My SIP intends to explore intentional technology and online space, through community, identity and give breath to alternative online worlds which uses identity, online community, and non-hierarchical critical theory in research and research-based art. The aim is to blend researchers, artists, online personas, meme-makers, and anyone else who has something to share, and create an open-access forum, giving sustenance to rhizomatic resource/knowledge-sharing and online/AFK community. I am a BA art direction student at the University of Arts London from Northwest London. My practice as a research-based technologist focusing on ideals of how technology can be used through an intentional, holistic approach. This often borns itself in ranging mediums, such as 3d design, sound-making and creative coding with the forefront of all my work being curation and research-based. The ideation of my SIP started with archiving critical theory, readings and media on the are.na platform, along with 3 other practitioners, Ester Freider, a CSM graduate, Sofya Rakitina a Graphic Media student at CSM, and Paloma Moniz, an associate lecturer at CSM and LCC. Together we gathered materials on cyberfeminism and internet culture, proceeding to follow up on Ester’s ideation of a critical forum and quasi-academic index. We manifested this into a collective project called Everyone is a girl, reflecting on the girl online, an idea of a self-surveilled identity, who 'tactically submits to the wills of the digital algorithm' [Ester Freider, 2023]. We take inspiration for our name from practitioners Alex Quicho’s article, ‘Everyone is a Girl Online’. Although this project associated itself with building a critical reader index, we began with building an online community through instagram, where we shared memes, artworks, tweets and articles along this topic, and our instagram began to act as an online archiving and resource-sharing platform alongside other users. When beginning the research process for my SIP, I looked into resources such as Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, which provides collected essays on DAOs, peer-led architecture within the arts and also mentions the intersections of resource-sharing within fields, such as a neuroscientist and interior designer. These systems have manifested themselves in many ways, and can be found in tangible and intangible structures such as a fungi network, and the inside of a computer. This is an approach we took together, with working with each other, and with community-building. Once our instagram was a bit more established, we organised a free event at Pushkin House, where people had the opportunity to share a presentation around the themes of 𝒶𝓁𝒾𝑒𝓃𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃, 𝓂𝒶𝓃𝒾𝓅𝓊𝓁𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃, 𝓅𝑒𝓇𝒻𝑜𝓇𝓂𝒶𝓃𝒸𝑒, 𝓈𝓊𝒷𝓂𝒾𝓈𝓈𝒾𝑜𝓃, 𝒻𝑒𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒾𝓃𝒾𝓉𝓎, 𝒾𝓁𝓁𝓊𝓈𝒾𝑜𝓃, 𝓅𝓁𝒶𝓎, 𝑒𝓍𝒸𝑒𝓈𝓈, 𝑔𝓁𝒶𝓂𝑜𝓊𝓇, through an open call made beforehand. During the night, we had excerpt and poem readings, video essays, presentations and a live performance. Being our first event hosting, we took on the view of community as autonomous, which encourages resource-sharing and utilises civic engagement to view academics as collaborative work. Sofya, Paloma, Ester and I also collaborated on a risograph zine, which was later scanned and shared through our website. All presentations [with authors permissions] are also free to view on our website. For my SIP, I knew I wanted to work with academics and art and community, yet I was worried as I wanted to explore my own interests in academia. I made a SIP proposal to bring artists together along the route of tech and divination [or techno-divination], essentially exploring tech as magick, the rituals we create around tech, referencing books such as Technic and Magic by Federico Campagna, Myth and reality by Mircea Eliade and Queer Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz. This was a proposal I wanted to carry out into my thesis work, as I wanted to explore my own practise as well as working with others. But curating and hosting events, building community and working alongside others who are just as interested in academia and arts, was also a practise within itself. It took a lot of decision-making, allocating tasks and navigating our own perspectives of where the collective was heading. Introducing this collective, we did not know it would be so community-based, but through peer-learning with each other and people interested in the collective, we were able to build it in a rhizomatic way. I think this SIP aided me in positioning my practise into more communal thinking, viewing academics, art and collaborative authorship as something that goes hand in hand as a means of pedagogical thinking.
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