Issue 2│Demokratisierung

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At a time when artistic exchange was low during the first Corona lockdown in 2020, when we could not meet each other or new people, we wanted a digital alternative to communicate, to be seen and to move closer to each other's work. 
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube as well as many other social media platforms do not provide the opportunity to be an independent, experimental space to meet our needs. On the contrary, looking closer on for example Facebook, there has been a kind of involvement in the election campaign of Donald Trump 2016 [1]. At the same time, on Instagram the guideline changes had (and have) harsh racist and sexist effects on BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) educators and artists posting their body, their body hair, their nipples and other visuals which is categorized as being political [2]. Social media and communication is power: We increasingly spend our time in an online existence [3] and therefore there should also be alternative spaces in this existence. There should be spaces for empowerment and lived change, also online, and this is what has inspired the basics of how our project BRICKING THROUGH is to be administered.

We started BRICKING THROUGH with the dream of having a user-based website that emphasizes and encourages artistic exchange and is run by artists/students, starting from creating the legislations and designing the community guidelines. With a democratically voted and acting administration, it is a sketch, an attempt and an experimental research of change in the art-field of which the internet of our times is a part.

 

The jump start for the project happened during the time of the Corona lockdown No.1, when we all, willingly or not, had to welcome an online existence as an essential part of our lives. In our isolation, we started to construct a digital future we dreamt of. 

In the very first thinking process, the project BRICKING THROUGH (that at that time was named Bricks of Babel) had three aspects. 
Firstly, it would be a social network for students made by students. Sympathising with an anarchistic sort of resistance, we wanted it to be an alternative to the power structures we live in, free from institutions and free from social media titans ruling autocratically: no more exploitation. We wanted a place where you are no longer a means to money, whether that implies your data being sold or you being just a number to fulfill a quota.

 

Secondly, we started out, and in many ways still are, idealistic. The project itself is built on exchanging with each other, thinking and discussing together. We want BRICKING THROUGH to be based on engaged reflection and to be a space where critical thinking and awareness about our spaces are constantly present; we need this in order to have the capability to articulate our contemporary conditions. An often occurring topic in our meetings is that we try to navigate our own relationship to the platforms we already know and to be aware of hierarchical power structures in general. Lately, we discussed if the “only students as users”-policy is against our own ideals, as students like ourselves are (if you focus on educational capital) a very privileged group. But as any community needs to share a common ground in order to stay relevant for its members, we still try to navigate the peripheries of the ground we wish to build on while all of us are still – for the moment being – students in the field of arts.

 

A key part of the project in this context is that we are in a constant change and adjustment to changing circumstances, such as when we face money issues or when new team members join us and others leave, and therefore the conversations and the input also change. Using these key coping mechanisms of flexibility and capability to adjust is a goal that BRICKING THROUGH provides us for being able to adapt when faced with change. In the end, what we are building is a social platform shaped by communication and not a bulky old castle. We need collaborative practises that reflect the new social spaces, and we need a dynamic room that is based on a shared respect towards the bodies involved with the space.

 

We want to achieve shaping the rest of the project with regular meetings and by working together as an art collective and through the actual use of the website. In this democratically administered website every user has the opportunity to influence others and to be a part of the changes applied to the platform itself. 
Thirdly and lastly, this project would be a place of artistic freedom. This means that adult content within artistic context can be published on the website. An artist who works on identity and body has a right to be seen, or someone who works graphically addressing violence or war should not be censored. This is not a new subject in art. Jonas Mekas was arrested for screening “Flaming Creatures” [4]. Printing Allen Ginsburg‘s “Howl” was a struggle that ended in court, too [5]. And a work does not even have to be illegal to be not shown and kept out of galleries and museums, as the Guerrilla Girls have been protesting for years, recently pointing out that the Kestner Gesellschaft has not shown any BIPoC artists at all between 2013 and 2017 [6]. All this having been said, there are too many examples; we need change.
While working with and on the legislation part, we soon learned that despite the misleading word "guidelines" in community guidelines, they are a legal document like any other, and a necessity for the place of mutual respect, artistic development as well as exchange and kindness we want to provide on this user-based website. Our first step in approaching this was enlarging our sphere, as the community guidelines should be a community project. We created an open call that was sent to several art academies for any interested and engaged student to join and participate in the project. That was the time when our team enlarged to the internationally based group of people we are today. We still strive to stay curious, and so are open to new connections.
We tentatively decided to pause our idea of premiering the website with the ability to post adult content within an artistic context, and instead to create an open discussion on our research once the website is online. This decision is based on the huge legal and financial challenges we face concerning so-called adult content, age verification processes, the community guidelines, and data-protection. 

 

For now we are working on starting our vision of artistic exchange in a micro form, with the tools we have at our disposal. We have a preliminary version of the website, the support of a lawyer specialized in internet law who is helping us with the community guidelines, and a website programmer who is an art student as we are. We are planning to post individually and collectively on the website, as we hope to see it used someday. One example for this is the experimental associative text below where we each wrote down our thoughts and experiences, and showed a reflection of our exchange. We can still open a website that will let us walk one more step towards our destination. We hope one day the reality will fit our ideals and till then we will reconsider, discuss and reshape.
 

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BRICKING THROUGH is/will be a multiple project: a social platform dedicated to art, exchange and communication, an artist collective based in Germany, Finland and Switzerland, which is initiating the platform, and an experimental learning space above all. Forced to temporarily adjust the project due to financial reasons, the platform is currently morphing into a collectively authored platform.

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References

 

[1] Burke, Garance. Watchdog org: Trump ‘16 campaign, PAC illegally coordinated. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-political-action-committees-elections-campaigns-42a5705b23bbbc780083f57b071bbcb0 visited 20.8.2021

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[2] Joseph, Chanté. Instagram’s murky “shadow bans“ just serve to censor marginalised communities. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/08/instagram-shadow-bans-marginalised-communities-queer-plus-sized-bodies-sexually-suggestive visited 20.8.2021

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[3] Statista Research Department, 2021. Daily social media usage worldwide 2012-2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/ visited 21.8.2021

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[4] Staff, Harriet. Film Comment Published 1964 Jonas Mekas‘ Statement After Arrest for Screening “Flaming Creatures”. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/02/film-comment-publishes-1964-jonas-mekas-statement-after-arrest-for-screening-flaming-creatures visited 21.8.2021

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[5] Adams, Alexander. The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s ”Howl”. https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/09/the-fight-to-publish-allen-ginsbergs-howl/ visited 20.8.2021

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[6] Guerilla Girls. AFTER 96 YEARS KESTNERGESELLSCHAFT DISCO…. Poster, 2018. https://www.guerrillagirls.com/projects visited 20.8.2021.

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