NEURO -- networking europe
Submitted by fls on Fri, 12/26/2003 - 12:06.
From February 27.-29, 2004 the second version of the makeworlds festival will take place in Muffathalle, Munich (DE). A new generation of media and network initiatives from all over Europe and different parts of the world present and work on their projects in a broad interactive framework that explores the different conceptual and practical idioms used to articulate and create new social, political and artistic practices. Originating within the networking culture of open communications and free exchange the event aims to connect contemporary debates on mobility, migration and social movements with new media instruments, information and communication technologies. 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.

What's new?

The new is emerging in unknown and multiple ways. It is emerging from the exhaustion and crisis of conventional political concepts that are no longer adequate to the unstable, informatic and immaterial dimensions of the emerging division of labour. The new technologies of the common are not universal hierarchies of political right but small scale and intimate practices of constitution. The new involves those who see the limitations of individual social practices of self-realisation and desire to turn them into general and transferable social technologies of emancipation.

Background

It is time for intellectual and political debates to merge with technology. Both to evaluate the current state of social movements and to build on those orientations that are pushing the limits of what are individually considered possible. NEURO sets out to create and map a new discursive terrain and practical horizon: the ideas of 'freedom of movement' and 'technologies of the common' draws into a synergetic perspective the range of irreducibly conflictual practices whereby society is reproduced.

Without losing sight of the (translocal) constitution of the local as indispensable site of intervention, NEURO seeks to review and research practices of networking that are already redefining the political geography of Europe. In the ongoing diversification of the social, processes of integration can no longer be clearly separated from mechanisms of exclusion. The working out of these tensions at a political and economic level is producing new levels of complexity as well as new opportunities for provocative and experimental projects that challenge orthodoxy and convention.

The focus on social reproduction is an acknowledgment that its various modes are proliferating across an ever-expanding terrain in a process that suggests that collective responses will themselves have to explore some of the idioms and tools of the network in each of the subjects under discussion, whether human rights and citizenship, Empire and Europe, free software and intellectual property regimes, the spectacle of civil society, or the institutional and bureaucratic mentalities present within post-governmental environments.

Beyond the juridical parcelisation of people into discrete, sovereign and rights-bearing subjects, the present offers a unique chance to express and form solidarities that catch up in political terms with the sociality of our being. For these struggles, networks and intercommunicative agency are not goals but their very conditions of possibility. Thus the new sits in opposition to the current forms of exclusion because the appropriation of subjective freedoms within Europe and beyond it are part of the foundations on which these political edifices themselves rest.

Tasks

What could be new today in networking? After the thin promises of new markets and new media, what aspirations remain for evolving struggles for information, knowledge and communication? What is the role of civil society in the framework of global governing practices of political mediation today? What is the impact of immaterial and affective labour for practices of migration and the reconfiguration of the global economy of biopolitical production? What projects of self constitution emerge from practices of refusal and exodus? How has the movement reposed the question of the autonomy of the political in the midst of a crisis of representation? Is mapping the best tool for expressing horizontal structures of cooperation and technologies of the common?

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 (networking europe) is the next version of the makeworlds festival, which for the first time took place in October, 2001.

Contact:  neuro@kein.org