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

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Reposted from Shareable, Anna Bergren Miller gives us the latest from the ever-active Ubiquitous Commons crew.

The commons are in the midst of a “double transition,” write Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, the team behind projects including Art is Open Source, Human Ecosystems, and, most recently, Ubiquitous Commons. On the one hand, the resources at stake are often abundant and immaterial—think personal data generated by social media networks or activity sensors—as opposed to scarce and material—like water and grazing land. In addition, the modern world has largely shifted from a physical relational environment to a virtual one: we increasingly live online, and we connect across screens rather than through face-to-face contact.

For those of us interested in protecting and expanding the commons, this double transition (increasing material scarcity combined with increasing immaterial abundance) presents a couple of challenges, which Iaconesi and Persico initiated Ubiquitous Commons in order to address. First, said Persico, “We’re constantly producing data—a very peculiar kind of data, such as that coming from our bodies. The idea of the “Ubiquitous” [in Ubiquitous Commons] is that it is something that will affect our daily life.”

Second, there is the question of why people share data. Human Ecosystems collates and visualizes data concerning communities’ “relational ecosystems,” but such visualizations—like existing social media platforms—do not permit users to express how they would like the information they share to be used. Iaconesi uses the example of a Tweet alerting municipal leadership to poor road conditions. “Even if I explicitly wrote something for the mayor, still the mayor has to pay 50,000 Euros to get this information,” he explained.

The commons’ “double transition” involves both the nature of the resources at stake and the human environment in which they are shared. (Courtesy Ubiquitous Commons)

Ubiquitous Commons is hard to categorize. Part research institute, part relational laboratory, part activist artwork, its objectives range from building a legal, technical, and philosophical framework toolkit to allow people to dictate the future use of the data they share, to promoting policy interventions friendly to their model. Its first project is Iperconnessioni Rurali [PDF], an investigation of the application of P2P networking technology to the challenges facing rural Italian communities.

Though these communities may once have represented the ideal of the commons in terms of their basis in “spontaneous mutual care and solidarity,” today “rurality has many phases,” noted Iaconesi. A typical rural village might include lifelong residents, commuters, and immigrants—all of whom have unique skills and needs, but lack direct connection to their neighbors. Take commuters: “They find themselves in these places in which there’s land, space, and the possibility for tight human relationships,” said Iaconesi. “But they don’t know what to do with it. So they find themselves in places with enormous opportunities that they are not in any way able to use.”

Through a series of workshops held in collaboration with partners including Rural Hub, Ubiquitous Commons developed a couple of potential scenarios in which P2P networks could be used to strengthen communities and empower residents. In the first, the Festa Automatica, members of the network share data about their excess food, including expiration dates. The Festa Automatica code uses this information to generate an ideal time for a food-sharing event, and sends an email or text blast to members suggesting they arrange a potluck dinner or food exchange accordingly. The potential benefits of Festa Automatica extend not just to food providers, who can avoid waste, but to community members who might not otherwise have access to healthy offerings.

The Ubiquitous Commons model. (Courtesy Ubiquitous Commons)

The second use scenario concerns food-product certifications. With a dizzying array of certifications available, all with their own (sometimes ambiguous) standards and accountability systems, it is hard for producers and consumers alike to know what a particular label means. Members of a rural P2P network could develop their own certification processes online, leaving the responsibility for establishing trust and distributing credentials to the network technology, and providing users with a clearer idea of what their specific program means.

Iperconnessioni Rurali currently utilizes block chain technology, but Iaconesi and Persico are exploring other systems. More important than the specific technology at play is their broader project: to develop, through real-world engagement with stakeholder communities, concrete proposals for leveraging the digital revolution for the greater good. “Basically, it’s a way for people to decide how they can do things with their relational environment,” explained Persico.

Ubiquitous Commons will present Iperconnessioni Rurali at Innovation, Connect, Transform (ICT) 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal, October 20-22.

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Human Ecosystems, workshop at SESC Vila Mariana, S. Paulo

RTCM – Real Time Museum of the City , S, Paulo, SESC Vila Mariana

HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna: emotional map

Matteo Lepore, Councillor for the Digital Agenda and the Promotion of the City, states that:

“With this project we intend to concretely experience the use of big data. We have launched the new civic network in Bologna and the city wi-fi, extending the coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with free access, offering high speed connection to schools, theaters and soon to enterprises and homes. We are reaching now the European goals for 2020, with social networks at the center of our innovation policies. We are aware that the digital ecosystem is an infrastructure for development, growth and inclusion. But to make this leap, we have to learn to systematize the data we produce: with HUB, we are going in the right direction, in particular considering the transition of Bologna toward metropolitan area and the public investments to come“.

At the end of the exhibit, the collected data will be released as set of Open Data, published by the open data portal of the city.

 

HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna: visualizations

This is a major breakthrough: for the first time the relational ecosystem as of a city, as it is expressed publicly on social network by city,  becomes formally a commons secured by public institution. A process in which, as society, we can begin to question the controversial public/private/intimate space  of social network – as well as the upcoming Internet of Things scenarios.

At the present time, most individuals generate data in ways in which they don’t realize or understand, and which they cannot understand, due to the opacity of collection processes, algorithms, classifications, parameters.And individuals are, currently, the only ones who cannot fully benefit from Big Data: to organize themselves; to create meaningful, shared initiatives; to understand more about themselves and about the world around them.

This overall scenario is what we confront with with our projects. Thanks to the City of Bologna today we are moving a big step forward.

Links

HE – Human Ecosystems
www.human-ecosystems.com

“Collaborare è Bologna”
http://www.comune.bologna.it/collaborarebologna
http://www.urbancenterbologna.it/collaborare-bologna

“Human Ecosystems @Ars Electronica 2015”, on “Fastforward 2” by Motherboard, 1° episode
http://motherboard.vice.com/it/read/fastforward-ars-electronica

Human Ecosystems in S. Paulo (BR), documentary by Universidade Metodista
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEgKX-M4AOI

Human Ecosystems in New Haven (USA), documentary by YWF – Yale World Fellows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCeAHgKcHU

Credits

HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna is a project promoted by:

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Salvatore Iaconesi of Ubiquitous Commons

Over the past twenty years, there has been such a proliferation of computers, smartphones, digital devices, surveillance cameras, maps, mobile applications, sensors and much else – all of it networked through the Internet, wireless and telephone connections – that an unimaginably vast new body of personal data is being generated about us, individually and collectively.

The question is, Can we possibly control this data to serve our own desires and purposes?  Or will we be modern-day techno-peasants controlled by the neo-feudal masters on the hill, Facebook, Google and Twitter and their secret and not-so-secret partners in the US Government?Salvatore Iaconesi of Ubiquitous Commons

Finding an effective response to this worsening situation is not going to be easy, but one brave initiative is attempting to start a new conversation about how to build a new, more socially benign data order.  The Ubiquitous Commons, a project launched by Italians Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, seeks to find new technological, legal and social protocols for managing the sheer ubiquity of networked information, and for assuring us some control over our digital identities.  Their basic idea is “to promote the adoption of a new type of public space in which knowledge is a common,” which they describe as “ubiquitous commons.”

Iaconesi and Persico believe that vital public and personal information should not be controlled by large proprietary enterprises whose profit-driven activities are largely hidden from public view and accountability.  Rather, we should be able to use our own data to make our own choices and develop “ubiquitous commons” to meet our needs.

Why should Facebook and its social networking peers be able to control the authentication of our digital identities?  Why should they decide what visual and textual works shall be publicly available and archived for posterity?  Why should their business models control the types of insights that can be gleaned from “their” (proprietary) Big Data based on our information — while government, academic researchers and the general public are left in the dark?

I remember how Google crowed that its search results could make better, more timely predictions about the flu and other contagious diseases than the Centers for Disease Control.  I don’t see this type of unaccountable, god-like power over social information as so wonderful and benign, especially when lucrative business self-interests may selectively govern what gets disclosed and what is used for private strategic advantage.

At the Berlin Transmediale Festival in January, Iaconesi and Persico said:

Each instant, the data we produce is used, processed, purchased and sold in multiple ways, and it becomes the object of myriads of experiments. Only a handful of these are clearly perceivable. Most of them are completely not transparent, opaque, ungraspable. Algorithms of multiple types, distributed across multiple layers, locations, and operations, constantly process the data we produce, and the data which is produced from the processing, and so on, in a chain which becomes ever more opaque and whose effects show up on the content we see online, on the products we buy, on the services we use, on our jobs, on the ways in which we are classified in our education, work, insurances, health, relations and more.

Ubiquitous Commons aims at creating a protocol which is legal and technical/technological through which people and organizations will be able to define how they wish the data they produce to be used.

Few organizations or public figures are even talking about this quiet, undeclared political struggle, perhaps because there is no off-the-shelf answer. It must be created. But it’s important to start this discussion because the struggle over our personal data and digital identities will have profound implications for democratic self-governance. If the NSA is able to act as a kind of uber-Stasi surveillance state, in selective collaborations with data vacuums like Facebook and Google, then the very idea of citizen sovereignty in our “democracy” will degenerate even more than it already has, leaving a troubling “legitimacy void” for all institutions.

Iaconesi, Persico and their partners aim to make data streams far more accessible and intelligible by (among other things) mapping them onto physical spaces. The results of this process are often striking. Iaconesi once prepared a series of heat maps of Turin, Italy, generated by marking the location that various social networking posts originated from. Two animated maps showed the intensity of posts in Italian versus those in Arabic over a period of time, plotting the movement of the two communities. “They are two different cities,” Iaconesi noted. Another map showed each location in which a user described something that he or she would like to change about Turin. “If I was mayor, I would look at this map,” Iaconesi said.

Iaconesi and Persico have conducted workshops in Rome, São Paulo, Hong Kong, New Haven (Connecticut) and other cities around the world to help local governments, urban planners, architects, artists, and others to make better use of data that is available.

Some social networking data can be analyzed to infer and map the emotional moods of people and their locations at the time.  When such data was analyzed and plotted on a map of New Haven, home of Yale University, it showed “a reddish blotch centered on the Yale campus, a palpable impression left by term papers, lab results, and midterms” – while the “epicenter of joy” in another map was located in the nearby suburban town of Hamden.

Should Facebook be the only entity allowed to assess data flows and to use them for its own proprietary goals?  yet if city governments and ordinary people are to access to such data, we clearly need to figure out new principles and techniques for legally and technologically managing them.

It’s unclear at this stage how far the Ubiquitous Commons vision will go, but obviously one can only begin by beginning. The project describes itself as “an international research effort dedicated to understanding the transformation of data, information and knowledge in the age of ubiquitous technologies.”

Ubiquitous Commons wants to develop new “critical understandings of the social, anthropological, psychological, aesthetic, political mutations” that hyper-interconnectivity among human beings (and their digitized bodies, objects and places) is creating.  It is also dedicated to “creating tools and practices” that can help bring about “new institutional and organizational models that are based on peer-to-peer, ecosystemic governance.”

For example, why shouldn’t citizens in a city be able to use P2P systems to crowdfund a civic action or enter into a shared decisionmaking process?  Public administrators should be able to monitor real-time data feeds concerning transportation, safety, the environment and public health.  All sorts of specially crafted maps could use data to reveal where people are happier, where more crime occurs, and where certain types of social and economic activities are surging.

To advance all of these ends, Ubiquitous Commons wants to develop “legal, technological and philosophical toolkits” for understanding how data commons could work in practice. As a proof of concept, could programmers develop web browser plugins that would apply Ubiquitous Commons principles?  How should the law regard the uses of data?  Iaconesi and Persico would like to develop as set of Ubiquitous Commons protocols to help create “a real-time museum of the city,” plotting its pulsating digital life, flows of people and economic activity, social moods, community life, and more.

In short:  data for the common good, not just for private profit.   Data for self-governance and democratic choices.

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