“Battleship Potemkin” is a metaphor for the beginning of Russian revolution. The film is also like a roadmap for making a film. “re_potemkin” is a metaphor for the beginning of another revolution, a roadmap for ways of making art that would influence life in digital age. The re-revolution has begun!
Information technologies offer us new ways of altering current social, cultural, political and economic systems. Richard Barbrook calls cyber-communism for this situation in which we are “superseding capitalism” in everyday life in cyberspace, but we are not aware of the political potential of this culture, which is already altering the rules of economics in some fileds rendering “another world possible”.
Digital reproduction renders “mariginal cost” almost zero in order to produce unlimited ‘multiples’, which was Beuys’ artistic gesture to produce artworks that could reach everybody. ‘web 2.0’ renders ‘culture industry’ unnecessary for the distribution of artworks. Adorno and Horkheimer introduced the notion of “culture industry” to explain why ‘mechanical reproduction’ didn’ t succeed in creating awareness against fascism among masses as predicted by Benjamin. Missing point in Benjamin’s text was that; anything reproduced must also be distributed. “Wireless networks” can be used in means of creating “network externalities” in order to create a background for Mauss’ “gift”, which was seen as an alternative to capitalism in but didn’t work because of scarcity of physical sources. But “digital gift” is possible today, as we see in “free /open source” movements and “copyleft” attitude in computer software. This attitude must be translated more efficiently to cultural productions and material life than it is being done today.
