The complexity of the establishment of research and related discourses into the field of performing arts has taken the course of an avalanche. From the product and image intensive period of the 1980s, following a period of politically orientated work, the 1990s and early 2000s will most probably be remembered as the era of research.

Download Yochai Benkler's significant book The Welth of Networks here.
This book and its fundamental concepts around new information economies was largely discussed in the second seminar of International Festival "The Theatre" in London in May 2006.
Benkler elaborates here notions that are also significant to the concepts of "The Theatre".

"Management often gets caught in the marketer’s twilight zone: Chasing after the most elusive of marketing aspirations. Cool brands have the “it” factor – that certain attitude, style and appearance to which people are magnetically drawn. This leads ambitious corporate executives to constantly demand of their marketing teams, “Make my brand cool.”

In this book Brand Hijacking from 2005 Wipperfürth brings some fundamental concept into the lights. Get rid of the cool of Madison Avenue and invites FCUK to the top of the food chain cool.

Ever wondered what would happen if you didn’t send the Jehovah's Witnesses away, when they came knocking?

Eventually they would invite you to join a meeting at Kingdom Hall. But they wouldn't do that until you were good and ready. They would come and visit you a number of times first, to talk about Christ Jesus,New Light and the Ark of Salvation. If you were observant, you'd notice a pattern in these visits. Each time the same lead Witness would bring along a different assistant.You'd probably not even pick up on this, or you'd rationalize that it was just random variation. But according to accounts from people who have left the sect - it's quite deliberate and it's designed to get you hooked.

Collaboration is one of the guiding terms of an emergent political sensibility in which certain collectivities and mutalities are being redefined as modes of affectual politics. Collaboration, literally, means working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavour. The filmmaker and activist Florian Schneider makes in this short text around collaboration and its ontologies an important statement in relation to notion of consensus and feel good, instead he argues collaborations are the sites of revolutionary potential. In the last instance collaborations are driven by the desire to create difference and refuse against the absolutistic power of organization. Collaboration means to overcome scarcity and inequality, as well as to struggle for a freedom to produce. It carries an immense social potential, as actualization and experience of the unlimited creativity of the multiplicity of all productive practices.

"You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word." Here Austin elaborates his concept of the performative, in a more comprehensive and less lectorial tone then in the book based on a series of lectures given in 1956 under the title "How To Do Things With Words".

Download here: J.L. Austin: Performative Utteran

Urbanism doesn't exist - it is only an ideology...

Get make your mind up, follow Rem Koolhaas to The Generic City, neon lights, sky high and simply wonderful.

"Urbanism doesn't exist. It is only an ideology in Marx's sense of the word. Architecture really exists, like Coca-Cola: Though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propagated around Coca-Cola - pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism which organised the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece."

Let go of melancholic notions of loss of public space, loss of urbanity, loss of communication...

Probably one of the most published texts on the net, but here it is again. Benjamin said it then (1935) and we say it again: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.

Michael Frieds absolute must, its boring as hell and tiring as mad but with some fireworks of irony makes it worth while every spent minute. But don't forget Sol Lewitts love declaration to miniart and miniskirts which made minimalism a time we still can smile when picking up from history.

God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing... an insulting evolutionary joke... The cosmetic is the new cosmic. ends Rem Koolhaas postmodern classical on a space stretching out smoothening out all options for diagonality and sneak previews of the outside. Koolhaas brings us a Truman Show world informed by airports, shopping malls and the efficiency of late-capitalism. As always brilliant with words, Junkspace is an almost compulsive litany simultaneously with and against the low of architecture.

I gave to this talk the title: « the emancipated spectator » . As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts , problems and theories which seem at first sight to bear no direct relation on each other. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is supposed to be the “keynote” lecture of this academy. He told me that he wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on “spectatorship”, because he had been impressed by my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. I first wondered what kind of relationship there could be between the cause and the effect ? This an academy bringing together artists and people involved in the world of art , theatre and performance on the issue of spectatorship to-day. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor, who, at the beginning of the 19th century, made a mess in the academic world by asserting that an ignorant could teach another ignorant what he did not know himself , proclaiming the equality of intelligences and calling for intellectual emancipation against the standard idea of the instruction of the people. His theory sank in oblivion in the middle of the 19th century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the 1980’s in order to put a new kind of mess in the debate about Education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic debate, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine and Poussin?

Elie During elaborates in this text originally published in ArtPRESS 2004 the distinction between procedure and operation. He argues that it is insufficient to establish a particular procedure as long as it is not followed by a thorough analysis of its operation. This text does not directly refer to performance but can offer certain pathways to discuss differences between architectural and performane practices.

This legendary theatre text which was performance by Tor Lindstrand and Mårten Spångberg are in many ways fundamental to the work of International Festival. The performance first presented in Berlin in August 2002 was staged as an artist-talk between Tor Lindstrand and Mårten Spångberg but the text is a compilation from interviews of other artists, actors, architects etc.
The text has been presented in several publications and were performed more then 3o times under the title "Artists't-talk". It was common that the audience detected that the text was not authentic but in case of there is a segment towards the end of the text that is repeated eight times. Even so it has happened that audience members have left the theatre convinced that these were the words by the individuals on stage.
Yet another time the text is being made available and we hope that somebody will perform it somewhere in some occation, or maybe just in the kitchen because it's fun.

Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvments in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovataing users often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Erik von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation.

Download the text here: Democratizing Innovation

The goal of this article is to show how a Wittgensteinian perspective could provide a new way of thinking about democracy that departs fundamentally from the dominant rationalist approach which characterizes most of liberal-democratic theory. A democratic thinking that would incorporate Wittgenstein's insights, especially his insistence on the need to respect differences, would be more receptive to the multiplicity of voices that a pluralist society encompasses. Taking off from reflections of Wittgenstein's later work, a series of central issues in contemporary political theory is discussed in order to sketch out this alternative way of democratic thinking.