During 2015-2016 Transnational Dialogues will conduct an artistic research module on alternative economies, examining its polarities and taking into account different perspectives, geographic regions and imaginaries from China, Brazil and Europe. A team of researchers, artists and designers will confront the contradictions related to the phenomena of collaboration as a promising economic innovation of our time.
Furthermore, we will take a critical look at the new on-line empires that have embraced the networked world to manage and engage its private resources to make profit with its last corners of privacy. My car is your car, my flat, my screwdriver, my photo, my text, my data. We will expose this tendency of corporate empires longing over boarders and creating a hegemony of data softly intervening into the political and cultural domains. (ON-LINE COLONIALISM AND THE PIRACY INTO PRIVACY).
Apart from this macro-view, we intend to reach beyond the international giants that rent, lend and trend technology, space and mobility. This means to scale down and look at local, regional examples of the networked world, the crowd, its hubs and follow up the phenomena of sharing and collaborating to identify possible spaces for interventions into local social, cultural and economic arenas. (FINDING ACHILLES – METEORITES)
Moreover, we will dive into the HISTORY OF SHARING with examples from ancient, pre-capitalist times and sharpen anthropology as one of our research and action tools. INTERVIEWS AND CONVERSATIONS will identify visions for a collaborative and maker-based P2P Civilization that longs for new social contracts. Therefore, we will engage artists, philosophers, anthropologists, designers and programmers to discuss, practically envision and examine projects that illustrate the opportunities, difficulties and potentialities of alternative economies. As a result we will create a section called TOOLS FOR BOOSTERS in which we will present options and proposals for the younger generation to boost their own capacities and skills.
Our process will be made visible on-line and flow into an e-Publication, to be published in late summer 2016. This module is conducted by Robin Resch of Artoholics e.V., with the collaboration with the Fellows of Transnational Dialogues 2015-16.