This workshop is a follow-up to the lunch time talk on digital commons and presents and discusses aspects of the topic on the basis of practice examples. As part of her practice research, Cornelia has identified and mapped various art projects whose aim is to contribute to the production and preservation of the commons over the last years. She has conducted interviews with the artists involved in which they describe their work, talk about their motivation and explain how they see their projects related to the art field. The filmed interviews will be the basis for approaching the projects and discussing the various aspects they represent. The workshop will touch upon self-organized education, free digital tools and how they shape what we are doing, free content licensing such as Creative Commons, alternative platforms for communication and exchange and open archives and collections. Questions linked to the projects will include what forms of organisation artists suggest, what values their projects represent, what forms of agency the projects exemplify, what forms of social relations they enable/activate/produce, where the projects are located, what role technology plays, what external economies the projects depend on, whose labour are they based on, what the working conditions are, what the projects produce, who profits from the projects, what the property relations involved are and, last but not least, what inherent conception of art they express? To attend this workshop no prior technical knowledge is required, but it intends to inspire everybody who uses computers and digital networks in their daily lives to rethink the use of these tools.
