CounterpointStimulating debate with the British Council

Access to culture opens you up to the possibility of internal transformations, of knowing your mind, of changing your mind--and the possibility of changing your self as a result. This is what makes it precious and revolutionary. Crucial and, for some, at times, as Jaak Kilmi’s film reminds us, threatening.

Last night we hosted a screening of Jaak Kilmi’s fantastic film ‘Disco and Atomic War’. We hired one of the Curzon screens, sent out invites and hoped that people would be as intrigued as we’d been by the title..

Counterpoint collaborated with Prospect magazine to produce a special supplement in the March 2010 issue of Prospect dedicated to investigating how advances in neuroscience are changing how we think about ourselves and our relationships with others. It is increasingly clear that neuroscience is providing radical new interpretations of how we learn to be, to play, to relate, and to learn. At the same time we need to get past the hardwired vs softwired binary to realise that productive future work will come through a combination of neuroscience's research, and cultural study.

Ivan Sigal is Executive Director of Global Voices, an important and innovative news organisation in the blogosphere. Produced by a community of some 200 bloggers who aggregate and curate the best of online citizen media from across the world, Global Voices emphasises voices that are generally not heard in the mainstream media, and in doing so aims to "amplify the global conversation online". Catherine Fieschi, Director of Counterpoint, asked Ivan his views on Cloud Culture and the future of the internet. Aptly they corresponded by email, and this is the result.

Tzvetan Todorov gave the keynote address at Counterpoint's The Inner Lives of Cultures conference in Brussels, 25 February 2010. This is a complete recording of the address, entitled Unity of civilization, plurality of cultures.

Counterpoint is launching a vital debate for our time. The rise of cloud computing is not only creating the battle for global internet control: it will soon change the very ways in which we exercise our creativity and forge relationships. In our ground-breaking report, Charles Leadbeater asks what will Cloud Culture be like? Who will own the cloud? How can we keep it open? And how can it empower the world’s poorest people?

In these three video clips from the launch of Counterpoint's Cloud Culture publication, the author delivers his thesis on the future of the internet as a space for cultural relations, the Artistic Director of the ICA is hopeful about the creative possibilities of that space, and Peter York gives his thoughts on the subject from a balcony overlooking Big Ben.

If copyright hadn't been invented, what kind of copyright would we want?