cultural policy event

Topology, Innovation and Cultural Policy
Arts Santa Mònica, Saturday 12 December

Organised by: YProductions in collaboration with Goldsmiths and University of Barcelona

Download the Report here

In recent years the concept of innovation has been introduced into the cultural sphere, importing some of its meaning from management and economic theory but also acquiring a new dimension as a consequence of  the peculiarities and singularities of the sphere. An alternative approach to innovation has emerged in the last decade that presumes that the cultural sphere is a space in which knowledge is produced in processes of collaboration. This collaboration takes place in spaces in which agents are actively connected to each other, in which public institutions, universities, cultural agents and private firms create virtuous networks aimed at sharing and transferring knowledge, ideas and objects between each other.  Innovation is understood as a context rather than as an output, and is to be found in the creative basins that lie at the heart of the city’s life. The role of policy-making agencies seeking to support this form of innovation is unclear; how can policy promote emergence rather than designing top-down cultural schemes? This form of innovation is inspired by movements such as free/open software, and encourages forms of cooperation as opposed to competition. It implies self-organization, encourages new ways of measuring value and gives autonomy to  cultural agents. All these changes present important challenges to policy makers who are used to defining culture as a static element or completed work that needs to be preserved and protected. In this new scenario, the aim is to maximize the circulation of objects and ideas in ways that enable collaboration.

This panel will address the problems that come from trying to apply this dynamic view of culture to the design of concrete measures or institutional structures aimed at managing culture. Cultural policy has traditionally operated with a notion of culture understood as a set of closed artifacts. Many new agencies are challenging this notion and are designing policies aimed at reinforcing cultural networks, promoting the emergent properties of cultural production and designing complex spaces of interaction between institutions, technologies and cultural producers. The following debate aims to analyze the extent in which these experiments can help to redefine cultural policy and how can these ideas be transformed into specific measures.

This half-day event will run for 3 hours, after a brief presentation carried out by YProductions each speaker will do a 20 minute presentation followed by a 15 minutes Q&A. The event will conclude with a 30 minute round table with all the speakers.

Speakers include:

Jose Luis de Vicente (Barcelona, Spain)
Ramon Sanguesa (Barcelona, Spain)
Monika Fleischmann (Bonn, Germany) - http://fleischmann-strauss.de
Ronaldo Lemos (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Exhibition

Exhibition “CULTURES OF CHANGE”
Arts Santa Mònica , 10 December 2009 - 28 February 2010

Curators: Josep Perelló and Pau Alsina

Arts Santa Mònica (http://www.artssantamonica.cat/ ) housed in an exceptional building on the Rambla in Barcelona, is a space of convergence and crossover between the different disciplines of contemporary artistic creation and science, thought and communication.

Attentive to the cultural mutations and social changes accompanying the transition to the knowledge society, and working in conjunction with universities and academic institutions, research institutes and centres for the production and presentation of art, science and communication, Arts Santa Mònica generates ideas, projects, research and materials that stimulate dialogue between the local and all it has to offer and the global dimension of society today.

Cultures of Change proposes to explore social and cultural dynamics from a radically multidisciplinary perspective. The new technologies in the realms of Artificial Intelligence or the Internet and other digital communication tools have made it possible to visualize, monitor and quantify aspects of our society and culture in ways that were all but unimaginable until very recently. At the same time, the theory of complex systems, which seeks to explain these phenomena through the collaboration of  science, is regarded by some as playing a very significant part in this research. The exhibition aims to open up discussion about multidisciplinary practice and the problems bearing on communication between closed disciplines when studying cultural and social communities.

The following partners from the ATACD research network have been invited to participate in the exhibition: Celia Lury, Goldsmiths, Richard Rogers, Amsterdam, Alex Adriaansens, V2_, Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Luc Steels, SONY LAB, Florian Cramer, Piet Zwart Institute.

Student Day

Organised by: the ATACD postgraduate student research network

A post-conference report from the Student Day can be downloaded here

Introduction
The Student Day will be a training day involving postgraduate students  participating to the conference. It will consist of a workshop-based session that will facilitate facilitate an exchange of ideas and encourage interdisciplinary discussion and two eynote presentations chosen from the list of plenary speakers participating in the conference. It is hoped that the Student Day will enhance participants’ awareness and understanding of topology and cultural dynamics and offer an insight into the potential but also the limitations of the topological approach. Active participation from all those attending will be encouraged in a relaxed and friendly setting.

The attendance of the Student Day is free of charge, but participants must register in advance of the event. Those who have registered for the event will be contacted in the weeks preceding the event and asked to prepare a short text responding to the keynote presentations (these will be publicised in advance), as well as a  statement on how their research relates to the topological approach to cultural dynamics.

Keynote speakers
Alex Arenas, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

Workshop:
Xin Wei Sha, Condordia University

Timetable
Morning Session
09:30 Registration
10.00-11.30 Opening and workshop
11.30-12.00 Refreshments
12.00-13.00 Workshop with Xin Wei Sha

Afternoon Session
14.30-15.45 Introduction and keynote presentations (Alex Arenas and Rosi Braidotti)
14.45-16.15 Refreshments
16.15-17.00 Discussion of keynote presentations