Lunch Bytes: The Commons

Chaired by writer, editor and curator Basia Lewandowska Cummings, speakers on this panel discussion include artists Stephan Dillemuth, Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven).

This panel looks at the ‘commons’, a concept that has gained attention in recent debates on online culture, as well as cultural production more generally. In its original meaning the term ‘commons’ refers to land that is open for collective use. In today’s art world, the commons is often used in reference to spaces and practices that are shared by groups aiming to resist commodification and forge an existence outside the capital-driven art market.

Turning to online culture and its history, it is possible to see a significant shift in how networked environments have been perceived as common spaces, from the 1990s ideal of a democratic cyberspace, to a current understanding of the web as a commercial and enclosed space. Looking at these developments, this panel examines the consequences of on- and off-line spaces of cultural production becoming increasingly privately-owned and subject to corporate and government control. Departing from this condition, this discussion examines alternative ways to collectively manage resources for artistic production. Furthermore, it will discuss the value of ‘the commons’ in relationship to the widely-shared experience of precarity, as public funding for the arts erodes and entrepreneurial strategies appear to govern both the arts and the current online environment.

Lunch Bytes is a series of four public discussions over the course of a year, which examine the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of digital networked technologies in relation to artistic practice. Each event is dedicated to a different topic and brings together European artists, media scholars, designers, curators and intellectuals.

www.lunch-bytes.com

Watch the previous two Lunch Bytes discussions on Youtube →

Organised in collaboration with Arcadia Missa; Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London; and the Goethe Institut, this series is part of a larger European project conceived by Melanie Buehler and the Goethe-Institut in Northwest Europe, comprising events in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Dublin, which will culminate with a symposium in Berlin in 2015.