[spectre] `The Articulation of Protest´

[Geert Lovink]

> OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY WELCOMES
>
> RASMUS FLEISCHER
> to lecture as part of
>
> `The Articulation of Protest´
> A Programme on Some of the Logistics
> of Information and Social Activism Today
>
> Friday, 14 September 2012 / 19:00
> Live audio streaming
>
> Office for Contemporary Art Norway
> Nedre Gate 7
> 0551 Oslo, Norway
> www.oca.no l info at oca.no
>
> OCA welcomes Rasmus Fleischer as speaker next week, on Friday 14  
> September, at 19:00 to lecture about current developments and  
> polemics within ‘social media’ and the reality of a social  
> engagement within these channels. In his analysis, Fleischer will  
> consider how enthusiasm and skepticism towards the internet, may in  
> some cases, be part of the same counter-revolutionary coin. This  
> presentation will be an attempt to understand how speed or its  
> contrary, delay, may become a resource for a deepened critique of  
> our contemporaneity.
>
> Rasmus Fleischer is a Swedish historian and co-founder of Piratbyrån  
> (The Bureau of Piracy), a group closely aligned with the Pirate Bay.  
> He has written extensively on how anti-piracy movements are today  
> fiercely attacking different kinds of search engines solely because  
> they provide links to files which may be copyrighted – with Google  
> among the very few uncontested. Gray zones are fostered by obsolete  
> copyright laws, which according to Fleischer found their golden age  
> roughly between 1800 and 1950 specifically around publications  
> without a revisionary evaluation as to their applications within  
> digital technology – that according to Fleischer, are set out with  
> the purpose to copy digital information. Facing these realities,  
> copyright industries have gone to the level of a draconian defensive  
> creating an environment of juridical surveillance that effectively  
> constitutes net censorship and consequently to one-side licensing  
> deals. In recognising that creative practices ‘thrive in economies  
> where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space  
> and time’, Fleischer maintains that there can never be a question of  
> finding one universal business model for a world without copyright.  
> But then a more urgent question is to be posed – ‘what price we will  
> have to pay for upholding a phantasm of universal copyright?’.
>
> ABOUT THE PROGRAMME
> ‘The Articulation of Protest’ is a programme of two lectures that  
> will look into strategies that have emerged in recent times through  
> actions and communication, and in dialogue or confrontation with  
> existing legislation, with the aim to secure free circulation of  
> information and knowledge in the face of the state's or capital's  
> attempts to control and to commodify them. In doing so, they will  
> explore individual and collective initiatives and other strategic  
> choices, and discuss them in relation to a history of critical  
> organisation, of free speech and activism.
>
> Rasmus Fleisher will be the introductive speaker of the programme,  
> followed by social theorist Alberto Toscano, author of Fanaticism:  
> On the Use of an Idea, on 21 September at OCA at 19:00.
>
> ABOUT THE SPEAKER
> Rasmus Fleischer
> Rasmus Fleischer is a Swedish historian, writer and occasional  
> musician. For nearly a decade, he has been lecturing about the  
> crisis of copyright. He was one of the persons behind Piratbyrån (or  
> The Bureau for Piracy), a group which during its existence (2003–09)  
> tried to actively question the basics of ‘intellectual property’ in  
> the intersections of technology, art and politics. He is the author  
> of the books Musikens politiska ekonomi (The Political Economy of  
> Music, 2012), Boken & Biblioteket (The Book and the Library, 2011)  
> and Postdigitala manifestet (The Postdigital Manifesto, 2009), which  
> is also his PhD thesis at the Institute of Contemporary History at  
> Södertörn University, concerning the motivations behind regulation  
> of sound media during the 20th century. As a historian, Rasmus  
> Fleischer is also investigating the transformations of contemporary  
> fascism.
>
> For more information on the programme, please contact OCA’s press  
> officer Maria Moseng.