collaboration

N.e.w.s. celebrates one-year! with an invitation to present at ISEA 2009 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) on the island of Ireland. N.e.w.s. will deliver the powerpoint presentation ‘Ruminations on Remuneration’ on Saturday, August 29, 2009 in Belfast at 12:30, University of Ulster. In this presentation (n.e.w.s.) addresses the relationship between rethinking the social and economic conditions of art and the artistic context of an emergent participatory community investing in creative production on the Internet.

The gentrye are all round, on each side they are found,

Theire wisdom’s so profound, to cheat us of our ground

Stand up now, Diggers all.
The Diggers Song, Gerrard Winstanley & Leon Rosselson
http://www.diggers.org/english_diggers.htm

This post follows up on an exchange initiated on n.e.w.s. a few months back by Branka Curcic under the heading of “The New Economy of Enclosure,” dealing with the pitfalls of the web 2.0 model and mindset, which she nicely summed up as the “private appropriation of community-created value.” http://www.northeastwestsouth.net/site/node/166#comment-37
This issue has gained some currency these past weeks as the French National Assembly has debated a bill entitled “Creation and Internet” – or Hadopi, the name of the proposed governmental organisation which it creates. The intent of the law (which will inevitably pass, despite some left parliamentarians jumping out of the woodwork at the last minute to defeat a second reading) is to severely crack down on the online exchange of audiovisual files, which it defines as “pirating,” by a three-strikes-you’re-off-the-net approach to internet accounts using peer-to-peer platforms to download or upload copyrighted content. Internet becomes a privilege for those who respect private property. Though probably unenforceable, this particularly iniquitous law was drafted by supposedly left-of-centre businessman and author Denis Olivennes, in a book entitled La Gratuité c’est le vol (Free is theft), a revealingly cynical echo of Joseph Proudon’s La Propriété c’est le vol (Property is theft). With any luck, history will look back on this law as the anachronistic convulsion of a senile music and film industry desperately lobbying to create artificial scarcity in the face of unstoppable profusion, using a business model from another century. But what are the intellectual underpinnings for even talking about “intellectual property”? And what kind of historical opposition has been mustered against it over the years?

On Tuesday 16 September, n.e.w.s. was presented at Basekamp. Joing us from various places in the world on Skype audio: Aharon from Brighton, Prayas from India, Magda from Brighton, Stephen from Paris, and Mia from London via IM. Scott, Mary, Garrett and I were in Philadelphia. It was great to have everybody online, even in the wee hours of the morning for some. We were able to facilitate a two-hour conversation about n.e.w.s., the goings-on so far and some of the problems that need improving as well as supporting its experimental and discursive nature. In this blog entry I will try to rehash some of the keys issues and explain how we structured the conversation. There will also be a soundfile and Skype chat on the site if you want to listen to and/or read the conversation.

We

n.e.w.s. has been invited to make a presentation at Basekamp. This evening the general n.e.w.s. website will be addressed: the launch, how we go further, what's needed, what needs to be deleted, etc. (see http://www.basekamp.com)

Both Ingrid Commandeur has already alluded to something like what I'm about to talk about, and so has Stephen Wright. Though here I've divested it of its locational/global factor, it still relates somewhat to territory. In this post, I'll describe some practices I'm attracted to in relation to this discussion. In the next post, I'll propose one hypothetical exhibition strategy, or non-exhibition strategy, produced in response to the wish to work with such practices.

Web 2.0 is often referred as type of social networking providing “power to a user and democracy for everyone (...), as incubator of innovative forms of media and free cooperation” among its users. But, what if another point of view is added to this innocent image? We simply have to be able to comment, discuss and criticize something that is loudly (and successfully) represented as a new form of “information superhighway” bringing everyone “equal rights” to create and distribute content.

When I met Renée and Sannetje, and they introduced me to n.e.w.s., I was drawn to participate in large part because I saw the website as a potential tool for greatly facilitating collaborative projects which involve regional networks.

I’ve been asked to be the moderator for this first phase of n.e.w.s., and I’d like to offer some reflections on what’s been happening so far on the website.

The exhibition “TV Gallery” has been conceived in order to contextualize and represent specific television production (“TV Gallery”) that was created at Belgrade Television and broadcasted on the Yugoslav TV network from 1984 – 1991. The exhibition is dealing with cultural policy, conditions of art and cultural production, public television and production and broadcasting of video art in territory of former Yugoslavia.

PUBLIC NETBASE: NON STOP FUTURE, New practices in Art and Media - New book about Public Netbase t0, edited by New Media Center_kuda.org and published by Revolver.

http://t0.or.at/nonstopfuture/