Dave Young - Consent to Print Outline

group processes

• Who owns the computer? Technical convenience / social decision?
• What sources were suggested for the content? Who?
• How did the group editorialise the content?
• At which points were there disagreements?
• Ask about individual agreements to specific decisions.
• Are all members of the group satisfied with what has been produced?
• If they had to follow the brief individually, what would have been different?

notes for short talk on hierarchical systems

Hierarchy is a social system of assumed consent. In a traditional hierarchy (eg military), the assumption of consent travels upwards through the ranks.

__Army__
Marshall
   ^
Colonel
   ^
Major
   ^
Lieutenant
   ^
Sergeant
   ^
Corporal
   ^
Private

If consent can no longer be *assumed*, then the hierarchy breaks down.

decentralisation / power

• How can power be disguised/anonymised in a flat hierarchy?
• How can this be used as a tactic to retain control?

Discipline: obedience/consent through fear/paranoia of discipline Control: obedience/consent through the manipulation of the will of a person

milgram

• "Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose" - (Milgram, 1973: 1)
• "Hobbes stated further that an act so executed is in no sense the responsibility of the person who carries it out but only the authority that orders it" (ibid. 2)

Notes

• Amnesty protest | registration problems | pluto
• what kind of newspaper?
• workshop magazine suggestion
• Process: Collecting headlines, then do layout
• One point of control - suggestions filtered through claudia
• Frontpage - name - hashtag suggestion / planet news / times
• Time constraint

• pizza is lowest common denominator

consent

• ad agency, important to agree on something
• camel= horse by committee
• publishing - indy pub, networked publishing: dropbox, skype to share ideas. All contribute thoughts, edit them collaboratively
• Writer - indy publishing, hong kong
• artist, individual/collab practice - performance based, (non)hierarchical
• hku worker - organised roundtable, continue discussion on web-based platform - how to? Post-disciplinary environment topic of the roundtable. want participants to be negotiators to design web-based platform.
• Fine art / move away from individual practice, through publishing
• artist/educator - publications with students, non-homogenous groups, diverse topics present problems for monolithic publications - broken formats / diverse fields
• In India - bringing new media closer to wider public.

What is excluded from consent systems?

• Silence

       - the better you know people, the more discussion
       - less likely to disagree with strangers
       - passivity / indifference?

• Abstaining

           - People abstaining from a vote
           - unpopular party wins

• Assumed Consent

               - Phone contracts, automatic renewal
               - "if you really wanted it to stop, you'd cancel"
               - think about automatic/silent consent in terms of 

social/sexual/productive/political pressures

How to Visualise Editing Process

• visual content
• western signs encoded in consent systems - eg color: green = yes
• Star rating systems - gradient
• Font sizes
• Visibility
• Versions

         - how to account for silence
         - transparency / popularity

• GIT

    - history | process
    - forking
    - logging / comments

• WIKI

    - the feeling of participation is important 
    - wish to be part of a community / to have left an imprint of authorship
    - few contributing full, in-depth articles
    - many contrbuting minor revisions/edits

Feedback

Group 1

• how a magazine is written, how it changes over time
• make internal processes more visible
• print is most important
• allow for all participants to comment, make it visual
• icon: symbolises consent/dissent
• system for commenting on text

Group 2

• how is it possible to not make decisions in print?
• Intention - possibility for openness, articulate dissent
• Print is finished / digital is dynamic
• lots of personal experiences regarding the above points
• closed formats / publishing conventions (exhibition catalogues)
• make publication before an exhibition / split catalogue from the exhibition itself
• post-publishing dissent

Prototyping notes

• Content | Form | Consent System
• Cartographic system
• Involve indifference/lack of desire to comment(i.e. silence)
• How to avoid "content then layout" VS need for a workflow
• Delegating roles? lottery state | mars 500 programme | assembly line

end notes

• forking
• visual comments - what other types of design possibilities does the interface offer?
• collaborative / working together/ productive
• "product is beginning of an idea"