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During the workshop period, forms of creative, critical, and subversive handlings of media and new technologies, in both theory and practice, shall be developed. The focus of the workshop thereby additionally lies in the specific information and archive situation of our society. The project furthermore offers an opportunity to examine strategies of “artist practice in the Postcapital Archive”—a new public space having long been influenced by new information and communications technologies.

Keywords: archetypes, archiving, collaboration, locative, mapping, memory, narrative, behavior, connectivity, creative commons, decoding, encoding, hacking, interaction, information society, language, mobile, networks, open source, poetics, recording, scripting, free software, transmitting, technology, identity, interface, open center, performative, representation, spokesperson, streaming, translation, transformative and transgressive character, voicing, addressing, participation, knowledge production, documentation, public space, community, addressing, participation, knowledge production, documentation, archive, register, classify, represent, organize, categorize, list, record, sort, catalogue

Contact/Registration
Iris Dressler
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
dressler@wkv-stuttgart.de
Fon: 0711 – 22 33 711

Program
July 10, 2008, 7 PM: Presentation and Discussion of the Postcapital Archive
July 11–12, each day 11 am – 6 pm: Workshop
July 13, 11 am: Final Discussion

From the Age of Visiting the Archive to the Age of Living in the Archive
Daniel G. Andújar

Our society, economy, and culture are founded upon interests, values, institutions, and systems of representation that in general terms limit creativity, confiscate and manipulate the artist’s work, and divert his energy toward sterile confrontation and discouragement. With an interest in revealing the configurations of power, the practice of art must establish mechanisms of social relationships that ensure its long-term impact and enable it to extend its discourse beyond the restricted confines of art lovers and of the institution itself. The digital gap, generational clash, and many other similar phenomena are challenging our traditional ways of working with, understanding, and managing information—and they are also changing our view in respect to negotiating, trading, in short, to living and understanding the world we’re inhabiting. The tools and resources presented by new information and communications technologies are indissolubly linked to the processes of structural change and to the fundamental transformation taking place in our society. Furthermore, the ways we think, relate to one another, consume, produce, and trade are undoubtedly being modified.

While management societies became intermediaries between creators and those possessing production, distribution, and commercialization means, new technologies are gradually eliminating the need for these intermediaries and management services. And it must be understood that the regulations of the new Law of Intellectual Property (especially regarding such topics as the private copy, having been reduced to its minimum expression) are outdated in this Internet era. During the last few years, copyrighting has become a controversial issue. On the one hand, present-day information and communications technologies have generated a new social reality in which both old situations and new sceneries coexist. On the other hand, undoubtedly, these transformations have also produced a crisis for the prevailing systems of distribution and cultural management. Societies have enough mechanisms to adapt themselves to their own processes, but we must ask ourselves if the current dogmatic legislative apparatus is prepared to confront these changes.

Social cooperation unveils its power of innovation and creation, understood as the best manner of supporting a model that permits distribution and expansion of content for participants, users, and audiences. Art also has a political function requiring ethical positions: aesthetics are not enough. Those who follow exclusively commercial and institutional models and practices may deem all this irrelevant, but they must learn to accept being anchored to traditional models radically differing from those most likely to prevail—and should note that digital space has not emerged simply as a means that favors communications, but as a new theater for a wide range of operations. And this is clearly a disputed space, the interests of which are threatening their old hierarchies.

Artistic practice, as I conceive it, must be transformed into a form of “resistance” against a model obstinately aimed at prevailing in a space of relations that is becoming more and more confused and globalized.

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