<nettime-ann> 14 August - cybernetic advertising agency / summer talks i

Hello all,

I’m fairly new to this list, and I hope this is the right place to post an invitation.

Together with Baruch Gottlieb, I’ll be organising the The Cybernetic Advertising Agency summer school, which is a one-week multi-disciplinary art and theory lab in The Hague where we explore the inner workings of the ‘attention economy’ and discuss its implications for the arts. What is not advertised on the site, but I will tell you here is that the target of these actions will be the Fossil Fuel industry, specifically Shell (in collaboration with Fossil Free Culture). Specifically, we will be addressing and resisting the funding of arts and education as a way of ‘art washing’ the corporate image.

Advertising is everywhere. It is central to the profit models of all the prevalent social platforms. Everywhere you look, you click, you listen, you walk you are bombarded with messages that are trying to engage you. Many forms of advertising mechanisms today not only send messages they also harvest all kinds of data to improve the advertising ‘targeting’. Such feedback loops controlling behaviour belong to the field of study called socio-cybernetics. Marshall McLuhan considered advertising the ‘first great art form’ of the electronic age. He meant a ‘corporate’, collaborative, multi-disciplinary art form that reached out into the society in a cybernetic feedback loop, sending out messages, gauging responses and then integrating information from the responses into new messages. For this summer school we will be working with the playful and light material of inflatable objects, under the guidance of artist Artúr van Balen and the Tools for Action collective (tactical media lives on). Inflatables are spectacular attention-grabbers all the way to the empty core. They are used both for advertising purposes and for social protest movement. In our working method, we will prepare our tactics, prepare our evaluation criteria, deploy our tactics, launch the inflatables and evaluate according to our criteria towards subsequent deployment

The Summer School workshops are only for our registered participants but on Tuesday evening 14 August during the School we will hold a series of public presentations and discussions on cybernetic aesthetics and persistently political problems. These lectures (in English) are free of charge but a reservation is necessary (you can get tickets here). We will be occupying the former US Embassy for this (which us currently vacant) - Korte Voorhout 2, Den Haag.

Below are more details on the program.

On another note, if there are other people on here working with cybernetics/tactical media/activism, please do not hesitate to alert me to this.

best,

Shailoh Phillips

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Tuesday evening public program:

19:00 - 19:30
Shailoh Philips and Baruch Gottlieb
‘The Cybernetic Advertising Academy: Socio-cybernetics, advertising and art’

19:30 - 20:00
Loet Leydesdorff
‘Anticipation and the Complex Dynamics of Communication’

20:00 - 20:30
Break

20:30 - 21:00
Marc Tuters
‘Cybernetic Cultures: Fantasies of absolute control’

21:00 - 21:30
Artur van Balen
‘Tools for Action: Art for activism’

21:30 - 22:00
Drinks

More info: http://www.westdenhaag.nl/exhibitions/18_08_Summer_School