Date sent: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 10:16:12 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Geert Lovink
To: nettime-l@desk.nl
Subject: zkp3/nettime: call for attention

* Call for Attention *

ZKP3 @ MetaforumIII
11-13 October 1996
Budapest/Hungary

100 copies 200 pages
+ through nettime-l

made in Hungary

Dear Nettimers,

After the presentation of the xerox zine/reader ZKP1 in Amsterdam at the Next Five Minutes (january 1996) and ZKP2 in Madrid during 5cyberconf (june 1996), we will now produce a third (edited) compilation of nettime material. This time the editing will be done by Tom Bass, who is based in Budapest.

For those of you who are new: ZKP stands for 'Zentralkomitee', a reference to the first meeting we held in the Spessart forrest near Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in march 1995, hosted by Verein 707 under the title 'Medien-ZK'. The discussion there (mainly attended by Germans) resulted in the international 'nettime' meeting in Venice (june 1995), hosted by Club Berlin, where we for the first time formulated some elements of 'net criticism'. One of the results of that meeting was the 'nettime' mailinglist...

The theme of Metaforum 3 will be 'content', the premisses of the information industry and rus under the title 'Under Construction'.

The question of content is a question of matter. After a glorious postwar period where the enlightening concept of information escaped from the concepts of matter and energy, it is filling today any governing organisations of power and knowledge. That doesn't mean that information means anything more then gaining general dominance. Information has become such a slippery term, that in the center of the 'information-society', in it's global virtual cathedral also called 'the Net', one is hectically cyberizing everything: 'the body', 'life', 'work', 'sex', 'mind' to adapt to a chaosmos which is not made for humans but for 'something faster'.

*Panic Content* as the counterpart of information-as-pure-essence is part of a privatized colonizing project which tries to gain land out of nothing. After building up boundaries around selections of information and access restrictions, one hopes that money flows in. Interestingly the success of the war machine Internet is partly based on pirate utopias of anti-market models like shareware, public domain, anti-copyright and a ring economy of knowledge exchange.

The awaited 'War on Content' (whose information is on what server?) is a conflict which connects this experimental zone to it's real existing outside. It also sets free a dynamism which is expected to catapult us over the upcoming time-wall and which, most of all, let us forget. Forget any information we will never be able to access because it is not public or digitized. Forget about Gandmother Europe which haunted us with it's outdated canonical culturism. Forget about 'false' believes and 'wrong' memories.

To execute the grand plan of escape into cyberspace a global city must be build where the systems of command, control and communication in the military, cultural and financial sector are modulating the flows of energy and matter diffundating the finest fabrics of personal and social life. It is no wonder that being confronted with such paranoid scenarios of a world panopticum, some people get obsessed with their lost innocence showing symptoms like child abuse, alien abduction and an obsession with unvisible censorship and secure intimacy. 'Content' may be a temporary fashion which exemplifies the mass psychology of the net in the nostalgic desire for something material, it's also a chance for re-building power-knowledge-structures which do not fit into the norms of the existing official quality control systems and are therefore defining zones for serious fun.

ZKP3 is the third of a xeroxed a-periodical we non-professionally published on cyberconceptual conferences based on the output of the nettime carawane, a curly path through the contemporary so called critical so called international cyberdiscourse. We hope that out of this temporary publishing practise ideas will come how to continue the project, do reprints, migrate into infranets, become content, grow to a newsgroup, make new friends or intensify old friendships.

We are still looking for a publisher who might be interested in a compilation of nettime stuff in English, but we have been unsucessfull so far. We still intend to put out something, which can be distributed in a proper way. So far, nettime/ZKP readers were copied on-the-spot during festivals in Amsterdam, Madrid, Linz and Rotterdam. A small nettime book will come out in German by the end of this year, published by ID-Archiv (Amsterdam/Berlin) and there are plans for a Slovenian and Japanese compilation. The magazine ARKzin in Zagreb regularly translates material into Crotian. And not to forget the local web outlets in Italy, Austria, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam... We also think of starting a usenet group called alt.nettime. The ammount of subscribers of the mailinglist is growing steady (3 or 4 new members a week) and we would like to keep it this way. Activities on the list are going in waves, according to the mood and we would like to encourage everybody to come up with their own stories and experiences. nettime also carries personal accounts, not only rational critiques... All these topics will be discused during a seperate nettime gathering in Budapest on monday october 14.

Budapest is a city of old hopes and new frustrations, it may be postmodern for hundreds of years, multicultural by default, most of all it cultivates a diversity of creative disfuntionalities which sentimentally resist the principles of effectivity and profit of today. Most of all it's a place to meet with people from the east on a territory which is part of 'their own' history. It might be also a city to build up models for east-west content generators and 'round-robin' city echange networks, or at least to make plans for the evening.

Gathered textes will probably come this time from Andreas Broekman, Eveline Lubbers, Janos Sugar, Mark Stahlman, Tom Bass, Hakim Bey, Konrad Becker, Sadie Plant, SubReal, Heiko Idensen, Erik Davis, Ravi Sundaram, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Jordan Crandall, R.U. Sirius, Richard Barbrook, John Horvath, Peter Weibel, Chris Christiansz, Michiel Hegener, Geert Lovink, Critical Art Ensemble, Matthew Fuller, Benjamin Perasovic, Brian Springer, Oliver Marchart, Armin Medosch, Sabine Helmers, Paul Garrin, Diana McCarty, Katja Diefenbach, bell hooks... and you?

doors closing 7th of October

thank you for patience

-pit&geert&tom