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Renzo Martens' Episode 3 : Analysis of a Film Process in Three Conversations Els Roelandt first published in A Prior Magazine #16, February 2008 I. Last summer, during my trip to Kassel for Documenta 12, I spoke with the young Dutch artist, Renzo Martens (b. 1973), who was barely known to me. To be specific, I had already met Martens, at another point in the summer's so-called 'Grand Tour'. Martens and I had shared a small apartment in Venice with some other colleagues and artists. I saw very little of him. As the only man in the group, he kept conspicuously to himself. He was quiet, ironing his shirts or practicing yoga. He barely spoke and impressed me as one of the most detached individuals I had ever met. Ultimately, thanks to our - coincidentally concurrent - visits to Documenta 12, we only really began a conversation somewhere near Duisburg , on the drive from Kassel back to Brussels .

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add