[no subject]

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Meta4um III - Under Construction
First Hungarian Content Festival
Budapest, october 11th, 12th, 13th, 1996

As a result of the dialogue that has come fom the conferences
Mta4um I (multmedia), Meta4um II (net-culture) the need for a sustained
examination of netbased content has become apparent. Enourmous amounts of
information are being shuttled between different areas of the world daily,
the growth of the internet is growing exponentially yet an exemination of
the content has yet to occure. In the past the difference between access
providers, content providers, and users had not been clearly defined, today
these same groups have been polarized into separate roles. Todays users
have become visitiors in the sense they are exploring a world that has
confines due to its enormous size.
Users still exert influence on the structure and the content of the
net as whole by their selectivity, they become in effect voters, the
popularity of a site has become a commercial validation.
There are still many questions to be answered, intellectual
property, infrastructure, international law, and maintaining cultural
integrity, until an examination of th content and how this will be used
these questions cannot be answered.
Commercialism in the traditional sense is being re-defined the web
has intoduced a different relationship between consumer and producer,
producers have to find new ways to use this new media, they will to have to
offer a much more qualitative message.
Access to become becoming a content provider has never been
greater, with the advent of an easily accesible medium by which anyone can
publish material the whole notion of what a content provider is has been
revolutionized. There is a need to build means by which different content
providers, artists, writers, commercial interests, and private users can
colaborate.
The particular goals of the MetaForum III conference is to examine
the growing importance of multimedia tools, visual, audio and live
transmission, in the evolution of the web.

Topics will include:

-Looking back to Fluxus and the situationist movement (inter/multimedia)
-Popularity of websites
-Construction of the hyper-media environment.
-National solutions (language/content control), global praxis (wandering
 websites) and personal ethics
-Copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property
-New forms of politics, shifting from parties to interest groups
-A bookmark market
-Changing one way media to two way media, NetRadio
-Video and performance, content art
-The art of navigation, search engines, infobots
-the problem of creating quality information, editing/data priesthood
-Authenticity, credibility, voluntary filters, new forms of mass panic
-Teknoculture and the Net
-Hungarian screen saver contest

Slogans:

-The Best Content Money Can Buy
-Stop Making Content
-Be Content, Be Content
-content providers of the world unite!
-My First Content
-now everyone can be a content provider for 16 minutes
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Metaforum III:  Under Construction (the first hungarian cotent festival)
is organized by the Media Reseach Foundation, in collaboration with the
Budapest Autom festival and the Intermedia department of the hungarian
fine art academy and will be held on october 11th, 12th, and 13th at
the hungarian academy of fine arts.

Contact: Diana McCarty (dia@szocio.tgi.bme.hu), Janos Sugar
(sj@dial.isys.hu), Geert Lovink (xs4all.nl)