Introduction-Figuring-Things

Introduction

First,


Then…

Repeat.

Collecting and circulating workshop scripts


Hackers & Designers (ed. Anja Groten)

Compress your files. Pick a story. Form a circle. Find yourself a spot on the spreadsheet. Write an anecdote. Run the script. Download the zip. Continue the thread. Install the package. Go on a stroll. Follow each other. Slowly. Like a worm. Rename the repository. Return. Close your eyes. Take turns. Repeat. Come prepared. Nothing to prepare. No prior knowledge required. Be kind. Don't assume. Scoop the mud. Pick a time. Wash your hands. Watch. Swap. Strip the wires. Connect. Take your time. Rearrange. Share the link. Go to line 42. Make a copy. Be patient.

This publication draws together self-published and unpublished workshop scripts that evolved in and around the collective ecosystem of Hackers & Designers. H&D has been organizing workshops since 2013 and along the way established social-technical affinities that are both loose and stable, temporary and ongoing. We met and befriended many practitioners and sister organizations since, and got acquainted with manifold, peculiar pedagogic formats – experimental approaches to working, learning and being together. This publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.

Situated between documentation and call for action, the workshop scripts presented here are companions to self-organized learning situations. They articulate and materialize aspects of such practice that cannot always be easily explained through existing frameworks. Contributions to this book document and reflect on self-organized learning situations that spontaneously assemble practitioners from various domains, diffuse disciplinary boundaries, blurring distinctions between learner and teacher, user and maker, product and process, friendships and work relations. They have in common that they seek affiliations beyond predetermined domains and bring together various vocabularies and methods all at once.

Documentation is rare, always incomplete, and it is therefore difficult to reconstruct what actually happens during such temporary collective learning communities. A challenge that also the art historian Heike Roms addresses in the conversation about 'Workshop Histories and Practices', creating a wider historical scope for some of the questions addressed in this publication. In her work Roms is interested in the history of artist initiatives that reformed art education through self-organized educational experiments in the 1960s and 1970s in the UK. Artists and educators organized study-groups for teachers and students in their private homes. Such evening classes became a kind of parallel institution, centered around exercises and public sharing of artistic processes.

Roms points out the difficulty of conducting research about such initiatives, as they were usually not well documented. The emphasis of such practices was on the momentary collective experience, and not so much on what was being produced at the end. There might be some remaining notes or printed materials, such as announcements, flyers, posters and pamphlets that hint at the character and content of the activity. Sometimes she found some prompts, a class outline or a score. However, in what ways such prompts were perceived, enacted, and iterated on, is difficult to reconstruct.

This publication addresses this challenge by drawing together workshop-based practices as a form of inquiry and by paying attention to the practice of (re)writing, (re)activating, documenting and reflecting on 'workshop scripts'. This is an attempt to show and discuss how workshops and workshop scripts shape, and in turn are shaped by the various environments they pass through. As a collection that holds various relational and iterative documents, it can therefore not be considered a product or example of one specific kind of practice. The practices it draws together are site, context, and time specific, never complete, always ongoing, and so are their forms of expressions.

Moving through manifold contexts (from institutional to grassroots informal) 
a collective as H&D is constantly in-the-making, and along the way, we develop "terms of transition" – socio-technical conducts that help us navigate, and 'stay in touch' in uncertain times. Workshop scripts are traces of such an attempt. They are ephemeral documents that may be written by hand or take shape on open source spreadsheets and notepads, Git repositories, Wiki's and mailing lists. These documents are brought into conversation and into circulation and as such reveal something about the ways collective practices weave together a range of places, legacies, objects and people across practices and disciplines, timelines and geographies. They are pragmatic, as well as imaginative, capture approaches, techniques and atmospheres that evolve from within specific communities and practices, all the while holding together the chaosmos of collective self-organization.


For instance, the workshop script 'ChattyPub', gives instructions on how to 'run' ChattyPub as a workshop AND as a platform for discussion AND as a publishing tool that explores a decentralized process of designing a publication, AND as an organizational open source collaboration software. The script does not solely document an instantaneous workshop situation but explores the intersections of workshop/tool/platform/documentation/distribution. The script is pragmatic and invites others to take it on and run with, all the while accounting for its entanglements with a specific socio-technical context. 

As situation-specific and context-sensitive artifacts, workshop scripts take manifold shapes and roles in this publication. Some derived from the immediate or wider context of H&D and its members, some are historical examples, some are fiction. They are accompanied by, or enmeshed in anecdotes, essays, graphic novels, speculative how-to's, reflexive conversations, that activate as well as situate them within the respective communities and practices. 
 This eclectic collection of workshop scripts reflects the continued effort of building collective ties through documentation, sharing practice with each other, paying attention to the details. You won’t find a precise definition of what a workshop script is. Instead you will encounter different ways workshop scripts are understood, materialized and put into practice in various contexts. A workshop script may be concise or expansive, it may include instructions and install manuals, code snippets, timetables, readme's, it may also include context-specific, personal and narrative aspects.

This publication attempts to approach these scripts and the practices they involve, not as products of linear or reproducible processes, but as resulting from and implied in particular socio-economic, socio-technical conditions. As such, the publication resists a generalizing approach to the reproduction of these scripts. When possible the initial appearance of the scripts, their format and layout are left intact, forgoing the impression of a blueprint. Thus, the contributions may require some commitment, some attunement and 'getting into'. 
 The idea for publishing these situated documents and their stories derived from the frustration and the joy of working and being together while negotiating unstable times and conditions, paying critical attention to the fleeting character of formats of encounter, as much as the continuous effort to stay in touch with those who we encounter. The scripts are never finished, always requiring more work. In some ways this publication can be considered a scriptothek. It is a script collection that continues collecting. The script + othek contains 'bibliotheek.' In German and Dutch language the Bibliothek/bibliotheek is a place of careful collecting, deciphering, making available and preserving the documents it holds and handles. It is often through the work and personal investment of the Bibliothekar*in, that such a place and the documents it holds are activated, and brought into circulation.

My approach as an editor is inspired by that of the Bibliothekar*in. Similarly it is also through personal, to some extent subjective affinities that I collect, decipher, preserve and circulate the stories intertwined with the documents this Scriptothek holds. It is rooted in – and energized by a sort of distributed locality. For instance the workshop script "A Case of Mistaken Identity" by the London-based graphic design collective Åbäke has been sitting in a pile of pedagogical documents since I received it as a workshop participant in 2010. It has been activated throughout the years, in implicit and explicit ways, and informed my personal appreciation for collective work in and outside art and design education. As you will read in the email conversation with Åbäke, my request to republish the document in this context unraveled an array of new exchanges, tasks, and prompts.

Thus, besides representing or giving visibility to specific documents and practices, publishing this eclectic collection in and of itself became a generative, ongoing and to some extent uncontrollable collective praxis. The scripts included in this collection are time stamped. They had (or will have) a moment, a place, people that activate them. Simultaneously, by entering this collection they also create new correlations and future outlooks. The featured documents and practices are iterative and ongoing yet not 'off-the shelf', not to be executed and re-used in any context. They each come with their own terms of transition.

Each contribution negotiated specific terms in order to enter this book, terms of activation, contextualization, adjustment, reconsideration. Be it through specific licenses that were added or even by being taken out of the public domain entirely. For instance, I invited the makers of the Not For ANY licensing toolkit to contribute some of their exercises to this publication. The Not For ANY toolkit invited "collective engagement with open licenses from a (techno)feminist perspective in a playful and embodied way [...]" and included "a series of exercises to do this with." Yet, my invitation led the toolkit to be taken offline. Instead the initial page serves now as a redirect to other groups and practices who have been more intensively continuing and complexifying the conversation around open licensing. Thus the editorial process set into motion new considerations about the conditions for further sharing (or not).

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 Clustering ====


As a hand-hold to the reader the contributions are organized into five clusters: Setting Conditions, Prompts, How-tos, Distributed Curricula, and Active Bibliographies. While the contributions are organized according to these clusters and appear in a linear order, they are also intertwined in multiple ways, and resists a linear narrative (forward-moving progressing, improving, innovating). Thus, the reader is invited to be on the look-out for other, multiple, and parallel connections and navigate the contributions idiosyncratically, non-linearly, in a zigzag, from back to front.

The cluster Setting Conditions pays attention to the specificity of self-organized collective learning environments, their site and context specific vocabularies and social-technical conduct.

The contribution "Open Source Parenting" by Naomi Walker and Erin Gatz of Prototype Pittsburgh, takes a "first things first" approach and attends to the conditions that need to be in place before being able to create or engage in any form of learning community. In their conversation Erin and Naomi reflect on how Black women in Pittsburgh are creating a better future for themselves and how allies can support them in this work.

The 'Platframe Postscript' (Anja Groten and Karl Moubarak) reflects on the collective process of building an online workshop environment that converges various tools and practices in a manner that sustains their 'contours.' Throughout the process of imagining, building and activating this digital infrastructure, the edgy term 'platframe' reminded the collaborators that this online environment we are building together consists of many parts, which do not necessarily blend together nor are they experienced as seamless.

The project WIN WIN by James Bryan Graves and Nienke Huitenga-Broeren concretely and imaginatively explores conditions in which less polarized online debate is possible by proposing a consensus-based algorithm that mediates controversial discussion and collective decision making. Angela Jerardi furthermore contextualizes consensus-decision making models and practices historically and in relation to contemporary activist communities. 
In 'Re-, and Undefinining Tools' the Feminist Search Tools (FST) workgroup reflects on the slow collective process of building, narrating and testing an ongoingly evolving library search tool, through various workshops, meetups, in various contexts and different constellations. This non-conclusive process creates a condition in which various context-specific definitions of tools can be expressed, as well as criteria for usefulness or usability of such tools. 
 In the following contribution Qianxun Chen sets new conditions for the FST conversation. The generative textual system 'Mycelines' brings to the fore recurring terminology and formulations that evolved from this particular collective reflection of a tool-building process.

The cluster Prompts inhabits concise propositions. Prompts can be playful provocations, invitations to reconsider, to change direction, a proposal to approach something familiar differently. The prompts of the Relearning Food script challenge participants to pay attention to the routes produced to reach our supermarkets and eventually our plates. Their prompt is to reconsider grocery habits based on geography and distances. The contribution "Across Distance and Difference" takes into consideration the changing economic and material realities of Mio Koijma and Hanna Müller who formulate small assignments for each other as an attempt to structure and sustain their collaboration in times and conditions that seem to work against that effort.

The prompts of the Spreadsheet Routines (Anja Groten and Karl Moubarak) as well as the Etherpad roleplay (Juliette Lizotte), both utilize in playful manner open source collaborative writing and editing tools, which serve as workshop sites, weaving together prompt, method and execution into an evolving collective techno-social narrative.

Sandy Richter reflects on an experience of participating in a workshop during the H&D Summer Academy 2021, during which it was not immediately evident what is the prompt, who is the host, who is the participant, observer/listener. Through her reflection the prompt of the workshop host Gabriel Fontana, is slowly unraveling.

In her essay Untitling Siwar Kraytem, substitutes short anecdotes around the subject and practice of naming, with a prompt as an opening to trigger thought and activate discussion around the politics of naming.

The contributions collected within the cluster How-to explore the tension field between the pragmatism of workshop scripts on the one hand and the imaginative, fictional aspects at work in such documents on the other. The contribution by Julia Bee and Gerko Egert offers a generous and comprehensive backdrop to the format and role of the how-to as it is explored in art, art education, and activism. They draw on several concrete examples of how-to's such as "The perfect robbery" by Juli Reinartz and Tea Tupajic, "Give and Take" by the Social Muscle Club, "Conceptual Speed Dating" by Brian Massumi and "Bodystrike" by the Feminist Health Care Research Group. These prompts derive from a compendium of how-to's – the publication Experimente Lernen, Techniken Tauschen (ed. Bee, Egert) and the accompanying platform Nocturne. According to Gerko and Julia, "the logic of speculative pragmatism (Manning/Massumi 2014) allows us to think of techniques not as something one needs to earn, or learns to master, but as a way to put into practice speculation in the midst of an actual situation".
 Similarly, contributions such as Mz* Baltazar's "Mud-batteries", Juliette Lizottes "The Saga of the Button" are also rooted in actual situations and induce practical instruction with reflexivity, and story-telling. Juliette Lizotte retells the eventful story of creating a seemingly straightforward interactive installation. The saga includes misunderstandings, pitfalls and detours of working collaboratively, negotiating diverging expectations, and techno-social dependencies. Stefanie Wuschitz's graphic novel furthermore tells the history of the magazine Api Kartini that evolved from the Indonesian Women's movement GERWANI. The Api Kartini zines focussed on publishing and disseminating practical knowledge for Indonesian women in the 1950s and 60s around health, repair, fashion, self-defense, negotiating better work conditions, but also contain elements of storytelling and poetry, and imagine alternative futures for women in Indonesia at the time.

The contribution "Display(ing)" by fanfare discusses the way a workshop script can be induced in an object. Through its material affordances the modular display system designed by Freja Kir and Lotte van de Hoef carries its own script and has been enmeshed in an ongoingly morphing collective practice of fanfare traveling with the display since 2014.

The scripts and accompanying reflections collected in the cluster Distributed Curricula address aspects of time and duration, be it through timed exercises, through expressing a certain intentionality for continuation, longer-term engagement, or by paying attention to and taking as a starting point what is already there, the prevailing collective condition.

Giselle Jhunjhnuwal reflects on the workshop Phylomon that catered to making and playing a cooperative game informed by local ecosystems. It addresses questions of longevity through the cooperative game mechanisms as well as the subject of building sustainable collective ecosystems, durable ways of co-existing on planet earth.

The starting point for the workshop assignment by the collective Åbäke was the condition that students were expected to work on individual projects. The workshop prompt – to swap these projects for a fixed amount of time – on the one hand acknowledged a certain learning culture that was already present, and on the other hand gave participants the permission to break with the prevailing structure of individualized education. The simple prompt had a long lasting effect on student's research trajectories and has been reactivated in various contexts.

The conversation with designer, coder and cook Sarah Garcin takes as a starting point one particular workshop instance and its many residues within manifold workshop situations that followed. The Intergenerational Solarpunk workshop script by Loes Bogers, and Pernilla Manjula Philip reflects on a continued exchange and multi-local process of developing a workshop in collaboration with two sister organizations Mz* Balthazar's lab and Prototype Pittsburgh. While departing from the shared goal of developing intergenerational learning formats about and around sustainable technologies, the evolving workshop scripts took shape and reshaped according to their respective local communities.

The ====== wiki reflections ====== by Jessica Wexleer and Yasmin Khan look back and toward the future, discussing the ways a janky platform – the Workshop Project Wiki (WPW) – built by H&D (André Fincato and Anja Groten) shapes a learning environment for design educators. The very condition of the platform and its syntax not being familiar to any of the workshop participants transformed the intergenerational group of workshop participants into peers. After several iterations of the FREE educators workshop, the Wiki remains the central point of publishing prompts, documenting outcomes, editing a growing glossary and planning future workshop iterations.

Contributions gathered under the categories Active Bibliographies put forward careful selections of resources, generous catalogs, narrated reference lists, tipps and tricks. They are active bibliographies because they derive from urgency and propose a shift. The conversation with Heike Roms became an active bibliography through a shared urge for more references around past and present ephemeral workshop-based practices. During the conversation we refer to various resources and practices

Petra Eros reflects on her experience of participating in the workshop + Rad I O by Mz* Baltazar’s Lab, which was further developed and hosted during the H&D Summer Academy in Amsterdam in 2021. She connects her workshop experience and the curiosities it sparked to various other initiatives with a stake in radio making, and took her contribution as an opportunity to engage in an exchange with one of the. The interview with Good Times Bad Times community radio is published as part of her contribution. Loes Bogers furthermore curated, edited and commented on an array of resources taking as a starting point the question how we can resist compliance with the unsustainable status quo of digital computing and electronics? The resources she draws together are accompanied by short personal reviews, followed by short prompts, that translate some of the concepts proposed into simple practical exercises. This resourceful and active resource list evolved along with the Solarpunk workshop development trajectory.

Lastly, the conversation with Gabriel Fontana took place while sifting through a pile of workshop scripts. Encountering these workshop scripts together, and explaining what they meant to us, the activity of sifting through the pile, activated personal workshop anecdotes, considerations that went into specific workshops and their scripts, their different moments of activation and iterations.