Memories of the Future

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Memories of The Future
Friday June 25th 2010, Arts Centre Vooruit, Gent (BE). Free entrance

The rapid rise of digital network culture has a fundamental influence on the construction of our personal and social memory. The technologies used today to register, organise, find and share information have thoroughly changed our relation to past and present, but also the dynamics between remembering and forgetting. Consequently, the role and function of traditional memory institutions such as the museum, the library and the archive call for a reconsideration.

Now that it has become more and more easy to store and share information, new media promise not only an expansion but even a replacement of human memory. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that the accessibility and readability of information is increasingly dependent on different fast-changing layers of technological and social mediation. At first sight, we seem to be caught between two doomed visions: a future in which it will become impossible to escape from a digital mode of remembering and being remembered; and a society which remains attached to traditional preservation and memory practices and therefore is rendered blind to an important part of our history. How to find a new balance?

This conference intends to examine the role and notion of memory within a digital culture. What are the new memory forms developing today, hovering between the physical and the virtual, the local and the global, the formal and the informal, remembering and forgetting? What do the new memory paradigms represent for the social function and responsibility of memory institutions? What strategies can they– in the light of the expansion of information and memory industries – put in place to continue playing a lasting role in the public sphere? And finally, what are the implications for our use of digital resources – from a personal, educational, scientific or industrial perspective – as well as for the way in which we confer meaning to them? In other words, how can the traces of the past find a new place in the present, as a promise to the future?

Memories of the Future is organised in the framework of the IBBT research project Archipel by IBBT/SMIT, FARO, BAM, Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent in co-operation with vzw Waalse Krook. In Archipel universities, heritage institutions, arts organisations and technology companies study the potential of a sustainable digital archive infrastructure in Flanders. Archipel is supported by IWT (Agency for innovation by Science and Technology).

Speakers: Geoffrey C. Bowker, Peter B. Kaufman, Geert Lovink, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew Payne, Richard Rinehart. More info and registration here.

Geoffrey C. Bowker (US) is Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburgh iSchool. For the past five years, he has been serving as Executive Director and the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor at the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University (CA). His main research interests are in the field of classification, standardization and interoperability, in particular asking how these play into the development of scientific cyberinfrastructure. He has written Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999, with Susan Leigh Star) and Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT, 2005). He is currently working on a book about how to read databases – how to recognize the social, cultural and moral values that are embedded in their construction and how to scope the range of possible emergent stories and the range of stories which cannot be told.

Peter B. Kaufman (US) is president and executive producer of Intelligent Television, a New York based production company investigating new production and distribution models for video projects, and exploring how to make educational and cultural material more widely accessible worldwide. He has been researching, amongst other things, Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships in the digitization of cultural heritage materials and possible business models for networked cultural and educational institutions. He has been involved in various think tanks, such as the World Policy Institute and the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University. Occasionally he serves as an expert advisor on access issues to the Library of Congress’s Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound.

Geert Lovink (NL) is a mediatheorist and net critic. He is a co-founder of initiatives like Adilkno (Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge), The Digital City, Nettime and Fibreculture. In 2004, following his appointment as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam, he founded the Institute of Network Cultures, which aims to explore, document and feed the potential of socio-technological evolutions. Recent research subjects include the role of the search engine in our culture (Society of the Query), Wikipedia (Critical Point of View) and internet video (Video Vortex). Lovink’s essays about network culture have been published in Dark Fiber (MIT, 2002), My First Recession (MIT, 2003) and Zero Comments (Routledge, 2007).

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (AU) is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the LKY School of Public Policy / National University of Singapore. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. His work focuses on the governance of information in a globally network society, on which he published the book Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government (MIT, 2007, with David Lazer). In his most recent publication, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2009), he looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget.

Andrew Payne (UK) is Head of Education & Outreach at The National Archives in the U.K. – the official archive of the British government which holds over 11 million catalogued items covering 1000 years of British and global history. As an E-Learning specialist he has been involved in the Unlocking Archives project, a unique collaboration between SEGfL (South East Grid for Learning), The National Archives, BFI (British Film Institute) and English Heritage. He is a passionate advocate for the power of cultural collections to inspire teachers and learners but believes that organisations need to actively mediate their collections to ensure their effective use.

Richard Rinehart (US) is Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and Associate Director for Public Programs of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is active as a new media artist and has curated several exhibitions on digital art and culture. For some years now he has been involved in the development of new models and tools for the documentation, preservation and recreation of digital and media art. On this area of research interest he is currently working, together with Jon Ippolito, on a book which is tentatively entitled New Media & Social Memory: A Murder-Mystery Into the Death of Digital Culture.