User:Eleanorg/2.1/gradProposal1

Tentative Title

dis/consent?

General Introduction

"If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others[?]" (Butler 2004, p.21).

I am interested in posing a challenge to the idea of autonomous individual authorship, by looking at how people can act as transmitters or hosts for the ideas of others.

This project is informed by the feminist proposal of 'consent' as a positive alternative to a culture based on coercion (i.e. one subject overruling another). I wish to contribute to this movement by problematizing its implicit assumption of an autonomous consenting subject. I will do this by experimenting with how people react when attempting to transmit or host others' ideas (i.e. one subject bleeding into another). In these experiments I will be searching for the point at which the desire to act in concert conflicts with the desire to assert our individual values. The aim is to highlight the difficulty of defining the outline of an distinct subject, in order to reconsider what 'consent' might mean.

Relation to previous practice

Taking the role of facilitator has long been a theme in my work. Often I design situations which invite people to encounter one another and exchange ideas (for example Play!Fight!, 2010). The question of how to curate the resulting content was always a dilemma in this approach, with me having the 'final say' seeming to contradict the ethics/aesthetics of my dialogue-based practice.

With Open Sauce I began experimenting with handing over curation to the projects' participants. In fact, observing the way in which they edited each other's work was my primary source of interest in this collaborative writing project. A developing interest here was in the power of the editor/curator either to promote or to erase the words of others. I was fascinated by observing how this power is exercised. My interest in the conflicting desires to echo and to erase others' views was continued in The Dissolute Image, which confronted participants more directly with the question of whether they would enable the distribution of other people's (possibly objectionable) content. Here, the vulnerability of the artefact in question is highlighted (an image divided into individual pixels), and it presents itself as a request for adoption - as opposed to the artefact of Open Sauce, a wiki text, which by its nature invites erasure/re-writing.

Relation to a larger context

• feminist movement for consent
• consensus-based activism
• filter bubble/user curation
• 2.0 - politics of hosting user-generated content
• net neutrality/ ISPs held accountable for infringement

Practical steps

My project aims to create discussion between people, and discussion is a large part of my research process. I will begin by creating small-scale 'prototypes' inviting participation or dialogue, in which a collaborative process is tested on volunteers who then give feedback about the feelings and thoughts it provoked in them. These prototypes will test the possibilities/outcomes of both social systems (rules, agreements etc used to enable the process) and technical tools (e.g. different techniques for embedding, hosting & transmitting content).

At the same time as developing these processes I will begin to situate my project socially in a specific context, so that participants in the final project have a real investment in the content being circulated. This will involve setting up interviews and meetings with people involved in the fields mentioned above, finding out what issues are currently of most concern and where points of intervention in discourses surrounding 'consent' could be made.

References

A list of references (Remember that dictionaries, encyclopedias and wikipedia are not references to be listed. These are starting points which should lead to more substantial texts and practices.) As with your previous essays, the references need to be formatted according to the Harvard method.) See: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/A_Guide_to_Essay_Writing#The_Harvard_System_of_referencing

Feel free to include any visual material to substantiate, illustrate or elucidate your proposal. For example use images to reference your work or that of others.