DEAF03 Symposium
Information is Alive was the symposium at DEAF03.
DEAF03 Symposium
Information is Alive focuses on archives as unstable, plastic, living entities. Information storage, processing and transmission take place on many levels: individually, in our memories; collectively, in stories, rituals, laws, celebrations, games, concepts, language, image and architecture; biologically, in fossils and in bodies as living forms. In the last twenty years information has been stored and retrieved more and more by means of digital technologies.
Unlike more classical archive forms, digital databases need not be ordered hierarchically, for they are made accessible through ever more complex linking technologies which no longer need to work linearly, as they did with old-style computers. Search engines can be designed to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. A digital archive, like the memory, need not be a static system. The value of what is stored lies in what it means for the present. We reuse and recombine our past to create the present. Memory is something that operates in the present and through that act is continually updated.
Research into the neurological, social, cultural and evolutionary function of memorizing or information storage can provide us not just interesting knowledge in its own terms, but also models and tools for understanding the possibilities of nonlinear computing and nonlinear database linking technologies. The question then becomes whether and how unexpected and artistically interesting developments can arise when kinds of information that were separate before the arrival of the digital computer are combined through the use of agents or the application of meta data.
Program Friday 28 February:
10:45
Opening words V2_
11:00
Foucault and the Archive
Introduction by Manuel DeLanda
12:00
Information Flows and Involuntary Memory
Lecture by Scott Lash
13:00
Lunch break
14:00
The Deep Pattern of Life
Lecture by Simon Conway Morris
15:00
To Be is to Perceive
Lecture by Ingo Günther
16:00
Tea break
16:15
Panel discussion
17:00
End
17:15
Presentation of the Digital Depot at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
free entrance for symposium participants
Program Saturday 1 March:
10:45
Opening words Manuel DeLanda
11:00
The Archive of Experience
Lecture by Brian Massumi
12:00
Archive and Aspiration
Lecture by Arjun Appadurai
13:00
Lunch break
14:00
Permanent Testing
Lecture by Winy Maas
15:00
Mobile Knitting
Lecture by Sadie Plant
16:00
Tea break
16:15
Panel discussion
17:00
End
