Artists in the Era of Social Networks

Dessy Gavrilova

We tend to forget today how closed the world was in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and how isolated the post-Communist countries were from European processes.

My first years of work in the field of culture coincided with the beginnings of democratic transition in Bulgaria. Reconnecting to the rest of the world proved to be a more lengthy process than the overthrow of the Communist government. I remember my first “networking experience”: In 1994 I took part in a cultural policy course at the Amsterdam Summer University. I could not believe the wealth of information that was all at once made accessible to me, the openness of the people I met there, the eagerness to discuss all possible subjects with colleagues from other countries long after the official course hours were over. At that time, networking was about meeting people and being excited about working with them. It was about ideas more than about project writing. In those days, networking was also about friendships.

When, in the last decade, dozens of collaborative and social networking sites rose to unprecedented popularity, analysts proclaimed a new era in the way people interact, unite around common causes and communicate. Web 2.0 awakened the presumptive expectation that it would make physical contact between people with common interests or goals unnecessary. But the Internet is not a solution for artistic networking. It is true that the exchange of information, communication, even the discussion of artistic topics are made easier in the Web 2.0 world. But encounters that lead to inspiration, to a meaningful exchange of artistic positions or to collaborative art work will never be displaced from real life into the Internet realm. Face-to-face encounters are needed more than ever today, in order to counteract the “flattening of the world” and the resultant shallow universality of artistic meaning. Art remains place-specific and culture-specific, and learning from one another and finding inspiration through personal encounters are still possible only “live”, in full bodily presence. They require time to get to know “the other”, and they require commitment.

Thus, to be meaningful, artistic networking still needs to be done in the clumsy old-fashioned way, with bodies being transported across countries and continents, with people spending time physically together, talking, arguing, sharing inspirations, debating aesthetic positions and preferences. In artistic networking it is the individual that matters, the likes or dislikes between persons, the strength of the commitment to create or achieve a goal together.

Dessy Gavrilova is the founder and director of The Red House – Center for Culture and Debate in Sofia, and is currently based in Vienna. Previously she led the Open Society Institute’s performing arts programme for Central and Eastern Europe, in which capacity she also established the Gulliver Connect programme together with KulturKontakt Austria and the Felix Meritis Foundation, Amsterdam.