.
__________
Jan van Eyck Event
__________
Saturday 29 – Sunday 30 September 2007
Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search
engine
— research conference initiated by Metahaven Design Research; curated
by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Gon Zifroni;
supported by Institut Français des Pays-Bas, Amsterdam, NL; City of
Maastricht, NL.
— gallery space Jan van Eyck Academie
— book tickets before 27 September at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
__________
Florian Cramer, Jodi Dean, Frédéric Martel, Ingmar Weber, Isabelle
Stengers, Bureau d’Études, Metahaven, Tsila Hassine, Open Search,
Michael Zimmer, Richard Rogers, Florian Schneider, Maurits de Bruijn,
Sabine Niederer, André Nusselder
Quaero: isn’t that the search engine that former French president
Jacques Chirac declared to be the European challenge to Google? A
public alternative to Silicon Valley-born commercial search engines,
funded by the French state, in service of the public good, in the
true tradition of the grand projet? An information machine capable of
reclaiming European language and intellectual heritage in the age of
globalization?
No. Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and
research labs working together on multimedia and web search projects.
It is a state-sponsored effort to stimulate private French
technological competitiveness.
But still, the issues that the idea of Quaero has raised – since its
public launch by the former French president – constitute a
formidable challenge. Internet search engines are political projects
proper if only because they give and take power; they represent
science, technology, (trans)national politics, private enterprise,
culture, territoriality and language in ever different combinations.
On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in
collaboration with the Maison Descartes, Institut Français des Pays-
Bas, organizes the Forum on Quaero, taking the concept of the search
engine as a pubic project as a starting point.
Search engines’ indexation methods inevitably lead to moments of
inclusion and exclusion (sometimes by hands-on censorship). Search
engines closely monitor their users’ behaviour and offer additional
services, retrieving and storing increasing amounts of private
information from them. The majority of web search is carried out
through only a few, very large corporate search engines which
communicate ideas about their role in the world via their brand
identities. These may lead to distorted impressions of what the
commercial search engine as a institution really entails. This
conference aims to bridge the gap between politics, policies and
practices in the field of web search. Some questions:
• What are the politics of the structure and image of search engines
and their technologies?
• To what extent have search engines like Google, which started from
the ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of
political bias? Can we envisage scenarios for the search engine as a
public domain institution?
• What kind of hierarchy (if any) should be implemented when deciding
what should go into a search engine’s database, and what is left out?
• Can contemporary web practices tackle the conventional static
models used to archive and present (institutional) concepts of
cultural heritage and democracy?
• Collaborative and participatory methods are increasingly placing
the Demos as the force that structures information. Can we work
towards a ‘politics of code & categorization’ that allows plural
interpretations of data to coexist and enrich each other?
• How can concepts of digital and networked European cultural
heritage reflect the political and social issues related to Europe’s
changing borders?
The Forum encourages and facilitates audience participation; it is
meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions
for the search engine.
__________
Programme
Saturday 29 September
11:00 – 11:10
Welcome by Florian Cramer (moderator)
11:10 – 11:15
Intro
11:15 – 11:45
Michael Zimmer
12:15 – 12:45
Florian Schneider
12:50 – 13:50
Lunch
13:50 – 14:35
Metahaven
14:40 – 15:00
Tsila Hassine
15:05 – 15:35
Ingmar Weber
15:35 – 16:00
Break
16:30 – 17:10
Respondents: Isabelle Stengers, Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer,
André Nusselder
17:10 – 18:30
Forum Part One
Round Table with all speakers, respondents and audience
18.30 >
Drinks and dinner
Sunday 30 September
10:00 – 10:10
Welcome by Florian Schneider (moderator)
10:10 – 10:15
Intro
10:15 – 10:45
Bureau d’Études
10:50 – 11:20
Frédéric Martel
11:25 – 11:55
Richard Rogers
12:00 – 13:00
Lunch
13:00 – 13:30
Florian Cramer
13:35 – 14:05
Open Search
14:10 – 14:40
Jodi Dean
14:45 – 15:15
Break
15:15 – 15:55
Respondents: Isabelle Stengers, Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer,
André Nusselder
15:55 – 17:30
Forum Part Two
Round Table with all speakers, respondents and audience, moderated by
Florian Schneider
17:30
Drinks – End
Admission
EUR 25 for 2 days, including lunch, dinner, drinks and publication.
Registration
By e-mail to Anne Vangronsveld: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Payments
SNS Bank, account no.: 858 2324 05
Stichting Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
IBAN: NL64 SNSB 0858 2324 05
BIC: SNSB NL 2A
Please put FORUMONQUAERO on your payment.
To be sure of a seat, we kindly ask you to submit your payment before
27 September 2007.
Additional programme information, press information
Metahaven Design Research: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: +31 (0)6 24276797 / +31 (0)6 48316543
__________
Speakers’ biographies in alphabetical order
Maurits de Bruijn (respondent) is a graphic designer working on a
variety of web concepts, which combine distinct visual identities
with an experimental scripting and engineering architecture. De
Bruijn criticizes the consequences that major search engines and
their indexing mechanisms force on the scripting architecture of web
sites. De Bruijn teaches information design and interface design at
ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem.
Bureau d’Études (speaker) is a Paris-based media collective founded
in 1998, comprising the artist duo Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier
Fourt. Using complex graphic tables conceived for the internet, they
map various hidden global structures of finance and world governance,
formalising patterns and connections through scientific and
informational exactitude.
Florian Cramer (speaker, moderator) is Media Design course director
of the Piet Zwart Institute. He was junior lecturer in Comparative
Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Cramer has published papers
in the fields of code poetry, comparative studies in the literature
and the arts, modernism, text theory, literature and computing; he
collaborated on the www.runme.org Software Art repository and edited
the Unstable Digest of code poetry. His German PhD thesis is called
Exe.cut[up]able Statements.
Jodi Dean (speaker) is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and
William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has authored or
edited 8 books, including Publicity’s Secret: How technoculture
capitalizes on democracy (2002) and Zizek’s Politics (2006).
Tsila Hassine (speaker) is a media artist and web programmer. She
completed BScs in Mathematics and Computer Science and spent 2003 at
the New Media department of the HGK Zürich. In 2004 she joined the
Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she pursued an MA in Media
Design, until graduating in June 2006 with Google randomizer Smoogle.
Hassine is a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie.
Frédéric Martel (speaker) is a writer, journalist and a researcher/
professor at Sciences Po-Paris. He is author of 5 books, including
The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 and De la
culture en Amérique (an overview on the American culture and art
policy system in the U.S.). From 2001 to 2005, he was the head of the
French cultural and academic services in the French Embassy in the
U.S. He is now the editor of nonfiction.fr, a new website dedicated
to books and ideas.
Metahaven (speaker) is a design research collective based in
Amsterdam and Brussels. It consists of Daniel van der Velden, Vinca
Kruk and Gon Zifroni. Their work focuses on visual identity and the
political, assigning key importance to the role of conflict in
relation to the design of institutions in the era of globalization.
Sabine Niederer (respondent) is managing director of the Institute of
Network Cultures in Amsterdam. She recently co-founded the Digital
Methods Initiative, a group of researchers, programmers and designers
dedicated to researching and visualizing ‘natively digital’ objects
of study, such as the tag, the thread and the link.
André Nusselder (respondent) is a philosopher. Last year he finished
his PhD thesis at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, in which he
investigated the role of fantasy in the virtual worlds created by new
media technologies: Interface-Fantasy. Weary of academic commentary
and conformism, he is now trying to develop different ways to write
on philosophical issues.
Open Search (speaker), by Erik Borra and Koen Martens, is a peer-to-
peer project whereby people mutually form a search engine without the
intervention of central servers or a central actor. The motivation
for this project is the censorship and manipulation by major
multinational corporations (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). Koen Martens
is a programmer, hacker, organiser, and the treasurer of GroenLinks
The Hague section. Erik Borra graduated in artificial intelligence
and is now involved in the Digital Methods Initiative. The Open
Search project is scheduled to be launched in 2008.
Richard Rogers (speaker) is Head of New Media at the University of
Amsterdam, and director of the Govcom.org Foundation, a group that
develops info-political devices for the web. Previously, Rogers
worked as Senior Advisor to Infodrome, the Dutch Governmental
Information Society initiative. He has also worked as Research Fellow
in Design and Media at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and as a Researcher
in Technology Assessment at the Science Center Berlin (WZB) and in
Strategic Computing in the Public Sector at Harvard University (JFK
School).
Florian Schneider (speaker, moderator) is a filmmaker based in
Munich. He has been involved in a wide range of projects dealing with
the implications of post-modern border regimes on a theoretical as
well as a practical level. He is one of the initiators of the
campaign kein mensch ist illegal at Documenta X in 1997 and
subsequent projects such as the ‘no border network’ and the online-
platform kein.org. He is a member of the PhD programme in research
architecture at Goldsmiths College, London, and teaches theory at the
art academy in Trondheim.
Isabelle Stengers (respondent) teaches philosophy at the Université
Libre de Bruxelles. Her interests centre around the constructive
adventure of modern sciences and the crucial challenge of what she
calls an ‘ecology of practices’, as a condition for embedding our
many diverging scientific practices in a democratic and demanding
environment. She has written numerous books, among which, translated
in English, Order out of Chaos, with Ilya Prigogine and Power and
Invention. Situating Science, and The Invention of Modern Science.
Ingmar Weber (speaker) is a postdoc in information retrieval at the
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. His PhD
thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany
deals with efficient data structures for and applications of a more
interactive search engine called CompleteSearch. Ingmar is generally
interested in alternative search engines and runs an informal seminar
on ‘Cool stuff on the web’.
Michael Zimmer (speaker) is the Microsoft Fellow at the Information
Society Project at Yale Law School for 2007-2008. His PhD The Quest
for the Perfect Search Engine: Values, Technical Design, and the Flow
of Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility, investigates how the
quest for the ‘perfect search engine’ empowers the widespread capture
of personal information flows across the Internet, threatening the
ability to engage in online social, cultural and intellectual
activities free from oversight, thereby bearing on the values of
privacy, autonomy, and liberty.
____________
The weekly programme can be viewed at: www.janvaneyck.nl
If you have any questions regarding this newsletter, please contact
Kim Thehu: [EMAIL PROTECTED] / +31 (0)43.350.37.21
If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please send an e-
mail, reference ‘no newsletter’, to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
______________
Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein 1
6211 KM Maastricht
The Netherlands
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
t +31 (0) 43.350.37.37
f +31 (0) 43.350.37.59
http://www.janvaneyck.nl
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