[HacktionLab] tm 2.5 luneburg lab project description

[Simon Worthington]

Hi

This is the work in progress German lab project that I was talking about 
in the meeting.

Simon

Teilmaβname 2.5b

In less than two decades, digital networks have moved from providing a macro
background environment – actively accessible by only a small coterie of 
scientists, experts
and state/corporate agents – to pervading and augmenting our lives at an 
increasingly
micrological level. As our world is plugged into the matrix, we know 
from direct experience
that the pace of change is feverish, the scope infinite and the effects 
in need of constant
reckoning. The Teilmaβname 2.5b Lab offers a space in which to examine, 
reflect and
operate upon the networked, mediatised society from an unhurried 
perspective. We seek
to slow down the machinic pace of ‘cybertime’ just enough to allow for a 
different tempo of
thought to engage and encompass it. The Lab will provide participants 
(artists,
technologists, film-makers, activists, cultural/media theorists) with 
the practical and
intellectual support and resources to build real-world, aesthetic, 
technical or theoretical
assemblages which operate acutely on the interface between digital 
networks and social
and political life. This activity will be situated within a variety of 
experimental, discursive
and distributive contexts.

Guiding principles of the Lab will be to maintain a wide historical 
perspective and to
scrutinise established programmatic and strategic positions: the 
concepts, experiments
and radical promise of past engagements with telecommunications, digital 
media and
aesthetics will be kept in mind, as much to reprise their energies and 
enthusiasms as to
create a gauge for where we find ourselves today. To this end, we will 
retrieve early and
inspirational forecasts of the internet’s radical social potential; 
avant-garde experiments
into the activation and participation of audiences; pioneering 
experiments in building
alternative social and technical infrastructures and self-institution; 
and technologists’
dreams of inherently horizontal, open and distributed networks. Their 
histories will help us
diagnose and think beyond the outlines of our contemporary networked 
life, with its
qualitatively new potentials and crises.

To help orientate the Lab’s activities, we have taken stock of the 
present (technological,
social, cultural & political) situation to frame some key characteristics:

1) The Subsumption of Sociality

There has been a subsumption and expropriation of our social, 
communicative and
collaborative energies through a series of enclosures of the 'means of 
sharing' and the
templating of the means of expression. Aggressive take-overs by 
hegemonic power and
capital of the net’s autonomous use play a dominant part, but we should 
also acknowledge
a failure on the part of resistant cultures to produce their own robust 
systems for the
sustenance of a counter-public sphere. How, given the cul-de-sacs and 
false turns of the
last decades, do we reappropriate our own sociality, creativity, 
collaborative impulses and
'free labour'? What transformations of 'ownership' or exploitation are 
scripted into the new
network structures and what new models of sharing should we look to develop?
2) What is Global Internet Culture? Whatever Happened to the Universal Web?
It seems that today, the main actors gaining full global oversight of 
network activity are
TNCs and governmental agencies. A global web, it appears, exists largely 
from above.
Apart from WikiLeaks style data-dumps, there are few means by which the 
lone web user,
living within their 'filter bubble' and the ontologies of ‘search’ and 
information indexing
established by a handful of companies, can access either the data-sets 
of Power or the
multiple worlds of the globe's net users. Some preliminary questions for 
the Lab, then:
How can we access, understand and map the multitudinous patterns and 
topographies of
internet use? What are the factors determining the conversion of 
knowledge into
information and back again? What are the dominant forces that shape 
involvement in the
internet? How has the ’90s polarity of the ‘info-haves and have-nots’ 
been reconfigured?
What is the significance of the drop in World Wide Web use, with more 
people now
'connected' via private networks, walled gardens and apps? How should 
this archipelago
of nets affect our engagement with – and development of – net culture? 
And what are the
key impediments to access for the ‘global citizen’?

3) Control vs Freedom, Life vs Object

The development of informational tools, driven largely by the economic 
forces of
production (global supply chains, just-in-time production), new models 
of ‘prosumption’,
and the military requirements of imperialism, are increasingly 
converging with the
techniques of biopolitical and informational governance. If human beings 
are conceived of
as the 'living wealth' of nations to be securitised, shaped and 
leveraged, how is the
development of an internet of things (object to object communication 
systems) creating
new forms of intervention into the physical stratum of bare life? How 
can these new forms
of subject mapping, data-tracking, neo-taylorisation, and logistical 
deployment be inverted,
taken apart, perverted, used to create new collectivities? What does the 
real ‘communal’
use of info-sharing and gathering look like? And what should we make of 
the promise of
‘open knowledge’, ‘open data’ and 'open source'.

Object-oriented ontologies, from Bruno Latour (Actor Network Theory) to 
Graham Harman
(Speculative Realism), are shaping research methodologies, network 
cultures and forms of
governance. How might radical social perspectives interpret these new 
scientific and
philosophical insights, which reconceive human and object relations? 
Revisiting the
question: 'do artefacts have politics' in the early 21st century 
requires us to ontologically
shift the subject-object dichotomies established by enlightenment 
thought, but also to bring
closer together networks of making and using which produce these 
relationships.

4) The Question of Organisation

The proliferation of social institutions (of education, medicalisation, 
culture, care, etc.) has
long been critiqued as producing social and psychic dependencies, 
normativities and
appropriations of the subject in accordance with the logics of 
state/capitalism – expanding
exponentially to organise and format human life. However, we are now 
undergoing their
mass defunding, as well as the paradox of an official take-over of 
anti-institutional
discourse (encapsulated in the UK government’s promotion of the term 
‘Big Society’).

Can we rethink autonomous activity in this climate, resisting a 
collusion with the contracted
state brought on by neoliberal ideology and austerity? If the idea of 
the 'self-organising
network' is reshaping politics from models of governmentality to 
grassroots activism, what
are its preconditions, and what forms of emergent organisation are 
moving beyond its
aporias? Can we update historical adventures in alternative, autonomous 
or anti-education
within the context of the net and its many knowledge sharing potentials?

5) Art in/after Networks

Net artist Vuk Cosic once half-jokingly described art as only ever 
having been a ‘subsitute
for the internet’. The net has, in other words, hard-wired many 
avant-garde proposals,
forms and tendencies, from audience activation/participation, to 
dematerialisation, to
collaborative production, to automatic creativity etc. into ‘real-world 
systems’. At the same
time, the creative industries and the Creative City have assimilated 
many of the tropes and
forms not only of radical aesthetics, but also of participative networks 
of production into
new paradigms of governance, wealth creation, urban design and social 
appeasement. On
the one hand government and business have learned to deploy aesthetics 
in increasingly
canny ways, on the other the rise and rise of conceptualism, 
dematerialisation and the
technologisation/computerisation of production have led aesthetics into 
a series of
quandries over its own ontology. If aesthetics literally means ‘of the 
senses’, what does it
mean today when the human senses have been so profoundly augmented by 
technology
and computation? How can we think digital aesthetics and/or art in 
networks now?

6) Re-groupings in New Communications Environments

While setbacks and constraints must be recognised, it remains essential 
to acknowledge
the degree to which the scale of today’s web use and the potential 
connective power of
CMC mount a challenge to political, social and cultural formations. We 
have recently
witnessed significant skirmishes and convulsions, where newly mobilised 
networks ran up
against a status-quo which confines everything to the outdated forms of 
'nation', 'state' and
old-style 'ownership'. What are the ongoing possibilities of 
appropriating media to form
new strategic spaces for (social, political, cultural) movement, revive 
forgotten experiments
and form new social combinations? To what extent are the critical uses 
of media
determined by existing technical protocols, power relations and 
control-matrices? And
what can new, emergent forms of collectivity create; what political and 
conceptual
challenges can be mounted by heterogeneous, mutative and distributed 
solidarities?

With Whom?

A permanent partner of TM2.5B is Mute magazine. Through this 
collaboration the Lab is
specifically aligning itself with some of the magazine’s editorial 
traditions, adopting its
distinct articulation of ‘culture and politics after the net’, as well 
as its active engagement
with experimental practice. Mute will curate the Lab’s overall themes 
together with
Leuphana, shaping the environment and programmes, and helping to select 
participants. It
will also provide the platform and infrastructure for most of the Lab’s 
discussion/
publication/collecting/archiving activities (see below).

In What Way?

TM2.5B will set up 2-4 open, networked Lab-environments for 12 or 16 
months. Each
addresses a theme or set of themes developed in relation to the Lab's 
key global
characterisations (see above), and consists of a range of elements: 
online and offline
publishing and discussion, workshops, and, potentially, art 
interventions, ‘boot camps’,
exhibitions, festivals or whatever else participants determine. 
Residency-holders will spend
a part of their time physically in Lüneburg, but the Lab’s physical and 
social boundaries will
extend far beyond the space of the campus.

Each themed Lab-environment will be able to give out 8-14 funded 
residency-months in
total. This translates into 2-4 residencies, comprised of individuals or 
groups, of between 2
-12 months. Some might enable specific works (an art work, a piece of 
software), others
might be awarded for more reflexive and theoretical work. 
Residency-holders do not have
to cooperate with each other, but are encouraged to do so, and might in 
some case be
selected for this purpose. They are also encouraged to comment and 
engage with other
projects in Leuphana's Moving Image Lab, LAP, ICAM, TM25A, KIM, 
Kunstraum and so on
– just as these are encouraged to engage with the themes and activities 
of the residents.

Residency-holders will work autonomously, i.e. not to a brief. Their 
projects do not have to
be unique to TM2.5B – on the contrary, we particularly welcome ongoing 
projects to stay in
TM2.5B for a limited period within their longer lifespans. We also 
encourage the inclusion
of projects with their own wider institutional infrastructures or, 
indeed, risky and speculative
projects with open outcomes.

How will the Lab Reach its Public?

The Lab environment is much bigger than the residencies. Workshops, 
festivals and other
events will draw in wider networks and publics.

The Lab will also pursue preparatory and orienting editorial and 
publishing work (e.g.
position papers; commented bibliographies or link-collections; resumés 
of the key
developments within a field etc.), helping to draw out and frame its 
themes. These
activities – which will also include researchers’ findings, 
discussion/interview transcripts,
etc. – will help open the Lab to a wider group of participants. New 
forms of open/
experimental documentation will be tested (e.g. the SocialBook), and 
publishing models
trialled more generally. Residency holders might contribute to 
associated publications
(books, pamphlets, etc.), but do not have to.

The Lab will also project itself outwards in the form of educational 
initiatives – using
models emerging online, as well as working with older histories and 
experiments in
autonomous education, whose ethos was emphatically participatory. The 
specifics of these
are to be articulated and might themselves indeed form a theme.

The Lab itself might also evolve into an actor, actively positioning 
itself with regard to some
of its themes, e.g. as an open think-tank, maintaining a special focus 
on exploration and
education.

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