User:Erica/Final presentation

   WARNING!!! WORK IN PROGRESS (❍ᴥ❍ʋ)

XPUB1

SPECIAL ISSUES

Through the Special Issues I enjoyed the development and exploration of a heterogeneous practice, but with some recurring patterns: collective ways of documenting, mapping, researching on a local/situated level through ad hoc tools or manipulation of existing technologies;

Questions around how to use this as emancipatory material to shape and give value to a collective knowledge and living.

Thinking with and through (digital) tools with others: I really enjoy thinking through the tools and I can recognize that this is often the way my voice contributes to the bigger group. I often find myself supporting other people's ideas by building upon their ideas and thinking together which kind of interfaces and infrastructures would facilitate or amplify specific questions, suggesting a different approach or reading of things.

SI#16: Learning how to walk while catwalking

• Special Issue page
• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Grgr_xpub1#And_I_wish_you_that_your_question_has_been_answered

SI#17: This box found you for a reason

https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Grgr_xpub1#What_is_a_loot_box??

SI#18: Radio Implicancies. Methods to practice interdependencies

Approaches and methods:

• relating to the larger context/ecosystem in which these tools are situated (yet to be named with mitsa)
• smuggling techniques from one domain to another (patterns of crunchiness with chae)
• editing through interfaces (emergent opera with gersande and kamo)
• decontextualizing and re-enacting situations through hybrid formats (parliament with mitsa and miri)
• writing, reading and learning with others (nested narratives with jian collective writing)
• facilitating collective research (sharing methods for diffractive reading with kim and kamo)

DEVELOPMENT OF RWM & PROTOTYPING

Prototyping, reading, writing, research

• Reading and writing habits developed in strict parallel with annotation, small coding experiment, and the playfulness of different formats. from the collective annotation in the pad to the intervention in the text with the replace function [Tiger Tsun] (which then become fundamental to the first special issue contribution) to the scripting of workshops, to more informal collective moments were spontaneous reading groups have formed (f.e. the Breakfast Club)

• Prototyping from playful creation of tools to use together and to code together (the soup generator, karaoke republishing, etc.) to a sharper construction of critical and situated making of tools that allow reflection and bring to the front hidden aspects and connections both digitally and physically (api that can be seen in the front end as publishing platform, the scripted workshops in SI18 with Kim and Kamo, and Amsterdam with Chae; public moments )

• interest in creating playful interfaces that intervene in the meaning of content through their function, aesthetics (the parliament)

• in the end I tried to include coding in prototyping but it was super difficult to be consistent with the research I was doing. Later in the second year, code-related prototyping popped up here and there but more as isolated or unrelated small exercises like:
  • learning how to work with databases and creating a personal library-blocknote
  • using pagedjs
  • ssh
  • learning ho to set up an automatic reload from nginx for flask apps
  • debian install party
  • wiki install
  • spreadsheet sequencer

THESIS AND GRADUATION PROJECT

HACKING MAINTENANCE WITH CARE

Reflections on the self-administered survival of digital solidarity networks

Within a context of generalized precarity and massive raise of the costs of life, maintenance has become an extremely delicate and contradicting issue for self-organized cultural initiatives. Special attention is dedicated here to those collectives, co-operatives, small institutions and organizations that rely on FLOSS (Free Open Source) software, self-hosted community infrastructure, for their artistic, cultural and activist practice. Their socio-technical infrastructure might inadvertently replicate the a condition of crisis and precarity whenever it turns out to be highly demanding and even unsustainable, in terms of energy costs, voluntary and affective labour, spare time consumption, and burnouts.

the process

• • boiler inspection---> personal digestion of the discussion ---> writing of reflections--->thesis + edit of the inspection form (draw a map of the process)
  • thesis as part of the process, trying to analyze and categorize the tropes and contradictions emerging from the discussion

Breaking expectations:

• From developing principles, to open questions as methodology: at the beginning I was planning to develop a system requirement specification as final project, as a way to formulate principles for sustainable collaborative practices in the cultural field and dealing with free software. But then I realized that that while there might be good practices they need to be reformulated according to the specificity of each collectivity: there's no one size fits all. I felt it was a more honest approach to stay with the format of open questions rather than crystallizing principles or guidelines. (connection to the bollenpandje public moment).

• Another challenge was for me to stay with a format that can potentially open up to discussion and also learn how to negotiate values, how to talk in public, and how to take care of the more social aspects of (X)publishing. And indeed I think my practice developed a lot in this direction as well: thinking with and through the tools, but also without hiding behind the technology.

BOILER INSPECTION

the evolution of the boiler inspection:

{show the folder with the evolution and inspected boilerszz}

• metaphors and playfulness, embracing the aesthetic of maintenance

• the form as a prop to trigger and facilitate a situated collective evaluation and discussion
  • situated because the form changes every time depending on both the discoveries of previous B.I. and the specific urgencies of each organization
  • collective because anyone who fills in the form becomes an inspector and makes annotations on the form itself

• evolution of the boiler inspection: small interviews-> drawing of the infrastructure -> collective inspection with form -> carbon paper form -> script for a talk -> workshop tool to make your own boiler inspection.

• As evaluation format: starting from the idea of stupidity of bureaucracy (from Graeber), and bureaucracy as interface for the enforcement of power -> The boiler inspection evolves around the idea of challenging bureaucratic stupidity and rigidity, becoming a tool to put into question again cristallized dynamics, relations and traditions in self-organization (ref to the tyranny of structurelessness by jo freeman)

• branching of possibility to document and present the gathered material

• current version of the inspection form and what is decided to be public and what not

GRAD SHOW

the final pubblication:
is a pubblication including the thesis, a commented inspection form, the instructions and the stickers to make a custom inspection form.

The installation at the graduation:
the plan is to print as many stickers as possible to stick all around. a small informational installation is set up on a moving trashbin

FUTURE

• • archive of gathered material
  • commons and collaborative practices
  • Boiler Inspection as workshop
  • XBUB3