posted
  • place: Arabianranta, Helsinki, Finland

quick notes

The N-1 event is curious — I wasn’t aware it was a pedagogic exercise to be acted out in front of (!) students at Arcada. This makes it a bit awkward with some of the invited people, though I simply jump in to the scene, aiming that for the students it would not be a business-as-usual pedagogic activity. That was hard to overcome in the lecture hall (suitably exquisite quality as is any Finnish public construct). So we oscillate in and out of the building, the lobby, outside, and so on, enjoying the cool sunshine. The students somewhat perplexed, but seemingly engaged or at least present.

Most of us live much of our lives in the ether. We have a mobile phone with us at all times with the result that we are always on and never truly alone. We have maps and geo-positioning on our phones so that we are always traceable and never truly lost. We tweet and update our Facebook status so that we often say what comes into our minds when it comes into our minds, and we are rarely truly reflective.

In all of this we are telling each other stories about what we are doing, and from this we curate stories about who we are. From all the shards and slivers that we scatter across the digiverse we are piecing together new kinds of identities – and these identities propel us in some directions and constrain us from moving in others.
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posted

The BricoReader wants You and You :: I and I

The call goes out to the brico network for the reader that Jerneja and I put together a few days ago.

Dear Bricoleurs!

In preparation for the upcoming projects and the BricoReader that we are planning for Pixelache in Helsinki in May, we are asking that folks within the Bricolabs sphere of action generate some special conversations with each other. We believe the relevant knowledge-base available here among us is of great value to share (more) widely.

The conversations, dialogues, and/or interviews that you generate may include anything that you think is relevant: for example, what issues you think define the Pixelache theme Facing North/Facing South; what is (your) theoretical approach to open infrastructures and open communities; what is your practice to bring this theory to life; and so on. These textual conversations may not necessarily form an essay, but will provide us with an array of rich material to assemble the BricoReader from. These dialogues may also include material relating to what you find most interesting/powerful/engaging about the distributed bricolabs network, how it functions, and how it affects participants and the wider communities that it serves around the globe. We are also playing with a few sub-themes for the Brico-Pixelache presence: deep resonant networks; anti-disciplinary collaboration; subjective infrastructures – autonomy vs. connectivity; the reversal of polarities; and the smell of Bricolabs. These phrases might give you some things to think and talk about as well.

To participate in this process, we would like you to start by considering who you would like to start a conversation with. We would encourage every Bricoleur to participate and especially to perhaps reach out to an unfamiliar Brico on the mailing list — imagine the power of such a set of dialogues that will then be collected and bricolaged into the BricoReader! Once you’ve got a dialogue partner, please send us yours & their names so that we might begin planning and mapping out where we can go with the Reader. At this point, there are 182 (!!!) people on the mailing list: plenty of energizing possibilities. If you are not aware of all the people on the list, it is also possible to go to:

https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/brico

and after logging in at the bottom of that page you can see see a full list of subscribers (by email address). If you need help on this let us know.

We will also list partners on this piratepad (you can add your name(s) yourself as well):

https://piratepad.net/briconversations

In addition, if any of you can think of other interesting individuals or groups to engage with but who are not on the mailing list please feel free to invite them into the conversation.

The conversations can be initiated immediately, and certainly may be conducted in any way you like — of course a text output suits us best. We see these as email or perhaps other text-chat transcripts, whatever.

To help the editing process (and the busy editors!) along we propose a formal deadline of 21 March 2013 to give us time to review and collate things. We are looking forward to your energized expressions!

kiitos/thanks/gracias/danke/takk fyrir/hvala/bedankt/obrigado/terima kasih!!

Jerneja & John