HDSA 2016 projectplan

work in progress

Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2016

Title: If you are so smart why are you so poor?

Subtitle: At work. About immaterial labor, digital economies and techno-societies.

Date: July 25th - August 5th 2016

Location: De PUNT (1st block), WAAG (2nd block), Weekend excursion: Rotterdam, End presentation and lecture night De PUNT (?),

Price:

Full program inclusive an informal welcome dinner, daily lunch, free access to the public programs, an arduino kit: €350,00 (excl. BTW) Price one program block: €200,00 (excl. BTW) Price public program: €5,00 entrance

Total amount of participants: 200-250 participants

Of which:

Full workshop program: 50-60 participants

Each workshop program: 30-35 participants

5 spots saved for members of We are here Academy & Hack your Future.

Lecture program: 100 participants

Film screening: 60 participants

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status: to be edited

What?

If you are so smart why are you so poor? The second edition the Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2016 will explore controversies around the topic of immaterial labor, and the effects digital economies have on our current techno-society.

Who?

Hackers & Designers is a non-profit cross-disciplinary community of programmers, engineers, designers, and artists. H&D started in 2013 and has been organizing meetups where collaborative and inclusive workshops (1-3 hours) are given. In 2015 H&D launched the first edition of the Hackers & Designers Summer Academy. About Bugs, Bots & Bytes.

The summer academy will include students from both academic and professional pursuits to build relationships and investigate new technology and design mediums which will jump start not only the academic careers in case of students, but also existing and future professional careers with more technological tools, more collaboration opportunities, clearer cross-disciplinary vocabulary, and an understanding of tech and design tools in a social context.

Designers and artists, in a world moving more and more digital, should be empowered with the tools of the digital realm including coding and hardware usage and construction. Conversely programmers and makers should be more comfortable and effective in engaging in creative process through familiarity with the vocabulary of designers and artists. All disciplines should become more comfortable in theoretical and social discourse, and thus be asking questions such as not only “can we” but “should we”.

Why?

Being inevitably part of a larger group of stakeholders of the immaterial labor discourse and knowledge based economies Hackers & Designers invites this year's summer academy participants to critically reflect on their (digital) activities that exist outside/alongside the traditional wage-based consideration of labor. These labor-intensive actions include: contributions to creative commons and open source, self-initiated research projects, community organization, social networking, blogging, vlogging, and mojo (mobile journalism)…

A lot of this labor is happening in and around digital and internet technology and at the same time enabled by the same technology. This creates a strange feedback loop of exponential proportions that makes understanding, legislating, and evolving innovative solutions extremely difficult. (Editors note: Example?) New concepts like encryption, crypto-currency, post-scarcity, deep/dark webs, etc., arise in dated and slow to change hierarchical social, corporate, legal, and political constructs.

Participants in this edition of the summer academy are likely already or soon will be laboring to push the design and execution of these technologies and social constructs to the next step of their evolution, but are currently ill-equipped with the necessary scope to make intelligent ethical decisions.

How should we approach the employment of encryption which is crucial for opposition under dictatorial regimes, but at the same time makes dark-net markets like Silk Road possible? How does one most effectively assist the elderly? How can one compensate laboring immigrants living outside the scope of traditional employment and taxation frameworks? How much labor is one willing to give to corporate enterprises such a Facebook for free access to platforms? How long can one labor for shelter/housing in an overpriced market before the pain of lack of pension contributions is felt?

Over the course of 10-days and by means of hands-on workshops Hackers & Designers will create an environment where participants will collaborate to build, sketch & prototype evocative projects in order to discuss and demonstrate scenarios that reimagine labor, economy and society of the future.

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Approach: Learning by Making

H&D functions as a proxy between developers and artists/designers. We believe designers and artists, should be empowered with the tools of the digital realm including coding and hardware usage and construction. Conversely programmers and makers should be more comfortable and effective in engaging in a creative process through familiarity with the vocabulary of designers and artists. All disciplines should become more comfortable in theoretical and social discourse, and thus be asking questions such as “should we” instead of only “can we”.

1st workshop week: Soft work

Curated by H&D, taking place at De PUNT, Frans de Wollantstraat 84, Amsterdam

Key words:

• forms of organization of work
• participation
• productivity
• communities
• exchange
• immaterial labor
• gender inequality
• informal economies
• crypto currency
• blockchain
• stock exchange, algorithmic trading, tax havens, …
• investments, shares, …
• digital labor, affective labor (youtubers),
• collaborative human interpreter [[1]]
• knowledge economies, …
• the contemporary geopolitical net sphere,…
• neural nets,…

Program

Sunday evening

Welcome dinner participants & tutors, by Guerrilla Kitchen

Workshop week 1 part 1:

H&D asked Freecoin and Bitcave to develop a workshop individually but hopefully feed each others results in meaningful ways. Both workshops will address the possibilities of „organizing immaterial & community economies“. The results of the workshop should be design proposals informed by technology & prototypes. The case of consideration is the community of members of We are Here and Hack your Future.

Monday

Morning: Freecoin

Lunch guest: We Are Here

Afternoon: Bitcave (alternative PWR or Simone Niquille)

Tuesday

Morning: Freecoin

Lunch guest: Hack your Future

Afternoon: Bitcave (alternative PWR or Simone Niquille)

Wednesday

Finishing up projects Freecoin and Bitave are present throughout the whole day for consultation

Evening: Presentations & (selected guests are invited) Metahaven will be there to review and critically reflect on the results

Workshop week 1 part 2:

Thursday

Moniker (alternative: Roel Roscam Abbing & someone else)

Evening: Movie night curated by Jeffrey Babcock

Workshop week 1 part 3:

Friday

Darsha Hewitt (alternative: Center for Genomic Gastronomy)

Weekend activity: Rotterdam excursion

Saturday Optional: Excursion (Something with Worm or V2?: Rotterdam tour with some evening program?)

Sunday: Free

Modes of production: hands-on! Workshopping, wire framing, software development & prototyping, designing, discussing

2nd workshop week: Hard work

Curated by Waag Society & Hackers & Designers, taking place at Waag Society’s Fablab, Nieuwmarkt 4 Amsterdam

Planning: August 1 till August 5

1 day workshop & lecture

4 days DIY lab at the workspace and Fablab of Waag Society

Key words:

• The Internet of Things
• Post-industrialization
• Waste-reducing products
• Smart houses, smart products, networked sex toys,…
• Problematics of machine-learning processes
• Robotization of society
• A new „intelligence’ of a new physical world
• Artificial intelligence

Modes of production: hands-on! Workshopping, hard-ware hacking, discussion

Program

Make machines work for you!

De IBM computer Deep Blue die het opneemt tegen schaakgrootmeester Gary Kasparov. En wint. Of een pc die de beste menselijke spelers van het tv-spel Jeopardy met gemak wegspeelt. De systemen die we creëren worden steeds slimmer. Is het tijd voor bankhangen? Kunnen we het werk overlaten aan de slimme machine? Van 1 tot en met 5 augustus experimenteren we in het Fablab met slimme technologie en oplossingen die ons leven 'makkelijker' maken. We’ll experiment with (open) technology; electronics, programming, Arduinos and digital fabrication in and around the Fablab. We’ll make sure the workshop is accessible for both the tech-savvy and newbie nerds.

Hard Work references

A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, generally including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

Artificial Intelligence for Robotics
Programming a Robotic Car
Learn how to program all the major systems of a robotic car from the leader of Google and Stanford’s autonomous driving teams. This class will teach you basic methods in Artificial Intelligence, including: probabilistic inference, planning and search, localization, tracking and control, all with a focus on robotics. Extensive programming examples and assignments will apply these methods in the context of building self-driving cars. This course is offered as part of the Georgia Tech Masters in Computer Science. The updated course includes a final project, where you must chase a runaway robot that is trying to escape!
https://www.udacity.com/course/artificial-intelligence-for-robotics--cs373

Useless machine A useless machine is a device that performs a mostly useless task, such as switching itself off, and performs no other practical function. Such a device may be a novelty toy, an amusing engineering "hack", or the focus of an existentialist philosophical discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
The Ultimate Machine/Useless Machine was created by Claude Elwood Shannon (the inventor of the word "bit")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ34RDn34Ws

Mechanical Turk An expression used for machines or devices that can purportedly do a task fully automatically, but which in reality is done by a hidden person
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions

https://media.giphy.com/media/pwBi3YrGypMyI/giphy.gif
https://media.giphy.com/media/13oMkxohx4E1AA/giphy.gif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbBO-hiF8wE

Public program

H&D Summer Talks night

Curated by H&D in collaboration with WAAG

Location: De PUNT Curator: Anja Groten & Amy Wu

Schedule

19:00 - 22:30: presentation /exhibition

19:30 Dmytri Kleiner: http://digitallabor.org/schedule/value-capture-and-the-affect-machine-non-money-capital-in-the-digital-age

20:00 (...)

20:30 15 minutes break

20:45 Femke Herregraven

21:15 Lauren and Kyle McDonald’s: http://emotional-labor.email/ (alternative: Market for Immaterial Value; Valentina Karga & Pieterjan Grandry http://www.marketforimmaterialvalue.com/)

References

Brian Holmes writes in “The Affectivist Manifesto” (2009) that activism today faces “the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order. The striking thing . . . is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance.”

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/zombies-of-immaterial-labor-the-modern-monster-and-the-death-of-death/ Zombies of Immaterial Labor was originally presented in the Masquerade lecture series, organized by the curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, January 25, 2010.

http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/the-political-economy-of-david-bowie/

http://www.e-flux.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2.-Maurizio-Lazzarato-Immaterial-Labor.pdf

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/designs-for-a-new-world/

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/towards-the-space-of-the-general-on-labor-beyond-materiality-and-immateriality/

http://www.arte.tv/guide/en/060180-014-A/futuremag?zone=europe

http://resonate.io/2016/

http://emotional-labor.email/

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary

Documentation

• hackersanddesigners.nl
• wiki.hackersanddesigners.nl
• meetup.com/Hackers-and-Designers-Amsterdam-NL

• facebook.com/hackersanddesigners
• twitter.com/hack1design
• github.com/hackersanddesigners

Things to add:

• Non-hierarchical approach (teacher & participants should meet each other on eye level and learn form each other)
• Keeping the price low increases level of participation
• Professionals and students can/should both join
• Are we able to organize accommodation if necessary? (Camping? OT301? Tetterode?)