The International Conference on Critical and Cutting-edge Art will be dedicated to exploring the intersections between critical theory, cutting-edge art and technology. The ICCA will be structured around central unifying themes of Critical Art and the application of these themes to create a portable knowledge management systems for artistic and curatorial work.

The aims:

1. the construction of foundations and critic theory of cutting-edge art, the invention and construction of models and language to critically describe and code cutting-edge art ideas and activities

2. the discussion of emergent phenomena in critical and cutting edge art in the context of networking, distributed systems, complex systems, parallel distributed processing

3. the construction of portable knowledge management environments and their role in artistic and curatorial practice - Free Arts Concepts Exchange

The format

1. Curatorial Colloquium: the sequence of open panel discussions and debates that manifest 6 topics: * Critical art* Critical and emergency states * Refugees and witnesses, * Politics of the hack * Atopia * Curating immateriality (please see details below). The panel discussions lead by radical curators and specialists in new media art field. It includes the invention and construction of models and language to actively describe and code cutting-edge ideas and activieties.

2. Collaboratorium and Radical Coding Workshops: the open workshop promoting new ways of thinking about code:
* advanced participatory workshop * performative presentations * actions and interventions. Workshops lead by artists and field-expert practitioners extend over realms of code and embedded code, environmental code, transmission and reception, workshops solely utilise free software.

3. Critical reader contains contributions by artists, curators and social scientists who critically analyze the mechanisms at play.(please see attached pdf with bios of participants) All actions will take place simultaneously in Q21: in choosen room but also between spectators in open space: floor, stairs etc.

1. Critical and Cutting-Edge Art: critical, performative, participatory acts of exchange via an online hub in which projects do not discriminate between physical and virtual object status, working through a series of critical, social, performative and (free) software-based projects towards the notion of an artistic operating environment, and experimenting with interrogating and overcoming economic, political, and social boundaries in digital and real space.

2. Critical and emergency states: the demands of "national security", the normalization of violence, and the maintenance of high levels of fear and anxiety have become part of daily life in the nation states of the so-called West. McLuhan: "from the egg’s point of view, a chicken is just a way to get more eggs." We might similarly say that from security’s point of view, insecurity is just a way to produce more security.

3. Refugees and witnesses: how our society fails to negotiate the challenges posed by economic globalization, human migration, and cross-cultural influence.
The concrete social axes of ethnicity, nationalism, gender, and religion.
The polarization of a net into antagonistic fronts — even if these fronts are not spatially separate. The most non-coherent groups and net communities using different unique dialects and discourses. The art of making tactical demands, exploring the potential for new emancipatory thinking and questioning whether art can be a space to reconceive current forms of subjection. Against (networked) information/transparency proliferation.

4. Politics of the hack, inventing relations outside of representation. The interest of the hackers lies first and foremost in a free circulation of information, this being the necessary condition for the renewed statement of the hack. Hacking as a pure, free experimental activity must be free from any constraint that is not self imposed. To hack is always to produce a difference, if only a second difference, in the production of information. Hacking art as seeking to permeate existing states with a new state of existence, spreading the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life.
Monopolising intellectual property - patents and brands - and the means of reproducing their value - the vectors of communication. The insistence on proprietary models of ownership as a form of slavery, racism and oppression.

5. Atopia. Atopian space is a real enclave within imaginary social space. The possibility of atopian space is a result of the impossibility of adequate and effective spatial and social quantification and calculation. It is not ‘nowhere’ (utopia) or ‘elsewhere’ (heterotopia), but ‘everywhere’ (atopia). Telesthesia are all forms of presence or perception at a distance.

6. Curating immateriality: archives, documentation, selling, renting, storage of new media art activities The larger perspective: a stock of information as archive, a body of information maintained through time that has enduring value. The danger of populism: valuation of efficiency of art events by number of spectators