Hi Marc, hi everyone, I just subscribed here :-)
> So, my other take is, are we by moving into the blockchain > technology merely 'setting up/adding' more elitism on top of other > froms of elitism, and deluding ourselves by thinking that we are > opening things up for better? Thank you for adressing all of this here. I stumbled upon the DAOWO conference (im so happy that this exists! Will be on the next events for sure) :-) - since then I am in the middle of trying to figure out how blockchain data structures can play a role for me (and us). And as everytime I find myself asking the question of "where should we begin" with the realisation that the first question to take is definitely not one about technology or blockchain, but rather how we want to live and work as artists and humans together in a loving and critical way - and how technology might help us in this or might be better avoided. > It is not only the physical, cultural, political, proprietorial and > technical, enclosures we need to change, but also enclosures of the > mind. Can the blockchain help us do that? As I am writing this we are in the middle of planning the next iteration of a festival I am working on with friends in Berlin (working title "LIEBE 3000"). We decided to take a year for research to do this project in 2019. (I guess this is not the place to only talk about "our projects", but it feels hard for me to separate this from all of these questions since I am having a hard time thinking about technology without including real cases of implementation.) Since a few years we experiment with platforms to organize artists, philosophers, composers and musicians in decentralized and technologically-driven ways. All resources (like instruments, gear but also skills) are shared, every possible gps position in the city can be used as a place to create something, organize events or meet. In this way a whole community builds and collaborates and experiments without any curatorial instance - but through an open source software / framework which we develop with the artists together (you can read / see more about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRYVH7fGa68 or here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux2R9jwEIgw or here on the actual platform: http://www.hoffnung3000.de). The projects usally are unfunded or supported by some cultural state fund. For us projects like our last festival HOFFNUNG 3000 became more than just a fun way to organize a festival but also a very basic question of finding alternative ways to live and work together. In some conversations with participants we have right now, people point out that HOFFNUNG 3000 meant a "hardcore collaboration" for them, I am still thinking about that word. A "hardcore collaboration" could be something where we have to step out of certain known and repetitive modes, procedures of building closed systems which confirm themselves and their rulesets. By entering "unknown" territory through meeting "strangers" and working on projects which are maybe more something like a collective meta (art) product like the festival itself, we might find ourselves actually learning something new and challenging us. This year we experimented with anonymization of artists through animal avatars, it caused a beautiful effect of people collaborating "randomly" each other based on their needs, curiosity and interests rather than age, gender and success. I was recently talking with a friend. He mentioned this book by Donna Haraway "Staying with the trouble". Here is a short description of her book: "The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures." HOFFNUNG 3000 became a place for me where "everything" was important. For example when the usual gender pattern occurred (guys taking the stage), it wasn't a thing a meta problem because a curator decided upon the programming, but it felt like everyone was responsible for this and had to take a stand im some regard (I dont want to say that this is not the case in more "traditional" festival settings, but still it feels easier in these cases to blame the management than yourself). For the next festival I like to think of a 1-2 month "camp", a building which we rent in Berlin with x artists living inside. The building should be placed in a vibrant part of town (as we also did this year), all actions and events should be open for the public and take place all over the city (and the world, last time we had activities from London, Tokio or Sardinia). These points might be interesting: * What kind of technological structure do we need to organize a group of around 50 - 100 people over 1-2 months? Our solutions so far are already very "effective" (https://github.com/adzialocha/hoffnung3000. Our actions in last year were decentralized and self-organized but the platform we built is rather central (which I also find interesting, it plays a lot with the whole politics of platforms). How could we use a much more "atomic" structure to use much more flexible systems of organization. Could a blockchain structure play a role here? * Would it make sense to have an independed network during this festival which lives from its peers (An IPFS-like peer to peer system among the participants and visitors)? Every instance on this network could also function as contracting units, for example holding "contracts" in form of resources one wants to give to the community or holding current "usages" of these, or nodes could serve static content or serve their computational power to run applications (like dapps in ethereum but without all the money) for artistic applications or "collaborative tools" (like a random meeting feature we had this year) * We love hacking and we want systems to be hackable. There is only a few good hackers around us, so still this whole philosophy of being open might stop right there were things get to complicated. We would need open and frequent workshops (also for the public) to get involved into the code, "experts" could function as collaborators who implement ideas by others when the borders seem to high (I am thinking about something like Beuys "8000 Eichen" artwork in Kassel. "Computerverwaldung statt Computerverwaltung" :-) a "ministry / office for hacking" should exist in our little group, enabling people to work together on code - with or without knowledge of it to hack the frameworks which act for us and with us). I find it important to think about a structure which is possible to manipulate on a very basic level * All of these activities are based around friendship, openness and love (all the things we should always think of first :-) ) the public we involved this year the most were pedestrians. We had curious people coming in and staying or yelling at us. Also the good beer drew people inside into our nerd-hub, letting them stay to have hour-long conversations One participant of this year written this recently, which I find very beautiful and inspiring: "The future should be Agar Agar 3000 [this was an performance which happend on this festival]. More campfires and boiling pots to sit around, more undefined spaces, shared activities from which we can take great risks. Definite experimentation with indefinite results. Activity and reflection." (Read the whole thing on this wonderful platform: http://rhizomatic-web-zine.herokuapp.com/#publication/5a020a4789dc210012a65f2e) Sorry for bombing you with all of this, it is hard to be concrete without writing to much about the actual contexts as you can imagine :-) you can read how I am thinking out loud - and not all of is is thought through, but I hope I find some resonance in this group here and maybe this might lead to some great ideas :-) Andreas -- www.andreasdzialocha.com _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
