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,

11 October 2019
panke.gallery Berlin

This talk examines several feminist concepts that are relevant for envisioning the (digital) commons. What they share is an understanding of knowledge as that which occurs by sustaining relational webs and ongoing relays, rather than as the endpoint of linear progressions.

Isabel discusses firstly Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), in which she urges that the first piece of technology was not a weapon but a bag for carrying seeds, asserting that the function of technology is not a resolution but a continuing process. Donna Haraway’s concept of “string figures” builds further on Le Guin by proposing how distributed forms of access to and dissemination of knowledge can give rise to collective agency, while Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology contributes to envisioning the commons as something that necessarily involves a constant transformation of knowledge – regarding both the objects of inquiry and the apparatus (resources, discourses) through which they are viewed. This is relevant for addressing how the commons can produce situated knowledges (Haraway) and understanding how its collective nature only seemingly suggests that it conflicts with the partial positionings of individuals within a collective.  

Isabel de Sena is a curator, author, and lecturer based in Berlin. She is working on the Philosophy and Aesthetics of Science and has published internationally. She has worked as a curator for institutions like Martin-Gropius Bau here in Berlin and others abroad. She is currently teaching at NODE Center for Curatorial Studies in Berlin and as a guest lecturer at CalArts in California.

 

27 September 2019
panke.gallery Berlin

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.

 

This talk examines several feminist concepts that are relevant for envisioning the (digital) commons. What they share is an understanding of knowledge as that which occurs by sustaining relational webs and ongoing relays, rather than as the endpoint of linear progressions.

I discuss firstly Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), in which she urges that the first piece of technology was not a weapon but a bag for carrying seeds, asserting that the function of technology is not resolution but continuing process. Donna Haraway’s concept of “string figures” builds further on Le Guin by proposing how distributed forms of access to and dissemination of knowledge can give rise to collective agency, while Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology contributes to envisioning the commons as something that necessarily involves a constant transformation of knowledge – regarding both the objects of inquiry and the apparatus (resources, discourses) through which they are viewed. This is relevant for addressing how the commons can produce situated knowledges (Haraway) and understanding how its collective nature only seemingly suggests that it conflicts with the partial positionings of individuals within a collective.  

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 paratexutal 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 in conversation with Cornelia Lund followed by Pirate Cinema screening.

20:00 Screening Pirate Cinema

Since its inception in 2004, Pirate Cinema has proposed an ongoing series of works, materials and practices that defy the proprietary logic of cinema. For this event, we have collected a number of short outtakes that demonstrate the potential of screening entire archives instead of films, let us inspect the aesthetics of digital deconstruction and probe the narrative promises of recombinatory cinema.