new media center_kuda.org

Monday, May 31st, 2010, 5pm
The Youth Center CK13, Novi Sad

Guest: Renée Ridgway, Amsterdam, http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/233

n.e.w.s (http://northeastwestsouth.net) was launched at ISEA 2008 in Singapore. n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South.

n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change from outside the normal parameters of established art world networks. n.e.w.s. offers space for a potential series of global dialogues, transactions and collaborations concerning art and its discourse. Content is curatorially determined: images, texts, podcasts, livestream and sound archives provide documentation of discussions, works or new media. Contributors change during the course of the year depending on interests and time. n.e.w.s. structures these contributions in the form of a blog/archive (images and text), regular online forums on diverse subjects ranging from Asian Biennials, an Internet for introverts to the paradoxes of slackerdom and erroneous positions. Building upon shared knowledge and past references, contributors engage with others’ practices. Multilingual translation, tagging and commentary contextualise the contributions and open up new possibilities; collaboration in the form of future projects such as our forthcoming publication and the Shadow Search Project.

n.e.w.s. is non-commercial and uses the visibility of distributed networks to create value around immaterial resources in a knowledge-driven economy. Using a bottom-up, grass roots methodology in a Web 2.0 economy, what distinguishes n.e.w.s. from other online communities is its collaborative curatorial model and partially remunerated content, without being an academic, governmental or cultural institution with structural subsidy. A system of trust and unexpected contingencies measure this intangible input. This strategy encourages a return not strictly based on attention economy (reputation) principles. A tool for the creation of immaterial resources and intellectual goods in an era of diversification, n.e.w.s. attempts to initiate, build and foster relations and provide a valuable platform dedicated to cultural bricolage, enabling less seen artistic endeavors worldwide visibility. n.e.w.s. is attempting to leverage the potential of participative technologies and communities to facilitate the possibility for an artistic discourse through (partially!) paid content. How can we negotiate the attention economy of the Internet with remuneration? In order to pay contributors n.e.w.s. is seeking out alternative models of exchange, collaboration and vocabularies by engaging visionaries and financial supporters in order to bridge not only fields of interest but shared enterprise. We hope to be able to answer some of these questions in our forthcoming publication for which we won the Competition of Ideas prize that rethinks the social and economic conditions of art in the 21st century and speculates potential models for remuneration.

n.e.w.s. contributors: Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Branka Curcic, Lee Weng Choy, Ruangrupa, Nishant Shah, Community Museum Project, Thomas Berghuis, Renée Ridgway

n.e.w.s. advisory board: Sebastian Lopez, Gunalan Nadarajan, Kitty Zijlmans, Shaheen Merali, Sarat Maharaj