This inverview, conducted by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, was originally published in Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain

Pascal Gielen & Sonja Lavaert: Our book Commonism is about the triangle of ideology, aestheticsand the commons.1 Our tentative assumption is that commonism may be the next meta-ideology, after neoliberalism. We understand ideology not only negatively as a false awareness, but also positively as a logic of faith that connects fiction and reality and can make people long for and work towards a better form of living together. In Assembly you and Michael Hardt do something similar with notions such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘institution’, ‘leadership’. What does ‘ideology’ mean to you and do you think it may also figure in a positive narrative?

Antonio Negri: In my experience, ideology tends to have mostly negative connotations, or, rather, I have regarded ‘ideology’ mainly in negative terms. This means though that we are speaking of something that is real. Ideology is a real fact. In addition, it is something real that embodies, shapes and constitutes reality. What I see as positive in this embodiment of reality is critique – which can be critique of the ideology or of reality – and the dispositive, understood as the transition of the world of thinking to that of reality. In my view, ideologies make up reality, but I use the term preferably when discussing its negative aspect, whereas when I speak of its positive aspect, i.e., the critique or the dispositive, I prefer these latter words.

The ideological dimension is absolutely crucial when thinking about reality and in trying to analyse and understand it, but, again, it can be both positive and negative. Gramsci, for example, saw it this way. The ideological dimension is an essential part of any analysis of reality, but a discourse on ideology is therefore always both positive and negative. On the one hand there is the bourgeois ideology (that Gramsci opposed, as do we) and on the other hand there is the communist ideology (that we support). Today, I think it is better to call the communist ideology a ‘critique’ or ‘dispositive’; ‘critique’ as in taking place in the realm of knowledge and understanding, and ‘dispositive’ in the Foucaultian sense of the transition of knowledge into action.

And, well, there is the matter of meta-ideology… Again, I agree with your view that ideology, being something that belongs to the realm of knowledge and understanding, in a sense branches out into reality, feeding and shaping it, and that therefore ideology is always and everywhere present in concrete reality. However, I would be very reluctant to speak in terms of ‘meta’, ‘post’ or ‘after’, as if it were something transcendent or as if there is such a thing as a space of transcendence at all.

When we speak of meta-ideology, we refer to the tendency of transcending the traditional party political differences between left and right. It is a trend that can be seen clearly today, wherever the theme of the common is picked up or where common-initiatives are being developed. And elsewhere as well: liberal politicians write books about the importance of the basic income; neonationalism presents itself as a longing for social cohesion; religiously inspired political parties emphasize communion and the community, et cetera.

Common is not the exclusive property of the left, that much is clear. Looking at history from a Marxist perspective, we see how it was precisely the commons that were transformed by capitalism to be financially profitable. Capitalism’s attitude towards the commons is about expropriation, exploration, creating surplus value, and the dominion that is founded on these things. The common exists in two major forms: there are natural commons and social commons and, as Michael and I put forth in Assembly, these can be subdivided into five types: the earth and ecosystems; the immaterial common of ideas, codes, images and cultural products; material goods produced by cooperative labour; metropolises and rural areas that are the domain of communication, cultural interaction and cooperation; and social institutions and services that provide housing, welfare, healthcare and education. Now the essential characteristic of the present-day economy and society is that the social production of the commons is being exploited by capital. The struggle of the commons therefore is working people re-appropriating that of which they were robbed by capital. Re-appropriating what was taken from them and putting it to work for the benefit of the common: that is the meaning of liberation and emancipation. This also means that the fiction of ‘post’ or ‘meta’ is debunked and eliminated. There is no meta. The struggle of the commons is the possibility of eliminating an ‘outside’ (meta [above], post [after]). This struggle is exclusively fought in the domain of immanence, meaning: here and now, at the heart of the reality in which we find ourselves, because there is no ‘outside’. By the way, we can only speak in the abstract about common as a general unitary, singular and exactly definable concept, because in reality the common is always twofold, just like labour is.

There is much talk about ‘common’ nowadays; studies are undertaken, and various movements and schools of thought have emerged around the theme. Here in France, for example, there is the school of the economist Benjamin Coriat, editor of Le retour des communs (2015); we have Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, who posit the common as a demand and alternative in their Commun (2014), and Carlo Vercellone and other comrades – and Michael and myself are two of them – who regard the common as something that can be used ontologically, can be annexed, and for whom the struggle therefore consists of re-appropriating the common. This also ties in with David Harvey’s reading of Marx. In Assembly we concern ourselves in great detail with his analysis and for the most part we agree with him. However, whereas Harvey focuses on capitalism as a continuous primitive accumulation, we see it as a developmental phase and therefore prefer to speak of formal and real subsumption, but this perhaps is a different theme.

What I’m trying to say is: my distrust of the term ‘meta’ is that it suggests that there is no difference or antithesis anymore between left and right. Well, of course left and right are inaccurate concepts, but to put it more plainly: it means that capitalism is no longer recognised and that being liberated of capitalism is regarded as something that could easily happen or would even be a battle that is already won.

To give a concrete example of how we use the term ‘meta’: the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011 was predominantly organized by the left, but people from quite different ideological backgrounds are also joining the movement and are developing new initiatives, out of necessity, for their daily survival. For that reason, this movement, which is really more of a patchwork of initiatives, is sometimes ‘accused’ of being apolitical. In that sense we call commonism a practice-based ideology and we call it ‘meta’ because it brings together people from various, traditionally opposed political currents, and does so out of necessity.

I fully agree with that conclusion and analysis, but I would still be wary of using such an ambiguous term. The word ‘meta’ covers a political concern aimed at reconciliation with regard to the profound rift between, to put it bluntly, the bosses and those who are exploited.

What do you think of the fact that the Open VLD, the liberal party in Flanders, is organizing a conference about the commons as apparently they think it is important, without necessarily wanting to capitalize it but, as things look now anyway, because they are genuinely interested or find something lacking in their liberal system?

It is obvious that we are facing enormous problems nowadays. We see a general transformation of the system of production as it is being automated and robotized. These are things that we thematized and analysed in our operaismo movement, some forty years or longer ago. In the first issue of Potere Operaio, in 1969, we demanded the ‘civil income’ (reddito di cittadinanza) and this was because we already foresaw this process in which labour would be reduced to a completely secondary element. The question is how to respond to this revolution and reality and as far as that is concerned I see an urgent need to create spaces for developing initiatives outside of capitalism.

There are a number of interesting initiatives in Belgium: the start-ups, with already 50,000 participants, and Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P Foundation. And yes, the commons is a domain that very much interests ‘the right’. The same goes for social democrats, by the way. So, the entire problem consists of understanding what the alternative could be, how to respond, what to do, and this is in fact the very theme of autonomy.

In our research and book we speak of aesthetics not only in regard to art but also in relation to society. We understand aesthetics as the shaping or design of both material and social things, of people. In your book Assembly we detect a similar idea: assembly characterizes the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons. Likewise, in Commonism, we oppose the aesthetic figure with the abstraction that we associate with exchange value, finance capitalism and neoliberalism. What does the ideal assembly look like, in your view? What are the conditions for its realization? How can non-humans (things, nature) be involved in an assembly? What instruments or strategies are needed? In short, how should assembly be practically organized in order to function well, in your view?

We argue that the assembly is already there. It is already there in the structure of the present-day economy in which labour has transformed itself in language and in cooperation that is largely autonomous. The assembly is what we are confronted with. The problem therefore is how these labour forces or subjects / people who produce subjectivity can become political subjects. This is demonstrated by the recognition of the common, by the transition to the common and being together, by the transition of the mere finding of being together to being aware of it. The transition of collaboration and being-in-common to the production of common subjectivity is the central element of the assembly.

The comrades and activists who take part in the fight of the movement, from Occupy Wall Street to the Indignados in Madrid, have attempted to bring about such a transition, especially from the condition of people producing under capitalism and whose situation simply happens to them to a free condition in which the common is built and formed. This transition is fundamental and in addition it demonstrates that commonism is much more feasible today than in the previous situation, in which the workers were organized and brought together by capital. Before, the workers were brought together, they did not come together of their own initiative. This is no longer the case and precisely this means an enormous boost for the possibilities. The possibility for liberation is infinitely larger and wider today, because there is this being-together, an ontological fact that is also a point of departure.

The assembly is an ontological fact that must become political, that is the heart of the matter.

Marx has said of the working classes that they were made by capital and that therefore it was necessary for them to become aware of their situation through a political party, an external organization, an ideology, et cetera, in order to become political. Today we see a maturity and an original organization, so to speak, thanks to the transformation that occurred in labour and society. Labour today is no longer a labour under command. The aspect of the command is becoming increasingly alienated from the possibility to work together subjectively. What is important, is that the language that is formed by the worker comes before the command, precedes it. The importance of neoliberalism, by the way, is that it understood that this autonomous use of language can be reversed and can be made use of by capital. This is why the most important political work of today is to recognize this subjective and special use of language and to reverse again what capitalism and neoliberalism have reversed, and to bring about the liberation.

We are still not quite convinced, in the sense that we miss a concrete definition of what assembly exactly is. Looking at this as a sociologists, we look at examples of assemblies such as the Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples, and we think: assembly is a tool, a meeting method, a more democratic way of organizing things, of taking autonomous decisions, of achieving self-governance. Can we say that assembly is a formula for organizing direct democracy?

What Michael and I have in mind is exactly the type of phenomenon like L’Asilo in Naples, where sovereignty has been reversed: to the common, to a space and a series of shared goods (beni communi) in the widest sense, both material and immaterial goods. In other words, where a series of remarkable initiatives is undertaken for the common good. The concept of common is always a production, something that is invented, made, shaped. The assembly is this: a body of people, a small multitude that manages well the shared (material and immaterial) goods and thereby constitutes a common. The fundamental concept of assembly is that the political and social are again joined and today we have a chance, an opportunity to do this. Unlike Lenin, we no longer find ourselves in exceptional conditions like it was with the Russian Revolution when there was only hunger, war and catastrophe and everything had to be torn down in order to create a new force. Now, today, we have the opportunity to transform the assembly into a force. Because that is politics: lending force. Or, that is aesthetics, if one wishes to use that term: lending form and force. There is no form without force. Politics is force, power – and that includes the aspect of violence. In politics it is about the force (the power, sometimes violence) to construct peace.

What we see in the practical functioning of assembly, for example, is that the practice of language becomes very important. After all, people have to speak to each other and try to convince others through dialogue. Now this mechanism has two problems: 1) those who speak more and better have an advantage in winning the debate; and 2) there is a class phenomenon. In the situation of an assembly the middle class becomes dominant: those who are white, educated and can speak well have the floor, so there is an element of selection. My question to you is: how can the assembly be organized in such a way that there is no such selection or that this shortcoming is compensated for by letting basis-democratic principles prevail? How does one give a voice to those who remain silent?

We are of course discussing examples and I think that especially in Naples, if one looks at the periphery, in the surrounding region, in all those places where the casa del popolo are strong and many initiatives are taken by the people, one definitely sees a direct proletarian use of language, and in quite dominant forms. There are also initiatives such as L’Asilo that already have quite a tradition, that have statutes and a legal structure. And yes, in those cases a certain political class is involved. However, I think that the assembly is both cause and product of a break with class distinction. The obvious objection one could have against these assembly initiatives is that not everything has been properly defined. We are after all speaking of a process that is not free of contradictions and downfall, but it is an extremely important process and it has begun.

The problem is that we have to develop a different model than that of parliamentary democracy, or, rather, we need a post-parliamentarian model of democracy.

What do you think of the fact that in Naples a commissioner for the commons (assessore dei beni communi) has been appointed? We ask this specifically with regard to your rejection of state institutions.

We cannot have this discussion with Naples as an example. The situation there is quite ambiguous. What is happening there now was achieved with great effort after an immense political crisis: the PD(Democratic Party) in Naples is divided into four or five factions, the 5 Stelle movement is weak, and there is this incredible Mayor Luigi de Magistris, a former magistrate – very straight and tough – who is open to what according to him might constitute the majority. So all this makes Naples a rather unique case, a confluence of events. There are so many contingent factors playing a part there. The first concern of the comrades who occupied buildings was therefore to obtain a guarantee, an anchoring in the institutions.

But to return to our point, the institutions are indeed a major problem, but we should not concern ourselves with the case of Naples as it is very much a separate case.

 In Assembly you regard the new leadership of the commons as a possible strategy of the multitude and as a tactic of the leader. The leader can only temporarily – and depending on her or his expertise – make certain tactical moves in the general strategy of the multitude. How can this be organized and in how much is your reversal of attribution of the strategy (to the multitude) and of tactics (to the leader) different from a representative democracy where leaders are also only appointed temporarily?

I think that we are faced with the problem of removing or eroding the political relationship between movement and leader. What is at stake is decision authority. What exactly was the formula of political parties? A party gathered a great number of people along a certain political line that was decided upon by the top, by the leader, and which was literally imposed on or taught to the people in a top-down fashion. In our work, Michael and I take the critique by movements as our starting point, because these movements reject the existing institutions. Today, we have to reject leadership but not necessarily institutions as such. So we are now faced with the problem of the institutions and we have to solve this, we have to face this, and study it together. Or, in other words: we have to bring back the leadership to the movement and it is within the movement that the hegemonial strategy of leadership must be developed. We have to take the decision authority away from the leader, or rather, take the abstraction and transcendence of the decision away from the leader.

But how does one choose the leader, and how do the commons differ from representative democracy?

The problem is not how to choose, as this can be done in any number of ways. The problem is that of the power that is given to the leader. Often though, the leader will spontaneously emerge from the multitude.

The power of the leader must be limited to the tactical level and this usually means the power to make proposals.

Anyone who has been active within the movement knows the phenomenon of the leader who spontaneously comes forward. It has to do with the actual needs and problems the movement faces and into which the leader has more insight than anyone else. One often sees how a leader’s power is acknowledged at some point and then begins, works out well, and thus becomes a reality.

Let me give an example. During the 1917 revolution, Lenin succeeded in becoming the tactical leader because he could instantly, in a very direct manner, provide answers to two problems that presented itself at the time: peace now, and land to the farm labourers. However, on the other hand, the powers representing the military and the farmers were convinced that neither the soldiers nor the farm labourers were ready for these changes and so they didn’t undertake any action. It was a paradox: the leader, Lenin, saying no to the ruling institutions because he understood what the soldiers and the farm labourers needed. This is a tactic that becomes power and force (forza).

The leader is always temporary, tactical. He steps forward in a struggle of the people / subjects who have demands and needs.

But then how does the leader know what those needs are? Simply because they stem from the people?

Quite so. He knows what is needed because he is part of it, because he is in the middle of it, but, again, this is a paradox. According to the official history books Lenin was a demagogue who played games with the people, but I know that the reverse is true: the revolution succeeded because Lenin understood that these were the real needs and because he immediately articulated an answer to them, without all the compromises, crippling detours and institutions as created by the parliamentary system. Those real needs to which he provided an answer were peace now, immediately, and giving the land to those who worked the land, without any compromise. 

The same is true for many leaders. Churchill, for example, took a direct decision to fight against the Germans in World War II. This is the point: the leader who immediately and directly coincides with the needs and wants of the many / the common.

In Assembly you defend the hypothesis that the institutions or the leader don’t need a centralized rule but that they can be realized by a multitude in a democratic manner. The examples you provide for the future of the movements are in line with this hypothesis: for example, Black Lives Matter. But isn’t this notion and aren’t these examples at odds with or even contrary to your criticism of the ‘horizontal leader-lessness’?

Well, many movements are leaderless, but that is not the issue. What is problematic, or what these movements need, is institutions. What we are trying to say is not so much that movements need leaders – as, again, they should take charge of leadership themselves – but that they do need institutions. It is a mistake for these movements not to have an institution, to not adopt an institutional framework. However, Michael and I are convinced that within the movements there is a tendency to do this, to form institutions – these are not anarchist groups – and thereby realize this horizontal hegemony. Our work is about searching for a type of institution that is not sovereign and is not connected to ownership. How this works out in practice, well, that is exactly what we need to discuss, think about, try out…

This leads nicely to our next question. You advocate complementarity of the three political strategies: pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony. Existing institutions are abolished and new, non-sovereign institutions are created. What exactly needs to be abandoned when it comes to existing institutions?

We are currently witnessing the death struggle of the concepts that have dominated political thinking and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The most important of these dying concepts are national sovereignty and property, both private and public. National sovereignty has been beaten by globalized capitalism, but at the same time actual capitalism is founded on those same barely surviving concepts that influence and mutually confirm each other. The concept or principle on which national sovereignty is based, in particular the ‘border’, has really become absurd. We transcend and cross borders constantly. Our brains are globalized and have no more use for the concept of border, so we need to get rid of it. That is the theoretical work that needs to be done: giving short shrift to moribund principles and concepts such as the border. As abundantly clear as this is for national sovereignty, so it is for ownership, both private and public: ownership is based on the same logic as the border, an obsolete concept that is at odds with reality. Even more so: property and border are one and the same thing.

The concept of the common, by contrast, is not one of ownership. In thinking about this issue it is extremely important to make a distinction between ‘common goods’ (beni comuni), which can be the object of ownership, and ‘the common’ (il comune) as in ‘commonwealth’, which is a production, something that is formed by the common from within and which consequently cannot be owned.

Is there anything positive you could mention about what these new ‘non-sovereign’ institutions might look like? How should the three political strategies – pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony over the institutions – work together exactly? Is there a sequence that these three strategies should follow, or should they be deployed in parallel?

That is a question of the political practice. I simply can’t answer that, as it is too hard to do this sitting at a writing desk. It is both impossible and undesirable. I don’t see it as part of my work, which is studying, philosophizing, providing general frameworks in a critical manner, studying the foundation of the discourse, questioning the principles and concepts. And then there is the practice of the struggle and it is within the struggle that debate and consultation should take place, among each other, about what should be done. We cannot be expected to predict the future, and it is not our ambition to do so. To me this is one of the core issues: we will have to wait until the future announces itself, breaks out. That takes place in practice, whereas in my work I wish to point out directions, and formulate a critique of the principles of ideas and structures.

In Assembly you quote Hegel: ‘Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as aSubstance, but equally as Subject’.2 What exactly is subjectivity to you? Does subjectivity take on a different form today and if so, what does it look like?

To Hegel, subjectivity meant synthesis and overcoming. Think of Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave dialectic: the slave overcomes the master in as far as he serves him and at the same time constructs him. Also think of the concept of the proletariat in relation to capitalism in the work of the young Marx: the proletariat forms itself and realizes its project in as far as it becomes a fully integrated part of the bourgeois society. In Capital we no longer find this interpretation, and it is also gone from or at least nuanced in our analysis of the reality of workers today. Today, the subjectivity of the worker is that of singularity, of a particularity that is being produced in the construction of the common. This particularity is invention, is immaterial and serves to construct the common, that is, a bringing together of all these things. The (worker’s) subjectivity of today is a production of ‘being’, as it is an innovation and a surplus. It is a practice of freedom and therefore the production of subjectivity is something that transcends any identity. The subject is non-identic, is not an identity (hence the impossibility of providing exact definitions for it). The subject is formed in the collaboration, in being social, and it is something historical.

How do you see the role of art and the art world in the organization of assembly? On the one hand we state that the art world today indeed has a role by creating a space for exchange and debate, which is lacking in mainstream media, at exhibitions and during biennales. On the other hand we conclude that it doesn’t go any further and that these initiatives remain limited to the domain of the discursive. Also, these initiatives are often used as PR tools, turning the debate into a commodity. In light of this, what role can the art world – and art itself – play according to you, and can it have a role at all in shaping and strengthening the commons?

As I have tried to clarify in my book Art and Multitude (1989), art can always be linked to its mode of production. Art is production. Its dignity is derived from the fact that it is production of ‘being’, of meaningful images. In other words, of images that shape ‘being’, that take ‘being’ out of a hidden condition and transform it into an open and public condition. This always happens during a process of production. This is why there is an analogy between how goods are produced in general in a certain historical context and how art is produced in that same context. In art there is always a ‘making’ in the sense of constructing something. Art is always a form of building, a bringing together, a productive gesture. When looking at things from this point of view, it becomes clear that it is all about making distinctions within this world. There is beautiful art and there is ugly art, useful art and useless art; likewise there is art that markets itself as a commodity and there is art that is a form of productive artistic making.

Like language, art produces communication, it makes connections. Especially nowadays, art is like the practice of language in constructing connections, becoming event. Art is getting rid of materiality and is increasingly linked to immaterial production. It follows the same trend as the immaterial production and makes connections in fluid, unstable, and new images, in unexpected forms and figures. In this way art affiliates itself with the present-day mode of production and, like this mode of production, it interprets behaviour that is related to special events and passions. We are in a phase of metamorphosis of art, just like we are in phase of the production mode in which labour is completely transforming itself.

With regard to art I would like to underline two things. First, I assume that art is a form of making and working that is therefore completely linked to the production mode of a specific historical situation. Second, I assume that art has the capacity to produce ‘being’. Of course not all art always produces real ‘being’. By this I absolutely do not mean that there is good and bad art; that is not for me to say. But I do think a distinction can be made between art that serves the market and that is produced and circulates within the market, and art that is absolute production, meaning that it produces ‘being’.

One year ago, at the Venice Biennale, Marx was read; at documenta 14 in Athens, so much engaged political art was shown that the 12 April 2017 issue of Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsbladlikened it to a ‘stage for the revolution’.  At the same time, however, these revolutionary platforms stay within the confines of biennales and documentas, which reminds one of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘aestheticization’ of politics, which according to him was also a sign of fascism. Is there a way out of this for art? Can art escape from institutions that maybe do not affirm fascism as such, but certainly neoliberalism, and that turn art into a commodity?

There is always an escape route! Obviously these places must be regarded as battlefields, as places of confrontation and collision, of conflict and rifts. One can always escape that which biennales and documentas represent: that is, one can and should try to escape their control function – these big art institutions of the state or the market do function as control mechanisms – and artists therefore find themselves in exactly the same condition as the workers.

In my view, the problem with art institutions is this: they are arenas, more specifically arenas of a fight for the truth, of critique of ideology and production, places where the discourse of power is exposed, but they are always also marketplaces. The point is to break out of this cage of control by the state and the market and this has always been part of the development of art as it has manifested itself in many different forms, each time in a different manner. For example, at one time we had patrons of the arts who had the same role as the art institutions of today; it was no different then.

And so we have this whole history of constant artistic resistance against these conditions. I don’t think that art has ever been in line with power in any way. The great Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors were not, nor were the painters of the Golden Age in the Lowlands. On the contrary, there have always been breaking points in art that become evident in the artistic production, while these painters and sculptors were nevertheless an integral part of their specific social context. Because of these breaking points one can regard art as a way of unearthing the truth. They qualify art as a mode of truth.

I often talk to friends-comrades who make art and they are becoming increasingly critical of the market. There is a general resistance against the market these days in the actions of those comrades who believe strongest in or empathize with the class struggle – a rejection of the market that is becoming more and more radical. The protest is expressed in this negation, which is quite strong, and it leads to a radical criticism without compromise and without market possibilities.

There is of course also, and quite often, a strong temptation of ‘nothing’, of not doing / making, or of presenting art works that express a not-doing / not-making.

Anyway, I tend to be cautious with regard to these issues, and I think that in every action – and therefore also in art actions – a material composition is required and therefore a composition with reality as well. What I mean is: one should neither look for purity nor demonize the power / force.

In Assembly you emphasize the importance of language and communication. You mention the changing of meaning of words, speaking, and translation, and the appropriation of words as important political action. In this context you posit the idea of entrepreneurship of the multitude. Is this at all possible with a term like ‘entrepreneurship’, which has been associated with capitalism in all its guises for over 200 years? Is there not a risk that critique will wither and distinctions become blurred with such an act of appropriation?

I don’t think so, and frankly I don’t understand why such a polemic arose around specifically this issue as soon as our book was published. We, Michael and I, have always recuperated and reused words, and reversed their meaning in our work. For example, ‘empire’ may be the most academic and traditional term in the history of political science. Not that we were the first to do so: the word ‘capital’ as the title of Marx’s three-part book on the critique of political economy is about as capitalistic as can be. There is nothing wrong in appropriating words that are part of the tradition and ethics of the capitalistic bourgeoisie and assign them a new meaning. On the contrary, this is what we should do. The problem with regard to this form of language practice is to understand the force of reversal.

As to the semantic series of words such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘enterprise’, ‘entrepreneur’ in relation to the common – because we never just speak of ‘entrepreneurship’ but about the ‘entrepreneurship of the common’ – the word ‘enterprise’ admittedly is rather ambiguous. Enterprise is something like Christopher Columbus who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and demonstrated a huge capacity for invention. So on the one hand the word refers to a heroic, fantastic project. Columbus engaged in an improbable and completely new undertaking in the space of his time. On the other hand, the term ‘enterprise’ also refers to that with which it is commonly associated, namely a project aimed at financial profit and at generating income.

What we try to do in Assembly is to appropriate words that belong to tradition. We see it as our task to gain words for the common, to recuperate the words. Again, we do not speak of entrepreneurship tout court, but of entrepreneurship of the common. Speaking of the entrepreneurship of the common has the same potential and power as speaking of refusing to work: it leads to a re-appropriation of the common. So the power of this language use lies in this action of re-appropriation and in this the reversal is crucial.

In Assembly you imply that revolution is ontological and not a contingent event – that revolution is not aimed at seizing power, nor that it brings you to power, but that it changes power, or that it can bring you to power but that it changes the nature of power in doing so. You call upon the multitude to seize power in the sense of Machiavelli at the end of The Prince (1532): a call for a new leader who emerges from the multitude, and to not waste the opportunity. What is essential here is the phrase ‘to take power differently’, by which you mean, with Spinoza, that the ‘common’ or ‘freedom, equality, democracy, and wealth’ are guaranteed. ‘Differently’ here does not mean repeating the hypocrisy of freedom (without equality) as a concept of the right, nor that of equality (without freedom) as a proposal by the left. The formulation therefore is inspired by Spinoza to whom the ‘common’ was the basic idea that can also be summarized as: there is no freedom without equality and there is no equality without freedom. Common is an ontological and logical category that assumes and unites an internally contrasting multitude of singularities. Our question is twofold. Why speak of ‘commonism’ instead of simply calling it ‘communism’? And where is solidarity in all this?

Why we don’t call it ‘communism’? Perhaps because that word has been all too much abused in our recent history. In Italy, in the 1970s, there was a group of situationists who called it commontismo(rather a sympathetic lot, these situationists, but it all ended very badly: they turned out to be activist robbers, went to prison or became drug addicts; it all ended tragically).

I have no doubt that one day we will call the political project of the common ‘communism’ again. But it’s up to the people to call it that, not up to us.

Where is solidarity in our discourse? In everything we say there is solidarity because solidarity is in the principles of our discourse. To say it in Aristotelian terms, there is solidarity as in three of the four types of causes: as material cause in the rejection of loneliness, as efficient cause in the collaboration to produce and as final cause in love. In other words, everything that we propose, our entire theoretical building, has its material, efficient and final cause in solidarity. The ‘commontism’ is drenched in solidarity. One cannot live alone, in loneliness, one cannot produce alone, and one cannot love alone.

Our proposals cannot be read in any other way but as proposals of solidarity, or how to escape from loneliness. We have to escape from loneliness in order to define a solidary, close community, as we cannot survive alone in a barren desert. We must escape from loneliness in order to produce, because alone we would never have the means or the time. We must escape from loneliness in order to love, because on your own and without someone else there can be no love. This is the only way to understand this radical transition of / to the common, a transition that we are evolving towards, by the way. There is truly a developing tendency towards solidarity and towards an escape from loneliness.

We live in times of great crisis and terrible emptiness but at the same time these are also times of great expectations. We are facing a void between that which is finished and that which still has to begin. Especially in talking to young people one becomes aware of this terrible loneliness, but also of this great longing. The desert caused by neoliberal capitalism is insufferable in every regard.

Our next question is about that. As in your previous writings, in Assembly you start from the optimistic thought that the Occupy movements demonstrate a rebellion of the multitude, that the ‘possible is a given’, that the ‘common is a given’. But in Assembly you also pose the question, perhaps for the first time, regarding why the revolution of the Occupy movements failed. Does this indicate a turn in your work, a turn away from the earlier optimism? And what does this mean for the idea of revolution?

There is no turn from optimism to pessimism in our work. What we attempted to do is to understand the problem in a realistic manner and to think about possible solutions. The problem as we see it is that of the limits and limitations of movements, both of Occupy and other movements we have seen over the past decade. The most important limitation, in our analysis, is that these movements have not been willing or not been able to translate themselves into institutions and that where they did attempt to do so and in those cases where they actually formed institutions, it all ended in a betrayal of the movement. We see this for example in a part of the Indignados that founded Podemos, who eventually betrayed the situation from which they departed. Having followed all the debates from close up, my opinion of Podemos is negative. They have not succeeded in maintaining the reversal of the relation between strategy and decision or between tactic and strategy, leaving only the tactic.

So it is not about being more or less optimistic, but about grasping the problem in a realistic manner and about thinking of ways to solve the problem and this is what we try to do in our work. We try to see the limits and limitations of the political common-movement. Our conclusion is that power should be seized, but that in and with that operation power should be changed. Therefore, as you quote and as we expressed it in Assembly, it is all about ‘to take the power differently’ and then maintain this radical transition / reversal.

You also deal with populism in Assembly. Shouldn’t we discard the term ‘people’ anyway?

Yes, that’s what the common is all about. The term ‘people’ stays within the logic of Hobbes and the bourgeois line of sovereignty and representation. It is a fiction that violates the multitude and has only that purpose: the multitude should transform itself into one people that dissolves itself in forming the sovereign power. Think of the original frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, which perfectly illustrates this. But it was Spinoza who, against Hobbes, emphatically used the concept multitudoand underlined that the natural power of the multitude remains in place when a political ordering is formed. Actually, Spinoza, in elaborating these concepts of multitudo and comunis encapsulates the entire issue of politics and democracy, as I have attempted to demonstrate in my book L’anomalia selvaggia and to which we refer again in part in Assembly. Crucial in the transition of singularity to the common, Spinoza teaches us, are imagination, love and subjectivity. Singularity and subjectivity becoming common and translating themselves into newly invented institutions, is one way of summarizing commontism.

With regard to the current digital and communicative capitalism you also dwell on critique and what you call Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s techno-pessimism. You state that in order to arrive at an evaluation of modern technology it is necessary to historicize the arguments of critique. The position of Horkheimer and Adorno only relates to the phase of capitalist development that is controlled by large-scale industry. This constitutes a serious limitation of their critique. My question is: is this restriction of their critique related to the counter image of Enlightenment and modern thinking as forged in the Romantic period by opponents of revolutionary ideas and emancipation and in which their Dialektik der Aufklärung is also caught? Or, to put it differently, is it due to the fact that they do not make an explicit enough distinction between emancipatory modern thinking and capitalism? What is your view on this, also in the light of your thesis on the alternative modernity of Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx, in which the first two are regarded as the main suspects by Horkheimer and Adorno?

I grew up against the background of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and it is evident that operaismo is indebted to their critical work, but at the same time the entire development of operaismo can be seen as opposing the conclusions of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Horkheimer and Adorno’s work leads to extremes and extremism, it takes you to the border and then you can’t go any further. It is the conceptualization of a hermetic universe. In operaismo we asked ourselves, departing from this hermetic universe, how one could break it open. Instead of ending where they did, in operaismo we took the hermetic universe as a starting point, that is the universe of capitalism, of the excesses of instrumental rationality, and of the logic of control and repression, and we asked ourselves how we could break open this hermetic universe. We looked for ways to force open this hermetic universe, which had deteriorated into commodity and was heading for catastrophe. Introducing subjectivity is the central element in this, the crowbar.

So we are the children of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also rebel against it.

What we rediscovered in operaismo (and also in Assembly) against the positions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectics is ontology, the class struggle and the possibility of subjectivation. Our interest in the pre-1968 Herbert Marcuse can be seen from this perspective, and what has been especially important, according to us, is the work of Hans-Jürgen Krahl. He was a young student of Adorno who was killed in a traffic accident in early 1970, but he wrote a very important work about the formation of the class struggle, Konstitution und Klassenkampf (published posthumously in 1971). His discourse was similar to what we tried to do in Italy. It involves the discovery of the immaterial and intellectual labour that had the potential for political action, for liberation and for breaking with the total exploitation. Georg Lukàcs also played an important part in this discovery, as did Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France. In the intersection between phenomenology and Marxism we find the fabric in which our movement originates.

If you, as an intellectual, thinker, researcher, critical theorist, were to give an assignment to the future generation, what would it be?

What I see as most important, as fundamental in my life, and what I experience as unique in my life and something that connects everything and is positive, is the fact that I have always been a communist militant. Throughout my life I have never done anything, not as a philosopher nor in any of the many other professions or occupations I engaged in, not as a sociologist or sometimes even as professional politician, never have I undertaken anything that wasn’t completely driven by my communist commitment. I have always been a communist militant in everything. That is what I would like to leave to the future. I would like for communist commitment to become the central element again in people’s lives. Because the commonist militant is the salt of the earth.

Pascal Gielen is full Professor of Sociology of Art and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor-in-chief of the international book series Arts in Society. In 2016, he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. His research focuses on creative labour, the institutional context of the arts and cultural politics. Gielen has published many books  translated in English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Sonja Lavaert is professor of philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She has published on early modern philosophy (Machiavelli, Spinoza), radical contemporary philosophy (Agamben, Negri, Virno), critical theory, Italian studies and philosophy of art. She is the author of Het perspectief van de multitude (2011) and she co-edited The Dutch Legacy. Radical Thinkers of the 17th Century and the Enlightenment (2017) and Aufklärungs-Kritik und Aufklärungs-Mythen. Horkheimer und Adorno in philosophiehistorischer Perspektive (2018). Her research focuses on the philosophical representations of history, and on the genealogy of political and ethical concepts in the interdisciplinary area of philosophy, language, literature, and translation.Credit: This essay is reproduced from the forthcoming book with the kind permission of the authors Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert and publisher Valiz, titled Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real, edited by Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen, for the Antennae-Arts in Society series (Amsterdam: Valiz, September 2018), www.valiz.nl. Text licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 License.

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Furtherfield Gallery
Saturday 15 Sep until Sunday 21 Oct 2018

Private View: Friday 14 September 18:00 – 20:00 (Register)

Open Sat – Sun, 11:00 – 17:00 or by appointment
Admission Free

DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE

Transnationalisms is an exhibition exploring changes in how we think about territory, border and movement in an age of increasing digital connectivity and nationalism. Curated by James Bridle at Furtherfield Gallery from 14th September to 21st October 2018, it is part of a series of events belonging to the EU-funded State Machines project on new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless.

PHYSICAL BORDERS

‘Jus sanguinis’ or ‘right of the blood’ refers to the way Spain aligns physical and geographical bodies by giving people citizenship only if they contain Spanish blood. It is also the name of a performance and installation (2016)  by Peru-born and Spain-dwelling artist, Daniela Ortiz, who arranged a blood transfusion from a Spanish citizen while 4 months pregnant. From deep inside her, infused by liquid Spain, her baby transcends national borders and her own body becomes a complex cultural terrain. The use of blood reminds us of the real violence of immigration laws, while the video installation recalls the ease at which mortal harm can flow through media veins.

Physically traversing Europe, the exhibition arrives by way of State Machine partners Aksioma & Museum of Contemporary Art, Slovenia and Mali salon, Croatia. At Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park it occupies land straddling its own official and vernacular boundaries. Sitting within Islington, Hackney and Haringey, Finsbury Park is described as ‘superdiverse’ with over 180 languages spoken and high levels of ‘churn’ as people come and go.

Daniela Ortiz, Jus Sanguinis, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist

DIGITAL BORDERS

If Ortiz represents a radically open border, then VPN (2018) by Critical Computer Engineering Group (Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev) is about protection. The work considers how VPNs can ‘sheath’ our private (data) parts during social intercourse online. Audience members will be able to use the repurposed condom machine to select an international destination for rerouting their data and then download a completely undetectable VPN to a USB for personal use. This is the first showing of the work which was commissioned as part of an artwork open call by the State Machines partner organisations.

CULTURAL BORDERS

Journeying ‘home’ to Furtherfield – where it was made and first shown in 2017 – is video installation We Help Each Other Grow by collective They Are Here (Helen Walker & Harun Morrison). It features former Tamil refugee, Thiru Seelan, seen only as his thermal signature from a heat-sensitive camera. He motions to a past and present he has no ‘right’ to – a dance that belongs to Tamil women; a city that belongs to the blood of British people. Yet there he is, at least temporarily, warm and well in both ‘spaces’ at once.

OTHER WORKS INCLUDE

Movables (2017) is a series of images by Jeremy Hutchison which look at the fashionable world of refugee disguise design.

CNI (2017) by Raphaël Fabre is the entirely digital portrait the French government accepted as photographic proof of Fabre for an ID card.

New Unions / After Europe (2016-) by Jonas Staal is a campaign and system for a new trans-democratic union in Europe.

They Are Here, We Help Each Other Grow, 2017. Film Still from Video shot on thermal imaging camera. Photo courtesy of the artists

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

James Bridle is an artist, writer and curator and one of Wired’s ‘100 most influential people in Europe’ (2017). He is  the author of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso: 2018). He is based in London.
jamesbridle.com

Critical Computer Engineering Group is a collaboration between Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev. Their manifesto begins: “The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.”
criticalengineering.org

Raphaël Fabre works on the interference of fictions and narrative storytelling in the real world, using techniques ranging from digital 3D technologies to set decoration. Born in 1989, he lives and works in Paris.
raphaelfabre.com

Jeremy Hutchison explores with situational performance in sites of production and consumption – often collaborating with factory employees, migrant labourers, online workers – to explore unequal human relations constructed by global capital. He was recently a member of the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.
jeremyhutchison.com

Daniela Ortiz generates spaces of tension in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and gender are explored in order to critically understand structures of inclusion and exclusion in society. Daniela gives talks and participates in discussions on Europe’s migration control system and its ties to coloniality in different contexts. Born in Cusco, she lives and works in Barcelona.
daniela-ortiz.com

Jonas Staal has studied monumental art in Enschede and Boston and received his PhD for research on art and propaganda in the 21st century from the University of Leiden. His work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theatre plays, publications and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy and propaganda. He lives and works in Rotterdam.
jonasstaal.nl

They Are Here is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison (f. 2006). Their work can be read as a series of context-specific games through which they seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. They are currently based in London and on the River Lea.
theyarehere.net

ABOUT FURTHERFIELD

Furtherfield is an internationally-renowned digital arts organisation hosting exhibitions, workshops and debate for over 20 years. We collaborate locally and globally with artists, academics, organisations and the public to explore digital culture and the changing world we live in. From our unique venues in Finsbury Park we offer a range of ways for everyone to get hands on with emerging technologies and ideas about contemporary society. Our aim is to make critical digital citizens of us all. We can make our own world.

Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information

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Furtherfield Gallery
Saturday 14 Jul until Sunday 19 Aug 2018

Open Sat – Sun, 11:00 – 17:00 or by appointment – Admission Free

Would you like to monetise your social relations? Learn from hostile designs? Take part in (unwitting) data extractions in exchange for public services?

Examining the way that the boundaries between ‘play’ and ‘labour’ have become increasingly blurred, this summer, Playbour: Work, Pleasure, Survival, will transform Furtherfield Gallery into an immersive environment comprising a series of games. Offering glimpses into the gamification of all forms of life, visitors are asked to test the operations of the real-world, and, in the process, experience how forms of play and labour feed mechanisms of work, pleasure, and survival.

What it means to be a worker is expanding and, over the last decade, widening strategies of surveillance and new sites of spectatorship online have forced another evolution in what can be called ‘leisure spaces’. From the self-made celebrity of the Instafamous to the live-streaming of online gamers, many of us shop, share and produce online, 24/7. In certain sectors, the seeming convergence of play and labour means work is sold as an extension of our personalities and, as work continues to evolve and adapt to online cultures, where labour occurs, what is viewed as a product, and even, our sense of self, begins to change.

Debt: Bad Spelling, an Adult Problem, Cassie Thornton

Today, workers are asked to expand their own skills and build self-made networks to develop new avenues of work, pleasure and survival. As they do, emerging forms of industry combine the techniques and tools of game theory, psychology and data science to bring marketing, economics and interaction design to bear on the most personal of our technologies – our smartphones and our social media networks. Profiling personalities through social media use, using metrics to quantify behaviour and conditioning actions to provide rewards, have become new norms online. As a result, much of public life can be seen as part of a process of ‘capturing play in pursuit of work’.

Although these realities affect many, very little time is currently given over to thinking about the many questions that arise from the blurring between work and play in an age of increasingly data-driven technologies: How are forms of ‘playbour’ impacting our health and well-being? What forms of resistance could and should communities do in response?

To gain a deeper understanding of the answers to these questions, we worked with artists, designers, activists, sociologists and researchers in a three-day co-creation research lab in May 2018. The group engaged in artist-led experiments and playful scenarios, conducting research with fellow participants acting as ‘workers’ to generate new  areas of knowledge. This exhibition in Furtherfield Gallery is the result of this collective labour and each game simulates an experience of how techniques of gamification, automation and surveillance are applied to the everyday in the (not yet complete) capture of all forms of existence into wider systems of work.

In addition to a performance by  Steven Ounanian during the Private View, the ‘games’ that comprise this exhibition are:

• Public Toilet by Arjun Harrison-Mann & Benjamin Redgrove, which asks visitors whether the Furtherfield building should be a gallery or a toilet… and also who has the right to make this type of decision.
• Treebour by Marija Bozinovska Jones (with special thanks to Robert Gallagher) is a sound work in which three anthropomorphised ‘trees’ personify the different kinds of work trees are required to do in contemporary society.
• Feminist Economics Yoga (FEY) by Cassie Thornton, The Feminist Economics Department (FED), invites us to think about how our screen addictions connect us to the predatory workings of the economy at large.
• Hostile Environment Facility Training (HEFT) by Michael Straeubig enables visitors to create their own ‘hostile environment’, a design approach used by governments in a variety of settings – schools, banks, universities, hospitals, places of work – to make staying in this country as difficult as possible for migrants.

Lab session leads and participants: Dani Admiss, Kevin Biderman, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Ruth Catlow, Maria Dada, Robert Gallager, Beryl Graham, Miranda Hall, Arjun Harrison Mann, Maz Hemming, Sanela Jahic, Annelise Keestra, Steven Levon Ounanian, Manu Luksch, Itai Palti, Andrej Primozic, Michael Straeubig, Cassie Thornton, Cecilia Wee, Jamie Woodcock.

Curated by Dani Admiss.

For more information visit the Furtherfield site

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Its main objectives are to foster the development and recognition of emerging European Maker and Design culture by supporting makers, their mobility and circulation of their work, providing them with international opportunities and highlighting the most outstanding talent; improve the connections among makers, designers and the market, providing thus tools, strategies, guides, contents, education, events, networks in order to enable them to commercialize their creations; stimulate and develop a genuine Europe-wide programming of Maker activities in order to contribute to the development of a vibrant and diverse European Maker and Design culture that can be experienced by a broad range of audience across Europe and beyond as well as to enhance the creation of work and of financially sustainable business activities by makers and designers.

P2P Lab has the pleasure to collaborate with DDMP by organising a cultiMake event concerning the crowdsourcing of open source agricultural solutions.

Partners: Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalonia (ES), Fab City Grand Paris (FR), Pakhuis de Zwijger (NL), HappyLab (AT), Polifactory – Politecnico di Milano (IT), Machines Room (UK), P2P Lab (EL), Republica (DE), Dansk Design Center (DK), Fab lab Berlin (DE), Fab Lab Budapest (HU), Innovation Center Iceland (IS), Foreningen Maker (DK).

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ArtFarm: Since 2013, when we bought 1300 m2 of land and small stone house, Artfarm has been our international project combining art and organic agriculture on the Croatian island of Hvar.

It is situated in the Starigrad Plain (in Greek: “Hora”, in Roman: “Ager”), a UNESCO protected agricultural area, close (2km) to the fisherman village and the beaches of Vrboska.

SEE THE MAP.

Our main art activity is the “artist in residence” program, where invited artist come to Artfarm, stay there a minimum of 10 days and interact with the physical and social environment.

Our organic garden and orchard produces vegetables and fruit during the whole season from May till October.

We enjoy a special position of importance on the island, as we are the place promoting the alternative culture and at the same time staying out of the tourist industry.

In 2017 we established the “1010 Festival”. “1010” is for 10 artists (or academics) who stay on Artfarm for 10 days. We had 2 monthly events from the 1^st of May through the 6^th of October: acoustic concerts, “megaphone” lectures, performances and debates, with an audience combining local and foreign visitors.

stone festival poster

“1010 FESTIVAL” 2017 LINE-UP ARCHIVE

OMFO (German Popov)- musician, Ukraine

2 weeks residence, 4 concerts

Takako Hamano– visual artist, Japan

2 weeks residence, paintings

Nina Targan-Mouravi– visual artist, Georgia

10 days residence, performance, painting

Nova Yorke– performer, Netherlands

1 week residence, performance

Maja Vodopivec, academic, University of Leiden, Netherlands

3 weeks residence, lecture

Duro Toomato, artist, Netherlands

5 months residence, signs and installations

Marta Petrinjak, painter, musician, Croatia

3 months residence, exposition “Hora”

and 1 concert

Kingalita, singer/dancer, Hungary

5 months residence, singing lessons,

8 concerts, Hvar and Vis Islands

Otoji & Rai, music duo, violin, double bass,

Japan, 3 weeks residence, 8 concerts, Hvar

and Vis Islands

Martina Matkovic, percussionist, Croatia

2 weeks residence, 7 concerts

“Goulash Disko”, we were part of the music festival, 5 concerts in Komiza, Vis Island

“Dancing Street”, 3 concerts in Stari Grad

(co-produced with “Gallery Fantazam” and

“Music Room Paiz”).

WHAT ARE OUR PLANS FOR THE FUTURE?

To improve facilities on Artfarm:

– make a more powerful solar energy system to be able to project art movies and documentaries

– improve the walls/fence around our land to get better garden protection from wild pigs, rabbits and pheasants.

– improve sleeping facilities for the visiting artists

– build a dance floor/stage and cinema screen

– increase our budget for hosting “artists in residence” and produce “1010 Festival”.

“Mr.Fixer” services:

– develop further information/advice services to help our visitors to stay out of tourist industry and experience the island from the inside.

Start initiative to end the use of (Monsanto!) pesticides & herbicides in the Starigrad Plain:

–“Cidokor” (glyphosate, Round-up) is still used by many local people to kill grass and weeds. We plan to end its use as much as possible. One way is to offer to locals (mostly winemakers) to manually (4-6 times per year) cut the grass in their fields as substitute for using herbicides.

Produce “1010 Festival” 2018 – here new ideas for residenties (to be confirmed)

Visual art, performance, lectures:

Gerindo Kamid Kartadinata, performer and environmental activist, Netherlands

Elica Grdinic, lawyer, European Court of Human Rights, France

Stefan Halikowsky, historian, University of Swansea, UK

Judith Witteman, visual artist, Netherlands

3D street graffiti artists (in contact)

Music:

Baba Zula, music group, Turkey

Levent Guzel, percussionist, Turkey

Evgeny Suvorkin, accordionist, Russia/Belgium

Stefanos Sekeroglou, violinist, Greece

Tlazolteoti Orkestra, music group, Mexico

Gypsy band from Hungary (in contact)

Small music sub-festival, (3 days in September).

Dance workshops (tango, belly dancing).

Singing lessons (Gypsy style, Turkish traditional)

And more.

As a non-profit foundation (NGO, charity), for presenting our programs we depend on the donations of our supporters, members and sponsors.

WHAT ARE YOUR BENEFITS AS OUR DONOR?

10 Euro or more

– you can visit Artfarm, meet the artists, have a free pancake lunch (with goat cheese and/or vegetables),free drink and get informed about public events.

100 Euro or more

– You can visit Artfarm, feel at home, meet the artists, and have free drink and lunch.

– You are invited to attend all the events on Artfarm and get free drinks (audience number

is limited to maximum 50 invited visitors).

OMFO concert

– You get the music of the musicians we host.

– You receive Mr. Fixer advice to be able to stay on Hvar Island outside of the tourist industry.

– You get all the local tips and translations:

from booking accommodation to hand made maps of best private beaches & biking and hiking secrets.

– You get secret tips for local pesticide-free (organic/bio) wine and food.

– You get all of our knowledge and contacts for travel around Croatia and the Balkans.

For donating via PayPal, credit card or IBAN (specify “donation for project Artfarm Mola Blaca”) visit our website:

starwingartists.com

Questions before and/or after donating? Staying informed? To receive our program updates and reserve lunches and events? Contact us via email:

[email protected]

Our NGO foundation details:

László Kinga, Djuro Grdinic (board members/art farmers)

Stichting Starwing Artists

Overtoom 301

1054 HW Amsterdam, NL

Chamber of commerce registration number:

41214620

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Description

The blockchain is widely heralded as the new internet – another dimension in an ever-faster, ever-more-powerful interlocking of ideas, actions and values. Principally the blockchain is a ledger distributed across a large array of machines that enables digital ownership and exchange without a central administering body. Within the arts it has profound implications as both a means of organising and distributing material, and as a new subject and medium for artistic exploration.

Contributors: César Escudero Andaluz, Jaya Klara Brekke, Theodoros Chiotis, Ami Clarke, Simon Denny, The Design Informatics Research Centre (Edinburgh), Max Dovey, Mat Dryhurst, Primavera De Filippi, Peter Gomes, Elias Haase, Juhee Hahm, Max Hampshire, Kimberley ter Heerdt, Holly Herndon, Helen Kaplinsky, Paul Kolling, Elli Kuruş, Nikki Loef, Bjørn Magnhildøen, Rob Myers, Martín Nadal, Rachel O’Dwyer, Edward Picot, Paul Seidler, Hito Steyerl, Surfatial, Lina Theodorou, Pablo Velasco, Ben Vickers, Mark Waugh, Cecilia Wee, and Martin Zeilinger.

About the authors

Marc Garrett is an internet artist, writer and curator. He is co-Founder and co-Director of Furtherfield/HTTP Gallery, London, and is one of Furtherfield’s principal researchers into net art and cultural context on the internet.

Nathan Jones is a poet, curator. Currently: Reid cross-disciplinary PhD scholar in Literature and Media at Royal Holloway University of London; associate Lecturer Fine Art Liverpool John Moores; and co-director of Torque Editions a hybrid publishing project and research platform.

Ruth Catlow is a net artist, and co-Founder and co-Director of Furtherfield. She is involved in research into net art and cultural context on the internet and co-curates featured works on furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery, London.

Sam Skinner is an independent artist, researcher and curator. Recent projects include: co-curation of The New Observatory at FACT, Liverpool in collaboration with the Open Data Institute; Research Associate at Kingston School of Art; and co-director of Torque Editions.

Table of contents

• Preface Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner
• Introduction Ruth Catlow
• Documentation
  • FinBook: Literary content as digital commodity Rory Gianni⍏, Hadi Merpouya*, Dave Murray-Rust⍏, Bettina Nissen⍏, Shaune Oosthuizen⍏, Chris Speed⍏, Kate Symons**
  • Text as Market Ami Clarke
  • Plantoid Primavera De Filippi
  • Terra0 Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling, and Max Hampshire
  • Critical mining: blockchain and bitcoin in contemporary art Martín Nadal & César Escudero Andaluz
  • The Blockchain: Change everything forever Peter Gomes
  • Satoshi Oath Jaya Klara Brekke and Elias Haase
  • 01.01.20 Kimberley ter Heerdt & Nikki Loef
  • Role Play Your Way to Budgetary Blockchain Bliss Pablo Velasco
  • A Shared Timeline PWR Studio
  • Gamer Case Images Simon Denny
• Fictions
  • Flying Under A Neutral Flag Cecilia Wee
  • History of Political Operating Systems > Interview with Dr. L. Godord Elli Kuruş
  • All That Happened Surfatial
  • Bad Shibe Rob Myers and Lina Theodorou
  • Defixio Nervorum Theodoros Chiotis
  • How to Surf Juhee Hahm
• Theory
  • If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!: Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms Hito Steyerl
  • HAUNTED BY CYBERNETICS / IMMUTABILITY MANTRA Ben Vickers
  • Blockchain Poetics Rob Myers
  • Love on the Block Max Dovey
  • Collections management on the blockchain: A return to the principles of the museum Helen Kaplinsky
  • Artists Rights in the Era of the Distributed Ledger Mark Waugh
  • Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About the Blockchain* (*But Were Afraid to Ask Mel Ramsden) Martin Zeilinger
  • Does digital culture want to be free? How blockchains are transforming the economy of cultural goods Rachel O’Dwyer
  • Aphantasia – blockchain as medium for art Bjørn Magnhildøen, Noemata
  • Interview with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst Marc Garrett

Photo by Ars Electronica

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Nearly everyone knows AS220 as one of the most happening places in Providence, Rhode Island. The “AS” stands for “Artists’ Space”; 220 was the initial address of the distressed building that it originally occupied in 1985. AS220 is now an incredibly vital cultural commons that offers everything: rehearsal spaces, poetry slams, live music and dance performances. Figure drawing, affordable artist studios, a Fab Lab and a print shop. Public access to specialized art equipment, cheap apartments for struggling artists, and more.

While AS220 has all sorts of interactions with businesses, government and philanthropy, it is really an unheralded model of a commons for producing and enjoying the arts. It is financially self-sustaining, independently managed and organically connected as a co-producer with various artistic communities.

AS220’s success as an arts commons stems from its fierce vision of what authentic art should be – and its resourcefulness in acquiring three large buildings in a once-troubled section of Providence’s downtown. The buildings, consisting of more than 100,000 square feet, enables AS200 to generate its own revenue through storefront leases while providing huge amounts of affordable downtown building space to host artistic enterprises. After more than three decades, AS200, with a budget of more than $3 million and 60 employees, is a self-confident, financially secure overdog for the underdog – artists.

AS220’s ownership of downtown real estate may be the financial secret of its longevity, but it could not have survived without its deep commitment to the arts as a commons. This originated in a manifesto written by three artists, Steven Emma, Martha Dempster and Umberto Crenca, in 1982, in which they called on artists to “stop harboring false hopes and come to terms with the present deteriorating situation in the arts.” They urged resistance to all attempts by the state, philanthropy, arts agencies and award systems to control or manipulate artists. “Art has been removed from being an integral part of our society and has been relegated to mere processes which have lead to the production of dry, academic, pedantic, superficial, mechanical and mass-produced works of art devoid of all integrity, honesty and meaning….” the artists wrote. They demanded that art be “allowed to flourish unhampered because art is one of the last areas of culture where humanity defines his spiritual nature.”

Crenca, better known as “Bert,” founded AS220 shortly thereafter and is its artistic director today. He is mostly a painter, but now spends much of his time overseeing the diverse artistic enterprises hosted by AS200 and the real-estate management that sustains this rare empire of vernacular arts and culture. The organization has always been primarily a group effort, however, achieved through the talents of people like Lucie Searle, who manages all of the real estate projects, Managing Director Aaron Peterman, helpful board members, a staff of dozens, and active collaboration with the state and city governments and the business community.

Calling AS200 a nonprofit organization fails to capture its real achievement or inner logic. While it is legally chartered and managed as a nonprofit organization, its deep cultural commitment is to protect the integrity of artistic freedom and creativity. It has refused to become a supplicant desperately trying to please stuffy donors or produce preconceived notions of “what sells” in artistic markets. It realizes that its core mission is not to make money in the marketplace, satisfy foundation program officers, spur urban development or please politicians. Its goal is to help artists to be artists, and to nourish artistic communities as artistic communities.

Walk around the three AS200 buildings and the fruits of this ethic can be seen everywhere. Fascinating and fantastic artworks abound: prints, murals and paintings on the walls, music wafting through the hallways, and posters advertising upcoming exhibitions and performances. AS200 is no genteel, sanitized haven for the fine arts as some society matron might conceive of them. It is a place where both amateur and accomplished photographers, poets, dancers, painters, musicians, hip-hop artists and digital fabricators with 3D printers can be themselves. The AS220 vibe is funky, experimental, transcendent, offbeat and startling.

A conspicuous example is the colorful eighty-foot mural that adorns the side of one of AS220’s buildings. It was designed by Shepard Fairey, the street artist famous for the iconic poster used by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Fairey contributed the mural for next to nothing because of a favor that Bert had shown him years earlier when Fairey had been an unknown artist.

The commitment to local art is shown by AS220’s policy toward rock bands. In the mid-1980s, it was extremely hard for local bands playing original music to get booked at any Providence clubs. Only large, national touring acts or local bands doing cover songs could get gigs. In response, AS220 instituted a “no covers” policy requiring that any song performed in its performance spaces must be in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons license. In explaining its policy, AS220 notes, “We believe that corporate control of music hurts our culture as a whole and hinders the free development of artistic expression. The ‘blanket licensing’ scheme enforced by the major music licensing corporations….helps fund major labels that perpetuate homogenized music, marginalize independent labels, engage in pay-for-play radio and undermine musicians.”

The “no covers” policy was later carried over to a special electronic jukebox in its bar and grill that contained only original songs; no cover tunes allowed. This enabled AS200 to avoid paying any fees to performance-licensing bodies such as BMI because the jukebox doesn’t have any industry-produced music. (The jukebox was retired when the staff person who created the jukebox left AS220, leaving no one else with the skills to maintain or fix it.)

This organization’s approach to exhibition spaces is also locally minded and inclusivist. Its mission statement declares, “Exhibitions and performances in the forum will be unjuried, uncensored and open to the general public. Our facilities and services are available to all artists who need a space to exhibit or perform from traditional sources because of financial or other limitations.” The main gallery space at AS220 is routinely booked for years in advance. (But there are other gallery spaces as well.)

Several things are striking about AS220 as a cultural commons: its sheer scale, its diversity of arts activities, and its self-confidence. The place is no platform for co-branding or crypto-marketing. It does not treat people as consumers (“exit through the gift shop”), but as human beings. It doesn’t pander. These institutional traits stem from AS220’s commitment to be an enterprise for and run by artists.

Authentic art is always compelling, which helps explain why AS220 has ended up becoming a highly effective catalyst of economic development in downtown Providence. Its projects directly serve more than 90,000 people every year. Thanks to such traffic and the kinds of people attracted to AS220’s music, galleries, performances and classes, the neighborhood has improved over the years. Nearby buildings that were once beset by drug dealers and prostitutes have been renovated. A fancy hotel has moved in. Other new businesses have arisen.

Beyond its artistic integrity and inclusiveness, AS220 has flourished by showing ingenuity in acquiring and renovating buildings. “Its venture into real estate was spurred on by recognizing that it needed to own its own space if it was going to be viable and sustainable,” said David Dvorchak, communications director of AS220. After losing its lease in one building and facing rising rents at another (due in part to its own positive effects on the neighborhood), AS220 was determined to be the master of its own destiny. Its programming needs also required more space.

So in 1992 it acquired a 21,000 square foot, three-floor building on Empire Street that was almost totally abandoned, and within one year had complied with all building codes and filled all of its space with artists, including a dance company and theater. According to an AS220 history, “This was accomplished with a very limited budget of $1.2 million, tremendous community support, highly imaginative fundraising and most significantly, tons of sweat equity.”

Today the building is home to a community darkroom, twenty studios for artists, a space for youth artists, three gallery spaces, a music performance space with eight to ten events per week. AS220 hosts monthly “Geek Dinners” as a networking event for local tech leaders. It also hosts monthly sewing circles, a monthly comedy series and figure drawing sessions and panel discussions. On the street level, a bar, restaurant and barber shop lease retail space from AS220.

Over the years, the organization acquired two other mixed-use buildings and renovated them to provide space for even more artistic projects. Its real estate holdings are now worth an estimated $25 million.

It is tempting for outsiders to regard the success of AS220 as simply a story of savvy real estate investment and development. But if AS220 were market-driven, its vision would have quickly curdled into commercial, sentimental pap. The organization was fortunate to have leaders that saw its real estate assets as ways to maintain its own independent vision, unbeholden to investors, politicians eager for conventional development or imperious donors.

What a concept: empowering artists by giving them space and autonomy, and building a hosting infrastructure with real equity assets, good leadership and a commitment to commoning. The revenue from its infrastructure helps lower the overhead costs for creating challenging art – and this in turn makes it easier to build a culture of artistic authenticity. The autonomy forces artists to take responsibility for themselves, both economically and artistically. And by helping isolated artists discover their voices and develop robust peer communities, the people of Providence have acquired real alternatives to the vacuous pop entertainment that the culture industries peddle. They have a place where they can become artists themselves.

David Bollier (US) is an author, activist, blogger and scholar of the commons. He is cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group and the author of Think Like a Commoner and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, among other books.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by thagrdnr

The post Patterns of Commoning: AS220 of Providence, Rhode Island: A Commons of, by and for Artists appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Both of these modalities of the digital arts are linguistic in nature. They challenge language, and create new idioms – words, sentences, phrases, meanings – in ways that are meant to be interpreted and performed.

So it is not entirely incorrect to say that artists’ main occupation is to create performative platforms for people’s expression, and to give people new opportunities to re-create the elements of their world by interpreting the artwork (which is, after all, a symbolic representation of the essence of its times, from the artist’s point of view). Art instigates a shared performative dialogue about how we shall perceive our shared reality.

In this sense, artists are indispensable enablers for the creation of our political and cultural commons. Whether their artworks are freely shared (as happens with many digital artists, for example) or not, they continuously contribute shared fragments of collective imaginaries that ultimately constitute our cognitive and psychic commons.

The digital arts pursue this mission through two key, coexisting modalities – the creation of frameworks and platforms for expression, and the re-appropriation and transformation of existing culture. The ubiquitous availability and accessibility of digital media enable artists to produce radical communication performances with relatively low effort, rivaling the expensive, highly produced performances of corporations and governments. This simple fact explains why digital arts are able to create so many insurgent new liberated spaces that can be appropriated, accessed, shared and used as commons.

Let’s examine a few.

The Human Ecosystems project enacts a participatory and inclusive process revolving around public data and information.¹  Data about the behaviors of people in given neighborhoods – transit patterns, hotspots of creativity, commerce, crime, and so forth – are aggregated from various social networks in cities and then compiled to reveal hidden “relational ecosystems” in that city. The idea is to transform real-time digital data streams into source material for visualizing hidden patterns of human interaction. City agencies can use the data to engage communities in participatory decisionmaking and policy-shaping processes. Academics and urban planners are studying the data-based “human ecosystems” to gain new insights into urban design and cultural anthropology. Artists are developing new types of artistic interpretations and public performances about city life. Citizens, designers, researchers, entrepreneurs and public administrators participating in Human Ecosytems workshops are learning how to use this data for diverse purposes, such as the design of innovative city services and peer-to-peer business models.

One outgrowth of the Human Ecosystems project is the concept of Ubiquitous Commons. Millions of citizens are generating vast quantities of digital information via their mobile phones, web visits, public databases and more every day. There are rich new opportunites to create new types of public spaces that could function as commons. The Human Ecosystems project wants to ensure that that happens. But this requires that public datasets using social networking platforms be made freely available and accessible so that the information can be used as a data commons.

With appropriate access, artists can use the data to create visualizations of how emotions, topics and modalities of expression flow across time and geography in the city, or generate sounds which render a city’s emotional expression. Researchers can use the data to make new ethnographic or sociological insights. Citizens and public administrations can use the data to understand how to engage communities and cultures in the city, forming human networks to participate in shared decisionmaking processes. Designers can use the data to invent anything from toys² to innovative services, adding value to the knowledge and expression produced ubiquitously across the city. The interests and relations discovered on social networks can be used to initiate productive dialogues about what citizens really want from urban spaces and city government, and reveal how they actually behave. Any processes of commoning find their origin in political activism. The radical transformation of the ways in which people have learned to communicate through the Internet have brought on major changes in the very definitions of what is (and could be) a “movement” in the digital age. The Arab Spring, the 99 Percent, Occupy³ and Anonymous ⁴ – often in conjunction with the digital arts – are causing a metamorphosis in how we think about personal identity, public space, authorship and aesthetics.

Increasingly, ad hoc movements based on digital collaboration are becoming powerful creative forces in their own right, shaping how people relate to each other and express themselves to the wider society, and self-organize to challenge the state. In Italy, for example, there is a rich history of collaborations between arts and political movements in the digital era. Some of the most notable ones have invented fictitious, shared public identities as a commons-based vehicle for artistic and political commentary. An early example was Luther Blissett (later renamed Wu-Ming), a collective identity used by hundreds of cultural activists starting in 1994 for participatory writing processes and for post-dadaist political actions.⁵  “Blissett” has been the “author” of countless situationist pranks, performances and even a historical novel that sold hundreds of thousands of copies in more than ten languages.

A more recent example is RomaEuropa FakeFactory, a participatory fake cultural institution that was created in response to the stodgy, traditionalist cultural policies of Rome’s city administration in 2008. The REFF argues, “Defining what is real is an act of power. Being able to reinvent reality is an act of freedom.” Its commitment to fake, remixed, recontextualized and plagiarized art projects has made it an international movement, eventually recognized officially by governments and organizations.⁶

Serpica Naro⁷ and San Precario⁸ are two movements that protested against the politics of austerity and its role in eliminating jobs and worsening precarity. Serpica Naro is a fictitious activist fashion designer created by the San Precario and Chainworkers collectives. She is intent on subverting the fashion system’s proprietary luxury brands and marketing, and building instead “open brands” that invite mass participation and creativity. San Precario is a faux saint – the Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives – who was invented in 2004 to protest the growing use of “flexible” working arrangements without social security or other benefits. There is even a specific prayer that can be made to San Precario, which asks for paid maternity leave, protection for chain store workers and holidays for call center operators.

A final collective artistic endeavor that has mobilized dissent toward the politics of austerity, especially as it affects public education, is Anna Adamolo,⁹ a fake ministry of education and the Minister herself, Anna Adamolo. The persona has been used as a way for the Italian people to collectively express their protests against the government. One email issued by Anna Adamolo, for example, declared, “Today, we symbolically build on the Net a new Ministry, the Ministry that we all would want to have in Italy, where the voices of the temporary workers, of the students, of the teachers, of all the citizens, are finally heard.”

All three projects are focused on using fictitious public identities as ways to create shared spaces for responsibility and purpose. All are based on creating a mythological persona that can be used to organize a commons: a collaborative vehicle through which to protest and express alternative proposals and solutions. In effect, these characters are a series of meta-brands – carefully constructed cultural memes that can be accessed and used by everyone.

Again, the patterns for creating digital arts commons are minimal and direct: establish a platform for expression (in these cases, meta-brands, collective identities, fake cultural institutions that act in open-source ways) and a participatory performative dimension (a movement, its mythopoiesis, its practices, meetings, events). For example, the Serpica Naro movement has turned into a toolkit for open source fashion in the digital age, and has developed a rich archive of knowledge and models. San Precario has produced a series of collaboratively collected kits, how-tos, tutorials and surreal protest models against precarity and austerity. Anna Adamolo now hosts an archive of art performances, lessons, open courseware on multiple subjects as a form of artistic practice. It has even proposed new models for formal and informal education systems.

Digital arts often manifest themselves in surprising ways in physical territories, leading to the creation of commons. In Sicily, Italy, the Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante – the Museum of Working Informatics in Palazzolo Acreide – has created a vast collection of old computer systems that people can use both physically and remotely via the Internet. They can enjoy using the amusingly obsolete computers, learn basics of electronic and computer science, and share a piece of our history.¹⁰ The museum is a place where people can conserve, repair and preserve our heritage in digital formats and hardware, but also use the documentation, software, electrical schemes, books, manuals and media of various kinds. This place is, in fact, the only known place in which older software artifacts can function in their native environment, allowing anyone to study and understand the transformation of user interfaces, communication and collaboration functionalities, visual cultures and more.

The point of many art projects is to create new commons through the creation of archives, communication patterns and knowledge sharing. In “Sauti ya wakulima,¹¹ (The Voice of the Farmers), artist Eugenio Tisselli used a few smartphones, some old, cheap mobile phones and other low technology devices to invite farmers from the Chambezi region of Tanzania to document their agricultural practices. The community, working with the artist, then used smartphones and mobile applications to publish images and voice recordings on the Internet, creating a shared digital space that allows easy, curated access to the community’s knowledge and memories. The project has enabled the farmers to communicate with extension officers and scientific researchers in remote locations, and to develop more advanced small-scale agricultural techniques for their harsh environmental conditions. All while making, through art, a powerful act of communication and awareness.

As the previous examples demonstrate, many of the most successful patterns for the creation of commons in the digital arts deal with the creation of archives: open collections of artworks, knowledge, data, content and more. This issue is fundamental to digital cultures that care about preserving the past and avoiding a digital dark age – “a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been in an obsolete and obscure file format.”¹² By creating archival materials only in open, documented, accessible and usable formats, they greatly enhance a society’s ability to preserve digital art, culture and knowledge production for future generations.

Perhaps the most forward-thinking example is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded by tech entrepreneur Brewster Kahle to provide free public access to vast stores of digitized materials. The Internet Archive includes websites, text, audio, moving images, software and 4.4 million public-domain books.¹³ Located in San Francisco and operating through donations and collaborations with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, the Internet Archive also provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Are digital archives really commons, or just open platforms? A commons, after all, requires an active social engagement and a “space” for collaboration and mutuality built around a set of shared values and visions. And yet open platforms are also important vehicles for aggregating and sharing the most prized elements of a culture.

One digital project which does succeed in creating a space for participation around a shared set of values is HowlRound,¹⁴ a self-styled theater commons dedicated to the proposition that theater is for everyone. Instead of begging for crumbs from the formal, hierarchical, market-driven universe – while compromising their artistic vision in the process – HowlRound wanted to reinvent nonprofit theater as a commons. Its starting point is that “artists should have more say in how the American theater is run” – which, in the eyes of HowlRound commoners, is theater that is authentic, innovative, community-connected and accessible to all. Its website, video streaming, online journal, conferences and web archives are now a hub for all sorts of American community and nonprofit theater people.

This, in the end, could be the best way to describe how digital arts have built successful patterns of commoning: through artists’ sensibilities they have enacted transgressive actions which have created liberated spaces in the culture, most of the time in open defiance of intellectual property-based economies, in order to enable inclusive participation and free access and use of artworks, knowledge, information and data. The forms of commons enacted in the digital arts varies – from subversive situationist performances through institutional collaborations and everything in-between – but each reflects the active presence of shared values and ethical approaches, enabled by a shift in the perception of the possible. This creates a perception of the possibility of a “new normalcy field,” which is among the most important elements that the arts can make – a continuous redefinition of what the world is, and of what it means to live in a society.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Salvatore Iaconesi (Italy) is a robotic engineer, philosopher, artist and hacker. He teaches Digital Design and Near Future Design at La Sapienza University in Rome and at ISIA School of Design in Florence. He is the founder of Art is Open Source, an international network of researchers, artists and designers dedicated to working across arts and sciences to gain better understandings, and to expose them to the transformations of human beings and their societies with the advent of ubiquitous technologies. Iaconesi is a TED Fellow, Eisenhower Fellow and Yale World Fellow. He is also an independent expert for the European Commission in the areas of ICT [information and communications technologies], design, open data and P2P models for education and production.

Photo by Dittmeyer

The post Patterns of Commoning: Digital Arts as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.