What are the possibilities for internet based distribution and production of video and audio?

Napster, Gnutella and their descendant have demonstrated famously the sheer scale of p2p filesharing systems, and the difficulties of exploiting this for the benefit of traditional entertainment products under traditional intellectual property regimes. However, less attention has been paid to the emerging audio and video products and the new genres of cultural product that exploit netbased distribution and production. This panel will survey different experiments and projects in this realm, specifically, projects that are designed to promote and sustain diverse cultural resources, generating demonstrable social value.

Christian Nold is the author of the Author of Mobile Vulgus, a controversial book about politically activated crowd dynamics. He is currently at the Royal College of Art where he is developing the Community Edit system.

Pit Schultz lives and works in Berlin. Currently involved into radio projects he is the cofounder of bootlab.org, klubradio.de, nettime.org, mikro.org.

Natalie Jeremijenko is in the Faculty of Engineering, Yale University, where she runs the Experimental Product Design program(xproduct)--a program and courses that explore technological innovation for social progress. She currently has an exhibition at Art in General that demonstrates several audio and video systems designed for the notforprofit arts sectors to promote participatory institutional agendas.

Sal Randolph lives in New York and produces independent art projects involving gift economies and social architectures, including Free Words, the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta. She has recently been developing new work in the areas of open source/copyleft music distribution (Opsound) and political organization (0pcopy).

Wolfgang Strauss will also join us having just rtned safely from the Sharjah Biennial in the UAE to report on his recent streaming projects in the Middle East. Wolfgang is the founder of thing.net

Neil Seiling: former Executive Producer of PBS television series Alive From Off Center. A Media Arts Curator since 1978, with an emphasis on building links between multi-disciplinary artists and their audiences through media development. Served on inaugural panel for short films at 1995 Sundance, and NEA Film/video Panel.

Alan Toner studies collaborativity, and the effect of information enclosure on cultural production and social life. Native of Dublin, Ireland. Studied Law at Trinity College Dublin, and NYU Law School. He is currently a fellow in the Information Law Institute at NYU Law. Member of Autonomedia editorial collective.

/ Remote Respondents /

Zeljko Blace is a co-founder of [mama], a media lab and culture club in Zagreb. He is presently taking part in a number of projects: Kultura NOVA, a multimedia institute organized by the European Cultural Foundation & Open Society Institute. Zeljko has organized and curated a number of new media events: GenArt2002, an annual exhibition, and recently Reality Check for Digital Utopia, a digital culture encounter.

Mark Davis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley. His work is focused on creating the technology and applications to enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research and teaching encompass the theory, design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using media metadata to automate media production and reuse.

Kate Rich is a sound engineer and activist. She is known to work for the bureau of inverse technology.