[Nettime-nl] Crystalpunk Bonanza of Origins - 13 jan 2007

[Wilfried Hou Je Bek <wilfriedhoujebek@yahoo.com>]

Crystalpunk Bonanza of Origins

http://socialfiction.org/index.php?insert=bonanza.html

Time: Saturday, 13 January 2007, 11.30-18.00
Place: Moira, Wolvenplein 10, Utrecht, the
Netherlands.
Free entrance (a 5euro lunch will be available)

with Luc Steels, Otto Rossler, Florian Cramer, Martin
Howse, Jonathan Kemp, Bruno marchal

Crystalpunk is a panoply of ideas revolving around the
same few Wandering Stars: the Game of Go and the Game
of Life, the origin of language and the origin of
mind, the suspected but never-realised capabilities of
mind, matter, memory and computers whispered into your
inner ear by unknown writers and succumbi, the power
of abstraction and a melancholy for the noise lost,
the BacterioPoetic and the cybernetic writing machine
envisaged by Italo Calvino and William S. Burroughs.

Currently, supported by the local Media-Art
institution Impakt, we are compiling our projected
collected philosophy of Crystalpunk into a book, to be
released to the public in March 2007. As part of this
process of writing we have been given the opportunity
to find inspiration and climb many wonderful vistas of
thinking by organising a one-day symposium. For this
we have compiled a varied groups of speakers who have
proven to possess (perhaps to their own amazement)
insights fruitful to the Crystalpunk imagination.

Speakers:

Luc Steels is professor at the AI lab of the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel and he has been an active
participant in nearly all developments in this field
for the last 30 years. What makes him especially
interesting for the Crystalpunk is his wide ranging
interest in ?origins?. The origins of intelligence,
the origins of social behaviour and most of all,
revealing his background in linguistics, the origin of
language. It is on aspects of the latter that he will
speak.
http://arti.vub.ac.be/steels

Florian Cramer has been for over a decade been the
most eloquent proponent of speculative programming.
His interest range from ancient number-magic to
renaissance hermetical philosophy to the avant-gardes
of the 20th century. In 2005 he published ?Words made
Flesh? his grand expose of the historical roots of
modern-day soft- and hardware.
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh
http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70

AP (Martin Howse and Jonathan Kemp) are responsible
for an ongoing series of events under the heading of
XXXXX. Traversing the fringes of art and science,
these International Crashes are a work in progress,
with artefacts like expended software, the reverse
engineering of Kekulé, Flip-Flop time-machines and the
artistic CPU, left behind on the ground like the
fallen breadcrumbs after a naked lunch of gothic
engineering. Rewriting history their are inventing
their own future.
http://1010.co.uk

Bruno Marchal is a research fellow at Brussel?s
AI-institute Iridia. His Dovetailer is a introspective
universal machine of which the intellectual history
begins with the ancient philosopher Plotinus. It is
the computational Library of Babel folded into a zoo
of interpreters, together creating an infinite number
of programs of which you, there is no way of telling
it is not so, can be one. And somewhere along these
lines theology is implicated and consensus reality is
reduced to a play with words.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7emarchal/

Otto Rössler has under his belt, amongst others, a
strange attractor that carries his name and a
brain-equation. His work spans decades, and time after
time he has shown up where the fire of discovery was
at its brightest to make his contribution, chaos
theory being only the most publised. Currently he is
working on Endophysics, or physics from within: a
far-ranging philosophy that enfolds from the
mediations of Descartes as the x-ray eyes that demands
us to learn to see through the magic carpet of Quantum
Mechanics. His biggest unfinished project however is
not a scientific theory but the foundation of
Lampsacus, a semi-mythical v-town that once
established would offer free education to all. As a
possible title for his talk is ?Leap into the True
Reality; post-Cartesian, Post-Fröbelian,
Post-Teilhardian, post-Everettian, post-Disneyian.
(with or without the 'posts')?. 

-------------------------
The Future was my First Love [And it Will be My Last]

http://socialfiction.org
-------------------------

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