DIY Culture Research Articles

Queer Trash

“Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art” series editor Charles Eppley speaks with Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman of Queer Trash, a curatorial platform based in New York City that features experimental art, music, and performance by LGBTQ2S+ artists. They discuss the concepts of queer sound and listening, methods of improvisation, queer identity and expression, tokenization and exploitation, DIY culture, and the limits of arts funding for queer sonic artists.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Co-De|GT: The Gamification and Tokenisation of More-Than-Human Qualities and Values

The article explores how the quality of life within a deprived urban environment might be improved through the ‘gamification’ of and interaction with, more-than-human elements within the environment. It argues that such quality may be achieved through the community’s multicentered value from the bottom up. This is shown through the case study of the Co-De|GT urban mobile application that was developed in the Synergetic Landscapes unit through real-life research by design experimental studio teaching. Complimentary experimentation took place during the Relating Systems Thinking and Design 10 symposium in the Co-De|BP workshop, where experts were able to be collocated for interactive real-time data gathering. This application addresses the need for collective action towards more-than-human synergy across an urban ecosystem through gamification, community collaboration and DIY culture. It intends to generate a sustainable, scalable token economy where humans and non-humans play equal roles, earning, trading and being paid for goods and services to test such potentials for future economies underpinned by blockchain. This work diverges from dominant economic models that do not recognise the performance of and the limits to, material extraction from the ecosystem. The current economic model has led to the global financial crisis (GFC). Furthermore, it is based on the unsustainable perpetual consumption of services and goods, which may lead to the untangling and critical failure of the market system globally. Therefore, this work investigates how gamification and tokenization may support a complementary and parallel economic market that sustains and grows urban ecosystems. While the research does not speculate on policy implications, it posits how such markets may ameliorate some of the brittleness apparent in the global economic model. It demonstrates a systemic approach to urban ecosystem performance for the future post-Anthropocene communities and economies.

A study on the characteristics of Bootleg fashion

Bootleg fashion emerged from the fashion industry after 2010, and has been used across a range of different genres. However, it has yet to be theoretically established; therefore, this study will explain bootleg fashion as a new genre, which will help in the planning and designing of products within domestic fashion brands. The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics and internal meaning of bootleg fashion as a recently emerged fashion phenomenon that borrows from other brands without permission. The research methodology included a theoretical literature review of fashion sites and related materials and empirical research using case analysis. Results of the analysis of both characteristics and internal meaning of bootleg fashion suggest the following characteristics:ﾠ“unauthorized use of symbolic elements,” “disorganization of boundaries between fashion,” “multiplicity through globalization,” and “newness through deconstruction and recombination.” Internal meanings derived from the analysis were “parody through symbol,” which is seen as “a parody and homage resulting from the unauthorized use of a brand,” while “decomposition through disorganization” is seen as a break-up of the boundaries between different fashions from a mainstreamoriented perspective. A juxtaposition of elements was demonstrated by “playfulness through transformation,” which showed that such fashion cannot coexist with positional transposition. Finally, “spread as a cultural phenomenon” was derived through the diffusion through digital media with DIY culture. As such, bootleg fashion has been reborn as an innovative fashion genre, breaking the taboo of the illegitimate from the past and demonstrating new endeavors.

Insaiderių tiriamas savo akademinės kultūros susikaustymas (sąstingis) ir lankstumas: Barselonos universiteto atvejis

Straipsnyje aptariama, kaip siekis rasti prasmingesnių dėstymo ir mokymosi būdų aukštajame moksle paskatino atsižvelgti į šiuolaikines žinių ir mokymosi sampratas, susijusias su jaunimo vertybėmis, pvz., DIY kultūra (Spencer, 2005). Vykdant Europos projektą „DIYLab – Do It Yourself in Education: Expanding Digital Competence to Foster Student Agency and Collaborative Learning” („Pasidaryk pats edukacijoje: skaitmeninių kompetencijų plėtojimas skatinant studentų agentiškumą ir mokymąsi bendradarbiaujant“; http://diylab.eu tirta, kas nutinka, kai insaiderių grupė analizuoja savo pačių akademinę kultūrą, ir kaip tai susiję su etnografinio tyrimo ribomis ir galimybėmis edukologijoje. Remdamiesi Viveiros de Castro (2010), nagrinėjome savo universitetinės kultūros susikaustymą (sąstingį) ir lankstumą, kurie pasireiškė, stengiantis įdiegti už institucijos ribų atsiradusią ir išsivysčiusią mokymosi bei dalijimosi kultūrą. Precedento neturinti skaitmeninių technologijų plėtra skatina gilius socialinius, kultūrinius ir ekonominius pokyčius bei apima visas gyvenimo ir visuomenės sritis. Šiandien turėtų būti klausiama ne apie skaitmeninių technologijų naudojimo tikslingumą, bet labiau apie tai, kaip, kur ir kokiais edukaciniais tikslais jos turėtų būti naudojamos. Tačiau, kaip matyti iš pastarųjų edukacinių pokyčių tyrimų (Hargreaves, Shirley, 2009; Sancho, Alonso, 2012), reikšmingų permainų galima pasiekti tik įtraukiant mokytojus ir mokinius į sprendimų priėmimo procesus bei įtvirtinant naujas praktikas perspektyviausiais institucinės kultūros aspektais ir siejant su mokytojų profesinėmis žiniomis. Turėdami mintyje šį kontekstą, į Europos projektą „DIYlab“ įtraukėme: (a) pagrindinių DIY kultūros elementų nagrinėjimą ir (b) etnografinės pakraipos (Tacchi, Slater ir Hearn, 2003) dalyvaujančiojo veiklos tyrimo (Reason, Bradbury, 2001) atlikimą. Šiame straipsnyje pristatoma, kaip šis projektas įgyvendinamas Barselonos universitete, nagrinėjamas mūsų akademinės kultūros susikaustymas (sąstingis) ir lankstumas. Išanalizuoti duomenys rodo institucinių laikų ir erdvių nelankstumą, žinių sampratos fragmentiškumą, taip pat institucinius „plyšius“, per kuriuos skverbiasi atsinaujinanti, reikli mokymo ir mokymosi kultūra.

Media meta-commentary and the performance of expertise

This article examines the rise of meta-commentary in US media, and considers the consequences it has for the social construction and the performance of intellectual expertise. Media meta-commentary is defined as critical reflection about media practices and performances, in which the primary basis for criticism is the comparison of different media formats. Meta-commentary began to emerge with the differentiation of the aesthetic sphere and the development of a new kind of expert, the cultural critic. Cultural criticism led to a proliferation of expert performance styles, including a type of counter-performance that rejects the somber and serious nature of traditional intellectual practices. By the 1980s, these new styles of intellectual performance were being reinforced by important institutional and regulatory changes within the media industry, and ultimately by the proliferation of new digital technologies and DIY culture. By the twenty-first century, media meta-commentary had become a distinctive and peculiar form of expert discourse, which legitimates the act of criticism while also relativizing it. The current environment suggests two possible outcomes: a hopeful one that encourages greater reflexivity, and a more ominous one that points toward populism.

The hot spot transformation in the research evolution of maker

The rapid development of digital technology together with the grassroots innovation has led to a new landmark of maker culture. Recently, a search with the query of ‘‘makerspace’’, ‘‘maker movement’’ and ‘‘maker culture’’ in Google Scholar found over 10,000 documents in total. As the volume of the literature grows rapidly, thus, a systematic review of maker research and its current challenges becomes essential. This study surveys the literature of maker between 1975 and 2016. The overall structure of its intellectual landscape is illustrated in terms of thematic concentrations of knowledge clusters of maker study, hot research categories and keywords, major contributing factors including contributing countries, organizations, and authors. Our review is based on 836 bibliographic records retrieved from the ISI Web of Science and visualized by the scientometric software of CiteSpace. This application results in comprehensive knowledge maps of maker research. The study identifies major intellectual cooperation network, co-occurrence keywords, research clusters and landmark articles, including: (1) the thematic clusters of ‘‘maker movement’’, ‘‘DIY culture and extended milieu’’, ‘‘craftsman hero’’ reflects the biggest knowledge base clusters of maker study. (2) “Physical computing”, “maker space”, “maker movement”, “3D printer” are the major frontiers of maker research based on analysis of citation burst. (3) In terms of contributing countries, institutions, authors, the major driving force of maker research is from the United States of America, England and Germany, with University of California Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology being major contributing institutions. Paulo Blikstein from Stanford University USA, Vasilis Kostakis from Tallinn University of Technology Estonia, Hans-Joachim Bohme from Technische Universitat Ilmenau German all have published three articles and rank at the top of the author list.

Global social activism, DIY culture and lack of institutional help

Abstract Since the 2008 world economic crisis, new and different ways of community organization, resilience and urban initiatives for provisioning and survival have emerged all over the world in an attempt to create urban spaces and opportunities in areas where institutions and governments are unable or unwilling to devote time and resources. Also, economic and sustainable models have found physical spaces from which to operate in the aftermath of the crisis and outside the ontological frame of extreme neo-liberalism. This article discusses the approximations to these initiatives in three texts addressing urban contexts in the United States (Detroit), Spain (Seville, Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid) and Mexico (Mexico City). These three works call attention to the specificity of these projects and expose recent approaches to community building and organizational solutions in the Hispanic world.

Reading Makers

Abstract Since its inception, digital and interactive art has been forced to negotiate the tension between the inherently spectacular nature of the technologies it uses and the desire of creators to embed relevant critical stances within the work. With the recent rise of “maker” or DIY culture, this negotiation has become even more pronounced as the production of technologies becomes more accessible and (allegedly) more democratized. In addition, our relationship with technology is becoming increasingly intimate. Whereas machines once could have been read as tools, through which we would enact our individualized wills, they now implicate themselves into our mental processes, our bodies and (one could argue) our very being. Within this cyborgian construction we risk mindless acceptance and integration of the particular logical models technology and its producers bring to the merger. A tension arises between our need to understand or recognize the logic which drives our lives and the technology, which often seeks to obfuscate that logic. This paper, through the application of philosophy of technology to a specific maker subculture - as it has been adopted by a movement in fine art (art and technology) - situates making as a form of artistic practice at the intersection of these ideas. As a mode by which technologically inclined artists can navigate the spectacular and the critical in their work, making allows these artists to enact criticality through revealing underlying technical (and social) logic in the systems (and objects) with which they engage. Thus, this paper will trace the philosophical foundations of this critical approach and finally analyse a series of works that reveal strategies through which “making” as a mode of “revealing” has been refined by artists as a critical approach to embedded technological systems.

Librarian in the underground: What academic libraries can learn from DIY culture

Academic library professionals are now in uncharted territory. We’re hurtling through unfamiliar, rapidly shifting landscapes. Information storage and retrieval, scholarly publishing, information literacy: everything’s changing on a daily basis. Get hung up on any one thing, and you’re already working in the past. Allow yourself to be overwhelmed and you’re paralyzed.

Self-Invention in the Realm of Production

In the 1960s and 1970s, self-avowed members of the counterculture, often based on the west coast and in the Rocky Mountain West, eschewed critics’ stereotypical notions of stoned and indolent hippies and struggled to build an alternative economic system. While rejecting corporate capitalism and consumer acquisitiveness, they built new enterprises, new institutions, new organizational forms, and new practices that gave proof of the possibility of creating economically sustainable, alternative lives. Do-it-yourself practices, especially building one’s own home or repairing one’s own vehicle, promised to free practitioners from working for wages in order to afford consumer goods—even as DIY culture often promoted traditional gender roles. While many of the counterculture’s attempts at escaping the employee-consumer nexus failed or were short-lived, it did succeed in outlining an alternative approach to both production and consumption that has had a continuing impact on American capitalist development.

Social Media Is the New Punk User Experience, Social Music and DIY Culture

Social Media Is the New Punk User Experience, Social Music and DIY Culture

Taking [a]part: the politics and aesthetics of participation in experience-centered design

In Taking [A]part, John McCarthy and Peter Wright consider a series of boundary-pushing research projects in human-computer interaction (HCI) in which the design of digital technology is used to inquire into participative experience. McCarthy and Wright view all of these projects -- which range from the public and performative to the private and interpersonal -- through the critical lens of participation. Taking participation, in all its variety, as the generative and critical concept allows them to examine the projects as a part of a coherent, responsive movement, allied with other emerging movements in DIY culture and participatory art. Their investigation leads them to rethink such traditional HCI categories as designer and user, maker and developer, researcher and participant, characterizing these relationships instead as mutually responsive and dialogical. McCarthy and Wright explore four genres of participation -- understanding the other, building relationships, belonging in community, and participating in publics -- and they examine participatory projects that exemplify each genre. These include the Humanaquarium, a participatory musical performance; the Personhood project, in which a researcher and a couple explored the experience of living with dementia; the Prayer Companion project, which developed a technology to inform the prayer life of cloistered nuns; and the development of social media to support participatory publics in settings that range from reality game show fans to on-line deliberative democracies.

When Your Seams Get Undone, Do You Learn to Sew or to Kill Monsters?

New domesticity—which is a return to a lifestyle that centers domesticity “in the service of environmentalism, DIY culture, and personal fulfillment”—is taking shape in mostly Westernized DIY spaces. New domesticity exists in a neoliberal and digital DIY ontology that distinguishes itself from the domesticity of previous generations while also making claims to a “return.” This essay lays out some key issues that need to be taken into account regarding this emerging form of Wi-Fi gadget facilitated public engagement through domestic space while noting how the issue of unwaged labor resurfaces in the context of digital labor by women.

Value the Edge: Permaculture as Counterculture in Australia

Value the Edge: Permaculture as Counterculture in Australia

Book Review: Social Movements and Their Technologies, by Stefania Milan

Social Movements and Their Technologies. Stefania Milan. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 248 pp. $85 hbk.The use of electronic media by social movements has garnered considerable attention in recent years, with some commentators labeling recent upheavals in Arab world and elsewhere as Twitter- or Facebook-driven revolutions. But labels such as these offer slim insight into complex role that media communication technologies play in lives of social movements. For those who seek to more deeply understand this subject, Stefania Milan's Social Movements and Their Technologies is a good place to begin.A professor at Tilburg University in Netherlands and Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, Milan delivers two important innovations with regard to study of media and social movements. First, she uses sociology-based social movement theory as a framework with which to examine media organizing and activism she discusses, thereby breaking with tendency within media studies to study political media without studying social movement from which this media has emerged, and tendency within sociology-based social movement research of paying too little attention to media making that goes on within social movements. Second, she positions media making organizations, groups, and individuals she studies as constituents within a transnational media justice-driven social movement. Here, she argues, [f]ar from being considered only as tools, media and communication technologies have become a site of struggle in their own right.At center of Milan's research is a comparative examination of emancipatory communication practices (ECPs)-which she defines as ways of social organizing seeking to create alternatives to existing media and communication infrastructure- of two media constituencies, these being community radio practitioners and Internetbased activists. Using language of social movement theory, Milan states that goal of her research is to examine the emergence of media and technology activism, its features, mobilizing frames, identity building, and action repertories.To conduct her study, she interviewed and observed work of community radio practitioners in twenty-four countries and interviewed Internet activists from sixteen countries over a six-year period. From this work, Milan has delivered an insightful study regarding ideologies and organizational efforts that underwrite these alternative and oppositional media-making projects, with her study of Internet projects (which she bundles under term radical techies) being particularly compelling.Describing philosophies that underpin work of techies, Milan observes that these activists share a set of sources of inspiration-namely, DIY culture, cyberlibertarianism, hacker culture, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, Zapatista discourse, and autonomist thought. On a practical level, Internet activist groups typically aim to provide non-commercial web-based communication tools, such as website hosting and blogging platforms, e-mail accounts, list services, and chat rooms, to citizenry and activist community. In contrast to services provided by commercial systems, they seek to do this while preserving anonymity and privacy of users through encryption techniques. …

Design as Activism in Helsinki

ABSTRACTThis article sketches out the emergence of an activist mode of design in the Finnish capital, Helsinki—a phenomenon that became particularly apparent during the city's year as World Design Capital in 2012. It gives examples of design activism, paying attention to their different political positionings in the contemporary landscape of urban change-making. It shows that design becomes entangled in problematic ways with official urban policy, even as it fuels an exciting and popular “urban vibe.” The article adopts an anthropological sensitivity to context, highlighting Finland's heritage of consensus politics and design's historical role in fostering national identity and supporting industry. In this light, the current embrace of activist design in Helsinki, from DIY culture to government policy, becomes both understandable and more open to critical reflection. The suggestion is that, as part of urban policy, alongside creativity, innovation, and participatory decision-making, design should also be subjected to deep and consequential critique.

Anarchism and Geography: A Brief Genealogy of Anarchist Geographies

AbstractAnarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers’ engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the 19th‐century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’s enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the 20th‐century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti‐globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice‐based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the ‘freedom of geography’ and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions.

Screens of intensification: on DIY concert videos of Lady Gaga and the use of media interfaces as tools of experience intensification

The article is based on the analysis of user-generated videos from a particular event: the Lady Gaga concert in Denmark on October 20, 2010. Within the theoretical framework of a media practice perspective, theories of a media cultural movement from sign to signal, and an affective understanding of the experience of liveness, I argue that the DIY videos do not only attest to the documentation or representation of the concert event, but rather show an urge to feel it, connect to it, and relate to others by sharing it. In that way media and screens can be understood as technologies that under certain circumstances enable intensified relations between bodies, spaces, and significant others. The experiential intensification of the event is established by using media to (1) visually enrich the real-time experience, (2) turn the collective receiver into an individualized and creative real-time auteur, and (3) deterritorialize the real-time experience by sharing it on social media platforms. Furthermore, I discuss two ways of analyzing “the signal” in my material: one focusing on the relation between body, event, and mobile media technology and the other on the formal features of the videos themselves. This distinction is nevertheless purely analytical given that the formal traces of the signal (the sensory turbulence of the videos) are so closely related to the spatially affected camera-body. The body in the space, the camera, and the audiovisual surface is in other words affecting each other, as the signaletic force of the concert-event affects all the three.Carsten Stage, Assistant Professor, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. His research interests are cultural and media globalization, affective online communication, participatory and DIY culture. Recent publications: Tegningekrisen—som mediebegivenhed og danskhedskamp (trans. The cartoon crisis—as media event and national identity struggle) (2011), “Contagious bodies. Affective and discursive strategies in contemporary online activism” (co-authored with Britta Timm Knudsen) in Emotion, Space andSociety (2011), and “Thingifying Neda. The construction of commemorative and affective thingifications of Neda Agda Soltan” in Culture Unbound (2011).

THE SPIRIT OF DWELLING AND INTERIOR DRAWINGS ON CHILDREN'S BOOKS COMPARISON BETWEEN JAPAN-EUROPE AND U.S.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the differences of the dwelling spirits on children's books between Japan and Europe & U.S. culture. First, (1) The concept of dwelling is different. In Europe and U.S. they think that the making a house is to look for the partner living with, on the contrary in Japan they think that the making a house is to make the space living with many friends. We have found other differences for following points : (2) View of a space, especialy private-space, (3) View of the communication with the neghborhood such as manners, (4) View of various life-styles, (5) Popularization of architectural technology and knowledge with DIY culture. (6) Their culture is reflected by detailed interior drawings and section drawings of apartment-houses.