Six Years
STRING FIGURES
ONLINE WORKSHOP WITH AILIE RUTHERFORD
23 February 2022 16:00-18:00
As part of SIX YEARS | What do curators care for?
As our every experience is commodified online and our inter-relationships are increasingly trackable, traceable, and data-mineable the project looks at how we can take more care in our digital lives.
If the web 2.0 is a fucked up racist, transphobic, misogynist shit-show of extraction and exploitation, then let’s imagine the feminist tools of the new web, a digital commons where we can pool our collective resources to build the systems we need to support each other. A space where we are not mind-controlled by state-corporate collaborations but able to collaborate with our peers in a way that can never be owned or co-opted or sold back to us. – Ailie Rutherford
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Proposed by Arlène Berceliot-Courtin, Karin Schlageter et Francesca Zappia.
The new edition of SIX YEARS | What do curators care for? stimulates a reflection on the practice of “care” within the field of “curating”. The programme, which develops within c|e|a’s online curatorial platform, aims to explore the systems of inter-relationships, empathy, mutual responsibilities and communications that trigger alternative practices of “ curating”, particularly through the interrelational potential of digital technology.
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String Figures
For the first event of SIX YEARS | What do curators care for?, c|e|a invites artist and curator Ailie Rutherford to lead an online workshop (in English only) for the members of the association.
Using a dedicated software, participants will be called upon to create a collective mapping of common needs and resources, by answering two questions:
We will work cooperatively – with honesty, fairness and caring for each other
We draw our strength from diversity and actively invite the participation of all those who improve it
String Figures takes its title from techno-feminist Donna Haraway’s metaphor for the inextricable threads that bind us all together. Since Covid-19 radically changed our working practices, Ailie Rutherford has worked with designer Bettina Nissen and creative technologist Bob Moyler to co-design a new collaborative software for collective work centered on a principle of mutual aid and cooperation. Adapted from a face-to-face workshop that used print blocks to create a map, this new digital tool allows local and trans-local collectives to collaborate in an online space, and create visual information diagrams remotely and complex, with the aim of building decentralized support networks.
https://string-figures-v1-0-3.glitch.me/
Ailie Rutherford is an artist and curator. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Her practice is collaborative and looks to feminist economics as an alternative collective organization that challenges the norms of capitalism. She founded the Swap Market, a space in South Glasgow dedicated to sharing objects, resources, ideas, knowledge and cultures without resorting to money. With the Feminist Exchange Network and People’s Bank of Govanhill, she explores ways to put feminist economics into practice at the grassroots level. Ailie Rutherford was also curator of the “Wired Women” events program at the last edition of NEoN Digital Arts, a digital arts festival in Dundee, Scotland.
https://ailierutherford.com/
WORKSHOP’S VISUAL ARCHIVE
