[rohrpost] Fri Dec 14 ~ Sat Dec 15 ~ Lawrence Liang ~ The River as Archive

[The Oil of the 21st Century]

The River as Archive
with Lawrence Liang

Fri Dec 14, 7 pm - 9 pm: Lecture & Discussion
Fri Dec 14, 9 pm - late: Screening (*)
Sat Dec 15, 1 pm - 4 pm: Boat Trip (**)
Sat Dec 15, 9 pm - late: Drinks, Music, Video (***)

Wiederaufbau für Kreditanstalt
Mauerstraße 68, Ecke Leipziger
U2 Mohrenstraße, U6 Stadtmitte



For the last "Oil of the 21st Century" event in Berlin, we have invited
Lawrence Liang, a researcher with the Alternative Law Forum in
Bangalore, whose key areas of interest, in recent years, have been the
various conflicts that arise at the intersections of law, technology
and culture, and whose interventions in the ongoing debates about
Intellectual Property have become a point of reference for numerous
theorists and practitioners all around the world.

"The River as Archive" sounds like a highly speculative undertaking, but
if we start in India, take a closer look at the struggles against
displacement, expropriation, and the commodification of the biosphere,
the function of the river as a repository of knowledge, as a highly
contested medium that tends to resist the processes of privatization,
commercial stratification and control, becomes instantly evident.

Still, the idea of the the public domain as the "Commons" is, at least
metaphorically, based on solid ground, on land. One of the questions
that Lawrence Liang brings to Berlin is if the place of shared knowledge
shouldn't rather be conceptualized as a body of water: the ocean, the
sea, or the river -- and why, in the imaginary world of Intellectual
Property, water is exclusively reserved for the phenomenon of "Piracy".

While we still "navigate", or even "surf", the often shallow waters of
proprietary archives, a whole new universe of distributed repositories
has emerged that is built on "streams", or even "torrents". These are
not simply metaphors for the free flow of information, but highly
advanced technologies and protocols that rely on the concept of the
river, as archive, for reasons of performance and efficiency -- and
that threaten to obsolete the fortified repositories of information.

"The River as Archive" begins Friday evening and ends Saturday night.
We will hear a lecture, watch a movie, take a boat and have a party.

   (*) With kind support from Pirate Cinema Berlin. For details, see:
       http://piratecinema.org/screenings/20071214

  (**) The trip starts at 1 pm at Mühlenstrasse (East Side Gallery, west
       of Oberbaumbrücke, north bank of the Spree, S Warschauer  
Strasse),
       at the new pier near the new billboard of the new "O2 World". The
       boat has a capacity of approximately 30 passengers. If you like  
to
       join us, please mail to reservations at oil21.org in advance.

(***) This will be the closing event of Wiederaufbau für Kreditanstalt.



The Oil of the 21st Century
www.oil21.org oil21 at oil21.org

The Oil of the 21st Century is a project by Bootlab,
based on a concept by Partner gegen Berlin, produced
in cooperation with Sarai, The Thing and Waag Society,
and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.



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