Assemblies via VLSC

Fair Assembly wants to make things public (zkm). The introduction establishes a comparison to the experiences of bringing-publics-together on World Fairs – described as events one only wants to participate in with some inner distance, a wish which eventually isn’t that easy to fulfill anymore. Consequently taking up the terminology of Very Large Scale Conversations Fair Assembly is seen as a participatory platform to collect projects in their online database (submission via their site – there is also a nice collection of keywords to find … ) which would try to examine how we create technology, and the contexts of our lives in which communication and technology meet. The term VLSC has been used by W.Sacks who also developed the conversational mapping tool (earlier) to examine

Bulletin boards, Usenet groups, blogs, email lists, web sites, even spam. Each of these Internet-enabled technologies allow for two-way communication, at least conceptually, at an unprecedented scale. They are a new form of assembly….
More on that theme listing projects, own essays and responses by W.Sacks, V.Vesna and N.Jeremijenko can also be found in the recent discussion titled Beyond Chat on electronic book review .




The simplest notion of a superstructure, which is still by no means entirely abandoned, had been the reflection, the imitation or the reproduction of the reality of the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way. Positivist notions of reflection and reproduction of course directly supported this. But since in many real cultural activities this relationship cannot be found, or cannot be found without effort or even violence to the material or practice being studied, the notion was introduced of delays in time, the famous lags, of various technical complications; and of indirectness, in which certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere - philosophy, for example - were situated at a greater distance from the primary economic activities. (R.Williams' "famous lags" quoted from M.Bérubé)