The research project “Creating Commons” explores interstitial practices which open the space between art and commons. They are challenging established notions of contemporary aesthetic practice as well as of contemporary commons, requiring the development of a new theoretical and aesthetic framework for this emerging field.
The framing questions for the research are:
– how can new forms of organization and collaboration bring forth different kinds of cultural works and social relations?
– how are new property relations articulated?
– how can artistic practices contribute to the further developement of the commons as inclusive, diverse and democratic forms of organization?
– what role can art and an expanded understanding of aesthetics play in the advancement of the commons as a political project?
We think these are urgent questions, because commons constitute constantly evolving realities pointing beyond the growing commercialization of culture and its damaging effects.
The research project is located at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant: # 100016_169419) and conducted in cooperation with HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).
Research is conducted by Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank and Shusha Niederberger. The project started in January 2017 and runs for 36 months.
Dušan Barok is a researcher, artist and cultural activist based in Amsterdam. His practice involves networked media, participatory events, and experimental publishing, and he runs and edits Monoskop. Monoskop is a media wiki that evolved from linking and contextualizing information on Eastern European experimental and media arts to host relevant files, such as books, texts, documents, and media files, and thus became a publishing initiative in its own right.
Due to its constant growth, Monoskop has transformed from a special interest archive to become a significant cultural resource. Today the wiki comprises of 6,744 entries and 13,616 documents, and the related WordPress log introduces new publications on a regular basis. Increasingly, Monoskop also triggers offline events, frequently with cultural institutions that have come to appreciate the unique resources of this autonomous archive.
Sean Dockray is an artist and initiator of the knowledge-sharing platforms The Public School and aaaaarg.
aaaaarg is an online library and open-source platform for freely sharing books and texts. It has its origin in collaborative working groups where resources were gathered in ‘online bookshelves.’ The project eventually evolved as part of the self-organized educational project known as The Public School where it served as a repository for shared study materials. From there it grew to become a major online resource for publications in the field of philosophy, art and political theory with tens of thousands of users, containing material in many different languages. The underlying infrastructure, as well as the contents, are the result of a collaborative effort to which various programmers and the users and editors of the site regularly contribute.
Marcell Mars (researcher and programmer) & Tomislav Medak (philosopher) work together on the project Memory of the World. They use the concept of the public library as a narrative device to address questions of general access to knowledge and how this has shifted in the digital age. As everyone has the tools to build their own library, they advocate for a new form of a public library, which consists of interconnected private libraries.
This mobilization of individual actors would help to generate a necessary discourse on the limiting aspects of intellectual property. Apart from their work on creating technical infrastructure for their project, they organize digitization campaigns for endangered knowledges, develop tools for sharing books and discursive formats such as exhibitions and texts.
Michael Murtaugh is a technologist specialized in community databases, digital archives, and tools for new forms of reading and writing online. He is a member of Constant, where he is also part of the active archive research project, investigating and developing digital archiving platforms for cultural institutions.
In this interview, Michael discusses how infrastructures shape practices, and how recognizing these performative aspects of infrastructure can be used to question relationships to and through infrastructure. He introduces Etherbox, a RaspberryPi operated network box enabling local communities to collectively write, but is set up as a visible tool to engage with imaginations of software, infrastructure, and services. The Etherbox thus takes the concept of active archives a step further. Whereas active archives try to formulate ideas how archives can live on and serve communities in more productive ways than a frozen account of a historical event, Etherbox expands the concern about the performativity of infrastructure into a tool, which addresses both the symbolical level (of speculative infrastructure) as well the functional level (of collective writing spaces). That intertwinedness of the aesthetical and the functional is expanding the territory of infrastructure into an ecosystem of writing.
In this interview, Marek Tuszynski, one of the two co-founders of Tactical Tech, explains what the goals of their non-profit organization are, how it is structured, how it aims to reach a wide audience through a variety of public engagements, and what its basic assumptions are. Originally dedicated to train human rights defenders and social justice activists in safe handling of technology, the organization has expanded over time and now also provides easily accessible information about critical use of technology for the average user. This is mainly done through exhibitions, workshops and freely accessible training materials on its website. Working with the paradoxes of technology means for TT to present technology, information and data in all their ambiguity, raising awareness of the political aspects of technology, including both empowerment and disenfranchisement.
Peter Westenberg is an artist and a member of Constant, an artist-run organization in Brussels, active in art and technology.
In this interview, Peter discusses the possibilities of licensing in artistic contexts to think about the future context of one’s work. He explains the format of situations, a way of working collaboratively across disciplines Constant has been developing over the years. How do institutional practices like organizing events and developing formats relate to artistic practice and aesthetics? And how can that practice be situated in the discourse about the commons?
Panayotis Antoniadis is one of the founders of NetHood, a non-profit organization based in Zurich concerned with bridging the digital and the physical space. NetHood is active in neighborhood projects, communal housing projects, and alternative currency projects. In this interview, Panayotis talks about the work of Nethood, Mazi Toolkit and how digital infrastructure can help create empowering hybrid spaces in neighborhoods.
Eva Weinmayr is an artist, designer, educator, and researcher based in London. Her long-standing engagement with digital and print publishing includes projects such as The Piracy Project, AND Publishing and other practice experiments that are all based on the idea of alternative knowledge production and the exploration of the agency of books.
Patricia Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz are the founders and members of the trans*feminist hackspace Mz* Baltazars Laboratory, Vienna in Vienna. It is run by a collective and offers, on one hand, a hackspace with a workshop program for female, trans and non-binary people, and on the other hand, runs a gallery space with a feminist exhibition program.
The lab is conceived as a safer space for people who have traditionally been excluded from or have felt unsafe in spaces where science is taught and technology is developed. It invites those people to participate or give workshops that bring together technology, art, and have a critical understanding of social structures.
In this interview, Stephanie Wuschitz and Patricia Reis introduce feminist hacking as an artistic methodology. They discuss the relationship between gender and technology and explain how Mz* Baltazar’s Lab aims at developing other imaginations of technology by consciously developing a community. They discuss the role of the space in developing that community and the importance of creating a safer space – both fostering engagement within the community and for the space, but also for reaching out to a wider audience.
Alessandro Ludovico is the co-founder of neural, a printed magazine established in 1993 dealing with new media art, electronic music, and hacktivism.
This interview focusses on two things. First, Alessandro reflects on his experience of how print publications changed over the last 25 years and their potential in a fully digital universe. They are now less about providing access, but more about providing a filter and stability against the very dynamic overflow of information. The second major theme of the interview is the “temporary library”, a collaborative practice to create short-term specialized libraries in the context of cultural events (festivals, exhibitions, etc.). After the event, they are donated to established libraries, thus contributing to making underrepresented aspects of (digital) culture available in the long-term.