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10 Years of
Activism, Community,
and Collaboration
A. Shaping Journalism And The Open Web 39
— Erika Owens
B. A Web Of People And Things 43
— Jon Rogers, Michelle Thorne
C. Designing For More Than An Event 49
— Sabrina Ng
D. Ethical Dilemma Café 53
— Ian Forrester, Jasmine Cox
E. Open Science: Spurring Discovery 59
And Innovation Worldwide
— Zannah Marsh, Stephanie Wright,
Abby Cabunoc Mayes
F. Empowering Debate via Art + Culture + Tech 65
– Luca M. Damiani, Irini Papadimitriou,
Kat Braybrooke
G. Strategic Action For Tech Policy 69
– Melissa Huerta
H. Queering MozFest: 75
Challenging Expectations of “Normal”
– Stéphanie Ouillon
I. Volunteers: The Ethos Of The Festival 79
– Kristina Gorr
J. The Web As A Platform 83
– Jean-Yves Pierre
K. Youth Zone: A New Generation 89
For Internet Health
– Zannah Marsh
L. The Revolution: Read, Write, 95
And Participate On The Web
– Christopher Lawrence, Amira Dhalla
M. Privacy In The Internet Age 103
A Fundamental Right
– Georgia Bullen, Jon Lloyd, Priyanka Nag
N. PopcornJS 109
– Ben Moskowitz, Bobby Richter,
Open Video Community
O. Transforming Education With Open Badges 111
– Tim Riches, Mark Leuba, Laurie Cooke
MOZFEST
65
TEN YEARS OF ACTIVISM, COMMUNITY,
AND COLLABORATIONS
F
Empowering Debate via
Art + Culture + Tech
by Luca M. Damiani, Media Artist + UAL Media Design Lecturer;
Irini Papadimitriou, Creative Director, FutureEverything;
Kat Braybrooke, Visiting Scholar, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin IRI-THEsys
“As computer hardware and software give us new capabilities...
we have to learn to feel with these new abilities. If we can’t feel
with them, they are numb metal claws and we will probably be
less than fully human in our exercise of these new abilities. The
vistas of digital art are only as wide as our potential to grasp the
possibilities with full human expressiveness.”
Jim Andrews, “Why I Am A Net Artist”, 2011, www.vispo.com
As the worlds of art and technology continue to merge
and consumers of digital culture become creators, the
web has become an important platform for open, decen-
tralised collaborations that reach across disciplines,
from net-art to culture-jamming. Through participatory
engagements at MozFest that explore these ideas in dif-
ferent ways, we have explored how digital art practices
can intervene in society, and how networked art and open
technologies can be combined to empower and amplify.
The idea to introduce a track to MozFest that would be
entirely focused on digital art and culture started with a
pitch in 2014 from Space Wranglers Paula le Dieu and
Kat Braybrooke, who believed that on a 2014 internet,
when given the right tools and knowledge, anyone could
evolve beyond being a consumer and become a creator.
They were joined by remix culture acionado Erik Nelson,
and together they united a diverse group of organisations
from Rhizome to Europeana, and Creative Commons
to the Internet Archive to help them launch a public
74
MOZFEST
67
TEN YEARS OF ACTIVISM, COMMUNITY,
AND COLLABORATIONS
call-out for a “living gallery,” which would feature 10
hands-on, digital artworks generated during the 48 hours
of MozFest that would be co-created along with festival
participants. The call-out got such a strong response that
the rst-ever ‘Art of Web’ track was born, connecting 40
artists and Facilitators from around the world to bring the
living gallery and its workshops to life. Outputs included
the creation of an evolving ‘human-user-sele’ initiative
with the artist Alison Hauser, “bots co-creating art with
humans” with the developers Forrest Oliphant, Gabriela
Thumé, and Vilson Vieira, remixes of Facebook identi-
ties through ‘data shadow’ audio puppetry with the artist
Stephen Fortune, and cultural skills-sharing Sessions to
redesign cultural heritage artefacts through open hard-
ware tools with Aalto University researchers Saana
Marttila, Kati Hyyppä, and Christina Holm.
Then, in 2016, Tate’s Luca Damiani (who had rst facil-
itated an activity exploring open source culture for the
Art of Web track in 2014) and the Victoria and Albert
(V&A) Museum’s Irini Papadimitrou came together to
launch the Artists Open Web programme, an exhibi-
tion programme and community of artists whose work
explores society and the open web. More than a hundred
artists have engaged in Artists Open Web since then, their
artworks covering topics that have included data liter-
acy, digital inclusion, open innovation, decentralisation,
online privacy, and security. The focus of the exhibits and
artworks, which evolved each year, varied. Some took a
documentary approach, others were structured as com-
plex systems, and others experimented playfully with
new technologies and articial intelligences. In doing
so, Artists Open Web has encouraged new collabora-
tions and critical thinking around the exploration of new
technological worlds, from big data to post-humanism.
It has also enabled the work of upcoming digital artists
to be featured in galleries at MozFest and beyond, while
facilitating new explorations of the impacts of creative
68
digital practices, from conceptualising to prototyping,
and re-making to experimenting.
A key thread running through all of these subsequent
engagements with art and culture at different MozFests
has been to explore the possibilities of what can happen
when creative producers are encouraged to engage with
an ‘open’ web, and ensure their voices are heard in con-
temporary debates about how it is managed, accessed,
and controlled. This applies both to those who already
identify as creatives, and also those who don’t yet - but
might one day, if given enough encouragement. We have
been able to engage with a wide diversity of people who
have creative ideas, from ne artists to coders, journal-
ists to sound designers, educators to students, human
rights organisations to experimental mixed-media art-
ists. Because everyone has worked together to build each
exhibit, gallery and creative intervention, these differ-
ences have become strengths. Like the web itself, it is
through these kinds of ever-evolving, decentralised and
networked multitudes that our world itself evolves for
the better.