Transmediale 2015 "CAPTURE ALL"

Description

Commoning the Networks: Feminist Methodologies (CN:FM Network)

In trasmediale 2015 – CAPTURE ALL, the Berlin-based international festival on new connections between art, culture and technology, we led collaborative activities to investigate how debates about distributed networks intersect with those on the concept of the ‘commons’. By commons, we mean knowledge resources that are collectively created, owned or shared between the members of the network, and are available to third parties. Commons, therefore, are there to be used and reused, rather than to be exchanged as a commodity. So, our research question is whether it is possible to undertake a process of ‘commoning the networks’ to co-create and share knowledge. How could this be implemented in practical terms? We used a feminist approach grounded on the notions of care, affect, nomadic, fluid, reflective, playful and non-profit to explore and debate the above question. We brought together scholars, practitioners and artists who are members of cyberfeminist collectives such as Genderchangers and Constant Association for Art and Media to develop a feminist methodology that facilitates movement, processing and exchange of ideas and practices in multiple directions amongst and across diverse networks, within an ethos that engages with creativity as a commons. We organised: a) a panel discussion on “Commoning the Networks” with guest participants from the cyberfeminist collectives mentioned above together with artists and scholars participating in transmediale 2015 – CAPTURE ALL and b) a workshop on “Developing and Maintaining a Feminist Server” that was based on the outcomes of the panel discussion. Our events attracted a large number of attendees during the day and we were interviewed by a German and Swedish radio on our concept of 'feminist methodologies'.

Period	31 Jan 2015
Event type	Conference
Location	Berlin, GermanyShow on map