Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation
Dates: April 3 and 4, 2009
Location: Philosophy Hall, Columbia University

A conference co-organized by
Ana María Ochoa
The Center for Ethnomusicology, The Music Department, Columbia University

Claudio Lomnitz
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University

This is an interdisciplinary and transnational conference that seeks to explore the interrelationship between the changing status of textualities, the rise of informal economies and the global politics of circulation.  By changing textualities we mean the transformation in modes of support and circulation of artistic artifacts and legal documents (from different types of musics, to cinema as well as documents that make up the legal archive). The point of departure for the conference is the realization that there is a gap between practices of archiving, production and circulation of different forms of textualities and their juridical status. The association between property, technology, art forms and governmentality is being challenged from a broad spectrum of creative practices, but this is not just a problem about intellectual property. The migration of the discussion in the globalization of the arts to a legal terrain brings to the foreground the increasing incommensurability between the local, national and global politics of diversity, and governmentality. Thus practices of exchange of digital texts become a radical site for the audiovisualization of the global crisis of the political entailed by this incommensurability.

Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation
Dates: April 3 and 4, 2009
Location: Philosophy Hall, Columbia University

A conference co-organized by
Ana María Ochoa
The Center for Ethnomusicology, The Music Department, Columbia University

Claudio Lomnitz
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University

This is an interdisciplinary and transnational conference that seeks to explore the interrelationship between the changing status of textualities, the rise of informal economies and the global politics of circulation.  By changing textualities we mean the transformation in modes of support and circulation of artistic artifacts and legal documents (from different types of musics, to cinema as well as documents that make up the legal archive). The point of departure for the conference is the realization that there is a gap between practices of archiving, production and circulation of different forms of textualities and their juridical status. The association between property, technology, art forms and governmentality is being challenged from a broad spectrum of creative practices, but this is not just a problem about intellectual property. The migration of the discussion in the globalization of the arts to a legal terrain brings to the foreground the increasing incommensurability between the local, national and global politics of diversity, and governmentality. Thus practices of exchange of digital texts become a radical site for the audiovisualization of the global crisis of the political entailed by this incommensurability.