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On the 10th of November 2015 at 17:30 in Liepaja University Art Research lab, Kūrmājas prosp.13, Liepaja, will be hosted a lecture by the Internet of Things (IoT) expert Rob van Kranenburg (NL) Technology, what is going on?

When Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay, Aborigines kept fishing. They did not see a boat. The Endeavour was too big and too strange to be a boat. To them it was an island. Only when Cook lowered a small boat did they react. They attacked immediately.

This is how we react to ontological change, the deep change that shocks our belief in reality. We keep shifting our worries into the more rigid old patterns of what is real, what is true and what is normal. To define normality belongs to real power. And real power is what I am interested in.

It has been said before that defining what is normal mostly has to do with language. Language defines the meaning of data, information, knowledge and wisdom. This seems obvious. So much, that it is a blind spot even to those who are very much aware of it.

We are in a moment of human history when a particular intelligence—that of the engineer, the maker—focused fully on here and now, has occupied the full extent of our capabilities for future scenarios and, by consequence, for future action. We’ve been in moments like this with the fire, the wheel, the book and the machine. These moments were like doors to rooms we did not know existed. Always though there were voices envisioning and predicting the existence of these doors. Some even described the rooms. Up until now, humankind has not been able to harvest from such visionaries the practical implementations that would turn these harsh and disruptive moments into gentle transitions of accumulated experience.

Rob van Kranenburg is e researcher and lecturer Founder and Board Member at Council Global, Dyne.org, IERC IoT Research Cluster of the EU Commission. R.van Kranenburg wrote The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID, Network Notebooks 02, Institute of Network Cultures. He is co-founder of bricolabs and the founder of Council. Together with Christian Nold he published Situated Technologies Pamphlets 8: The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World. He currently works as Community Manager at the EU Project Sociotal. He is consultant to IoT China, Shanghai 2014. He Chairs AC8 - Societal Impact and Responsibility in the Context of IoT Applications of the IERC, The European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things. Rob is co-editor of Enabling Things to Talk Designing IoT solutions with the IoT Architectural Reference Model, Springer Open Access.

He ranks number 6 on the top 100 Internet of Things (IoT) thinkers list on Postscapes.

Since 2007, Rob van Kranenburg has been involved in the study program LiepU "New Media Art" in the development and works here as a lecturer. Under his leadership, students carried out various projects, including the concept of the development of the Latvian Post, research and creative workshops on the euro-orphans in Liepaja, etc. socially significant projects that uses new media tools.

Lecture is organized by the Liepaja University Art Research Lab with the support of project "Renewable Futures" program, funded by the EU program "Creative Europe".

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