<nettime> An update on INC 2.0

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear nettimers,

the announcement below was already posted on this list a while ago. Here's an update from Amsterdam about the transition of our institute of network cultures that will happen from mid 2026.

We’re proud to announce the INC Exit Fest in Amsterdam on June 24-26, 2025. We just finalized a very first draft of the program. As it stands now, the event will open on Wednesday night with a University of Amsterdam contribution at their Spui25 venue entitled Neither Good, Nor Bad, Nor Neutral. The two-day conference is in the former squat OT301. Sessions will deal with cybernetics and critique aka the whereabout of net criticism, urgent aesthetics, social media blues, expanded publishing and archiving, From VideoVortex to Stream Art Network, MoneyLab and precarity in the arts and Internet Core. The event that includes performances, screenings and an INC 2.0 assembly  closes (also at OT301) with the ‘traditional’ INC-VOID streaming program and DJ party. More info later can be found here: https://networkcultures.org/geert/events/incs-exit-fest/. Let us know if you want to come and contribute.

The archiving of our 22 year-old Wordpress website is well underway. We’re centralizing content on our website and get rid of services like Vimeo, our mailman server listcultures.org, the Flick photo collection etc. In June will hand over our static webpages to the Royal Library in The Hague (organized by Archival Consciousness and Giovanni Rosetti). The website itself will remain as it is and will be used in the years to come, ready for INC 2.0 after we left the HvA polytech. Until July we will finish and distribute two (digital and paper) readers

There is a considerable and still growing scene of  'Gen Z' researchers, critics, designers and artists that contribute to INC, making is very likely that the organization will continue. A quick look at the website, for instance the collection of longforms will bring you up to date about their concerns: https://networkcultures.org/longform/. 

There is now a legal entity for INC 2.0, coordinated by Sepp Eckenhaussen (for now), a society with members (a small foundation might follow). In this way we can already now join research consortia. In a few months there willl be a first meeting of society members. Contact info@networkcultures.org if you want to know more.

If and where a (small) office in Amsterdam will happen still remains open but we should be tackle this somehow.

Last but not least, this email is also invitation to you all to contribute so that we can figure out together how best to organize in these dire times. Do you want to get involved from where you are? Do you have suggestions about funding? The earlier belief that it would be best to dissolve and disappear, then regroup and somehow reappear may be naive. How useful is international networking these days as a form of organization? Should INC (also) become an ‘organized network’ as Ned Rossiter and I have been advocating over the past two decades?

Regards, Geert & INC Team

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> On 15 Jul 2025, at 17:48, Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear nettimers,
> 
> as we prepare for our summer break and plan the forthcoming period of the Institute of Network Cultures here in Amsterdam, we'd like to share some of our recent projects and publications with our mailing list. As you may have already heard, in one year INC will be decoupling from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA), continuing independently after July 2026. For the sake of convenience, we've labeled the post transition organization INC 2.0. There's a lot of (exciting) challenges which we'll be tackling in light of this transition: we'll be finishing up current series and starting new ones, developing new formats, events, networks and collaborations.
> 
> We'll also be working on archiving 22 years of the INC website. And in the coming months we’ll produce the last INC Reader and the last title of the Theory on Demand series.
> 
> We're looking forward to new beginnings, and will be focusing on hybrid and IRL collaborations and events. And we're hoping to have established a new physical space and office around mid 2026. Either way, in typical INC fashion, we'll celebrate this transition with a two day event (including a party, of course) that will take place in late-June, 2026. We hope to see everyone there and keep you posted!
> 
> If you have any comments, questions, proposals, ideas, or suggestions on how you want to be involved, feel free to reach out to us at info@networkcultures.org.
> 
> Now that the dust has settled from the fourth edition of the INC Expanded Publishing Fest on June 20, and we'd like to invite everyone to check out the Expanded Publishing reader and the event report. The final book was entirely developed and printed using Etherport and is available to order and read here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/expub-exploring-expanded-publishing/. 
> 
> The event report and stream archive can be found here: https://networkcultures.org/void/2025/07/14/expanded-publishing-fest-4-event-summary-and-chapter-introductions/. 
> 
> Also out: Post-Communist Grounds, edited by Neda Genova. In Search of the Commons’ is a collection of  interventions seek to explore and activate practices of commoning in post-communism in a range of genres and media forms, with a specific interest in developing experimental aesthetic practices. ​This volume seeks to re-orient discussions about the commons away from prevailing frames of analyses, which tend to ‘assume that emancipatory ideas of commons and commoning come from the West’ (Vilenica, 2023).  On par with this supposition is the devaluation of experiments in commoning situated elsewhere that engage different historical experiences of struggle against enclosures. This includes not only various efforts of organizing reproductive labor, public infrastructure, or free time during state socialism across the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’, but also the experiences of anti-imperialist, agrarian, and anarchist struggles and revolts in these regions that may as well have predated or, as it were, outlived the formation of socialist states. 
> 
> The book brings together contributions that depart from differently constituted ‘post-communist grounds’ to reshuffle and remix their composition, setting them in productive relation to questions that define our present-day: from an intimate engagement with the feminized experience of labor emigration in contemporary Georgia to the disappearance of spaces of everyday creativity in Poland to accounts of the challenges of internationalist organizing on the Left today through the prism of the collective LeftEast. Order or download here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/out-now-post-communist-grounds-in-search-of-the-commons/.
> 
> Plus a selection of some of our latest blog postings and longforms:
> 
> The Impenetrable Male: Giga Chad as Digital Body Armor by Merthe Voorhoeve
> https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/07/15/giga-chad/
> 
> An-Aesthetic Autonomy: Rebuilding the Art World After Its Neoliberal Degradation by Sebastian Olma
> https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/26/an-aesthetic-autonomy-rebuilding-the-art-world-after-its-neoliberal-degradation/
> 
> Gooning by Design by August Kaasa Sundgaard & Ruben Stoffelen
> https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/23/gooning/
> 
> Senescence Cosplaying as Vigor: Klein Bottles and the Optics of Fear, the fourth letter from LA by Peter Lunenfeld
> https://networkcultures.org/blog/2025/07/08/senescence-cosplaying/ 
> 
> Best, Geert
> 
> -- 
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-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org