[Nettime-nl] Paul Edwards Lecture: Thinking Globally: Computers, Networks,andthe Construction of "Global" Spaces

[matthew fuller <fuller@xs4all.nl>]

Public Lecture

Paul N. Edwards
Thinking Globally: Computers, Networks,and the Construction of "Global" Spaces

Time: 17.00hr
Date: Wednesday 3rd December 2003
Entry: Free, all welcome
Language: English
Place:  Collegezaal, Piet Zwart Institute, Overblaak 85,
Rotterdam

Brief abstract:
This talk explores how information infrastructures
underlie, and help to produce, concepts, ideologies, and critiques of
globalization and global space(s). the chief example will be climate
change, a global political issue that would not exist without the global
information infrastructure that produces data and knowledge about the
planetary atmosphere. Also discussed will be the World Wide Web and
other kinds of global infrastructures, as they exist in both ideology
and practice.

Bio:
Paul N. Edwards is Associate Professor of Information at the
University of Michigan, where he specializes in the history, politics,
and culture of information technologies. He is author of The Closed
World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT
Press, 1996) and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge
and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001) and Changing Life:
Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1997). Edwards is presently completing a monograph tentatively titled
The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global
Atmospheric Politics. His work has received a number of awards,
including a Guggenhiem Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholars Award. Edwards
is spending the 2003-04 academic year in South Africa, where he is
researching the technopolitics of information infrastructure before and
after apartheid.

Background reading:
A number of articles and book chapters by Paul N.
Edwards can be downloaded at his website, http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/.

Transport:
Overblaak 85 is the largest of the yellow Kubus buildings in
the centre of Rotterdam.  You can get here by Tram 1 or by train or
Metro to Station Blaak.

This event is hosted by Media Design Research at the Piet Zwart
Institute, the institute for postgraduate studies and research of the
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam.
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/.  It is organised in collaboration with
V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam.  http://www.v2.nl/
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