User:Tommi/SI29

This is a WIP page

Keywords

Critical concepts related to the work of this special issue I added to the Grapevine:

• Accelerationism
• Cancel
• Capillary
• Elitist
• Interoperability
• Perma-Hybridity

How did I learn what I know?

The topic of Special Issue 29 unlocked a game-changing awareness on my past, present, and future pedagogical path. I could never answer this question:

How do I know what I know?

Nobody ever canonically taught me any of the technical skills that I know, and I seldom had technically-oriented classes in my academic path. Still, I never considered myself “self-taught”, both for practical reasons (how could someone actually teach themselves something?) and for ideological ones (I refuse the individualistic and isolated narrative of learning things alone). At the same time, I am extremely chaotic and I have never studied or learned from books consistently. Hence, the question remains: where did my knowledge (especially technical) come from?

The truth is that I absorbed and processed information through gossip, that is through informal, non-hierarchical, unstructured and possibly incorrect sources.

You would not (and should not) fully trust the authenticity of a gossipy information source. When in a technological context in particular, gossip as a pedagogical tool is key, because its intrinsically apocryphal nature forces the receiver to question, re-interpret, and test the information by experimenting with it. There is only one way to test if sowtware works: to test it. Working technical solutions could be made more efficient, performant, or generally improved, but this is not the role of gossip pedagogy, as it enters the domain of productiveness/performativeness, where the value of de-constructing societal concepts is jeopardised.

• +++TTODO: Vernacular learning as the vernacular Web

Our Digital Home

This is a workshop by Youjung, Tommi and Barbs following the practices and research done during Special Issue 29. When talking about privacy and social media, we are often led to question our digital identity. Nevertheless, all identities inhabit a home, like we do ourselves. What are our digital homes? How are they and who controls them?

This workshop will be a collective exploration of where our data, our work, and our memories live. Together, we will unmask the marketing depiction of the cloud as something remote and intangible, and we will concretely see that what we call “the Internet” is just a huge amount of more or less big computers all over the world.

Using a local device, we will replicate a little cloud, and play with it by uploading pictures and show that they can be accessed locally or via the Internet. Possibly, if time allows it, we will print the webpage we made and make a little zine about it.

Our digital home is a bit like our own home, we are opening the door to invite people in and to communicate with the world, while when it’s closed we want it to be our safe place. Same thing with ports in a connection.