This social technology is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result of The Hologram process is the construction of a robust multidimensional health network, collectively-oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive capitalism.

The Hologram’s protocol ensures that all caretakers are cared for, and regards properly supporting someone else’s well-being as therapeutic in itself. As the racist, capitalist and patriarchal world crumbles around us, participants are invited to design long-lasting systems for support and solidarity that can ensure that our species can outlast the ongoing social, economic and planetary emergencies.

The project aims to enact a functional system for non-expert healthcare based on mutualistic support and solidarity that works towards a speculative post-capitalist future where peer cooperation is an essential value. It aims to foster people’s personal transformations within small groups through a peer-to-peer healthcare system and enable the system’s viral proliferation in broader social and geographical contexts.

The Hologram Course

Within the CreaTures context, The Hologram started with the course We must begin again: Asking for help as a new world, in which people from all over the world were invited to meet online to study and practice what it means to ask for help. The course was run in Autumn 2020, following an incubation period and exploratory workshop organised at Furtherfield’s space, as part of Cassie Thornton’s artist residency.

“We believe that destruction is making space for new beginnings and that we have no choice but to begin again. We see asking for help as a way of coming into a new world with humility, curiosity and interdependence with all beings. We want to work together with you to remind ourselves what we have been forced to forget: how to be a cooperative, interdependent species. In this project, the person who articulates their needs and asks for support can take us to a whole new world.”

– from The Hologram course invitation

In the series of six online course sessions (Sept-October 2020), 26 participants were guided through a process to remember together why and how to ask for support, and how to ensure that our supporters are supported. Together, they experimented with how to organize and value the support they need to survive and thrive in the coming new world: they practiced and discussed the social skills, values, and priorities that are central to The Hologram’s model for collective peer-to-peer healthcare.

• Each session focused on a particular topic:
• Trust and questions of Bad Support
• Atrophy of the Sharing Muscle
• Failienation
• Learning to Trust Ourselves Again
• Wishes and Time

Participants also practiced Social Presencing Theatre and experimented with their first Hologram meeting. The last session was dedicated to building a Hologram Community of Practice. Each person left the course empowered to assemble and participate in their own Hologram group.

A CreaTures member joined the course as an embedded researcher and shared autoethnographic logs of their experience throughout, giving The Hologram facilitators an invaluable participants’ perspective. This provided insights into the complex tensions and interplay between personal/individual and shared/collective experiences across the six weeks. Their reflections on the appeal (or otherwise) of certain elements of the experimental practices employed also informed the development of future courses.

The Hologram team offers several courses every year, each shaped to fit common collective needs. Outside of the CreaTures scope, multiple courses took place including, for instance, a series of courses designed especially for healthcare workers or people who identify as men.

The Hologram LARP – We were made for this // 2050 Fugitive Planning

From inside the stillness of global lockdown, The Hologram’s viral healthcare system was used as a parafictional framework (where fiction is presented as fact) of radical planning “for the post-pandemic futures we wanted”. Through participation in this Live Action Role-Play (LARP) over two online events, twelve people made contact with who they would become, individually and collectively, by 2050.

The LARP had two related goals, offering participants an opportunity to:

“ make contact with who we want to become, individually and collectively, by 2050 [and to] see yourself as a powerful and supported being who will survive and thrive the coming emergencies and crises that await us…”.

– Cassie Thornton (2021)

The LARP was intended to provide the next level of learning and transformation through social holography.  In this immersive game, participants played characters based on the most powerful and well-supported version of themselves. They time-travelled 30 years in three weeks to enact their survival and thriving through multiple emergencies and crises. Human systems collapsed and reformed, in the wake of social upheavals borne of entrenched colonialism, racism and environmental crises. Capitalism ended.

The Hologram Community of Practice and Workbook

The Hologram Community of Practice meetings have been organised on a monthly basis via a Telegram channel and run online by community members. Connected to the community is a series of online, facilitated, two hour-long sessions called Minimum Viable Holograms (MVH). In these sessions, one of The Hologram peer-facilitators walks newcomers through the basic ideas of the project to explain how each part of the social holography process works, and how to have transformative and supportive conversations.

Eleven MVH facilitators have been trained so far to support people in their first Hologram session. The community has been collaborating on a full programme of developments and aims to sustain the practice and network beyond 2023, when Cassie Thornton plans to step down as the creative lead of the project. A summary video provides a glimpse into the MVH sessions: 

The Hologram Workbook (Starter Kit for Anti-Capitalist Futures) was created to provide easy answers to the question: What is The Hologram and how do you use it? This short illustrated manual (translated into 5 different languages) walks incomers through the first steps of starting their Hologram group and is intended as an accompaniment to the support received from another practitioner who is familiar with The Hologram protocol.

The Hologram Film

The Hologram film directed by Thornton and produced and edited by Jonathan Lee, attempts to model the Hologram practice and its use both online and offline. It also reveals the radical proposal underneath the practice, which is that many people can simultaneously create an expanding network of contributors who are healthy and stable enough to survive and thrive through the end of capitalism, and to make new ways of organising human cooperation with what is found in the rubble. The film consists of a simulation of the Hologram protocol performed by people who are a part of the large community of practitioners using The Hologram practice in their life. 

The Hologram film was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at an exhibition, workshop and video launch event at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology as part of the Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (July 2022).

In the nine months following The Hologram course, numerous events took place. Community members ran two more Hologram courses, eleven people set up their own Holograms, while 35 people joined The Hologram Community of Practice on Telegram and 36 people joined a new, monthly Community of Practice meeting. 40 people also signed-up and participated in Minimum Viable Holograms (MVH) taster sessions that enable people to create their own care clusters. These MVH programmes were developed with a specific focus on diversity. The Hologram also received significant additional funding and support through other social and cultural organisations. A website and community forum were created and populated by networks of The Hologram participants.

The first prototype of Commonspoly was created at the 17th ZEMOS98 festival in Seville in 2015, during a working session facilitated by Guillermo Zapata and with the participation of Vassilis Chryssos, Francisco Jurado, José Laulhé, Carmen Lozano, Rubén Martínez, Peter Matjašič, María G. Perulero, Virginia Benvenuti, Natxo Rodríguez, Igor Stokfisiewski, Menno Weijs, Carla Boserman and Mario Munera. The group decided to hack the popular board game Monopoly whose design principles prescribe land monopolisation, rent extraction and driving competing players to bankruptcy as a win strategy.

In contrast, Commonspoly invites players to collectively convert private spaces on the game board to public, and eventually into common holdings. It sets up a struggle between a Speculator – player character who wants to privatise everything at all costs – and the rest of the players, whose objective is to take assets into common ownership and fight against capitalist speculation. The game has four types of goods: environmental, urban, intangible or knowledge-based, and health or care-related – and cooperation is the only way to win. Commonspoly enables playful ways to mediate complex questions.

Focusing on urgently needed changes to existing social paradigms, politics and culture in relation to the commons, it celebrates what Adrienne Rich has called radical happiness: those moments of collective joy that bloom when a group of people share a common understanding of what it means to actively and truly participate in society. We can find radical happiness in an assembly, at a protest or at a party. It takes many forms, but there is always a common thread – people coming together and working as a group rather than as isolated individuals. Commonspoly feeds the players’ desire to cooperate and allows for free experimentation, discovery and learning around socio-economic questions that arise in real, everyday life.

Upon the collective creation of the first game prototype, the ZEMOS98 cooperative began coordinating and facilitating the development of the Commonspoly project. To encourage collaborative game development the game was made available for free, as a set of downloadable and editable files. The game is typically played in public sessions at cultural events where it engages diverse local communities, but it can also be purchased or downloaded for free in different languages as print-ready files and played privately.

New game versions created by players are then distributed under the Peer Production License and their creators are listed as authors, while ZEMOS98 stays listed only as the author of the game versions that they developed themselves. This peer-process ensures inclusion of diverse personal experiences of the commons and creates an open space for the development of a distributed authorship of the game. The emphasis on collective authorship is a key part of the Commonspoly project. The openness to ongoing re-negotiation is designed into the game, which then becomes a commoning artefact on its own. Through these playing formats and development strategies, Commonspoly has already reached people in 23 countries and was released in five different iterations and four different languages.

For instance, a Brazilian teacher adapted the game to the local context for her students; a UK-based Esperanto expert made a game translation. ZEMOS98 themselves has developed four game editions so far, with the latest one – the Commonspoly Green Edition – used in the CreaTures project. Initially, the Commonspoly gameplays within the CreaTures context were supposed to take place in-person in Seville, Spain. After the Covid-19 pandemic started, there was no possibility for physical game encounters and ZEMOS98 started experimenting with an online gameplay format (the first online game board prototype was released in June 2022).

To support game dissemination, ZEMOS98 initiated an international Commonspoly Network of socially engaged citizens interested in the game and its philosophy. A multidisciplinary team of social researchers and creatives were appointed as Ambassadors for the Network to support Commonspoly gameplays in various cities and countries.

Within the CreaTures project, ZEMOS98 organised a series of gameplays in cities across Europe to enable broad access to the project for different groups, including the scientific community and members of the public. These gameplays took place in Thessaloniki, Greece (July 2021), facilitated by Irene Kalemaki; in Helsinki, Finland (July and August), facilitated by Oula Rytkönen and Andrew Gryf Paterson; in Italy (September 2021), facilitated by Angela María Osorio Méndez; in Lisbon, Portugal (August and October 2021), facilitated by Sandrine Cristomo; and in Madrid, Spain (November 2021), facilitated by the Rosalia Gutiérrez.

All events were facilitated and thoroughly documented for CreaTures research purposes in order to look into the hidden transformative potential of such creative practices. The research work was led by the following questions:

• How does the game help players to reflect on commons in real life?
• How can the game stimulate cooperation?
• Can the game create new relations and a ‘ripple effect’ that would grow in
• the long-term, beyond the context of a single gameplay?
• How does this effect travel through conversations and experiences that
• people have after a gameplay?
• What kind of relations does it foster?

The final Spanish gameplay concluded with an intense debate on the difference between public and commons, on the realism of a society of the commons and on the role of the state in the globalised world. The Commonspoly Ambassadors were active throughout the duration of the CreaTures project, collecting data from gameplays, improving facilitation skills, and documenting various game experiences and processes. The Ambassadors Network is still active and new games are being organised beyond the CreaTures context.

Aside from the gameplays, the Commonspoly project was showcased at multiple cultural events, including the Gaming for the Commons Festival (online and in Seville, Spain; November 2020), the at FIBER 2021 festival (online; December 2021), and the CreaTures Festival (Seville, June – July 2022).

Under the mentorship of different invited artists and experts, participants delve deep into the possible uses of fungi as organisms that provide a viable alternative to unsustainable materials such as plastics. Fungi may well represent a revolution in the field of new biomaterials and can be also seen as a live, widespread wetware that humans and art can interact with through signaling. The community gathered around MyCoBiont workshops and events – including students, permaculture and fungi enthusiasts, researchers, and designers – is invited to learn from artists and other professionals who have been working with mycelium in diverse experimental ways.

The initial workshop in the series was led by Rok Zalar and Bojana Rudovič Žvanut from Gobnjak, an initiative for urban mushrooming and Kersnikova’s partner organization. The workshop consisted of 7 parts and introduced participants to the lifecycle of fungi and the basics of their nutrition and reproduction. Together with the skilled tutors, participants explored suitable substrates for mycelial growth and learned about the preparation and sterilization of vessels and microbial cultures suitable for fungi cultivation. They also built a mini cultivation chamber, providing suitable conditions for mycelium growth, and crafted their own molds for mycelial bricks. Mycelium was further explored as a commonly-used material for food, packaging, and building material.

The second workshop titled Radio Mycelium (July 2021) was led by the artist Martin Howse and focused on constructing a series of experimental situations examining a new wetware imaginary of fungal mycelium in relation to local, global, and universal electromagnetic signals. Participants built DIY radio receivers, tested the reception of signals, and further explored the connections between mycelium and deep space radio signals, noting simple parallels between the scaled formations of radio telescope arrays, and the arrayed forms of certain mushroom bodies. At the final gathering they were able to sonify resistance modification in an electrical circuit by fungi.

At the third workshop Becoming-with Fungi (September 2021) led by artist Mary Maggic, participants explored the detoxifying properties of fungi to imagine new cross-species toxic entanglements. The workshop started from the recognition that industrial petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical activity has permanently altered the planet through the widespread presence of xenoestrogens or endocrine-disrupting compounds. Participants were asked to bring a household product containing a xenoestrogen ingredient (plastic bottles, cosmetics, soaps, or even their own urine) from which they extracted synthetic hormones and toxins using DIY techniques. Subsequently, they created a xenoestrogen cocktail and fed it to Oyster mushrooms growing on Petri dishes stained with Remazol blue, a synthetic fabric dye. For the following two weeks, they observed the mushroom growth over time to see how these respond to the toxic residues of human industrial capitalism.

Taro Knopp lead the fourth co-creative workshop that took place in February 2022. Tied to Taro’s long-term project titled ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus, the workshop invited participants to construct an installation consisting of transparent acrylic globes equipped with various technological sensors, radio transmitters and receivers. These closed and self-sustaining eco-systems combine different locally extracted organic materials and technological components. The electronic devices inside the globes sense the changes in the living mycelia and create a sound environment with radio waves, thereby creating a symbolic techno-organic machine. The mycelium globes have become a part of a permanent exhibition of artworks at Kersnikova and will enable continuous observation, research and creation of new combinations in the years to come. Artists and biohackers will thus have the opportunity to monitor this inspirational hybrid ecosystem over a prolonged period of time. The ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus workshop, together with an accompanying sound performance, is also conducted as part of the CreaTures Festival in Seville.

The MyCoBiont was concluded with the exhibition Sound for Fungi: Homage to Indeterminacy led by artist Theresa Schubert (February – March 2022). The work began as a laboratory experiment in which Schubert played sinus frequencies to fungi mycelia that she collected in the woods near her home in Berlin. After several weeks of observing these samples, housed in custom-made soundproof boxes, most showed a positive response to the sound, growing faster and denser than samples grown in silence. Schubert then created an interactive video installation that simulated the experiment using a tracking sensor, where hand movements simulate the role of sound frequency and modify fungal growth in real-time.

In April 2022, Kersnikova produced a short film documenting the MyCoBiont project and processes in all workshops and exhibitions:

Acknowledging that human-food practices are key drivers of climate change, the workshop prompted participants to co-create scenarios and collages imagining alternative food practices that prioritise eco-social sustainability and consider more-than-human perspectives. The workshop outcomes were compiled into a collaborative More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook presenting eleven experimental food futures recipes that aim to provoke imagination and inspire critical thinking on how human-food practices could be different – supporting relational flourishing.

Taking place on July 6th-7th 2020 and situated at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference, the two-day workshop invited interdisciplinary exchange among food-oriented researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in working towards eco-socially sustainable food systems and practices. The aim with the event was to provoke co-creative engagements as well as long-term collaborations among interested participants within the ongoing FFF network program.

Each workshop day focused on a distinct theme. Day one – titled Fantastic(e)ating Food Futures: Reimagining Human Food Interactions – examined interdependencies between food, eating and social practices, and critically engaged with future flourishing through food-tech innovation. Technology is often hailed as a change-maker but it may have ambivalent impacts on food cultures. Food-tech propositions, such as cooking with smart kitchenware or high-tech farming, are contested areas navigated by multiple human and non-human stakeholders. Day one activities thus sought to examine:

• What changes do food technologies bring into everyday life?
• How might we incorporate more-than-human values into food-tech futures?
• How might we leverage imaginative design approaches to scaffold the development of fantastical and sustainable food-tech cultures?
  

Day 2 – Designing with More-than-Human Food Practices for Climate Resilience – reached beyond the food-tech focus to engage with more-than-human food practices in a broader environmental sense, exploring food futures as nature-culture entanglements. The day-two activities drew on a rich variety of existing projects tackling food sustainability, observing that many of these projects fail to acknowledge multispecies plurality. Participants were invited to reflect on these examples and imagine ways of including muti-species perspectives in sustainable food transformations. Through four hours of collaging and exchange of food experiences, critical reflections, imaginations as well as boundary objects, participants unearthed a rich variety of intriguing dilemmas:

• How can we rethink hierarchies in food systems?
• Why are non-humans not credited for their contributions to food processes?
• Can fermentation & human-microbe care provide a model for change?
• How would slugs design food policy?
• Doesn’t more-than-human also imply less-than-human?
  

While originally envisioned as an in-person event in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the workshop was shifted into an online space due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Moving the originally proposed – embodied, co-creative, sensorial – food activities such as foraging and cooking into an online, remote context brought about various challenges but also a chance to explore new ways of working together, while physically apart. The workshop authors used the Zoom video conferencing system and experimented with Miro boards as the main co-creative playground to connect all 33 participants who were joining from countries across Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia.

The custom-made Miro boards designed for the workshop include various interactive elements such as ‘picnic areas’ for collective reflection and ‘food pantries’ stocked with examples of more-than-human food practices across five food system areas. Together with a deck of Food Tarot cards and various food-based boundary objects brought by participants, these Miro components and artefacts served as ingredients for the co-creation of experimental recipes.

Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to record short videos introducing themselves and their food boundary objects that were compiled into a video loop and shared in one of the Miro boards. At the workshop, the loop served as a ‘shared table’ where everyone introduced themselves and the foods they brought along. Apart from working with (representations of) food materials in Miro, workshop participants engaged in foraging walks in their home kitchens to bring more ingredients to the table and worked in small groups to combine their food objects, experiences, and imaginaries and piece them together into the experimental, more-than-human food futures recipes.

The experimental recipes resulting from the workshop include a wide range of proposals: from slug-driven food governance to a picnic meal reimagining the human body as a resource. All eleven recipes were collectively turned into the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook. These recipes don’t provide exact ingredient lists or precise measures; they are not step-by-step guides for cooking up better futures. Rather, they reflect on existing food issues and present proposals for alternative approaches that embrace values of inclusivity, multi-species pluralism, and eco-social restoration. By voicing these intentions, they serve as a provocation to rethink human-centric hierarchies in food systems.

The collaborative Cookbook was released in an online, interactive format and as a downloadable PDF. The book was further published in the Responsible Research and Innovation Tools collection (April 2021), in the Aalto University publication series ART + DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE (July 2022) and as a printed zine booklet (May 2022).
In June 2022, the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook was awarded a Special Award of the Jury at the Umeå Food Symposium 2022.

The Cookbook zine and online website were exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022). A short 5-minute video presentation from the Seville event can be watched & endured here.

The Nocturne project has unfolded as an experiment in care-taking and intimacy with the more-than-human world. The network of Nocturne altars operates as an economy of care – visitors to the interventions are responsible for upholding the integrity of the site, both in the more-than-human species that inhabit it, as well as in care-taking of the altars. The practice of generating new rituals with non-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and re-emphasizing the grounding impacts of more-than-human interactions. 

The Nocturne lanterns were created using an adaptation of the Akari process of bamboo paper lamp making in Japan: following the Akari tradition, the lanterns are made of foam-core, saran wrap, string, and painted beeswax. Combined into altars, the lanterns each spark a distinct sensorial experience: the way the sunlight backlights a native plant species at sunset; the sound of the birdsong at sunrise; the scent of jasmine leaves opening as the day cools into night. 

The first public showcase of the Nocturne altars within the CreaTures project took place during the Wild Altars: Radio Walk Stairs installation situated in the artist’s local neighbourhood in Silverlake, Los Angeles (March – August 2021). The work was presented as a ‘wild’ outdoors intervention inviting casual and serendipitous encounters. Near to home, such interventions slip into existing ecologies, opening a temporary space for new ceremonies and eco-rituals, beckoning humans to slow down and pay attention to the special arrangements of elements and lives around them. 

“This pause and break in their typical movement patterns and speed are meant to lead to a moment of deeper observation of the network of more-than-human species around them. Generating this embodied experience aligns with relocalization practices, and subverts the hierarchy of intellectual versus embodied knowledge present in Western epistemologies. To come back to our bodies is to come home, and in this case to come back to the more-than-human entanglements that we are a part of. “

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

QR codes at the site of the altars enabled members of the public to learn about the work, the artist, and reach out if they wanted. The received communication was positive and full of gratitude. The general response was an appreciation for having art in the neighbourhood, and an appreciation of the message. The altar stayed up on the stairs for about a year.

One of the original ideas that Isabel had was to undertake a daily or weekly ritual of visiting the altar and taking a few quiet moments to sit on the steps and listen to, and feel, the elements around her. The ritual evolved over time as she visited the altar less and less. As she prepared to create a further altar on a different staircase, it seemed that a new ritual might involve building a new altar each year, both locally and in more remote locations.

A critical part of the Nocturne project are the social processes involved in co-creating altars and eco-rituals together. There were two workshops organised throughout the course of the project: the first titled Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals workshop at the CreaTures Feral track at the 2021 Uroboros festival (May 2021, online) and the second Co-Creating Wild Altars organised at CultureHub’s ReFest: Reunification (March 2022, Los Angeles).

The Uroboros workshop was structured as a design hack: participants from many parts of the globe were broken up into small groups to brainstorm how they might create a wild altar: what materials they would use, where the altar be placed, what eco-rituals would emerge from the intervention. The workshop was accompanied by a Discord channel to encourage dialogue and communication post-workshop.

The second workshop at ReFest involved twelve participants creating their own small lanterns at the artist’s home studio in Los Angeles. Participants learned the process of creating these wax sculptures and took their creations to place in their own home environments, dedicating them to new eco-rituals they hoped to enact.

Following on the Wild Altars, Beavers created a multimedia installation Nocturne: Sea Altar incorporating audio, audio-reactive visuals, and seven light sculptures to honour the ocean, inviting visitors to engage in a practice of deep listening to ask: what are more-than-humans telling us?

The Sea Altar was showcased at the Atmospheres Deep exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (Monterey, California; May – July 2021), at Sui Generis: Debates about the Singular exhibition in the SOLA Contemporary (Los Angeles, California; January 2022), and at the Symbiosis: Sculpting the Art of Living Together exhibition in CultureHub (Los Angeles, July 2022). 

The Nocturne project was further exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022). Accompanying the altars, the Cooler Planet exhibition also unveiled a short film The Sky Has Not Yet Fallen showing conceptual background of the Nocturne project:

Within the Hackcamp project, participating cultural organisations and communities conduct analysis of their internal environment and processes related to eco-social change. Based on this analysis, each organisation identifies challenges that appear as urgent, and core values that might be shared by other organisations operating in similar contexts. Examples of challenges identified in past Hackcamps include: the need for effective and fair incorporation of decolonial perspectives in organisations’ internal practices, the need to identify strategies to combat racism and structural violence against racialised people, or the need for internal strategies embracing ecological responsibility.

The Hackcamp methodology relies on five main principles

• Trust in collective intelligence and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing
• Consideration of all knowledge, avoiding distinctions between experts and non-experts
• Willingness to listen to each other’s ideas and to accept diversity as the intellectual basis
• Prioritisation of practices and experiences that care for and value the common good
• Use of visual and body languages in addition to oral and textual tools.

Collaborative production is key for Hackcamp. The co-creative activities are organised with the help of a facilitator who knows the subject matter of the particular event and guides the participant group with empathetic and non-invasive techniques. A Hackcamp meeting is concluded with a public presentation of results and a feedback session inviting external stakeholders who have professional experiences with the main addressed theme.

The ZEMOS98 team typically documents the entire development and process of the Hackcamp for subsequent evaluation. Previous Hackcamps include: Hackcamp Reclaim the Commons held during the ZEMOS98 Festival in April 2015 for activists, makers, thinkers and hackers from all over Europe; Expanded Education Hackcamp held at Fi2 Tenerife in October 2016; and HackCampIAAP organised in June 2017 with the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration (IAAP) – part of the Andalusian Regional Government.

The edition of the Hackcamp run within the CreaTures project was held in Seville, Spain and involved six participants from various cultural organisations. This Hackcamp was divided into two days (30th and 31st May, 2022) and focused on issues around eco-social and decolonial transformation of cultural and creative practices. The objective was to define a roadmap with tips that can inspire development within the participating
organisations and other similar initiatives. The first part of the session consisted of a transparency exercise led by ZEMOS98, showing the cooperative’s internal self-evaluation mechanisms, the status of their current projects and the strategic challenges they have faced throughout their development.

Inspired by the introductory session, participants proceeded to gather learnings, reflections and ideas on how to approach an eco-social and decolonial change within small cultural organisations. To map the possible pathways towards this change, participants compiled their thoughts into the following key areas: micro-policies (understood as non-technical and non-instrumental measures that can be implemented in an organisation in order to address structural changes), tools (understood as technical or instrumental solutions that can be used by an organisation to carry out such
a turnaround), and projects (other projects or organisations whose practices can be inspiring).

From the data collected at the CreaTures Hackcamp event, ZEMOS98 is currently producing an open paper both in Spanish and in English that will be published as an open-source document. The Hackcamp is an ongoing series of events and a format of co-creative gatherings that ZEMOS98 has been using in a long term. There will be additional Hackcamp events happening in the future. The Hackcamp organised within the CreaTures project helped us to expand and further refine the Hackcamp format and future events will build on these findings. 

Andrew Gryf Patterson, in collaboration with several other members of the Pixelache association, sought to explore how the association has developed and sustained its internal organisational practice. By engaging with organisational meta-data, the Pixelache office as a tangible memory device, and the production of two audio zines, they gathered perspectives from active members reflecting upon how the organisation has transformed internally over the course of its existence. 

The creative research process within the Pixelache project involved an extensive mapping of the association’s history and its internal organisational practices over the 20 years of its existence, which resulted in the production of two audio zines. This process consisted of several stages, including: background research into organisational metadata, a workshop focused on gathering materials for the zines, and a production of a project website to host the zines and other project outcomes.  

Background research into organisational metadata

The first stage in the process (January – February 2022) was a compilation of festival and member metadata over the 20 years as reference, followed by the production of a handmade Gantt-style chart of past and present association members. The compiled data was used to build a timeline of main Pixelache events, moments of internal transformation and a generational map of key members and their roles in sustaining the association.

While the existing Pixelache website and content management were a record and source of information to consider, so too were digital organisational documents and portfolio reports. This metadata was gathered as a backbone of factual information upon which narratives could be based or problematised. Throughout the process, the work-group focused on the available data as well as on the ‘gaps’ and what possibly got lost in the association’s history documentation over the time, asking: What could we gather to assist our memory? What was sustainable and what was lost in the process?

Tracing the participation of members allowed a glimpse into patterns on, and offered a reference point for personnel changes in the association. The internal movements in the association implied that roles like producer, board member, or artistic director were accessible to any member with the motivation and will to take them on. This information, of course, did not reflect intersections such as: who feels entitled to take roles, internal dynamics, or other intersections. It allowed, though, to see general changes, like the nationalities and gender of members and producers, and to detect general dynamics in terms of content, interests, and strategies.

From the metadata compiled in the timeline and generational map, the next step was to identify other artefacts (events, objects, narratives) from the association’s history that were useful in co-creating an overview of Pixelache’s internal transformations. This included consideration of the ways in which the association responded to these transformations, and what the impact was of these changes.

Audio zine material gathering workshop

As new association members from 2021, Irina Mutt and Sumugan Sivanesan were invited to lead a workshop with Pixelache members and other interested persons to focus on making collective ‘fanzine’-style audio vignettes or anecdotes capturing key moments from Pixelache’s history (March 2022). By choosing this method – recording situated audio narratives in a quick, unstructured way – these audio vignettes were aimed to encourage further in-depth engagements with Pixelache’s archival documents and online content management system.

The two-day workshop was undertaken as an internal ‘social association memory event’ in the Pixelache production office, in Suvilahti Cultural complex, Helsinki, on 25-26th March 2022. Pixelache members were invited (via members mailing list) to “meet, have some talks, organise materials and check what items, memories and resources we have in the office”. The intention was to consider the sustainability and internal transformations of the association over time, with regards to the things, artefacts or objects that carry traces of Pixelache’s key events and recall transformations in the organisation of cultural programming. 

Due to the length of time that the association has existed, this inevitably involved facing the fragmentation, density, non-linearity of, and of course gaps in, data. This begged a question on the type of stories that could be possibly told about arts associations with a complex and extensive history like Pixelache’s. There is the challenge of what remains materially of associational activity, and what members of an organisation remember or forget over time.

It was speculated that the Pixelache production office was itself an interface device, a container of objects with various usages at different times, a non-linear and non-organised archive, full of tangible data. Being on-site, it was possible to trigger memories relating to Pixelache, in a sort of ‘Proustian madeleine’ process, allowing a more playful approach to the idea of archive: objects as traces surrounded by different stories, where these stories are subjective ways to recall the past. This enabled reflection on, and questioning of, whether there is any objectivity in archives, data or statistics

Interview & workshop data analysis

Following the workshop, it was identified that the information gathered in the Pixelache office missed certain voices of recent producers and board members. Several additional interviews during April 2022 were conducted with the most recent generation of active members according to their availability, focusing mostly on Pixelache festivals and experiences between 2013-2019. Irina, Sumugan and Andrew then worked together to select and edit the workshop conversations and interviews into the audio zine format (May 2022). The editing process led to the arrangement of narrative themes around two main clusters, which was further complemented by a selection of related artefacts from the Pixelache office ‘archive’ that came up in the conversations.

The first thematic cluster was decentralisation, and its relationship to the festival production, its rotating co-directorship model, and related socio-economical aspects of cultural work. It was recognized that burn-out of social organisational energy, which paradoxically also allowed space for new persons to take on curatorial roles, was an important factor in why the organisation has kept going for so long in the past decades.

The second thematic cluster was community and the diversity of disciplines, practice backgrounds and experiences, and how this related to expectations of what the association has been doing together. Resulting from the thematic clustering are the two audio zines: Decentralisation, Burn-out & Hijack and Communities of Practices. 

The Pixelache zines

🔊 Decentralization, Burn-out & Hijack

This audiozine pastes together conversation around ET grilling, open camp model, festival activity in 2013-2015, decentralisation within the association, changing production teams, burn out, and the semi-serious ‘positive hijacking’ taking Pixelache forwards. Featured objects in the office include liquid smoke, a fabric scheduling device, a megaphone, and a hacked exercise bike.    

🔊 Communities of practices

This audiozine pastes together conversation around organisational labour, friendships and motivations, changing disciplines within Pixelache with the recent years, the festival in 2019, safer space ambitions, things left behind, and a need to collectively imagine future desires. Featured objects include the internal ‘pixel’ currency used to partially compensate association member’s work, a 3D printer, a bedside artwork, and safe space guidelines.

Dissemination

As a public dissemination platform to circulate the zines and other research documentation (images, links, text vignettes), an interactive page on the existing Pixelache’s website was created.

The Pixelache audio zines together with other creative and research artefacts were exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022).