Connecting People Apart - Events Series

This was published in Mute on June 11, 2012

Events registration (free) and details here -  Contact [email protected]

20 June

Opening presentation – ‘Talk to Me’ with Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (RIXC) with a contribution by Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore). Reception and drinks.
Venue: Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg. 19:30-22:00
Event booking (free)

21 June

‘What Would the Community Say?’ – A public consultation on regional sustainability and participation projects with Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore) in cooperation with DialogN.
Venue: Freiraum, Lüneburg. 13:00-15:00
Event booking (free)

McKenzie Wark book launch and presentation, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International.
Venue: b-books, Berlin. 21:00-23:00
Event booking (free)

22 June

The Community Complex, A Post-Media Lab conference
Participants: Johannes Paul Raether (Basso), McKenzie Wark (The New School, New York), Nishant Shah (Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore), Marcell Mars (MaMa, Zagreb), Tatiana Bazzichelli (transmediale/reSource), Clemens Caspar Mierau (Spackeria/c-base), Pod (CiTiZEN KiNO/XLterrestrials, Berlin/San Francisco), Graswurzel TV, foebud e.v. (Bielefeld), Tactical Technology Collective (Berlin and Bangalore), Freifunk (Berlin). 
Venue: Denkerei, Berlin. 13:00-20:00
Event booking (free)

After conference event: Performative screening - CiTiZEN KiNO (#16): Technotopia / Dystopia : A Social Garden-i-fication Is Elsewhere!
Venue: c-base, Berlin. 22:00
Event booking (free)

23 June

Live Stream/Media Lounge: ‘From Waste to Resource. Recovering Sustainable Attitudes’
Venue: Kulinarisches Kollektiv, Berlin. 17:00-20:00
Event booking (free)

The Post-Media Lab is part of the Lüneburg Innovation Incubator, a major EU project within Leuphana University of Lüneburg, financed by the European Regional Development Fund and co-funded by the German federal state of Lower Saxony.

Full programme details

Events booking (free) – http://pml.eventbrite.co.uk Contact [email protected]

Opening presentation - ‘Talk to Me’ with Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (RIXC) with a contribution by Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore)

Wednesday, 20 June, 19:30-22:00
Venue: Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg
Reception and drinks

Everyone wants someone to talk to. Nowadays, scientists have performed various experiments in order to verify the old assumption that talking to plants makes them grow better. This is a prototype for an interface, which allows talking to plants remotely via the internet. We invite everyone to participate in a collaborative experiment by talking to growing plants using an online remote interface.

‘What Would the Community Say?’ - A public consultation on regional sustainability and participation projects with Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore) in cooperation with DialogN (Lüneburg)

Thursday, 21 June 13:00-15:00
Venue: Freiraum, Lüneburg

Nishant Shah will pass on and upon reflect experiences about the changing face of citizen action in a post-mediatized world. He will be presenting audio-visual material from studies in India and China –  from a 'Global South' perspective – in order to look at the affective circuits of digital technologies and how our current models of development and change fail to address these conditions of being human - because mostly they are targeted at conditions of being a subject. This presentation will be embedded into the discursive context of 'citizen participation' and 'liquid feedback' projects destined for Lüneburg as part of a development region funded for by the EU and EFRE.

Book launch and presentation with McKenzie Wark. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International

Thursday 21 June 21:00-23:00
Venue: b-books, 14 Lübbenerstr, 10997 Berlin

McKenzie Wark appears at b-books to talk about his book on the life and times of the Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street.
McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can …

Organised by The Post Media Lab at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. In collaboration with Mute and b-books

The Community Complex - A Post-Media Lab  conference

Friday, 22 June 2012, 13:00-20:00
Venue: Denkerei, Oranienplatz 2, 10999 Berlin 

13:00-15:00 / Workshop I: Practice 
15:00-15:30 / Pause
15:30-17:30 / Workshop II: Privacy
18:00-20:00 / Evening Panel

Whether you want to have something to do with the ‘community industry’ or not, it has something to do with you. Through its burgeoning expansion, our forms of relating, caring, communicating and collaborating, are being transformed, enclosed, templated and put to work. The most affective components of network culture are rapidly being engineered into ‘product’. Just as virtual space is augmented, real space becomes ever more virtualised, securitised and impoverished. The rise of the network-assembled community has coincided with a radical disinvestment of national and municipal communities in the age of austerity. As services are withdrawn, the ‘community’ itself is enjoined to step into the breach. ‘Community’, in the era of networked neoliberalism, has become both a target of governance as well as of business. 
Beyond the commercial drive which is ‘connecting people apart’, communities of difference are also flourishing in the post-internet age. Reimagining community is not just the preserve of belligerent nationalisms and Web 2.0 but also a long-standing activity of alternative, artistic and political cultures’ responses to commercialisation and industrialisation, from the 17th century puritans and diggers, the artist communes of the 19th century, through to the political squatter scenes of post-68 generation, the hacklabs of the past years and new movements such as Anonymous. The Community Complex will ask how normative forms of sociality and identification are not only produced but also challenged in today’s mashup of the virtual and real, free and waged labour, computational and affectual, real-time and bio-time, as well as minor and molar imaginings of connection. To achieve this we bring together different perspectives and experiences of critically engaging with the new realities of mediatised ‘community’ and its reimagination.

Participants: Johannes Paul Raether (Basso), McKenzie Wark (The New School, New York), Nishant Shah (Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore), Marcell Mars (MaMa, Zagreb), Tatiana Bazzichelli (transmediale/reSource), Clemens Caspar Mierau (Spackeria/c-base), Pod (CiTiZEN KiNO/XLterrestrials, Berlin/San Francisco), Graswurzel TV, foebud e.v. (Bielefeld), Tactical Technology Collective (Berlin and Bangalore).

After conference event: Performative screening - XLterrestrials and PML-present: CiTiZEN KiNO (#16): Technotopia / Dystopia : A Social Garden-i-fication Is Elsewhere!

22:00-late
Venue: c-base, Rungestrasse 20, 10179 Berlin

As much as society appears to be thoroughly seduced by all the technological empowerment in this crash course information + capture age, the flaws, the cracks and all the discontents are beginning to show. In spite of the tsunami of corporate-feeds, gadget trends and heavily wired agendas, a Social Garden-i-fication of on-the-ground communities is underway and determined to grow by any means or hack necessary!

Citizen Kino is an experimental hybrid of public cinema, theater, laboratory and media self-defense.

Live Stream/Media Lounge: 'From Waste to Resource. Recovering Sustainable Attitudes'

Saturday, 23 June 2012, 17:00–20:00
Venue: Kulinarisches Kollektiv, Lausitzer Str.13 (aka Schweizerei), 10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg

A virtual tour through Re-Use Centres from all over the world
Participating Centres are: SCRAP in Portland, Oregon (USA), ReCircle (Brussels / Belgium), Long Beach Depot For Creative ReUse in Long Beach (California / USA), Mini-Scrapbox (Reepham / UK), The Resource Exchange (Philadelphia /USA), Kunst-Stoffe (Berlin / Germany).

In cooperation with Kunst-Stoffe (Berlin), Drap Art (Barcelona) and Les Petites Gourmandises (Berlin)

Link to the original here