| PANELS
Public Production
The public sphere is a terrain of free and conflictual forms of expression, a physical or medial space in which cultural and public discourses can unfold as much as different forms of action, cooperation and conflict. However, not every new medium will also immediately engender an expansion of the public sphere. On the contrary, technical media can effect a limitation of the public sphere when the forms of agency that they facilitate either predetermine the content they can convey, or homogenise communication, or reduce the friction that exists in social relations. In extreme cases one could speak of ‹negative public-machines› which negate or siphon off the characteristics of the public sphere. The panel will raise the question in which cases technical media and their applications extend the potentials of the public sphere, and in which cases they don't.
The discussion will be held in English.
The event is organised in cooperation with transmediale, Berlin.
Participants:
Moderation:
Dr. Andreas Broeckmann, transmediale (DE) http://www.transmediale.de
Common Property – Allgemeingut
The starting-point of the thematic considerations on the 6th Werkleitz Biennale was a debate on copyrights. It soon turned out that the conflict between the cultural producers' seemingly natural right to access socially relevant images and information and the rights of the authors is symptomatic. The demand for new ownership relations extended to information and knowledge predominantly serves the interests of industries reliant on cheap (intellectual) resources, like in the field of biotechnology. The real conflict affects the ongoing negotiations between private (exploitation) interests and societal autonomy that are taking place globally and on various levels. In the debate on copyrights and intellectual property, which «ought to especially interest people working in the creative field» – who are themselves always also ‹authors› – the cultural scene is being used against its own interests. Culture is not conceivable without the free exchange of and the uninhibited play with signs, images and stories. Instead of this (spurious) controversy over more or less copyrights and authorship rights, we would like to discuss here the societal opportunities and political perspectives of expanding common property. The central question is: What belongs to everyone, and how can that which belongs to everyone be socially appropriated?
The discussion will be held in German.
Participants:
- Dr. Ulrich Brand (DE), political scientist
- Hans-Christian Dany (DE), freelance author, artist and publicist
Moderation:
Curators of the 6th Werkleitz Biennale
Royalties and Commons
At a meeting of 4.000 people the decision was made that patent fees are an imposition and an unfair tax on free work, and that for this reason the meeting obliges to immediately abolish them by burning all patents. Should anyone be apprehended for not possessing a patent, the united people will defend and protect him.
The discussion will be held in German.
Participants:
- Mercedes Bunz (DE), editor of de:Bug, Zeitschrift für elektronische Lebensaspekte
- Erik Stein (DE), member of the publishing collective b_books
Moderation:
Ariane Müller, artist and co-curator of the 6th Werkleitz Biennale
COPYRIGHT, the right to quote and fair use.
a Picture critique
One of the main copyright problems is revealed in the creative (further) use of copyrighted material: ready-made, found footage, compilation, satire, critique; they must invoke the legal exceptions of the right to quote and of free use. What works without problems in academia, though, is a constant problem in the field of media. Works that invoke these rights are not exhibited, broadcast, or even created in the first place; sometimes they wind up in court. Is an entire cultural field threatening to disappear in face of the exploitation industry's aggressive approach? Do the copyright restrictions really leave room for the freedom of art? These questions will be discussed, also within the context of the recently published draft of a copyright legislation.
The discussion will be held in German.
Participants:
Moderation:
Marcel Schwierin (DE), filmemaker http://www.schwierin.de
geteilte Kultur / Shared Culture
Not only the economic but also the cultural union of East and West Germany after 1989 is a lot more complex than it seemed shortly after reunification. In detail, the notion of an all-German identity proved to be less a real societal experience than a political programme. Cultural practice takes place in certain social contexts: While a specific West German cultural context spread across the East over the past 15 years, the East German one was often indiscriminately suspected of being ideological and run down as provincial and irrelevant. The reformatting of the East German cultural landscape in the 1990s brought both the cultural producers and the cultural institutions the experience of discontinuities and the loss of social contexts and collective knowledge. From the perspective of the West, on the other hand, the development always appeared as one continuously situated within the cultural system of reference.
A horizon of experience common to both East and West has perhaps only been established at the end of the 1990s in the form of newly defined demands on the cultural sector under the conditions of neo-liberalism and post-Fordism. Cutbacks, privatisation and the compulsion to survive on the market are now leading to a number of radical changes in the West as well. Against the background of these experiences, the question today is, which practices and players have been written out of the culture business and which new relationships and links have been established. The discussion will also be on the question to what extent community and a public can be created by means of culture and beyond ideological appropriation.
The discussion will be held in German.
Participants:
- Annegret Hahn (DE), director of the Thalia Theater Halle
- Simone Hain (DE), architecture historian
Moderation:
Helmut Höge (DE), freelance journalist
The Long Night of Crime
The panel on the ‹Long night of crime› deals with the potentials of individual and collective artistic and activist practices that question systems of order under the conditions of globalisation. Subversive and interventionist strategies in commercialised and privatised urban and media spaces will be presented and discussed. These include new forms of distributing information, graffiti campaigns, temporary interventions, and collective uses of spaces the ownership rights of which are not determined. What the presented strategies and projects have in common is that they either operate in a space ‹without law› or deliberately seek a confrontation with the dominating law enforcement in the sense of a negotiation process. Questions that are raised in this context include, to what extent the legal situation (especially in regard to immaterial goods) contains dead, that is unenforceable laws.
The discussion will be held in English.
Participants:
Moderation:
Hans-Christian Dany (DE), artist and publicist
|