---
# System prepended metadata

title: Vocabulary for digital Commoning methods
tags: [Open Calls]

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###### tags:`Open Calls`

# Vocabulary for digital Commoning methods

## Comments from Basel
- The title is promising, the cases generally interesting and, yet there are no new insights regarding the 'how' of commons in design. 
- The article’s contribution to the field and design critical discourse is unclear. 
- The projects this paper draws together seem generally interesting, timely and relevant. Yet their relationship to the subject matter of the publication could be unfolded and discussed more. 
- **The paper in its current state is missing a main argument and/or question.**

- The discussion of the projects is descriptive rather than argumentative or discursive. Many artistic practices and methods are briefly mentioned but not further elucidated. 
- It therefore remains unclear how the authors relate the manifold examples to the discussion around commoning.
- The authors mention relevant literature and diverse selection of artistic practices, yet the connection between these references to the subject matter remains implicit and is not further elaborated.
- Manifold concepts and examples (too many) are mentioned without unpacking them, situating or contextualising them in relation to a main research question or argument. In addition, the text lacks proper citation and does not cite according to the provided style guide.
- The paper misses a conclusion and generally requires substantial improvement. 
- To improve the text, it is recommended to choose one of the two case studies, and develop a clear framework for analysis for this case, formulate a question/dilemma/issue that can be discussed on the basis of this case study.

## __Introduction__
**A vocabulary for digital commoning methods**
Departing from Station of Commons practice at large, this study case paper inquires the conditions and implications for commoners’ actions operating in the technological space. Station of Commons was initiated in early 2020, as a collective of artists, designers and programmers, to stand for the re-appropriation of technology within the public space and situates now as an independant research project on digital commoning practices.
The current neo-liberal processes of extraction and appropriation over digital technology produces new spaces of objective contradiction between common interest and very narrow ones. ( Something is missing here)In his book “Common Space” architect and activist Stavros Stavrides notes that theses contested spaces operates as possibilities for manifestation of commoning practices, for thinking and acting together in terms of art, design and coding practices.

Situated at the intersection of art & design practices and radical technology, Station of Commons questions how collaborative process embedded in technology can find form into new knowledge and know-hows within, against and beyond capitalist modes of production. And how to rethink another model of shared empowerment situated in time and space unique to its agents and communities. The mode and modalities of collective organization operate as research core of this paper from a Critical Making perspective. In the book “Aesthetics of the Commons” Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver declares that “Today infrastructures are increasingly computational and communities need the protected right to digital networks just as much as to public transport, education or space”.

The paper examines “Lumbung Radio” as a situation of work thought together with artist collective Ruangruppa in the context of documenta fifteen; A collective radio co-created with its participants as well as its operating infrastructure.

Finally, the research argues that Digital Commoning practices refers to infrastructural work and conceptual work operating together, and elaborates in the sense of political philosopher (Antonio Negri) that commoning practices manifests as a new force implicit in today’s living labour that is not imposed from outside the workforce.

## __Part1__Digital Commoning Practice

http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Digital_Commons

The digital commons are defined as an information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusivedible, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.

Fuster Morell, M. (2010, p. 5). Dissertation: Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons.

We situate closely to this this definition of Digital Commons by Felix Stalder (Stalder 2010) and believe that 

- Situate digital commoning in the technological space that reflects on his/her dettachment from private companies with narrow interest: Radical Alternative Strategies( Experiment on new novel ways for digital commons trough our practices )such as Library at station of commons or What system actually zoom partial implementation - Other experiments on commoning: Digital Library with Marcel Mars

The necessity for artists to resist capitalist extraction operated by the market found form in collective organization since the begining of the previous century. -Political input here to be writeen later-. The impressionists, dada, surealist and situationist formed groups against the artist branded as individual genius working under legal contract to commercial and institutional venues. The relation between the collective ,as political and social body/structure, and the space, where the collective can operate, experiments with the ideas of autonomy, resource, governance, knowledge and related means of production. Artist collective want to think this space as a laboratory, extended studio for speculative inquiries, a space in the making open to develop/implement social and political interventions. The exhibition wants to find distance from the exhausted model of the project inspired/copied from industry that is defined over a limited time and budget. The so called artist-run gallery may be one of this alternative space. The overall recent rapid development of technology/Internet/online tools questions the position of this other physical space in relation to the digital culture,(- even more since COVID lockdowns-). The possibility for a radical social imagination must happen in the digital space.

The exhibition “Digital Commoning Practices” curated in 2021 questioned the manifestation in the physical space of radicality within the digital space. The production of this space departed from SoC practice of re-appropriation of technology as Commons within public space, which stands for radical alternative strategies to the neo-liberal system in terms of digital means of production, communication and distribution. Station of Commons began its operation in early 2020 as the pandemic forced lockdown and remote work. In March 2020 in the first post of our blog we wrote, “new online artist-run platform to broadcast, share and discuss Commoning practices within Open technology”. We thought of objective as simple as necessary: how do we continue our work as sound artists, performance makers and creatives at large in times of isolation, and still resist the hegemony of narrow private interests in the technological space. 

An audio stream is a fragile online data. The sound wave generated by the artist converted in digital form must reach the audio streamer server first. The server can then create a mount point where the listeners can connect to listen to the audio stream. The server operates the key role in audio broadcasting. Station of Commons built a solid digital infrastructure that provide a very reliable audio stream. That point determines the quality of access offered to the listeners. The audience can listen to the stream using any phone or computer. There is no requirement for high end equipment, neither high bandwith internet to listen to an audio stream. The digital infrastructure manages the distribution of the stream to serve the  to commoning process 

n, the listener can proceed to click PLAY to activate the sound . to reach an online,  


from its original producer reaching for an on-line audience.

- Audio as medium - Brandon Labelle

https://hackmd.io/O8WRY9KuQ4egzVhfPZccBQ

The complex and entangled ontology inherent to an auditory position, of sonic thought and imagination, voice and care, is, from my view, enabling for a deep and complex ethics. For instance, in listening one is situated within an extremely relational instant, one conditioned by the silence of thought (attention for the other, even of oneself – the oscillations that sound out an inner acoustic), and in sounding forth one may vary the conditions of that attention, to nurture and care, as well as to argue and disrupt.** Sound and sounding practices may therefore function as the basis for creating and occupying a highly malleable and charged relational arena, modulating the social coordinates and territorial boundaries by which contact and conversation may unfold. Through such auditory conditions and experiences one may learn from the affective and animate channels of relations how to recognize more than what appears in the open.


- The collective decision of tools - Ivan Ilich/ Open Source Publishing / Constant
- Decenter the channels of commoning from museum or concert venues - Story of the internet
- Situate digital commoning in the technological space that reflects on his/her production of space / performativity as a form of appropiation. - Lefevbre Production of Space
- From private companies with narrow interest - 

## __Part 2__Aknowledgement

The lumbung concept is very simple: 

"Word for a communal rice barn, a place where farmers share harvest surplus. Only surplus!" documenta fifteen handbook.

lumbung radio operates following similar principle.  

- Creating within the difference(of practice, of culture, of timezone ) and resources

- Lumbung Radio meetings as a place of open encoutering (Open Invitation, let other participant organize the meeting as an act of integrating other ways of doing)

documenta fifteen prompt of Lumbung imply an experimental way of organisation where it was mainly collectives that paricipated in the discussions and extensive forms of "assemblies" that took place prior to the key moments of the exhibition. How to the define the *we* and its potentalities based on the difference of others? What was to be shared and also not to be shared? Since Sound was the first common evident thing among us it seems to be a good point of departure to establish a gound of negotion rather than a ground of affirmation (Stavrides 2017). The subjectivity and diverse practices where discovered troughout the process of worlding (Escobar 2017) and draw a map of actors located in different parts of the world with different worldviews and interests and those actors also invited people created a network that expanded beyond the initial participants. Although sound is immaterial as medium is also codnitioned by its qualities and the one that impacted the most for our collective discussion on creating a experimental radio interlocal radio was time. Time became important as it determined the choice of tools to be infrasctured but also the time to schedule for our meetings to take place; In this sense the digital commoning ritual of meeting is also limited by world distances.


- Share the singularities  / Idea of freedom Ranciere / Deciding on tools together

## __Part 3__Process

- Caring about the future trought reflecting on archive but also trough infrastturing (Star) 

Following a commons based peer-to-peer approach in contrast to a market-based approach, and hvaing cumulated many hours of sounds, music, interviews the Lumbung Radio Meeting brought the questions of archiving to the forefront. The common shared material where all Lumbung radio participants where owners was to be stored prperly but also maintained in a way that the sense of shared ownership is lasting. 

The role of the designer as a commoner working in and out of the system, network the microacts, A design in which theres not problems to be solved or the designer as problem solver but as problem revealer (Dimeji Onafuwa, Ph.D)
In this sense the the role of designer is more linked to an enabler.

- Music and process/ seems dificult but understanding how is made the unblackboxing. Resistance

Commoning practices manifests in the collective process of making together. The reappropriation of technology proceeds with a form performativity within technology as contested space. From the radio listener perspective, this performativity happens with the sound artists playing live their set. However, another performance operates behind the curtain of the website and the PLAY button. There is the __performative process__ between the sound artists and the online platform broadcasting the live stream. The digital tools utilized to connect to the main audio stream sever requires time and efforts to implement. The digital tools to stream audio live are usually not among the usual applications used by sound artists. There are two fields of practice coming together.
=> do we go technical and tell exact applications? ---- No but will be good to talk about the open source systems  and also the cocreation a platform that allows other problemes to be shared. *Diffuse design* by Ezio Manzini and Brandon Labelle spaces of 


The commoning operative process departs from the standpoint that every participants learns from the other in the making of a common objective/goal/perspective. Apparently trivial questions may trigger new perspective on tools used on regular basis. The new comer, because of the specifities of their own practice, operates a reflective gesture on the designed use of the tool. This process is an exchange of knowledge and know-how between practioners that transforms into mutual learning. The communication unpacks the problems and develop solution in a dialogical movement. This constant shift of positions produces the process of performativity within the technological space, a digital commons is being designed. The process of making together manifests beyond a technical achievement, and produces situation of friendship based on mutual acknoledgment. => this could lead to part Acknoledgment


The commoning practice happens in the making together collective 
  


**- Relationship and learning by gesture of making together**
**- Domination protocols / exchanging the current systems everyone uses help criticality on dominant protocols**
Critical Making as defined by Matt Ratto is process of creation where the designed object is not intended to be exposed but where the process ignites a novel understanding of the system in which is created. What is valued is the *making experience*. The formats of collective research given by the concept of Lumbung that was taken as a basis for the Lumbung Radio allowed for the formats of co-creation to be open ended and in contrast to other collaborative commisioned projects, it didn't had a precise form established; It was however important to recognize as part of the process the current production tools put in place for the different participants to make their radio operational and exchanging on this once in the weekly meeting created a conciousness of the practical tools we aim to put in place for Lumbung Radio. The practicalities, limits and possibilities of the systems envision for the infrastructure evoque the claim of Audre Lorde in 1971: "The Master's tools will never dismantle the masters house";


What is it that we are sharing when collectively coordianting a radio project? 

Lumbung Radio collective effort bases itself on the participation of a mlutitude of radios, where each one defines their practice based on their intentions and the impact they hope to achieve.


Among all the participant radios there there was technical discussion that came very early about the means of production as of what technologies were used to stream and also what processes where put in place to make their radio operate. Following an Open Design approach our intention was to find a interoperable set of technologies that could allwo for redistribution and sharing in a friendly way.



"The digital commons are pushed to the margins of the online environment by
commercial monopolies that over the years have overtaken the open sharing
and peer-to-peer communication channels of the Internet."

## __Part 4__Decentralizing

- Decentralized Coordination by invitation(Is important state the remark that the invitation was not create a radio from scratch but to artfully create the space for other radio and sound initiatives to be part of it.)
- P2P
- The apppropiation of the means of communication/ Communication as a service ZOOM

## __Part 5__conclusion__

The decision to use the Vocabulary form to discuss and approach the relation/entanglement bewteen creative processes and commoning practices happened to be very dynamic and open platform of discussion for us; Juan and Gregoire. We discussed many hours on what those "words" implies, means in term of collective counter strategy within the digital space. 

words to articulate concepts and practices


The discussion process over theoretical issues    


All these words relates one to another, and irreversible entanglement. Where is the art?





## First Draft
The exhibition “Digital Commoning Practices” departed from Station of Commons; a practice of re-appropriation of technology as Commons within public space, which stands for radical alternative strategies to the neo-liberal system in terms of digital means of production, communication and distribution. Station of Commons began its operation in early 2020 as the pandemic forced lockdown and remote work. In March 2020 in the first post of our blog we wrote, “new online artist-run platform to broadcast, share and discuss Commoning practices within Open technology”. We thought of objective as simple as necessary: how do we continue our work as sound artists, performance makers and creatives at large in times of isolation, and still resist the hegemony of private interests in the technological space. 
The exhibition “Digital Commoning Practices” opened in March 2021, in the gallery Oksasenkatu11 in Helsinki. It is an artist-run, non-profit gallery and does not charge any rent from artists and started operation in 2010. The space and its equipment are free to use as long as the artists can invigilate the gallery on a regular basis. After almost one year of the foundation of Station of Commons the practice that was developed involved streaming sound artists, organising collective moments of ideas sharing on commoning practices from creatives all around the world and also sharing experience to conferences on ways to pursue their events in an open source fashion. Despite the Covid restrictions at that time, we decided to commemorate our anniversary by organising the first hybrid event. The temporality chosen for the exhibition was of 3 weeks, allowing for 3 phases to showcase the practical, theoretical and artistic interventions of architects, designers, programmers and musicians that had worked the concept of commoning. It was important for us to find a proper aesthetic that will move away from the white cube to a participatory space at the same time physical and digital.


**Phase I: Open Source Audio Stream**
Music sharing was one of the first incentives for file sharing on the internet and also in its effort of decentralisation thanks to the development of technologies such as p2p (peer-to-peer). The term p2p was invented in the early 2000s (Oram, 2001) and was popularised by Napster, a p2p file sharing application. The paradox of people downloading from one main server was challenged by this technology as millions of people were able to share music directly with others from all around the world. 

**Phase II: Digital Commoning Practices**
The second phase consisted of 8 discursive interventions, 2 of which were activations to showcase some of the more “Digital” ways in which commoning practices could be imagined in some future scenarios. 
Selana Savic from Critical Media Lab exposed “Thinking Toys for Commoning'' research and how thinking tools or toys as she called, allow for imagining different types of commoning models; She showed us a data visualisation tool on how people, resources and activities could be distributed, this project was codesign around an autonomous housing community in Switzerland. One of the big takeaways from her talk is that storytelling is an important tool when imagining the future for the commons as she stated “Creating stories and organising the imaginary”.

Stavros Stavrides highlighted the potentialities of commoning as a collective process and 3 ways in which it could be used to reclaiming the city:

1. Reclaiming the right to the city means reclaiming the city as commons. Reclaiming the city as commons means reclaiming the power of collective creativity: reclaiming the city-as-oeuvre
2. In the process of challenging established common worlds, space is being activated as a source of social potentialities.
3. Sources  potentialities of commoning  may be: Alternative cohabitation practices, Insurgent public spaces and territorialities of resistance. 

He concluded with gesturing towards an emancipated society as urban commoning may become a force to shape a society beyond capitalism as long as it is based on forms of collaboration and solidarity that de-center and disperse power and also creating discussions on the meaning of democracy, on the uses and effects of horizontality and on the values of solidarity and equality unfolding in commoning initiatives and movements.

The title of Dubravka Sekulic talk was a word play: The first part makes reference to Sylvia Wynter a  unsettle is what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man” and in this context as who owns the “universal”. The second part, “really useful knowledge”  was a debate in the UK around the subject to give more useful skills to the working class, this phrase has been taken by many artists to celebrate unpractical knowledge. She raised the question of who decided on the definition of useful. She reminded us that as we were using proprietary tools deviced by the ruling class (ZOOM) to discuss commons, we should acknowledge its use for labour and environmental exploitation as this tool was designed for labour optimisation.
Cornelia Sollfrank had just finished a research project called Creating Commons, and she wanted to pursue some aspects of that research in a technofeminist perspective. She started her talk with one contemplation with what she called a Feminist check-in:

Where are we? (space, event, people, economy)
Why are we here? (individual / collective)
What do we want to achieve? (individual / collective)
It was followed by raising some of the merging points of commoning practices and feminist mouvements as well rasiing the issue of how male dominated servers and shadow libraries made her start this server:
Feminism.memoryoftheworld.org
The fourth intervention by Martino Morandi, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting took place in their own video call instance of Big Blue Button. The talk had an image background of the building of  french cloud services provider OVH on fire and as they talked we collectively took notes on top of the image. Students from Ecole de Recherche Graphique (BE) were also present to discuss with the audience.  It was a hands-on conversation on the ongoing techno-political transformations in (remote) learning environments. They raised the question of how to infrastructure otherwise in more just and solidary ways? And exposed the concept of student-user.
We gave a lot of though on how to share resources after the exhibition so we invited Marcel Mars to tell us about his experience on founding Memory of the World instance to share pdfs and books as we also installed one instance for Station of Commons. His talk was centered around the idea that service providers such as Google, provide storage but not the technological know hows on how to use them as they take care of that puting the user in a dependant position.
The last part of this phase was a dialogue of Nora Sternfeld and Gregoire R. positioning as an educator and an engineer respectively on creating a parallel on how education and technology are being taken away from the public and put into corporate.

Phase III: DIWO Workshops and sharing resources

Phase III: DIWO Workshops and sharing resources
The last phase included 2 workshops were only one was done on the gallery. Gregoire R. showed participants how to install Zerotier, which allows for direct and secure communication across devices and as an example he demo its uses on uploading Arduino files remotely.
The second workshop didnt took place as of time constraints.

**lumbung radio**

---
**How does Lumbung curatorial statement relates to digital commoning**
- **Againts the capitalist way of production in what way? piste: Gary Becker = vouloir tout privatiser**
- **Define Digital Commoning Practice for Station of Commons and how it relates to Lumbung**
- **Unpacking: Live Broascast, Weekly meeting as "collective experience in Lefevbre",**
- **Why Radio? give a bit more on "sonic thinking" and "Radiophonic", The creation of a shared sonic collective space pg 217(https://slowrotation.memoryoftheworld.org/Bernd%20Herzogenrath/Sonic%20Thinking_%20A%20Media%20Philosophi%20(42525)/Sonic%20Thinking_%20A%20Media%20Philoso%20-%20Bernd%20Herzogenrath.pdf)**
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Radiophonic_Workshop
- **Critical technical practice to explain infrastructure pg 21 (https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/CriticalMakersReader.pdf)**
- **Conclusion proposal: How peer to peer technolgies could support Lumbung radio ?**
---
lumbung Radio is an online community radio project that has its starting point at documenta fifteen. Trying to find distance from private technology companies with very narrow interests, lumbung radio develops an alternative model in terms of means of production, communication and distribution based on Open-Source infrastructure. 

Lumbung is a term that the documenta fifteen visitors had been hearing at lot throughout the exhibition. Lumbung refers to the practice of communal rice barns in rural Indonesia, ruangrupa’s country of origin. Once the harvest completed by every farmers of the region, they all share the surplus with the community. The farmers only are not obliged to provide a certain amount, or proportion of their production. They put in common what happens to be in excess in their own production. This common pot can then support less fruitful harvests. That practice is based on trust to share and build together. As mentioned in the documenta fifteen handbook, the lumbung values are “generosity, humour, local anchoring, independence, regeneration, transparency and sufficiency”.

The first discussions with ruangrupa were oriented toward what is Station of Commons understanding of these values? How to think together lumbung as a concept from South East Asia farmers within Station of Commons practices? Our understanding was that documenta fifteen is located in Kassel(Germany) and must use local resources to find form into an international exhibition. One of the venues is the Fridericianum museum, one of the oldest museums in the world. Museum Fridericianum organizes international exhibitions on regular basis with consequent budgets. Another one is Trafo Haus, a former small post-office building located near a park in the city center. Trafo Haus is run by a community of young artists who decided to use the space as a gallery and publishing house. This artistic gesture by the curatorial team to work with different structures, and mode of organization, reflects on Station of Commons stands to reappropriate technology within the public space. Our proposal was that if documenta fifteen has to communicate with commercial means of communication such Instagram or Youtube, then there must be the possibility for a radical technology practice to engage with lumbung artists. Lumbung radio would be a laboratory of sound originating from lumbung network practice to produce an unique audiophonic experience to the listeners.

The stand on radical technology manifests in the collective design of the digital infrastructure. Infrastructure space  is always doing something, like an operating system it makes certain things possible and others impossible, it is the point of contact and access( Keller Easterling). Through Station of Commons and other members various experiences in audio streaming, lumbung radio uses Open Source instance libretime. This instance provides the essential services; file management, calendar for audio material, converting files, audio stream with IceCast and an API for a dedicated webpage. 

lumbung radio experiments with decentralized methods of coordination. The coordination process cannot only originate from the Western perspective. We need to share and work together with other cultures from other location such as South East Asia, Latin America, Middle East…  lumbung radio works with alternative and grassroot art collectives active in punk, queer and BIPOC scenes. 

lumbung radio collaborators contribute by providing content in weekly basis. Station of Commons is an active contributor. 
Audio content come in three forms:
•	Relay stream from other radios such as radio alHara or radio Nopal.
•	Pre-recorded material such as interview series by On Care and Resilience.
•	Live Stream broadcast from event location, such fugitive radio.

lumbung radio uses the technic of live streaming. Using our equipment and Open-Source technology, we can stream in real time from the location of the concert or discussion. We connect directly to the sound system and broadcast live. That technic is also a gesture of decentralization as any contributors in the world can broadcast in real time from their own location. Lumbung radio departs from documenta in Kassel, however Kassel is not the center for lumbung radio. Lumbung radio broadcasts 24h a day to provide content to listeners around the world during the 100 days and after.

The future of lumbung radio depends only on the interests and decision of each contributors. Each radio’s participant have their own way of working and producing audio material. This collective decision reflects and acts on lumbung as an operative concept to design and produce art within the technological space. The lumbung radio practice developed from an attempt to bring together sound practice from documenta fifteen into a sustainable collective of designers, sound artists, theoreticians, hacktivists and curators. There is a collective learning process in the making that implies both efforts, an openness for newcomers, and the political understanding to engage with local and inter-local struggles.


## Citations


> We have to establish a ground of negotiation rather than a ground of affirmation of what is shared. We don’t simply have to raise the moral issues about what it means to share, but to discover procedures through which we can find out what and how to share. Who is this we? Who defines this sharing and decides how to share? What about those who don’t want to share with us or with whom we do not want to share? How can these relations with those “others” be regulated? For me, this aspect of negotiation and contest is crucial, and the ambiguous project of emancipation has to do with regulating relationships between differences rather than affirming commonalities based on similarities.
> 
> Stavros Stavrides in https://www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/



> Of course there are always attempts to control and enclose this sharing of knowledge, for example the enclosure acts aimed at controlling the internet, this huge machine of sharing knowledge and information. I do not want to overly praise the internet, but this spread of information to a certain degree always contains the seed of a different commoning against capitalism. There is always both, the enclosures, but also the opening of new possibilities of resistance. This idea is closely connected to those expressed in the anti-capitalist movement claiming that there is always the possibility of finding within the system the very means through which you can challenge it. Resistance is not about an absolute externality or the utopia of a good society. It is about becoming aware of opportunities occurring within the capitalist system and trying to turn them against it.
> 
> Stavros Stavrides in https://www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/


> To me this is not primarily a question of scale, it is more a fundamental question of how to approach these issues. But if you want to talk about a larger-scale initiative, I would like to refer to the Zapatista movement. For the Zapatistas, the process of negotiation takes two forms: inter-community negotiation, which involves people participating in assemblies, and negotiations with the state, which involves the election of representatives. The second form was abruptly abandoned as the state chose to ignore any agreement reached. But the inter-community negotiation process has evolved into a truly alternative form of collective self-government. Zapatistas have established autonomous regions inside the area of the Mexican state in order to provide people with the opportunity to actually participate in self-governing those regions. To not simply participate in a kind of representative democracy but to actually get involved themselves. Autonomous communities established a rotation system that might look pretty strange to us, with a regular change every fifteen or thirty days. So, if you become some kind of local authority of a small municipality, then, just when you start to know what the problems are and how to tangle with them, you have to leave the position to another person. Is this logical? Does this system bring about results that are similar to other forms of governing, or does it simply produce chaos? The Zapatistas insist that it is more important that all the people come into these positions and get trained in a form of administration that expresses the idea of “governing by obeying the community” (mandar obedeciendo). The rotation system effectively prevents any form of accumulation of individual power. This system might not be the most effective in terms of administration but it is effective in terms of building and sustaining this idea of a community of negotiation and mutual respect.

> .......For Lefebvre the right to the city is the right to create the city as a collective work of art. The city, thus, can be produced through encounters that make room for new meanings, new values, new dreams, new collective experiences. And this is indeed a way to transcend pure utility, a way to see commons beyond the utilitarian horizon.
> 
> Stavros Stavrides in https://www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/


> In a relational ontology, “beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to their ever-evolving weave.” (Ingold 2011: 71) Commons exist in these relational worlds, not in worlds that are imagined as inert and waiting to be occupied.


> By interrupting the neoliberal globalizing project of constructing One World, many indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and poor urban communities are advancing ontological struggles. The struggle to maintain multiple worlds – the pluriverse – is best embodied by the Zapatista dictum, Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, a world where many worlds fit. Many of these worlds can thus be seen as struggles over the pluriverse.
> 
> This conjuncture defines a rich context for commons studies from the perspective of pluriversal studies: on the one hand, the need to understand the conditions by which the one world of neoliberal globalization continues to maintain its dominance; and on the other hand, the (re)emergence of projects based on different ways of “worlding” (that is, the socioecological processes implied in building collectively a distinctive reality or world), including commoning, and how they might weaken the One-World project while widening their spaces of (re)existence.
> Arturo Escobar in https://patternsofcommoning.org/commons-in-the-pluriverse/



>The complex and entangled ontology inherent to an auditory position, of sonic thought and imagination, voice and care, is, from my view, enabling for a deep and complex ethics. For instance, in listening one is situated within an extremely relational instant, one conditioned by the silence of thought (attention for the other, even of oneself – the oscillations that sound out an inner acoustic), and in sounding forth one may vary the conditions of that attention, to nurture and care, as well as to argue and disrupt. Sound and sounding practices may therefore function as the basis for creating and occupying a highly malleable and charged relational arena, modulating the social coordinates and territorial boundaries by which contact and conversation may unfold. Through such auditory conditions and experiences one may learn from the affective and animate channels of relations how to recognize more than what appears in the open.
>
>LaBelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press. ISBN 9781906897512 [Book], Page 7

















