[Nettime-nl] JvE Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine

[Jan van Eyck Academie <program@janvaneyck.nl>]

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Jan van Eyck Event


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Saturday 29 – Sunday 30 September 2007
Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search 
engine
— research conference initiated by Metahaven Design Research; curated 
by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Gon Zifroni; 
supported by Institut Français des Pays-Bas, Amsterdam, NL; City of 
Maastricht, NL.
— gallery space Jan van Eyck Academie
— book tickets before 27 September at anne.vangronsveld@janvaneyck.nl

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Florian Cramer, Jodi Dean, Frédéric Martel, Ingmar Weber, Isabelle 
Stengers, Bureau d’Études, Metahaven, Tsila Hassine, Open Search, 
Michael Zimmer, Richard Rogers, Florian Schneider, Maurits de Bruijn, 
Sabine Niederer, André Nusselder
 
Quaero: isn’t that the search engine that former French president 
Jacques Chirac declared to be the European challenge to Google? A 
public alternative to Silicon Valley-born commercial search engines, 
funded by the French state, in service of the public good, in the true 
tradition of the grand projet? An information machine capable of 
reclaiming European language and intellectual heritage in the age of 
globalization?
No. Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and research 
labs working together on multimedia and web search projects. It is a 
state-sponsored effort to stimulate private French technological 
competitiveness.
But still, the issues that the idea of Quaero has raised – since its 
public launch by the former French president – constitute a formidable 
challenge. Internet search engines are political projects proper if 
only because they give and take power; they represent science, 
technology, (trans)national politics, private enterprise, culture, 
territoriality and language in ever different combinations.
 
On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in 
collaboration with the Maison Descartes, Institut Français des 
Pays-Bas, organizes the Forum on Quaero, taking the concept of the 
search engine as a pubic project as a starting point.
Search engines’ indexation methods inevitably lead to moments of 
inclusion and exclusion (sometimes by hands-on censorship). Search 
engines closely monitor their users’ behaviour and offer additional 
services, retrieving and storing increasing amounts of private 
information from them. The majority of web search is carried out 
through only a few, very large corporate search engines which 
communicate ideas about their role in the world via their brand 
identities. These may lead to distorted impressions of what the 
commercial search engine as a institution really entails. This 
conference aims to bridge the gap between politics, policies and 
practices in the field of web search. Some questions:
• What are the politics of the structure and image of search engines 
and their technologies?
• To what extent have search engines like Google, which started from 
the ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of 
political bias? Can we envisage scenarios for the search engine as a 
public domain institution?
• What kind of hierarchy (if any) should be implemented when deciding 
what should go into a search engine’s database, and what is left out?
• Can contemporary web practices tackle the conventional static models 
used to archive and present (institutional) concepts of cultural 
heritage and democracy?
• Collaborative and participatory methods are increasingly placing the 
Demos as the force that structures information. Can we work towards a 
‘politics of code & categorization’ that allows plural interpretations 
of data to coexist and enrich each other?
• How can concepts of digital and networked European cultural heritage 
reflect the political and social issues related to Europe’s changing 
borders?
The Forum encourages and facilitates audience participation; it is 
meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions 
for the search engine.
 
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Programme

Saturday 29 September
11:00 – 11:10
Welcome by Florian Cramer (moderator)
11:10 – 11:15
Intro
11:15 – 11:45
Michael Zimmer
12:15 – 12:45
Florian Schneider
12:50 – 13:50
Lunch
13:50 – 14:35
Metahaven
14:40 – 15:00
Tsila Hassine
15:05 – 15:35
Ingmar Weber
15:35 – 16:00
Break
16:30 – 17:10
Respondents: Isabelle Stengers, Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer, 
André Nusselder
17:10 – 18:30
Forum Part One
Round Table with all speakers, respondents and audience
18.30 > 
Drinks and dinner

Sunday 30 September
10:00 – 10:10
Welcome by Florian Schneider (moderator)
10:10 – 10:15
Intro
10:15 – 10:45
Bureau d’Études
10:50 – 11:20
Frédéric Martel
11:25 – 11:55
Richard Rogers
12:00  – 13:00
Lunch
13:00 – 13:30
Florian Cramer
13:35 – 14:05
Open Search
14:10 – 14:40
Jodi Dean
14:45 – 15:15
Break
15:15 – 15:55
Respondents: Isabelle Stengers, Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer, 
André Nusselder
15:55 – 17:30
Forum Part Two
Round Table with all speakers, respondents and audience, moderated by 
Florian Schneider
17:30
Drinks – End
 
Admission
EUR 25 for 2 days, including lunch, dinner, drinks and publication.
Registration
By e-mail to Anne Vangronsveld: anne.vangronsveld@janvaneyck.nl
Payments
SNS Bank, account no.: 858 2324 05
Stichting Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
IBAN: NL64 SNSB 0858 2324 05
BIC: SNSB NL 2A
Please put FORUMONQUAERO on your payment.
To be sure of a seat, we kindly ask you to submit your payment before 
27 September 2007.

Additional programme information, press information
Metahaven Design Research: office@metahaven.net
phone: +31 (0)6 24276797 / +31 (0)6 48316543

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Speakers’ biographies in alphabetical order

Maurits de Bruijn (respondent) is a graphic designer working on a 
variety of web concepts, which combine distinct visual identities with 
an experimental scripting and engineering architecture. De Bruijn 
criticizes the consequences that major search engines and their 
indexing mechanisms force on the scripting architecture of web sites. 
De Bruijn teaches information design and interface design at ArtEZ 
Institute of the Arts in Arnhem.
 
Bureau d’Études (speaker) is a Paris-based media collective founded in 
1998, comprising the artist duo Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt. 
Using complex graphic tables conceived for the internet, they map 
various hidden global structures of finance and world governance, 
formalising patterns and connections through scientific and 
informational exactitude.
 
Florian Cramer (speaker, moderator) is Media Design course director of 
the Piet Zwart Institute. He was junior lecturer in Comparative 
Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Cramer has published papers in 
the fields of code poetry, comparative studies in the literature and 
the arts, modernism, text theory, literature and computing; he 
collaborated on the  www.runme.org Software Art repository and edited 
the Unstable Digest of code poetry. His German PhD thesis is called 
Exe.cut[up]able Statements.
 
Jodi Dean (speaker) is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and 
William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has authored or edited 
8 books, including Publicity’s Secret: How technoculture capitalizes on 
democracy (2002) and Zizek’s Politics (2006).
 
Tsila Hassine (speaker) is a media artist and web programmer. She 
completed BScs in Mathematics and Computer Science and spent 2003 at 
the New Media department of the HGK Zürich. In 2004 she joined the Piet 
Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she pursued an MA in Media Design, 
until graduating in June 2006 with Google randomizer Smoogle. Hassine 
is a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academie.

Frédéric Martel (speaker) is a writer, journalist and a 
researcher/professor at Sciences Po-Paris. He is author of 5 books, 
including The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 and 
De la culture en Amérique (an overview on the American culture and art 
policy system in the U.S.). From 2001 to 2005, he was the head of the 
French cultural and academic services in the French Embassy in the U.S. 
He is now the editor of nonfiction.fr, a new website dedicated to books 
and ideas.
 
Metahaven (speaker) is a design research collective based in Amsterdam 
and Brussels. It consists of Daniel van der Velden, Vinca Kruk and Gon 
Zifroni. Their work focuses on visual identity and the political, 
assigning key importance to the role of conflict in relation to the 
design of institutions in the era of globalization.
 
Sabine Niederer (respondent) is managing director of the Institute of 
Network Cultures in Amsterdam. She recently co-founded the Digital 
Methods Initiative, a group of researchers, programmers and designers 
dedicated to researching and visualizing  ‘natively digital’ objects of 
study, such as the tag, the thread and the link.
 
André Nusselder (respondent) is a philosopher. Last year he finished 
his PhD thesis at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, in which he 
investigated the role of fantasy in the virtual worlds created by new 
media technologies: Interface-Fantasy. Weary of academic commentary and 
conformism, he is now trying to develop different ways to write on 
philosophical issues.
 
Open Search (speaker), by Erik Borra and Koen Martens, is a 
peer-to-peer project whereby people mutually form a search engine 
without the intervention of central servers or a central actor. The 
motivation for this project is the censorship and manipulation by major 
multinational corporations (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). Koen Martens is 
a programmer, hacker, organiser, and the treasurer of GroenLinks The 
Hague section. Erik Borra graduated in artificial intelligence and is 
now involved in the Digital Methods Initiative. The Open Search project 
is scheduled to be launched in 2008.
 
Richard Rogers (speaker) is Head of New Media at the University of 
Amsterdam, and director of the Govcom.org Foundation, a group that 
develops info-political devices for the web. Previously, Rogers worked 
as Senior Advisor to Infodrome, the Dutch Governmental Information 
Society initiative. He has also worked as Research Fellow in Design and 
Media at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and as a Researcher in Technology 
Assessment at the Science Center Berlin (WZB) and in Strategic 
Computing in the Public Sector at Harvard University (JFK School).
 
Florian Schneider (speaker, moderator) is a filmmaker based in Munich. 
He has been involved in a wide range of projects dealing with the 
implications of post-modern border regimes on a theoretical as well as 
a practical level. He is one of the initiators of the campaign kein 
mensch ist illegal at Documenta X in 1997 and subsequent projects such 
as the  ‘no border network’ and the online-platform kein.org. He is a 
member of the PhD programme in research architecture at Goldsmiths 
College, London, and teaches theory at the art academy in Trondheim.
 
Isabelle Stengers (respondent) teaches philosophy at the Université 
Libre de Bruxelles. Her interests centre around the constructive 
adventure of modern sciences and the crucial challenge of what she 
calls an ‘ecology of practices’, as a condition for embedding our many 
diverging scientific practices in a democratic and demanding 
environment. She has written numerous books, among which, translated in 
English, Order out of Chaos, with Ilya Prigogine and Power and 
Invention. Situating Science, and The Invention of Modern Science.
 
Ingmar Weber (speaker) is a postdoc in information retrieval at the 
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. His PhD thesis 
at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany deals with 
efficient data structures for and applications of a more interactive 
search engine called CompleteSearch. Ingmar is generally interested in 
alternative search engines and runs an informal seminar on ‘Cool stuff 
on the web’.
 
Michael Zimmer (speaker) is the Microsoft Fellow at the Information 
Society Project at Yale Law School for 2007-2008. His PhD The Quest for 
the Perfect Search Engine: Values, Technical Design, and the Flow of 
Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility, investigates how the quest 
for the ‘perfect search engine’ empowers the widespread capture of 
personal information flows across the Internet, threatening the ability 
to engage in online social, cultural and intellectual activities free 
from oversight, thereby bearing on the values of privacy, autonomy, and 
liberty.
 

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The weekly programme can be viewed at: www.janvaneyck.nl

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