[spectre] De Balie Sept 1-3: The Public Desire - in search of new forms of public culture...

[Eric Kluitenberg]

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

------------------------------------

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

-------------------------

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