[rohrpost] 2. Make Worlds Festival, München, 26-29 Februar 2004

[geert lovink]

MAKEWORLDS (2) CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
http://www.makeworlds.org

NAME
NEURO -- networking europe

SYNOPSIS
Movements and technologies of the common

DATE
February 26-29, 2004

LOCATION
Muffathalle, Munich (Germany)

DESCRIPTION
A new generation of media and network initiatives from all over Europe and
different parts of the world present and work on their projects in a broad
interactive framework that explores the different conceptual and practical
idioms used to articulate and create new social,  political and artistic
practices.

Originating within the networking culture of open communications and free
exchange the event aims to connect contemporary debates on mobility,
migration and social movements with new media instruments, information and
communication technologies.

WHAT'S NEW?
The new is emerging in unknown and multiple ways. It is emerging
from the exhaustion and crisis of conventional political concepts
that are no longer adequate to the unstable, informatic and
immaterial dimensions of the emerging division of labour. The new
technologies of the common are not universal hierarchies of
political right but small scale and intimate practices of
constitution. The new involves those who see the limitations of
individual social practices of self-realisation and desire to turn
them into general and transferable social technologies of
emancipation.

BACKGROUND
It is time for intellectual and political debates to merge with
technology. Both to evaluate the current state of social movements
and to build on those orientations that are pushing the limits of
what are individually considered possible. NEURO sets out to
create and map a new discursive terrain and practical horizon: the
ideas of 'freedom of movement' and 'technologies of the common'
draws into a synergetic perspective the range of irreducibly
conflictual practices whereby society is reproduced.

Without losing sight of the (translocal) constitution of the local
as indispensable site of intervention, NEURO seeks to review and
research practices of networking that are already redefining the
political geography of Europe. In the ongoing diversification of
the social, processes of integration can no longer be clearly
separated from mechanisms of exclusion. The working out of these
tensions at a political and economic level is producing new levels
of complexity as well as new opportunities for provocative and
experimental projects that challenge orthodoxy and convention.

The focus on social reproduction is an acknowledgment that its
various modes are proliferating across an ever-expanding terrain
in a process that suggests that collective responses will
themselves have to explore some of the idioms and tools of the
network in each of the subjects under discussion, whether human
rights and citizenship, Empire and Europe, free software and
intellectual property regimes, the spectacle of civil society, or
the institutional and bureaucratic mentalities present within
post-governmental environments.

Beyond the juridical parcelisation of people into discrete,
sovereign and rights-bearing subjects, the present offers a unique
chance to express and form solidarities that catch up in political
terms with the sociality of our being. For these struggles,
networks and intercommunicative agency are not goals but their
very conditions of possibility. Thus the new sits in opposition to
the current forms of exclusion because the appropriation of
subjective freedoms within Europe and beyond it are part of the
foundations on which these political edifices themselves rest.

TASKS
What could be new today in networking? After the thin promises of new
markets and new media, what aspirations remain for evolving struggles for
information, knowledge and communication? What is the role of civil society
in the framework of global governing practices of political mediation today?
What is the impact of immaterial and affective labour for practices of
migration and the reconfiguration of the global economy of biopolitical
production? What projects of self constitution emerge from practices of
refusal and exodus? How has the movement reposed the question of the
autonomy of the political in the midst of a crisis of representation? Is
mapping the best tool for expressing horizontal structures of cooperation
and technologies of the common?

None of the initiatives present at neuro will offer a
one-size-fits-all solution to global wrongs. However when taken
together it is imagined that they will exhibit the power of
generating communicable ideas out of small, laboratory contexts
that are embedded within different environments and in dialogue
with one another.

NEURO will be a major opportunity for forming creative
alliances - within a coherent discursive field - between all those
that share the aspiration to raise theory and activity to a level
adequate to the practice of digital generations.

TOPICS
NEURO is organized around seven major topics, that each constitute an area
for  debates on different levels and in different formats. Various input and
output devices will be attached to these topics.''

  * SPECTACLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Scaling the summits: esf, wsf, wsis - Multi-stakeholder ideology and
global governance scenarios - Snares of inclusion, pitfalls of
political mediation and the development discourse

* TRANSITIONS OF LABOR
Outsourcing and lean production - The becoming migrant of labor -
Cognitive labor and industries of affect - Division and recomposition:
the biopolitical network of immaterial labor

* FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
Third generation wall and wireless lager - Management, mobility and
post-human rights - Local and remote control

* CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION AND POLITICS OF SPACE
Mapping, mobile devices, games - Resisting virtual regimes  -
Protest in the non-protest

* SOCIAL ONTOLOGIES OF OPEN SOURCE
The collapse of techno- idealism  - Hyper-alienation and property
out of control  - Ethics of open images and imagination

* FORMATION AND INFORMATION
Educational projects in networking environments - Knowledge
production, general intellect and the crisis of learning - Strategies
of self-valorization from do-it-yourself to everyone-is-an-expert

* CONSTITUTIVE PRACTICES
Ad-hoc-networking and virtual organizing - Escape, exodus and
refusal - Hijacking speech: multilingualism beyond identity and unity

SEE ALSO

http://d-a-s-h.org
http://www.muffathalle.de
http://www.kein.org
http://www.generation-online.org
http://www.incommunicado.info

CONTACT
neuro at kein.org

HISTORY
NEURO (networking europe) is the next version of the
makeworlds festival, which for the first time took place in
October, 2001.

AUTHORS
Arianna Bove, Erik Empson, Susanne Lang, Geert Lovink,
Florian Schneider, Soenke Zehle

SPONSORS
NEURO -- Networking europe is designed, organised and realized
in the framework of the Europewide Internet-platform D-A-S-H
that was set up in the summer of 2002 with the support of the
EU-Commission and the Federal Youth Ministry in order to support
young people in realising media projects and initiatives against
racism and exclusion. D-A-S-H will host a five days workshop on
computer games after the NEURO event. Thanks to:
Muffathalle. LHM, JFF, Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation & BpB.