Welcome to all empyre subscribers and, especially, this months
moderators and discussants, Penny Travlou, Smita Kheria, Tiziana
Terranova, Dmytri Kleiner, Adam Hyde, Salvatore Iaconesi, Joss Hands
and Marc Garrett. We have the collective responsibility of welcoming
in 2012, during the year's first monthly theme. For much of the world
2011 was, at best, a challenging year, and 2012 looks like more of the
same. This appears to be a period of socio-economic change as the
shifting tectonic plates of geo-political power grind against one
another. I've never been keen on futurology or fortune-telling but am
confident 2012 will be another year of turbulent events that will have
us end up in a different place to where we started.
In this globalised and highly mediated context, during the month of
January, we wish to focus empyre discussion on how writing and
publishing are currently evolving in the context of global networks.
We wish to engage a debate about open models of writing and
publishing. We hope to gain some insight into how changes in notions
and practices of authorship, media, form, dissemination, intellectual
property and economics affect writing and publishing as well as the
formation of the reader/writerships, communities and social engagement
that must flow from that activity. Specifically, we wish to look at
examples of open publishing, whether they be FLOSS manuals, copyLeft
or CopyFarLeft or other publication models, in order to look at new
methods for knowledge making and distribution. We also wish to
consider how communities of shared-value emerge through such
initiatives and how their members are able to identify themselves to
one another and others.
As usual, the month (the next three weeks) will be structured into
weekly bite sized chunks, each led by a moderator and involving two
discussants. Participants can choose to post to the list at any time
but the discussants for each week will have the opportunity to focus
the debate for that period. We hope that as many empyre subscribers as
possible will feel engaged and contribute to the discussion.
Our guests are, in the order of the weeks they will participate:
Tiziana Terranova lectures and researches cultural studies and new
media at the Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'. She is
the author of Network Culture (Pluto Press, 2004) and has recently
co-edited, with Couze Venn, a special issue of Theory, Culture and
Society on Michel Foucault's recently published courses. She is
currently working on a book about neoliberalism and digital social media.
Dmytri Kleiner describes himself as a Venture Communist. He creates
miscommunication technologies, including deadSwap, Thimbl and R15N and
is the author of the Telekommunist Manifesto. He lives in Berlin and
his url is http://dmytri.info
Simon Biggs is an artist, writer and curator. His work focuses on
interactive systems, new media and digital poetics
(http://www.littlepig.org.uk). He is involved in a number of research
projects, including the EU funded project Developing a Network-Based
Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and
Innovation in Practice (http://www.elmcip.net). He is Professor of
Interdisciplinary Arts, directing the MSc by Research in
Interdisciplinary Creative Practices, at the University of Edinburgh.
Adam Hyde lives in Berlin. In 2007 Adam started FLOSS Manuals, a
community for producing free manuals for free software. Through this
work he also started Booki (a book production platform) and has been
pioneering Book Sprints - a methodology for collaboratively producing
books in 5 days or less. Previously, as an artist, he was 1/2 of r a d
i o q u a l i a, Simpel and other artistic projects engaging open
source and free media.
Salvatore Iaconesi teaches cross media design at “La Sapienza”
University of Rome, at Rome University of Fine Arts and at ISIA Design
in Florence. He is the founder of Art is Open Source and of FakePress
Publishing, focusing on the human beings' mutations through ubiquitous
technologies and networks.
Penny Travlou is a social geographer and ethnographer lecturing in the
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the
University of Edinburgh. Her research currently focuses on studying
emergent network-based creative communities. She is Co-Investigator on
the ELMCIP project.
Marc Garrett is an activist, artist, writer and co-director/founder
(with artist Ruth Catlow) of internet arts collective
http://www.furtherfield.org (since 96) and the Furtherfield Gallery&
social space in London. Through these platforms various contemporary
media arts exhibitions and projects are presented nationally and
internationally. Marc also hosts a weekly media arts radio programme
on Resonance FM, co-edited the publication "Artists Re: thinking
games" and is editing a new publication "Conversations As We Leave The
21st Century". He is currently undertaking a PhD at Birkbeck
University, London.
Joss Hands is a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University where he is
Director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture
(ARCDigital). His research interests are at the intersection of
technology, new media, politics and critical theory. His focus has
been in two main areas. The role of technology in providing an arena
for the expression of dissent and the organisation of resistance
movements and the role of technology in more formal democratic
procedures, specifically the role of the Internet in contributing
towards the development of deliberative democracy. He has recently
completed a book on digital activism, @ is for Activism: Dissent,
Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture, published by Pluto Press.
Smita Kheria is a lawyer and lecturer in law at the University of
Edinburgh. Her focus of interest is intellectual property law and
issues around authorship, especially concerning artists' practices
with new media. Smita is an associate of SCRIPT: the AHRC Research
Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology and is
Supervising editor (Intellectual Property) for SCRIPT-ed, the journal
of Law, Technology& Society.
best
Simon
Simon Biggs
si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK
skype: simonbiggsuk
s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/
http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
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