Why Share? Commoning and queer feminist publishing / slvi.e from Hackers & Designers

For this hands-on session On an Open-Source Design Practice: an Octomode Work Session, we turn our attention to the experimental open-source design tool called Octomod https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/wiki/Octomode. Octomode is a collective editing space for PDF making, using Etherpad, Paged.js and Flask, developed by our friends over at Varia. This tool has been further elaborated upon by Hackers & Designers in the pursuit to make the tool more accessible for non-tech savvy collectives aiming to opt out of proprietary design tools. In doing so, this workshop pays homage to both the question "Why share?” but also, if so, "How?" 

This talk and workshop is held by Hackers & Designers member slvi.e.
slvi.e is a writer, editor, sailor and member of Hackers & Designers. In the context of Hackers & Designers, they work on publications that contextualize and archive Hackers & Designers pursuits around actively imaging and prototyping "fairer", more "ethical" technology. Their current interests are green cargo, the materiality of the internet; retracing the materials that make up our hardware, and self-organization. 
Hackers & Designers is an Amsterdam-based non-profit workshop initiative organizing activities at the intersection of technology, design and art. By creating shared moments of hands-on learning, H&D stimulates collaboration across disciplines, technological literacy, and different levels of expertise. Current members of the collective are: Loes Bogers, Selby Gildemacher, Anja Groten, Heerko van der Kooij, Juliette Lizotte, Karl Moubarak, Pernilla Manjula Philip, slvi.e and vo ezn.  

 

“How do we find new ways to construct culture, to imagine new societies, when the tools that we might use are restricted and bound up in systems of oppression?” Paul Soulellis (2018)

This workshop and lecture series takes Soulellis' question as its starting point to explore publishing as a practice of sharing, caring, and commoning. Commons are living infrastructures that are built through the accessibility and distribution of resources. They are organized within a defined community and maintained through co-creation and reciprocity. They offer counter-practices and counteraesthetics to the hierarchies of ownership, profit, and closure that shape the dominant forms of cultural production. Rather than focusing on the publication as a design object or repository of knowledge, the question “Why share?” turns to publishing as a continuous practice of rehearsals, infrastructures, and tactics of relation.

In conversation with practitioners from different areas of work and engagement, this series examines acts of sharing and distribution as queer_feminist strategies in the field of publishing. Together, we will ask how publishing can become an infrastructure of relation rather than isolation, and how the act of sharing itself can model other possible forms of living and working together.

Funded by equality funds from the University of the Arts Bremen.