Commoning the Networks: Feminist Methodologies

In trasmediale 2015 – CAPTURE ALL, the Berlin-based international festival on new connections between art, culture and technology, we will lead 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 will use 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 will bring 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 will organise: 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 will be based on the outcomes of the panel discussion.

This project (i.e. organisation of CN:FM events in Transmediale 2015) have been funded by the ECA RKEO grant.

We developed and organised: 1) a workgroup discussion on feminist methodologies to technology and distributed networks; 2) a hands-on workshop focused a) on the notions of the feminist server leading to observations about the nature of a network focusing on feminist approaches to technology and b) the development of an offline network of individuals, groups and collectives who will initiate further theoretical on feminist methodologies to technology and practical work on the feminist server; and, 3) a presentation of the outcomes of the two previous sessions, including a ‘launch’ of a network dealing with the above issues.