[HacktionLab] Ideas

[penguin]

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On Sun 18 Sep 2011 08:22:50 BST, m3shrom at riseup.net [m3shrom at riseup.net]
emailed subject: "[HacktionLab] Ideas" saying ...

> Some early morning ideas. From the conversatoons went been having at the lab.
> 
> Propsal .
> 
> Change the title and subtitle of the tech tools leaflet. To ' Are you being farmed?'. Tools  to escape the matrix.

- -1 from me. Sorry, but unless you already know what the booklet is
about, this title & sub-title doesn't actually make much sense - and the
booklet is aimed at people that don't know what it's about. I think we
need something a lot more descriptive, even if it is duller. Will try
and think of some alternatives. Later.

> 
> And reorganize it along the following themes.
> 
> Communicate directly and securely.
> Use open and decentralized internet services
> Keep creating our own media and info networks
> Use lower impact power,  computers and hosting.

+1 - think this is a really useful structure (but does creating our own
info networks fall into point 2?)

> 
> 
> Once we have these ideas tools and services clear, we can promote them in lots of different formats.
> 
> Leaflet
> Pub chats
> Blog posts
> Magazine articles
> Workshops
> More workshops
> Radio discussions
> Viral videos
> A 30 to 90 min show / interactive talk 
> 
> I've got some ideas for the show. 
> 
> Videos
> The meatrix
> Cows with guns
> Recent one from Brazil free culture movement
> 
> Guests talk show bit 
> 2-5 invited guests talk about the project they want to promote like a A list celebrity plugging their latest film or book. The guest bring a relevant short  film each. 
> 
> Songs
> Grime version of free software song
> Afrobeat fela kuti style recriminatuons against Google and Apple
> 
> Discussion points
> When is it ok to use Facebook and other stories facilitated by Jerry Arab Springer. 
> Does anyone remember email? 
> 
> pledge ceremony
> This involves a cheesy group public show of commitment to the values we are communicating, pastiching celebacy pledges. Ideally we have a plant in the audience who publicly shuts down their Facebook. They then exit stage left for a session with one if our counselors.
> 
> Then a final thought which plays out the soundtrack of an 8 bit version of 80s classic 'you're the voice' 
> 
> Sorted let's get some bookings 
> 
> M3sh on the move
>  
> 
> 
> ----- Reply message -----
> From: "Simon Worthington" <simon at metamute.org>
> To: <hacktionlab at lists.aktivix.org>
> Subject: [HacktionLab] tm 2.5 luneburg lab project description
> Date: Sat, Sep 17, 2011 5:19 pm
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> HacktionLab mailing list
> HacktionLab at lists.aktivix.org
> https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/hacktionlab

- -- 
penguin

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