The 7th International Art+Communication festival will take place in Riga, Latvia, from September 30 - October 3, 2004. The festival will offer a space of exchange for new media practitioners and grassroots activists and who are critically exploring ideas of locality, in response to the continental European (and global) "normalization processes".

This year's event will also signify the culmination of the Trans-European Cultural Mapping (TCM) program that explored ideas of locality, cartography and the politics of open-systems in the context of European expansion, for which a series of "locative media" workshops took place throughout the Europe over the summer of 2004. The TCM workshops sought to explore the collaborative cartography as a means of cultural expression through developing a set of tactics and open web-mapping tools with which to redraw the map of the new EU from previously marginalized points of view.

The main themes of the festival will include the following:

Locative Media - With the advent of the mobile Internet and the ubiquity of location-sensing technologies, space is becoming a site for digital media production. Despite the manifold promise of collaborative cartography, can locative media escape its own axiomatic system?

Spectrum Ecology - Advances in wireless internet technology are changing not only how people approach the spectrum. How are ideas of use and ownership being analyzed and reconsidered in this environment.

Tactical Cartography - How can maps be used both to help legitimize certain "fringe" Internet-debates and throw light on the "shadowy network" society.

Endocolonization - In the context of a "War on Terror", global borders are being mapped _within_, in a battle for "hearts and minds". How does "the local" assert itself while at the same time avoiding becoming reactionary and fundamentalist.

This year's event will also signify the culmination of the Trans-European Cultural Mapping (TCM) program that explored ideas of locality, cartography and the politics of open-systems in the context of European expansion, for which a series of "locative media" workshops took place throughout the Europe over the summer of 2004. The TCM workshops sought to explore the collaborative cartography as a means of cultural expression through developing a set of tactics and open web-mapping tools with which to redraw the map of the new EU from previously marginalized points of view.
http://locative.net/tcm/workshops

The program is available at RIXC website