About Digital Caretaking ☲fireside☲ (Online) Talk Series
To attend Register at low-traffic announce list. In 2024 we are currently migrating webservers, the substack is a temporary thing FYI thanks for your patience \0/
What?
From 9.7 until 10.12 2024 a series of twelve short-form talks broadcast online location shared via email to interested parties shortly before commencement. The progressive, just-in-time approach to honours the ephemeral nature of adaptive, context-dependent livelihoods, emphasising flexibility and responsiveness to diverse situations.
The Shortform ☲fireside☲ talks take place against the burning backdrop of climate catastrophe, in the wake of the fourth industrial automation, and sixth species mass-extinction. This must not be mistaken for e/acc accelleration , instead, more along the lines of Sadie Plant’s social poetic theory; Tiziana Terranova’s post-autonomism (grassroots public seminars, workshops etc, artists, activists, precarious knowledge workers & the imperilled who may be still officially affiliated with universities). Events led by Autoluminescence ardently embracing confusion, paradox, and uncertainty as communicative outcomes. Poised at frontiers of digital caretaking and futures literacies to intervene in the growth logic that drives the marketplace to nurture Climate Resilience Development. The ‘Quick-and-Dirty’ mode is aptly described: “The sheer dirtiness of its signal makes it a powerful antenna, picking up on connections and information sources that tidier discussions would dismiss as pollution”, by occultxenosystems an addendum that spawned Xenofeminism and other postpatriarchal feminisms to come.
The ☲fireside☲ series features esteemed transdisciplinary researchers whose offering of hands-on approaches and home-brewed remedies, advance aesthetic techniques of locally codesigned infrastructure, spawned from computing arts savvy, sanguine tactics of tacit somatic practices, citizen-led commitment to equity in governance and making processes that acknowledge our planetary catastrophe.
Who? Curated and hosted by Nancy Mauro-Flude. The guests are a cohort of esteemed designers, artists, theorists, feminist economists, radical administrators, sandboxing soothsayers, blockchain researchers, software developers, and human rights lawyers who work at the frontiers of heritage and address the complex dynamics of neocolonialism.
The talks aim for a small but broad audience willing to engage in active listening. Avenues to make de-identified constructive critiques are provided. They provide a glimpse into permacomputing movement, autonomous webserver cooperatives, Opensource Visual Design Tools, policy analysis throughexperimental sandboxing, anti-colonial feminist fora, and data fauna. The Collapsible Project an environmental defence design education community and repository, the free software foundry of Dyne.org, among other anticolonial reading and doing practices, such as The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest.
The ☲fireside☲ talks create a space for guests, hosts, and attendees to ruminate upon the complex and intimidating issues many constituents face. They aim to raise awareness about radical alterities and acknowledge the fiscal, ecological, corporeal, and transcendental costs associated with the increasing dependencies of local economies on international markets driven by Big Tech.
This list is in no way exhaustive. The learning curve for the uninitiated is acknowledged, and the project is committed to finding appropriate ways to connect with interested constituents from underrepresented groups, underserved communities and allies of/or FLINTA.
To manage expectations, a Code of Conduct is provided for readers to consult to avoid behaviour during events that may harm participants. These protocols are constantly being developed; thus, rewriting is always an option.
Why? As we advance further into the 21st century, it is crucial to move beyond outdated imperial conventions and embrace progressive practices of codesign to foster adequate citizen-led infrastructures based on awareness care and connection rather than command and control.
In most cases, commentary is responded to asynchronously and shared with the community at a later date. Reports and/or transcriptions, of these dialogues, contribute to a Digital Caretaking Catalogue resource and collection. Additionally, the problems, and concerns explored in ☲fireside☲ assist in the codesign of a transdisciplinary Post Carbon Syllabus, where theory weaves through applied craft knowledge and hands-on workshops in autonomous computing arts, electronic scuplpture, aesthetic techniques, and longitudinal conversations around holistic planetary infrastructures igniting (ancient) future literacies of postpatriarchal worlds.
Transformative agendas and advanced aesthetic techniques provide radical counterpoints to the so-called social impact of growth-generated enterprise models; too often, efforts are proven to be inadequate token exploits entirely unrelated to the social life of the on-the-ground community being addressed. Instead, distinctive approaches such as small-scale pedagogy, informal artistic trade, experiential grassroots participation, and intergenerational craft knowledge are potent context-based methods for social cohesion, more adequately suited to future flourishing livelihoods.
How? HowHow
20-30-minute online talks. Made possible through video conference software.
The reciprocal nature of research-integrated teaching and learning is foregrounded to
provide a glimpse into the tools and mediums. It approaches that focus on alternatives to the uninformed consent strategies of FAANGz: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, corporations that arguably prey on and profit from unsuspecting users exploiting rudimentary digital literacies.
The intention is to seed the ground for interested communities and build trust through experiential methods and community-led forms of sharing. This provides an entry point for citizens to gain fluency and confidence in future literacies.
The 2024 ☲fireside☲ talks commence at the winter solstice with the waning of the Sun and follow its rebirth through the blossoming of spring to the blooming of the first School of Permacomuting Arts AC/DC+ Assembly in 2025.
This is a space where propositions can be continued through more applied, intensive hands-on workshops, activities, and classes developed to reinforce agency, pollinate, and spark meaningful actions toward citizen-crafted infrastructure and (digital) literacies, to bridge the gap between transdisciplinary researchers and local communities through in-situ engagement.
Where? A URL provided by the host gives the Registered audience access to the presentation, enabled via a videoconferencing instance and displayed on a web browser client. Before each transmission, interested parties will receive an email with further information about how to join.
In general,Autoluminescence considers the environmental impact of digital services and web infrastructure. This means there is no need for expensive hardware, proprietary software or a high-speed Internet connection. On rare occasions, the host might outline particular specs in advance.
Participants can choose to deploy one of the following web browsers: Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, Safari, or Brave. Each has particular features that appeal to individual preferences. Testing a browser is recommended, as performance depends on the computing device hardware and operating system. Quality may also vary according to specific environments and conditions. For example, the time of day or weather in remote areas can often cause interrupts.
