The ongoing transmediale project of The Post-Digital Review gathers experts from the fields of digital culture art, policy, curating and research to discuss shifting forms of cultural practice, of organisations, of the economy as well as of politics in a post-digital world. This particular session will focus on the question of how art and culture contribute to build new forms of commons for a post-digital civil society. The first event of the Post-Digital Review, Understanding Post-digital Cultural Forms was an intensive One-Day Review Summit organised by transmediale in cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office and hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 10 November 2014. In the festival edition of The Post-Digital Review, we invite further experts as well as open up the discussion to the audience. An impulse lecture will be given by Nishant Shah followed by short position statements from the participants and an intensive open discussion.

Discussion
At Foyer Stage

The ‘off.networks’ mailing list started as an attempt to bring together researchers, activists and artists that work on the idea of an offline network, operating outside the Internet. Such networks could range from artistic projects (eg. deadrops or wifitagger) and “personal networks” (eg PirateBox.cc or subnod.es), to community networks (eg commotionwireless.net, nethood) and large city-scale mesh networks (eg. guifi.net, freifunk.net, awmn.net.). The first assembly of off.networks took place at the CCC last month. In their second scheduled meeting during transmediale Festival, the members of this network wish to make their first effort to build a diverse and dynamic community around the design, implementation and deployment of offline networks in different contexts. They wish to reflect critically on the role of such local networks in shaping the evolving hybrid urban space and in addressing the threats which are posed by internet corporations and surveillance states on citizens’ privacy and freedom of speech. In other words: How can the under construction “offline networks” allow us to join forces in reaching our common visions without sacrificing pluralism and independence? The answer might not be so simple as offline networks are subject to hybrid design and therefore require the collaboration between people with different expertise; they are context-specific and thus need to be easily installed and customised by non-savvy users; they have to compete with more and more ambiguous commercial initiatives that now pop up claiming a similar logic.

The session will open by short presentations by existing members of the off.networks community: Aram Barholl, Jeff Andreoni, David Darts and Matthias Strubel, Andreas Unteidig, Sarah Grant, Panayotis Antoniadis and Ileana Apostol. Other artists and practitioners taking part in transmediale will also join and an inclusive and open-ended mode of discussion will follow. The stage will be given to participants from the audience who will have 2-3 minutes each to present their thoughts and ideas forming a big round table.

> off.networks@librelist.com

The off.networks community (international)

The offline networksor ‘off.networks’ community has started as an attempt to bring together researchers, activists and artists that work on the idea of an offline network, operating outside the Internet. Such networks could range from artistic projects (eg. deadrops or wifitagger) and “personal networks” (eg. PirateBox.cc or subnod.es), to community networks (eg. commotionwireless.net) and large city-scale mesh networks (eg. guifi.net, freifunk.net, awmn.net). In their second scheduled meeting during transmediale Festival, the members of this network wish to make their first effort to build a diverse and dynamic community around the design, implementation and deployment of offline networks in different contexts. They wish to reflect critically on the role of such local networks in shaping the evolving hybrid urban space and in addressing the threats which are posed by internet corporations and surveillance states on citizens’ privacy and freedom of speech.

Panagiotis Antoniadis (ch) DIY Networking

Panayotis Antoniadis is a senior researcher at ETH Zurich. He has an interdisciplinary profile with background on the design and implementation of distributed systems (Computer Science Department, University of Crete), Ph.D. on the economics of peer-to-peer networks (Athens University of Economics and Business), post-doc on policies for the federation of shared virtualized infrastructures (UPMC Sorbonne Universités), and an on-going collaboration with urban planners on the role of ICTs for bridging the virtual with the physical space in cities (project nethood.org). Panayotis is currently active in the organization of various interdisciplinary events that aim to bring together researchers, practitioners, and activists from various fields around the participatory design of hybrid urban space with a focus on wireless and peer-to-peer technology. In this context, his personal conviction is that there is an urgent need for a global social learning framework, a toolkit, that will allow citizens to build their own local networks for supporting local interactions, and claim their right to the (hybrid) city.

Aram Bartholl (de)