The Working Group seeks to address the question of transformative education and learning within a critique of the economic, political and social dimensions of technology and development especially among the countries in the South. The Group cooperates to argue new forms of tactical education and learning programmes, challenge the dominant developmentalist ideology of literacy, and open a forum for greater discourse on the themes of people's empowerment, participation and organization.
Broad perspective: HOWTO: the will to organize
"hoping to not have bored you so far. willpower we have, we don't need to manifest it. more people is counscious, even without manifesto. we need to do and to tell people how to do. we need to focus on problems and document how to solve them. we don't need a manifesto. we need an howto. there we go with everyone bulding it up in his/her own language. there we can point out problems we all know about, there we can focus the ways out then, and i hope we won't be all staged on a hollywood movie at the end. ciao :)" jaromil (
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Broad perspective: COMMONING.
Global challenges and goals: a glocal design to educate for commoning.
The coming decade worldwide will be determined by the strained relationship between formal and informal structures and environments. A design for commoning, for living together locally in a globally connected world, is the new challenge . On a political pedagogic level there is foremost the need to redefine the balance between securities and insecurities. Feeling safe has to do with the ability to deal with un-safety and insecurity, to have a corporeal experience of agency. It has very little to do with being safe. For how long will it last? The education we aim for can be defined as creating and facilitating the intellectual, corporeal and socio-cultural temporary zones of potentialities within which insecurity is distributed on an equal level. Learning then is lifelong by default, an intricate multiple relationship that is about learning how to deal with insecurity and instability. This relationship forms the basis of all democratic action as it creates trust on a convergence of levels we humans need in order to sustain the practice of everyday life and confrontations. We start - crudely naive and simplisticly - our discussions with the assumption that this notion of distributing insecurity has been employed inadvertedly as a political principle in the Pacific Rim, in sharp contrast to the US and Europe where notions of security, control and safety as a default in business, health, have led to a deep mistrust of risktaking and employing distributing security as a political and pedagogic/didactic principle, leading to only more fear of public space and fellow citizens. Our next assumption is that we find embodied the practices and embodied processes of a new found agency of citizens in forging new balances between security/insecurity in Asia in new media centres. We then posit that it is vital for the project of commoning that we find ways of documenting what is going on, harvest a concept-scenario-prototype format from their ways of working. For that we need to find common ground, identify.
Working Group Members: Gustaff H. Iskandar, Co-Chair, West Java, Indonesia Fatima Lasay, Co-Chair, Korakora.org, Quezon City Philippines Rob van Kranenburg, Co-Chair, Virtual Platform, Amsterdam, Netherlands Roberta Alvarenga, Independent researcher, producer and founder of ARTFICIAL - International Network of Digital Culture Articulation, Catolic University of São Paulo – PUC, São Paulo, Brazil Tressa Berman, Director, BorderZone Arts, Inc., Research Fellow, Transforming Cultures, UTS, San Francisco, California, USA Clarissa Chikiamco, Program Coordinator - Ateneo Art Gallery; Initiator/Organizer - End Frame Video Art Project, Visual Pond, Manila, Philippines Nina Czegledy, Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Adjunct Professor, Concordia University, Montreal, Toronto, Canada Régine Debatty, Blogger, We-make-money-not-art, Turin, Italy Kenneth Fields, Professor, Peking University and China's Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China Deanna Herst, Department of Communication and Multimedia Design, Willem de Kooning Academy/Hogeschool Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Lynn Hughes, Hexagram Researcher, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Doyun Lee, UNESCO DigiArts Coordinator, UNESCO, Paris France Nova Paul, School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand Daniela Reimann, University of Flensburg, Department of Visual Arts, Germany / University of Art and Industrial Design Linz, Austria, Kiel, Germany Willem-Jan Renger, Dean of the Graduate School of Art, Media, Music & Technology, Utrecht School of the Arts, Hilversum, The Netherlands Trebor Scholz, Institute for Distributed Creativity, Brooklyn, New York, USA
