Excavations

Excavations Gallery Arrives at the UN Internet Governance Forum

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 18:52:44 +0000

Excavations Gallery Arrives at the UN Internet Governance Forum Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/09/2021 - 11:52

Darija Medic

MEDlab is proud to launch Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet, an online art exhibition and discursive space, exploring the future of the Internet through the past and present of human self-governance. It has resulted from the collaboration spanning the last six months of an artist cohort exploring historical governance practices to inform the future of online community governance. Over the course of its meeting, this group across continents and disciplines met regularly, providing collective feedback for each project, exploring many aspects of governing communal spaces past, present, and future. The process has generated an interdisciplinary exhibition, which we are now happy to launch in the framework of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, taking place this week in Poland. The online exhibition itself is publicly accessible, offering several pathways into the projects, including their relationship to past governance archaeology mechanisms, as part of a larger research project MEDlab has been developing with King’s College London.

Please join us for a guided tour December 10 at 15:45-16:05 CET (7:45-8:05 MST); register on Zoom here.

Excavations builds on earlier efforts to create a dialogue between multimedia artists and policy spaces such as the ART@IGF, an international exhibition on digital policy, conducted as part of IGF2017 in Geneva. As a further development of this initiative, Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet explores specific digital policy issues around human rights and access. Its aim is to actively facilitate a conversation beyond familiar models to imagine new, more inclusive Internet governance policies, centering actors coming from underrepresented fields of arts and humanities.

By gathering a range of voices from internationally renowned artists, the exhibition brings perspectives such as intersectionality, indigenous practices, and media archaeology into conversation. The artists and researchers participating include: Barabar (Bhawna Parmar and Rubina Singh), Mateus Guzzo, Caroline Sinders, Şerife Wong, Eryk Salvaggio, Ioanna Thymianidis, Mara Karayanni, Mallory Knodel, Antonia Hernández, Lotte Louise de Jong, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and Jenny Liu Zhang, Cat Chang, and Isaac Gilles (Plot Twisters).

Join our tour to hear more and visit the exhibition, where you can explore the projects, hear the artists guide you through them, and connect them to a long legacy of governance practices as together we rethink the future of the Internet.

Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet is curated by Federica Carugati of (King’s College London), and Darija Medic and Nathan Schneider (Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder), with support from the Eutopia Foundation and the British Academy, in collaboration with DiploFoundation.

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Meet the Excavations Cohort

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 17:00:11 +0000

Meet the Excavations Cohort Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/13/2021 - 11:00

Darija Medic

Image source: Questions and Answers - Audel’s New Electric Library (1938). Scan is courtesy of the Media Archaeology Lab.

MEDlab is pleased to announce that the Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet cohort has formed. Initiated by MEDlab and King’s College London, the cohort will facilitate a conversation through interdisciplinary, practice-based explorations on diverse governance practices across time and space, beyond the dominant models in today’s online cultures. The cohort positions art practice at the center of building a bridge to social scientific research in rethinking governance models and the long history of creating spaces that are governed inclusively.

Our open call received an outpouring of powerful proposals, and we had It is with great pleasure that we announce our cohort members:

Barabar is a social design collaborative born out of Bhawna Parmar and Rubina Singh’s quest to decolonise design and use it as a tool for social justice. They will be working on a speculative provocation which explores the future of human rights in the ‘Digicene’ by imagining a world amidst dystopia and utopia, where people and corporate governments try to co-exist.
Mateus Guzzo (Brazil, 1992) works with (moving) images, strategy, and social agency to design collaborative alternative platforms of imagination, culture, and public policy. He will develop a visual diagram exploring active online content-moderation governance systems in dialogue with content moderation methods of Media Democracy movements in Latin America, particularly in Brazil.
Caroline Sinders is a critical designer and artist looking at how technology affects society through the lens of human rights and design. For this cohort she will undergo a critical inquiry into the sustainability of scale, mapping scale, movement and creation of data within data cooperatives.
Şerife Wong is an artist and founder of Icarus Salon and Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist exploring gaps between datasets and the world they reflect, using digital art and writing. Together they are putting forward a proposal for a "situationist blockchain" based on the writings and political organization of the Situationist International.
Ioanna Thymianidis is a contemporary artist and HR professional creating sculptures exploring patterns in nature and patterns in human society. She will offer the Excavation cohort her take on Human Capital and Human Governance within our digital workforce through the medium of digital sculpture and mapping.
Mara Karayanni is an artist and sysadmin based in Greece, who works with networks and servers, they enjoy making tech related zines and silkscreens. She will be working on a resource challenging the lack of gender inclusivity in the Free and Open Software communities by translating male pronouns found in existing online tech documentation to female and neutral ones.
Plot Twisters is an online community of creators who are researching and developing personal storytelling tools, especially for young people. They will offer the cohort an online self-governance framework, which supports the members of Plot Twisters to communicate expectations, lead self-motivated projects, explore the interdependence of their roles, and most importantly, play.
Mallory Knodel is the Chief Technology Officer at the Center for Democracy & Technology and chairs the Human Rights Protocol Considerations research group of the Internet Research Task Force. Continuing the work that a global network of movement leaders in intersectional feminism did, defining a set of principles for the internet, she is leading an engaged group of expert engineers, setting out to visualise core internet protocols differently, from routing to security, through illustrations, drawings, charts, images, metaphors and texts.
Antonia Hernández is a Montréal-based theorist, designer and media artist whose work explores the infrastructural aspect of intimacy. Lotte Louise de Jong is a media artist based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, exploring how we mediate our identity through the digital spaces we inhabit. For the Excavations cohort, they will explore the different and contrasting ecologies governing sex webcam platforms by uncovering the tension between the hypervisibility that characterizes webcammming and the inconspicuous nature of the platforms where it unfolds.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She will be creating a web reflection on the project: A chatbot to move acknowledgement to action for honoring native land.

This group will meet over the course of several months to delve into a process of collaborative work, exchange and building of new exciting projects into an online exhibition format, supported by MEDlab, King’s College London and their associate researchers. During the process, the group will reflect on issues around governance in collaboration and co-creation spaces such as the cohort itself and in relation to the affordances of online spaces. As the development of conversational and shared spaces is the primary drive to realize this inquiry, we will also share some elements of collective prototyping as the cohort runs.

Follow our posts in the coming months to stay up to date with the project!

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Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet

Anonymous — Tue, 18 May 2021 16:07:27 +0000

Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/18/2021 - 10:07

A multimodal conversation

Image source: Questions and Answers - Audel’s New Electric Library (1938). Scan is courtesy of the Media Archaeology Lab.

After a full year of almost every facet of life porting online, the stakes of governing online communities and infrastructures have never been higher. As a contribution to current digital policy conversations, this project invites artists, tinkerers, and technologists to bring explorations of human governance practices, from ancient civilizations to contemporary social movements, from the slums of emerging megacities to Indigenous communities—all into dialogue with the governance of the Internet.

In comparison to present and historical democratic institutions offline, online communities have an impoverished set of tools available for democratic governance (Schneider 2020). Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet is interested in what might be learned from pre-digital mechanisms across diverse societies and cultural practice. Ancient Athens’ system of lotteries for public offices, for instance, could help us better regulate algorithms today (Carugati 2020). There is a long record of practice and research on governance in the social sciences that bear valuable insights. For this exploration, we propose to conduct media archaeology on a wide range of historical, present-day, and fictional governance practices and to radically expand the repertoire available for governance in online and offline communities alike.

Excavations will employ a research-creation model based on the exchange between the social sciences and art practice, in the context of online community governance. How can communities govern platforms in the age of algorithmic governance? Who is accountable to whom, and how? How is labor distributed between code, bot, land, and flesh? How is identity negotiated between what is fluid and verified? What are instances in which freedom of expression is in conflict with regulation?

This project aims to open the spaces between the visible and the layered, nuanced particularities of specific communities and platforms, through a collaborative excavation of what it means to make and be community on the Internet today. We hope to explore governance challenges including, but not limited to:

Accountability for how platforms organize work and personal data
Participatory design and consent
Building and sustaining communities
Resolving rule violations and conflicts
Overseeing algorithmic decision making

We invite creators to explore possible futures for Internet governance, drawing inspiration from non-digital sources of experience including:

Indigenous practices exploited, ignored, or suppressed by colonizers
Historical democratic practices that have been absent from more recent governance norms
Emergent innovations in subcultures past or present
Imaginations of future governance from science/speculative fiction
Rituals of community in conversation with rituals of justice systems

Practice-based researchers are invited to apply for our multimodal cohort, which will develop and co-create online explorations into a public conversation and exhibition. Chosen practitioners will receive a $1,000 stipend to develop Web-ready explorations, in collaboration with other members of the cohort. Explorations can range from documentary to speculative, including provocations, proposed frameworks, visualizations and maps, prototypes, reenactments, identity corrections, interventions, musings, and anarchives (Zielinski, 2015). The cohort will meet online in both synchronous and asynchronous form from July-September 2021 on a regular biweekly basis, in which each of the chosen projects will be developed in a collaborative process of iterations, mutual feedback, and collective work. The result of this process will be an exhibition at global digital policy venues, a public conversation, and a collective web space.

Timeline:

Deadline: June 15, 2021
Notification of decisions: July 1, 2021
Cohort residency: July-September 2021
Public conversation: December 2021

Applications are now closed.

Curated by Federica Carugati of (King’s College London), and Darija Medic and Nathan Schneider (Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder), with support from the Eutopia Foundation and in collaboration with DiploFoundation.

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