The World-Information Institute (WII) is an independent cultural institution based in Vienna, Austria, established in 1999 and officially launched in 2000. The institute conducts research and organizes various events, including conferences and exhibitions, focusing on digital culture and information technologies.
The World-Information Institute is an international network of partner institutions and experts collaborating in the fields of information and communication technologies and their social implications.
WII’s main research areas involve collecting, organizing, and analyzing information about shared resources and in this context, issues related to intellectual property laws, new ways of creating cultural works, how information is searched and organized, surveillance technologies, big data, and data visualization, cultural and media policies. A recent initiative to improve cultural and media policies is the “Netzpolitischer Konvent” (the Convention of Austrian civil society on net politics), where a list of demands was prepared and shared with the public.
Projects
World-Information.Org series of projects - launched Brussels 2000 World-Information.Org was launched as the main media project of the European Capital of Culture 2000 in Brussels. The social, cultural, and political dimensions of the new information and communication technologies were discussed.Springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Heft 3/00 (in German, retrieved: 16 March 2017) The World-Information exhibition presented objects and research results on topics such as the history of modern communication technologies, the "big players" in the IT industry, financial networks, and human rights. The program was completed by the "World-Info Con" conference. Most resources are available on the world-information.org page.World Infostructure Exhibition (retrieved: 16 March 2017) The first presentation was followed by a series of conferences and exhibitions in Vienna (Technisches Museum Wien, 2000),http://world-information.org/program/vienna (retrieved: 16 March 2017) Amsterdam (Oude Kerk and De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, 2002),http://world-information.org/program/amsterdam (retrieved: 16 March 2017) Novi Sad/Belgrade (Museum of Vojvodina, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2003),http://world-information.org/program/serbia (retrieved: 16 March 2017) Bangalore (2005)http://world-information.org/program/bangalore (retrieved: 16 March 2017) and Paris (as part of the festival "Futur en Seine", 2009).http://world-information.org/program/paris/events/1242060832/1242061298 (retrieved: 16 March 2017)
Deep Search (I) — Vienna 2008
The "Deep Search" conference dealt with "the social and political dimensions of how we navigate the deep seas of knowledge".http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search/en/book/deepsearch-book_en/ (retrieved: 21 September 2016) Critically analyzing a situation in which Google assumes a monopoly-like position in the field of search in many countries around the world, the conference asked questions such as: "How is computer readable significance produced?", "How is meaning involved in machine communication?", "Where is the emancipatory potential of having access to such vast amounts of information?", "What are the dangers of our reliance on search engines?", and "Are there any approaches that do not follow the currently dominating paradigm of Google?“
Critical Strategies in Art and Media - New York, 2009
This conference on the future of cultural freedom and cultural intelligence in digital theory and practicehttp://world-information.org/wii/critical_strategies/en (retrieved: 21 September 2016) took place at the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York. It followed attempts to go beyond the obsolete models of the artist/author as genius and searched for collective and collaborative practices that could invent new terrains and flows. New kinds of virtual spaces and their role for critical cultural practices were discussed. The conference also aimed at developing strategies that could allude to being instrumentalized by the creative industries in, their seemingly infinite appetite for things "radical".
Deep Search (II) — Vienna, 2010
The debate on the policies of searching continued in 2010 with the conference "Deep Search II": "The automatic classification of data, its indexing, and its evaluation are at the heart of new communication environments. What lies beneath is not just a drive to organize the world's information, but also to classify human relations: from the management of the modern workplace and consumers in mass societies, to the bio-political management of the network society."http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search2/en/ (retrieved: 21 September 2016)
Shared Digital Futures — Vienna, 2013
The conference "Shared Digital Futures"http://world-information.net/sdf/ (retrieved: 21 September 2016) dealt with the impact of digital networking technologies to the production of culture and examined the new role of the artwork as the same end product and raw material for further production of culture, models for sustainable funding of Commons, new forms of collective authorship, and the opportunities opened by the blurring of boundaries between artists and audiences.
Information as a reality — Linz, 2014
The conference and exhibition "Information as a reality"http://world-information.net/iar/ (retrieved: 21 September 2016) in cooperation with the magazine Springerin and with Ars Electronica at the Lentos Art Museum in Linz dealt with critical cultural practices in digital networks and the increasing change of social reality by digital models and virtual information regimes. Cultural workers have played an important pioneering role in the colonization of digital worlds. What role can they assume now, 20 years after the emergence of the Internet?
Digital Clouds and Urban Spaces — Vienna, 2014
The conference "Digital Clouds and Urban Spaces"http://world-information.net/digital-clouds/ (retrieved: 8 October 2016) at Architekturzentrum Wien focused on smart cities and the city as an information system, where urbanity is increasingly shaped by networks of informational technologies. The conference took account to the fact, that this does not only apply to phenomena as traffic control systems or planning models, but that the world of work, social spaces and cultural processes are also subject to substantial transformations related to these developments. Before this backdrop, the conference questioned the simplistic promises made by global corporations and their technologies to render cities more efficient, safer and cleaner.
Critical Net Practice — Vienna, 2015
In a cooperation with the magazine Springerin World-Information Institute revisited 20 years of net culture. The resulting texts formed the main part of issue XXI/1 (winter 2015) of the magazine.http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft.php?id=87&pos=0&textid=0&lang=en (retrieved: 21 September 2016). The English version of Mission interconnectedness. A roundtable on 20 years of Net culture with Konrad Becker, Josephine Berry Slater, Felix Stalder, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, is also available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2015-03-17-becker-en.html (retrieved: 21 September 2016). Issue Presentation (MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna): Critical Net Practice: Information as a reality?http://mak.at/jart/prj3/mak-resp/main.jart?reserve-mode=active&rel=de&content-id=1343388632770&article_id=1419146574316 (in German, retrieved: 21 September 2016) Jumper / Band XXI, No. 1, Winter 2015.
Algorithmic Regimes - Vienna 2015/2016
The international conference and event series "Algorithmic Regimes"A brief description of all project parts with links to documentation videos can be found at http://world-information.net/algorithmic-regimes-and-generative-strategies/ (retrieved: 21 September 2016). examined the growing influence of digital control systems and their cascading effects of powerful effect on cultural and social realities. In addition to the conference, the event "Algorithms are no Angels" with Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood, a Video interview with Stefano Harney, and an audiovisual evening about the power of algorithms were conducted, that presented an annotated remix of film clips and documentaries,The playlist can be found at http://world-information.net/screening-the-algorithmic/ (retrieved: 21 September 2016). relating to automated control systems.
Wahlkabine.at Wahlkabine.at was founded in 2002 by the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 and was presented for the first time during the National Council elections in the same year."WWWahlspielchen", Falter 45/02 (November 2002), p. 21. The article is not available in the newspaper's online archive, which goes back only to the year 2005, download scan: http://wahlkabine.at/presse/falter2002/filedownload (in German). The online polling-booth sees itself as an instrument of political education, which encourages the users to deal with political content playfully and provides factual information and feedback opportunities.
Given the fact that increasing personalization nowadays replaces more and more the political content, Wahlkabine.at considers the publication of all party-programs and their scientific contextualization as a fundamental tool for political participation as well as a revealing resource collection for personal reflection on the voting behavior.Cf. "Why wahlkabine.at?" at: http://wahlkabine.at/ueber/Infofolder_wahlkabine_ENGL.pdf/attachment_download/file (retrieved 8 October 2016).
Wahlkabine.at focuses on elections on Austrian national and regional levels and on EU-level (European Parliament), but also includes elections of the Austrian National Student Union and a few individual cases (e.g. Austrian Economic Chambers / Sector Information and Consulting 2010).For a list of all elections covered, cf. http://wahlkabine.at/archiv (in German), retrieved: 16 September 2013. In the context of regional elections in Vienna in autumn 2015 (with an electorate of approximately 1.14 million eligible voters) 160,000 users visited the online polling booth.http://wahlkabine.at/ltw2015wien/schlussauswertungltw2015wien/ (in German, retrieved: 21 September 2016)
Future Non Stop Future Non Stop – started as a project in 2010, online since 2012 – is an extensive archive and an experiment in logics of navigating information: “Based on an extensive archive going back to 1994 the site collects materials that serve as important reference documents in the field of new media, politics, and art and makes them accessible to a wider public. Instead of a hierarchically structured archive, an experimental navigation interface opens up new ways to explore large information nodes. Documents are associated by a range of tag that allow to filter relevance according to topics and issue relations. ASCR, short for Advanced Semantic Content Repository, is the open-source information architecture and "editing back end" of Future Non Stop.”http://future-nonstop.org/ (retrieved: 22 September 2016)
Initiatives / Sub-organizations and their Projects
Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0
The Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 was established in 1993 as an arts and culture related international competence platform for the critical use of information and communication technologies. Over the years, it has pursued a broad range of transdisciplinary activities. From producing and hosting infrastructure to organizing conferences, festivals and exhibitions, local interventions and skill transfer, as well as international research and publishing. Konrad Becker and Francisco de Sousa Webber, who founded the institute, currently form the board of directors together with Felix Stalder.
History