Netzkulturen / Basel Net Cultures

In the 1990s, a range of Basel-based activities anchored in THEswissTHING helped to spur local net cultures – such as a local node of THE THING Bulletin Board System (BBS), a website, as well as L@den, a media lab for artists and cultural producers hosting lectures and workshops. THEswissTHING and neighboring initiatives spawned the local net art and activism scene. They were driven by a culture of sharing, sought to reframe artistic practice outside the institutional art world and approached it as infrastructural labor.

A new online collection presents a series of video interviews and interview transcripts centered around these net initiatives that sprung up in Basel. The conversations took place as part of the SNSF-funded research project Sharing Knowledge in the Arts, which asks what can be learned from the 1990s net art and activism scene surrounding THEswissTHING to design novel research infrastructures in and for the arts today.

The project has two aims: a) analyzing THEswissTHING as a bottom-up initiative for sharing knowledge to understand how ethical issues of sharing were negotiated in this context and b) learning from those insights for current Open Research Data (ORD) publishing practices.

The interviews complemented archival research which focused on the personal archive of Barbara Strebel – who initiated the Basel node of THE THING, among many other things – as well as documents by others relating to neighboring initiatives.

A first set of interviews are now online, including conversations with Barbara Strebel, Annette Schindler, Felix Stalder, Catherine Walthard and Reinhard Storz. More interviews will be made accessible soon.

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🔗 You can access the interviews here.