SharingKnowledge /OpenSource /BerlinCopenhagen

Free Floating Faculty is docking in Berlin!

 

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THE WHATWHOWHEREHOW OF THE FREE FLOATING FACULTY /READER_01

WHAT........

The Free Floating Faculty is initiating a series of collaborative research
tasks, examining art as knowledge production. The project is taking place
in both Vienna, Berlin and Copenhagen.

Under the title SharingKnowledge /OpenSource /BerlinCopenhagen, the Free
Floating Faculty will dock at Sparwasser HQ to take part in the project
CitySellingCityTelling. In Berlin we will relate our work to the projects
contributing to CitySellingCityTelling INS/International Necronautical
Society, Tadej Pogacar/CODE:RED and Andreas Fogarasi/Public Brands. The
Free Floating Faculty will subsequently bring the projects from
CitySellingCityTelling to Copenhagen, to host discursive workshops
involving the local audience.

Berlin, Sparwasser HQ:
April 20th - May 28th

Copenhagen, Overgaden:
April 20th - June 19th

SharingKnowledge is a process of production in which we tell to share and
listen to un-learn. What do we know, who told us and who do we tell? Every
process of production is collective. We meet, talk, listen, read, see and
exchange.

OpenSource is a method of production in which we share know-ledge,
information, challenges, experiences and ideas. We make our thoughts
accessible, we exchange ideas and actions, not to take and claim, but to
share and distribute.

BerlinCopenhagen are two anchor points of the Free floating Faculty between
which we are not in transit but at home! We invite local audiences to
engage in sharing files and exchanging knowledge in a collaborative effort
of unlearning!

 

WHO..........

INS, International Necronautical Society
Andreas Fogarasi/ Public Brands
Tadej Pogacar/ CODE:RED

The projects involved in CitySellingCityTelling are in different ways all
examining the role of art and the relation to society in ways that
challenge the public being addressed. What does it mean to address a
public? What is a public!?

Collective and process-oriented projects include a public be it defined
by common interests, a specific site/ the local or a sudden time frame in
the process of production.

Dealing with counter or parallel economies, with the signs signifying a
(constructed) public or common property,, with the language of propaganda
or an abstract notion of death as presence and/or amnesia are all
perspectives narrating different local-ties in social, economic, political
and cultural ways. These perspectives can seem closer to the defining
specificities than a place, a moment or a situation in itself.
In Copenhagen the INS, International Necronautical Society, Andreas
Fogarasi and the project Public Brands and Tadej Pogacar with his project
CODE:RED will be presenting their work to the local audience and take part
in the more informal workshops in the framework of the Free Floating
Faculty.

We invite the INS to engage in the workshop PROPAGANDA! and to present
their project Calling All Agents: INS Radio Broadcasts that took place in
London 2004. This project will be the basis on which the INS and the Free
Floating Faculty will deal with the use of propaganda as a strategy and as
a way of addressing and drawing the attention of a public.

We invite Tadej Pogacar and the project CODE:RED to take part in the
workshop MAYDAY! in Copenhagen. In this frame work we will put a focus on
the performative aspect of art and activism and talk about organizing as
the forming of counter publics and as a social tool.

We invite Andreas Fogarasi and the project Public Brand to take part in
the workshop PIRACY! in Copenhagen. What defines a public and what kind of
social and cultural economic role does signs play?

 

WHERE....

We are floating!

The Free Floating Faculty is aiming at producing public spaces, counter to
the commercial, the culturally dictated, the economically defining and
other so called public spaces that we (have to) relate to as citizens,
consumers, visitors or rejected subjects. This is what we wish to un-learn.

In Copenhagen the Free Floating Faculty will be based on a life boat
positioned in the harbor of Christianshavn. This will be our informal
meeting point, hangout and point of identification in the local area.
The workshops will take place at different venues depending on the topic,
the size of the working group, the weather etc.

We will be using local venues like community houses, pubs, parks and
others. We will also make excursions to places representing or hiding a
story connected to the workshop topics. In Copenhagen we will also be
docking at the nearby islands around the city.

The Free Floating Faculty will board the former sea trawler of the GDR
fishing fleet Stubnitz, visiting Copenhagen in May. Here we will be
introduced to the history of the ship, have a guided tour and talk about
the shift in the use of Stubnitz from production industry of the GDR into
the cultural industry of new Europe.

 

HOW..........

This is an overview of the activities of the Free Floating Faculty in
Copenhagen, also being the points of exchange with projects in Berlin and
Vienna.
The events at the Free Floating Faculty will take the shape of informal
discussions, workshops and excursions. These will take place in the
framework of our lifeboat in the harbor of Copenhagen or in other local
spaces. We will be producing readers as common starting points for the
workshops and as post-productions. The readers will contain common
property, material found on the internet, images and shorter texts by us
and other participants, material that we wish to share and distribute. We
will also produce programs for tv-tv, a local, artist run TV station in
Copenhagen.

April 20th - June 19th
As our contribution to the exhibition CityRumble at Overgaden in Copenhagen
the Free Floating Faculty has put together this program of workshops. The
themes serve as anchor points in a process of examining what it means to
produce, read and delete knowledge. The program will in itself serve as a
method of challenging art as a kind of knowledge production.

WEEK 17: WRITING HISTORY!
Under the theme WRITING HISTORY! and on the basis of the historical example
of the Woman,s prison, positioned in Christianshavn until nearly a hundred
years ago, we will talk about the writing of history as collective memory
and amnesia and about the role and position of women in history. For this
workshop we invite a representative of the local affiliation of the
Salvation Army to talk about their social work in the local context, in
history as well as today. We also invite the art collective Women Down the
Pub, who are playing an important part in researching and spreading other
histories than those of the books...
Journalist Marie Boe, working with ,ultra local media,, will also be
joining us.
In addition the artist Dahn Vo and his father will tell the story about the
ship in which the family escaped Vietnam 25 years ago. This part of the
workshop will take place in the pub of the Vo family in Valby.

WEEK 18: MAYDAY!
Under the theme MAYDAY! we will discuss international networks of
grassroots and redefinitions of work and of organizing. We invite the local
affiliation of EuroMayDay to evaluate the 1st of May parades and to talk
about organizing as alternative spaces in a commercially dominated society.
For this workshop we also invite La Loko, an artist group working with
Esperanto as an alternative frame for language, culture and exchange.

WEEK 19: PIRACY!
Under the theme PIRACY! We will discuss filesharing as a form of knowledge
exchange and production. We will unfold notions of piracy, not as taking to
claim as property, but as taking to share and distri-bute. We will talk
about pirate media on the basis of the historical example of the pirate
radio Radio Mercur. We also invite the activist network Piratgruppen to
talk about their work and their fights with an out-datet legislation system
(especially concerning the use of the internet) and to take part in a
discussion on filesharing as a demo-cratic tool.
We will be screening the movies Skibet er ladet Med..., a Danish comedy
from the 1950-ties about a pirate radio station assembling Radio Mercur, as
well as the classic Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn. We are working
on producing PIRADIO at the Free Floating Faculty in Christianshavn.

WEEK 21: SOUNDSCAPES!
We invite sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard and the radio collective John Moss,
broadcasting via the internet from Vienna, Copenhagen and Gothenburg, to
talk about sound as a way of gathering information, producing and
exchanging knowledge.

WEEK 22: PROPAGANDA!
The London based group INS, taking part in CitySellingCityTelling at
Sparwasser HQ in Berlin, will be joining us in Copenhagen in discussions of
the relation between art and propaganda as a political, cultural and social
tool.
This workshop will be co-hosted by the art magazine Øjeblikket, of which
the coming issue has the theme Propaganda.

WEEK 23: SELF ORGANIZING!
On the backdrop of the exhibition project W...WirWissen at Exnergasse in
Vienna in which the Free Floating Faculty takes part, we will discuss
collective production of knowledge in self-organized frameworks. We invite
Manoa Free University, hosting the project in Vienna, as well as other
participating groups from Berlin and Hamburg. This workshop will take place
one of the nearby islands...

WEEK 24: The Free Floating Faculty sails on to Masnedø...

For further information see: www.freefloatingfaculty.org