A user´s guide

Session # 3: Non-Profits, Independent Spaces and Intellectual Rights.

We talk a lot about the impact of intellectual property in music today: bands leaving their labels, new business models, technological and legal mechanisms of control… But let´s get practical. How do independent music initiatives deal with it on a daily basis? This 3rd session of A User´s Guide to the Millenium focus on this topic from the perspective of the music scene in Berlin. An open and informal discussion to gather information and exchange experiences around questions like:

* What is the legal framework of intellectual property in Germany regarding music?
* Which are the agents involved?
* What´s the impact on the sustainability of the music scene?
* What strategies are being used to respond to it?
* What are open licenses and how do they [really] work?
* How would an alternative IP model look like?

To address these issues we have invited Freies Neukölln, Allan Cunningham and Reboot FM. But you are all welcome to join the discussion and share your questions and experiences.
Ausland, Territory for experimental music, performace and art.
Freies Neukölln is a music bar located in Kreuzkölln, programming only public domain and free licenced music.
Allan Cunningham is a writer. He teaches Intellectual Property on-line at Queen Mary, University of London.
Reboot FM is a free cultural radio station based in Berlin.

@8 months ago with 1 note

Session #1: A User´s Guide to the Millennium

Schönstedtstraße 7, access through the yard
U7, Rathaus Neukölln

This is the first of a series of sessions devoted to the backstage of artistic and cultural projects: money, precariousness, legal stuff, working conditions, etc. Those issues we usually address when the public event is over and we go for a beer, as if they were not a structural part of what we do (even though we know they are).

How do you finance our artistic and cultural projects? Do you make a living out of them? Do you pay taxes? Do you have a health assistance? And unemployment benefit? And maternity allowance? What about retirement pensions? Is public funding sustainable in the current context of global financial crisis? Is private funding an option for every kind of project? And what about crowd-founding? What is the impact of the so-called creative economy policies on the life and the work of artists and cultural workers? Can we invent new ways of dealing with economic (un)sustainability?

Presentations by Juste Kostikovait (Kioskproject, Berlin) and Arantxa Mendiharat (Conexiones Improbables, Bilbao) followed by Q&A with the audience.

Juste Kostikovaite is a curator and cultural manager. Together with Kioskprojects, acuratorial initiative based in Berlin and Vilnius, she initiated the Artist-In-Residency project CAN which invites artists from Baltic and Scandinavian countries for the AiR program in Berlin, a platform organising workshops, open work process situations and discussions.

+info http://www.kioskprojects.org/spheresofpower/

Arantxa Mendiharat is the coordinator of Conexiones Improbables, an initiative based inthe Bask Country that connects artists, scientists and thinkers with business projects, public institutions and social organisations. Conexiones Improbables provides environments of dialogue and interaction in search of committed social and productive innovation, developsprogrammes that enable shared learning between different experiences and is an active member of several European groups that contemplate methodologies for the hybridisation of differences.

+info http://conexionesimprobables.es/

Coordinated by Lorenzo Sandoval and Maria Ptqk.

@9 months ago with 1 note

Session #2: Counter Education

Marta de Gonzalo y Publio Pérez Prieto. The intention, 4 DV, 22’, 4 wood studios 155 x 144 x 202 cm. with 20” screens, drawings, canvas, objects and paint interventions on wall, 2008.

This 2nd session of A User´s Guide addresses some of the issues that currently affect pedagogy, education and the acquisition of knowledge.

How do these concepts get together? What does it mean to approach them critically? Can knowledge be transfered, subverted and appropiated without reproducing old-school patterns? What is the role of authority in the transmission of knowledge? Is it possible to teach and learn polically? And how does the growing privatization of educational institutions affect the “production of talent” in the so-called Knowledge Capitalism?

These are some of the questions that will be inspire the discussion in this 2nd session, lead by Spanish artists and educators Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto and Berlin-based collective The Public School Berlin.This session will be followed by a class by “The Impossibility of Teaching” by The Public School Berlin taking place on August 26th at 19:00 at Program (Invalidenstrasse, 115). See below for further details.

August 23, 19:00 at Altes Finanzamt (Schönstedtstraße 7)

The Public School Berlin+ A User´s Guide: counter education.

- The Public School Berlin .

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.

- The Intention; Las Lindes; 15M presented by Marta & Publio.

Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto are artists and high school teachers based in Madrid, developing a theoretical work and artistic practice on audiovisual literacy and critical pedagogies. They are involved in teacher’s training, education of artists and self-representation projects with youth. They understand the cultural production as poetic and formal instrument of representation that guide to personal and collective critical attitudes.

August 26, 19:00 at Program (Invalidenstrasse 115)

The Public School Berlin + A User´s Guide: The Impossibility of Teaching.

If teaching is understood as the transmission of knowledge, does that imply that knowledge can be “had”? And can we rethink pedagogy if we leave this conceptual metaphor (knowledge = possession) behind us? If we assume that knowledge is impossible to have, how does that affect the space of teaching, and authority itself? What becomes of the impossible desire to overcome our teachers, who are always “supposed to know” (Lacan)?