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A designerly journey into textiles and HCI leads to thinking about data as a material for a cybernetic future.
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The idea of events being opposed to everyday life is widely reflected in events literature. Events are generally characterized as being ‘out of the ordinary’. This paper explores the creation and performance of the extraordinary, as well as the spills over of the extraordinary into everyday life. Using ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and interviews, the social practices of the fantasy event ‘Elfia’ were studied. The results show how the participants, both in everyday life and during the event, actively create and maintain the extraordinary via meanings, materials and competences. But instead of being completely out of the ordinary, the event provides a temporary re-arrangement of status and social order. This paper challenges the dominant narrative about events as extraordinary spaces of freedom and escapism. Instead, the extraordinary turns out to be interwoven with everyday life.
At its core, raving has existed in opposition to normativity, and so has electronic music. If newcomers enticed by hard trance remixes of 2000’s Top 40 hits embrace this opposition, it is often done in ways removed from history. As Loren Granic AKA Goddollars, co-founder and resident of A Club Called Rhonda in Los Angeles, stated: “Many of the newcomers are straight/white kids who are very far removed from the LGBT community, despite fist-pumping by the millions to a music that was born from gay people of colour sweating their asses off at 5 AM in a Chicago warehouse.” If the role marginalized people have played in the creation and pioneering of their favourite music is ignored, how would people react when told that their fun might also harm marginalized groups? The ethics of lockdown raves have always been fraught, as their repercussions reverberate beyond the people who choose to attend them; meanwhile, data shows that people of colour were more likely to be targeted for attending raves during the lockdown.
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Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach that of nation states; on the other, our mobility and hard-won rights are under threat. What tools do we need to understand this world, and how can art assist in envisioning and enacting other possible futures?This publication investigates the new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies. It is the result of a two-year EU-funded collaboration between Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL), NeMe (CY), and a diverse range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.Contributors: James Bridle, Max Dovey, Marc Garrett, Valeria Graziano, Max Haiven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Francis Hunger, Helen Kaplinsky, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Rob Myers, Emily van der Nagel, Rachel O’Dwyer, Lídia Pereira, Rebecca L. Stein, Cassie Thornton, Paul Vanouse, Patricia de Vries, Krystian Woznicki.
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