Distributed Web of Care

Announcing Skillshares: Peers in Practice

The Distributed Web of Care presents a skillshare series called Peers in Practice. This series invites the artists in residence at the Ace Hotel to investigate the distribution of power, autonomy and control.

Through an intimate interactive event, participants and artists will develop a dialog related to their practices by performing acts of collective caring, discussion and documentation. As a participant in the skillshare, all we require is an open mind and desire to share together. We will be experimenting with different modes of documentation throughout the events. We will also send out a small set of readings and ask you to generate a few questions based on those readings so we can come together with an informed baseline.

There will be four skillshares held between July 1st and July 22nd, culminating in a vibrant party in July 29th where the fellows and stewards from the Distributed Web of Care project will present their work on both tools and theory on a web of care, not control. Space is limited for the skillshare event. Please RSVP here.

Stephanie Gray and Eliza Chandler

Date: 07.22.2018. 1~4pm

Stephanie Gray is a poet-filmmaker known for Super 8 films and poetry that explore the experience of urban space, queerness, disability and class. She explores the mysterious ground between pop culture, fact, fiction and desire, while working between nostalgia, place and memory. She is the author of two poetry books, most recently, Shorthand and Electric Language Stars (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), and four chapbooks, including Under the Surface (above/ground press, 2018) and A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction (Argos Books, 2015). Work also appears in the anthology How Lovely the Ruins (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2017).

Eliza Chandler, an Assistant Professor at the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University, aims to bring together the arts, disability studies, and justice-based activism. She teaches courses on disability arts and culture, disability rights and justice, and community-based social activism; she is the co-director of the project Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life, a many-partnered grant supports the development of activist art (including Deaf & disability art, fat art, and Indigenous art) and interrogates its connection to the enactment of social justice. Chandler is a practicing curator, a board member of the Ontario Arts Council, and the co-founder of Creative Users Projects, a community arts/activist initiative that supports crip artists through artistic development and works to create a more accessible arts culture. Prior to these roles, she was the founding artistic director of Tangled Art Gallery, a gallery in Toronto that showcases disability arts and advances accessible curatorial practices. Chandler regularly give lectures, interviews, and consultations related to disability arts, inclusive curatorial practices, and disability politics in Canada.

Free, RSVP

All Events - Location: Ace Hotel Boardroom, 20 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001

The space is accessible via service elevator. Please note your access needs in the RSVP form and ask the front desk for assistance. 7.22 skillshare will have a Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) service

Past Events

#1 Ari Melenciano

Date: 07.01.2018. 1~4pm

Ari Melenciano is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, creative technologist and DJ. She is a master’s candidate at NYU’s ITP department, practicing at the intersection of experiential design and emerging technologies via creative computation, human-computer interaction, engineering and design. She is the creator and producer of new media arts, culture and technology festival Afrotectopia, as well as the creator of Justice Factory, a data visualization platform that highlights social justice issues and human rights violations.

Read Building a Museum 353 Years in the Future by Ari about her residency.

#2 Mindy Seu

Date: 07.08.2018. 1~4pm

Mindy Seu is a designer and educator. She is currently a student in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where her research focuses on digital archives UI and methods of digitization. Formerly, she was a designer at 2x4 and instructor for Interactive 2 at California College of the Arts.

The skillshare will also include the following short workshops presented by stewards of the DWC project:

Lai Yi Ohlsen

Peer to peer protocols require trust and the negotiation of shared resources - so does the dance floor. Webs of moving bodies and sound are an ideal environment to understand how we can, and already do, prioritize care over control within a system. With a good enough groove, peers work together without ever skipping a beat. ‘100 Scores’ by Lai Yi Ohlsen is a repository of improvisational movement scores based upon computer science algorithms. For DWC she will present scores related to the potential of the distributed, peer to peer web.

Juliana Castro

Meme culture and fast-paced social networking have encouraged the use of copyrighted resources without proper attribution. This talk will highlight the benefits of open-access, show a selection of available public domain and Creative Commons archives, and address best practices and fair use uses of institutional repositories and other people’s work.

Zach Coble

Participants will engage in a conversation about gathering and using data from the web for social good. The steward will briefly show recent projects and we will use these examples to create a dialog about the legal and ethical issues involved in such projects.

#3 Jessia Lynne and Shannon Finnegan

Date: 07.15.2018. 1~4pm

Location: Ace Hotel Boardroom, 20 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001

Jessica Lynne is co-founder and editor of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. She received her B.A. in Africana Studies from NYU and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Art21 and The Cue Foundation, Callaloo, and The Center for Book Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Aperture, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Kinfolk. She was a Winter 2018 Columnist-in-Residence at Open Space, SFMoMA’s interdisciplinary publishing platform, and is co-editor, alongside Sharon Louden, of the forthcoming book, The Innovators: Defining Change in the Art World, that will be published by Intellect Ltd. and The University of Chicago Press.

She is a board member of Black Art Futures Fund and The Organization of Women Writers of Africa.

Shannon Finnegan is an artist whose practice involves a mix of drawing, design and writing. Her current motto is “Reinventing my strangeness as an art form that only I am the perfect practitioner of.” She’s created Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, Disability History PSA, and other projects about disability culture and access.

Free, RSVP

We are planning to offer skillshares and party in July in partnership with the Ace Hotel New York. We will announce details about workshops and events via Taeyoon Choi’s mailing list. Please join us for the Distributed Web of Care Party on July 29th.

group photo

Distributed Web of Care is an initiative to code to care and code carefully.

The project imagines the future of the internet and consider what care means for a technologically-oriented future. The project focuses on personhood in relation to accessibility, identity, and the environment, with the intention of creating a distributed future that’s built with trust and care, where diverse communities are prioritized and supported.

The project is composed of collaborations, educational resources, skillshares, an editorial platform, and performance. Announcements and documentation are hosted on this site, as well as essays by select artists, technologists, and activists.

Distributed on Dat and GitHub.