by Bas Bergervoet and Marijke Tiemensma for the NMDC = New Media & Digital Culture, a Master program at Utrecht University. Originally published online at mtschaefer.net
http://www.vimeo.com/10461578

by Juliana Brunello

Are you a Wikipedian yourself? If yes: Have you contributed to any Wikipedia articles? Which one(s)?
No, I have never contributed to any of the Wikipedia articles. For a while I was working on a text for an article on cognitive justice, but I haven't finished it yet.

You have written about cognitive justice, meaning that all kinds of knowledge should be equally valid. In this sense, do you believe that Wikipedia is biased?
Wikipedia is as biased as the people and technology who make it. Wikipedia is a materialisation of knowledge, as any other database or archive - I hope to say more about that in my presentation. The question of bias is really a question about any claim - including Wikipedia's - to a neutral perspective. Do I think that there is such a thing as a 'Neutral Point of View' or that we can speak of neutral technology? No. In that sense all technology designs are biased. Recognizing that there is bias, and working with it, is the first step towards cognitive justice.
We can work on designs that allow us to keep differences visible. Wikipedia does that in a way, but often one needs to go into the history of a page to see if there were other understandings. In that sense we can describe Wikipedia as a palimpsest (put simply, a place or artifact with a variety of layers). In an Wikipedia article we only see the top layer, a kind of consensus layer, in which all the underlying layers are implied. The challenge is to make the underlying layers more visible.
In the case of Wikipedia and our diversity of knowledges, I am more inspired by the concept of contact zone. I have described contact zones as third spaces in which we translate, meet, clash, connect, co-constitute, and intra-act, establishing relationships based on responsibility and (agonistic) respect. In this way a contact zone is a space in which we question any order coming from above. What I hope CPOV will do, is to question the ordering and othering by Wikipedia.
Cognitive justice is for me about different ways of knowing the world and treating these knowledges equally. Establishing the validity of knowledge, in particular what methods, rules, processes or apparatuses we use to say something about what is valid or not, is an ethical and political project. We should not leave that to a Science that pretends to stand outside the world we seek to understand. Cognitive justice is about located, accountable positions from which we know. Cognitive justice is thus not about being tolerant towards other ways of knowing the world, but about engaging with the ontologies underlying these different ways of knowing the world. The lack of cognitive justice results in violence: violence in the form of being indifferent to difference and in the denial of the ethical.

Can Wikipedia be improved in terms of equality? If yes: How?
Yes. Let's start by understanding Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia of a particular form of (local) knowledge which has gained global dominance. The design of Wikipedia itself is producing a new iteration of this local knowledge for global use in the manner in which it organises knowledge. We can look at projects related to Wikipedia. We need to look in particular to Wikipedia practices and the wider Wikipedia ecologies. I think we should understand the CPOV as a kind of mapping of these practices and ecologies, in which alternatives become visible and interventions possible. Can we re-design Wikipedia to become a contact zone? In my presentation I will present an example of what I call a contact zone design. In such a design the knowers decide how their knowledge will be organised and presented. I don't know if Wikipedia is open for the radical change such a design implies.

by Juliana Brunello

I have been running some interviews with the speakers from the conference and posting it on our blog. I was going to make only individual interviews, but by researching about the works from Patrick Lichty, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kidall, I saw a connection and thought it would be interesting to make a common interview with the three of them.

I believe most people think of art as something 'mona-lisish'. So, can you explain to me as an artist-layman, why the project 'Wikipedia Art' is called art?
Patrick: Here's a good metaphor. Wikipedia Art ist to art as was Duchamp's LHOOQ to the Mona Lisa. The meterialist, antiquatioan view of art is certainly valid, but what is it to take conceptual art into a user-driven milieu like Wikipedia, and then what is it to take it tactical by leveraging the reaction in order to bring attention to its cutlural practices? This is especially important as Wikipedia is positioning itself to supercede institutions like the OED and Encyclopedia Brittanica, when it is closed to Encyclopedia Dramatica...
Nathaniel: I prefer to think of Art as "Research and Development for Humanity" (I'm stealing this line from contemporary digital artist, Zach Lieberman). Artists no longer simply make images, they make discourse - they ask us not only to "look," but to "look again," to re-examine. For me, Art and Philosophy bookend all of culture. This "work" that is a "work of art" asks us to look again at epistemology, power, and information, and how they relate to each other. It does so on both a micro level - evidenced by the behavior of Wikipedia editors all the way through to the figure head and his lawyer - and on a macro level - speaking back to how people relate to information online.
Scott: Contemporary art projects in the last several decades have increasingly looked at systems and structures of power, such that the definition of "art" has expanded to mean things that are not only art objects, but ephemera, documentation, text itself, concepts and much more both in and outside of the gallery. Wikipedia Art could be said to derive from the post-minimalism period expanding upon art ideas of Kosuth, Barry, Smithson and many more. In the same way that "Land Art" was an escape from the gallery and manipulating space itself, Wikipedia Art works with an information landscape, manipulating elements that comprise much of our daily existence.

What were the underlying motives for launching the Wikipedia Art project?
Nathaniel: I'd like to point you to a few links to answer this question, and you can feel free to cite/quote as you see fit.

• http://wikipediaart.org/
• http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/02/wikipedia-art-virtual-fireside-chat.html
• http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2009/04/art-space-talk-scott-kildall-and.html

Scott: Same links as Nathaniel. It's all in the original Fireside chat interview.
Patrick: I'll let Nathaniel and Scott fuield this one, but my understanding it was that of a bit of an "exquisite Corpse" project on Wikipedia, but by the time I came on as a cohort, I felt that it had become something that could make visible the internal structures of Wikipedia and show it's cultural specifficiies.

What can be 'read between the lines' in this particular piece of art?
Nathaniel: Actually, we were quite forward about our intentions - what the project is and does - and it was more successful than we ever imagined it would be. Our paper goes into more detail than we ever have before, but there isn't a need to read "between the lines" - it's all there, and cited!
Scott: We were very careful to be transparent about our motives behind the piece. Between-the-lines, were the various responses: in blogs, comments, print publications, all resulting in what the piece "is". We wanted to emphasize the collaborative process involved in Wikipedia Art and that this artwork is comprised of all of the discourse surrounding it.
Patrick: That Sometimes a work of art changes from its initial intention; that properly contextualized, a work of art can have a great deal of impact.

Can one learn something from it?
Patrick: Yes. This is self-evident.
Nathaniel: The most important thing this work did, in my opinion, was bring to the fore how information and power influence one another, how people-powered democracy still breeds hierarchical structure, and the kinds of cultures that make important decisions about our perceptions of reality, often without our awareness. The work does this both explicitly - by bringing debates, arcane rules and how they are (or are not) followed on Wikipedia, to the surface - and implicitly - as the debates trickled up to falsehoods and name-calling by some of the power brokers at Wikimedia. We said nothing; they made our point for us.
Scott: Hopefully, there is much to be learned from Wikipedia Art. It depends on what you choose to read about it and believe. There have been many contradictory opinions about the work, and in these varied opinions lies a "non-consensus," that the artwork resides in a zone of the indeterminacy. It succeeds because the work was designed to produce dialogue.

How is it different from other art intervention projects?
Patrick: It is on Wikipedia.
Nathaniel: I'm not sure I want to get into the specifics of what makes this project "different" - it misattributes value to "the new." More important than it being different, it is successful.
Scott: This is the first significant art intervention into Wikipedia -- an encyclopedia.This makes it unique in venue. There are many small details that differ, but in terms of intervention works, it is similar in that it uses an existing structure and the loopholes within the structure (in this case the citation mechanism) to assert its existence.

I see Wikipedia Art continues to exist in a remixed way. But can it still be called Wikipedia Art, if it is not taking place in Wikipedia anymore?
Patrick: Does a work about Wikipedia have to be ON Wikipedia? That would limit discursive portential immensely.
Nathaniel: We tend to refer to these works as Wikipedia Art Remixed. The intervention is over, but the piece lives on in its discussion, and in projects like this.
Scott: Same as Nathaniel; these works are Wikipedia Art Remixed.

I understood Wikipedia Art as being a form of re-constructing the social reality of Wikipedia, so that, in this way, the social reality constructed by the community is made more visible, facilitating its understanding. Am I right on that?
Nathaniel: You've got the spirit of it, yes. Less re-construction, though, and more of that accent / making visible. We all know the mythical wonders of Wikipedia, but the flaws go well beyond the standard debate around fact and fiction - POWER is of huge importance.
Scott: I think the reconstruction or as Nathaniel aptly puts it, making visible occurred mostly outside of Wikipedia. I'm not sure exactly how much the Wikipedia community was affected, but I do know that many non-editors began to reconsider the mythology behind Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation itself.
Patrick: More than the social reality of the community, it also shows how that social reality and hits history is trying to reshape the global conception of the construction of knowledge.

Apart from the Wikipedia Art page, have you contributed to any articles, bots or software improvement in Wikipedia? Which one(s)?
Nathaniel: We both often add to Wikipedia pages on art, digital artists, and our regions. Most recently, for example, Scott fixed a mistake on the page about the Digital Dark Age, and I added a page on the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Scott: The Wikipedia Art project stemmed from our direct experience on adding and editing articles on Wikipedia. Here is where we found a surprising lack of arts coverage and began to wonder about the invisible layer of editors that were behind the consensus-driven site, and thus began the idea for an intervention.
Patrick: I have, but cannot remember.

What other projects are you currently working on?
Patrick: I am curating two shows, one on mixed realities between the physical and Second Life, and the other being a remix of the popular viral site "YTMND.com"
Nathaniel: I've had two solo shows of work in the last month. Both are much more invested in discourses surrounding the history of images than Wikipedia Art was, but I see them all as part of the same practice.
For Distill Life, I permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. http://nathanielstern.com/2010/passing-between/
And Given Time activates and performs two permanently logged-in Second Life avatars, each forever and only seen by and through the other. This one is a dedication to my wife. http://nathanielstern.com/2010/given-time/
Scott: I am working on a variety of new projects. The one most related to Wikipedia Art is an individual artwork that I developed as a resident artist at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center called "After Thought." Using brainwave testing with flashcards, I produce a custom video for each subject that reflects their emotional mind-state.
Link is: http://www.kildall.com/artwork/2010/after_thought/index.html
This artwork is a sort of "subjective science" -- where interpretation and meaning become murky the more you look at it. The notion of a video that truly reflects your consciousness has been echoed in popular culture in ways that are both appealing and disturbing.

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
Nathaniel: This isn't a simple debate, a gag, or trolling. We see Wikipedia as an important project with enormous potential - some of which it already meets. That in mind, it needs to be critically examined. Like CPOV, Wikipedia Art began such a discussion, and we're very proud of that fact.
Scott: We're both quite pleased with the success of the work. More than anything, it's been amazing to hear polarized opinions about it -- the controversy of Wikipedia Art itself has revealed that Wikipedia hit a critical point, which requires an examination of structural bias around obscure rules when an open system essentially closes itself off. This contradiction in the ideology behind a structure that is supposed to be open is of utmost concern: how our culture transmits knowledge itself.
Patrick: I think it's interesting that something like WPA continues to resonate so much with people.

by Juliana Brunello

Are you a Wikipedian yourself?
No. I am mostly a "Wikipedia consumer," and not a "Wikipedia producer." But an organization that I am a member of, an alternative online media outlet from India (www.sanhati.org) was once involved in what I believe is called a "wiki war" over an entry on a government sponsored, anti-people miltia in India (called the "Salwa Judum"). At that time I got to see how wikipedia handles controversial topics.

Have you contributed to any Wikipedia articles? Which one(s)?
No, I have not.

Do you believe popular knowledge should be put together with scientific knowledge or should it be kept apart? Why?
Not only should scientific and popular knowledge *not* be kept apart, in fact they cannot be. Science arises from knowledge in society ("popular knowledge" if you will). If Science attempts to separate itself from its source, as it has tried to do, it turns against the people. Historically we see that scientific knowledge has accorded to itself the status of the best or true knowledge (or "knowledge" without any qualifications). Other types of knowledge then became qualified in some way, such as "popular knowledge, " "folk knowledge," "traditional knowledge," and so on. On the other hand we speak of "knowledge" (without qualifications) located in different places in society. We also speak of the necessity of a dialog among people from these different locations. We are currently working on the concept of "Gyan Panchayat" which roughly translated means "Public Hearing on Knowledge." I will elaborate on this concept during my presentation.

Nowadays there is a hierarchy upon knowledge; some knowledge is considered more valuable than others. The same thing happens with knowledge coming from certain persons in the society. You, on the other hand, speak of the ideal of equality. Do you see this ideal in Wikipedia?
Continuing from the answer to the previous question, our political goal is precisely to challenge the hierarchies that you speak of. From our perspective the hierarchies can be challenged effectively if a knowledge movement takes shape in society at large (i.e. outside the universities and other recognized institutions of knowledge). The wiki movement, the FLOSS movement, the movement against patents, copyrights, the movements against the corporatization of the University in Europe, all appear to us to be working towards this goal in their own ways.

Is this ideal a utopia? Can it be put into practice in the 'real world'?
This is not a utopian vision. We consider it a necessary condition for the emancipation of vast sections of oppressed humanity. However to make any progress on it requires robust political movements.

By Juliana Brunello

I was trying to find some information about you and your thesis online, but I was not very successful. Could you tell me more about it?
It is not online, because it's not published yet. It should be soon...

Have you completed your Masters, or are you still working on it?
I'm still working on it...I've been quite busy with my other research projects in my university and that's why I haven't finished it completely yet.

What is your thesis about? How does it involve Wikipedia?
I've been studying the talk pages of the Wikipedia article about the Kosovo War.

Why are you interested in Wikipedia as a topic? Are you a Wikipedian yourself?
The whole concept of Wikipedia is interesting. There are many sociological, epistemological etc. issues, which could be revealed by observing the interaction and content in Wikipedia. I'm an active user and not-so-active producer in Wikipedia. I've also studied the social dynamics of the open/free source movement, which is the background, still influencing in Wikipedia.

For your research, do you follow a specific sociological model or methodology, or do you use a mix of models, methods and theories? Which one(s)?
I've used the method which contains the principles from ethnomethodology, ethnography, new rhetoric, discourse analysis and conversation analysis. My methodological orientation is concentrated more to the philosophical backgrounds of the wiki-knowledge than the empirical research. The most inspiring theorists are Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas and Harold Garfinkel.

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
I think it'll be very interesting seminar and I'm sure we have great debates there.

by Juliana Brunello

Could you tell me more about your interest in Wikipedia as a topic?
I studied European Intellectual History with Dominick LaCapra at Cornell University, and I am interested in ambitious systems of knowledge classification in the West starting from the French Encyclopédistes in the 18th century and scientific positivism in the 19th century. I think that Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, and I cite Wikipedia articles often in my writings, for example in my work on the "New Computer Science" or in philosophical-sociological essays in my upcoming book "Betting on Longshots." However, like a lot of people, I think that Wikipedia could be improved. Community consensus about what constitutes legitimate-established knowledge is important, but so are the original insights of the individual scholar who has worked more deeply and insightfully on a particular subject than anyone else. A more sophisticated model for balancing these two contributory streams needs to be developed. This won't be easy. Right now consensus is tending to suppress the understanding of the really advanced scholar. Many Wikipedia articles are reproducing accepted clichés. This is related also to the tendency to make a fetish of information as opposed to knowledge. What is mere information and what is real knowledge? To get beyond the clichés, we need something like a renewed Marxist ideology critique. Gustave Flaubert did this very well about 140 years ago in his "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas." We don't need to compile a new "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas," because Wikipedia, considering one major element of its complex cultural constellation, already is such a dictionary. The best way to support my argument is to provide concrete examples, which I will do in my talk at the conference. Finally, I think that an improvement in the Wikipedia knowledge model can run parallel to a breakthrough in our conception and implementation of what a database is, so this work is related to my work with Alexis Clancy in inventing the "New Computer Science." What are the real potentials of contemporary "New Media" and "New Technology" for improved repositories of knowledge? How can the structure of the database as technological artefact be upgraded to a relationship of pattern, similarity, or resonance between database element and software executable, as opposed to the combinatorial and reductionist set theory relationship of today. How can we move from static information to dynamic knowledge?

What caught your attention first? Was it Gustave Flaubert's critique that led you to Wikipedia, or did Wikipedia led you to Gustave Flaubert's critique?
I was invited by Geert Lovink to speak at the conference, and then I thought about what I could uniquely contribute. Flaubert was a great sociologist of knowledge, and I have been reading his books for a very long time. I studied French literature long before becoming a computer scientist and programmer. That's what eventually led me to becoming quite well known as a Baudrillard scholar. Flaubert's novels Sentimental Education and Bouvard and Pécuchet are also great critiques of the pretensions of knowledge compilation systems, but I will only mention these essential works in passing.

Are you a Wikipedian yourself? (I assume so, as I found your User-Page there.)
Yes, I am a Wikipedian, in the same sense that I am a Trekker. I have developed a unique vision for Star Trek and its future, somewhat outside of the mainstream, so I would develop something similar for Wikipedia.

Have you contributed to any Wikipedia articles, bots or software improvement? Which one(s)?
I contributed to the Jean Baudrillard article, and to some of the Star Trek articles. Also some things in bioArt, and in the area of art and technology.

Do you believe Wikipedia to be an example of utopia, since it is mostly based on unpaid collaboration?
I have never understood why unpaid work of any kind, from housework to programming, could be regarded by anyone as utopian. Money is a reality, it's based on a rational system, albeit an economic system that needs to be radically improved. Artists, creators, intellectuals, nurses, dancers, activists, under-employed academics and scientists, down-and-outers, we all need to get paid. Let's focus our efforts on figuring out how to fight for our rights to prosperity, not accept poverty. Live long and prosper, Spock said. To voluntarily work without pay is a system of self-exploitation and self-surveillance. I love the book The Simulation of Surveillance by William Bogard. We need to go beyond Foucault-, Orwell-, and Huxley-inspired models of how contemporary quasi-totalitarian systems of social control work. Individual freedom right now is in big trouble. American hyper-reality, hyper-work, hyper-consumerism, hyper-communication, and hyper-eating today strike me in so many aspects as being systems of mutual- and self-surveillance. Ask anyone in authority or performing any official job anywhere in America any question, and you will always get a no before you get a yes. The current system of ubiquitous cell phones is also a system of mutual- and self-surveillance. My friends, family, and co-workers want me to permanently account for myself. Where am I, what am I doing, and what am I thinking? And I'm asking myself the same disciplinary questions. We don't need Big Brother anymore, since we are all keeping tabs on ourselves and each other. The TV show "The Prisoner" contains some great ideas about this.

Do you think we can learn something from Wikipedia as an example of community? More specifically, do you use anything you've learned from Wikipedia in you new project of Shapiro Technologies?
Of course we can learn from Wikipedia as an example of community. It is a great collaborative project. Regarding Wikipedia and Shapiro Technologies, I'll have to do some thinking about your excellent question, because I don't have anything to say about it right now. So far, Shapiro Technologies is more a dream than a reality. We had a group in Frankfurt am Main that existed for half-a-year, and has just dissolved. We are now starting to reflect on what we need to do differently to move forward with the implementation and realization of the idea of the pragmatic-utopian high-tech enterprise. This is a "big idea," I think, because it is an entirely new version of Marxism. As a thinker, I am also trying to build a bridge between Marxism and Buddhism, because I think that Buddhism is also fundamentally about the question of happiness, and we who are working ourselves to death in the West are not happy.

Anything else you would like to add? Comments, ideas, thoughts?
I would like to mention the work of my brother, Fred Shapiro, who created the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, which has now eclipsed Bartlett's Familiar Quotations as an American reference work that is the most definitive collection of general quotations.