florian schneider's blog

The Art of Rent is a cycle of 4 meetings that started in January at Queen Mary University of London. This series of public seminars was open to everyone: our experiment with academic structures to build a sort of open university. Open to London, to everybody who lives here or passes through this metropolis. We tried to take the word "metroversity" literally and experiment a metropolitan space inside the university's space itself.

During the last 15 years the contemporary art world has grown extensively. The term globalisation is often used to describe this process, especially when the explosion of mega events such as biennales and art fairs are discussed. But globalisation is also about competition between regions, nations and continents.

On a higher educational level, this is very well reflected in the so-called Bologna process: a political attempt to make Europe and its surroundings a more attractive milieu and competitive force, economically speaking.

The Copenhagen Free University ceased its activities by the end of   2007 and in connection with the abolition of the institution we have   written the following statement:

New York Union Semester is an innovative program, providing the opportunity to learn about organized labor in a challenging environment both inside and outside the classroom. As interns, students learn the inner workings of organized labor while they make a contribution to the important work unions do. In the classroom, students analyze the experience they are gaining in the field, by studying the U.S. Labor Movement past and present.

Too many conferences organized presently by art academies draw attention to the recent developments of PhD trajectories in art. Yet, an even more important issue today pertains to the specificity of Ma programs of art academies.

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth are backing a scheme to make publicly funded education materials freely available on the internet.

The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.

For seven weeks, a massive movement has been growing within the French University system, uniting professors, students and staff in a struggle against Sarkozy's new university reform law, the law concerning the "Liberties and Responsabilities of the Universities" (LRU).

The University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis, with the support of University administration and personnel, has been on "active strike", offering alternative classes and workshops open to all. Today the movement is at a turning point, revealing the depth of the crisis.
http://universiteparis8engreveactive.org/

Das HAU/Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin veranstaltet im Rahmen des thematischen Wochenendes "RE-EDUCATION einen Online- Videowettbewerb. Aus der Ankündigung:

The mailinglist "edu-factory" http://www.edu-factory.org has opened a second round of discussions which will last from now till the end of february. The initiators of the debate on the educational factory and the world of the university have summed up the experiences of the first round as follows:

"Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they were put off by restrictions these companies wanted to place on the new digital collections." Heiko Recktenwald forwarded this article to the nettime-l mailinglist.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/19/business/19library.php

On the mailinglist nettime i came across a message that introduces a new strategy to increase the efficiency of anti-piracy advertisement which is apparently ignored by teenagers. The proposal is to introduce a copyright education curriculum to elementary school children...

Ladies and Gentlemen,
dear SUMMIT delegates and SUMMIT contributers,

it is my utmost and sincerest pleasure to welcome you to the first SUMMIT non aligned initiatives in education culture.

I am supposed to deliver a speech since a summit is usually opened by a speech. But of course such a speech would be un-speechable. Who am I that I could possibly take the chance to claim the right to open such a thing as a summit? For whom could I speak -- hardly for what is supposed to be myself? Whom should I represent? Why should you believe such a performance is relevant at all?

If one principle could be seen to inform the opaque surface of what in the 1990s was called a "new economy" -- the shifts and changes, the dynamics and blockades, the emergencies and habit formations taking place within the realm of immaterial production -- it would certainly be: "Work together".

Facing the challenges of digital technologies, global communications, and networking environments, as well as the inherant ignorance of traditional systems towards these, 'working together' has emerged as an unsystematic mode of collective learning processes.