Institute of Network Cultures | The Art of Free Cooperation – Edited by Geert Lovink &Trebor Scholz

This book takes an inventory of the art of collaborative practice, surveys the landscape of new, cooperation-enhancing technologies, and renders the inner workings of cooperative processes as a new model for social movements. Civic participation is on the decline, but, online, more people work together than ever before. Activists contribute citizen journalism. New media artists create social online tools and urge others to participate. Knowledge collectives gather information in large, open repositories. Free culture — with all its file-sharing applications — is blossoming.

Contributors Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz link the debates about web-based, cooperation-enhancing technologies to the broader world of political activism.

The Art of Free Cooperation includes a DVD with a feature-length film collage, narrated by Tony Conrad, illustrating the principles of free cooperation through the visual language of science fiction movies, additional texts, interviews and highlights from the international ‘Free Cooperation’ conference, organized by the editors, that led to this book.

ISBN: 9781570271779 — 192pp. & DVD — $20 paper
Order your copies at www.autonomedia.org

Naked Logic: Lecture of Boldizsár Hordós at Metaforum X, Budapest

By Geert Lovink, November 12, 2024

I am happy to teach computer history at a fine arts university. Besides, I also work with small kids. Part of my job is to pry phones out of their hands—not the most pleasant part of the day. This is partly because (as with every mandatory intervention) it stirs up more chaos than it prevents. [...]

Infrastructure that Sticks: Digital Affect Within Sovietcore

By Salome Berdzenishvili, November 4, 2024

Жить тяжело и неуютно Зато уютно умирать (Living is difficult and confining, But dying is liberating) The words written above are an excerpt from the song Sudno (Boris Ryzhy) by post-punk band Molchat Doma from Minsk. These words also often loop over the reels on post-Soviet aesthetics found online – the ones of decayed brutalist [...]

Ágnes Básthy: Crisis? What Crisis? Taking a Suspicious Walk around a Fashionable Notion

By Geert Lovink, October 31, 2024

(Text of the speech by Ágnes Básthy on the first day of Metaforum X, Budapest, October 25, 2024) “‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprized the term to indicate the [...]