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.
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett are the co-founders of furtherfield, an artist-led organisation and community platform located in Finsbury Park, North London. Furtherfield asks critical questions about art and technology, and addresses today’s important questions through exhibitions, labs and debates across many platforms and spaces.
In this interview, Ruth and Marc look back on how they started from an online community and grew into a multidimensional space for different practices in and through technologies and art culture. They highlight the importance of communities and public space, and how they reflect their concerns in their curatorial practice in today’s techno-political situation. They explain how furtherfield is working as a community-driven institution, how formats and subjects are developed, how they position themselves in the cultural landscape, and how they manage to get funding. Alongside these insights into the inner life of furtherfield they provide a detailed discussion about the importance of data as a commons, how this discussion is related to historical events, and what an informed, critical mindset could achieve for the future of us all.
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.
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.
When films enter the database 0xDB(1) and its underlying software pan.do/ra(2), they become digital objects. As such, they form part of a network of interrelated elements that constitute the archival environment and, at the same time, point beyond it. How does this new environment affect our way of dealing with moving images? How does it affect the films and their aesthetics to be embedded in a digital framework of paratextual elements? And how do the films, in turn, influence this framework? What does it mean when the films are shown in the context of a Pirate Cinema(3) screening? And ultimately: how does this change not only the way we see the films, but also cinema itself?
(1) https://0xdb.org (2) https://pan.do/ra (3) https://piratecinema.org
Sebastian Lütgert is an artist, programmer, and writer. He is (together with Jan Gerber) the founder of experimental movie database 0XDB and the software behind it (pan.do/ra). He has co-initiated other initiatives like Pirate Cinema Berlin, Bootlab and texts.com.
Cornelia Lund is an art, film and media theorist and curator living in Berlin. She is the co-director of fluctuating images, a platform for media art and design with a focus on audiovisual artistic production. She has been teaching design theory at various universities.
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.
Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber are two artists and programmers who developed the movie database 0xdb and its underlying software pan.do/ra. The more than 15,000 films in the database are objects that cover films hard to find online. 0xbd is not just a database for films but treats film as a veritable digital object, which allows new ways of dealing with films.
The project offers a number of special features such as the visualization of the timeline, time-based annotations, additional information and interlinking with other objects and information, and allows for in-depth search. The project stands in the tradition of autonomous archives and other critical media practices and has collaborated with artists and political activists worldwide. The software, as well as the movies, are available for free.
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.
Mauricio O’Brian is a co-founder of Goteo.org, a crowdfunding platform foregrounding collective return. The platform was founded in 2011 and is one of the pioneering platforms. It was developed by Platoniq, an arts and media design collective working on participatory culture in the digital realm, working since 2001 and based in Barcelona, Spain.
Goteo is different from other crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter in the way it conceptualizes crowdfunding as a participatory project. Central for Goteo is the social return of the projects. It promotes projects working for the commons, open code and/or free knowledge, putting the accent on the public mission and favoring free culture and social development, allowing only projects available under a free and/or open license. Apart from the usual monetary contributions, Goteo includes collaborations like services, material resources, infrastructure or participation in specific microtasks needed for the development of projects. It is thus as well fostering a network of local communities. It has always put an emphasis on local events, working together with local communities, organizations and public institutions and has sought to involve the community through local workshops and other means in developing new features. Goteo has put a lot of emphasis on partnering with a wide range of public and private institutions, primarily municipalities in Spain. The principle of “co-responsibility” is also touching on public decision-making processes.
Goteo is managed by the Goteo Foundation, a non-profit organization that unites all the agents committed to the development of the project.
Mauricio O’Brian talks in this interview about the social dimension of crowdfunding and explains the concept of crowd benefit and social return in crowdfunding. He discusses the vision of a culture of co-responsibility, and how this is also linked to decision making processes when it comes to partnerships with public institutions.
Cultural scientist and curator Daphne Dragona talks about alternative community-based network systems and the role art can play in their development.
Practices of commoning are driven by affect, a sense of new possibilities and a desire to respond to existing asymmetries of power. In the case of network infrastructures, asymmetries usually refer to issues of access, as well as to the surveillance and commodification of circulating information. Wishing to oppose the structures of the sovereign corporate systems of communication, different examples of alternative networking have emerged in the last two decades. Initiated and built by artists, activists, and other network practitioners, these infrastructures manifest a desire for accessible, user-owned and controlled systems, that respect the needs of different territories, communities and users.
What can we learn from the recent history of alternative and radical networking? What are the promises and challenges of the commoning of infrastructures in times of increasing socio-politcal divides and conflicts? When does commoning need to be readdressed and which forms of learning and doing might be of help? Turning to examples coming from the fields of art, this presentation will examine how the poetics and imaginaries of counter-infrastructures can assist in re-imagining the way we relate to each other and to the world itself.
Daphne Dragona is a Berlin-based theorist and curator. Since 2015 she has been part of the curatorial team of transmediale festival. She has worked with different institutions for exhibitions, conferences, workshops and other events. Dragona has been working in the field of digital and urban commons since 2009, having curated Esse Nosse Posse: Common Wealth for Common People (EMST 2009), Mapping the Commons, Athens (EMST 2010), Off-the-cloud zone (Transmediale, 2016) and “… An Archaeology of Silence in the Digital Age”, solo exhibition of Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud (Aksioma, 2017). She holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens.