Category: Barcelona

Barcelona Collective Intelligence Creative Practice PhD storytelling Visual Writing

Collective Intelligence Decidim Style #1 :: Start Here

Visual sketch by me of immersive multi-dimensional experience watching/participating in DecidimFest20 (Nov-Dec 2020)

Call and Response1

A long time ago, back in the last millennium, I remember sending out calls on email lists. And while I waited for responses to come back, I could visualise and sense the calls going out into a vast assembled body of communication networks and peoples, all with their own collectives and networks in turn (offline as well as online). And responses would always come back, as reliable as an echo, but not an echo, as each reply would be unique and distinctive, coming live and afresh from the senders.

… Collective Intelligence Decidim Style #1 :: Start Here
Barcelona Collective Intelligence Español Film/Video PhD storytelling Visual Writing

Collective Intelligence PhD online! [en/es]

Very happy to finally share these posts about my Collective Intelligence PhD:

General Argument: Decidim is a prototype for public-commons participatory democracy, forming part of a live ecosystem of collective intelligences with transformative impacts.

Argument 1: Decidim is part of a live ecosystem of interconnected collective intelligences.

Argument 2: Decidim.Barcelona is a prototype for public-commons participatory democracy and has characteristics of a live collective intelligence.

Argument 3: Decidim has transformative impacts.

[Versión en castellano casi lista] Argumento: Decidim es un prototipo de democracia participativa público-común, que forma parte de un ecosistema vivo de inteligencias colectivas interconectadas, con impactos transformadores

Videos:

… Collective Intelligence PhD online! [en/es]
Barcelona Catalan Collective Intelligence Creative Practice Español Film/Video PhD Sound storytelling Visual

La Colmena / The Hive of Decidim

[es/en] La Colmena (The Hive) (2019) is a documentary style video sharing (some of) the inner life of Decidim, made from material recorded during the fieldwork with the Decidim Team (July 2018). If you are interested to help with translation/subtitles, please message me on Twitter.

La Colmena builds on the experimental video The Sound of the Hive which transmits the hum of the Decidim office that was still ringing in my ears for a long time after returning home from fieldwork.

Barcelona Collective Intelligence Creative Practice Gephi Intersectionality Mexico PhD storytelling Visual

Centres, Margins, Distributions

Excerpt from Preface to 1984 Edition of bell hooks’ Feminist Theory. From Margin to Center.
Paul Baran’s network typologies from “On Distributed Communications”, a document prepared for the
United States Air Force Project Rand (1964).

Baran’s network typologies from the early days of computing (1964) are still referenced by Tecnopolitica researcher-activists at the forefront of social transformation today (see diagram below). Decentralized and distributed networks, politics and technologies are at the heart of Tecnopolitical practices, however their politics are far removed from Baran’s context of US Air Force funded research. Politically, Tecnopolitica would have more in common with the trajectory of bell hooks whose framework: emphasises ‘the centre’ (contrasted with the margin); suggests ‘the decentering of the West globally’ and a focus instead on ‘attention on the issue of voice. Who speaks? Who listens? And why?’ (p. 40, 1994); and continues to be a reference point today for people arguing for ‘decentering and decolonising knowledge’ (Moreno Figueroa, 2019).

However, the substance and vibe of the hooks’ text sends very different messages to these stylised network visualisations (above and below)….

… Centres, Margins, Distributions