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Sophie Toupin: The Commons, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Resistance
The Commons, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Resistance
(S. 199 – 216)

Sophie Toupin

The Commons, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Resistance

PDF, 18 Seiten

  • Commons
  • Digitale Kultur
  • Urheberrecht
  • Kunst
  • Autorschaft
  • Ästhetik

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Deutsch

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Deutsch, Englisch, Französisch

Sophie Toupin

is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Québec, Canada. Her current research examines the relationship between communication technologies and revolutionary movements in the context of liberation struggles. She was awarded a Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) postdoctoral fellowship (2020–2022) at the University of Amsterdam to explore the linkages between feminism, data and infrastructure. She is one of the three coeditors for the upcoming book The Handbook of Peer Production (Wiley, 2021).
Shusha Niederberger (Hg.), Cornelia Sollfrank (Hg.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.

 
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a ‘double character.’ They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the ‘commons.’ In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a ‘thinking tool’—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.