Rehearsing
From platforms for carbon removal to net zero proposals—infrastructure—is increasingly being positioned as essential for acting upon climate change by tech designers, governments, corporations and policy makers. However, communities transnationally are rehearsing their own proposals for—and contestations of—these infrastructural transformations. The rehearsing thread is indebted to abolitionist practices and its contributors focus on developing practices aimed at the uprooting of habits, operations and structures while interrogating the implications of their own activation (Maynard, 2022). The thread focuses on researching the technical political scenes (and their design) that will inevitably emerge with climate change as it intensifies its hold on society, and on our economies. Such rehearsals take the form of grounded speculations, often involving digital media and practices that model modes of transformation through prototypes, toolkits, as well as workshops and events. Working together with organisers, translocal community groups, we generate actions and campaigns focus on building alternatives through creating scenes to commune within and to collectively practice, learn and revise from. Through critical practice and collective action we seek to understand how infrastructural oppression shapes lives– focusing on approaches to rehearse a different social order into being.
Documenting
Documenting carries the promise of evidence, comprehensiveness, realness, and fact; it cleaves time, space and social relations, and visually, materially generates (knowledge of) the world (Azoulay, 2019). Yet, documenting also has a history of de-emphasizing, obscuring, and erasing that is ultimately baked into the technologies and media it relies on, from colonial archives and magnetic tapes to databases and cutting-edge machine learning systems. The documenting thread is geared towards deconstructing documentary media and aims at developing aesthetic vocabularies that challenge their contemporary visual regimes. What are modes of documenting and types of data that preserve the integrity of the subject while exposing the framing and rendering of supposedly neutral representations? How can we leverage absences, preserve gaps, and work around non-disclosures while simultaneously situating the documenter? How do we expand the possibility of collective action through positioning the intimate, diasporic, decentralized in opposition to mainstreamed visions and colonial cartographies, with the understanding that the distant “there” is present in the immediate “here”?
Publishing
The publishing thread refers to the process of creating publics. This process is not merely distributive, but social and political. It prompts us to consider who we publish for, and how we do it. How do we share knowledge? What kind of context do we create for others to interact with our research? How can we provide means to create, control and maintain this context by the public? We articulate and discuss artistic and activist approaches that have been producing solidary and transversal strategies to rework the processes, protocols, and infrastructures of publishing encompassing design, media, technology, law, politics, and economy. We develop practices and provisional infrastructures, designed to support and nurture the publics-we-need.