User:Artemis gryllaki/GradPrototyping/Overview
Systers Constellations
'Systers' originates from the combination of the words systems and sisters. Already in 1987, a mailing list called "Systers" was founded by Anita Borg to support women in computer science and related fields.
My project focuses on the practices of feminist hacker communities, that work towards reversing the phenomenon of social exclusions (gender-based among others), in technological circles, hackerspaces and the geekdom. Their work creates safe spaces for excluded individuals to gain agency with technological matters; redefines who counts as a hacker, and what counts as hacking; encourages collective knowledge production and Do-It-Together practices in inclusive and diverse environments; builds and maintains technical infrastructures that support feminist and activist work.
Together with Angeliki Diakrousi, Greek media artist and researcher, we got involved with two feminist hacker initiatives:
- /ETC: an annual international event, where feminists gather to critically study, use, discuss, share and improve everyday information technologies in the context of the free software and open hardware movements.
- SysterServer, a feminist server, run and maintained by women. It hosts online services for feminist projects and acts as a place to learn administration skills. After our participation in these projects, we decided to initiate a series of Feminist Hack meetings in Rotterdam.
Feminist Hack meetings are informal gatherings that include tech skill-sharing, sociopolitical discussions around technology and art practices. http://varia.zone/en/feminist-hack-meetings-jan.html. The meetings are hosted in Varia, a coworking space and centre that explores everyday technology. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the meetings have to switch to online; there is an urgency to explore how this can happen.
My role in this project is to support:
the organisation of various thematic gatherings;
the research/suggestion of tools to document these gatherings and find ways to publish them.
In my current project prototype, I suggest:
To set up a Wiki, where participants of the feminist hack meetings can collectively upload and edit documentation material such as images/texts/audio.
Curated documentation or the events, personal experiences, embarrassments, frustrations can be afterwards visualised in a website, in the form of a digital timeline.
