Community Think Tank

Community Think Tank is an online platform created by the 2017-18 students of the MA course Transforming Critical Practices (TCP) in the Visual Cultures department of Goldsmiths, University of London. We envision this platform as a digital medium to present the research that we have each individually pursued over the past year. Using keywords and interactive modes of representation, this platform combines our respective research topics into a collective format, employing #keywords as nodes in a rhizomatic web of knowledge. 

 

Though at first sight the subjects may appear to be varied and disjointed, they are in fact woven together by a series of linguistic markers that outline their theoretical commonalities. In this statement, we aim to outline key threads that connect our research and to reflect on the ways in which networks and platforms have pervaded our surroundings, professional lives, consumption habits, community-building and modes of resistance.

 

Contemporaneity involves a major turn from the traditional, vertical/hierarchical structure towards a horizontal one: a network in which we are all consumers and producers. In art as well as politics and philosophy, the network plays a key role in this process. In our research, we examine the term ‘network’ and the terms around it by means of contrasting lenses, backgrounds, and goals. Our main goal is to draw out the tensions that platform-economies evoke. What do they make possible, and what systems do they sustain? In what ways do they offer new modes of being and production? Are emerging platforms a new way for neoliberalism to pervade our lives, and transform us into active components of production-societies? In the era of globalisation, the world wide web, and around-the-globe connection, platforms and networks can embody important modes of organization and resistance. However, at the same time, globalisation authorizes a means of division, which grants access and emancipation to certain individuals over others.

 

We are students who come from varying academic backgrounds, such as art history, critical theory, postcolonial studies, global policy, film theory, animal studies, and cultural & business theory. We bring together a series of research projects that employ different methods to analyze the issues that arise from the concepts discussed: digital counterpublics and cyberfeminist activism, artist-driven food establishments, guerilla activism, reality hacking, collective food production, de- and re-classification of the “animal” world, permacuratorial theory, globalization of indigenous art, as well as developments in the art market and the music industry.

 

This year’s community think tank culminates in a series of collaboration-based workshops at The Field, New Cross, an anti-capitalist social and educational co-operative in London. On the 19th of May, 2018, we will host a day of communal workshops, gardening and cooking open to all. Workshops include magazine jamming, poetry writing and active bystander training sessions. We will also teach elemental wood-oven cooking with basic ingredients, and prepare a dish inspired by (post)colonial relations between Indonesia and the Netherlands. The workshop series will conclude with a participatory dinner, resulting from the cooking collaborations, in which we will reflect on our experiences. Transforming theory into practice, these forms of collaboration value engagement with different communities to promote the exchange of ideas beyond academic boundaries and the development of experimental research practices.