Winter Camp 09 Introduction by Geert Lovink (and a response by Shannon Clark via nettime):
“If we take network technologies seriously, we have to ask ourselves: What’s next after the initial excitement? What happens after we have linked up, found old classmates, become friends and even meet up? Will networking be seen as an additional loose level of social interaction or will the ties become more serious? What do networks do to our culture in the long term? Will we constantly move from one platform to the next initiative, following the global swarm? Do we really wish to carry our social network with us, wherever we go? How do you cope with Web 2.0 hype? Are the constant requests to be linked a plague, and should we see those sites as a modern telephone book or rather as something that fosters new forms of cooperation? Will we return to our busy everyday life after the fashion is over or go for a deep commitment to the virtual? As artists, researchers and cultural workers are drawn into the network paradigm, it seems pertinent to collectively inquire into what happens when networks become driving forces. How can networks maintain their critical edge while aiming for professional status? Doesn’t everyone want to get paid for their ‘free labour’?
When a network settles down, and is suddenly not so new anymore, it can be quite a challenge to maintain the level of initial activity. Should a network then transform into a so-called ‘organized network’? Organizing a network does not mean canceling spontaneity and making way for rules and hierarchy: it can provide a place for sustainable knowledge sharing and production. As Ned Rossiter argues in his book Organized Networks (2006), face-to face meetings are crucial ‘if the network is to maintain momentum, revitalize energy, consolidate old friendships and discover new ones, recast ideas, undertake further planning activities, and so on’. This event is therefore meant for those networks and (potential) network members that cry for support to gather in real life, conspire, discuss and make the necessary steps forward. Winter Camp does not have an (academic) educational or training component, even if there is a lot to learn.
The political concept of organized networks is clear: the invention of new institutional forms immanent to the logic of networks. The Winter Camp is an exploration in how to do that, what such institutions might looks like, what they might do, how they might operate in different geopolitical contexts, how they are financed, speculate and reassess what their relation is to other institutions and each other, etc. As a meta-network, the event aims to produce an overview of network strategies that hold a combinatory potential for trans-network collaborations. This is the scalar dimension of organizing networks: how can we scale and keep-up, not become introverted and not only invent and innovate but, in the end, use the network form in the implementation of changes that we envision on a society-wide level?
With the Winter Camp, the Institute of Network Cultures intends to facilitate this transformation for a dozen existing and new networks around the topic of new media, art and culture. Some have emerged within the context of the INC, such as Video Vortex and MyCreativity, others have existed beforehand (Incommunicado) or are on the verge of becoming a network (Bricolabs). The format is a mix of a conference and workshop with the emphasis on getting things done. We hope to find a balance between intense sessions of groups, plenary sessions, mid- size meetings and lots of possibilities for informal gatherings.
The Winter Camp is mainly focused on theorists, artists, producers, researchers, curators, activists and other new media experts and interested people.
Winter Camp 09 will be a week-long program of workspaces/workgroups and plenary presentations, in which 12 groups can work on specific current topics. The maximum capacity is 150 participants. Experiences with temporary media labs go back to the 1990s (for instance Hybrid WorkSpace/Documenta X and Temp Media Lab/Kiasma). The Wintercamp 09 format was inspired by the special card box architecture, built by Paco Gonzalez for the 10th edition of the Zemos98 festival in Sevilla, Spain, in March 2008. Here, unlike the Hybrid WorkSpace, where groups showed up one after the other during a three months period, in Sevilla 10 groups worked for 5 days in groups of 10 participants under the guidance of a ‘professor’ (workshop leader) on contemporary web 2.0/ new media topics, accompanied by a plenary program.
The Winter Camp is framed around parallel workshops that convene once a day for (public) lectures and debates. The outcomes will vary from code and interfaces to research proposals and manifestoes. Plenary sessions will be held during this working conference as contextualization as well as a dialogue or debate about the limits and possibilities of the networks at hand. For the moment it is not completely clear what that will be like. The program will probably end with a public session where results of the workgroups will be presented, varying from wikis to maps and interventions, and from radio stations to performances.
Crucial to the concept of the Winter Camp is the intention of ‘antagonistic encounters’. Existing and emerging networks will be challenged and interrupted by polemic contributions from outsiders, either online or in real-life. Self-referential ghettoization is the last thing that has to happen. The preparation and programming stage of this event will develop a collaborative database that adopts negation and difference as a productive principle. In this way, we begin to contour the borders of networks and in so doing establish the materiality of collaborative potentials. There is no single model for networks to become sustainable. To get all the options on the table is a first necessary step in order to move to the next step. Networks, Get Organized!
Given the constraints of participation – limited numbers – the format of the Winter Camp places an immediate organizational challenge upon networks: who participates? The issue of ‘governance’ and openness is one that each network at some stage has to address. The process of building a network of networks thus begins well before the time of the Winter Camp meeting, and will be incorporated into the discussions before, during and after the event.
Along with a great curiosity about how networks do what they do, one of our key motivations in putting this event together has been the question of institutions. Whether we like it or not, institutions are part of our daily life. Just as economic globalization has massively transformed the world on a seemingly annual basis, so too have institutions as we usually understand them – those whose foundations are built from concrete and steel, bricks and mortar – been subject to considerable change in the age of electronic networks. While many primary institutions of social and political life (the state, firms, unions, universities) have struggled to adapt to changing circumstances, they have nonetheless made recognizable and frequently substantive changes. Indeed, many have reinvented themselves as ‘networked organizations’.
Having said that, the prime focus of Winter Camp 09 is not on those established organizations and how networks are used to increase, and optimize, inter-institutional exchanges. While it could be said that such institutions have undergone a crisis – both in terms of legitimacy and ontology – it would be a serious mistake to suggest their hegemony has diminished. Counter-sites of power are needed to contest the assumption that once a dominant institution becomes networked it somehow operates in a more soft, benign mode. Network surveillance through data-mining and user-profiling is only becoming more sophisticated as a biopolitical technology of control.
At the same time, and particularly with the advent of the neoliberal state over the past 30 or so years, space has been created for new institutional players. Witness the renewed role of religious organizations in the management and provision of social services, or the rise of NGOs and community organizations. Civil society has not so much ‘withered’, as Michael Hardt once put it, but rather proliferated due, in part, to the economic logic of outsourcing.
Where, then, does all this leave the culture of networks? This, in many ways, is one of the guiding questions that has shaped the organization of this event. It seems perfectly sensible and strategic to us that the organization of networks is a process of instituting new social-technical relations that have unique and special capacities to do things in the world, to effect change and transform subjectivities. How might networks take advantage of this new institutional condition, retaining their strengths – which include the culture of free distribution and sharing – while securing (or, more likely, inventing) the possibility of real sustainability of social and economic life?
Organized networks move between informality and structure, and it is this yet unexplored terrain that Winter Camp would like to investigate. There could be events that are totally ‘structure’ free but for us that would defeat a central purpose of this meeting, namely the cross-pollination of ideas and practices across the various networks, most of whom do not know each other, and who the organizers also do not know. The study of network cultures is, as the name already indicates, the core business of the Institute of Network Cultures, the initiator and organizer of Winter Camp 09. It is in this light that we would like to gather both practical and conceptual knowledge from networks themselves, document these ideas and make them accessible to an ever-growing range of groups and individuals that have started to work under the ‘network condition’.
There are many more questions to ask, critiques to be made, and agendas to be tested. No doubt, this will be the stuff of the Winter Camp and beyond. For now, we just wish to register the connection between the culture of networks and the need for new institutional arrangements in which networks can play a vital role.” Geert Lovink
Shannon Clark: Winter Camp 09: How Would You Organize Your Network?
Geert,
The schedule and format you have outlined for WinterCamp is very much in the spirit of an Open Space (though with some modifications) and in some other ways similar to the ongoing (and very successful & widespread) BarCamp movement - I suspect from the name you chose this is not a coincidence.
I’ve organized, facilitated and otherwise helped out with now dozens of such events - a few suggestions & observations from one event organizer to another.
(I’m sending this to nettime as I hope it may help other event organizers as well)
1. More than any other single factor the absolute most important part of any event held in Open Space (or similar formats) is the invitation. Who you invite - either directly or indirectly via a more open/public invitation - and even more so the frame which you set for the event - who will be there, what will be expected at the event, what goals if any are expected after the event etc. As Nina notes, there is some inherent tension in an event focused on networks and openness which is itself somewhat private & closed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - and indeed it can be a useful tension - but it should be recognized.
2. I describe all events I facilitate as having an “ebb & flow” - the goal with any event where people are breaking up into small group discussions is to as the organizer create an overall structure and schedule such that people return from those small groups and intermingle, flow back together as a group and have the shared experiences which bind a group together (meals are excellent for this
- but likewise shared group activities and experiences).
3. I would caution you about being too rigid with the workshop breakouts - there are many roles which people play at an Open Space or BarCamp style event. One is around the formal sessions - some people run sessions and mostly participate in others. But that is not the only or even most important role. An equally important role is that of “Butterflies” who “flit” between group, perhaps spending a few minutes in one session, then shifting to another, perhaps spending many sessions in ad hoc conversations in the hallways. These people play a vital role in weaving together the group - in cross pollinating ideas, in helping connect with people who find themselves in the hallways instead of in a session.
Whenever possible I prefer to hold these types of events in a single, large, open space. (If the weather permits I love holding entire conferences outside and at least in part in motion). The key aspect of being all together in a single, large space (ideally with minimal furniture - and what furniture there is pushed out to the edges) is that it greatly facilitates people overhearing other discussions, people migrating between discourses and at a minimum having a generalized sense of what else is happening - which conversations are striking a deep chord with the group (and which are not) - and helping each individual find others at the event with shared passions.
The mistake I see countless events (including most BarCamps) make is to have lots of small rooms, scattered throughout a venue, and to have very few shared group experiences so once the event starts everyone ends up with a personalized experience - moving between rooms - but has little overall sense of what the group as a whole is experiencing of thinking about.
I would also highly recommend taking time on the first day to give everyone present a very visceral sense of who else is there - what brought them to the space, what backgrounds or perspectives they are bringing to the event.
I generally do this with a group, physical exercise - plus if the group is small enough some basic introductions.
One favorite is to pick THREE (no more and no less) broad themes related to the event.
For WinterCamp this might be “Networks. Art. Politics” (pick better/more focused ones - but ideally terms which are in tension with each other)
Then you ask the whole group to form a TRIANGLE where each person places themselves along an edge which represents what their specific interests are (i.e. if mostly Art then at that point, if equally Art & Politics then midway between those two points). The point of the exercise being threefold.
1. It forces people to choose since you don’t allow them to break the edges - so they can’t be equally interested in all three.
2. It gets people physically milling and moving about - which as a start to an Open Space/BarCamp style event is vital - it breaks people of the habit of just being passive listeners as they are all to often at most more typical conferences or events.
3. Once formed it gives people a broad perspective on the interests of the crowd PLUS an immediate chance to find fellow travelers who share specific interests (i.e the people immediately around you in the triangle have just identified themselves as sharing your exact interests).
I generally start an event with an overview of the logistics (welcoming people, pointing out where facilities are, going over the broad schedule for the day). Then I give a short background about the format, the event (sponsors/organizers etc). Then the group exercise(s). And following that the first day’s breakout sessions. I typically have a grid with eh available spaces for breakouts - and then ask people to come to the center of the group and identify themselves and the session they would like to see happen. (and then select a time for that session - typically only scheduling the first day - leaving the later days to be filled in later)
What usually happens is that other people in the group share similar or related interests - and rather than each convening a separate session usually folks agree to work together on the same session. And the schedule often shifts are people ask for the bigger spaces (or spaces with facilities they need for a session such as a projector) and to balance out the schedule etc.
This process may take some time- but it also serves as a means to introduce a large portion of the group to each other.
Then we go into the breakout sessions.
I would usually also recommend keeping any formal presentations or talks to the EDGES of the schedule - in the mornings BEFORE working sessions or in the late afternoon/evening post-dinner. This allows people to e stay in a “working session” mode for a concentrated period of time. It is, however, good to have a shared group lunch - just don’t also have a speaker at or during lunch - instead people will naturally be continuing conversations started in the workshops and in the hallways.
It is also usually a really good practice to end the day back together as a group - and to at the end of each day get a brief report to the group as a whole about the discussions & progress made in the various sessions during that day (usually to do this means asking each session to have at least someone taking some notes - on paper & perhaps on a wiki) to report back later.
Starting each day as a group and building that day’s sessions and then ending the formal part of the day with reports back to the group usually dramatically accelerates the progress of the group as a whole.
I think your schedule of evening group experiences and events is a really good contrast to the working sessions during the days - shared meals & experiences really help bind people together.
Hope this is helpful and that you have a great and highly productive event!
Shannon
Originally
from Networked_Performance
by jo
reBlogged
on Feb 17, 2009, 5:24PM
Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on February 17, 2009, 6:24pm
Posted under reblog art, reblog wikinomics
This post was written by admin on February 18, 2009
Tags: art, networks
