Interview with Otto von Busch by Regine Debatty on his social art project, Roomservices.

[This is a collaboration ]with Evren Uzer, an Istanbul-based urban planner and a PhD candidate, on roomservices, a series of practical research projects that explore urban and rural issues and transgress the borders between urbanity, social reorganization, design co-location, applied socio-geography and social art work. With the roomservices projects they experiment with ‘tools’ for providing a different viewpoint or just celebrating the differences in everyday life by revealing their varied shades under new light.

Regine: “I’d like you to tell me more about the “roomservices” urban interventions. The booklet Adventures in Local Knowledge Production (download it as PDF) presents the “low-level networks of pro-ams, prosumers, producers and other co-creators.” Could you explain us briefly who are these people? How important is their contribution of Pro-Ams to cultural, economic and social life or even to research?”

Otto: “Roomservices is run by my partner Evren Uzer and me and in the Adventures in Local Knowledge Production we mapped the low level knowledge production in Innsbruck, Austria. We focused on all small actors not appearing in the yellow pages or entrepreneurial maps, but instead engage in very lose and informal networks. People and places of huge creative potential but that do not appear in our current organization of society. These are serious hobbyists and professional amateurs. We created a simple classifying system for understanding how they operate in the city, connect to each other and to other systems, focusing on three aspects of actors in the low-level networks; archetypes, hubs and channels. Traditionally these are poets, discussion circles, small bands, hobby modders, rehearsal studios, squats, pirate radios etc.

There has lately been a lot of talk about “creative industries” but it will be a serious mistake to consider these activities as industries or even production facilities. We instead tried to see them as co-creators as at this level much is very collaborative and society still struggles to get a grip on what this really is. This level of society is not fitting to our entrepreneurial models but we need to rethink our economic operating system in many ways if we want this low-level to blossom and be the ground for a “new economy”. The copyright and music sharing debates we see now is only the tip of the iceberg of this change we think.”

It is also important to state that it is not a question of including all spare time activities into economic systems or transactions. Hobbies and recreation must still be a free zone for play, relaxation and leisure too. The question is if we can find ways to survive of our pro-am interests and not see all work as necessarily alienating.”

Regine: “Which conditions ensure that a lively network of pro-ams can thrive?”

Otto: “Our purpose was not so much to look at the fertilizers of pro-ams or “creative industries and creative class” as in the works of Richard Florida for example. Evren and I tried to find way to map the so far unexplored correlations between these networks and actors. But the sharing and spreading of new ideas is central, not only through the Internet, but socially. Various platforms, amplifiers and scenes are central for the sharing of knowledge at this level and this is actually something that can be supported beyond the “recreation” or “hobby” level it is perceived as today.

But understanding this level of society is only in its cradle. We have spent centuries optimizing industrialism and institutional capitalism and we still lack models and maps for the low-level knowledge production.”

Regine: “How can an expertise raised on non-profit and democratic principles meet with capitalistic modes of production?”

Otto: “Well this is something that we need time to understand and experiment with and social entrepreneurship, activist business, and anti-preneurship are just a first wave of experiments. Perhaps we need to once again look seriously at local currencies and other means for exchange that can operate on levels where global capitalism does not fit. We need more tools to see how this works, it is apparent that there is no longer ONE public and ONE market but multitudes of publics, markets, levels and networks in society, and most probably we need several models to see them all. Not one theory will explain it. Not one ring will rule them all.”

(via we make money not art)