The February 2010 issue of The Economist reported that digital information is growing out of measure, out of the storage and computing capacity of the current network infrastructure. The article appeared to be very optimistic and comfortable about new business opportunities of such a trend, but some data provided by the report itself point to a structural contradiction. The question for us is whether the technological limits of the Turing universe will unveil a political limit: if the excess of social cooperation and communication feeding the mediasphere may turn into a sort of political singularity. Indeed, the current debate on network economy and new immaterial commons appears to have obliterated any notion of surplus or excess and to be dominated by metaphors of horizontal, linear, and symmetrical cooperation. Moving from the critique of the Marxian law of value also advanced by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth, Matteo Pasquinelli will discuss the political models that are employed to describe the notion of surplus and how this should affects any politics of the commons today.
Read more on Pasquinelli's blog
Situated throughout SALTonline.org, SALT Galata, and SALT Beyoğlu,“One day, everything will be free...” consists of a series of projects that engage with the promises of free economies, contemporary finance, and the cultural institution. This much is known: the task at hand is to implicate the relationship between SALT and the funding institution. But in order to do this, the project begins with a detour, a direct detour, directly into that which is made to disappear from view: associative histories and certain technical aspects of the job; knowledge economies, cultural piracy, class relations, and structural contradictions.
Matteo Pasquinelli, Laurel Ptak, Özgür Uçkan, Caleb Waldorf, and Eva Weinmayr have been invited to give lectures and research presentations for a program titled FUTURES AND OPTIONS, scheduled for March 15th and 16th at SALT Beyoğlu. This series of talks will allow us to hear from a range of protagonists who have variously engaged with the topics under consideration in the long-term research project, “One day, everything will be free…” This program will also provide a setting to invite the range of responses that will carry this project forward, or perhaps derail it entirely.
MARCH 15
18.00 Eva Weinmayr, The Piracy Project
19.15 Laurel Ptak, Publishing In Process: Ownership In Question
MARCH 16
16.30 Özgür Uçkan, Big Brother v. Little Brothers
17.45 Coffee break
18.00 Caleb Waldorf, Interface and Labor
19.15 Matteo Pasquinelli, Surplus and the Common
All the talks will be held in English.
