Our research has shown, however, that the dispersed companies and individuals working on Quaero do not harbor such political ambitions. There is a huge discrepancy between Quaero’s rhetorical-political fireworks and the techno-scientific practices involved in its realization. This conference aims at bridging 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 make new political imagination develop for the search engine. The conference is conceived as a forum that encourages audience participation and does not pose hierarchies among speakers; it is intended as a public think tank, a live sketchbook tackling new questions for the search engine.
Invited speakers: Bruno Latour, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Barbara Cassin, Florian Schneider, François Bourdoncle (Exalead), Vincent Grelet (Jouve), Jodi Dean, Bureau d’études, Will Turner, Florian Cramer, as well as introductions and presentations by the Jan van Eyck Quaero team.
Some of the issues to be addressed are:
— What role can the digitization of European cultural heritage play 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 on the content of database – what is included, what is left out? Who has the authority of decision?
— 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 beyond the democratic model and allow plural interpretations of data to coexist and enrich each other?
— To what extent have search engines such as Google, that started off from the ideal to provide 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, problematic in the long run? 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 (France, for instance) still have a role to play in this context?