Geert Lovink on Mon, 30 Sep 96 09:31 MET


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zkp3/nettime: call for attention


* Call for Attention *

ZKP3 @ MetaforumIII
11-13 October 1996
Budapest/Hungary

100 copies 200 pages
+ through nettime-l

made in Hungary

Dear Nettimers,

After the presentation of the xerox zine/reader ZKP1 in Amsterdam at  
the Next Five Minutes (january 1996) and ZKP2 in Madrid during  
5cyberconf (june 1996), we will now produce a third (edited)
compilation of nettime material. This time the editing will be done by
Tom Bass, who is based in Budapest.

For those of you who are new: ZKP stands for 'Zentralkomitee', a
reference to the first meeting we held in the Spessart forrest near
Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in march 1995, hosted by Verein 707 under
the title 'Medien-ZK'. The discussion there (mainly attended by
Germans) resulted in the international 'nettime' meeting in Venice
(june 1995), hosted by Club Berlin, where we for the first time
formulated some elements of 'net criticism'. One of the results of that
meeting was the 'nettime' mailinglist...

The theme of Metaforum 3 will be 'content', the premisses of the
information industry and rus  under the title 'Under Construction'.

The question of content is a question of matter. After a glorious
postwar period where the enlightening concept of information escaped
from the concepts of matter and energy, it is filling today any
governing organisations of power and knowledge. That doesn't mean that
information means anything more then gaining general dominance. 
Information has become such a slippery term, that in the center of the 
'information-society', in it's global virtual cathedral also called
'the Net', one is hectically cyberizing everything: 'the body', 'life',
'work', 'sex', 'mind' to adapt to a chaosmos which is not made for
humans but for 'something faster'.

*Panic Content* as the counterpart of information-as-pure-essence is
part of a privatized colonizing project which tries to gain land out of
nothing. After building up boundaries around selections of information
and access restrictions, one hopes that money flows in. Interestingly
the success of the war machine Internet is partly based on pirate
utopias of anti-market models like shareware, public domain,
anti-copyright and a ring economy of knowledge exchange.

The awaited 'War on Content' (whose information is on what server?) is
a conflict which connects this experimental zone to it's real existing
outside. It also sets free a dynamism which is expected to catapult us
over the upcoming time-wall and which, most of all, let us forget.
Forget any information we will never be able to access because it is
not public or digitized. Forget about Gandmother Europe which haunted
us with it's outdated canonical culturism. Forget about 'false'
believes and 'wrong' memories.

To execute the grand plan of escape into cyberspace a global city must
be build where the systems of command, control and communication in the
military, cultural and financial sector are modulating the flows of
energy and matter diffundating the finest fabrics of personal and
social life. It is no wonder that being confronted with such paranoid
scenarios of a world panopticum, some people get obsessed with their
lost innocence showing symptoms like child abuse, alien abduction and
an obsession with unvisible censorship and secure intimacy. 'Content'
may be a temporary fashion which exemplifies the mass psychology of the
net in the nostalgic desire for something material, it's also a chance
for re-building power-knowledge-structures which do not fit into the
norms of the existing official quality control systems and are
therefore defining zones for serious fun.

ZKP3 is the third of a xeroxed a-periodical we non-professionally
published on cyberconceptual conferences based on the output of the
nettime carawane, a curly path through the contemporary so called
critical so called international cyberdiscourse. We hope that out of
this temporary publishing practise ideas will come how to continue the
project, do reprints, migrate into infranets, become content, grow to a
newsgroup, make new friends or intensify old friendships.

We are still looking for a publisher who might be interested in a
compilation of nettime stuff in English, but we have been unsucessfull
so far. We still intend to put out something, which can be distributed
in a proper way. So far, nettime/ZKP readers were copied on-the-spot
during festivals in Amsterdam, Madrid, Linz and Rotterdam. A small
nettime book will come out in German by the end of this year, published
by ID-Archiv (Amsterdam/Berlin) and there are plans for a Slovenian and
Japanese compilation. The magazine ARKzin in Zagreb regularly
translates material into Crotian. And not to forget the local web
outlets in Italy, Austria, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam... We also think
of starting a usenet group called alt.nettime. The ammount of
subscribers of the mailinglist is growing steady (3 or 4 new members a
week) and we would like to keep it this way. Activities on the list are
going in waves, according to the mood and we would like to encourage
everybody to come up with their own stories and experiences. nettime
also carries personal accounts, not only rational critiques... All
these topics will be discused during a seperate nettime gathering in
Budapest on monday october 14.

Budapest is a city of old hopes and new frustrations, it may be
postmodern for hundreds of years, multicultural by default, most of all
it cultivates a diversity of creative disfuntionalities which
sentimentally resist the principles of effectivity and profit of today.
Most of all it's a place to meet with people from the east on a
territory which is part of 'their own' history. It might be also a city
to build up models for east-west content generators and 'round-robin'
city echange networks, or at least to make plans for the evening.

Gathered textes will probably come this time from Andreas Broekman,
Eveline Lubbers, Janos Sugar,  Mark Stahlman, Tom Bass, Hakim Bey,
Konrad Becker, Sadie Plant, SubReal, Heiko Idensen,  Erik Davis, Ravi
Sundaram, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Jordan Crandall, R.U. Sirius,
Richard Barbrook, John Horvath, Peter Weibel,  Chris Christiansz,
Michiel Hegener, Geert Lovink, Critical Art Ensemble, Matthew Fuller,
Benjamin Perasovic, Brian Springer, Oliver Marchart, Armin Medosch,
Sabine Helmers, Paul Garrin, Diana McCarty, Katja Diefenbach, bell
hooks... and you?

doors closing 7th of October

thank you for patience

-pit&geert&tom
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