Crafting Commons and Listening Space at Our Networks 2020

Our Networks is a conference about the past, present, and future of building our own network infrastructures. The event brings together enthusiasts, hardware and software hackers, researchers, organizers and more to collectively explore creative and critical engagements with the Internet and alternative infrastructures.

The topic this year was Growing Our Networks in Uncertain Times↔Places and I had the great opportunity to participate with two events, a roundtable discussion which we organized and moderated together with Gabrielle Benabdallah (DXARTS SoftLab collaborator and HCDE PhD student), as well as an online performance of our collective project Listening Space, with Audrey Briot.

Here’s some words about the two events and some documentation from the conference:

Crafting Commons: A round table on cybercraft networks

Craft practices rely on the exchange and transmission of techniques, technical skills, tacit and explicit knowledge about materials and methods but also on the circulation of common values and ethos, fostering shared mindsets and communities.

Many of these communities around the world are developing and passing on these technical and cultural legacies to fellow practitioners, creating cultural and intellectual commons in the same movement, by organizing autonomous conferences, camps, short residency programs, and working collaboratively bringing local and international networks together. This session proposes to bring several of these practitioners together to discuss what their practices create beyond artifacts, and how they contribute to establishing self-determined communities and to fostering commons.
Assignees: Afroditi Psarra, Gabrielle Benabdallah, Heidi Biggs, Audrey Briot, Shih Wei Chieh, Amor Muñoz, Constanza Piña, Melissa Aguilar.

Here are some screenshots from the live stream:

Shih Wei Chieh talking about the “Tribe Against Machine” camp in Taiwan

Constanza Piña and Meli Aguilar talking about the “CyborGrrrls Technofeminist Meeting” in Mexico City

Amor Muñoz talking about her work “Maquila Region 4”

Audrey Briot talking about her textile hacker collective “Data Paulette”

Heidi Biggs talking about their project “High Water Pants” which was developed at the DXARTS SoftLab

Listening Space

Listening Space is an artistic research that explores transmission ecologies as a means of perceiving the surrounding environment beyond our human abilities. Conceptually the project seeks to define transmissions ecologies as raw material for artistic expression, to understand and re-imagine in poetic means, representations of audio and images broadcasted from space. The artists are creating cyber physical systems for sensing the invisible universe that surrounds us. By using open-source tools, DIY electronics, hardware hacking and digital crafts, they aim to approach art and science and create artifacts that explore the idea of citizen science. Specifically, by focusing on electromagnetic-field (EMF) and radio frequency (RF) detection, they aim to re-claim the depth of transmission ecologies, evolving at a higher rhythm than liveness, through our environment and bodies.

Screenshot of the streaming of the Listening Space video performance at Our Networks 2020

Screenshot of the streaming of the Listening Space video performance at Our Networks 2020

The aim of this performance is to share the process of listening, intercepting and decoding satellite data, and to make this process into a participatory experience. The participants will engage with software-defined radio techniques, will learn about DIY antennas, and RF sensing. The satellite transmissions are sonic, and rhythmical so sound will be a prominent feature of the performance. Our ultimate goal is to plant the seeds on hacking telecommunication systems through diy techniques, initiate a discussion on transmission ecologies, and along the way, to create an immersive shared experience about the invisible information networks that surround us. Lastly, the recorded transmissions will be shared with the public both in a .wav and in a .png format as an archive of the lived experience, which they can further use/manipulate for other research and art practices.

Here’s the video performance we presented at the conference: