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,

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)

After the exhibition, the books have been donated to MIZ, the library of Zurich University of the Arts, where they have been cataloged, indexed, and are now available for loan.

Check out the catalog, and find 56 books and publications around digital culture, the arts and the commons.

Many thanks to the staff of MIZ, especially Felix Falkner, Rolf Wolfensberger and Maya Penasa Oehninger, for providing a permanent home to the “Creating Commons” version of the “Temporary Library”!

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).

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.