Cyber Utopias - Touring Programme
Monday, 6 May 2002, 6 pm
C3 Center for Culture and Communication, Budapest, 1014 Budapest, Országház u. 9

The international Cyber Utopias conference is part of a larger series of events in Zagreb organised by Multimedia Institute mi2 and Goethe Institute, Zagreb.

In an attempt to expand and strengthen network activity and collaboration within the region, a concise version of Cyber Utopias is to be toured in cooperation with C3 in Budapest and with Idea Foundation in Cluj - currently establishing the first independent new media center in Romania.

At the focus of the touring program is the introduction of “a.network” - of emergent new media centers in South/Central Europe, and the ‘immaterial’ production and exchange panel of the Cyber Utopias conference, which focuses on the economic and political implications of forms of intellectual production that are specific to new technologies, from creative, open source software development to socially progressive mailing lists promoting the free flow of information (open source intelligence), including the creation of shared web environments.

Presenting in Budapest are: Ricardo Dominguez, Sebastian Luetgert, Joanne Richardson, Felix Stalder and McKenzie Wark.

Ricardo Dominguez Co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), the group that developed Virtual-Sit In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is Senior Editor of The Thing (bbs.thing.net). He is a former member of Critical Art Ensemble (1987 to 1994), the originators of the theory of Electronic Civil Disobedience). He recently presented a 12 hour streaming media net.performance with Coco Fusco, entitled "Dolores from 10h to 22h" from Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, in Helsinki (http://www.kiasma.fi/ars/dolores), 2002. Ricardo was a Fake_Fakeshop Worker from 1997 to 2000 (http://www.fakeshop.com), a hybrid performance group, that was one of the first net.art projects presented at the Whitney Biennial 2000. Dominguez has collaborated on a number of international net_art projects: among them are Dollspace, produced with Francesca da Rimini (http://www.thing.net/~dollyoko), and the Somatic_Architecture Project with Diane Ludin (http://www.thing.net/~diane), he is also an OS_slave for i_drunners (a Mistresses of Technology Project) - (http://www.idrunners.net). He has also collaborated with Jennifer and Kevin Mccoy (http://www.airworld.net) on a number of projects, and participated in "The Warhol Hijack" with the Verbal group(NYC). Ricardo is also founding member of nettime latino (nettime.org). He presented EDT's SWARM action at Ars Electronica's InfoWar Festival in 1998 (Linz, Austria). His first digital zapatismo project took place in 1996 - 97, a three month RealVideo/Audio network project: The Zapatista/Port Action at (MIT) with Ron Rocco. His essays have appeared at Ctheory (http://www.ctheory.org) and in "Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas," (Routledge, 2000), edited by Coco Fusco. He edited EDT's forthcoming book "Hacktivism: network_art_activism", (Autonomedia Press, 2002).

Sebastian Luetgert · Co-moderator of nettime, member of and mikro and bootlab, founder of rolux.org (http://www.rolux.org), textz.com (http://www.textz.com) and project Gnutenberg, and "Last tuesday", where people can "exchange mp3 files, beta-test new viruses from Asia or vote for the most stupid new dot-com brand." Author of "Introduction to a true history of the Internet" and other publications on the contradictions of the network society and the cult of new technology.

Joanne Richardson · Philosopher, film and media theorist and freelance organizer working and living between Croatia, Hungary and Romania for past two years. Co-organizer of ASU2 and co-founder with Zeljko Blace of “a.network.” Managing editor & designer of subsol (http://subsol.c3.hu), a webzine with contributions from artists, activists, philosophers, and organizers of autonomous spaces. Author of Twilight of the Idols, and essays on sovereign media, experimental film and video, net.art and activism.

Felix Stalder Post-doctoral fellow with the Surveillance Project, a transdisciplinary research initiative in Kingston, Canada. Director of Openflows (http://www.openflows.org), a project in participatory media and "open source intelligence." Author of numerous publications on media studies, political economy, and the social, political, and economic dynamics of new communication technologies.

McKenzie Wark Co-moderator of nettime and co-editor of the Nettime anthology Readme! Author several books including, Virtual Geography, The Virtual Republic, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, and most recently A Hacker Manifesto, which can be found online (http://www.feelergauge.com and http://www.textz.com). With Brad Miller, he co-produced the multimedia work Planet of Noise. Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at SUNY, Binghamton.