Sher Doruff, Nancy Mauro-Flude (eds.): Connected: LiveArt (2005)

“The Connected! Programme spanned a two year period from January 2003 to January 2005. It officially concluded with a celebratory Birthday party for Art in the Theatrum Anatomicum of Waag Society, the local ‘home’-base of many Connected! projects. Although most of the people present at that event agreed with Federico Bonelli’s assessment “that art could have committed suicide in 1984″ – the research and the show goes on.

The Connected! Programme had four nested components: Projects, Artists-in-Residence, Sentient Creatures Lecture Series and Anatomic. This book documents many of the activities in these domains; the lectures, the events, the workshops, the performances, the installations, the discourse. Yet, it’s interesting to note that pulling together material for this publication was a bit like trying to capture the wind. Much of the work produced in this two-year period emphasized the real-time process of the making. Documentation of that often fragile, unstable and always already ephemeral process is sketchy at best and marginal to the actualization of the event itself. For many of these artists, documentation is a secondary concern, an afterthought. For others, documenting is an integral process indistinguishable from the event itself.

There are myriad photos in this catalogue of artists behind their laptops. Myriad photos that say little about the levels and layers of codified communication emitted from those unseen screens. These casual, unpretentious shots are images of social networks in progress – the translocal – a feedback loop of the local effecting the global affecting the local affecting the global. Not only does the artwork produced, or better transduced, scramble representational meaning but so too does the process of making. Performance practice that addresses the indeterminate dance-on-the-edge-of-chaos in compositional processes is a felt thing, an experience that doesn’t always translate well in laptop snapshots.”

Co-writers: Federico Bonelli, Beth Coleman, Josephine Dorado, Lucas Evers, Wander Eikelboom, Howard Goldkrand, Jan-Kees van Kampen, Arjen Keesmaat, Jeff Mann, Mark Meadows, Hellen Sky, Michelle Teran, Ananya Vajpeyi

Publisher Waag Society, Amsterdam, September 2005
Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 Netherlands License
160 pages

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Anne Goldenberg: La négociation des contributions sur les wikis publics: Légitimation et politisation de la cognition collective (2010) [French]

Les wikis sont des sites hypertextuels éditables dont chaque modification est publiquement consignée. L’usage de ces artefacts s’est notamment répandu pour de grands projets de production de connaissances (encyclopédie, documentation en ligne). Dès lors, les participants doivent s’organiser pour surveiller et discuter de ce qui constitue une contribution. Nous avons d’abord réalisé une enquête par questionnaires en ligne autour du concept de contribution suivi d’entretiens qualitatifs menés auprès des participants à trois wikis publics1. Ceux-ci l’ont défini comme une activité de production de connaissances, en tension entre intérêt personnel et collectif, besoin de reconnaissance et disposition d’anonymat et dont les principes de pertinence sont régulièrement discutées. Ces mises en débat semblent structurantes dans la mesure où les contributeurs et contributrices parviennent à distinguer ce qui relève d’une dispute sociale ou d’un débat d’ordre épistémique (relatif aux connaissances). L’usage de wikis publics dans une perspective épistémique amène les contributeurs à faire face à deux contradictions : L’ouverture à la contribution publique entre en tension avec le besoin de valider les connaissances diffusées. La participation du plus grand nombre est mise au défi par l’établissement de conventions sociales qui complexifient l’adhésion au projet. Que révèle l’étude de la négociation des contributions au regard des problèmes de justesse et de justice propre aux wikis publics ? Une analyse plus poussée de la gestion des désaccords dans les trois communautés étudiées a bien permis de relever une violence latente malgré les conventions sociales et épistémiques en place. Mais l’étude a aussi revélé l’importance du rôle des participant investis dans l’organisation, la mise en relation et la contextualisation des interventions. L’émergence d’une culture de la contribution serait ainsi tributaire d’une responsabilisation vis-à-vis des enjeux politiques et épistémiques impliqués dans la production participative de connaissances.

Sociology and Communication dissertation thesis
Faculté de communication, L’Université du Québec à Montréal et Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis
324 pages

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Andrew Famiglietti: Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians: The Political Economy and Cultural History of Wikipedia (2011)

“This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers.

I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia’s actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia’s content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles.”

Doctor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies / Communication, 2011
Dissertation Committee: V. Ekstrand, N. Patterson, R. Gajjala, D. McQuarie, D. Parry
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
290 pages

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