What: Artistic Strategies within Web 2.0: The Politics of Internet Culture
Who: Geert Lovink
When: Mon 8 Mar, 6.30pm – 8pm
Where: Block F Level 2 #F202, LASALLE College of the Arts
Type: Lecture
Admission: Free.

The first wave of net.art in the 1990s experimented with manually-written HTML code of the then brand new World Wide Web with the aim to reverse and deconstruct the utopian communication design of the dotcom era. A decade later, the so-called Web 2.0 is democratised, corporatised, and even more controlled. How do artists, critics and creative workers respond to the rise of blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace? How did artists lose their innovative competitive edge and find themselves outsiders when it comes to the 'Twitter revolution'?  The question I will deal with in this presentation is how we can re-invent, and redesign, spaces for creative intervention in digital culture. What is at stake when we interact with social networks on the internet who owns our searches and how do they manage us? How do we curate the abundance of material that is now floating on the Net? What does it mean in this context that we are more and more moving away from an archive-focused Web to a news river' that is happening in real time?

About the Speaker:
Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. In 2003 he was post-doc researcher the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg/Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007). His institute recently organized conferences and related publications on urban screens, creative industry, online video, network theory, culture of search and Wikipedia research.