CONFERENCE: DISPLAYS FOR BECOMING PRESENT / EXHIBITING NETWORKING
Performance Julien Maire, GP, November 21, 2009
Panel with Trebor Scholz and Nikolaus Hirsch with response by Stefan Römer. GP, November 21, 2009
The aim of the conference is to conduct a debate about the conditions of production as well as to present forms of practice that involve contemporary technologies, everyday media, audio culture, and participatory models. Following the approach of Networked Cultures, these projects will not be considered in the light of the promise of mechanistic innovations in the technology of digital culture. Rather the aim is to investigate the extent to which technologies influence social practices, information exchange, and political activism under everyday conditions and at locations of cultural transformation.
In particular, digital technologies change our understanding of proximity and distance, and also the ways in which we work together. Ad-hoc communication takes place over thousands of kilometres. The construction of identity is permanently in progress and generates multiple relations. Distances become calculable numbers that shed light on the acceleration of connections and of global partnerships. National, social and cultural concepts resist hegemonical lines of demarcation. – Networked Cultures takes off from a heterogeneous present state of society under post-colonial conditions. It is impossible to hark back to older forms of production and presentation. Networks act through permanent shifting. Needs, fears, and desires at present lead networks towards modes of dispersion.
It seems that Networked Cultures are our avant-garde. Nevertheless, they can hardly assert an autonomous status. Networking practices activate temporary environments and agonistic publics, which operate within various politics of mobility and through different organizational and political structures. For example, research by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer suggests that Networked Cultures are an approach that "replaces the most powerful figure of modernity: the threatening figure of the masses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries".
What are the dispositifs and spatial models that display the politics of networking? Which specific spatial formats make current projects manifest? How could institutional concepts, e.g. for Media Labs, be re-thought and developed today?
The conference is the first of a series of events to be held with international partners. The programme has been set up by Doreen Mende as part of the curatorial grant 2009 of Labor für Kunst und Medien Berlin. The contributions and discussion will be mainly in English. www.dock-berlin.de
Saturday, November 21, 2009. Second day of a three-day long discursive event at General Public.
2.30 PM
Impossible exhibiting
BERYL GRAHAM, curator, Sunderland University, www.crumbweb.org
AGNES MEYER BRANDIS, resident artist, Labor fuer Kunst und Medien www.forschungsfloss.de
HERWIG WEISER, resident artist, Labor fuer Kunst und Medien www.zgodlocator.org
Respondent: ALEXANDER KLOSE, author and researcher
4 PM
Different spaces of research
PETER MÖRTENBÖCK, architect, www.networkedcultures.org
PETER HANAPPE, computer scientist, Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris www.csl.sony.fr
Respondent: SABETH BUCHMANN, theoretician and author
5.30 PM
Struggles of translocality
NIKOLAUS HIRSCH, architect, www.culturalspaces.in
TREBOR SCHOLZ, media activist, New School University, New York www.digitallabor.org
Respondent: STEFAN RÖMER, artist
8.00 PM FINAL DISCUSSION WITH ALL PARTICIPANTS
10.00 PM PERFORMANCE JULIEN MAIRE
GENERAL PUBLIC
Schoenhauser Allee 167c
DE 10435 Berlin
www.generalpublic.de
Contact: Doreen Mende, dm(at)doreenmende.net