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30.10.15

testing the graphviz tool

19.10.15

The Darmstadt Delegation: back to the castle!

The Darmstadt Delegation* is meeting this time in Stuttgart to participate on the symposium »(Re-)Constructing Authorship« (22-24 Oct.) at the Schloss Solitude:

Modes of Production after the Computational Turn
>> Let's first get things done!

During particular historical junctures, characterised by crisis, deepening exploitation and popular revolt, hegemonic hierarchies are simultaneously challenged and reinvented, and in the process of their reconfiguration in due course subtly reproduced. During such 'sneaky moments', the shared authorship of collective action is split between those engaged in struggles of social justice and those struggling for just technologies.

The paradoxical consequences of this divide have been baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using 'free' technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, 'alternative tech practices', like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select few, some of which propose crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking, and refute the rest as naive or unsophisticated in their technical practices. Even when there is a great desire to bridge the gap, the way in which delegation of technological matters to the 'progressive techies' is organised, reconfirms hegemonic divisions of labor and can be as pertinent as political and philosophical differences. Conversely, if our tools inform our practices and our practices inform our tools, then we will have to reconfigure the divisions of labour between 'activists' and 'techies.

How can we re-tell narratives of social justice activism and struggling for just technologies in a way that they converge rather than divide? What stories of collective authorship can we produce in those 'sneaky moments'? The workshop is an occasion to discuss design artefacts, computational tools and language devices available in moments of crisis.

*The Darmstadt Delegation is an ongoing collaboration following from a workshop based on anecdotes that took place as part of the Thinking Together Symposium (http://www.osthang-project.org/projekte/thinking-together/?lang=en) in 2014 at the Osthang Architecture Summer School, Darmstadt, Germany. It is the assignment of the delegation to explore the techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist practice and tools. Currently active delegates are: Miriyam Aouragh (University of Westminister, UK), Seda Guerses (Princeton, US), Jara Rocha (GREDITS/Objetologías, Bau School of Design, ES) and Femke Snelting (Constant, BE).

15.3.15

Let's first get things done! at LibrePlanet 2015

The current distance between those who organize their activism to develop “technical infrastructures” and those who bring their struggles becomes especially evident in the pragmatic spirit of getting things done. "Radical" activists may turn to services provided by Fortune 500 companies, while alternative tech initiatives sustained by a select (visionary and male) few may remain insistent on crypto with 9-lives. Through a close study of digital self-defense campaign sites, we want to pause to explore other modes of collaboration.

The Darmstadt Delegation, 2015

(present delegates: Seda Gürses & Jara Rocha;

distant -but close- delegates: Femke Snelting, Miriyam Aouragh)

MIT Stata Center
Cambridge MA
Room 32-155
Saturday, march 21
16.15h (Session Block 5A)

(for those not present, it will all be streamed from here: https://libreplanet.org/2015)

29.9.14

The Darmstadt Delegation / DL14

The darmstadt delegation came together on the basis of a shared experience of troubling differences in the politics, values and practices of “activists" heavily using networked technology for their struggles, and of "techno-activists" who struggle to develop progressive and alternative technologies. We observe that, loyal to a utopia of a globally functioning interwebs, techno-activists usually organize around universal values: information must be “free”, secure, “privacy-preserving”, accessible, etc. In comparison, those who bring their political struggles to the interwebs may express political differences across a broader spectrum, situated in local and/or global contexts. However, pragmatic decisions due to time pressure and lack of resources often mean that these struggles may integrate themselves into proprietary and conservative technical infrastructures. As a consequence, during “sneaky moments of first getting things done", many organizational matters are delegated to "techies" or to technological platforms.

If we believe the mantra that our tools inform our practices and our practices inform our tools, we may want to radically reconfigure these divisions of labor between “activists” and “progressive techies". But how? Where do we start? What are ways to resist those sneaky moments in which we pragmatically submit ourselves to "specialization of work" that reproduce hegemonic divisions of gender, race, class and age, and that reinforce ideological differences between activists for social justice and activists for just technologies?

The darmstadt delegation follows in the steps of numerous initiatives which are working on crossing divides while developing technical alternatives for current day struggles. Most recently, we see ourselves in conversation with the numerous initiatives that have aligned around backbone409 [1], interference [2], transhackfeminist camp [3] and the internet ungovernance forum [4]. We are excited to have the opportunity to continue some of these conversations with you in the context of DL14 [5]. Due to unforeseen constraints, only Seda Gurses will be physically present at the conference. For those who would like to discuss more, I encourage you to get in touch with all of our delegates [0]