NEURO--networking europe

Movements and technologies of the common
Munich, February 26-29, 2004

From February 26th to 29th young artists, filmmakers, musicians, theorists and activists from all over Europe and many other parts of the world will meet at the Muffathalle in Munich for a number of events, speeches, discussions, presentations, performances, concerts and actions reflecting the pulse of the age.

NEURO is not only a conference, nor is it just a fair or a conventional festival. Rather it is a place for collaboration and common production. It's about a critical, connected practice and a practical critique of networking. It will host debates, presentations and reports on the results of ongoing projects and provide an opportunity to discuss new ideas, plan and start common projects.

First of all, NEURO stands for "Networking Europe". Only few weeks before the official eastern enlargement of the European Union, it ill promote the networking of new media initiatives and projects from within Europe; in and outside of the new borders. The central question will concern, at what point young people in Europe join together with one another, where the traces of this association runs and how they can be bundled into creative alliances.

Though not an end in itself, networking is now raising more than ever questions that cannot be answered at straightaway: What does networking actually mean nowadays? What does networking have to do with freedom of movement? How do social movements network? How can technologies be used in ways that create social change on a broader level than the self? How do we conceptualise the common that is created in and through networks whilst not being reducible to them.

Ten years after the start of the internet boom, the crisis of the idea of networks is long overdue. Alongside the collapse of the new markets, the bombastic constructions about media art, media theory and media activism have fallen like a house of cards. Nevertheless, in the ensuing impasse, a new generation of media and networking initiatives have formed and taken onboard the discussion and reflection on everyday life, and new tasks, methods, functions, challenges and perspectives.

About two years after the first make-world festival, NEURO will again interface with current debates around migration and mobility, racism and nationalism, civil society and global mobilisation, networking and new technologies, informatisation and precarious labour, education and control society, common organising, and digital culture.

None of the initiatives present at neuro will offer a one-size-fits-all solution to global wrongs. However when taken together it is imagined that they will exhibit the power of generating communicable ideas out of small, laboratory contexts that are embedded within different environments and in dialogue with one another.

NEURO will be a major opportunity for forming creative alliances - within a coherent discursive field - between all those that share the aspiration to raise theory and activity to a level adequate to the practice of digital generations.

Program, background and more: neuro.kein.org

NEURO topics

NEURO is organized around seven major topics, that each constitute an area for debates on different levels and in different formats. Various input and output devices will be attached to these topics.
SPECTACLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Scaling the summits: esf, wsf, wsis - Multi-stakeholder ideology and global governance scenarios - Snares of inclusion, pitfalls of political mediation and the development discourse
TRANSITIONS OF LABOR
Outsourcing and lean production - The becoming migrant of labor - Cognitive labor and industries of affect - Division and recomposition: the biopolitical network of immaterial labor
FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
Third generation wall and wireless lager - Management, mobility and post-human rights - Local and remote control
CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION AND POLITICS OF SPACE
Mapping, mobile devices, games - Resisting virtual regimes - Protest in the non-protest SOCIAL ONTOLOGIES OF OPEN SOURCE
The collapse of techno-idealism - Hyper-alienation and property out of control - Ethics of open images and imagination
FORMATION AND INFORMATION
Educational projects in networking environments - Knowledge production, general intellect and the crisis of learning - Strategies of self-valorization from do-it-yourself to everyone-is-an-expert CONSTITUTIVE PRACTICES
Ad-hoc-networking and virtual organizing - Escape, exodus and refusal - Hijacking speech: multilingualism beyond identity and unity

NEURO formats

NEURO_SPACE
The center of NEURO will be a collective installation of more than 50 groups, initiatives and projects in the Muffathalle, which will be transformed through presentations, performances and Ad-hoc-productions into a collaborative workspace.
NEURO_TALK
Parallel to this a conference, sheltered in the Cafe of the Muffathalle, will hold lectures, dialogues and discussions on the constitutive practices of civil society, immaterial labour, migration, Open Source, and educational strategies.
NEURO_PITCH
In conjunction with the conference tracks and grouped by topics a number of projects will present their specific approaches and experiences on a small stage in the center of the main hall. NEURO_LOUNGE
At night, NEURO will host concerts, electronic music performances, local and remote DJ'ing and radio programs of participating artists. NEURO_STREAM
NEURO will be accompanied by photo exhibitions, film screenings, live streams, video-jam-sessions, as well as near-to-realtime-encoding and audiovisual archiving.
NEURO_SESSION
NEURO offers many spaces for meetings taking place in a planned or ad-hoc fashion, in secure or unsecure, conform or informal ways, product- or process oriented, as training or strategy meetings.

[Text and images on this site are taken from neuro.kein.org]