Framed by her long-standing research on collaborative practices, geographer and ethnographer Penny Travlou introduces two projects she has been involved lately: Platohedro, a space, a platform and community based in Medellín, Colombia, and the Feminist Autonomous Research Center in Athens (FAC). Platohedro refers to the indigenous concepts of Buen Vivir and Buen Conocer and works on adapting them to the contemporary living conditions in urban societies, while FAC puts an emphasis on commnity-based autonomous knowledge production. Both are concerned with forms of thinking and working together that allow for creating alternatives to extractivist, colonial, racist and anti-feminist modes of (knowledge)production.

https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-penny-travlou
https://platohedro.org/
https://curatingcommonwellbeing.platohedro.org/
https://feministresearch.org/

Interview conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 31 March 2021.

The exhibition OPEN SCORES brought together a series of practices through which artists articulate their specific forms of digital commons. From online archives to digital tools/ infrastructure and educational formats, the projects envision a (post-)digital culture in which notions of collaboration, free access to knowledge, sustainable use of shared resources, and data privacy are central. For the exhibition, each of the projects created a unique score to present their practice.

Participants:
Dušan Barok (monoskop.org), Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (memoryoftheworld.org), Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber (0xdb.org), Kenneth Goldsmith (ubu.com), Sean Dockray (AAAAARG), Zeljko
Blace (#QUEERingNETWORKing), Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett (furtherfield.org), Laurence Rassel (erg.be), Marek Tuszynski (Tactical Tech), Michael Murtaugh, Femke Snelting & Peter Westenberg (Constant), Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar’s Lab), Panayotis Antoniadis
(nethood.org), Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it), Eva Weinmayr (andpublishing.org), spideralex, Sakrowski (curatingyoutube.net), Creating Commons.
Curated by Creating Commons
(Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder)

Participants: (from left to right):
top row: Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz Baltazars Laboratory Vienna), Laurence Rassel (erg Brussels, constant Brussels)
2nd row: Ruth Catlow (furtherfield London), Rahel Puffert (University Oldenburg), Patricia Reis (Mz Baltazars Laboratory Vienna), Marc Garrett (furtherfield London)
3rd row (middle to left): Cornelia Sollfrank (CC research project), Mario Purkathofer (Dock18 Zürich), Zeljko Blace (MaMa/ccSPORT)
bottom row: Marek Tuszinsky (tactical tech Berlin), Shusha Niederberger (CC research project), Peter Westenberg (constant Brussels), Felix Stalder (CC research project).
Not in picture: Penny Travlou, University of Edinburgh

Venue: Hek (House of electronic Arts, Basel)

Report

The two-day research meeting was preceded by an evening lecture by Laurence Rassel, the director of e.r.g. (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels). In her lecture, she elaborated on her way of managing the art school for which she has conceived a method that combines elements from open source software, feminism, and institutional psychotherapy. Rassel also took part in the next two days’ meetings in which her model served as a reference for reforming the institution from within, while all the other invited projects are self-organized institutions.

In a first-round all the participants introduced their organizations which clearly demonstrated a huge variety not just in scale, but also in terms of objectives and forms of organization reaching from non-profit businesses with 30+ employees to associations without any employees that are largely based on volunteer work.

The introductions were followed by two theoretical inputs, one by Penny Travlou (remotely), and one by Rahel Puffert. As an ethnographer Travlou, for many years, has conducted research on collaborative practices, collaborative economies and networks, everyday commoning practices related to questions of self-organization, alternative and circular economies, de-growth, and sharing practices (rhizomic ethnographies), investigating local projects (e.g. in Athens and Medellin), but also considering the transglobal scale via distant platforms. She works with the term commons, engaging in a critical discourse on commons, updating it to accommodate concepts such as the “other” and the “stranger” (as a member of the community e.g. in refugee projects), to decolonize knowledge practices (e.g. peer-to-peer-learning with indigenous), to establish concepts of collaboration based on time, i.e. to build trust over time by slowing down as activist and academic practice, to create shared cultural values via commoning. Stewardship and care are core elements of cultural commoning in her understanding, also considering feminist discourses on reproduction, which underline some of the ideas articulated in the first workshop. Her notion of the commons also combines informational/digital commons and urban/educational commons and reflects social practices that unleash peoples’ capacity to create things together and take their lives and livelihood in their own hands. Her research is aligned along the concepts of culture and creativity in particular. The second input by Rahel Puffert introduced various concepts and aspects of the “institution” that could serve as a basis for the following discussion. With her personal background in pedagogy, Puffert chooses the “school” to be one example of “institution,” transferring the earlier introduced categories –affirmative/descriptive, critical/deconstructive, and mediating between the two – to this basic institutional format. Following theoreticians such as Parsons, Illich, Foucault, or Bourdieu, she elaborated on how schools are conceptualized as either supporting society as it is (integration, adjustment, achieving of goals, preservation of norms ) OR enabling learning and critical thought. In this context, she suggested distinguishing between “school” and “learning” and pointed out the advantages of both, institutionalized and self-organized learning environments.

Triggered by the theory inputs, the rest of the meeting consisted of moderated work sessions between all participants along prepared questions. The questions included e.g. how experiences in self-organized contexts are different from experiences with and within institutions, what the particular institution produces and holds in common (e.g. space, publications, knowledge, services (hosting), skills (campaigning), tools, libraries, methods, code, films, manuals, reading lists, situations, redistribution of money, etc.), what the organizing principles and agreements are for the various projects are (e.g. association, foundation, company, etc.), if and how they define roles and functions within their structures (questions of leadership, power, and decision-making), if and how self-critical modes of working and rules for rotation e.g. are in place, if ways of working are being reflected and made transparent (internally and externally) e.g. through documentation as in open source, what the funding models are (public, private, self-funded, etc.) and aspects of sustainability and transition. Another considerable part of the discussion was circling around the question of how aesthetics could be understood and defined in the context of organisational practice. It was suggested that the act of (consciously) giving form to a material, an action, a relationship to the world, technology, an institution and thus making something perceivable, visible, transferable, and “beautiful” can be understood as aesthetic practice.

Almost all the projects embody different approaches and values, but what all of them hold in common, was an understanding that they are more or less embedded in the current capitalist/neoliberal system while using their organization/space to create, live and promote their own social imaginations for which DIWO (doing it with others), collectivity and collaboration are important features as well as the provision and care for shared resources. This outcome suggests a proximity to the commons discourse that the projects share.

Interviews conducted with participants

Institutional Practice with Peter Westenberg

Networking Institutions with Z. Blace

Negotiating Space in Culture and Technology with Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett.

Working with the Paradoxes of Technology with Marek Tuszynski

Feminist Hackspace with Patricia Reis and Stephanie Wuschitz

Experimenting with Institutional Formats with Laurence Rassel

First published in German as “What can we learn from the (digital) Commons? Ästhetische Praxen des Lernens und Verlernens” in springerin 4/2019

Educational formats and projects in the art field have become part of everyday practice – at least since the “educational turn”[1]. Art institutions offer workshops or provide resources for diverse formats: Colleges, academies, free schools.[2] In this way, they create learning situations in which speculation, reflection, updating, and production can take place – independent of prescribed necessities and according to self-determined exigencies. Extensively theorized and problematized as part of curatorial practice, these activities stand for a “shift from exhibition-making to the production of knowledge”[3] and have snatched the formerly rather neglected questions of education as a (partial) task of art from the realm of classical mediation and endowed them with the symbolic power of new discursive power. Art mediation reacted to this with its own shift, an “educational turn in education”[4] that consists of adopting and further developing increasingly radical and critical approaches to education – and shaping them into a critical practice of mediation.

Questions that accompany these developments both in the curatorial field and in the field of mediation are questions about one’s own relationship to the institution for which one works or within which one works. It is not uncommon for direct relations with institutional power to produce contradictions with one’s declared critical practice – and such contradictions cannot always be made positive or productive through reflection alone. This may be one of the reasons why artists* and cultural producers* are working to create their own places and spaces for dealing with knowledge. The creation of self-determined situations for learning – and unlearning – promises to escape institutionally established boundaries and thus not only to be able to act more freely in terms of content but also to test new methods of producing and imparting knowledge in practice by fundamentally questioning traditional knowledge practices.

Taking our work in the research project Creating Commons, in which aesthetic practices committed to the production or preservation of digital commons are investigated[5], as a starting point, I would like to reflect here on a few selected projects in which educational aspects also play an important role. These are different formats, most of which are located outside of traditional institutions. In these projects, what Philip Agre has called “Critical Technical Practice”[6] is intertwined with self-organization in an expanded artistic environment using emancipatory pedagogical approaches.

The Public School

Meanwhile, The Public School has become a classic.[7] Founded in 2008 in L.A. by the US-American artist Sean Dockray, it evolved from reading together in Reading Groups, with the self-organized art space in which these groups met also being an important element. It is a school without a curriculum, composed of a group of interested people, a space where they can meet, and a website where the seminars are coordinated. The principle is that individuals offer what they can teach or what they would like to work for, and others make specific wishes. This means that the contents of the seminars are not curated, but develop exclusively according to the needs and competencies of the participants. The process of negotiation takes place online on the project’s website, which not only allows all decision-making to be followed transparently but is also open to all interested parties. This makes it the organizational heart of the project. For the programmers* of the website, the political claim of the project is most strongly reflected in the software: “Every programming decision influences what the users* see and how they can act.”[8] In order to realize the claim of greatest possible inclusiveness, the website is continually adapted and further developed in consultation with its users*. This means that the tool that enables new knowledge-production situations is itself part of the “commoning” process. Not only do form and content meet to open up a new space of possibilities; digitally networked infrastructure also meets with a local community. Due to its universal structure, the project was able to spread to about a dozen other cities.

Mz* Baltazar’s Lab

One project that, in contrast to AAAARG, for example, is gaining considerable momentum through its local positioning and the formation of a community is the Vienna-based Mz* Baltazar’s Lab[9] – a hacklab, in existence since 2008, which is run by a trans*feminist collective. The core of this project is the space in which workshops, meetings, lectures, and exhibitions take place. According to Stefanie Wuschitz, one of the co-founders, the physical space as a common resource represents an important moment to bring together diverse users* and to create collective practices.[10] Collectivity means common knowledge production, but also care and solidarity.[11] The ethnologist Sophie Toupin locates Mz* Baltazar’s Lab in the worldwide scene of feminist hackspaces, which by creating their own spaces promote feminist resistance practices and expand the conventional understanding of hacking with gender-related and feminist aspects.[12] Intersectionality is another important working principle, and the associated preoccupation with inequality, oppression, and violence brings entirely new dynamics to the strongly masculine and white field of technology. Accordingly, the activities of the hackspace develop along the principles of feminist hacking,[13] whose basic assumption is that both technology and gender are coded and thus also codable – i.e., changeable – systems. Feminist hackspaces are places where a coexistence is cultivated that clearly differs from the traditional hacker scene and its merciless meritocracy, so that as many people as possible can train themselves in an emancipatory engagement with technology.

École de recherche graphique (e.r.g.)

The projects mentioned above could be supplemented by a number of other examples since almost all of the projects examined by Creating Commons also have educational aspects. These range from workshops within the framework of public institutions[14] to the creation of one’s own infrastructure[15] and self-organized schools.[16] The example of the École de recherche graphique (e.r.g.) in Brussels shows how a radically critical pedagogical approach within an institution can sound out and even expand its boundaries. The publicly funded school, which follows the tradition of experimental universities of the 1970s, has been undergoing an institutional transformation since 2016 under its current director Laurence Rassel. The principles of free software are combined in Rassel’s management concept with feminism and the “institutional psychotherapy” developed in France in connection with reform psychiatry.[17] For Rassel, the focus here is on setting in motion what is stuck in an institution – the instituted – through a process of re-establishment.[18] Here, the central concern is not the construction of non-institutional contexts, but the transformation of an existing structure with the aim of involving all participants in the process of transformation and thus practicing a form of collectivization.

Educational Commoning

For all educational approaches in the field of digital commons, the principles of free software are an essential inspiration.[19] They not only configure the collaborative and open-source creation of software but also stand in their social dimension for a reorientation of power relations in relation to the creation, dissemination, and authorization of knowledge in the age of the Internet. With values such as collectivity, transparency, new forms of self-organization and radical free access[20], they provide essential impulses for emancipatory knowledge practice in general.

However, these values are not simply present, but are the subject of an ongoing process of negotiation, reflection, and development, i.e., “commoning.” Educational formats in this context are nothing other than the creation of situations in which this process can take place. Not only is given knowledge imparted, but it is also shown how knowledge is recognized and legitimized and how a diverse set of knowledge can be created or disseminated. Joint learning – and unlearning – is thus one of the essential resources of digital commons.

[1] See Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” in Curating and the Educational Turn, Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson (Eds.) (Amsterdam: Open Editions, de Appel, 2010).

[2] Some examples: Community College, Nachbarschaftsakademie, metroZones Schule für städtisches Handeln, A.C.A.D.E.M.Y, Free University, etc.

[3] Jaschke and Sternfeld, p. 14.

[4] Ibid., p. 17.

[5] https://www.zhdk.ch/forschungsprojekt/544343.

[6] Philip Agre, “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI,” in Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, ed. Geoffrey Bowker et al. (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997).

[7] https://thepublicschool.org. The technical infrastructure is presently being restructured and reprogramed.

[8] An interview with Sean Dockray, Expanded Appropriation, https://vimeo.com/60889535

[9] https://www.mzbaltazarslaboratory.org/

[10] Feminist Hackspace, Interview with Patricia Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz (2018), https://vimeo.com/319823285

[11] See also spideralex, “Creating New Worlds – with cyberfeminist Ideas and Practices,” in The beautiful warriors: Technofeminist Praxis in the 21st Century, ed. Cornelia Sollfrank (minor compositions, 2019).

[12] See Sophie Toupin, “Hackerspaces: The Synthesis of Feminist and HackerCultures,” Journal of Peer Production 5 (2014).

[13] See Sophie Toupin, “Feminist Hacking: Resistance through Spaciality,” in The beautiful warriors, ed. Sollfrank.

[14] For instance, Public Library, an exhibition at the Württembergischen Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2014): https://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/program/2014/events/public-library/.

[15] For example, Furtherfield, https://www.furtherfield.org/.

[16] Relearn: Variable Summerschool: https://constantvzw.org/site/Relearn-Variable-Summerschool.html

[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_psychotherapy

[18] See Gerald Raunig, Instituent Practices. Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming (Vienna: transversal texts, 2006): https://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/raunig/en.html

[19] See Free Software Foundation Europe: https://fsfe.org/about/basics/freesoftware.de.html and Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

[20] See the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifest.