meeting / conference / net.radio 'party UNLIMITED' London / backspace / ICA - 02-04 / 07 / 98
Organisers: Manu Luksch & Armin Medosch
Asked by the Austrian Cultural Institute, London, to design a programme on net.culture as part of the Festival of Central European Culture, we suggested to the ACI and those who were to be the participants, to meet in London for three days. This would provide a forum in which to analyze models, compare histories and agendas, exchanging experience of what we named loosely 'art servers unlimited': a range of initiatives to support the blend of creative / experimental / noncommercial / sociocultural / artistic / critical (delete where applicable :-) use of the net which included providing internet access, bursaries and spaces for working, meeting or presentation.
'The real goal (...) of this carefully designed situation is to prepare and maintain a human network - through forgetting conventional media efficiency and replacing it with a sort of unmediated human attention.' Janos Sugar.
The event took the form of an intensive working meeting. With the support of several organisations (named below) and due to the self initiative of many participants, the group increased to about fifty participants from 9 European countries. ASU was a meeting open to all who were willing to contribute to the subjects of discussion. Bringing together a significant number of projects and people and revealing the broadness of scope, interest, strategies in this new and rapidly changing field was a goal in its own right.