Forum on Quaero

a public think tank on the politics of the search engine
29 – 30 / 09 / 2007, JAN VAN EYCK ACADEMIE MAASTRICHT
Initiated by Metahaven: Design Research, Amsterdam / Brussels, Curated by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Gon Zifroni. Organized, hosted and funded by the Jan van Eyck Academie and Maison Descartes. Information: office@metahaven.net. With contributions by: Florian Cramer, Jodi Dean, Frédéric Martel, Ingmar Weber, Isabelle Stengers, Bureau d’Études, Metahaven, Tsila Hassine, Open Search, Michael Zimmer, Richard Rogers, Florian Schneider & Maurits de Bruijn, Sabine Niederer, André Nusselder

On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in collaboration with the Maison Descartes, Institut Français des Pays-Bas, organizes a conference about the French information technology project Quaero, its political agenda and the new frontiers that appear if its initial questions are to be taken seriously. Quaero, as announced by former president Jacques Chirac, is a state-sponsored effort to boost technological research and development. Yet it was launched under a political banner: that of counteracting and challenging the dominance of American companies in internet access and search technologies, and challenging Google’s efforts of digitizing the world’s libraries in an attempt to monopolize the access to information and cultural heritage.
Such political ambitions are largely absent from the ideas of the dispersed companies and individuals working in the Quaero consortium. There is an enormous gap between Quaero’s initial rhetorical-political fireworks, and the techno-scientific practices now involved in its realization.
This conference aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the politics of search engines. In that sense, this conference attempts to take the political side of the Quaero assignment seriously, including the questions it left unanswered.
The Quaero framework could lead to the development of a new political imagination for the search engine. The conference is conceived as a forum that encourages audience participation and does not pose hierarchies on speakers; it is meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions for the search engine.

Some of the issues to be addressed are:
* What role can the digitization of European cultural heritage have in establishing a European identity?
* How can a digital European cultural heritage/domain reflect the changing borders of Europe, and the national identities of the different countries that were, still are, or are no longer part of Europe?
* What kind of hierarchy (if at all) should be implemented when deciding what should go into that database, and what is out? Who decides this?
* Will contemporary web practices be allowed to tackle the conventional static models used to archive and present culture to the public?
* Collaborative and participatory techniques are effectively placing the Demos as the force that structures information. How can we work towards new categorization techniques that go even beyond the democratic model and allow plural interpretations of data to coexist and enrich each other?
* To what extent have search engines like Google, who started from the ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of political bias? Is the double role of indispensable tool for public information combined with relentless private interest, in the long run, problematic? Can we envisage new roles for the search engine as public domain?
* What are the politics of the structure and image of search engines and their technologies? Does the nation state (like France) still have a role to play in this context?