I participated in an ISEA (International Symposium for the Electronic Arts) panel in Istanbul last week. Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield.org, who so generously invited me to attend a panel on digital infrastructures for climate change, wrote a review of the panel, from which we are excerpting. The original article is much longer and contains many interesting links.

At the end of the entry, Ruth explains why p2p is so interesting for artists as well:

Those of us who share your (p2p) analysis of the contemporary political moment may also perceive a possible role for themselves in the generation of mutual commons-based interfaces for engagement that go beyond solely textual formats to arrays of performance, narrative (fact and fiction), image, sound, database, algorithm, music, theory, sculpture – to explicitly re-conceive inalienable social relations.

Ruth Catlow:

“Our panel brought together political philosopher writer and activist, Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer 2 Peer Alternatives with cyberformance artists Helen Varley Jamieson and Paula Crutchlow (participating remotely). Also seated around the table were another 25 artists, academics and environmental activists.

Yi-Fu Tuan provides a useful analysis of why this kind of interdisciplinary working can be troublesome.

‘The language of ordinary discourse and a portion of poetry is rich in symbols and metaphors. Science by contrast strives to remove the possibility of multiple readings. A traditional world has the ambiguity and richness of ordinary and ritual speech. The modern world on the other hand aspires to be transparent and literal’.

This insight resonates with interchange on other panels between people from indigenous and post-industrial cultures, highlighted in the SCANZ Eco-Sapiens round-table with Maori elder, Te Huirangi Waikerepuru and James Leach’s presentation about the people on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.

Finding ways to facilitate inter-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange should help us to overcome dangerous ruts in behaviour and models of mind in order to avoid dead-ends and dead-drops in the development of our civilisation[9]. Attention to networked and ecological approaches enable otherwise siloed worlds of knowledge and research to intersect and start to work together. To this end Sophie Jerram[10], New Zealand-based artist, curator and environmental activist, generously agreed to act as official provocateur to ensure legible exchange across disciplines.

Helen Varley Jamieson (in the room, Istanbul) and Paula Crutchlow (in Exeter, UK) wrangled a networked presentation and micro-performance of Make-Shift – A Networked Performance of Connections and Consequences, compelling in its warmth, from the uneven and uncooperative Internet connection. Make-Shift takes as its theme and materials, our patterns of domestic consumption and the concomitant impact on the environment. The cyberformers work with a collection of network tools in UpStage along with other social media tools. In their regular performances, audiences arrive in two homes (often located in different countries if not continents), bringing with them all the plastic packaging that they would have otherwise discarded in the previous 24 hours and these provide the raw materials for a key part of the performance.

For this panel, Helen and Paula performed, demonstrated, theorised and discussed Make-Shift while puppeteering and giving voice to digital avatars and handling backdrop changes upon the online stage, in real time. The other people in the room shouted out to Paula and laughed out loud at Dave (a regular avatar- a sympathetic representation of ‘everyman’ in the online stage) and his plaintive reflections on his own wastefulness – as he contemplated mountains of old mobile phones, scussi cables and broken monitors.

Their physical-to-virtual meaning-making and the connection with domestic space, combined with expected (if uncontrollable) technical glitches to ask questions about how to increase ‘intimacy across an impersonal medium'[14] giving rise to later discussions about: co-produced artistic contexts and infrastructures as a way to extend ways of thinking, feeling and acting in the world together and; the uselessness of shame and guilt as a response to environmental responsibility.

Michel Bauwens gave an informal introduction to the ways in which commons-based peer production suggest alternative routes to a sustainable civilization. He introduced the Nutrient Dense Project as an example of a typically smart combination of localism and globalism whereby in the absence of formal academic scientific research into this subject (one can speculate why) farmers share their experience and knowledge of soil enrichment to produce more nutritional food.

Currently the market is central to our culture and dominates the state. The social contract is breaking (most clearly articulated by the Indignados protests in Spain) as it becomes more expensive to study, there are very few available jobs for young people, and those that find jobs are paid less to work harder for longer and for a reduced (or no) pension.

Michel observes that while we need to find ways to cooperate, collectivist strategies are often shown to evolve into tyrannies and proposes that as our networked communications and mass media expand we can instead form communities on a more manageable (tribal) scale through self-aggregation.

By transposing what has been learned by sharing the production and use of immaterial goods such as software, to strategies for developing sharing in other productive modes. He sites open-source car design and distributed manufacture (through the use of 3D printing) that does away with patenting and built in obsolescence- constituent principles of our unsustainable consumer-based society. After all, he says ‘there is a light bulb made in 1903 that is still burning!’

In this way the community sits at the centre of innovation rather than the corporation- putting peer production at the core of civil society in mutual alignment- open and transparent.

He recognises that peer to peer production is currently dependent on capitalism (companies such as IBM invest huge percentages of their budgets into the development of FOSS) but observes that history suggests a process whereby it might be possible to break free from this embrace. He suggests that by breaking the Free software orthodoxy it would be possible to build a system of guild communities to support the expansion of mission oriented, benefit-driven co-ops whose innovations are only shared freely with people contributing to the commons. In the transition to intrinsically motivated, mass production of the commons, for-profit companies would pay to benefit from these innovations.

Sophie drew attention to the challenges and risks involved, and the tensions of maintaining a grounded personal and domestic life while contributing to the commons; also the need to develop ‘largesse’ or surplus for those pioneers of the new strategies while the system adapts. This prompted discussions about other examples of cross-cultural (and even intergenerational) commons-based peer production and the economic models and tactics being developed by artists and activists – who often share a precarious existence- in order to continue their work.”