iDC BLOG

Verge - New media art symposium in Stockholm on April 8

An international symposium for New Media Art at  Moderna Museet in Stockholm on the 8th of April 2006.

The goals of the Collegium are:

To create an international and interdisciplinary forum at the Ph.D. level by expanding the field of artistic research in connection with art, the natural sciences, the humanities, and technology.

Incommunicado

http://www.incommunicado.info/conference

ncommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else
Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards a critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', also known as the catchy acronym 'ICT4D' (ICT for development). Before the recent “flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging.

Different actors continue to promote different -and competing- visions of 'info-development'. New info-economies like Brazil, China, and India have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances that challenge our sense of what 'development' is all about. Development-oriented systems (like simputers and MIT’'s $100 computer system) emerge and re-emerge. The corporate sector suddenly discovers the “bottom of the pyramid” and community computing, in their drive for markets beyond those now increasingly stagnant in the OECD countries, and among the prosperous and professional in the rest of the world.

However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging alliances should not be romanticized in terms of a new tri-continentalism. Brazil's info-geopolitical forays are anything but selfless. And while China's investments in Africa have already been compared to the 19th century scramble for Africa led by European colonial powers, many expect it to be soon exporting its 'Golden Shield' surveillance technologies to states such as Vietnam, North Korea, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, for all of whom it is acting as a regional internet access provider.

However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. In parallel, and in eager response to the newfound enthusiasm for ICT4D through Public-Private Partnerships (fueled largely by the ongoing UN financial crisis and the broader neo-liberal privatization agenda), major info-corporations are advertising themselves as “partners in development” and are promoting ICTs as the vehicles for “good governance and effective service delivery” („e-governance“), but also to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out public-sector alternatives, and subvert south-south cooperation.

Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for themselves either as basic infrastructures supportive of all other development activity or as complement to older forms of infrastructure and service -oriented development. And often they are expected to meet a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty, catapulting peasants into the information age, promoting local ICT and knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratization through increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course, info-development also facilitates transnational corporate efforts to offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of transposition, leaving local 'stakeholders' at a loss as to whether or not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain industries likely to move on anyway.

Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restrictions on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or open-source-oriented organizations across the world seem more likely to receive support from southern than from northern states, and these coalitions, too, are challenging northern states on their self-serving commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political organizations.

Meanwhile lesser-known members of the UN family, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), are beginning to feel the heat brought on by “no-logo”-style campaigns that are targeting the entire range of public international actors and bring an agenda of accountability to the institutions of multilateral governance. As a response to the increasingly contradictory (dare one say confused) info-political activities of the major agencies like the ITU, UNDP, UNESCO, and WIPO, even the UN has begun to lose its aura. As public tagging of a perceived positive UN role in governance, humanitarianism, and peacekeeping shifts towards corruption and inter-agency rivalries, (carefully guided by neo-conservative think-tanks), the ensemble of supra-state apparatuses supposed to sustain visions of a post-imperial order suddenly seems mired in a frightening family dispute that threatens to spin out of control.

In spite of the neat sociological grammar of declarations and manifestoes, increasingly hybrid actors no longer follow the simple schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sector alliances. Responding to the crisis of older top-down approaches to development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing states and international agencies to work directly with smaller non-governmental organizations. And while national and international development agencies now have to defend their activity against both pro- and anti-neo-liberal critics, info-NGOs participating in public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find themselves in the midst of another heated controversy over their new role as junior partner of states and corporations. Responding by stepping up their own brand-protection and engaging in professional reputation management, major NGOs even conclude that it is no longer their organizational culture but their agenda alone that differentiates them from corporate actors.

The spectacular world summit on the information society (WSIS), barely noticed by the mainstream media but already uniting cyber-libertarians afraid of UN interventions in key questions of internet governance, will conclude later this year. While many info-activists are assessing (and re-assessing) the hidden cost of invitations to sit at 'multi-stakeholder' tables along with mega-NGOs and corporate associations, others are already refusing to allow an organizational incorporation of grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed consensus being built around the dynamic of an 'international civil (information) society'. Mirroring the withdrawal from traditional mechanisms of political participation, there is growing disaffection with multilateralism as the necessary default perspective for any counter-imperial politics. Unwilling to accept the idioms of sovereignty, some even abandon the very logic of summits and counter-summits to articulate post-sovereign perspectives. And alongside this of course, is the day to day reality of those at the grassroots and most importantly working as policy, research and practice info-intermediaries to find ways of using (and remaking) ICTs to be of benefit to the “multitudes”.

History
The 'incommunicado' project started early 2004 as a web research resource combined with an email-based mailinglist. It was founded by Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, who had earlier collaborated during the European Make World and Neuro events, that attempted to develop critical work around new media and no border issues.

Incommunicado didn't start out of the blue. It was a merger from two lists, Solaris, founded late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein, and a defunct G8 Dotforce list. The Solaris email list was an early attempt to develop a critical discourse around the ICT4D policy complex and was inspired by the then-newly opened centre Sarai in Delhi, a place that embodies new cultural practices beyond the classic development models. Beginning in late 2003, the first World Summit on the Information Society accelerated the awareness that critical voices, inside and outside the Machine, had to gather in order to reflect on the circulating metaphors and rhetoric. Poor outcomes of the alternative 'WSIS, We Seize' campaign, which positioned itself outside of the world conference spectacle, proved that there is a great need for a radical critique of notions such as 'information society', 'e-governance', 'digital divide' or 'civil society'.

At the moment there are 300+ subscribers to the list, and at any given moment in time 50-70 users are either reading the incommunicado rss-news or searching the collaborative weblog, whose topic areas include network(ed) ecologies, ICT for Development, internet governance, analyses of the NGO sector, and emerging South-South relations. So far, incommunicado has been an exclusively online resource and list community, consisting of researchers, ICT practitioners, activists and social entrepreneurs. The event in Amsterdam in June 2005 will be the first meeting of this emerging network. Future plans include the launch of an open-access journal or an incommunicado reader.

On Being Incommunicado
The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter also implies an extra-judicial space of exception, where torture, executions and "disappearances" occur - all-too-frequently in the lives of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the world.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order, the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer articulated in third worldist or tricontinentalist terms. Yet despite the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and third-worldist perspectives that continue to inform contemporary visions of a different information and communication order.

The term 'incommunicado' was chosen as the name for this research network to acknowledge that while questions related to info-development and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context, this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead, one of the aims of the incommunicado project is to explore tactical mobilizations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its concepts, and its absolutization as a political perspective.

It's Always Best to be Open...

Rhizome Net Art News:

What does free software mean to cultural producers? As the UK government prepares to host a pan-European conference on the regulation of Intellectual Property, the Open Congress will attempt to answer this question. The organizers (including the Chelsea College of Art and Design, NODE.London, Wireless London, Mute, and Tate Digital Programmes) note, 'The development of Free and Open Source Software has revitalised interest in collaborative creativity, the public domain, and the 'openness' of public institutions.' Their two-day congress, held 7th-8th October at one of London's best-known public institutions (Tate Britain), takes up the themes of Governance, Creativity, and Knowledge, and invites artists, academics, and activists to present and discuss their work. The line-up includes the EFF's Cory Doctorow, the Alternative Law Foundation's Lawrence Liang, 'Hacker Manifesto' author Mckenzie Wark, Libre Society's Johanna Gibson, and Trebor Scholz, of The Institute for Distributed Creativity. - Charlotte Frost

http://opencongress.omweb.org 

Net_User_3 Bulgarian Conference on Media Art

http://netuser.cc/2005/en/conference.htm

Net User’s mission is to research, analyze and give understanding about the variety of practices in the global network and their current development. The conference aims to initiate collaboration among creative parties developing various Internet activities and to provoke public interest in new media art and culture locally and internationally.

Common Hands

http://www.iaspis.com/commonhands/

IASPIS SYMPOSIUM, AUTUMN 2005

In recent years, a renewed interest in collective work and activity can be discerned more and more clearly in the art world. Collaborations of various sorts Ð between artists and artists, artists and curators, artists and others Ð have begun to appear as alternatives to the predominant focus on the individual so often found in the art world. At the same time, these collaborative efforts often constitute a response to specific, at times local, situations, and they constantly run the risk of being swallowed up and incorporated into the very systems against which they are reacting. In a variety of projects, the form and basis of collective activities have been presented, examined, and called into question: how people work on a short-term basis, as well as on more long-term bases; how they spread their attention across various subjects, methods, lifestyles, different political orientations; how they hope for some kind of emancipation; and last but not least, what sort of satisfaction results from working in a group.* Taking the Matter into Common Hands is a symposium in two parts which, against the background of this development in the art world, seeks to map these activities and to discuss the working relations and conditions of artists and other producers of culture. It also aims at exploring the future prospects for the kind of collective action in the art world that is geared towards long-term research and production of knowledge.

Ubicomp 2005

http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2005/calls/callworkshops.shtml

UbiComp 2005, the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, will be held September 11-14, 2005 in Tokyo, Japan. The annual conference provides the premier forum in which to present research results in all areas relating to the design, implementation, application and evaluation of ubiquitous computing technologies, bringing together leading researchers from a variety of disciplines and geographical areas who are exploring the frontiers of computing as it moves beyond the desktop and becomes increasingly interwoven into the fabrics of our lives.
Last year, over 400 people attended the UbiComp 2004 conference, representing 4 continents, 24 countries and a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives. 

Symposim on Podcasting

http://isis.duke.edu/events/podcasting/description.html

Duke University is pleased to announce that we will be hosting the first-ever academic symposium on podcasting from September 27-28 of this year. The two-day event will feature a hands-on podcasting workshop, as well as panel discussions of the economic/business, legal, political, journalistic, and cultural impacts of podcasting by bringing together prominent members of the podcasting community with policymakers, scholars, and media experts.

The symposium is being held in conjunction with the Duke Digital Initiative and is the result of a collaboration among several departments and centers at Duke, including the Information Science + Information Studies program, the Jenkins Chair in New Technologies & Society, Office of the Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Center for Instructional Technology, Center for Documentary Studies, Program in Film/Video/Digital, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Duke Law School, Fuqua School of Business, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Music, and the Department of Cultural Anthropology.

The symposium will be free of charge and open to the public. The symposium proceedings will also be webcasted, videocasted, and (of course) podcasted. Addresses for the various feeds will be announced soon. 

‘Arte.act: The Political Potential of Art’

at Wyspa Institute of Art
Event accompanying “Dockwatchers” exhibition

“Arte.act: The Political Potential of Art” a conference organized by ‘Krytyka Polityczna’ (‘Political Critique’) and the Wyspa Institute of Art

Curators: Magda Pustola and Aneta Szylak
Timing: September 3-4
Place: Wyspa Institute of Art / Wyspa Progress Foundation
Ul. Doki 1, building #145B
80-958 Gdansk, Poland
Phone.: (+48) 691 916 601 / (+48 58) 320 4446

www.krytykapolityczna.pl
www.wyspa.art.pl

‘Krytyka Polityczna’, Warsaw-based quarterly, and The Wyspa Institute of Art, located in the historic Gdansk Shipyard, welcomes an international and interdisciplinary group of intellectuals, artists and activists: Irit Rogoff, Stefan Nowotny, Therese Kaufmann, Aneta
Szylak, Waldemar Baraniewski, Dorota Monkiewicz, Adam Mazur, Lukasz Ronduda, Benjamin Cope, Katarzyna Bratkowska, Kinga Dunin, Magda Pustola, Slawomir Sierakowski, Maciej Gdula, Edwin Bendyk, Grzegorz Klaman, Marek Sobczyk, Mateusz Falkowski, Konrad Pustola, Grupa Twozywo,  Rene Lűck, the participants in the ‘Arte.act’ project. The conference, preceded by the ‘Dockwatchers’ exhibition, is aimed at  verifying the subversive potential of art in contemporary Poland.  ‘Arte.act’ refers to politicization of culture, power relations organizing the cultural field, and emancipatory character of artistic activities.

As the appropriation of culture in Poland have been constantly reinforced and have become highly destructive, Magda Pustola and Aneta Szylak, the curators, want to reverse the process so that art can seize politics. Together with other participants in the ‘Arte.act’ project, they want to verify what is the real influence of art, and whether it is worth thinking of art as an efficient instrument for political action today.

Is art a pre- or non-political method of doing politics? Or just one of the technologies of power, of regulatory techniques, with artists as politicians’ direct competitors? Why everybody wants art to be political? Is art able to create a space where political means
alternative, not instrumental? Happening alongside the official celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Solidarity, the conference intellectually comments on this one of the most symbolically and politically charged events in Polish history. It uses works presented at the ‘Dockwatchers’ exhibition as a direct point of departure for the debate.

The funding has been provided by the Minister of Culture, The Foundation of Janusz Palikot, Austrian Cultural Forum, the Communication Unlimited advertisement agency,  Lot Polish Airlines, Polmos Jozefow and the publishing house Słowo/obraz terytoria.

Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism

From:  stevphen shukaitis (by way of Ned Rosssiter from spectre

 Papers are invited for a conference:

"Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class  Composition in Cognitive Capitalism"

Venue:
University of Cambridge, UK:

Location:
to be announced.

Date:
Saturday 29 – Sunday 30 April 2006

Among other themes the conference will address issues of cognitive  capitalism, class composition, new social subjects, the knowledge economy and immaterial labour. Papers will be provided in advance of the conference. They will be  translated into English. They will be circulated via the medium of website and internet mailing lists. The papers will eventually be published in book form. Conference organised under the aegis of “Universitas adversitatis”, a peripatetic university. Supported by the Uninomade network. With possible involvement of other organising bodies. A full prospectus for the conference is being prepared. For proposals of papers, and for participation in the conference, 

further details from: Ed Emery [Class Composition Conference]

Peterhouse Cambridge CB2 1RD
E-mail: [email protected]

URBAN SCREENS 2005

Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society

http://culturebase.org/home/struppek/Homepage/urbanscreens_call.html

URBAN SCREENS 2005 is an international conference ranging from critical theory to project experiences by researchers and practitioners in the field of Art, Architecture, Urban Studies and Digital Culture. The focus is on understanding how the growing infrastructure of large digital displays influences the visual sphere of our public spaces. How can the commercial use of these screens be broadened and culturally curated to contribute to a lively urban society, including the audience interactively?

TIME:        Friday, 23 Sept. 2005 (extended to 24th according to feedback)
LOCATION:    Amsterdam, the Netherlands
CONTACT:     Mirjam Struppek  [email protected]

ORGANIZATION:
- Institute of Network Cultures, Hoogeschool van Amsterdam
- Dep. Art and Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academy / Univ. of Amsterdam
- Urban||ReseARTch, Berlin

APPLICATION FORMAT:

1. Name of the project/paper
2. Author(s)
3. Contact Person ( e-mail/phone/fax/postal Address)
4. Short 350-word abstract of the paper/presentation
5. Short biography of the author(s)
6. Related WEB-links
7. Description of the type of media needed for the presentation

Please mail to [email protected] the following in the subject heading of your submission email: "URBAN SCREENS 05 - submission"