. Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, pp 39-46. (German)

• "Interview mit Pit Schultz", in Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, eds. Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, pp 75-79. (German)

• Clemens Apprich, "The Truth Games of Radical Net Cultures" / "Igre istine u radikalnim mrežnim kulturama", in The Idea of Radical Media, eds. Tomislav Medak and Petar Milat, Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut, 2013, pp 16-39. (English)/(Croatian)

• Clemens Apprich, "nettime", in Apprich, Vernetzt – Zur Entstehung der Netzwerkgesellschaft, Bielefeld: transcript, 2015, pp 53-60. (German)
  • "nettime", in Apprich, Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017, pp 40-45.

• McKenzie Wark, "The Silver Age of Social Media: Nettime.org and the Avant-Garde of the '90s", in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul, Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp 400-412.

Links

• Nettime mailing lists
• nettime-l List Archives
• tldr.nettime.org Mastodon instance
• https://tldr.nettime.org/@bot (Mastodon)
• nettime-l Publications
• "new mods, new nettime-l", 7 Aug 2023.
• "nettime back and running", 30 Apr 2023.
• "Moving Nettime to the Fediverse", thread, Nov 2022, Dec 2022
• "nottime: the end of nettime", thread, Apr 2015.
• "Overview of Nettime Lists and Activities", 3 Mar 2002.
• Nettime press conference, Vienna, May 1997. [24] [25]