---
title: "World-Information.Org"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-Information.Org"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:53.274088+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The World-Information Institute (WII) is an independent cultural institution based in Vienna, Austria, established in 1999 and officially launched in 2000. The institute conducts research and organizes various events, including conferences and exhibitions, focusing on digital culture and information technologies. 
The World-Information Institute is an international network of partner institutions and experts collaborating in the fields of information and communication technologies and their social implications.
WII’s main research areas involve collecting, organizing, and analyzing information about shared resources and in this context, issues related to intellectual property laws, new ways of creating cultural works, how information is searched and organized, surveillance technologies, big data, and data visualization, cultural and media policies. A recent initiative to improve cultural and media policies is the “Netzpolitischer Konvent” (the Convention of Austrian civil society on net politics), where a list of demands was prepared and shared with the public.

== Projects ==

=== World-Information.Org series of projects - launched Brussels 2000 ===
World-Information.Org was launched as the main media project of the European Capital of Culture 2000 in Brussels. The social, cultural, and political dimensions of the new information and communication technologies were discussed. The World-Information exhibition presented objects and research results on topics such as the history of modern communication technologies, the "big players" in the IT industry, financial networks, and human rights. The program was completed by the "World-Info Con" conference. Most resources are available on the world-information.org page.
The first presentation was followed by a series of conferences and exhibitions in Vienna (Technisches Museum Wien, 2000), Amsterdam (Oude Kerk and De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, 2002), Novi Sad/Belgrade (Museum of Vojvodina, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2003), Bangalore (2005) and Paris (as part of the festival "Futur en Seine", 2009).

=== Deep Search (I) — Vienna 2008 ===
The "Deep Search" conference dealt with "the social and political dimensions of how we navigate the deep seas of knowledge". Critically analyzing a situation in which Google assumes a monopoly-like position in the field of search in many countries around the world, the conference asked questions such as: "How is computer readable significance produced?", "How is meaning involved in machine communication?", "Where is the emancipatory potential of having access to such vast amounts of information?", "What are the dangers of our reliance on search engines?", and "Are there any approaches that do not follow the currently dominating paradigm of Google?“

=== Critical Strategies in Art and Media - New York, 2009 ===
This conference on the future of cultural freedom and cultural intelligence in digital theory and practice took place at the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York. It followed attempts to go beyond the obsolete models of the artist/author as genius and searched for collective and collaborative practices that could invent new terrains and flows. New kinds of virtual spaces and their role for critical cultural practices were discussed. The conference also aimed at developing strategies that could allude to being instrumentalized by the creative industries in, their seemingly infinite appetite for things "radical".

=== Deep Search (II) — Vienna, 2010 ===
The debate on the policies of searching continued in 2010 with the conference "Deep Search II": "The automatic classification of data, its indexing, and its evaluation are at the heart of new communication environments. What lies beneath is not just a drive to organize the world's information, but also to classify human relations: from the management of the modern workplace and consumers in mass societies, to the bio-political management of the network society."

=== Shared Digital Futures — Vienna, 2013 ===
The conference "Shared Digital Futures" dealt with the impact of digital networking technologies to the production of culture and examined the new role of the artwork as the same end product and raw material for further production of culture, models for sustainable funding of Commons, new forms of collective authorship, and the opportunities opened by the blurring of boundaries between artists and audiences.

=== Information as a reality — Linz, 2014 ===
The conference and exhibition "Information as a reality" in cooperation with the magazine Springerin and with Ars Electronica at the Lentos Art Museum in Linz dealt with critical cultural practices in digital networks and the increasing change of social reality by digital models and virtual information regimes. Cultural workers have played an important pioneering role in the colonization of digital worlds. What role can they assume now, 20 years after the emergence of the Internet?

=== Digital Clouds and Urban Spaces — Vienna, 2014 ===
The conference "Digital Clouds and Urban Spaces" at Architekturzentrum Wien focused on smart cities and the city as an information system, where urbanity is increasingly shaped by networks of informational technologies. The conference took account to the fact, that this does not only apply to phenomena as traffic control systems or planning models, but that the world of work, social spaces and cultural processes are also subject to substantial transformations related to these developments. Before this backdrop, the conference questioned the simplistic promises made by global corporations and their technologies to render cities more efficient, safer and cleaner.

=== Critical Net Practice — Vienna, 2015 ===
In a cooperation with the magazine Springerin World-Information Institute revisited 20 years of net culture. The resulting texts formed the main part of issue XXI/1 (winter 2015) of the magazine. Issue Presentation (MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna): Critical Net Practice: Information as a reality? Jumper / Band XXI, No. 1, Winter 2015.

=== Algorithmic Regimes - Vienna 2015/2016 ===
The international conference and event series "Algorithmic Regimes" examined the growing influence of digital control systems and their cascading effects of powerful effect on cultural and social realities. In addition to the conference, the event "Algorithms are no Angels" with Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood, a Video interview with Stefano Harney, and an audiovisual evening about the power of algorithms were conducted, that presented an annotated remix of film clips and documentaries, relating to automated control systems.