New Network Theory
International conference
28-30 June, 2007
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Thursday 28 June - Public Event

9:30
Doors open, coffee & tea

10:00
Welcome by Geert Lovink, Richard Rogers, Jan Simons

10:15 – 12:30
Morning session
Moderator: Richard Rogers

Siva Vaidhyanathan
Tiziana Terranova
Wendy Chun

12:30 – 13:30
LUNCH

13:30 – 15:30
Early afternoon session
Moderator: Geert Lovink

Alan Liu
Anna Munster
Martin Kearns

15:30 – 15:45
TEA/COFFEE

15:45 – 17:45
Late afternoon session
Moderator: Matthew Fuller

Warren Sack
Olia Lialina
Florian Cramer



Friday June 29

9:30 – 9:45
Introduction by Geert Lovink, Richard Rogers and Jan Simons

9:45 - 11:30
Plenary Session
Moderator: Richard Rogers

Nosh Contractor
Valdis Krebs
Katy Börner

11:30 – 13:30
Parallel sessions

A: Network Theory
Moderator: Geert Lovink

Time and again metaphors have been laid upon on the Internet, with more or less successful results. Metaphors have moved from the sociological to more complex, imaginative categories. Is network itself a metaphor? Networks have grown up, and have been materialized in maps. Most of all, networks have turned from the abstract to a personal, concrete category.

Tincuta Parv
Marianne van den Boomen
Leslie Kavanaugh
Verena Kuni
Mirko Tobias Schaefer

B: The Link
Moderator: Richard Rogers

What constitutes linking, and how could we describe its mirror phantom, or rather, its shadow? The link as a reference to another informational object only comes into being as a conscious act. There is no automated process of putting links. And there is no unconscious or subliminal linking either. Linking is tedious work. It’s an effort and should be considered ‘extra work’. There is no routine in linking. It’s a precise job that needs constant control. But the opposite of the conscious link is not the broken but the absent link. What is the lifespan of links and networks?

Iina Hellsten
Astrid Mager
Clifford Tatum
Charli Carpenter
Leah A. Lievrouw

C: Locative Media
Moderator: Jan Simons

The Internet was thought to abolish space and time constraints through media. Wireless and mobile media have are-introduced questions of space and place. Cyberspace and the so-called 'real world' converge into what Lev Manovich has called 'augmented reality,' and in this 'augmented reality' it does matter where you are. Locative media allow people to map and share their own cartographies (which implies the dazzling theoretical possibility that there are as many maps as there are map-makers), but they also allow authorities to keep track of everybody and everything. Locative media might give rise to two extreme forms of claustrophobia: will it be possible to ever break out of one's own maps, andwill it be possible to keep out of sight?

Adrian MacKenzie
Claire Roberge
Nancy Nisbet
Sophia Drakopoulou

13:30 – 14:30
LUNCH

14:30 – 16:30
Parallel sessions

A: Networks and Subjectivities

Network theory cannot function without actors, but arguably each network has particular subjects implied or built in, be they old boys, terrorists, credit card transactions. The unexpected might occur. Networks constrain and also script the behaviour of its subjects, but accidents may happen, disruptions may occur. The challenge of the network is to rescript the action or turn the format into a productive constraint for doing subjectivity.

Bernhard Rieder
Michael Goddard
Konstantinos Vassiliou
Franz Beitzinger
Ulises Ali Mejias

B: Networking and Social Life

‘Networking’ continues to be encouraged in our professional lives, but no one seems to have thought through how life would be guided if we apply network theory to professional ‘networking’ rather literally. As network scientists’ terms and ideas spread, it is of interest to speculate about one’s social life, governed by the power law, preferential attachment, hubs, self-organization, swarming and cascading effects. To network in a colloquial sense, essentially is to connect oneself with a hub. As the hub receives more connections (or becomes ‘preferentially attached’), the hub may become a superconnector, handling a disproportionately large number of connections relative to those of the other hubs in the overall network. As the network continues to grow through self-organisation, general knowledge of the existence of the superconnector may cause swarming behaviour.
A superconnector, network science reports, has the greatest vulnerabilities, however. If the superconnector cannot handle the traffic, the network breaks down. If there's breakdown, with or without cascading effects, which determines the extent of the damage, you’re on your own again. One implication is that one should continue to seek fresh hubs (as long as they last), and keep them from becoming overheated superconnectors. Hub-seeking behaviour, along with superconnector-care, come to guide social life.

Yukari Seko
Kristoffer Gansing
Alice Verheij
Kimberly de Vries
Kenneth Werbin

C: Art and Info-Aesthetics
Moderator: Warren Sack

Going beyond the first generation of net.art, how we envision art forms that utilize networks either as source material or environment? Since the first network drawings there has been a sharp increase in 'mapping'. It is known that it is hard to imagine networks without a graph in mind. Now we speak in terms of 'visualization' which takes us away from the technicality. There is a growing gap between the increased visualization and our understanding of these maps, and networks in general.

Olga Kisseleva
Wayne Clements
Jacob Lillemose
Katja Mayer
Olga Goriunova



Saturday June 30

10.00 – 12.00
Parallel sessions

A: Actor-Network Theory and Assemblage
Moderator: Noortje Marres

What is special about actor-network theory is that it aspires to take into account the non-humans and emphasize translations or redefinitions. All entities are transformed by their enrolment in specific networks, and their capacities and agency derive from this enrolment. Whilst actor-network theory proposes a dynamic ontology, in its account the main aim of network-building is to produce stable spaces. Actor-network theory was developed to account for socio-technical networks built with the aid of science and technology (shellfish, vaccinations, statistics, diesel engine, seatbelt), but now our question is what becomes of this approach when it is applied to particular new media practices, such as advocacy, publicity and DIY/domestic media. What are the peculiarities of these media practices that would be a productive challenge for actor-network theory?

Thomas Berker
Adolfo Estalella
Marijke de Valck
Betina Szkudlarek
Michael Dieter

B: Networks and Social Movements
Moderator: Eric Kluitenberg

"The whole world is watching," is what demonstrators at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 shouted in Haskall Wexler's film MEDIUM COOL (USA, 1969). Media networks were seen as a critical source for information, knowledge, and enlightment where you had to make sure you got your message through. Nowadays, media networks have become a target of irony, parody, and mockery, and as means of disconnection as well as tools for connecting movements. Activists rather organize networks through physical movements from event to event and through material objects like leaflets. Are we seeing the signs of post-network social movements?

David Garcia
Paolo Gerbaudo
Megan Boler
John Duda

C: The Global and the Local

It's easy to deconstruct McLuhan's 'global village' and even more so to reject place-specific metaphors such as 'digital city' and 'homepage' as retro constructs. If we downplay the totalizing syntheses of the local and global, we run the risk to understand important cultural dynamics within networks. Instead of pushing 'the local' as a universal solution for today's problems, we have to carefully re-assess the interaction between 'place' and 'flow'. The importance of language, cultural identities, gender and race are not 'politically correct' items in some discursive chess play but are valuable elements in a patchwork of case studies that tell us how networks are both embedded and escape the traditional understanding of locality.

Ramesh Srinivasan
Jana Nikuljska
Ali Mohammad Javadi
Deborah Wheeler

12:00 - 13:00
LUNCH

13.00 – 15:00
Parallel sessions

A: Anomalous Objects and Processes

Network objects and processes are increasingly characterized by the presence of so-called “bad objects” like viruses, worms, spam, unwanted porn, and so forth. The aim of this panel is to address the question concerning these anomalous objects. In what sense are these bad objects anomalous? And is there, in fact, a certain logic of anomality underpinning contemporary network culture; a counterintuitive logic that escapes the dualisms of good and bad and normal and abnormal? If so, this would imply that these objects are not etymologically “anomalous”, that is, “outside series”, “irregular”, “accidental.” The aim of this panel is to address the question of anomalies by seeking conceptual, analytic and synthetic pathways out of the binary impasse between the good and bad and the normal vs. the abnormal.

Greg Elmer
Jussi Parikka
John Johnston
Tony Sampson

B: Networks and movements: an interdisciplinary conversation
Moderator: Mario Diani

What is the interplay between online and offline relations with and among networks? This session looks empirically into whether collective actions should be thought about in terms of networking. Is there a possible tension between physicality of social movements and intangible quality of networks?

Elena Pavan
Giorgia Nesti
Stefania Milan
Francesca Forno
Claudius Wageman

C: Mobility and Organization
Moderator: Sebastian Olma

How are we coping with the space of flows, as Munuel Castells described them? How do scholars these days define the relation between networks and organization, beyond the early euphoria of the 'virtual office’? What is the dominant business rhetoric, a decade after the rise of the network society?

Marga van Mechelen
Jean-Paul Fourmentraux
Desiree Hoving
Robert van Boeschoten

15.30 - 17.30
Closing session conference

Noortje Marres
Matthew Fuller