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Quaero moderation
Quaero moderation
Florian Cramer
29/11/2007
Welcome
Why talk about search engines in an art school and not an
engineering school? The title of this conference is indication
enough of politics: the French and German search engine projects
reflect that information search has become a cultural, political,
economic if not geopolitical issue - who owns the keys and the
access interface to information and knowledge?
It would be easy to boil down the issue to a
European-American industrial "me, too" issue: Quaero as Europe's
answer to Google just like the Ariane is Europe's answer to the
Space Shuttle, or Airbus vs. Boeing. It's also rather easy to
dismiss the European search engine efforts as just another
predictable failure and black hole of EU subsidies like the
Ariane.
But the issue is more than just industrial politics:
Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the Bibliotheque Nationale:
issue of cultural politics, cultural dominance of Google; "When
Google Challenges Europe", departing from the Google Books
program.
Historically new that access to information, and how it is
designed, is culturally as much an issue as the information
itself: Umberto Eco's fiction of medieval monastrey which hides
Aristotle's treatise on the comedy. Science and knowledge reforms
are closely linked to information access reforms, universities,
libraries, printing presses since the reformation and
enlightenment.
Development in search engines: In the beginning, from Lycos
to Hotbot to Altavista, just about the size of the search index.
Revolution through Google, and now contested by Quaero: How the
results are sorted and ranked, in other words: how they are
presented to the user.
Less abstract example, taken from a work of one of my
students: Google search in Europe, China, misspelling. And we're
only scratching the surface of it.
Michael Zimmer
Michael Zimmer is the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the
Information Society Project at Yale Law School for 2007-2008.
Media studies scholar,
PhD on Quest for the Perfect Search Engine - pun on Umberto
Eco as well (Search for the Perfect Language)
social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of new media and
information technologies: privacy, autonomy, and liberty.
"Privacy and Quaero's Quest for the Perfect Search Engine:
Threats and Opportunities"
Quaero's ideal of the perfect search engine vs. Google's
ideal, privacy issues in the Quaero search engine concept
Florian Schneider
filmmaker (features on migration and new global movements
for Arte), political and media activist, initiator of "No human
is illegal" and the affiliated web site kein.org which now also
hosts the Nettime mailing list, organizer of festivals related to
media activism, publisher of art/theory/activism magazine
Makeworlds.
Metahaven
06 24276797
Design research group, affiliated to Jan van Eyck, members:
Vinca Kruk, Adriaan Mellegers, Tina Clausmeyer, Daniel van der
Velden.
topics: identity, politics, history, aesthetics,
resistance, cryptography, branding, iconography, heraldry,
disappearance, empire, conspiracy theories, sovereignty,
independence, discourse.
Tsila Hassine
Originally from Tel Aviv, obtained a degree in mathematics
and computer science and a Media Design M.A. from Piet Zwart, now
postgraduate researcher at Jan van Eyck.
Has worked with search engine manipulations and politics
already as a student, collaboration with De Geuzen on global
anxiety monitor.
Ingmar Weber
Studied Mathematician, works at the Max Planck Institute
for Computer Science in Saarbruecken, Germany, Ph.D. project on
Algorithms and Compexity Group, will build a search engine in 15
minutes here on the panel, followed by a critical survey of
existing web search engines
Respondents
Isabelle Stengers
Prof., philosopher, but graduated in chemistry - and one of
the few outstanding philosophers with an natural science
background [not mathematics or physics] , like Jean Piaget,
Humberto Maturana, and her co-author Ilya Prigogine - philosopher
of science both in the sense of a historical philosophy of
science and philosophy built on scientific insight: systems and
chaos theory - political and ethical questions are central to her
work, critical investigator of philosophical and political
concepts.
Maurits de Bruijn
Graphic designer, specializing on dynamic media - among
others, designer of Jeanne van Heeswijk's and Metahaven's web
site, learned to program because of that.
teaches at Arnhem Academy of Art and Design
Sabine Niederer
Art historian, design theorist, producer and curator of new
media / arts / digital culture events, managing director of the
Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, teaches Critical
Design at the School of Interactive Media in Amsterdam
Andre Nusselder
Ph.D. on human-computer interface as a medium of
imagination, now researches how new media technologies construct
images of the past