<nettime> Update from INC and latest activities

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear nettimers,

as we prepare for our summer break and plan the forthcoming period of the Institute of Network Cultures here in Amsterdam, we'd like to share some of our recent projects and publications with our mailing list. As you may have already heard, in one year INC will be decoupling from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA), continuing independently after July 2026. For the sake of convenience, we've labeled the post transition organization INC 2.0. There's a lot of (exciting) challenges which we'll be tackling in light of this transition: we'll be finishing up current series and starting new ones, developing new formats, events, networks and collaborations.

We'll also be working on archiving 22 years of the INC website. And in the coming months we’ll produce the last INC Reader and the last title of the Theory on Demand series.

We're looking forward to new beginnings, and will be focusing on hybrid and IRL collaborations and events. And we're hoping to have established a new physical space and office around mid 2026. Either way, in typical INC fashion, we'll celebrate this transition with a two day event (including a party, of course) that will take place in late-June, 2026. We hope to see everyone there and keep you posted!

If you have any comments, questions, proposals, ideas, or suggestions on how you want to be involved, feel free to reach out to us at info@networkcultures.org.

Now that the dust has settled from the fourth edition of the INC Expanded Publishing Fest on June 20, and we'd like to invite everyone to check out the Expanded Publishing reader and the event report. The final book was entirely developed and printed using Etherport and is available to order and read here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/expub-exploring-expanded-publishing/. 

The event report and stream archive can be found here: https://networkcultures.org/void/2025/07/14/expanded-publishing-fest-4-event-summary-and-chapter-introductions/. 

Also out: Post-Communist Grounds, edited by Neda Genova. In Search of the Commons’ is a collection of  interventions seek to explore and activate practices of commoning in post-communism in a range of genres and media forms, with a specific interest in developing experimental aesthetic practices. ​This volume seeks to re-orient discussions about the commons away from prevailing frames of analyses, which tend to ‘assume that emancipatory ideas of commons and commoning come from the West’ (Vilenica, 2023).  On par with this supposition is the devaluation of experiments in commoning situated elsewhere that engage different historical experiences of struggle against enclosures. This includes not only various efforts of organizing reproductive labor, public infrastructure, or free time during state socialism across the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’, but also the experiences of anti-imperialist, agrarian, and anarchist struggles and revolts in these regions that may as well have predated or, as it were, outlived the formation of socialist states. 

The book brings together contributions that depart from differently constituted ‘post-communist grounds’ to reshuffle and remix their composition, setting them in productive relation to questions that define our present-day: from an intimate engagement with the feminized experience of labor emigration in contemporary Georgia to the disappearance of spaces of everyday creativity in Poland to accounts of the challenges of internationalist organizing on the Left today through the prism of the collective LeftEast. Order or download here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/out-now-post-communist-grounds-in-search-of-the-commons/.

Plus a selection of some of our latest blog postings and longforms:

The Impenetrable Male: Giga Chad as Digital Body Armor by Merthe Voorhoeve
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/07/15/giga-chad/

An-Aesthetic Autonomy: Rebuilding the Art World After Its Neoliberal Degradation by Sebastian Olma
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/26/an-aesthetic-autonomy-rebuilding-the-art-world-after-its-neoliberal-degradation/

Gooning by Design by August Kaasa Sundgaard & Ruben Stoffelen
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/23/gooning/

Senescence Cosplaying as Vigor: Klein Bottles and the Optics of Fear, the fourth letter from LA by Peter Lunenfeld
https://networkcultures.org/blog/2025/07/08/senescence-cosplaying/ 

Best, Geert

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