Calendars:Networked Media Calendar/Networked Media Calendar/19-03-2013 -Event 3

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Joint 1&2: 14:00 De(centralized) practice: An afternoon of short presentations and discussion with Diana McCarthy, Reni Hofmueller, Seda Guerses and Femke Snelting with lunch together starting ±12:45


Diana, Reni, Femke and Seda are part of communities that envision new ways of collaboration or practice using networks. Part of these pursuits entails building alternative tools and reconfiguring networks using open and decentralized solutions, and nurturing a sharp culture of critique of centralized or proprietary services.

In this line of practice, dichotomous thinking may prevail. We may at times even use it to fuel our political/creative/alternative projects e.g., free vs. proprietary in the 90s, and centralized vs. distributed in the age of social media.

Yet, these dichotomies may become passé and even turn unproductive. How can we venture into undoing these dichotomies in order to take a critical look at our work, rethink and re-present its remarkable history, and identify the potentials of our "alternative networks" beyond these dichotomies?

This afternoon is jointly organised with the Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussels (The Networked Social http://www.networkedsocial.constantvzw.org/ ) and Institute of Networkcultures (Unlike Us http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/ )

with:

Diana McCarty

diana is a founding member of the radia.fm network of cultural radios, a network of radio stations that support citizen media. they made a content exchange platform between the radio stations, networking their audiences/makers. she can contribute to the question of what makes an "alternative" social network and how you can use existing (social/digital/analog media) to do it.

Reni Hoffmueller

Reni is an artist, she worked on mur.at an project with started with the then novel goal of providing its user base (mostly artists) with free web services. that was the alternative platform of 20 years ago, before "free" services took over. nevertheless, mur.at exists. what does it mean for your vision to get hi-jacked? and, how do you sustain your alternative social networks? are questions that she can talk about extremely well.

Seda Guerses

is a researcher working in the group COSIC/ESAT at the Department of Electrical Engineering in K. U. Leuven, Belgium. She is interested in the topics of privacy technologies, participatory design, feminist critique of computer science, and online social networks. Seda is particularly excited about the topic of anonymity in technical as well as cultural contexts, the spectrum being anywhere between anonymous communications and anonymous folk songs. Beyond her academic work, she also had the pleasure of collaborating with artistic initiatives including Constant vzw, Bootlab, De-center, ESC in Brussels, Graz and Berlin. http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/~sguerses

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting is an artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of the Brussels based association for arts and media, Constant. Femke co-initiated the design- and research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Currently she coordinates the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a partnership of four European medialabs to investigate interrelations between tools and practice. http://snelting.domainepublic.net/


  • centralized vs. decentralized systems (is this even the dichotomy we want to discuss?): how would you tell the story of your community and its tools and networks? how does your practice relate to the centralized services, controlled operating systems and platforms, and apps that have become part and parcel of the internet? would you agree with claims that decentralized/alternative networks are more empowering, more conducive to action, participation, critical creativity and interesting explorations? or vice versa: that centralized systems are endangering them. or what does it take to make an alternative practice possible in a networked world?
  • the confrontation: what have we (at times painstakingly) learned from the networked social that has been imposed upon us and our "friends" over the last decade? where are we having troubles with centralized corporate networks (e.g., what happens when centralized services are all "free" and "access for all" becomes their motto)? where do they (un)expectedly change the shapes of our communities (e.g., where goes faces)? where do we find interesting openings that help us re-configure our practices?are these different networks in opposition or simply compliment each other? what are the ways in which our practice, our questions and desires, our values and our (networked) tools co-evolve?
  • technics: in what ways does the changing infrastructure, e.g., the virtual machine and the clouds it has spurred, the apps and api-mania, the socialization of every word spoken in webs only visible to the companies that run these services, affected your communities' practices or even the ability to keep your alternative networks alive? what are some turns of technology that are becoming game changers, e.g., what can we hope for form html5?
  • resistance: what have we achieved over the years with our communities and their technically mediated practice, that just does not gizz with the venture capitalist social media?

what are some of the potentials of community practice that we are strengthening with centralized/alternative networks? how do we shed a critical light on contested terms like privacy, intellectual property, freedom of speech, creativity, production, labor through our practices in our diy/alternative/distributed networks?

  • materiality: how do you sustain alternative networks when standards change, communities evolve, political agendas turn, and money recedes?
  • conflating values and design: are there values that are assumed in diy/free software/free content/alternative network spaces, that may be need to be put under greater scrutiny? are there moments in which we conflate the conditions of the practice with the values we want to have (e.g., if we are free/diy/alternative, then we are open/we are avant guard/we are under attack/ we are not exploited/we are truly creative/productive in a non-capitalist sense of the word/we are critical and aware of gender, race, class, and those basics that keep on popping up/ we are transparent/ we are political/ we are many...). is anybody really making these claims? where are they helpful for community practice, where not so? where do we want to be?
  • audience: who are your comrades in practices? who are your enemies? are you hanging local? is there a value to going more than local? what are ways of coming together which is not about "scaling" or "network effects" that inform our alternative networks?
  • dreams: what are some interesting questions we can raise or values and practices we may want to have in our "alternative networks"? what is the practice that you have always imagined and failed, or feared, or made, or shaped, what does its tools look like? what are some things to take from the past to the future of our networks, what are some things to leave behind?


pp : http://piratepad.net/prJ1yP77GS

audio recording: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/decentre/decentrelized_practice1.mp3 http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/decentre/decentrelized_practice2.mp3

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