<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; ">Hi all,<BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN> </DIV><DIV>I'm Lorenzo, Italian, recently resettled in Germany, town planner and media artist. It's the first time I intervene; I often wanted, but I must say that as a non native english speaker, somehow it's hard to react in time to the lively exchange of this list! but I find it really enriching to follow anyway... well, I just received from another list the following text of the opening speech at the SUMMIT in Berlin, and I found interesting the positions expressed here by Florian Schneider, especially with regards to the final demands for the summit. So, I propose it to you, hoping that is not too off topic...</DIV><BR><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Opening speech by Florian Schneider</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Ladies and Gentlemen,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">dear SUMMIT delegates and SUMMIT contributers,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">it is my utmost and sincerest pleasure to welcome you to the first SUMMIT non aligned initiatives in education culture.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I am supposed to deliver a speech since a summit is usually opened by a speech. But of course such a speech would be un-speechable. Who am I that I could possibly take the chance to claim the right to open such a thing as a summit? For whom could I speak -- hardly for what is supposed to be myself? Whom should I represent? Why should you believe such a performance is relevant at all?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I am mentioning these questions not in order to impress you (or our guests from britain) with some autodidactically appropriated understatement. I am mentionig them since it refers to the condition that characterizes the aporia of the project SUMMIT and its process as such.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">i learned today, impossibility might be the wrong word: what i mean is an inverted potentiality, or if you like: a negative potentiality in the sense that we feel an urgency to do exactly what seems to be unthinkable, unfeasable, unforseeable and way beyond our power or actual capacities.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Ladies and Gentlemen,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">let me reflect on this basic condition of the event for a few minutes at its very beginning and lets start by describing some phenomena: We are meeting in an extremely interesting place at a very distinct moment.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The main venue of SUMMIT is a theatre. Truly one of the most exciting theatres in Germany and we are very grateful for the hospitality we encountered over the past few months -- we really know that this is everything but a matter of course and we appreciate it very much.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">But why did we choose a theatre, and not a conference center, an art academy or any other more or less appropriate space for a gathering like this?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The reason may be obvious: a certain playfulness, a kind of mockery or mimikry. Something like a parody in the truest and driest sense of the word, a parody understood as a melody that is slightly misaligned and by that uncovering the mechanisms in which authority operates due to a small delay and a certain distortion. Let me please make thi absolutely clear: It is not about humorous effects or satirical exaggerations, but about gaining access to the courtly theater by the relatively simple means of copy-paste.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">But there is also another reason. That reason implies the opportunity to stage something, to make an experiment, to create a certain artificial mis-en-scene that would not be possible by nature. We understand the SUMMIT as a dramatic laboratory that calls into question all that exists.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">SUMMIT is taking place less than two weeks before the heads of governments of the eight most powerful nations of this world are going to meet in a rundown luxury ressort a two hours car-ride north of here. We have chosen this moment explicitely not in order to protest, not in order to lament, and not in order to propose alternatives.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">We are meeting here and now, since we feel the urge and desire to open up new fields.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">At the moment SUMMIT consists of 82 working groups, workshops, presentations, caucuses, dj-sets, and parties. We are sure that there will be further, ad-hoc sessions that are going to be scheduled on the fly.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The wide range of delegates is characterising the specific concept of SUMMIT: From professors of universities and art academies to delegates from migrant self-organizations, from software developers to artists, curators and museum directors, from the initiators of free and self-organized academies to precarious labor activists and union organizers.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">It would have been unthinkable in advance, impossible to envision, let alone planning it, and in fact it is nothing we can rely on: there is no common ground or common agenda and i promise you: there won't be anything like that.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Non-alignment is a non-identitarian and non-representative category. It is neither nor. It does not call for unity, it does not claim a territory, it rather tries to overcome blockages, escape dichotomies and liberate itself from a self-inflicted immaturity and dependence.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">We are perfectly aware that on this basis we can only produce misunderstandings and i really do hope that these misunderstandings become as creative, enlightening, unexpected as possible.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">So, what can be the goal of SUMMIT? What can we achieve in these four or five days?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I do not believe that we should try to start a new project. Most of us are already busy enough and can hardly manage to cope with our manifolded commitments, mostly unpaid and extremely urgent.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">i also believe, that we do not just have to renovate and realign an existing body of knowledge, update its organizational structure and methodologies. No, we really need entirely new terminologies, we urgently need really new concepts and new categories...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I am very confident that these four days offer us the extraordinary opportunity to formulate the challenges and demands, compile the sources and release a program that might outline the main characteristics, lay out the infrastructure and make available the pre-requisites of a multitude of networked educational, pedagogical projects.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Please allow me to mention quickly three points that seem important to me and might work as an example how we could proceed last but not least in terms of an "impossible" declaration or action plan:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1. open source radicalism</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">We are not satisfied by the wikipedia. The button with the logo of the creative commons license is defientely not enough. If free software is not free beer, free knowledge is more than information about some ingredients and on this basis we want to take over and run the entire brewerie and create two, three, four, many open, free, nomad, monad, pirate, peer-to-peer universities</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2. new configurations of the self</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">in order to struggle against the ongoing privatization and proprietarization of knowledge production we need to invent and create new models of multiple ownership. This seems to me the only chance to deal with increasingly fluid forms knowledge and would enable us leave the common notion of individual mastery behind. A generecally open notion of mutual owenership that might enable us to reappropriate the means of immaterial production</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">3. increasing complexities</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">we all know, that we live in a world that undergoes dramatic changes and is commonly perceived as increasingly complex. Instead of reducing these complexities, simplfying them, the enormous challenge we are currently facing is to fold and unfold, or better: multiply complexity.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Tomorrow night we have scheduled the first session with a public editing of the declaration and we are going to use that opportunity to start from scratch, with a blank sheet of paper and</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Ladies and Gentlemen, dear SUMMIT delegates,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">we are all more or less familiar with the fundamental problem of emancipatory pedagogy: in the moment when I try to teach somebody how to liberate him or herself, i re-align to an infinite line of regression and power reappears even stronger than before. The more I try to explain, mediate, communicate or teach, the more I reaffirm the distance, inequality and dependency of those who lack knowledge on those who seem to possess it.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Lets cut this gordic knot, lets take advantage of a this enormously privileged situation where we have the opportunity to meet and discuss, argue with each others and question ourselves in such a great company for about four days and nights.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Lets come forth and lets unalign!</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Thank you very much!</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>