18:30-19:45    PUBLIC KEYNOTE sensing dissensus

Femke Snelting & Eva Weinmayr

Venue: The Glasshouse, HDK-Valand, in the courtyard of Vasagatan 50, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Attendance is free, booking recommended. (Followed by reception).

This collaborative artistic research project explores potential strategies of dissemination that acknowledge the tensions and overlaps between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access. Invested in collective art and knowledge practices, we are concerned with how the current drive to openness in dissemination policies might overlook relational aspects. How can we develop non-universalist policies, agreements, frameworks, licences that consider that there might be ethical reasons to refrain from release and re-use? 

In this keynote we will map a series of proposals which make conditions for re-use explicit. We will look at a set of experimental and provocative Open Content licences, such as the Decolonial media licence, the Non-white-hetero-male licence or the Consumer dilemma license, proposals that are sometimes ad-hoc and punk, sometimes more structural attempts to critique, re-orient and reflect upon conventional modes of sharing content. Lastly, we will ask, is there a way to make the conditions for re-use explicit without relying on the law?  How would a courageous and careful politics of sharing and re-use look like? With courageous we mean a politics that considers entangled notions of authorship; that takes power differences into account and that “open” means different things in different contexts. 

This research is funded by the Swedish Research Council, and working in partnership with Constant Association of Arts and Media, Brussels, and the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University.

BIOS

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, feminisms, and Free Software. In various constellations, she works on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud.

With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard, she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice and para-academic gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists that creates spaces for articulating what computational infrastructures in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication results from a collective disobedient research project which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

In the research project Ecologies of Dissemination ​​​​​​ she develops, together with Eva Weinmayr, feminist and decolonial approaches to Open Access.  Until 2021, she was responsible for artistic direction of Constant, an association for art and media based in Brussels. Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts.

Femke regurlarly teaches at New Performative Practices (Stockholm University of the Arts) and supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht). She also contributes to Nubo, a cooperative which provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services.

Eva Weinmayr’s collaborative practice is grounded in contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis. In 2020 she published her doctoral thesis, titled Noun to Verb, on a MediaWiki. This research is concerned with the micropolitics of publishing from an intersectional, feminist perspective. (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, SE)

As interims chair of faculty Art and Education at Munich Art Academy (2022-23) she co-initiated together with students kritilab, an open source platform for discrimination-critical teaching in the arts. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” inspired by US activist, teacher and theorist bell hooks (with erg, Brussels, BE).

As part of Ecologies of Dissemination (HDK-Valand, 2023-24) she is currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK). Ecologies of Dissemination​​​​​​, a collaboration with artist Femke Snelting, seeks strategies for dissemination and a politics of re-use that acknowledge the tensions between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access. More specificly, they explore in which way the current drive drive to universal access policies might overlook relational aspects.

Recent artistic research-based projects include “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22, with Lucie Kolb), “Library of Inclusions and Omissions” (2016-20), “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), AND Publishing (2010-ongoing, with Rosalie Schweiker).