Dialogue
Wed 25 Oct 2023

Opening Keynote at Sensing Dissensus

The Glasshouse, HDK-Valand

Participants

Femke SneltingEva Weinmayr

Opening Keynote at Sensing Dissensus, October 25-26, 2023, organised by European Artistic Research Network (EARN)

Wednesday 25 October, 18:30 – 19:45 (CEST)

Ecologies of Dissemination is a collaborative artistic research project that explores potential strategies of dissemination that acknowledge the tensions and overlaps between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access. Invested in collective art and knowledge practices, we are concerned with how the current drive to openness in dissemination policies might overlook relational aspects. How can we develop non-universalist policies, agreements, frameworks, licences that consider that there might be ethical reasons to refrain from release and re-use?

In this keynote we will map a series of proposals which make conditions for (re)use explicit. We will look at a set of experimental and provocative Open Content licences, such as the Decolonial media licence, the Non-white-hetero-male licence or the Consumer dilemma license, proposals that are sometimes ad-hoc and punk, sometimes more structural attempts to critique, reorient and reflect upon conventional modes of sharing content. Lastly, we will ask, is there a way to make the conditions for reuse explicit without relying on the law? How would a courageous and careful politics of sharing and re-use look? With courageous we mean a politics that considers entangled notions of authorship; that takes power differences into account; and that “open” means different things in different contexts.

More on Sensing Dissensus

In the organizers’ words: This is a two-day gathering of researchers and research groups, both formal and informal, institutional and para-institutional within EARN and its affiliated networks of colleagues. We will address different aspects of collaboration and forms of dissensus / disagreement in artistic research.

You can find the full programme here: http://www.artresearch.eu/2023/03/02/sensing-dissensus-25-27-10-2023/

Contributors

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism and Free Software. With the Brussels-based association for art and media, Constant, she experimented with Free Culture as a trans*feminist practice through performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes. Her thinking about reuse was sharpened as part of her work with the Libre Graphics Movement in dialogue with the practice of Open Source Publishing (OSP), a design collective that she co-founded in 2006.

Currently Femke works in various constellations on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists on what computational infrastructures do to collective life. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication resulted from a collective disobedient research project, which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

Femke supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht) and contributes to Nubo, a cooperative that provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services. In the context of SoLiXG, she develops Counter Cloud Imaginaries, non-sovereign institutional infrastructures and methods for infra-resistance. With the Infrastructural Rehearsals collective, she collaborates on proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches to the climate crisis, from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives.

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr works at the interface of art, critical publishing and radical education. Her focus is on decolonial feminist discourses, pedagogies and practices. From 2019 until 2022 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” (with erg, Brussels) and co-initiated kritilab, an open-source platform and laboratory for Critical Diversity Literacy at the intersection of art and education. As part of “Ecologies of Dissemination”(HDK-Valand, 2022–24) with Femke Snelting, she develops decolonial feminist practices to Open Access.

Recent collaborative publication projects include “Noun to Verb”, a PhD thesis concerned with the micro-politics of publishing from an intersectional feminist perspective that was developed and published on a MediaWiki. She collaborates with Lucie Kolb on decolonial, feminist approaches to naming and cataloguing knowledge in institutional libraries in the Global North that led to an exhibition and the online publication “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021–22); Further projects include “The Piracy Project” (2010–15, with Andrea Francke), an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and modes of reproduction.

Currently, she works as Guest Professor for Critical Access at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel Academy of Art and Design (CH) and is part of the team of the MA “Critical Social Practice in Art Education” at ZHdK Zurich. Since 2024 she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK).