Dear Tim Kuik,

With this letter I want to invite you on behalf of Incubate to the Incubate Innovation Lecture. At this event Andrew Keen will give a keynote speech on new media, culture and one of your favorite subjects: piracy. This keynote speech will be held Friday 18 September 17:00h at De NWE Vorst, Tilburg.

Incubate is the annual celebration of independent culture in Tilburg. This year it takes place from 13 to 20 September. We bring more than 200 cutting edge artists in an intimate context to an international audience. Black metal next to free jazz. Street art next to academic dance.  It is a diverse view on indie culture as a whole, including music, contemporary dance, film, visual arts and, that’s why I write you, debates.

Speaker Andrew Keen is a web entrepreneur as well as a web critic. In 1995 he founded Audiocafe.com and built it into a well-known first generation Internet music company. But after a while, Keen saw the negative impact of the democratization of the internet and the web 2.0 hype. He wrote ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, which became an international bestseller and earned Andrew Keen the nickname ‘The Antichrist of Silicon Valley‘. He has written for many other publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Guardian and many others. You can read an article where he will be talking about here or check out the De Groene Amsterdammer of this week (nr 36). It has published a big article by him.

After Keen’s keynote speech, a discussion between an international panel of experts from the fields of arts, economy and politics will take place. Panelists will be Konrad Boehmer, whom I assume you know, economist and artist Hans Abbing, member of the European parliament for the Pirate Party Amelia Andersdotter and artist James Kirby. The discussion will be moderated by Xandra Schutte, the editor-in-chief of De Groene Amsterdammer.

I am sure this lecture and the discussion could be of great interest to you and your organization. Please let me know if you accept our invitation. You can call me at 013 – 590 483 9, or e-mail me at joostAPENSTAARTincubatePUNTorg.

Hope to see you Friday 18 September here in Tilburg!

Joost Heijthuijsen
Head external management at Incubate