[wsfii-discuss] call for papers, networks and sustainability

[Armin Medosch]

hi, 

please find below the call for the The Sixth European Meeting of the
Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. Of the six conference
streams, which are all very interesting, 'networks and sustainability'
is probably of interest to members of this list, so that the call for
this stream is included in full
hope to see you in Latvia
armin

The Sixth European Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and
the Arts

Place and dates: Riga/Liepaja (Latvia), 15-20 June, 2010
Main Organizer: Electronic Text + Textiles (e-t+t) 
slsa.2010 at gmail.com

Venues: 
Main site for the academic programme, reception, lunches:
The Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga)
Other conference sites:
e-t+t; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts; Riga City Art Space
(t.b.c.), The Art Lab, University of Liepaja 

Streams
1. Textuality and Materiality 2. Architextures 3. Biopalimpsests 4.
Tissue Cultures 5. Networks and Sustainability_In Liepaja 19-20 June: 6.
Art as Research 

Main Call for Papers, all Streams
http://www.e-text-textiles.lv/SLSAeu2010/streams.htm
conference email: slsa.2010 at gmail.com


Networks and Sustainability

Chairs: Rasa Smite ( director of RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture,
Riga) and Armin Medosch (researcher, writer and curator, Vienna and
London) 

This stream will interrogate the complex relationships between " network
technology" and " network society", in order to reveal the multilayered
texture of networks and to consider what potential network culture
contains for sustainable development in technological, social and
cultural fields. 


After the initial privatisation of the net in the 1990s, there was a
wide-spread believe that the decentralized structure of the net would
remodel society. Although it did not exactly work out like that, and the
net has come under ever more closer corporate and state control, many
important developments in the emancipatory use of the net originated in
the network culture of the 1990s. While some of the techno-utopian ideas
of the 1990s failed, we propose that a deeper analysis of many of the
facets of network culture is now demanded. Taking stock of progressive
and innovative developments in network culture, we are asking: 

* Which approaches exist for sustainable and social development of
technologies (merging communal and technological developments)? 

* Which projects are underway to address the alternatives of energy use
and other environmental issues (stemming from ICT)? 

* In which ways have alternative networks been able to create and
maintain own network infrastructures (regarding server hosting,
bandwidth, wireless and wired community networks, etc.)? 

* What can artists learn from FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
communities and vice versa? 

* In which ways has network culture already transformed the ways
artists, curators, art historians and the audience "work" together? And
which alternative models for dealing with authorship rights and
collective authorship exist? 

* Which (artistic) strategies have been successfully used for purposes
of resistance, social transformations, development of autonomous and
sustainable structures? 

For this stream, we welcome papers by researchers, media theorists,
social scientists, network activists and artists, who are engaged with
the issues of sustainable development, ecological and alterantive uses
of new technologies, social networking and social software development,
etc.

All proposals should be sent to this email address: slsa.2010 at gmail.com