From Tomorrow On A conference on art, activism, technology and the future of independent media at Cornerhouse, October 28 and 29, 2005 You are invited to join artists, activists, theorists, experienced media practitioners and pioneers for two days of presentations, discussions, screenings and public debates on potential futures for the developing independent and alternative media movement. Successful current models for independent media production and distribution will be presented and discussed, while other sessions will focus on communities and networks, aesthetics and ideology, and the politics of independence.The conference will be streamed live. Click here Please Note: The link will only be active during the conference.Tickets: One day- £20.00 full / £15.00 concs Two day- £30.00 full / £20.00 concs Ticket includes a copy of the From Tomorrow On Reader. Two day price includes screening ticket for The Battle of Orgreave on Thursday 27 October. For more information and bookings contact Rebecca Keating on +44 200 1515 or email rebecca.keating@cornerhouse.org Conference programme Friday October 28From tomorrow on: Current models and future possibilities for independent media production Dee Dee Halleck (Deep Dish TV, New York)Pit Schultz (Bootlab Berlin)Indymedia Manchester)How well do the existing models work, technologically, artistically, economically, politically? How can or should they develop or change? The panel will present projects, set themes and ask questions that will be returned to throughout the weekend.Camcorder aesthetics and the articulation of protest: Issues of representation and ideology Hito Steyerl Emma Hedditch (andiwilldo.net) Mick Fuzz (Undercurrents.org)Issues of representation and ideology. Whom do we speak for? Whose interests does our action ultimately serve? This panel will present and discuss different approaches to issues of art and propaganda, activism and representation, and debate the questions raised by Hito Steyerl’s text at The Articulation of Protest Saturday 29 OctoberVirtual spaces, real networks: What can or should differentiate new, independent media systems from the mass media we already have?Simon Sheikh (OversigtTV TV, Copenhagen) Agnese Trocchi (CandidaTV, Rome)Bjoernstjerne Christiansen (Superflex, Copenhagen)Do you serve a community or build an audience? Who are these networks for? Do they really constitute a new space for action?What is independence and how to achieve it? The political economy of knowledge productionLeigh French (Variant magazine) Saul Albert (University of Openess) Seda Gürses (de-center berlin) Micz Flor (Centre for Advanced Media Production, Prague)In this final session the panel will ask what independence might be in theory and make suggestions on how to work towards it in practice, basing the discussion in their own varied experiences.From Tomorrow On is a collaboration between Cornerhouse and the Research Group for Art and Democracy, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University and Cornerhouse, and is organised by Will Bradley and Lesley Young.About the SpeakersSaul Albertworks with the University of Openness, The People Speak, Twenteenth Century and Dorkbot London. More info and links may be found here.Micz Floris a media developer and training consultant at the Center for Advanced Media – Prague, where he initialised Campware. Over the past few years he has been working with independent media institutions in the south-east of Europe as well as Asia. Besides his work in consultancy, training and development, Flor has been organising a series of cultural events and symposia, including the exhibition One Bit Louder in Liverpool, Moneynations2 in Vienna and flashlights at the Pandaemonium biennial of moving images, London. In early 1999 Flor worked as content developer for Public Netbase Vienna, where he also co-edited the web/print publication ‘period after’ concerned with independent media development. In 1998, while living in the uk he founded and co-edited the online/tabloid publication crash media. Living in manchester from 1998 to ’99, he initialised the structure and architecture of the independent cultural server yourserver. Flor was involved in the organisation of the hybrid workspace, a collaboration between Documenta X and the Berlin Biennial, 1997 in Kassel. In 1998 he organised the temporary media lab ‘revolting’ in Manchester. Before moving to the UK, he set up Berlin’s content provider art-bag.net and since then has contributed to and worked with Berlin’s net.radio programme convex tv.Leigh Frenchis a co-editor of Variant magazine. Variant magazine is an independent, critical arts and culture publication, published three times a year with a circulation of 15,000 copies per issue throughout the UK & Ireland, and internationally through its subscription base. Relaunched as a free tabloid in 1996, Variant aims to widen the involvement of its readership in debate,discussion and awareness of social, political and cultural issues which are otherwise ignored,hidden,suppressed or censored. It looks to its readership to provide,inform and generate content for the magazine. As such,we address and engage a wide ranging �community of interest�. Variant is a unique, innovative arts and culture magazine, highly praised within the sector for its cross-disciplinary approach to publishing. Variant has proven there is a real need and desire for a magazine with the independence to be critical that addresses cultural issues in a social and political context. Mick Fuzzis an internet activist who concentrates on distributing video on the internet and organising public screenings. He has worked with award-winning social justice video production company Undercurrents since 1999 and Indymedia UK since its formation in 2000. “Rather than maintaining an illusion of impartiality, the kind of media we create contains blatant incitement to get involved in positive campaigns and make a difference. Mainstream media just can’t do that. Our real challenge is to create outlets and distribution networks for this material.” Mick is involved in creating and screening video for campaign group including Manchester No Borders, the Dissent Network and Rising Tide. He is currently working with the UK Indymedia video collective to create a database of online films to be downloaded for public screenings and promoting an online toolkit for community video makers called Ourvideo.org. Seda Guerses is based in Berlin. In recent years she has worked on various topics in technology including the feminist critique of computing, open source technolgies and philosophies, security and, most recently, privacy and ubiquitous computing. On and off she has also been active in immigrant politics. In additon she is part of a network of DJs from Berlin crossing Oriental, Balkan and electronic music. Guerses recently involved in starting a group initiative called de-center berlin on the politics of representation in art and the media. Dee Dee Halleckis a media activist and co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego. Her first film, Children Make Movies(1961), was about a film-making project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. Her film, Mural on Our Street was nominated for an Academy Award in 1965. She has led media workshops with elementary school children, reform school youth and migrant farmers.In 1976 she was co-director of the Child-Made Film Symposium, which was a fifteen year assessment of media by youth throughout the world. As President of the Association of Independent Video and Film Makers (AIVF) in the seventies, she led a media reform campaign in Washington. She has served as a trustee of the American Film Institute, Women Make Movies and the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation. She has authored numerous articles in Film Library Quarterly, Film Culture, High Performance, The Independent, Leonardo, Afterimage and other media journals. Her book, Hand Held Visions: the Impossible Possibilities of Community Media is published by Fordham University Press. She recently co-edited a book for M.E. Sharpe, publishers, entitled Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest.As professor in the Department of Communications at the University of California, San Diego, Halleck taught courses in the history of telecomunications, telecommunications policy, production of television and the history of community media in the United States. Links to information about her courses can be found here.In 1989 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for an ecological series for the Deep Dish Network. She received two Rockefeller Media Fellowships for The Gringo in Maï¾–analand, a feature film about stereotypes of Latin Americans in U.S. films, which was featured at the Venice Film Festival, the London Film Festival, a special jury prize at the Trieste Festival for Latin American Film, and first prize from the American Anthropological Association’s Visual Anthropology Division. Her recent film, Ah! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet was shown at the Woodstock Film Festival, the Vermont Film Festival and the Dallas Video Festival. Her work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Austrian Triennial of Photography, the Wexner Center, the Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Bellevue Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum and she also co-coordinated a twelve part series on the prison industrial complex in the United States entitled, Bars and Stripes.Emma Hedditchis a visual artist and writer living in London. Her productions include: ‘A Pattern’ (since 2000), an ongoing collectively shot and edited video; ‘This is what we have done, and this is what we are doing’ (2005), animated drawings by persons in the context of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; ‘Video home, come on’ (2004), a home-video viewing session and archive, with Electra and Electric Studios, Brixton; ‘A Political feeling, I hope so’ (2004), Cubitt Gallery, London, a social situation exploring conditions of belonging; ‘Parts of it are moving’, an ongoing collection of digital images with persons engaged in or the results of anarchist thought and social strategies, shown in ‘Double Check. Re-Framing Space in Photography: The Other Space, Parallel Histories’, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Celje, Slovenia, 2004 and Camera Austria, Graz, Austria, 2005.Ongoing research into feminist thought and writing has informed much of this activity, as well as a desire to expose the economics of art production. She has been engaged in collaborative dialogue with The Copenhagen Free University since 2001, and has worked for Cinenova Women’s Film and Video distributor since 1999. Her essays include: ‘Stay Away, Don’t Stay Away, in ‘afterthought: new writing on conceptual art’ ed. Mike Sperlinger, 2005; ‘Now that we are persons: an essay on the maternal subject’, Mute magazine, 2004.Pit SchultzBorn in Heidelberg, Schultz studied computer science in Berlin. Since the late 90s, he has worked as an internationally renowned organizer in independent culture and media projects. He was co-founder of “Radio Internationale Stadt” and Nettime, contributed in 1997 to the “Hybrid Workspace” at the Documenta X in Kassel and in 1999 founded Klubradio in Berlin. In 2000 he founded the Bootlab, an organization for the support and development of electronic art and culture. Simon Sheikhis an art critic and curator, assistant Professor of Art Theory and coordinator of the Critical Studies Programme at Malmﾚ Art Academy, Sweden, guest curator at NIFCA, Helsinki, Finland, and one of a loose collective of artists and others responsible for the independent broadcasting organisation Tv-Tv in Copenhagen. Since 1996 he has been co-editor of ﾯjeblikket, a danish magazine for visual cultures, and since 1997 has been writing for the daily newspaper Information. He has edited anthologies including We Are All Normal (and we want our freedom), Black Dog Publishing, London 2001, and In the Place of the Public Sphere?, b_books, Berlin 2002. Sheikh lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.Hito Steyerlis a documentary filmmaker and author living in Berlin. She has published many filmic and written essays centered around questions of globalization, urbanism, racism and nationalism and her films include: Germany and Identity, 1994, Land of Smiles 1996, Babenhausen 1997, The Empty Centre, 1998, Normalitﾊt, 1999 and November, 2003. Steyerl is visiting professor for Cultural and Gender Studies at the University of Arts, Berlin and her recent exhibition include the Berlin Biennial, 2004; Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, 2004; and City of Women, Ljubljana, 2003. Agnese Trocchi was born as *macchina*, a digital entity, in AVaNABbs (Bullettin Board System), and settled in Rome. She grew up in techno organized disorder and created a Web site focused on the illegal rave scene in Italy with Francesco Macarone Palmieri: Ordanomade, Children of The Noise Age (http://www.kyuzz.org/ordanomade). She has developed counter-networks in Rome including http://www.thething.it. She is also co-editor of Torazine Magazine : Pills of Pop Counterculture. She is also co-founder of Candida TV, a video project on the infestation of mainstream television channels. Since 1999, she has been collaborating with Diane Ludin and Francesca Da Rimini in the net project Identity_Runners