Imagining Commoniversity
The workshop took as starting point the assumption of University as a Common to engage with the student protests in the UK (due to the taxes increase) as well as the European movements experience that emerged in the previous years to tackle the Bologna process issue. It was open to a registered audience joining 12 people with an interest in education/university, new media technologies, activism, mapping techniques, art and architecture.
The depparting point of the mapping exercise was addressed towards the future and tried to imagine how a common University in Europe could look like, how it should work and what should be its role in society. Through mapping strategies, open collective discussions and the implementation of new media technologies, we worked on the experience and the tradition of a British group such as Archigram, to sketch and design the ‘vision’ of an ideal and utopian Common University of the future. Looking at the experiences of avant-garde free-universities and utopian architects as Archigram. Presenting the history and contemporary practices on data visualization. Pedagogic choice: image making workshop. One image to be produced in forms of maps and/or plan to research a possible representation of a common university.
The results, we produce one poster that was printed in the following weeks as final result of the workshop and presented together with other posters produced within the context of Visualizing Transnationalism. Augmented reality, through Quick Recognition Codes (Qr codes) will be employed as tool to open a dialogue between a more classical form of map/plan/drawing with the resources available in the internet space.
The posters were displayed in different cities of the Transeuropa Festival 2011 and hanged in different public spaces and festival venues. A presentation of the workshop was presented during the festival at the Home of the Festival in London.
Reflections. Lessons learnt. The methodoloy of the workshop included the use of n-1, an autonomus and distributed digital social network set up by the hacker and free software movement as a tool for activists to organize and improve knowledge production.
This activity is supported with:
