Two of the editors of the volume Aesthetics of the Commons (Diaphenes 2021) Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder discuss with WPCC journal the potential and meanings of the digital commons in creating new subjectivities and new imaginaries on and off the internet. Within this they question whether the focus on the aesthetics of the commons is useful for understanding phenomena such as ‘artistic shadow libraries’, pointing towards the need to build institutions for which ‘practices of commoning are central’. Also considered are the modern art system, copyright, and the corrosive individualism of Western modernity in the artistic sphere. Against these factors they note instead that, ‘the commons are structured through different relations, and care expresses that difference’. New economic approaches are needed in the arts supported by political actors which might include the ‘re-envisioning [of] public institutions, such as public broadcasting, as part of a commons’.

Keywords: commons, aesthetics, copyright, platform capitalism, shadow libraries, care, art system, decolonisation

Editorial Board W., (2021) “Aesthetics, Commons and the Production of the Subject: An Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16(1). p.74-81. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.920

Full Article as PDF download

We are very happy to announce the launch of our book Aesthetics of the Commons, online via Depot in Vienna.

Tuesday, 9 March 2021, 7 pm (CET)

Link to zoom meeting (will be active at 6.45 pm):
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82459911204?pwd=Y0FscUMwS1c5QmNtSmxTZ2JmMW9Xdz09

Book launch and discussion

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art in the post-digital has the possibility to not only conceive or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. The underlying social imaginaries ascribe a new role to art in society and they envision an idea of culture beyond the individual and its possessions.

Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a ‘double character.’ They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the ‘commons.’ In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a ‘thinking tool’—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

Contributions to the book by Christoph Brunner, Daphne Dragona, Jeremy Gilbert, Olga Goriunova, Gary Hall, Ines Kleesattel, Rahel Puffert, Judith Siegmund, Sophie Toupin, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver.

Aesthetics of the Commons. Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, and Shusha Niederberger, eds. 2021. Zürich Berlin: Diaphanes
(available as softcover or open access PDF)

Online launch event with:

Olga Goriunova, cultural theorist, Royal Holloway University, London.
Shusha Niederberger, artist, researcher, and educator, Zurich.
Gerald Raunig, philosopher, Malaga/Zurich.
Cornelia Sollfrank, artist and researcher, Berlin.
Felix Stalder, cultural and media theorist, ZHdK, Zurich.

The event will be held in English.

This book is part of the research project “Creating Commons“, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant: # 100016_169419), hosted and supported by the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts,

Participants (left to right):
top row: Cornelia Sollfrank & Felix Stalder (CC research project);
middle row: Annette Mächtel (UdK, Berlin), Annet Dekker (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Paul Keller (Kennisland, NL), Jan Gerber (0xdb.org), Rahel Puffert (Universtität Oldenburg), Marcell Mars (Memory of the World);
bottom row: Shusha Niederberger (CC research project), Olga Goriunova (University of London), Sebastian Lütgert(0xdb.org), Anna Calabrese (UdK, Berlin), Dusan Barok (Monoskop.org), Tomislav Medak (Memory of the World), Sean Dockray (aaaaarg.fail).

Venue: Hek (House of electronic Arts, Basel)

Report

The research meeting opened with a public talk by Olga Goriunova (Reader in Digital Culture,  University of London). She started by revisiting her concept of “organizational aesthetics”, that is, the relationship between the construction of the online platform (or any other production/exhibition space) and the kinds of processes and art works that are produced and made public through it. She then extended this perspective to the relationship between the commons and art practices, in particular the changing social roles and subject positions (beyond the classic triple of artists, curator and audience) that the commons creates. She focused on the audience which is transformed even when not actively participating, introducing the notion of the “lurker”, a figure from online culture, denoting people who are subscribed to a forum or a mailing list, but only read and never actively post something, even though the technical set-up would not only allow but invite to do so. Rather than seeing this a negative, passive aspect Goriunova focused on the active role of producing a context in which posting and debating comes meaningful to begin with. The horizon of the commons, then, is not the naïve vision that everybody becomes a producer, but an expanded notion of what production is in the networked context and of keeping the hurdles low to move between different subject position within a continuum.

The two-day workshop, a mix of discussion in the plenary and focused working groups, started with a review of the artistic projects. They were all concerned with how to deal with large numbers of cultural works in the context of three interrelated crises: commercialization, copyright and cultural production. Commercialization, so the widely shared view, has been leading to a flattening of the cultural landscape by over-promoting a small types of works and undervaluing the large majority of culture, to the point of removing it from circulation. Copyright, with its peculiar notions of authorship and ownership, and the burdensome process of “clearing” rights for reuse, makes it exceedingly difficult to experiment with new ways of using digital information, particularly for established cultural institutions. Hence the need for artist not only to think about it, but to develop actively new forms. This was also motivated by what was seen as  crisis of cultural production, which created a need to develop new ways of interacting with very large numbers of material (rather than a small number of canonical/auratic works) which many of these projects had worked with and, second, with the need to develop new narratives that express and make visible cultural relationship across and beyond the disciplinary and geographic categories that dominated cultural discourse after WII.

All projects tried to address these three interrelated crises in different ways, while common themes emerged during the meeting. Against the concept of ownership with its associated ideas of exclusivity and control, notions of care and custodianship were proposed developed, both theoretically and practically.

The need to navigate a broken copyright regime has been a pressing issue for many years for most of the projects; the approaches ranged from intensive, long-term lobbying at the European level on behalf of memory institutions, to dealing cooperatively with open-minded rights holders (mainly small press publishers) who increasingly understand the value of the open access archives to produces a cultural context in which their works find an audience, to approaches to more or less simply ignoring copyright. There was an understanding that copyright limits urgently needed experimentation to find the right form for archives and institutions in the digital context, where the differences between the catalogue and the work, between meta data and data increasingly blurs.

A second major theme was the transformation of what started often as individual (art) projects into infrastructures that many people ome to depend – some projects have more than 150’000 registered users. Different approaches were discussed, ranging from technical solutions (such distributed files systems (DAT)), to inter-generational (handing over the project to a new generation) and institutional approaches (decentralization and multiplication of archives).

The third major theme focused on the relationship between institutional forms, community and changing subjectivities. These projects show that archives and libraries in the digital context, when allowed to move beyond their historical institutional form, look very different. Production and preservation become mutually constitutive and the notion of care extends from the archivist/librarian to the user, which brings them into a new relationship (commoners) centring round the concern for a resource (commons) and a range practices (commoning) aimed at sustaining care. Not all participants were equally at ease with framing their activities as commoning, pointing towards a tendency in the commons discourse of glossing over differences and idealizing consensus harmony.

This third cluster of concerns in particular laid important groundwork for the next two research meetings.

Interviews conducted with participants

Producing Organizational Aesthetics, with Olga Goriunova

The Practice of Sharing Knowledge, with Sean Dockray

From Notepad to Cultural Resource. The Aesthetics of Crosslinking at Monoskop, with Dušan Barok

Expanding Cinema, with Sebatian Lütgert & Jan Gerber

Caring for the Public Library, with Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak

This exhibition brings together 16 practices through which artists articulate their own 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,  artists have developed a SCORE relating to their practice. A SCORE can have different meanings: It can be a general instruction, a working instruction, a performance instruction or an operating instruction. In any case, it is meant to lead to a realization of an intended action and as such is an interface between a human actor and an object/material/machine. And a SCORE can also be linked to a technical HOWTO document, in that it contains information on how to perform a specific task.

Within the exhibition, the newly developed SCORES add an aesthetic layer while pointing to the socio/political impact of the presented projects. The exhibition will also feature the interviews conducted as part of the research project as well as a temporary library on the subject of digital commons. Furthermore, there will be a program of talks, screenings, and workshops.

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

Curated by Creating Commons (Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder)

Exhibition guide (PDF)

Talks, screenings, and workshops

Sat. 21 September 2019, Opening, 19:00
20:00 TEMPLATES, Music Performance, Johannes Kreidler
21:00 Let’s make a salad. Homage to Alison Knowles
22:00 DJ Gigsta
23:30 DJ ROLUX-FOX

Sun. 22 September 2019, Workshop, 11:00 – 17:00
Wiki What?
Workshop with Dušan Barok. Collaborative building and maintenance of knowledge resources using monoskop.org as an example.

Fri. 27 September 2019, Talk and Screening, 21:00
Film as Digital Object.
Sebastian Lütgert in conversation with Cornelia Lund, followed by Pirate Cinema screening.

Sat. 28 September 2019, Workshop, 11:00 – 17:00
Sebastian Lütgert on the 0xdb film database.

Fri. 11 October 2019, Talk, 19:00
Thick Webs & Continuous Relays: Feminist Epistemologies for the Digital Commons
Isabel de Sena

Sat. 12 October 2019, Workshop, 11:00 – 17:00
Moments of Autonomy. Feminist educational practices for the digital commons
with Andrea Hubin (Kunsthalle Wien), Shusha Niederberger (Haus für elektronische Künste, Basel), Peggy Pierrot (e.r.g., Brussels), Daphne Dragona (transmediale), Safa Ghnaim (tactical tech), Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory, Vienna) and others.

panke.gallery
Gerichtstr. 23 / Hof 5, 13347 Berlin (map)
Wed–Sat: 15:00 – 19:00

E: info@panke.gallery
W: panke.gallery

This exhibtion is part of the SNF-funded research project “Creating Commons” and supported by the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, (IFCAR), Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK).

Originally published in German, as “Furtherfield: Mit Nachahmung fangen Commonistinnen wenig an” in springerin 4/2019

The connection to a place has a material-productive and a strategic-symbolic function, particularly for a concrete utopia that does not simply paint the image but examines real practices as germ forms. The example of the London project-space Furtherfield can serve to describe an ethics of place, which means networking local activists and hackers with one another and thus interweaving eco-social cooperation with progressiveness, localization with decentralization. The project, initiated by artists in 1996, is a self-proclaimed “(de-)centre for art and technology” in London’s Finsbury Park. Collaborative practices and “DIWO” (Doing It With Others) are just as constitutive here as the development of a digital and local culture of the Commons. Furtherfield can thus be understood as a “commonistic” germ form – commonism understood less as ideology (1) than as an “inclusion society” which is to be permanently further developed. According to Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz (2), this is based on a different structure of cooperation, as well as on material and social preconditions that allow people to create their own living conditions. Inclusion is thus not merely an ethical-moral attitude, but the condition for action can be shaped collectively by all commonists.

For commonists, helping to shape an ethic of the place means neither unilaterally announcing a re-rooting of those uprooted by modernity – that would be the neo-traditional gesture – nor rejecting the connectivity of digital nomads – that used to be the New Economy spirit – but robbing both entities of their exclusive peaks. It means cultivating “response-ability” (Donna Haraway). The concern for a commonistic place and the maintenance of a platform require the voluntary activity of commonists who, beyond the rules of abstract property, take care of the general availability of goods, resources, digital technologies, codes, etc.

The concern for the place is the concern for all commoners who can assert their needs in that place or on that platform and contribute according to their individual abilities. Exploitation and competition, property and profit, containment and exclusivity can be unlearned here by initiating and prospective commonists together. Commercial providers of the same goods, resources, codes, etc. are “out-cooperated” (Sutterlütti/Meretz) by countering their enclosures with “dis-enclosures”, as I would like to call these forms of collectivization of formerly privately-held resources. Dis-enclosures are dependent on the permanence and resilience of the Commonists if they do not want to be one-off projects. Dis-enclosures can counteract privatizations and employ a community concept that makes it possible to overcome the fetishes of growth and competition. Political state-transformation theories cannot think of this constituting process.

Commonists rarely begin with imitation as a repetition of dichotomies proven in capitalist modernity – such as individuality vs. collectivity, private enterprise vs. nationalization. They are interested in setting their own rules, designing their own stories, rituals, and exercise systems with speculative, dis-enclosing, and pre-mitative activities that contribute to preservation – and expansion! – of the commons are interested. With the concept of pre-mitation, I propose to regard the initiating moment of Furtherfield also as aesthetic moment.

Furtherfield interweaves digital communities with non-digital ones in a way that corridors emerge; corridors that connect places and between which decentralization prevails.

Furtherfield is also experimenting with blockchains with which the gathering groups of people can make life and business more democratic, more transparent and less hierarchical. In this way, blockchains can help to design trustworthy paths or corridors in the midst of the total exploitation desert called Big Data, but they are neither immune to (e.g. company-internal) hierarchies, nor do they represent applications far removed from the market. The question also remains as to who programs the so-called consensus algorithm and organizes trust in complex, knotted relationship networks. But commonists who have renounced cultural pessimism can live with the fundamental susceptibility of technology (here: blockchain) or cultural technology (here: self-organisation) to abuse of power. The possible self-organization of networked communities as basic units that reject bureaucratic centralism seems important to them. Corridors are important when left-liberal zeitgeist prefers the nomadic to the identitarian, but right-wing populist reaction time turns the need for rootedness into an absolute. Here, Furtherfield works with two strategies in one and the same place: Finsbury Park as an important public recreation site for its residents, which includes migrants from a great many countries, has its own cultural practices; these encounter the dis-enclosing strategies of the digital commonists – in the Community Media Lab Furtherfield Commons, in an exhibition space in the middle of the park, in an online magazine, and on a mailing list – and continue to develop cooperatively. The communities are permeable and enrich each other. The germ form of the other society becomes noticeable precisely in the penetration of the various practices that take place in one place. Each format creates an assemblage of people, technology and environment that benefits commoning as a whole. What is decisive is sustainable practice.

Furtherfield, as can be asserted with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski (3) thus constructs a “locally functioning folk machine” that slowly but effectively undermines established forms of rule and replaces them with a better practice in the sense of a network of peers. These (pre-)figurations of the future are recognizable and applicable from the outside as pre-mitative practices. For an aesthetic of commoning, this means the following: The mimetic capacity leaves imitation; the emulation of the old becomes obsolete, de-learning and re-learning intertwine, pre-mitation is created and makes transformational processes visible, so that from now on imitation would also be possible again: as imitation of the new. And so commoning does not only mean the self-administration of the resource or the platform, which, whether “rival” or “not rival”, is open for use by as many people as possible and does not exclude anyone through an abstract concept of property (or license). What is also decisive is the symbolic, performative and aesthetic quality of the gathering bodies in one place, including those that are not (yet) present, those that are still excluded, but for which corridors are created: Access authorization, residence permit, work that secures their livelihood and, last but not least, care community.

The initiators of Furtherfield, Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, refer historically to Marx’s concept of “original accumulation” and the enclosures it entails. Their reference back to the “levellers” is decidedly directed against these enclosures, which to this day take place worldwide and are constantly imitated by neoliberal governments and transnational corporations, whether shock-like or reformist. Furtherfield creates here a place of counter-movement. The practice of permaculture, for example, is no less relevant here than the insight into global value-labour chains and areas of use of drones, the cultivation of corresponding peer-to-peer practices, and the self-understanding of peers beyond discipline or field of activity. For Furtherfield, digital commons help to hack social reality, while the regularity of the commons (à la Elinor Ostrom) can also help to protect open access through reciprocity from being commercially enclosed. Uncompensated cultural practices can thus be made usable again, and digital practices do not disappear somewhere in cyberspace, but link as relevant empirical values back to social practices and the possibility of resistance against hegemonic exploitation systems. The site and the platform Furtherfield succeeds through stability and resonance in outgrowing the utopian precondition and in manifesting itself as embodied or within the assemblies of physical bodies.

1 Vgl. Nico Dockx/Pascal Gielen (Hg.), Commonism. A New Aesthetics of the Real. Amsterdam 2018.
2 Vgl. Simon Sutterlütti/Stefan Meretz, Kapitalismus aufheben. Eine Einladung, über Utopie und Transformation neu nachzudenken. Hamburg 2018.
3 Vgl. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro/Deborah Danowski, In welcher Welt leben? Ein Versuch über die Angst vor dem Ende. Berlin 2019.