Eric Kluitenberg on Thu, 31 Aug 2006 23:42:05 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime-ann> De Balie Sept 1-3: The Public Desire - in search of new forms of public culture...


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A  N  N  O  U  N  C  E  M  E  N  T

The Public Desire

In search of new forms of public culture...

September 1, 2 & 3, 2006
De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics
Amsterdam

Admission free – please reserve!
http://www.debalie.nl/agenda


After the age of individualisation, now the ‘public’ seems to be the focus of attention. In the first weekend of September (2006), De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam, will explore the new forms of public culture, which we think we see emerging in all kinds of unlikely places around us - primarily by asking questions such as:
Where are the new forms of public discourse and debate? Is a new shape of the ‘public’ without movements emerging? How does such a thing work? How important are the new forms of knowledge sharing such as Wikipedia and the various digital commons? How sustainable are they? How to handle public fear and the obsession for public safety and hyper-surveillance? How can we utilise public space in novel ways as a space of encounter and surprise, rather than an extended shopping mall (beyond ‘reclaim the streets’)?
The challenge is to go beyond the eternal lamentations of the decline and fall of the ‘public” (public space / public man / public culture). Merely offering a critique is not enough. The critique needs to be updated and nuanced, public culture needs to be reinvented!


There is such a thing as society!

The 1990s are sometimes described as the era without social movements. In-between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crash of Nasdaq many residents of Western countries lived in a happy illusion that liberalism and democracy had achieved their final victory (the illusion of the ‘End of History’). With this triumph public culture seemed a redundant anachronistic notion henceforth. However, recent events have shown that public culture is remarkably alive - from the World Social Fora, to the mass mobilisation against the CPE-labour laws in France and the on-going precarity debate, to the cultures of information and knowledge sharing of the digital commons in their various guises. The era without (the necessity) of social movements appears to be over, but the new social formations are unfamiliar, heterogeneous, puzzling, contradictory, in need of clarification...

The Public Desire is a kaleidoscopic weekend program full of debates, conversations, performances, interventions, public cinema, art projects and discussions about old and new forms of public culture.

Background materials, detailed descriptions and program information can all be found in the special web dossier on the Balie website:
http://www.debalie.nl/dossierpagina.jsp?dossierid=51947


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PROGRAM OVERVIEW
(of English and ‘non-verbal’ programs - click the URLs for details or scroll below)


* Saturday September 2 – from 13.30 hrs
Radio Ballet LIGNA
I Am[not]sterdam. 10 Exercises to get the City out of your Body”
Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62935


* Saturday September 2 - 15.00 hrs
Issue Politics - From Parties to Issues
Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62483


* Sunday September 3 – 11.00 hrs
Permanent Breakfast
Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62943


* Sunday September 3 - 15.00 hrs:
From Open Source to Open Knowledge
Discussion about the public accessibility of scientific knowledge
Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=media&articleid=63175

* Sunday September 3 - 20.30 hrs
Creative Class Struggles
or
Creative Precarity: On the creatives and their class consciousness
Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62459



Live webcasts:
All these programs can also be followed live via internet as videostream and mp3 audio.
For details please refer to: http://www.debalie.nl/live



PROGRAM DETAILS:

* Saturday September 2 – from 13.30 hrs

Radio Ballet LIGNA

I Am[not]sterdam. 10 Exercises to get the City out of your Body”

The free radio group LIGNA exists since 1995. LIGNA consists of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners, and Torsten Michaelsen, who since the early nineties have been working at the "Freies Sender Kombinat" (FSK), a public non-profit radio station in Hamburg. In several shows and performances they have been investigating the importance of dispersal in radio as well as of the radio. One of the main focuses is to refer to forgotten and remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new forms of interactive practices. Another emphasis has been placed on the development of concepts and the production of performative audio plays in order to find out how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations

The “Radio Ballet” is an excellent example of the latter: it is a radio play produced for the collective reception in certain public places. It gives the dispersed radio listeners the opportunity, to subvert the regulations of the space. Held for the first time in Hamburg’s Central Station in 2002, this focused on how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations. Yet, Ligna's performances aim to confront the privatised, controlled production of capitalism with the dispersed, yet collective, uncanny and public production of the radio. The Radio Ballet brought back excluded gestures of deviant behavior were invited to enter the station, equipped with cheap, portable radios and earphones. By means of these devices they could listen to a radio program consisting of a choreography suggesting permitted and forbidden gestures (to beg, to sit or lie down on the floor etc.).
These suggestions were interrupted by reflections on the public space and on the Radio ballet itself.


The Radio Ballet I Am[not]sterdam, especially developed for De Balie, consists of a radio broadcast, produced for the Leidsestraat in Amsterdam. The radio broadcast will suggest ten different exercises to get the city out of your body. The dispersed collective of radio listeners will be able to perform deviant gestures that no one would or could do alone.

Is it possible to subvert the logic of the corporate city, if people do not subject themselves to it anymore? Come and find out!
Become part of the LIGNA Radio Ballet in the Leidsestraat on Saturday, 2nd of September 2006!


The Radio Ballet starts at 14:00. You can get radios at De Balie from 13:30 on. But better bring your own radios, or mobile phones with receiver! The Ballet will be broadcasted on the Frequency of Radio Patapoe 88,3 FM.

I Am[not]sterdam! Dispersed collectivity instead common identity! Don ´t subject to the corporate city - become alien by public radio listening!

Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62935


* Saturday September 2 - 15.00 hrs

Issue Politics

From Parties to Issues

Social and political mobilisation is increasingly centred on Issues rather than ideologies or ‘political programs’. Without issues there no longer is a public to enlist for a collective task. A critique.

‘Don’t be happy - be worried!’ is what Noortje Marres writes in her PHD thesis No Issue, No Public - Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics, which she defended in November 2005 at the University of Amsterdam. The political establishment has been discussing the widening gap between citizens and the state / government for many years now, but still refuses to call her own institutional structures into question. Understandable perhaps, but Marres points out that issues play an increasingly important role in public life and therefore also in political life. People mobilise less and less around collective notions of political identity, and increasingly around social and political issues they are concerned about and that they are unable to resolve individually. Many issues, furthermore, are uninhibited by the traditional ideological dividing lines that appear redundant and often seem to stand in the way of finding effective collective arrangements.

Asked differently - is the structure of representative democracy, with its political parties and systems of representation of the people still adequate for a time in which citizens organise themselves ever more effectively, discuss among themselves about countless issues on web fora and set up their own local constituencies? Is it correct to speak about a ‘crisis of democracy’, or should we rather speak of a ‘crisis’ of the political system? And aren’t we witnessing an unprecedented flourishing of democracy, everywhere except in ‘The Hague’ and ‘Brussels’?

Discussion with Noortje Marres, political philosopher and researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Michel Feher, philosopher, cofounder of Zone Books and author of Powerless by Design, a critique of the ‘international community’, Inge van der Vlies, professor of administrative and constitutional law, University of Amsterdam, Rebecca Gomperts, founder of Women on Waves and Emer Beamer, artist and organiser of a range of ‘civic education’ projects.

Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62483


* Sunday September 3 – 11.00 hrs

Permanent Breakfast

On the morning of may 1st 1996 a group of artists around Friedemann Derschmidt began to breakfast in public places.
The idea is quite simple and catching: one person invites others to breakfast. The invited persons ( usually 4 ) commit themselves to invite others to a public breakfast on the next possible date. And so on.
As a matter of fact, the public breakfast became a kind of cult, and more often people could be seen taking a seat at a beautifully set breakfast table standing on a spare parking space in a parking lot, an empty dysfunctional fountain or in parks or malls. Among the places were breakfasts where breakfasts have taken place are Vienna, Tokio, Kharthoum, Qualandia chechpoint (between Jerusalem and Ramallah) and London.


This initiative can be seen as an attack on the decline of public space and it tries to focus peoples attention to a collective experience in public space. Passers-by are invited to join in and to have breakfast with utter strangers. This way the breakfast acts as a sort of social interface, reclaiming the commercialised and regulated public space. On Sunday September 3rd the Leidseplein transforms into a public breakfast table.

Starting at 11.00 am we reclaim the square as a place where we can all join in and listen to speeches, share personal stories and meet new friends! Speeches are in Dutch, the food is tasty in all sorts of languages!

Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62943


* Sunday September 3 - 15.00 hrs:

From Open Source to Open Knowledge

Discussion about the public accessibility of scientific knowledge

In a knowledge economy and network society free access to information and knowledge are indispensable for a healthy development of public culture. While we are technologically more able to share knowledge and information world-wide than ever before, valuable knowledge is increasingly locked up behind invincible intellectual property rights clauses. Exchange of such knowledge is confined to researchers and their patrons. When knowledge does not circulate it is also less likely to be critically tested, and even less likely to filter down in the rest of society.

alternatives to these restricted knowledge practices are therefore considered in many different places, One important source of inspiration for new practices of knowledge sharing is the open source movement that originates from the realm of software development. By collaborating, sharing tasks and building on each others results a viable alternative model has emerged here for the traditional closed industrial model of software production. It has lead to lower prices and higher availability of countless products and services. These principles are now translated to other domains of intellectual / knowledge production. The collectively written on-line encyclopaedia Wikipedia is probably one of the most well known and internationally visible example of this “open knowledge” principle.

This development provides a tremendous impetus for the discussion about the public accessibility of scientific knowledge; for non- specialists, interest groups, but also internationally for people in countries that need such knowledge most urgently but only have severely restricted access to vital information and knowledge resources. The move from open source to open knowledge calls forth many questions: How does such an open knowledge system actually function? How is it financed? How can the sustainability of the various open knowledge initiatives be strengthened? What is the influence of open source principles and such initiatives as creative commons and Wikipedia and others on public culture?

A discussion with:
Saul Albert (artists and writer from London, he is cofounder of the initiative The People Speak which deals in its collaborative projects (for instance Talkaoke, Distributed Library) with notions of democratised media),
Ronald Beelaard (Wikimedia Nederland, ended up with Wikipedia through his board function with a public library and is one of the moderators of the Dutch Wikipedia),
Sebastian Lütgert (artist and software programmer from Berlin, whose internet projects such as ROLUX, textz.com en Pirate Cinema are often related to opening up knowledge and information to free exchange and distribution and the negation of intellectual property rights. In 2004 Lütgert became the object of absurd legal proceedings over the on-line publication of texts of Theodor W. Adorno.)
Paul Keller (Creative Commons Nederland, is head of the Public Domain Program of the Waag Society in Amsterdam and is an active member of the European noborder network).


Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=media&articleid=63175


* Sunday September 3 - 20.30 hrs

Creative Class Struggles
or
Creative Precarity: On the creatives and their class consciousness

In recent years the “creative class” is regarded as the avant garde of Western economic development. Cities proclaim themselves to be ‘creative cities’. They roll out the red carpets for creative workers with equally creative marketing campaigns. Although the term “creative class” appears to refer to the traditional socio-economic definition, in fact an unheard of diversity of professions is subsumed under this heading: fashion designers, journalists, financial consultants, ICT experts, artists, graphic designers, and advertising professionals.

The most important characteristic all these groups seem to share is a fast and flexible life- and work-style. Work doesn’t stop here at office hours, but continues into the ‘late hours’, and one continuously has to be up to date with latest developments in the field. These mobile, highly educated, and flexibly deployable employees - cultural entrepreneurs - are presented by policy makers as an ideal for the European labour market, which is transforming itself thoroughly to become ‘the most competitive knowledge economy of the world’.

Concurrent with the discussion about the creative class another discussion has gained momentum, about another and comparably diverse class; that of precarious labour. Precarious here means uncertain, hazardous - as in the ‘precarious balance’ of a rope-dancer. This new class of employee usually operates in serial temporary and flexible work arrangements, and has no predictable security about income, pensions, or guarantees about the future availability of social benefits or chances for self-improvement in a Europe where the welfare state has become a thing of the past. A remarkable form of social mobilisation has surfaced around the issue of precarity, in one of the most unlikely areas where it could have been expected; the domain of free and flexible labour.

Both classes, the creative and the precarious, merge to some extent. Artists are obviously highly familiar with such precarious living and working conditions ever since their professional group was first invented. Reasons for some to speak about a “creative under-class” or a “creative class-struggle”. Many members of this ‘creative under- class’ are involved in voluntary labour; they share information and ideas with each other and could become the founders of a new public domain (2.0), a “creative common”. The growing identification of the cultural and creative sector as an economic domain does raise the question however if it is still possible to escape from such stifling economic utilitarianism?

As part of this concluding evening of the weekend of public culture at De Balie the Creative Workers Manifesto will be presented, a call for decent creative labour conditions.

Discussion with; Ned Rossiter, researcher University of Ulster, Belfast, kpD / kleines post-fordistisches Drama (Marion von Osten, artist and independent theorist, Katja Reichard, independent bookstore Pro qm and organiser of autonomous culture events, Berlin), Mei Li Vos political scientist and chairwoman of the Alternatief Voor Vakbond (Alternative for Labour Union), and contributions by Flexmens.org and Greenpepper Magazine.

Master of ceremonies for the evening is Max Bruinsma, design critic.

Link: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp? podiumid=politiek&articleid=62459

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NOTE:

All programs are admission free - however, please reserve a ticket in advance via the website of De Balie or the special reservation number +31.20.55 35 100
http://www.debalie.nl/agenda


Details about live webcast videosterams & mp3 audio:
http://www.debalie.nl/live
(all time indications CET)

Address:

De Balie
Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10
Amsterdam
http://www.debalie.nl

Route / map:
http://www.debalie.nl/route

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