What makes city spaces and digital domains alike? Freedom, anonymity, surveillance, and the laws that define what is "legitimate" mark offline and online territories. Footpaths and cybercafes are the frontiers of a new commons, in a sense they are the nodes of moves to reclaim and renew spaces. The letter of the law inscribes itself on both to control access and what can be done, or said. This makes both squatters and the artisans of signs, fugitives in the new urban night. The Raqs Media Collective takes both these realities into account in setting the frame for "Signs in the Shadow of the Laws of Space".

Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) is a group of media practitioners based in Delhi. Their interests line in the dynamics of urban space and the culture & politics of the contemporary city. Their background is in documentary filmmaking. Currently, they work in a wide variety of practices, embracing video, installations, print, sound, computers and the Internet. The Raqs collective are are co-initiators of Sarai : The New Media Initiative (www.sarai.net) which is South Asia's first public initiative on urban culture, media and daily life, established in 2000.

-----------------------------------------------------

How does the "Ctrl C + Ctrl S + Ctrl V" function translate in terms of Cultural Production? Ravi Sundaram draws on the culture of the copy in South Asian urban spaces to postulate a form of "pirate modernity" that negotiates local needs and global influences with flair, innovation and a very public notion of the culture of the new media & information technology.

Ravi Sundaram is a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and one of the co-initiators of Sarai : The New Media Initiative. Sundaram is a political scientist, researcher on urban space and a new media theorist. He has lectured at Cyberconf5, Madrid and the Johannesburg Biennale and is a regular contributor to the Reader-List, Nettime and other online discussion lists. Sundaram's work looks at the coming together of new non legal or 'pirate' electronic culture and urban space in contemporary India.

-------------------------------------------------------

What are the possibilities of a new cultural politics of shared creativity in the digital public domain? Nancy Adjania explores how the need to develop norms of collaborative creativity can be reconciled with the freedom of expression in a climate of increasing censorship, copyright regulation and state repression. She also considers what the possibilities and the pitfalls of an alternative cultural practice in hybrid media can be and envisions how the 'fast lane' of digital practices and the 'slow lane' of the visual, plastic and performance arts can encounter each other?

Nancy Adajania is an art critic and curator based in Mumbai. She is currently Chief Editor of the visual-arts journal, *Art India*. Adajania has written and lectured on the arts, in relation to post-colonial politics, new media art in India, and the cultural effects of globalisation at the Lottringerstrasse 13 Discussion Forum, Munich and at the Transmediale Salon, Berlin. Adajania was joint-convenor of the international symposium "Kapital und Karma: Conversations between India and Europe" held at the Kunsthalle in Vienna. She has conceived and moderated a series of discussion platforms on urban culture, activism and artistic initiatives at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai.

What are the legal implications of copyleft culture? Can there be "free software" in art? How can new models of collaborative authorship in the arts engage with the notion of intellectual property rights? In what ways do copyrights and intellectual property act as barriers to freedom of expression? What are the juridical constituents of the "personhood" that intellectual property assumes, and how are these being challenged? Lawrence Liang brings a legal and a philosophical perspective to bear on issues of creativity, culture and censorship in the digital age.

Lawrence Liang is a lawyer, legal scholar and human rights activist based in Bangalore. His interests are in intellectual property rights, media law, cinema, cultural studies, freedom of expression and the legal position of refugees and victims of communal violence. Liang is one for the co founders of www.indialawinfo.com, a portal specialising in Information Technology and cyberlaws in India, and is associated with the Alternative Lawyers Forum, Bangalore. Liang is currently a research associate at Sarai, and is involved in a research project on intellectual property rights and the commons. He is one of the moderators of the <commons-law@sarai.net list. Lawrence Liang drafted the license for Opus (www.opuscommons.net)

--------------------------------------------------------------

Geert Lovik explores how the creation of the "Digital Commons" can act as a counterpoint to the existence of the "Digital Divide". He delineates how the idea of the Digital Commons has emerged from the "practice" of alt.net culture and the history of tactical media initiatives. What do terms like 'scarcity' and 'abundance' mean in a digital context? Will an explosion of bandwidth lead to a renewed interest in the translation of the "Digital Commons" into actual possibilities, or will it lead to greater attempts at state and corporate control over the digital public domain?

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and Internet critic, based in Sydney and Amsterdam. He is co-founder of the community provider: The Digital City, the Nettime mailing lists, and most recently Fibreculture, an Australian network for Internet research and culture. Geert Lovink was one of the key conceivers of the Hybrid Media Lounge at Documenta X. This year the MIT press will publish two of his books: "Dark Fiber", a collection of essays on critical Internet culture, and "Uncanny Networks", interviews with media theorists and artists.

zurück zu den News