Monday 24th March
- Laurence Rassel
- Bellas necesidades (Beautiful needs)
Using fiction, the articulation of a narration, let you consider a situation that defies you not to let machines speak instead of yourself, but to talk to them from our own point of view. Fragmenting words, situations, objects and recomposing them with the aim of experimenting about different questions related to our connection with technology and testing some ways of communication. Sharing the knowledge of using media to go beyond stereotypes, social control, purity of discourse.
Thinking about machines, systems and codes, software and free licenses, gender questions and discourse and communication formats, the formats of our détournés representations about sci-fi, about “What about if...”; about the desire of telling a different story, anonymous, collective, cryptic, out of market, out of media, a non-ending story.
Visual artist, Laurence Rassel is a cyberfeminist and member of Constant, an artist-run organisation in Brussels that connects from 1998 theoretical thinking, critical use of new technologies, artistic behaviour and political questions on the net. They are working on topics related to open source, cyberfeminism, copyleft and ways of sharing new knowledge about media. Constant has organised numerous digital culture events such as Jonctions and Stitch and Split about race, gender and sci-fi.
Tuesday, 25th March
- José Luis de Vicente
- Un diario personal de las utopías digitales (A personal diary of digital utopias)
If something similar to digital culture exists, it might be defined as the way our vision of daily life is transformed by the unexpected scenarios suggested by new technologies. And one of the basic engines of digital culture is the utopia, the conviction that the revolutionary technologies appearance will be enough to unleash deep social transformations. This talk is a personal chronicle that pretends to investigate the function that utopia carries out in a space in which culture, society and technology converge. It also pretends to ask if the moment of getting them out has already come.
Cultural investigator. He works on projects about innovation, creativity, technology and culture and collaborating with organizations like Sónar, ArtFutura, OFFF, CCCB, Medialab-Prado, y FAD, among others. He is one of the bloggers at Elástico.net. José Luis de Vicente collaborates in different media and teaches at Escuela de Diseño Elisava.
Wednesday, 26th March
- Wu Ming
- Narrar no es suficiente. El oficio del cuentacuentos en la época digital (Telling is not enough. The job of storyteller in the digital era)
Telling and listening to stories is not just a need of a human being, but also a pleasure. Myhts, fables and legends, or magic formulas and spells, are useful to modify reality. There are stories to educate and stories to go to bed; stories to sell and stories to remember. It is very often to judge the function of a story according to the content: who the good ones and the bad ones are, which the moral of the story is and what the author wanted to tell us. Actually, a lot of what a story can do depends on the way you tell it, on the instruments you use and also depends on the relation stablished by the storyteller and the community. We will discuss about all this aspects of narration from the experience of Wu Ming and, in this particular case, the experience of Manituana, the last work by the collective.
Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. In Chinese, "wu ming" means either "anonymous" or "five names", depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The group has published several novels in print and online, released under a Creative Commons license, and they are available for download on the group’s website. As of December 2007, only Q and 54 have been translated into English, whereas most books are available in several European languages.
Thurday, 27th March
- Lisa Parks
- Satellite Secrets: Between Spying and Dreaming
This talk explores uses of satellites as part of our encounters with the past and the future. It builds upon my book, Cultures in Orbit, and discusses uses of satellite technologies that emerge from two very distinct practices – 1) state-sponsored espionage and 2) media art & activism. I begin with a description of state-sponsored projects designed in the 1960s to conceal or hide satellite technologies from the public and deploy them as top-secret vision machines to be used in the name of national and global security. I contrast these classified state projects with artists’ and activists’ uses of satellite technologies from the 1970s to the present. By creating experimental transmissions, performances, and installations, artists and activists have drawn attention to the unique properties of satellite technologies, critiqued the militarization and corporatization of orbital space, and dreamt up alternative uses of these high capital machines. Such works are crucial, I argue, to the process of imagining satellite uses in the public interest. I end the talk with a few fantasies for future uses of satellites. Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is also an affiliate of the Departments of Art and Women’s Studies and serves on the Executive Committee on the College of Creative Studies. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke University Press 2005) and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press 2003) and Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Duke UP, 2007).
http://www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/professors/parks/parks.html
Friday, 28th March
- Geert Lovink
- Issues in Critical Internet Culture
I will give an introduction to the work of the Institute of Network Cultures and then switch to my own research. Then I will talk about the current Web 2.0 and blog theory in particular. I will put this in the perspective of the previous late nineties dotcom hype.
Media theorist, net critic and activist, studied political science on the University of Amsterdam (MA) and holds a PhD at University of Melbourne. In 2003 he was a postdoc fellow at University of Queensland in Brisbane. 2004 he was appointed research professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (interactive media) and associate professor (new media) at the University of Amsterdam. His position was renamed as the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org). In 2005 his instute organized four international new media conferences: one on the history of webdesign (www.decadeofwebdesign.org), one on alternatives in ICT for Development (www.incommunicado.info/conference), another on urban screens (www.urbanscreens.org) and the Art & Politics of Netporn (www.networkcultures.org/netporn). In 2005-2006 he is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, the Centre for Advanced Study in Berlin where he is finishing the third volume of an ongoing research on Internet culture, to be published by Routledge New York..
