Index
Authors
  • auf facebook teilen
  • auf twitter teilen
  • Social Mail
  • print this page

Collective authorship

Let’s First Get Things Done!

The Darmstadt Delegation

How can we retell narratives of social justice activism and struggles for just technologies in a way that they converge rather than remain separate? What stories of collective authorship can we produce in those »sneaky moments?« For the Darmstadt Delegation, the short workshop at »(Re-)Constructing Authorship« symposium was an occasion to discuss what design artifacts, computational tools, and language devices are available in moments of crisis. The workshop functioned as a prism of our continuous work on the divisions of labor and technopolitical practices of delegation that occur in times of crisis.1 The graph is a snapshot that shows the intersections between the workshop discussion and a vocabulary built over time between members of the Darmstadt Delegation.

For the workshop, we asked participants to propose relevant anecdotes for collective analysis. Using »time,« »separation,« and »labor« as orientation devices, we divided ourselves into three groups. »Time« (red font) was used to look at those sneaky moments as a situation of urgency and intensity. The group discussing »separation« (red border) focused on processes of fragmentation happening at those moments. Through the lens of »labor« (pink background), we could zoom in on the way power relations are reinforced at such moments.

This labyrinthine graph is not a data visualization, but a thinking device. It is a playful text2 that a number of agents can not only read, but also co-write and execute. Lines, colors, and contours act as a semiotic gesturing of thought, generating multiple promiscuous concepts. The image was made with the help of Graphviz, short for Graph Visualization Software3. It distributes items diagrammatically and automatically over a surface, attempting to minimize the amount of crossings and scaling to fit. The graph mediates a »sneaky« thinking that keeps on changing position, intentionally reorients the conversation, directs the reader, and willingly loses the stream of recognizable, hegemonic, artificial, and collective consciousness.

Merken