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Sunday, November 13, 2005

Posted 12:39 PM by Anurag

World Information City events

World-Information City

Global Information Landscapes and Urban Transformations

World-Information City is a one-week programme of events addressing
global issues of intellectual property and technology in conjunction
with changing urban landscapes.

Held at India's IT metropolis Bangalore, World-Information City is a
cooperative project of the Institute of New Culture Technologies/t0
(Vienna), Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam), ALF (Bangalore),
Mahiti (Bangalore) and l ocal partners.

The programme brings together researchers, artists and activists from
Europe and South Asia. It consists of a conference, workshops, an
exhibition, a public campaign, and a series of musical and art
events based on electronic media, and has been produced with the
financial assistance of the EU's EU-India Cross Cultural Programme.

For more details, see http://world-information.org/wio

WORLD-INFORMATION CITY CONFERENCE

Dates: 17 – 18 November, 2005
Venue: Cubbon Park Auditorium

The conference segment of World Information City brings together panels,
discursive and research based presentations and conversations on
“Information” and the “City” as societal and political realities, with a
particular emphasis on their interrelationships. We hope by doing so we are
able to speak not only to the broad themes of information, society, politics
and history but also to the concrete realities of “World Information Cities”
such as Bangalore.

Information - by which we mean the gamut of practices and processes of
knowing and making known the world - can also be seen as that constellation
of embodied intellectual labour, accumulated cultural capital and evolving
knowledge systems that play a key part in the maintenance of the fabric of
contemporary existence. In particular, the increasing importance of
information in all its social expressions is becoming manifest in physical
environments, and above all, in the shaping of urban spaces. The power
structures that shape information as “intellectual property” are impacting
more and more on the design of urban environments, often unhinging notions
of social equality and giving rise to practices of disobedience.

But while information and its interaction with urban environments are partof everyday experience, it remains a grossly under-theorized category.
World-Information City and the conference that is placed at its culmination
is an effort on our part to inaugurate a set of discussions that we hope
will inform future work in this area as well as contribute to debates within
the public domain.

The conference aims to initiate reflections on the histories of different
information regimes and on the transformations of urban spaces in the
emerging global information economy. It looks at the realities of
intellectual property, surveillance and censorship and at efforts to counter
them, and discusses the founding and sustaining of the “commons” of
information, considering ways in which practices of knowledge uphold,
transgress or subvert governing protocols of social, cultural and political
life.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, 17 November

10:15 – 11:15             Welcome – Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum,
Bangalore)

Statement of Partnership – Paul Keller (Waag Society, Amsterdam)

World-Information.Org (Introduction) – Konrad Becker (Institute for New
Culture Technologies, Vienna)

Official Opening – Thetis Tsitidou (EU-India Programme)

Faultlines Considering Fissures in Information and Society. Shuddhabrata
Sengupta (Researcher-Practitioner, Artist, Writer, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) –
Keynote Presentation

11.15 - 11.30             Tea break

Global Information Landscapes and Urban Transformations in Asia

11.30 - 13.00 Title.
Solly Benjamin (Urbanist, CASSUM, Bangalore) – Presentation

13.00 - 14.00             Lunch break

14.00 - 16.00 Cyborgs and Cyber Cities How City Space and Labouring get
inflected by Information in Bangalore and Delhi.
Nishanth Shah (Research Scholar, CSCS, Bangalore), Iram Ghufran
(Researcher-Practitioner, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Panel

16:00 - 16.30             Tea break

                                    Implications of IP on Knowledge /
Culture Production

16: 30 - 18.00 The Organization of Knowledge and Culture Production.
Felix Stalder (Media Theorist, Vienna/Zurich) – Presentation
Urban Agents – Hybrid Spaces.
Eric Kluitenberg (Media Theorist, De B alie, Amsterdam) –Presentation

18:00 - 19:30 Trouble in the Archives.
Shahid Amin (Historian, Delhi University), Shuddabrata Sengupta and Ravikant
(Sarai-CSDS) – Conversation

Friday, 18 November


10.30 - 12:00 Underground Raids and Multiplex Screenings The Turbulent World
of Entertainment, IP, Regulations and Real Estate in Delhi.
Jawahar Raja (Legal Practitioner and Researcher, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi), Anand
Vivek Taneja (Researcher-Practitioner, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Panel

12:00 -12:15                         Tea break

                                    Technologies of Information Control

12:15 - 13:45 Surveillance, Security and Social Sorting in the City.
David Lyon (Historian, International Surveillance Project, Queens
University, Kingston, Ontario) – Keynote Speech

13:45 - 14:30                        Lunch Break

14:30 - 16:00 News you can use Toward Political and Personal Ecologies of
Information in Society.
Subramanya Sastry (Software Programmer, Open Sourc e Activist, Sarai-CSDS,
Delhi), Taha Mahmoud (Researcher-Practitioner, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi) – Panel

16:00 - 16:45 The Scanner at the Border.
Florian Schneider (Media Activist, ‘No Borders Campaign’ / ‘No One is
Illegal’, Munich), Felix Stalder, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta – Conversation

16:45 - 17:00                        Tea break

17:00 - 18:30 The Collateral Damage of Breaking News.
Arundhati Roy (Writer, Delhi), Lawrence Liang and Shuddhabrata Sengupta –
Closing Conversation

Conference Editors: Konrad Becker (t0 – Institute for New Culture
Technologies, Vienna), Lawrence Liang (ALF, Bangalore) and Shuddhabrata
Sengupta (Sarai-CSDS, Delhi)

Conference live streams: Netbase, Vienna http://www.netbase.org/t0)
Point Ephémère, Paris (http://e-ngo.org <http://e-ngo.org/> )

World-Information City Exhibitions

1.    World-Infostructure Exhibition

World-Infostructure Exhibition and Guided Tours
World-Infostructure visualizes subject matter linked to various aspects of
the information society based on research by World-Information.Org on global
communication networks, the global media market, global content channels,
global brain ware, global data bodies, global info rights and digital
security. Numerous information displays illustrate issues associated with
the development of digital media, new communication tools, and sophisticated
technical instruments e.g. the increasing use of biometric devices. Special
dis plays will be developed relating to local issues of the World-Information
City Bangalore.

Date: 14 – 19 November
Opening hours: 09:00 – 18:00
Venue: Cubbon Park Huts

Opening
Date: 14 November
Time: 17:00 – 21:00
Venue: Cubbon Park Huts

2.   World-Information City Exhibition

The exhibition is a dispersed show across different sites from Russell
Market in Shivajinagar through Tasker Town to Cunningham Road. It is
designed in such a way as to facilitate site-specific works, but also to
allow for interaction with different publics. The exhibition is also
stretched between these three points in the city (Russell Market, Cunningham
road, Cubbon Park ) so that the experiences, sights, sounds and smells along
the way are part of the show, it is thus simultaneously being informed and
broadened by the media and art projects. Guided Tours through the exhibition
offered on demand.

Date: 15 – 19 November
Time: 11:00 – 20:00
Venue: Dispersed between Russell Market in Shivajinagar through Tasker Town
to Cunningham Rd.

Opening
Date:14 November
Time: 18:00
Venue: Centre for Film and Drama, 5th Floor, Sona Towers, 71, Millers Road

Projects:

Centre for film and drama
5th Floor, Sona Towers, 71, Millers Road
· Age/Sex/Location - Raqs Media Collective
· Now Showing the Cinematograph Act, Alternative Law Forum
· No_des, Sarai Med ia Lab
· Rhizome(working title), Sarai Media Lab
· Why I am so blaise, Rahima Begum
· Dancing on Glass, Ram Ganesh (8:00 pm, 18th November)

Colab Art and Architecture Gallery, 202, Shah Sultana, Cunningham Road
· "Down the road" (Sheela Gowda)
· "Melrose, Bangalore" (Christoph Schäfer, sponsored by Max Mueller Bhavan
Bangalore)

Lady Jehangair Kothari Memorial Hall, Queen's Circle (Queens Road and
Cunningham Road intersection)
· "Makrolab – Electronic Media monitoring" (Marko Peljhan)
· “On voice culture and automatisme” (Navin Thomas)

Lawyer's Collective, 1st Floor, No. 4A, MAH Road, Off Park Road. Tasker
Town, Shivajinagar
· "World Info City TV" (Shaina Anand)

Elgin Talkies, Shivaji Road
· "Electricity as network" (Ashok Sukumaran)

Location
·            "Straigth 8 - Film Tales Part I" (Ayisha Abraham)
·            “The square and the round god – an idea for a universal
trajectory (in the manner of a proposal for 12 German pop songs)" (Hilary
Koob-Sassen)
·            "Untempered – a soundscape installation" (Rajivan Ayyappan)

Theatre Play “Dancing On Glass”
Date: 18 November
Time: 20:00
Venue: Centre for Film and Drama

"Melrose, Bangalore"
Christoph Schäfer (sponsored by Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore)

Exhibition Curators: Ayisha Abraham, Namita Malhotra, Kiran Subbaiah


"Revolution Non Stop" (German with English subtitles)
Christoph Schäfer (Cinema-room at Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore)

World-Information City Campaign Projects

Dates: 14 – 20 November
Venue: Public Space – Bangalore Streets

Billboard Designs, Posters and Stickers in the Public Sphere:
Along the lines of the overall topic “What do stricter intellectual property
laws mean for the public, for digital ecology, accessibility of knowledge,
and also for the future of urban spaces?” World-Information.Org will be
presenting the following projects:

“Delinquents” by Ullrike Brückner (Berlin):
Portraits of “delinquents” accused of digital crimes point at the twofold
character of intellectual and cultural property.
(Website: http://www.musterfirma.org <http://www.musterfirma.org/> )

“Good questions” by Sebastian Luetgert (Berlin):
9 Questions central to the problematic character of digital property.
(Website: http://www.textz.com <http://www.textz.com/> )

“Drawings” by Elffriede (Vienna):
A series of drawings combined with text questioning the viewers about their
point of view or making them conscious about questions referring to the
theme.
(Website: http://www.elffriede.net <http://www.elffriede.net/> )

“You are free” by Paula Roush (London)
This project consists of invading the everyday space of advertising, whose
production and consumption cycle is dominated by a regime of intellectual
property known as ‘copyright’ with an infiltration from the parallel
production regime of copyleft.
(Website: http://www.msdm.org.uk <http://www.msdm.org.uk/> )

“Who owns your knowledge?” by Dominik Hruza (Vienna):
… and who benefits from the information you produce?

“United We Stand” by 0100101110101101.ORG:
A band of media artists, 0100101110101101.ORG use non-conventional
communication tactics to obtain the largest visibility with the minimal
effort. Past works include staging a hoax i nvolving a complete made-up
artist, ripping off the Holy See, and spreading a computer virus as a work
of art.
(Website: http://0100101110101101.org <http://0100101110101101.org/> )

World-Information City Guided Tours

"Community-Radio Project Number 20"
with Ashish Sen
Date: 15 November
Time: 08:30 – 17:30
Location: Villages in Karnataka

This radio project started it’s work in Budikote (Kolar district, Karnataka)
in 1999 with a needs assessment study, findings of which revealed that the
community did want an information centre, which would give them timely and
locally relevant information, through audio, a medium which they were
comfortable with. With this end in mind began a spate of training sessions
for volunteers conducted by experts from All India Radio on programming
techniques. As an outcome of these training sessions volunteers began to
make programmes on topics such as sericulture, organic farming techniques,
child and reproductive health, ins urance etc.
In Partnership with VOICES (http://www.voicesforall.org <http://www.voicesforall.org/> )
Web site: http://www.voicesforall.org/communityradio/namma_dhwani.htm

“Cities within Cities: an intellectual turbulence within a global ideal”
with Solly Benjamin
Date/time: 16 November
Time: 08:00 – 15:00 (Departure: Cubbon Park – Mahadevpura)
Location: Bangalore

A travel through several contested landscapes in Bangalore. Some of these,
in Bangalore’s eastern periphery, will be huge territories serviced with
high grade infrastructure dedicated to IT companies. Their adjoining areas
are both reside ntial and home based manufacturing but contrast in the very
low levels of infrastructure and services. Such marginality is only
surfacial as deeper lie complex political contestation in the way of day to
day “encroachments” as urbanization engulfs.

Attendance limited – advance registration at projects@mahiti.org

Workshops

Economy of the commons
With Felix Stalder
Date: 19 November
Time: 16:00 – 18:00
Venue: Cubbon Park Auditorium

This workshop will focus on the heterogeneity of commons-based peer
production. Taking software production as a starting point, we will examine
the different actors – commercial companies, NGOs, academics and students,
as well as individuals – who are able to sustain a common project (the
development of a particular code base) despite the diverging, and possibly
even conflicting, agendas they pursue by doing so.

Participants of this workshop will gain insight into the emerging economy of
the commons, helping them to better devise strategies to act within it.
Participants are encouraged to contribute their own experiences as actors on
open source projects as the empirical reference points for the workshop.

Connected-Programme (Presentation, Waag Society)
With Floor Van Spaendonck
Date: 19 November
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Venue: Cubbon Park Auditorium
Website: http://spresearch.waag.org <http://spresearch.waag.org/>

The presentation will focus on the Connected! LiveArt programme wherein Waag
Society worked with several artists and communities on networked (connected)
art. In the programme the collaboration and communities-building aspect was
emphasized and also represent ed part of the research.

The programme had four nested components: Projects, Artists-in-Residence,
Sentient Creatures Lecture Series and Anatomic, a weekly gathering of young
media artists interested in networked composition.

Open sound workshops
            Date: 15 – 18 November
            Time: 09:00 – 18:00


1. Full disclosure and digital art – why programming matters
With Chris Kummerer

This workshop will demonstrate and introduce free software programmes. Some
of them were designed specially for the demands of musicians and
video-artists, whereas others – though highly useful for artistic production
– weren't developed with the digital/media artist in mind. The aim of this
workshop is to show that in many cases open-source – in contrast to its
commercial counterparts – is more useful when it comes to combining the
potentialities of different programmes. We will further concentrate on
technical skills, working with source code, communicating special demands to
programmers, and especially on the implications of licensed software on the
creative use of programmes.

Participants will be able to gather experience and skills with the
introduced tools in a performance during the Closing Event of
World-Information City. Additionally, a project developed in the workshop
will be presented in the Closing Event.

2. Interactive digital audio workshop
With Ralf Traunsteiner

In the centre of interest is “Pure Data” (Pd), oriented along the lines of
graphics and objects, as means for the production of interactive
audiovisuals in real time. Pd is an open-source software and will be
provided on different platforms (Linux, OS-X, Win). Pd is a real time signal
processing system with many extensions and interfaces thus supporting
networking and interaction, which makes it an useful tool for experimental
audio, multimedia and installation artists. Participants from India will be
provided with a first overview on graphical DSP-Programming with Pd. After a
short introduction to the basics of digital audio-signal-processing we will
concentrate on the practice-oriented intermediation of production,
improvisation and live presentation of electronic music.

Participants in the workshop will gather experience and skills in the field
of networked multimedia performances during a joint “Pd-Network-Jam”
presented in the Closing Event of World-Information City. Additionally a
project developed in the workshop will be presented during the Closing
Event.

3. FOSS
With Par ag Goel, Dinesh, Abhas and Edward Crompton
Dates: 14/15 November
Time: 9:00 – 18:00
Venue: Mahiti

The workshop has four main sessions.

a. FOSS for Desktops.
Parag Goel who manages the Evolution and OpenOffice projects at Novell,
India, will be conducting this session.

b. FOSS for Management Information Systems.
Dinesh from Servelots (http://servelots.com/ <http://servelots.com/> ) will
conduct this session.

c. FOSS for Servers.
Abhas from DeeprootLinux (http://www.deeproot.co.in/
<http://www.deeproot.co.in/> ) will conduct this
session.

d. FOSS for Open Publishing.
Edward Crompton from Mahiti will conduct this session.

4. Electronic Media Monitoring
With Marko Peljhan
Date: 15 November
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
Venue: Jehangir Kothari Hall

Electronic Media Monitoring captures and analyses signals of global
communication streams. The basic setup of the electronic media monitoring
unit provides an all purpose scanning and electronic interception
environment covering various bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Electronic Media Monitoring targets satellite based media on the widest
possible geographical basis, satellite based media programming, rx
operations in UHF and L-band comsat areas, satellite tracking, VHF satellite
rx-tx, video KU-band reception and analysis, experimental satcom project
development and other forms of electronic communication.

Closing Event

Date/time: 19 November, 2005, 18:00
Venue: Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan

World-Information City, a week-long transnational programme of events
related to issues of the information society, is wound up in this closing
event that features various forms of artistic and social engagement with
information, including electronic music, open source projects, and the
shortfilm showcase "Thought Thieves".

?         Electronic Music Performance

Ish/dbase
Chris Kummerer
TronStoner

?         Presentation of Open Sound Workshop Results

?         Thought Thieves: Presentation of Winner Projects

Thought Thieves is a short film showcase about corporate appropriation of
knowledge, culture, and creativity. It is a grassroots response to the
Micro$oft propaganda competition of the same name. www.thought-thieves.org <http://www.thought-thieves.org/>
<http://www.thought-thieves.org <http://www.thought-thieves.org/> >

?         Signal Sever
With Marko Peljhan

Signal Sever is the sensor array and processing unit conceptualized by pact
systems which maps the electromagnetic spectrum, processes, transforms it
and sends it back into the ether in many different directions and forms

Venues and locations

Jawahar Bal Bhavan Auditorium, Cubbon Park, Bangalore 560001

Mahiti, #314/1, 2nd Floor, VijayKiran Building, 7th cross, Domlur Layout,
Bangalore 560 071

Alternative Law Forum (ALF), No 4 Ground Floor, 3rd Cross, Vasanthnagar,
Bangalore 560052

Jehangir Kothari Hall, Queens Road, Bangalore

Centre for Film and Drama, Sona Towers, 71 Millers Road, Bangalore

Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, No. 716, C.M.H. Road, Indiranagar 1st
Stage,
Bangalore 560 038

LOGOS:

PARTNERS
EU-India Partners:
- Waag
- Sarai
- t0

Local Partners:
- ALF
- Mahiti
- Goethe Institute
- Voices

SUPPORTERS
1. ECCP
2. EU + disclaimer!
3. Wien Kultur
4. Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore5. BMAA
6. OSI
7. Österreichische Komission für die UNESCO

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