[Reader-list] Event Announcements--Lectures at the Centre for Internet and Society

[Sanchia de Souza]

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, invites you to two 
lectures this weekend. On Friday, 27 March, Patrice Riemens will speak 
on 'The Dark Face of Google', and on Saturday, 28 March, Emma Ota will 
speak on 'Technology and the Mediation of Place'.

'The Dark Face of Google'
==========================

* Talk by Patrice Riemens

* Date and Time
27 March 2009; 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm


The extraordinary rise of Google Inc. from a 'confidential' search site
in the late nineties, the heydays of Altavista, to its present preminent
status on the internet, has attracted a lot of attention. The admirers
see Google as the incarnation of things to come, not only in information
retrieval & management, and not even on the Internet only, but in the
economy and society as a whole. The nay-sayers variously view Google as
a flattening behemoth of digital information, or as a cultural war
machine, bent on the Americanisation of the planet, and generally as a
mendacious commercial monopoly pretending to 'do no evil' while
hypocritically promoting open source, access, and life in general.

Outside this discussion stand an ever growing mass of millions of users
who ask no questions, profess neither admiration or hatred (and if so,
rather the former), but are happy to use the search engine and the many
other services provided by Google. That they hereby gladly if
unwittingly contribute to reinforcing the assets of Google, in the words
of Yann Moulier Boutang, "the only company in the world that is able to
make 14 million people work for it at any given moment, for free", is
one of the many starkly under-lighted aspects of this Internet giant's
operative mode.

'The Dark Face of Google' is the title of the book written two years ago
by the Italian Ippolita Collective, which Patrice Riemens is currently
translating. Ippolita's brief is neither eulogizing nor demonising
Google, but to understand it, especially in its less advertised aspects.
Their aim is to educate Google's users, not to wean them away from it,
and to politicise the discussion about search, digital services, and the
management of information and knowledge in general. Patrice Riemens will
discuss a few points in this context.

* The ways in which Google determines, undermines, or enforces existing
power and knowledge structures

* The Google Books Project and how it reinforces IPR tyranny

* Google's local policies and how they affect fundamental civil liberties

This talk, like Ippolita's book, is intended as a general, informed
introduction to an issue that has been insufficiently discussed, due to
media hype, and the apparent innocuousness of a readily available,
extremely fast and effective, free, Internet service.

* Speaker

Patrice Riemens is a social geographer by education and a private
intellectual and internet activist by choice. He is a promoter of Open
Knowledge and Free Software, and has been involved as a "FLOSSopher" (a
'philosopher' of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movements) at
the Asia Source and Africa Source camps, held to promote FLOSS among
non-governmental organisations. He is a member of the Dutch hackers'
group Hippies from Hell.

He has formerly worked with De Waag Center for Old and New Media, an
institute housed in an old castle in Amsterdam, on the cutting edge of
technology, culture, education and industry. Patrice has also been on
the staff of Multitudes, a French philosophical, political and artistic
monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang.

-----

Technology and the Mediation of Place
======================================

* Talk by Emma Ota

* Date and Time
28 March 2009; 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

When mediated space surrounds us and our sense of place is increasingly 
constructed through technology, how do we locate ourselves? Challenging 
notions of location and locality, Emma Ota will present an overview of 
two years of research into the mediation of place through technology and 
the developments of media art in Asia.

We carry many locations with us, virtual, physical, psychological and 
cultural locations which have a complex relation to each other; this 
presentation will consider the impact of new media upon the construction 
of these locations and how they interact with each other, as these 
technologies increasingly become part of the reality of our located 
experience, no longer separate apparatus, not merely a portal to 
elsewhere but part of our encounter of place.

When identity, community and culture are formulated upon mediated 
experiences we are led back to Benjamin’s discussion of the loss of 
aura, debating what meaning can still lie in the original; yet, 
arguably, such an original state has never existed, all phenomena 
encountered and assimilated through one form of mediation or another. 
But to be mediated is to transform and, as Heidegger has demonstrated, 
technology presents an enframing of its content, which may lead to new 
revealings but also a loss of that which lies beyond the frame. We have 
perhaps reached a stage where we can no longer comment upon mediated 
localities, but must turn to the localities of mediation.

These are just some of the critical debates which Ota has been 
investigating in her research. While pursuing theoretical research into 
this topic, Ota has also followed studies in Japan, Korea, China, 
Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia in an examination of new 
media art provision and development in East/South East Asia. 
Interviewing artists, curators, theorists etc. over the course of a 
year, a large body of documentation has been accumulated which will be 
presented as a small glimpse into the new media condition of the region.

* Speaker

Emma Ota is a curator and researcher based in Tokyo, the Director of 
Dislocate, Project for Art, Technology and Locality, and a Researcher at 
Musashino Art University, Department of Visual Imaging and Sciences. Her 
practices focus upon media arts and international exchange. She has 
worked for the media arts organization Trampoline, based in Germany and 
the UK and co-curated the Radiator Festival for Art and Technology in 
2005. She initiated the project Traversing Territories, fostering 
collaboration between students and young artists in Japan and the UK 
(which has since continued annually). In 2006 she established the 
project Dislocate for art, technology and locality which brings together 
international artists and experts in the discussion and debate of the 
role of new media in relation to our surrounding environment.

Ota is guest curator at Ginza Art Lab, an independent artist run space 
and was also co-curator of Space Rabi Adesso, Koenji in 2008. Ota is 
highly concerned with promoting international cross-cultural 
communication between children and is co-founder of Inter-play, an 
organization which runs collaborative workshops and projects between 
children in Japan and other countries around the world.

Other projects have included ‘The Moon’, a groundbreaking contemporary 
art exhibition of Japanese and UK artists held in the historic gardens 
of Kodaiji Temple, Kyoto, and ‘A Gift to Those who Contemplate the 
Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling’, an artist in residency 
exchange project with participant artists Erika Tan (UK) and Mio Shirai 
(Japan).

As a researcher Ota is investigating the development of media arts in 
Asia and its relation to specific social and cultural contexts, in 
particular ideas of place, these investigations have led her to China, 
Korea, India, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. For more 
information please see www.dis-locate.net and www.eonsbetween.net.

=========================================================================

* Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 
14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

* Map

For a map, please see link: http://tinyurl.com/apltcb.

* Contact
Sanchia de Souza (Email sanchia at cis-india.org / call +91 80 4092 6283)

-- 
Sanchia de Souza
Publications Manager
Centre for Internet and Society
Email: sanchia at cis-india.org