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,

Sonntag, 20.10.2019, 22:05 bis 23:00 Uhr.

BAYERN 2, Zündfunk Generator.
Diese Sendung zum Nachhören unter: www.bayern2.de/zuendfunk
Als Podcast und in der Bayern 2 App verfügbar

Früher versprach das Internet, allen Menschen Zugang zum kollektiven Weltwissen zu verschaffen. Heute verdient Google Milliarden mit der Internetsuche – was nicht google-bar ist, existiert nicht – und mit YouTube als audiovisuellem Netzarchiv. Und die EU-Urheberrechtsreform droht, die Macht der Netzoligopole noch zu vergrößern. Wider diese fortschreitende digitale Privatisierung und Einhegung arbeiten Künstler und Aktivisten daran, Zugang zu kulturellen Gütern zu schaffen bzw. zu bewahren, indem sie Web-Archive und Netz-Plattformen betreiben: Beispielsweise das Kunst-Wiki Monoskop, die Online-Bibliothek Aaaaarg, das Archiv für Avantgarde UbuWeb oder die experimentelle Filmdatenbank 0xDB. Sie schaffen die technischen Infrastrukturen, bilden Communities und handeln gemeinsam die Nutzungsbedingungen aus. Autonom, kollaborativ und kostenlos stellen die Projekte kulturelles Gedächtnis her und bieten der Allgemeinheit einen Zugang: ein Netz von file sharing-Technologien und Schattenbibliotheken jenseits von Social Media-Plattformen und Kulturindustrie. An der Züricher Hochschule der Künste untersuchen der Kultur- und Medienwissenschaftler Felix Stalder und die Künstlerin und Netzforscherin Cornelia Sollfrank im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts “Creating Commons” die Web-Archive als ästhetische Commons-Praxis: Welche Aufgaben und Verantwortlichkeiten ergeben sich für Archive wie für Archiv-Remixer? Wie wird Archivarbeit im Spannungsfeld von Zugänglichkeit und Urheberrecht zur Gemeingut bildenden Praxis?

Künstlerische und aktivistische Strategien des Commonign gehen über den Unterhalt und die Zugänglichmachung von Ressourcen hianus. Fragen von autonomer Infrastruktur, alternativen Wissensformen und ein erweitertes Verständnis ästhetischer Praxis werden nicht nur diskursiv aufgeworfen, sondern auch experimentell umgesetzt.

Anhand von Beispielen aus ihrem aktuellen Forshcungsporjekt “Creating Commons” entwicklen Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank und Shusha Niederberger anhand von drei konkretene künstlerisch-aktivistischen Projekten aus dem Bereich der Digital Commons die zugrunde liegenden Fragestellungen und Strategien.

Mehr Infos unter www.creatingcommons.zhdk.ch

Find the File, Festival, 21-24 March 2019
Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt

The research project Creating Commons (Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, Shusha Niederberger), based at the Zurich University of the Arts, is invited to present first results of its research as part of the festival Find the File. The festival is a discursive music festival that explores questions about collecting and archiving music, in discussions, concerts, and installations. It is about what new possibilities and challenges have arisen for archives with the digital, and how new forms of knowledge can develop through the collecting activities of ‘amateurs’. Last but not least, questions of accessibility will also be addressed.

Creating Commons is involved with two contributions:

1) Artistic Shadow Libraries, Video installation,
Creating Commons,
For the entire duration of the festivals in the foyer of the HKW

The interview montages show artists who create web archives as aesthetic commons practices: the art wiki monoskop, the no-budget avant-garde archive UbuWeb, the online libraries aaaaarg and memoryoftheworld.org, and 0xdb.org, a database of 15,000 films. Through technical infrastructures, communities and mutual negotiation of terms of use, these ‘shadow libraries’ provide access to cultural goods – autonomous, collaborative, free. In times of progressing enclosures, they thus make an undogmatic and precarious contribution to wide accessibility and collaborative production of cultural memory.

2) Enter and Revive: Conditions for Accessibility and Reuse,
Discussion Sunday, 24 March 2019, 17:00
Guests: Diane Thram (musik anthropologist, Rhodes University), Marisella Ouma (Intellectual Property Consultant), Cornelia Sollfrank (artist and researcher), Gregory Markus (RE:VIVE, The Netherland Institute for Sound and Vision) Moderation: Florian Sievers

Archives and collections are increasingly making an effort to not only document the past but also to make their stock of material available for people to revive and experience, for the purposes of artistic- and knowledge creation. However, granting access to archival material implicates many legally and historically sensitive issues: What sort of tasks, what responsibilities do archives as well as archive-remixers have regarding provenance research, participation and accessibility? What practical examples are there for how to release the tension between reactivation and original context, reuse and author rights? What role does the immaterial character of music and sound play here? In what way can archival work become a commons-building exercise?

LINKS:
Creating Commons https://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch
Find the File Programm: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2019/find_the_file/find_the_file_start.php
Installation Artistic Shadow Libraries: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_149235.php