http://titipi.org/projects/discomfort/CatalogOFFDigitalDiscomfort.pdf
Door: Jara Rocha
“Through the imposition of closed, proprietary,
exclusive and over-optimised commercial formats for
so-called “webinars”, this situation is rapidly resulting
in the settlement of a monoculture in mediated gatherings. GAFAM & co are taking over research and
educational ecosystems, while turning all interactions
into business transactions. It is therefore urgent to
find ways to capture the damage of this cloudy landscapes, wider bandwidths, endless remote-working
video calls and pervasive user-ization (the dominant
tendency towards subjectivity-as-user-only). These
are all elements partaking in an evident cultural and
aesthetic flattening on platforms. These elements
come to erase diversity, smoothly deepen structural
dependencies and provoke relational precarity. They
reproduce a techno-colonial regime that passes
through deadly environmental damage and exploitative labour.
Curated as an anti-solutionist collection, the
Catalog of Formats is an attempt to document the
plausibility of such practices and to encourage affirmative counter-forces. The Catalog may work as a
device for trying emergent formats and hopefully
destabilizing too comfortable articulations of online
gatherings. It is an invitation to do so while enjoying
the rigourous, engaging and creative formats for and
by communities themselves.”
