From sunny Buffalo, Miami of the North, greetings to you all.
As an East Berlin-born artist I divide my time between Brooklyn and Buffalo
where I enjoy teaching Critical Netcultures at the Department of Media
Study, State University of New York. One of my current web-based projects
"79 Days," co-relates the media coverage of the wars in Kosovo and Iraq.
http://79days.net
My past work engaged with issues of migration, militarized borders, police
violence, historical memory, immigration, and exile. Occasionally I
facilitated events creating networks of productive discontent which mediate
art institutions, educational contexts, the public urban arena as well as
the Internet.
http://molodiez.org
I am also member of the founding collective of the new, collaborative weblog
DISCORDIA working on the intersections of art, dissent, theory, techno
cultures and politics. http://discordia.us
So, -- welcome everybody to this list and thank you for joining us, and for
your introductions.
Geert and I were much inspired by the ideas of the German theorist Christoph
Spehr and other recent initiatives on collaboration (ie. a recent conference
at The Banff Centre) when we prepared our initial conference notes.
http://freecooperation.org
What's the goal of this list? We created this list with the focused purpose
of preparing the conference in April and we'd like to close it down in
mid-May unless the majority of participants suggests otherwise (in which
case this should move into a different format).
Our hope is that the discussion will be focused on the issues of the
conference- on collaboration, social network architectures and critical
web-based work in this context. Please do not post announcements or
promotional material to this list.
The discussion that already started on the list is very much part of what we
intended for this debate- and Warren's comments and suggestions were already
useful. Topica was a tool at hand with which I had years of ad-free, spam
free experience (once the initial corporate interface has been overcome).
I had the same thoughts like Warren-- it's probably too late to switch and
should serve the purpose for now. But we should indeed start a discussion on
formats, maybe also considering WIKIs. Tom Leonhardt had a few ideas on this
and may be able to set one up for us if needed!
We would like to discuss conference formats and hope to carry ideas of
collaboration into the formatting of the conference: from collaborative
presentations to workshops...but more about this in another email soon.
Currently we formed a small team here at the university consisting of Shawn
Rider, Orkan Telhan, Tom Leonhardt and myself. We write grants and hope to
make this conference possible in the best way.
We really look forward to this exchange and thank you all for becoming part
of this collective inquiry.
Best,
Trebor