Tuesday 14.10.2014

WKV Stuttgart: Conference: Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of Knowledge Production

CONFERENCE
October 30 - November 2, 2014

PUBLIC LIBRARY.
RETHINKING THE STRUCTURES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
Akademie Schloss Solitude

WITH
Daniel García Andújar, Dusan Barok, Vuk Cosic, Hans D. Christ, Sean Dockray, Iris Dressler, Jan Gerber, Herbordt / Mohren, Henrik Hillenbrand / Oliver Kraft / Björn Kühn / Anna Romanenko, Olia Lialina, Sebastian Lütgert, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Irit Rogoff, Simon Sheikh, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, Jean-Baptiste Joly, Sophie-Charlotte Thieroff
and others
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INTRODUCTION
From October 30 till November 23, 2014, the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and Akademie Schloss Solitude are carrying out the project 'Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of Knowledge Production'. It consists of an exhibition – which acts in the same time as an open laboratory and a 'scandromat' – at the Kunstverein's platform Querungen (Traversals) as well as a conference that will be held from October 30 to November 2, 2014 at the Kunstverein and Akademie Schloss Solitude.

The project reflects and discusses today's conditions of knowledge production: from the neoliberal politics of education and the monopolization of 'intellectual property' to alternative critical and anarchistic ways of sharing and 'borrowing' knowledge.

It is initiated by the free software advocate, cultural explorer, and social instigator Nenad Romic aka Marcell Mars, who was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2013. One point of departure is his ongoing 'Public Library'-project that envisions a constantly growing, decentralized network of digital libraries based on the open source library application Calibre and the plug-in 'Let's Share Books.' The latter was designed by Mars to connect and share Calibre libraries via the Internet.

The four-days-conference comprises lectures, presentations, workshops and panels with international artists, curators, net activists and theoreticians. It sheds light on the social, economic, and political implications of the existing, changing, and / or disappearing infrastructures of education and knowledge: that is, of libraries, schools, the academic world et cetera. Especially in the 'Western world,' these infrastructures are still taken for granted, though we can observe how these infrastructures are increasingly subjugated by the imperatives of austerity suggesting that there is no other solution than privatization.

FURTHER INFORMATION / PROGRAM
see: www.wkv-stuttgart.de