networks in the wild zine
Networks in the Wild was made for the DIY Methods conference in 2022.
After a few years of investigating networks of different kinds: networks for connectivity, for community, and for connection - I was curious I could take the notion of networks further.
This was my submission to the open call:
Networks have long captured imaginations in and outside of the academy: from Deleuze and Guattari’s mobilisation of rhizomatic root structures to actor-network theory, from network science to the indigenous imaginaries of networked pluriverses. Network culture has emerged alongside these thought landscapes, accompanying the exponential adoption of communication networking technology that has shaped the digital world on the world wide web, most notably the widespread adoption of the now-omnipresent “social network”. Most recently, web3 and blockchains technologies have similarly utilised such imagery and their accompanying ideologies, albeit in service of projecting imagined digital futures. All of these cases seem to prove that networks are, indeed, everywhere in both explicit and implicit forms.
This submission seeks to push these understandings and mobilisations of networks into the realm of (academic) attribution, applying them to the heuristic device of academic attribution, and authorship. In most academic disciplines, paper authorship remains a linear and hierarchical device, reinforcing networks of power in the academy and relative importance of scholarship within disciplinary realms (and their wider applications). Acknowledgement sections often operate as supplements to paper authorship, as spaces where wider networks of support are given space and contributions are acknowledged. However, their form remains limited to the implicit linearity of the printed page and the “list” format, rather than the social connections from which such contributions emerged. If academic attribution and authorship could be reimagined as networks rather than lists: what would this look like? Who would be included? What labor would be acknowledged? What social relations would emerge?
This submission seeks to use the zine format as a kind of visual “literature review” of networks and their applications in various contexts, using screenshots and drawing methods to investigate different network-related projects on the web. A few examples include: Rhizome, A Body Without Organs, Open Syllabus, Wikipedia’s “See Also”, and LittleSis. This “literature review” of networks will be used to collectively brainstorm what networked attribution in the academy might look like, and the types of tools that could be employed in order to enable this work. Experiments with code will be uploaded online to github in an accompanying repository, and connections made to the wider movements of “open research” and “open science”. On the initial zine, writing, doodling, comments, and questions will be encouraged.
