How do we think about networks under post-digital conditions? What does this imply for research?
The next transmediale festival, End to End (E2E), aims to deal with the pervasiveness of networks and their limits. It refers to Robert Filliou’s The Eternal Network (1983), pointing to the interconnectedness of everyday-life actions across an emerging global world at that time. This is a good reminder that network cultures exist beyond the technical reality of network culture as we now know it despite our primary identification of networks with social media and planetary computation. By drawing on the legacies of critical and autonomous network cultures, transmediale 2020 aims to make the limits of Internet-based networks visible but also highlight alternatives. Is there a conceivable counter-power to networks? Which alternative technological models and cultural narratives are needed to construct the principles of end-to-end communication anew? How might the critique of networks extend to non-western contexts and reflect the limits in a global perspective?
The once canonical model of centralized, decentralized and distributed networks is in need of differentiation and more detail today. This means broadening the discussion of networks to other ecologies that would include non-human elements such as animals, energy, clouds, climate, and so on. Moreover, despite this everlasting debate over networks and their potential to rethink eco-socio-technical structures, relatively little of this network thinking has permeated the artworld or research cultures. In this workshop we would like to explore this line of thinking and ask what it means to research networks, and moreover to think beyond the organizational logic of the academy to other forms of organizing knowledge production and distribution. What are the limits of research networks and what would an end-to-end principle of research look like? Might the workshop (if not festival) examine its form in light of this?
Research Workshop
28 – 30 Jan 2020
Canadian Embassy, Berlin
Presentations at transmediale festival, Berlin
31 Jan – 2 Feb 2020, Berlin
Organized by:
– APRJA_, A Peer-Reviewed Journal About_
– Aarhus University, Digital Aesthetics Research Center
– transmediale – festival for art and digital culture
– Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University
– Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab, Concordia University
Further details can be found at https://transmediale.de/content/closed-research-networks-call-for-papers