User:Eleanorg/2.1/gradProposal1

Tentative Title/z

dis/consent? porous publishing

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).

Online publishing has radically changed what it means to publish a cultural object, and what the nature of that object is. No longer singular and stable, networked documents are vulnerable to others with which they are linked. (For example: dynamic websites break when an API is changed; images embedded from other servers can disappear; news feeds fill personal sites with unpredictable external content.) This has brought with it an exciting uncertainty about the status of the singular, proprietorial author who creates and controls a discrete document.

I will be exploring the possibilities of networked publishing to create porous documents, responsive and vulnerable to the input of others, as an exercise in actively embracing the internet's challenge to the idea of autonomous authorship. Specifically I will be looking at how networked documents, and people, can act as transmitters or hosts for the ideas of others. I propose this as an exercise in setting aside the individual ego, in an attempt at a more communal sociality. This exercise is informed by my previous work arguing for a productive embrace of the crisis over authorship, and in opposition to those discourses attempting to resist it by shoring up traditional discourses of author as autonomous producer.

<describe roughly what project will be: publishing technique or exercise inviting participants input. Say how this carries on Radical X.>

Social context

I want to explore the ambivalent relationship between the discreet author, and the social body to which she is inevitably vulnerable. In order to do this, project participants must have a stake in the content being published: it must be specific to a social context, so as to avoid becoming a purely formalist exercise in mash-ups, or an iteration of versions in which no one has a particular investment. One setting in which the question of where individual authorship bleeds into collective expression is particularly prescient, is in grassroots political organizing. This is a context in which I have personal experience, having witnessed the difficulty of reaching consensus in order to act together - and, indeed, debates about to what extent consensus is necessary for effective action. Grassroots activism is at once about disseminating one's own message, and also about showing solidarity. This is a paradox which recurs in in activist circles, although the dilemmas it poses seem rarely to be acknowledged.

One exception to this rule is in feminist activism and theory: a field which is unusual in its self-reflexivity about the process of organizing itself. << not actually true; UK feminism reproducing power structures>>

<<how does dilemma of reaching consensus relate to feminist proposal of consent?>>

This project is informed by the feminist proposal of 'consent' as a positive alternative to a culture based on coercion. 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. 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

consent

• Consent to Sexual Relations

models of democracy

• Multitude
• Beside Onself
• Ding Politics

hosting & transmission

• Post digital print
• Marx on alienation

http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/A_Guide_to_Essay_Writing#The_Harvard_System_of_referencing

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andre's comments

• identity inseparable from community
• "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 editor role - to decide what to leave and what erase
• pre works share the act of removing, to unveil something constructed commonly
• will the prototypes develop into a larger scale project?
• seems a broad scope, but you don't seem to be lost or overwhelmed by its wideness.