User:Dave Young/Trimester5 Overview

Trimester 5 overview

This page is a quick overview of workshops I've facilitated over the course of the trimester, while working toward a final version of my graduation project.

Transmediale: Consent To Print

Eleanor Greenhalgh and I hosted a workshop on the topic of collaborative publishing as part of Transmediale's Post-Digital Print thread. I was interested in the social systems that are used to constrain collaborative creative processes, and in particular how they often fail to function. My first trimester had involved looking into critiques of cybernetic views of society - i.e. the reduction of the complexity of human behaviour to information modulated by feedback loops, and I had become interested in how this notion plays out when a group is a given the task of designing a particular tool.

An extract from my blog report on the festival can be found below:

One particularly interesting point raised by the workshop participants was how ‘silence’ fits into consensus systems. In many instances (including contemporary democracy), silence takes the form of abstinence, meaning that you forego your vote/opinion and cede power to the majority. But how can we render silence to be an active political stance, rather than passive disengagement? One participant gave the example of a telephone contract, where silence is seen as consent to extend the contract – if you don’t want your bill to continue, you must expressly state so as your contract is ending. A second participant spoke about how, during an election in her home country, many people abstained from the voting process due to a feeling of disillusionment with the political system. The result was that, while both primary parties were considered badly by the public, the worse of the two actually got into power. So, the question returns – how can a position of silence actively engage with a democratic system?

The full blog post can be accessed here.