nettime Free Bitflows participation
We hope to get nettimers interested to participate in Free Bitflows: Scheduled for beginning of June 2004 in Vienna it is a follow up in a series of conferences over the last two years. Free Bitflows is an event that tries to look into access and distribution of digital content- and will also showcase a number of works and installations in cooperation with our project partners... |--- | Announcement and Call for Participation: |--- | FREE BITFLOWS: Cultures of Access and Politics of Dissemination | | http://freebitflows.t0.or.at Vienna June 2004 |--- | | * Conference | * Workshops | * Exhibition | * Residency | |--- What's going on here? In early June 2004 a digital culture event will be held in Vienna to examine the theories and practices for making new cultures of access viable. The problem is clear, but not the solution. As some means of production are becoming as cheap as to be practically freely accessible (last year's computer equipment, software, basic Internet access), a new question confronts independent cultural producers: how can we organize access to cultural works to match the new freedom of production? The Internet came with a promise that 'everybody can be a publisher'. Although not everybody wants to be a publisher, those who actually do, find it very hard to make it work. As it turns out, this promise is only true in an extremely limited, technical sense. While, yes, I can set up a website, or put my song on Kazaa, but what next? The problem becomes not so much technical as social- there is lots of sharing, but little in terms of making a living. Money remains squarely in the hands of the old industry. The issue of distribution is not just an economic question. It's also a political one. At stake is the semiotic democracy, that is the ability of the largest number of people to create and share culture freely, and it is about making sure that in the context of overabundance and heavy-hitting marketing machines, new, independent content can still find its audience. In short, the question is how do innovative production and distribution come together to support each other. Free Software seems to have found a way to do just that, but what about the rest of cultural production? We invite the interested public to participate in this event. There are many ways to do that. Coming June, you can join is in Vienna. Before that, artists, theorists, observers, activists or space aliens are invited to propose presentations for the conference and themes for the workshops, to submit works for the exhibition, or apply for a residency. Further information on the conference, workshops, residencies and exhibition can be found on the project website and below. Free Bitflows is a part of the exStream project, a two-year collaborative project in which five media art organisations are working together through the exchange of organisational, artistic and technological resources to create a common platform for the creation and distribution of new media art projects. Hull Time Based Arts (Hull, UK); V2_ (Rotterdam, NL); Bootlab (Berlin, DE); interSpace Media Art Center (Sofia, BG); t0 / Institute for New Culture Technologies - Public Netbase (Vienna, AT) Conference: -- The conference will take place on June 3-4, 2004. In format it will proceed along a series of relatively dense presentations, organized into larger themes, to facilitate the interaction among the presenters and with the audience. We expect this to allow us to deal in depth with four themes, roughly three speakers each. We invite those interested to submit a proposal for a talk. Below are the four main themes, please indicate which of these your talk would address. * Organizational Intelligence for Independent Producers: Content Syndication and Sharing The content gap is encroaching the independent information providers- The ruthless market efficiency not only shapes content, the quality and depth of information content, in the mainstream channels but the pressure of a global neoliberal regime also has various effects on the not-for-profit intelligence nodes. Being able to compete in certain standards and formats of culture and knowledge dissemination requires smart, mobile and flexible solutions which make best use of the tools of information technology. Global informational networking seems too obvious to mention... but how can it be made into an actual practice and real asset for independent content providers? Possible Topics: - Reconfiguring Independent radios - Content Sharing for Independent Publications - Independent TVs and the crisis of content * Search and Destroy The politics of search engines and retrieval systems Search engines are essential aspects of pull media. Yet, as the recent rumors of Microsofts takeover of Google have indicated again, the search space is not neutral. Access for all is not only
Re: nettime Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing
Eugene asks about Georgio Agamben. Below is a short note on him. I find his writings on the state les interesting and useful than his return to the question of commodity fetishism, which is a refreshing revisiting of a neglected concept. On the state, his approach seems more philological than historical. By not bringing his thinking on the commodity and on the state more closely together, one is not really given much of a handle on how developments in the commodity form may have transformed the state. 'Biopower' becomes a vague, transhistorical notion in Agamben. Agamben is one of the few contemporary thinkers to try to think *past* Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which I think is still an untranscended horizon in its matching of political and theoretical intransigence. And so in the note below I concentrate on his handling of Debord. k In the final analysis the state can recognize any claim for identity But what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p87 How can we have fidelity to Debords memory? Agamben suggests we apply Deleuzes image of picking up tools on the run as a way to use Debords books, as if they were tactics for thinking. They might be tactics to turn not least against what became of Marxist thought in its long march through the academic institutions. Debords thought runs counter to much late 20th century Marxism in that it did not abandon the question of the fetish character of the commodity. Louis Althusser excised this troubling part of Marxs legacy, allowing Marxist thought to devolve into academic specialisms, each of which addressed the economic, political or ideological instance which, without the theory of commodity fetishism, no longer formed an integrated complex. Marxist thought in its post-Althusserian guise was unable to think through the becoming-image of the commodity, in which exchange value eclipses use value, opening the Debordian spectacle toward Jean Baudrillards world of pure sign value. The spectacle may be the alienation of language itself, the expropriation of the logos, of the possibility of a common good, but Agamben rightly perceives a way out, at the end of the spectacle. What we encounter in the spectacle is our linguistic nature inverted. It is an alienated language in which language itself is or can be revealed. The spectacle may be the uprooting of all peoples from their dwelling in language, the severing of the foundations of all state forms, but this very alienation of language returns it as something that can be experienced as such, bringing language itself to language. Agamben finds the emerging crisis of the state in this complete alienation of language. The state now exists in a permanent state of emergency, where only the secret police are its last functioning agency. As Agamben says, the state can recognize any identity, so proposing new identities to it is not to challenge it, merely to require of it that it extend its logic. New identities may push the state towards a further abstraction, but on the other hand merely recognizes in the state a grounding it really doesnt possess as final authority on the kinds of citizenship that might belong within it. The coming struggle is not to control the state, but to exceed and escape it into the unrepresentable. For Agamben Tiananmen is the first outbreak of this movement that did not want to be represented, but rather to create a common life outside of representation. Tiananmen might be a spontaneous outbreak of a new Situationist movement. The situation, in Agambens reading of Debord, is beyond the fusion of art and life sought by the historic avant gardes. It comes after the supercession of art. Surprisingly, Agamben offers Nietzsches eternal return as an image of the situation, where everything repeats itself as the same, only without its identity as such. What never occurs to Agamben is to inquire into the historical rather than philological -- conditions of existence of this most radical challenge to the state. Agamben reduces everything to power and the body. Like the Althusserians, he too has dispensed with problem of relating together the complex of historical forces. In moving so quickly from the commodity form to the state form, the question of the historical process of the production of the abstraction and the abstraction of production disappears, and with it the development of class struggle. It may well be that the coming community is one in which everything may be repeated, as is, without its identity but what are the conditions of possibility for such a moment to arrive the first time? That condition is the development of the relations of telesthesia, webbed together as a third nature, which present as their negative
