User:)biyibiyibiyi(/RW&RM 04/session2

session 2 homework

theme thesis

theme here:

Format chosen: An analytical essay exploring related artistic, theoretical, historical and critical issues and practices that inform your practice, without necessarily referring to your work directly.

annotated bibliography with 5 key texts(synopsis)

• The Precarious Work and Postfeminist Politics of Handmaking (in) Detroit

synopsis: The article examines craft culture in the post-industrialized Detroit. It provided a critical perspective on DIY culture, pointing out the implicit inequality of its modus operandi. There is a difference between DIY for pleasure and DIY out of necessity. And calling attention to history of Detroit's history of industrialization and its dissolution, labor struggles, economic marginalization, as a noteworthy context against a homogeneity of exploiting Detroit as a blank slate to be inscribed, as DIY culture indicates.

• Bauwens,M.,Kostakis,V.andPazaitis,A.2019.PeertoPeer:TheCommonsManifesto. Pp. 33–45. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/ book33.c. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0

synopsis: The article is extracted from an anthology essays written about Peer to Peer production in the space that's referred to as the commons. It maps four quadrants of categories to start with, varying on two scales of global - local, for profit - for commons, the quadrants are models of global, for profit model, global, for commons model, local, for profit model, and local, for commons modal.

While discussing these models of operation, the authors critically examine the notion of share economy in context of cognitive capitalism. In the organization and realistic operation of sites such as AirBnB, there is not substantial production of real community or the commons, but individuals competing for their own livelihood.

The local-profit model is illustrated by BitCoin. Many aspect of autonomy and large scale participation are celebrated and encouraged by p2p infrastructures, though individual profit-maximization is still the primary motive.

In article continued to examine the quadrants at twofold perspective. For example IBM investment on open source developments as exploitative of common's work but provided paid work and sustainable outputs.

What most valuable for me to read this article is it articulated the modus operandi of centralized/decentralized infrastructures, along with their ideological implications in terms of economy, social relationships, labor, and value creation.

• Open Sourcery: When Hacker Culture Informs the Design Studio

synopsis: The article provided the theoretical context of why a hacking course was undertaken in a design curriculum. It considered maker culture as counter activism towards widespread and normalized adaptation of commercial design tools, Photoshop and Maya.

During the hacking course, students reversed engineered electronics harvested from Point Douglas, considered as the third world pocket of Winnipeg. By introducing a way of hacking to the curriculum, a modus operandi of simple and distributive approach to invention was introduced and practiced.

• Rosenzweig, R. (1998). Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet. The American Historical Review, 103(5), 1530-1552. doi:10.2307/2649970

synopsis: A very rich survey spanning across social cultural, biographical, bureaucratic, and ideological histories of the Internet. Development of network communication between computers, then installed with different systems and different languages therefore uncommunicative to each other, (later known as APRANet) as a military need to enable fast speed communication after possibility of impending nuclear war. The directives of the research's development are criticized, for example by Paul Edwards, a student of Donna Haraway, as a closed world communication that dispatches commands from central authority.

The article also included antithesis to APRANet, which are example of usenet, born out of students in 60, 70s counter cultural movement exasperated by the walled-up APRANet. Computer Lib, Homebrew Computer Club were also cited as examples of antithesis to centralized, proprietized hardware and software. Such as IBM (which developed from military contracts).

Also what was interesting was provenance of newsletter groups, mailing lists as medium of early network communication and means to foster sense of community and knowledge commons.

• Hacking with Chinese Characteristics: The Promises of the Maker Movement against China's Manufacturing Culture

synopsis: an overview of maker movement in China from the very first hacker spaces. The writer took noticed of the unique cultural fabrics that exist in Chinese context of maker culture. It also provided brief history of how maker culture originated in Silicon Valley. Origination of maker culture in the U.S. was instilled by media such as the Wired Magazine, as ways to enabling of new forms of citizen science and democratizing technology production. It drew critical comparisons between the Chinese context and elite reuse culture; such as, the understanding of dealing e-waste in mundane small shops in China as making out of necessity and intuitive acts, as compared to reuse promoted as an compensation towards consumerism.

The article also discussed topics of authorship and IP(intellectual property) in context of Chinese manufacturing. It cited "Gongkai", a principle that refer to open sharing principle in Chinese manufacturing and "Gongban", a prototype board that's shared across various components in manufacturing business to decrease cost. This is cited as example that differs to the quintessential Western open source culture.

The examination of Chinese maker movement offered by author's field work challenges western authority and authenticity claims of what counts as innovation, creativity, and design; challenges a global maker movement that subsumes local practices in the visions and historical references to American digital culture.

mini prototype

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