Co-curation and hosting of the lecture part in Phase 2 of the exhibition Digital Commoning Practices, by Station of Commons that took place at the artist-run gallery Oksasenkatu 11, in Helsinki, March 6-28 2021, during lockdown. See exhibition credits and lecture programme

Lecture programme

Exhibition outline

The exhibition “Digital Commoning Practices” departs from Station of Commons; a practice of re-appropriation of technology as Commons within public space, which stands for radical alternative strategies to the neo-liberal system in terms of digital means of production, communication and distribution. “Digital Commoning Practices” starts with a question: How to think of a collaborative process embedded in technology that can find form into new knowledge and know-hows within, against and beyond capitalist modes of production?

“Digital commoning practices” intends to both elaborate a critical discourse on the economization process, and to reflect on digital tools development to resist, and rebel, against privatization of technological means. Activist and architect Stavros Stavrides insists that commoning practices must welcome a multitude of knowledges, discourses, practices and know-hows for the emergence of commoning spaces. The dynamic at work operates as a collective and transformative effort always in the making. The exhibition invites artists, activists, urbanists, publishers, designers, programmers, feminists and educators to open, share their work in an Open Source way of doing and thinking.

An exhibition as timelime

The exhibition process produces a month long timelime to articulate different temporalities; live audio streams, lectures, discussion and workshops.This format imagines an exhbition as an intersection of eventfull temporalities more than a division of space in the traditional white cube practice. “Digital Commoning Practices” timeline develops over three phases.

The exhibition opens with the celebration of the first anniversary of the Open Source audio stream. Together with Helsinki based N10 collective, Station of Commons will broadcast 5 sound artists whose work has developed in absence of concert situation.

The second phase aggregates a network of activists, theorists and artists involved in physical and technological spaces. This moment intends to intersect their knowledges and practices to examine and think together commoning practices in the current hybrid spaces. This phase interrogates how digital commoning practices can come to terms with old gender stereotype and how can all technology pirates work together.

The third phase entittled “Commoning Education/Educating the Commons” discusses how can digital practices and radical education can learn from each other. Learning together from the practices of the participants we will deploy an edifice to initiate an operative digital commoning practice…

Exhibition credits

With artistic and discursive contributions by
Heta Bilaletdin, Juan Gomez, Pahat Kengät, Sam Hart, Tommi Keränen, Malin Kuht, Constantinos Miltiadis, Marcell Mars, Martino Morandi, Jara Rocha, Gregoire Rousseau, Selena Savic, Dubravka Sekulić, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Stavros Stavrides,Nora Sternfeld, Samuli Tanner, Värvöttäjä.

Exhibition credits
Exhibition concept, curating, and co-organization by Gregoire Rousseau.
Open Soure audio stream co-curated by Otto Mannistö.
Co-organization and lecture moderation by Constantinos Militiadis.
Server operation and on-line services by Alain Ryckelynk.
Big Blue Button instance by constant.
Visual communication, communication, and Activation parts co-organization by Juan Gomez.

Supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation, Goethe-Institut Finnland, and best brewery in town Valillan Panimo.

Phase 1: Open Source audio stream

06.03.2021 N10 Open Source audio stream:

Pahat Kengät, Värvöttäjä, Tommi Keränen, Samuli Tanner, Samuli Tanner, Heta Bilaletdin.

OFFREAL video installation by Malin Kuht
/Ground floor in gallery space.
Alexander Galloway writes in his book „The Interface Effect”, that „an interface is not a thing, an interface is always an effect. It is always a process or a translation.” This effect includes how humans are affected by an interface and the way they are able to engage with a machine. OFFREAL considers interfaces as conjunctions of possibilities, histories and power relations.
In OFFREAL, two virtual assistants, called Ashley and Allison, are given the ability to diffract their existence as interface(s) and their looks. In addition to the female-coded voice, many avatars are designed according to pop-cultural ideals of beauty, which raises political and representational questions. The categories race and gender remain contested in the discourse on virtual bodies. What does it mean to be human and to become human in this digital age? Human-ess and Machines meet somewhere OFF the REAL in a speculative space.

CREDITS:
Text 2 Speech Avatars by: ODDCAST https://www.ttsdemo.com/
Masking & Script Editor: Helen Stefanie (https://www.helenstefanies.com/)
Script Editor & Sound Design: M_x _child (https://soundcloud.com/mxchild)

Phase 2: Digital Commoning Practices

First Session: Intersecting Commons

11.03.2021 19h UTC+2
Activation with Selena Savic in discussion with Station of Commons Juan Gomez & Gregoire Rousseau.

11.03.2021 20h UTC+2
“Rethinking the common: Exploring the potentialities of space commoning”
by Stavros Stavrides
If commoning is about complex and historically specific processes through which representations, practices and values intersect in circumscribing what is to be shared and how in a specific society, where can we locate the potentialities of space commoning? Based on the view that commoning practices are characterized both by the means they employ and by the subjects that participate in them, this presentation will explore how inhabited space may become a shaping factor of solidarity and collaboration relations between commoners.

12.03.2021 19h UTC+2
“Unsettling the Universal: Really Useful Commoning”
by Dubravka Sekulić
Feminism, reminds us Lola Olufemi “is a political project of what could be.” Commons can be understood along similar lines. Both have to be understood as verbs, concepts that do, unsettle and transform, ways we are in the world. Thinking at the intersection between digital and urban, in my talk I will propose a reading of the public library as an important node in the feminist and commoning consciousness raising operation.

13.03.2021 19h UTC+2
“Variations of Gender and Technology Trouble”
by Cornelia Sollfrank
Technofeminism is based on two basic assumptions: 1) technology is not neutral and 2) technology is a highly gendered field. These presuppositions open up a field of questions, problems and related practices. Based on selected positions in theory and practice, the talk exemplifies some of the tensions and openings from which to rethink ways of encountering the current technopolitical crisis. Commoning here serves as a framework for the process of vision and implementation, of experimentation and evaluation, of responding to the contemporary condition by creating new forms, formats and formations and questioning them again.

Second Session: Commoning Education/Educating the Commons

18.03.2021 19h UTC+2
Activation with Sam Hart on “Peer-to-peer Public Works”

20h UTC+2
“How to infrastructure otherwise”
by Femke Snelting, Jara Rocha & Martino Morandi.
A hands-on conversation on the ongoing techno-political transformations in (remote) learning environments. How to infrastructure otherwise in more just and solidary ways? On de-schooling, interdependent learning and The bundle theory of the student-user. With Martino Morandi, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting.

19.03.2021 19h UTC+2
“Educating the Commons and Commoning Education”
by Gregoire Rousseau and Nora Sternfeld in dialogue.
All over the world, education – which could be understood as a universal right and public good – is facing processes of economization and privatization. Technology – which could be understood as a common means of production, collaboratively developed – is taken away from the public and put into corporate hands. This conversation investigates the question of shared and common knowledge from the perspectives of an educator and an engineer, respectively.

20.03.2021 19h UTC+2
“Distributed resources versus distributed tech”
by Marcell Mars
Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on Foreshadowed Libraries. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
https://gist.github.com/marcellmars/10392e6e784e8734efa307623833597b

Phase 3: Workshops

VPN Aesthetics
VPN SSH
Gregoire Rousseau
An hands-on time with Virtual Private Network as infrastructure for direct and secure communication between connected devices. We introduce Zerotier VPN technology, how to set up it as administrator and client on most used OS including Raspbian/Raspberry Pi.

We will install various software using VPN such as remote desktop client(VNC), and as practical example how to upload new files to Arduino remotely.

Tactical Amateur Librarianship, or pole vaulting through the corpus of knowledge
Workshop for introduction to the ways of organizing, archiving, collecting and reading sources. After an introduction about the evolution of scholarship it will proceed to demonstrate open source apparatus that can be used to facilitate research, formal or otherwise. These are

• Calibre : for general book organization and reading /Calibre-ebook.com
• Zotero : reference manager and citation software /Zotero.org
• Hypothes.is : tool for collaborative online reading and annotation /Hypothes.is

Biographies

Heta Bilaletdin
Utilizing samplers, vocals, field sounds, a computer, random items and dusty four-track tapes, Heta Bilaletdin creates music concrete, sludgy beats, sugary melodies, peculiar dub and disjointed disco. Expect the unexpected and humane feelings squeezed out of electronic instruments.

Juan Gomez
Juan is a media artist and interaction designer living and working in Geneva, Switzerland. He graduated with honours from the Haute école d’art et de design – Genève (HEAD – Geneva) and is working in the intersection between art and design. He organizes workshops on critical technology, curates panels on contemporary publishing practices and conceives interactive installations with programing tools he develops.
His current interest are: The materialisation of social technologies in temporal urban spaces and their potential for generating valuable discussions in urban decisions; On empowering methods for the civil society to engage with their technological tools and on inclusive ways for teaching coding in playful ways. He is currently a PhD candidate in Design with a the practice based thesis Re-decentralize design: Tools for a new spatial design practice tutored by Anthony Masure (HEAD) & Jeffrey Huang (EPFL).

Malin Kuht
Malin Kuht is a media-critical artist and educator. She studies Fina Arts, Pedagogy and Political Science in Kassel. She is interested in contemporary music, media theory and technofeminist practices as well as exploring how gender is inscribed into our technologies and more explicitly used within interfaces. Her current research focuses on the future of the historisation of the first cyberfeminst international. Since 2016 she supports the activist alliance Unraveling the NSU Complex.

Marcell Mars
Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on Foreshadowed Libraries. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
https://gist.github.com/marcellmars/10392e6e784e8734efa307623833597b

Constantinos Miltiadis
Constantinos is transdisciplinary architect and researcher currently research fellow between the Departments of Design & Architecture of Aalto University. Most of the past year he spent sitting in his 25m2 room in Helsinki.

Martino Morandi wrote this bio text on a QWERTY keyboard on a Lenovo laptop on a seat of a Trenord train moving on the italian RFI rails, running on electricity from state hydro-electric power plants on the Alps. He researches the tangle of and our entanglements with these elements and is interested in the politics of our interactions with technology at different scales, from power plants to bio texts.

Pahat Kengät
Pahat Kengät is an electronic musician and composer from Finland. With their music Pahat Kengät seeks to recreate a variety of emotional states and experiences as electronic soundscapes, utilising a selection of electronic and acoustic instruments, and voice. The music itself ranges from soft drones to hectic noise, with focus always remaining on static and repetitive minimalism.t

Tommi Keränen
Tommi Keränen is a noise maker from Helsinki. Active since the mid 1990s, he performs and records as a solo artist, and is a member of Testicle Hazard, Large Unit, Köttskogen, Gentle Evil and The Truckfuckers. He uses mainly primitive electronics and non-standard digital synthesis to create slabs of vivid swirling noise. His discography consists of over two dozen entries ranging from cryptic tapes to some critically acclaimed releases like the Bats in the Attic CD (among The Wire’s Rewind picks in 2010).

Jara Rocha works through the situated and complex forms of distribution of the technological with a trans*feminist sensibility. With a curious confidence in transtextual logistics and a clear tendency to profanate modes, they tend to be found in tasks of remediation, action-research and in(ter)dependent curatorship. Main areas of study have to do with the semiotic materialities of political urgencies.

Gregoire Rousseau
Artist and educator based in Helsinki, co-founder of Station of Commons.
Grégoire Rousseau is artist and educator based between Helsinki and Paris. He is graduated both as Electrical Engineer and Master of Fine Arts. His artistic work questions the role of the machine, the algorithm within the digitally controlled society, and the complexity of the neoliberal interests in relation to public knowledge, to commons within technological space. Beside artist practice, Rousseau has been teaching in Finnish Academy of Fine Arts for ten years where he developed and implemented the first space dedicated to technology in 2013. In 2001, he founded electronic music record label Tuulanauhat; in 2014, he co-founded Rabrab Press with Sezgin Boynik, Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Arts. In 2018, he authored the publication “Learning from electric energy in the arts, Knowledge happens together”; in 2020 he initiated Station of Commons a platform of commoning practices within technological space. http://rousseau.fi

Alain Ryckelynck
Alain’s main interests has been science and technology since an early age. Early discovery of computing and then Internet led to a passion in combining technologies and channels to build interactivity, for humans and living creatures or machines. IT professional, CTO, entrepreneur in various related fields such as system administrator, web developer, hosting and streaming provider with AJ-Group.net and having most fun experimenting with electronics and interconnected devices. As part of Station of Commons, Alain is in charge to administrate and manage servers and other online services. Currently living with his family in Espoo, Finland.

Selena Savic
Selena Savić is an architect and researcher, interested in architectonic qualities of (wireless) communication, the plethora of ways technical infrastructures organize space, the use of machine learning for humanistic inquiries into discourses, digital literacy and digital citizenship. Postdoctoral researcher at Critical Media Lab, IXDM, Basel; previously Postdoc fellow at ATTP TU Vienna. She holds a dual PhD from the Federal Technical Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) and the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal (IST), grantee of the FCT, Portugal and SNSF, Switzerland.

Dubravka Sekulić
writes about the production of space and is interested in the unsettling common sense of architecture and universal epistemic frames. She is a Senior Tutor at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London (UK) and holds a PhD in history and theory of architecture from the ETH Zürich. She wrote Glotzt Nicht so Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (jan van eyck, 2012), Constructing Non-alignment: The Case of Energoprojekt (msub, 2016), and co-edited, together with Žiga Testen and Gal Kirn, Surfing the Black (jan van eyck, 2012). She was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart and Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. Together with Elise Hunchuck and Jonathan Solomon she initiated New Schools for Space. Most recently she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on a film Don’t Trace, Draw! (2020).

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software. In various constellations, she explores how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. Femke is member of Constant, association for art and media based in Brussels and collaborates as Possible Bodies, The Underground Division and The Institute for Technology in The Public Interest.

Cornelia Sollfrank
Cornelia Sollfrank (PhD) is an artist, researcher and university lecturer, living in Berlin (Germany). Recurring subjects in her artistic and academic work in and about digital cultures are artistic infrastructures, new forms of (political) self-organization, authorship and intellectual property, techno-feminist practice and theory. As a pioneer of Internet art, Cornelia Sollfrank built up a reputation with two central projects: the net.art generator – a web-based art-producing ‘machine,’ and Female Extension – her famous hack of the first competition for Internet art. Her experiments with the basic principles of aesthetic modernism implied conflicts with its institutional and legal framework and led to her academic research. In her PhD “Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property,” Cornelia investigated the increasingly conflicting relationship between art and copyright. This led to her current research project ‘Creating Commons,’ based at the University of the Arts in Zürich. Her most recent artistic work, the performance À la recherche de l’information perdue, is about gender stereotypes in the digital underground with the example of Wikileaks. The artistic research group #purplenoise, founded in 2018, investigates the potential of social media for political manipulation.
Recent publications include “The beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century” (minorcompositions.org), “Aesthetics of the Commons” (diaphanes.net) and “Fix My Code” (with Winnie Soon) (eeclectic.de) – all open access. Homepage: artwarez.org

Nora Sternfeld
Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. Since January 2018 she is documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel (School of Art and Design Kassel). From 2012 to 2018 she was professor for Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki. Furthermore she is co-director of the /ecm – Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna; part of the core team of schnittpunkt. ausstellungstheorie & praxis; a co-founder and part of trafo.K, Office for Art, Education and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna); and since 2011, a member of freethought, a platform for research, education, and production (London). In this capacity she was also one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly 2016. She publishes texts on contemporary art, exhibitions, politics of history, educational theory, and anti-racism.
Curator and Educator, Professor of Art Education HFBK Hamburg

Stavros Stavrides
Dr. Stavros Stavrides, architect, is Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he teaches graduate courses on housing design (social housing design included), as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience.
Extensive research fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico focused on housing-as-commons and urban struggles for self-management.
Research topics include urban commons, urban struggles, experience of metropolitan space, housing, spatial theory, architectural design and planning.
His recent publications include Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (Manchester 2019), Common Space. The City as Commons, (London 2016, Istanbul 2016, Athens 2019), Towards the City of Thresholds (Trento, 2010, Madrid 2016, Istanbul 2016, N. York 2019), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (Athens, 2010) and From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens, 2002 National Book Award) as well as numerous articles on spatial theory and the urban commoning culture. He has lectured in European and North and South American Universities on urban struggles and p