Media Ecologies & post-industrial production

 

Programme

8.30 – 9.00: Coffee & Welcome Address

Phoebe Moore, University of Salford

Thanks to Dr Michael Goddard, Dr Ben Light and Dr Ben Halligan of Media, Music and Performance, University of Salford, who will be chairing sessions.

9.00 – 10.00: Keynote Speaker, Michel Bauwens
Founder, P2P Foundation
Lecturer, Dhurakij Pundit University International College

An Infrastructure for Open Everything

The condition for a more free and equal association around common value creation is the existence of distributed infrastructures that are characterized by lower costs of entry. In this talk we will survey the trends towards Open Everything, i.e. the conditions for such an infrastructure to quality as "open", the enablers as expressed in a new type of social charters, the typology of infrastructures being built, as well as the kind of open practices that they enable.

See http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show_public/28717702

 

Morning Sessions: Media Ecologies and Collaborative Platforms for Social Action

This panel will look at various projects and proposals for more integrated and adaptive collaborative platforms for social action. It will look at the following issues: 1) what is missing in the current generation of technology 2) specific issues related to commercial ownership of collaboration and social networking platforms: to what degree should they be replaced by independent or common platforms and under what conditions would such alternatives be viable 3) what is the direction that alternative platforms are moving to, are there compatibilities which could lead to synergies 4) how might these adaptive platforms be used to build collaborative networks with an interface simple enough to meet specific needs without knowing potentially novel needs in advance? In other words, how might we better match people, skills, resources, and other necessities to best meet a variety of desired outcomes without diminishing others?

 

10.00 – 10.15: Coffee

 

10.15 – 12.00: Presentations

Room 1
Chair: Michael Goddard

Tav Espian Blog & Mamading Ceesay Blog Espians Web 4.0: Creating weapons of mass construction through a decentralised socio-economic-technological platform

Suresh Fernando & Matt Cooperrider– OpenKollab Creating a Collaborative Platform to Connect Organizations with Aligned Missions – possibilities and challenges Radical Inclusion

 

Room 2
Chair: Phoebe Moore

Steinn E. Sigurðarson The threshold of confluence: why structural similarities, feeds, and simplicity are they keys to interoperability Profile

Mushin J. Schilling Gaiaspace social/collaboration meshwork for State of the World Forum Profile

Ralf Schlatterbeck Open Source and Peer to Peer Money Open Source consulting

Tom Moroz How OSI, Oxfam GB, and the Eurasia Fdn are using KARL, an open source collaboration system KARL

 

12.00 – 13.00: Discussions

Facilitator: Sophia Bustamante London Creative Labs

 

13.00 – 14.00: Lunch

 

14.00 – 15.00: Keynote speaker, Matthew Fuller

Profile

Reader, Centre for Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths University, London

Transparency, Interrogability and Experiment

P2P production suggests the possibility of a flat ontology of actors in the development of real techno-cultures. Its visionary aspect is in this quality of levelling but it also brings about questions of design, the politics of knowledge and the capacities of technologies and the materials of technocultures to recognise and work with differentiation. This talk will discuss a number of projects that attempt to do that and a number of theoretical perspectives attempting to make such problematics handlable.

 

15.00 – 15.15: Coffee

Nathan Cravens introduces the afternoon sessions.

Afternoon Sessions : Media Ecologies for Open Design Communities and Distributed Manufacturing

Free software-based peer production has developed integrated and sophisticated platforms facilitated by the fact that software can be executed in the same digital environment in which it is designed. But such is (at least presently) not the case for open hardware and any object that need to be made physically. In this case, much more integrated feedback loops are  needed, which require more sophisticated collaboration platforms that may included designs, videos, the management of flows, recursive loops from physical experimentation; comparisons between experiments in various locales and so on. We want to know: what is the state of the art of the current collaborative platforms? What is needed? Are there any possibilities for synergies between various platform projects currently being undertaken? 

 

15.15 – 17.00: Presentations

Room 1
Chair: Ben Halligan

Sam Rose & Paul Hartzog FLOWS

Melissa Sterry Creativity's Role in Creating Collaborative Web 2.0 Platforms & Environmental Digital Messaging Societas

Massimo Menichinelli (to present remotely using video conferencing) "Open P2P Design. Metadesign for Open Design projects" http://www.openp2pdesign.org

Participation by video conferencing (please send Phoebe your details):
Catarina Mota & Kirsty Boyl openMaterials

 

Room 2
Chair: Ben Light

Smári McCarthy Fab labs, Tangible Bit, Industry 2.0 Profile

Eddie Kirkby & Haydn Insley Manchester Fab Labs: A Transfomational Activity for Advanced Manufacturing in the 21st Century Manchester Manufacturing Institute

Erik de Bruijn blog RepRap and personal fabrication

 

17.00 – 18.00: Discussions

Facilitator: Smari McCarthy Tangible Bits

During the wrap-up/discussion hour the floor will be open to discussions regarding anything that has occurred during the day and makes sense within the context of the conference. The discussion will be guided, in that we will avoid bikesheds and other conversation stoppers. The goal will be to map out what has been done, what needs to be done, and who will do it. People will by this point in time know more or less what is important to the future development of media ecologies, so letting them discuss freely is probably a good strategy.

 

The After Gathering

We will probably go to the Crescent, which is near to the Innovation Forum. This 'real ale' pub also has a side room that can be used for further discussions about 'what's next'. Manchester is a great city so after the pub, people should go into the city centre, Phoebe and all session chairs (other lecturers at Salford University) can help!

 

The Day After (17.00 Wednesday, November 4th 2009, location to be confirmed)

Jussi Parikka, Anglia Ruskin University

Media Ecologies of Animal Intensities: Ecosophy and Media Studies

Dr Parikka's paper focuses on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab. The Eco Media project developed new modes of thinking media (ecology) through a tracking of the intensities of nature. However, in this case the medium is understood in a very broad sense to cover the ecosystem as a communication network of atmospheric flows, tides, reproductive hormones, scent markers, migrations or geological distributions. The project(s) do not focus solely on the ecological crisis that has been a topic of media representations for years, but they seem to engage with a more immanent level of media ecology in a manner that resembles Matthew Fuller’s call for ”Art for Animals.”