Non-Governmental Matters (en)

PREFACE

The word “Matter” means individual, subject, obstacle, story, problem, material, substance, relationship, etc. The direct translation can be read as "zhih" in Chinese, which can mean “magazine”. The english word “magazine” comes from the Arabic word “storehouse”, which also represents the attempt of this research to map these unofficial art science organizations. So this interesting word is used to metaphorically represent the wide range of discussions that this research project wishes to cover.

This small book invites several organizers of independent education systems, autonomous artist groups, and science art summer camps, to share their valuable experience in running these organizations. The motivation for this research project is very much related to my own learning experience too. This is probably because I am an independent artist who is not part of the academic system, so these groups are my main learning environment. Around 2006, my training at Shih Chien University was mostly about multimedia design and interactive design. We had a basic Arduino course and a Processing course, and then I continued my passion by learning Max/Msp and Puredata myself. I think we were among the first group of students in Taiwan to be exposed to coding art, which some people defined as "new media art" back in the early 2000s. I didn't really have any training in "contemporary art" and I didn't know what "art industry" was, but really enjoyed making works with these interactive media, and I had the experience of selling these works for income. It was not until I was introduced to conductive thread that I was able to make my first piece using embroidery to transform circuits into fabric patterns during a residency in Mexico in 2013, with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for Culture and the Arts. Because of this residency experience, I also had the experience of working with a local Aztec village. When I returned to Taiwan, I only hoped to find fellow artists who also used conductive fiber materials to organize a project or community that combines electronic textiles and ethnic textiles, but I found that there seemed to be no one who used electronic textiles or wearable devices to create art in Taiwan. Electronic textiles in Taiwan seemed to be about practical medical wear or functional clothing with LEDs that can protect bicyclists at night. In 2015, I found an event through the internet called e-Textile Summer Camp in an old abandoned textile factory in France called Le Moulins de Paillard. We had to do projects such as: to make a music parade with the street people with fiber sensor clothes via MIDI signals (to allow musicians to change the way they control music with flexible touch interfaces), to express the abstract concept of "computer" by embroidering conductive stitches and magnetic balls together, to replace leather and fabric with dried black tea mushroom film and fungal materials, to promote the concept of civic science by intercepting meteorological satellites with wearable antennas, and so on. Honestly, I simply wrote a letter to the organizer, Mika Satomi, and she gladly agreed to let me join their rally. The first year was a great experience because I finally had someone to talk to about these topics, and some people even found out about my e-textile work on the internet. Secondly, I really enjoyed the learning environment and the variety of people who shared the same passion for creativity. The best part was to find someone in the factory in the middle of the night still working on their project, watching them write code and work on a firmware machine, or a knitting machine, or making a chemical dye, and feeling the same feeling you had in school when you stayed up all night working on the same project with your classmates. The seven to ten days of meetings each year turned into a long-lasting friendship, and no one ever really left the community, we continued to discuss and live our skills through social media, and shared various art competitions and open calls. Later on, some participants held similar camps in their hometowns and invited people from the extended family to participate, such as the e-Textile Spring Break in New York, “Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors” in Romania, I.N.S.E.C.T in Denmark, and Tribe Against Machine in Taiwan.

In 2018, I was invited to Shenzheng to give a talk about my experience organizing Tribe Against Machine, and I have met many autonomous art communities at another event hosted by Gathering for Open Hardware Science (GOSH), such as Hackteria Open Source Biological Art Platform. In the following years, I have visited many hackerspaces and art collectives in Switzerland and Indonesia following the footprints of Marc Dusseiller, the co-founder of Hackteria. I have come to appreciate the value of art networks and environments on a deeper level: "It is a crucial thing to be surrounded by like-minded friends.” I mean, maybe participating in these activities in the moment is enjoyable in and of itself, we never talk about what exhibitions we're going to attend afterwards or how to make more money, but the activities themselves are a way of life or a social form. At first glance, these are very common concepts and community experiences that have a profound impact on the nature of any art industry or art social structure. In any case, perhaps the purpose of this study contradicts this foundation to some extent, as a large part of this study is a utilitarian exploration of how to make these beauties sustainable, or how best to manage them industrially, a part that will be left to future discussion. In particular, on an island like Taiwan, with its inherently closed geographical location, I would like to try to introduce these communities in a more friendly way, while respecting the geopolitical premise, and to touch on issues such as the so-called speculative creation and the reasonable interface between these communities, and the distinction between art and the art industry in a relatively casual discussion. To a greater extent, these experiences and journeys have transformed me from an individual-centered independent creator to an individual interested in the process of community formation to the establishment of new disciplines and the creation of non-traditional educational systems. Promoting a certain culture is a long process, and after seeing these community organizers take communities to their current size while staying true to certain values, you know that it's a full-time, multi-year endeavor that requires a lot of effort. I would say that the energy of these organizers comes mostly from their idealist character, because most of them do not get equal returns or profits from their work in running the organization, they are just willing to commit themselves to a vision, and these actions and organizations deserve to be seen and supported. I think being a facilitator, or a “live and personal centered ChatGPT” is a job I can do.

I have discussed these ideas with a friend I met at the e-Textile Summer Camp in Paillard, he said: “There isn't a solution, modern tech isn't sustainable, it's also not accessible broadly. There are largely privileged folks with access with a few grants to help a few cherry picked disadvantaged folk. I am involved in a traditional music community with sustainable 400 year music, dance, musical instrument building practice and that's not what modern tech looks like at all. Since modern technology is inherently unsustainable, it is interesting to ponder what all this rhetoric is about - open source, democratizing etc. The answer is imagination and inventiveness are portable - they don't need to stick to a particular substrate.”

In any case, I'm glad to be able to put my best efforts into archiving these networks for once. I must thank these interviewees for their support over the years, no matter how seemingly illogical or even ignorant my views and opinions are, they have always embraced my curiosity and remained critical of me, allowing me to freely express myself without fear of my ideas being ridiculous, which is the best proof of the network's support. When we separate, we continue to have various discussions and even aimless conversations through various social media platforms, which is a big reason why I was able to include many egocentric views in this study, because I feel like I am part of this network.

INTRO

As part of the research project and publication of “Non-Governmental Matter”, we sought different perspectives from interdisciplinary art collectives across Europe and Asia. We seek to create a working model within artists communities that functions independently of government regulations on artist funding; thereby encouraging artists in these communities to work collectively and across mediums to address pertinent issues through their own creativity and unique cultural knowledge. Our goal for this project is to provide alternative frameworks for artist groups and solo artists interested in working collectively and across disciplines. The major part of this is research particularly focused on the forming method, history and financial model of art communities, collectives, art groups and networks. The targets are being studied here mainly associated with the “camp” network. Following this main purpose, several alternative targets rather than “camps” were also interviewed in this project, organizations such as Re-FREAM or Fabricademy, which use European grants or mixed funding sources, are used here as reference groups in comparison to other autonomous camps or non-funded and self-organized activities. Or other reference groups such as Senyawa provide insights into other issues arising from the exchange between the West and the East, such as colonial issues and conceptual conflicts. Similarly, this research aims to reshape and imagine a sustainable industry or platform, "What is the Machine? in order to support artists outside of the existing academic system.

Interfacing with different communities and camp network leaders across Europe and Southeast Asia have taught us about the diversity of thought and practice across different working groups, who at the same time, share a common goal of open source accessibility to share knowledge and skills. As the art world continues to move into increased privatization, privileging the free flow of material knowledge and information without borders is paramount to fostering critical and theoretical practice, beyond the confines of institutions.

One such model of autonomous organization is the summer camp which is both an educational and networking occasion for artists, scientists and hackers. They are undefined, well known templates for organizers to generate events to support individual artists who share similar interests. This research we have gathered illustrates these networks, and informs us on best practices for their utilization to make them more accessible in the future.
Although informal in structure, camps mobilize communities beyond the limitations of academic (in)accessibility, Traditional craftsmen and scholars weave together materials and digital technologies on the same loom by eating and living together, more importantly, this model emphasizes new modes of artistic, cultural, and theoretical production. In other words, the main component of networking and knowledge dissemination is friendship, and the output of the activity is about the iteration of concepts gained through human contact rather than technical advancement, and the evolution of the participants' ideas and their mobility is the real value.

Introduction of Interviewees

Our primary research was based on interviews with organizers of camps and networks. Several organizations were associated with each other based on their friendship from the e-Textile Summer Camp Paillard. The rest are associated with Shih Wei Chieh’s participation. Due to research targets in this research being mainly focused on networking and friendship between people, this research can also be seen as a study involving anthropological aspects, even more, perhaps it also empowers the potential network in the future. All interviewees are shortly introduced below.

Marc Dusseiller is a promoter of open source and DIY culture, an educator and a workshopologist. He’s one of the main characters of Hackteria Open Source Biological Art. His main activities across Europe and Asia and the camps he organized play a big role for intercultural communication. As one of the founders of Hackteria global network, he’s been working with Indonesia collective Lifepatch for more than 10 years. He is continually expanding the boundary of modern western art by organizing workshops in Yogyakarta, Slovenia, Zurich. He’s known as the “old hacker spirit” who creates content and value with limited local material and resources with DIY methods, therefore, his global nomadic path and culture impact is interesting to observe, where the question “why is globalization important?” is being discussed.

Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson are known as KOBAKANT, one of the pioneers in the e-textile and wearable art field. Their 8-years long organizing “e-Textile Summer Camp” in Le Moulins de Paillard in the south of France has created a large network for e-textile artists. Many other international networks have also been influenced and built by the friendship of this camp, such as Tribe Against Machine in Taiwan, Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors in Romania, e-Textile Spring Break in New York, I.N.S.E.C.T. camp in Denmark. In this interview, she also briefly introduces their Wish Lab project, which is a criticism of the wearable e-textile industry.

Andreas Siagian, the main member of Indonesian collective, Lifepatch. In the interview, he described the basic background of Lifepatch and Indonesian art. He also touches on his journey from a collective member to a more individualistic organizer. Andreas has been working with Marc Dusseiller for more than 12 years across Switzerland and Yogyakarta. Their friendship established a unique example of global cooperation and community formation.
Anastassia Pistofidou, participant of Paillard e-Textile Summer Camp, founder of Fabricademy Barcelona. Fabricaedemy is a community and an independent education platform with a decentralizing model. Its courses mainly focus on emerging technologies in the fields of wearable technology, biomaterials, and fashion. Independent laboratories with specific manufacturing machines from all over the world can be registered online to become a "node" of Fabricademy as long as they complete a certain level of education and training. The sustainability of her system comes partly from student tuition fees, partly from subsidies from other central institutions, and partly from local government subsidies from laboratories in various countries that join the platform.

Rully Shabara, Indonesian sound artist in Indonesia, member of Senyawa. Although Senyawa is an individual music label rather than a community, which differs from all the other interviewees in this project, his rich experiences in working with tribal culture with the care of colonialism is crucial to the potential project that will work with aboriginal community in the future. In this interview, he didn’t follow the given questions but chose answers on a fundamental level. His project Gugus Gema is a music production project which works with more than 23 aboriginal traditional instruments. The other project he was involved with, Instrument Builder Project (IBP) is an Australian government funded project but executed in Indonesia. His experience in both of the projects provides a good standard to refrain colonial exploitation in global collaborative projects.
Giulia Tomasello and Christian Dils are a pair of scientists and artists involved in Re-FREAM. Re-FREAM is an EU-funded science-art matching program for the incubation of forward-looking science-art projects. This interview explores the details of collaborations and the use of funds for the EU-funded Arts and Sciences programme. Giulia is also a participant of Tribe Against Machine in Taiwan and Paillard e-Textile Summer Camp. She has been a feminist movement promoter, and she continues to work hard to promote feminism and citizen science through wearable electronic textiles and bioplastic technology. Christian Dils is head of the TexLab laboratory department at Fraunhofer IZM and has been working in the field of flexible e-textiles for 20 years. In this interview he provided a perspective from a scientist in Re-FREAM.

Svenja Keune, Postdoctoral Researcher Swedish School of Textiles, is also a contact from e-Textile Summer Camp in Paillard. She is the co-founder of I.N.S.E.C.T Summer Camp which was held in August 2022. There were two parts in this camp, the first part was on “Interspecies Exploration by Bio-Digital Manufacturing Technologies”, This part proceeded with conventional workshop format. The second part was on "Towards Multi-Species Worldings as an Everyday Design Practice", this part proceeded as an open summer camp.

Stephanie Pan and Stelio Manousakis are founders of Modern Body Festival, a biennial since 2014 supporting wearable technology art and tech artists working in the performing arts. Even though their art festival has a large number of new media components, they did not target the open selection to pursue the advancement of contemporary technology, but used a broader framework to collect and support works that care about the state of human beings; many elements of these frameworks specifically support women's participation. The Modern Body Festival stopped post-pandemic, and they're now moving to smaller events like the Modern Body Laboratory.

Ryu Toru Oyama is an artist from Okinawa and a professional pharmacist. He is a co-organizer of the HlabX event organized by Hackteria, and he organized Oki Wander Lab in Okinawa, a three-week bio-art workshop designed to support non-professionals as well as professional artists to participate in bioscience-based knowledge However, since the opening day of the event was only a few days after the outbreak of the epidemic, all physical activities were forced to be temporarily converted to online activities. Hackteria also provided some international connections and assistance in this event, including organizing online workshops, as well as some support from Feral Lab, an alliance of European art summer camps.

Tincuta Heinzel is an artist, scholar and curator interested in the relationship between art and technological science, with a particular focus on smart textiles and wearable technology. A participant in e-Textile Summer Camp and Tribes Against Machines, she curated with Hillevi Munthe in Romania and Slovenia in 2018 “Attempts, Failure, Trials and Errors”, an open call for "failed'' e-textile prototypes exhibition. In her interview, she raised quite a few common definitions of "camp" and its purpose in a philosophical sense.
Ted Hung is the founder of Fablab Taipei. Although he is not the organizer of an independent technology and art unit, since he is the only Taiwanese organizer among the interviewees, his content can also be used for comparison with the interview content from Fabricademy and Green Fablab. In this interview, he briefly answered the questions about the importance and influence of the international network on Taiwanese organizations and its impact on the diversity of digital production content from a geographical point of view. He also provided some information about the current status of the Fablab Alliance.

Jonathan Minchin is an educator, organizer and founder of Open Lab, Green Fablab and ROMI, whose programs span education and R&D and has extensive experience working with central government agencies. There are also many transnational examples of these cooperation experiences, but only within the EU. In his interviews, he mentioned a lot of wise understanding of system operation.

ABSTRACT

As part of the Non-governmental Matters research project and publication, we seek different perspectives from interdisciplinary art groups in Europe and Asia, and we seek to reshape and imagine a sustainable industry or platform within a specific artist network: "What is a machine?” to support artists outside of existing academic systems. Prior to this study, the Holo Project was the first iterative project proposal to turn this idea into a practical action. When the project was denied a grant, it prompted us to step back and explore the problematic structure of government arts grants and the nature of international exchange. The Tribe Against the Machine and Friends from the Future, both of which were held in Taiwan, and the HlabX events organized by Hackteria in various countries, are precedents for a low level of collaboration with these foreign online communities. The obstacles encountered by these projects also contributed to the exploratory momentum in this study. This study focuses on the initial motivations, histories, and financial models of art communities, collectives, art groups, and networks. In addition to the main focus on organizers associated with "camp" networks, several alternative targets such as Modern Body Festival, Re-FREAM, Open Lab, and Fabricademy, which work with government agencies, were interviewed and are used here as a reference group in comparison to other autonomous camps or non-subsidized and independent initiatives. There are several main objectives in this study: the first is to map and document all international communities relevant to the topic of this study. Second, to speculate on alternative forms of the traditional camp model on a global scale. In this interview, the interviewees were mainly asked about the sources of funds and the operating methods of their events, but what this research mainly wants to reveal are the various communities and evolutionary trajectories that are hard to be perceived, as well as the interviewees’ views on the creation of the art industry. The responses collected are mainly as follows: 1. The elements that constitute the sustainability of activities are people, not funds. 2. The international character of the community is not the purpose of the community but the cause of the community. 3. The organizer refuses the government subsidy because they do not want the sustainability of the event to be reduced. 4. The interviewees' organizations rely on support from complex systems. 5. The aging of organizers and participants is a common cause of network aging. 6. A new industrial system with more political correctness is expected and needs to be continuously discussed and fought for.

1. In the ecology under the rapid evolution of technology and capital ecology, how should art, design, science, and craftsmanship cooperate in the future? We know from past events that short, speculative, lacking in depth and purpose, or actions based on "temporary ethics" and one-sided knowledge lead to a lack of sustainability momentum, and the lack of consensus in the design method.
2. Trust issues and resource allocation issues caused by the sovereignty of multiple communities in a cross-domain and cross-community platform, these sovereignty issues come from the differences in ecology and needs of all parties, including political and economic ones, regardless of the overall purpose being "correct".
3. In previous cross-domain collaborations, these collaborations have included technical and conceptual aspects, for example during the cross-domain craft activities in the Tribe Against Machine event, due to time constraints or differences in cultural habits, the community omitted ecological discussions and jumped directly to technical co-working. Although these collaborations were beneficial to the event organizers in terms of international publicity due to the large number of international participants, the short-term hackathon-style events created interesting but short-lived momentum. Ultimately, there is a lack of a long-range or ecological perspective. It is important to recognize that these deficiencies are cognitive problems, not just technological and intellectual problems.
4. Differences in social ecology, political systems, and economic resource conditions, lead to cognitive conflicts in the design of cross-domain activities. These cognitive differences may also be understood as differences in the perception of time length. This has led to different weighting of "output" and "process" in these joint collaborations, which then leads to instability in cooperation.

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Keywords: Transnational cooperation, arts and culture alliance, e-textiles, bio-art, art industry

What are The Matters?

This case study is based on: Modern Body Festival (art festival), e-Textile Summer Camps, Tribe Against Machine (summer camp), Attempts, Failures, Trials and Errors (group exhibitions mixed with summer camps), e-Textile Spring Break (winter camp), HlabX (independent curated exhibitions held at several international events), Having Friends in the Future (an online version of a camp/ art residency). These organizations can be roughly divided into two main networks: the e-Textile Network, and the Hackteria Open Source Bioart Platform and its collaborative international community circle, in this case the Indonesian collective Lifepatch and the 2019 event Oki Wander Lab in Okinawa.

MAPPING

Making a formal record of these events and organizations was another potential motivation for this interview, and before the deadline two layers were created using Google maps: an event layer and a unit layer. The activity layer includes art festivals and summer camps related to the interviews; the unit layer includes hackerspaces and labs. The purpose of the mapping was to create interfaces and archives for these separate networks to increase visibility and, in particular, to increase the chances that independent organizations or events would be visited in the future.

E-textile network and “Camp”

The planned interviews involved the organizers of three camps, and the way in which the interviewees was decided was based on inter-camp collaboration or spin-offs, such as the e-Textile Summer Camp in Paillard in 2016, where many camp members discussed the idea of setting up other e-textile camps in other countries. E-Textile Summer Camp is a specific gathering, mainly an exclusive gathering of e-textile artists organized by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson in Le Moulins de Paillard, in the south of France. The gathering was mainly active from 2009 to 2017, with the main participants coming from academic institutions in Europe in the beginning. This was followed by the Tribe Against Machine e-textile camp, first curated by Shih Wei-Chieh in 2017 and 2018, and co-organized with Yuma Taru in Taichung, Taiwan in 2017 and 2018, then by the e-Textile Spring Break in New York, organized by Lara Grant, Nicole Yi Messier, Victoria Manganiello, Sasha de Koninck, Liza Stark in 2018, Attempts, Failure, Trials and Errors, organized by Tincuta Heinzel in Romania and Slovenia in 2018, and I.N.S.E.C.T in Hvalsø, Denmark in 2022. These four camps have in common that they were all organized by members of Camp Paillard in France and that most of the participants are from Camp Paillard. At the administrative level, all three camps receive government subsidies, and only e-Textile Spring Break is still in operation.

The camp Tribe Against Machine in Taiwan has opened a collaboration on the topic of electronic textiles and the preservation of Taiwan aboriginal textiles, and was also a window to the international e-textiles community for Taiwanese craftworkers. The National Culture and Arts Foundation, the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan, and the Council for Information and Policy (CIP) provided a total of NT$1 million in grants for two years (2017 and 2018). Since this camp in Taiwan was the only non-European camp, much of the money was spent on airfare and accommodation for the artists. The camp is currently on hiatus, but the art and craft practices and international collaborations are still being promoted by Wei-Chieh Shih and Yuma Taru.

Artists collaborate to transform traditional Atayal bridal headset into interactive 'spirit'-detecting installation at Tribe Against Machine event in Taiwan
Attempts, Failure, Trials and Errors was a group exhibition of small prototypes of electronic textiles from Paillard camp participants, which culminated in a group exhibition at the Piksel Festival 2017, which on the other hand was curated in a way that mixed the framework of the camp with local architectural education, so that the participants were mostly architecture students. There was also a part of the event that invited and supported e-textiles artists from far away through online interactions.

The e-Textile Spring Break in New York mainly continues to focus on the artist gathering format of the Paillard camp, which consists primarily of artist workshop exchanges and focus group configurations. The goal of the event continues to be about exchange and community support among e-Textile artists. The camp is still active, with more than 15 artists participating in each of the years - 2018, 2019 and 2022.

The I.N.S.E.C.T camp in Denmark, except for the organizer and a few participants from Paillard camp, can be said to have completely departed from the theme of electronic textiles and focused mainly on the subject of "multi-species symbiotic design" and "bionic design" community, with about 80% of the participants being young students. Although the theme is almost entirely new, the loom workshop is still based there, and the structure of the event is mostly derived from that of Camp Paillard, so it can be considered as part of the extended influence of Camp Paillard. The first camp was open to the public and had a strict selection process for participants, and was conducted in the more traditional format of a digital fabrication workshop. The second camp was completely open to anyone interested in the subject matter.

Another initiative in Taiwan involving e-textile networks, "Having Friends in the Future" organized by the Tribe Against Machine and the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute (NTCRI) in 2020 and 2021, also involved the use of international networks. Originally, there was a plan to invite digital e-textile artists to come to Taiwan in 2020 to collaborate with NTCRI, but due to the epidemic, 23 international participants were selected online through an open call. Three of them were from Paillard e-Textile Camp, two from e-Textile Spring Break NY, two from Hackteria Bio-Open Source Art Platform, six from Taiwan, and the rest were from friends in the e-Textile community who got the news of the open call and came to apply. Through online workshops and lectures, participants shared their knowledge of local crafts related to Taiwan with NTCRI, either by introducing their own techniques to each other or by sharing their way of combining materials and concepts, such as topics about civic science and feminism. These samples were sent to Taiwan and were eventually made into 23 books that were sent back to the participants, including 16 samples made by individuals and 6 samples made by two or more participants, also in the tradition of Paillard's e-textile camp. The following year, as an upgrade version to the sample book event, a conceptual installation was presented and constructed as a physical exhibition, a performative library of materials with the aim to reduce the language barrier in the process of cross-country collaboration. The event was in a way an online camp, as the e-Textile Summer Camp templates were used extensively, especially for the workshop exchange and the sample book, which made online communication less difficult as there were still many participants with previous experience in art camps.

First of all, these various evolved versions from the "traditional" electronic fabric camps show the transnational influence of the international network of artists, both financially and culturally, and Tincuta Heinzel gives a pretty good general definition of the so-called "camps" in the interview, on top of which she mentions more philosophical meanings of the camps; she mentions the story of a city built by the Soviets in 1950, allusions and reminders that the work of 'map-making' in this study may belong to a reflection of a utopian idea and the difficulties it may encounter.

The so-called “autonomous” camps, as you call them, are mostly about a community of practitioners coming together and exchanging skills and knowledge, debating topics of common interest. From my perspective, they are more like the artists’ colonies, they are a form of gathering that allows people from different corners of the world, Europe, U.S., Australia, Taiwan, to meet and to get to know each other, to learn about their practices and exchange experiences and knowledge. Like in the case of E-textile Summer Camp, it is mostly about bringing together practitioners from different parts of the world who do not have time during the year to meet otherwise. It is in this sense an active, inspiring and generator of new ideas, in a less formal context. ----Tincuta Heinzel

Victoria is a city built in the 1950s by the Soviets, next to a factory for armament built during the Second World War by the Germans. The city was built to accommodate the workers and the specialists brought there to work in the factory. The city was built from scratch in the mountains, and it was actually born from economic and war necessities. And because it was built from scratch, it followed the kind of ideals of that time - that of Socialist, brutalist kind of architecture, with mainly blocks - communal buildings, and following a certain type of architecture. It is also interesting to notice the kind of institutions which were supposed to support the social life of the city: the house of culture, the telephone and post buildings, the highschools, the sports infrastructures, the city hall. The story is that when the Soviets came and they saw the place and the factory, they also came with a “catalog of cities” and the Romanian authorities had to pick a model. In this sense we can say that it is like a ‘town object”, or a “product” that you buy from a catalog. And they implemented this town in Romania. Apparently, this “town model” (both in terms of architecture and urbanism) has been built similarly in Russia, in Georgia and in India. It would be interesting to see what happened in all these cities once inhabited, what is the afterlife of the Socialist design and architecture utopias. ----Tincuta Heinzel

HACKTERIA OPEN SOURCE BIOART PLATFORM NETWORK

In addition to the e-textile camp system, another system interviewed for this study is the Hackteria Bioart Platform and its surrounding international community, particularly the art collective in Indonesia, which is already an extremely international community dedicated to the promotion of open source and DIWO culture. Marc Dussseiller, the main figure in the community, has been all over: in Switzerland, other parts of Europe, India, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Unlike the e-textile community, Hackteria's international dimension stems from the camaraderie and enthusiasm born from major international art festivals and the recognition of the open source spirit. These collaborations and friendships between Switzerland and Indonesia have been going on for more than 12 years, like the ROŠA (Regional Open Science Hardware & Art, Indonesia) workshop in September 2022, organized by Marc in collaboration with LifePatch’s co-founder Andreas Siagian and funded by GOSH, which has just ended. Many Indonesian and Taiwanese artists got some international exposure thanks to Marc's connections, and most of the networking and events were organized by Marc, making Hackteria a community very much guided by the charisma of key people. These long years of exchange and practice have set a kind of model for these proposals for international exchange, and they share a common goal of open source accessibility for sharing knowledge and skills.

In 2009, I also kept in the loop with some friends I met that invited me to a festival in Indonesia, it’s called Yogyakarta International Media Art Festival held by an Indonesian media art collective called HONF, the house of natural fiber. So Cellsbutton International Media Art Festival of Yogyakarta. So I combined my trip to Bangalore to continue to join the media art festival in Yogyakarta to join there. ----Marc Dussiller

“Why global?” The forming and foundation of Hackteria was a global thing already. There were collaborators like co-founders from India (Yashas Shetty), it was already there. We started this as a group of enthusiasts that already were globally distributed. ----Marc Dussiller

In addition, HlabX is an international tandem event starting in April 2019 initiated by Hackteria, with the aim of reviving Hackteria's international network. Continuing the friendship from the highly successful HackteriaLab 2014 - Yogyakarta in Indonesia in 2014, it was hoped that some kind of international joint event could be held in Indonesia, Taiwan, Okinawa and Switzerland, motivated by the memory of the old friendships and the repair and renewal of its network. But unfortunately, the event was greatly affected by the COVID 19 outbreak in May, and the tribute was eventually forced to be held mostly online. In any case, the event can be seen as an example of an attempt to independently mobilize international cooperation, with the main components of the event including the Oki Wander Lab in Okinawa, hosted by Ryu Oyama, and the Wormolution - Hackteria Temporary Autonomous Laboratory at 1000 Ecologies workshop in Geneva.

After the last large-scale HackteriaLab 2014 - Yogyakarta, we are looking forward to host this HLabX Programme involving a series of related events, gatherings, residencies, temporary labs and it's presentations in 2019-2020 in Taiwan, Yogyakarta, Okinawa, Switzerland and beyond. We want to connect the old and new networks which we have created throughout our activities during the past 10 years.----HLabX_Programme

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND DATAS

Interviews

The study focused on interviewing organizers about their experiences in starting a technology arts community. Interviews were conducted with 14 organizers from the electronic textiles network and Hackteria network. The interviews lasted about two hours and were divided into two sessions in principle, at a cost of NT$6,000 per person. In the first interview, we worked with the interviewees to identify appropriate directions for discussion, and in the second interview, we gave more precise questions. Most of these questions centered on respondents' general perceptions of profitability and industry, sources of grant funding, and the possibility and need for international collaborations. The verbatim transcripts of these online interviews, which were videotaped or recorded, were eventually collated and translated into Chinese and English by the interview facilitators, and the collated verbatim transcripts were made publicly available on Tribe Against Machine’s wiki and were extracted for use in this study.

Second-hand Information

Most of the secondary information comes from community organizers' websites or wikis, as well as from links mentioned by interviewers in their interviews.

Physical Visits

During the study period, the researcher visited the Electric Wonder Land Camp in Croatia in August for seven days organized by Radiona, whose director had promised to participate in an online interview but did not show up in the end, which was a pity. The researcher also visited Lifepatch in June and held workshops and experimental activities there for three weeks. The researcher also visited Gudskul in Jakarta, where a member of Gudskul promised to participate in an online interview but did not show up in the end. The visits to Gudskul, Lifepatch, and Radiona were all facilitated by Hackterial co-founder Marc Dusseiller. This assistance included transportation and accommodation arrangements, and the organization and promotion of the workshops. The day after Radiona, the researcher went to the I.N.S.E.C.T camp in Denmark for seven days, where he met Tincuta Heinzel and Svenja Keune, and then to Berlin, where he interviewed Mika Satomi, and where Tincuta Heinzel provided accommodation in Berlin.

People

This part is relative to strategic thinking, and one of the questions that kept coming up in the interviews was about "people", which is related to the meaning of forming communities, and perhaps more about exploring the philosophical purpose of these organizations and networks. Iin many shared food and housing events or art workshops with more days of activity, the notion that "the process is the work itself" has long been promoted; "people" should be hypothetically considered as the ultimate "output", and we must establish that "people" are the infrastructure of the future industry we imagine, because people are the carriers of concepts and carry experiences and communications that cannot be quantified. This is also the reason why the interview focused a little on the development of movement and friendship between organizers and artists.

Art camps take place in a communal way, like traditional craftsmen and scientists weaving together materials and digital technologies on the same loom. More importantly, this model emphasizes new modes of artistic, cultural and theoretical production; in other words, the main component of networking and knowledge dissemination is camaraderie, and the output of the activity is an expression of interpersonal, rather than technical or material, iterations. Another way of saying it is: the evolution of the participants' ideas and their movement are seen as the ultimate value. These activities are often most criticized for their lack of material quality art production, but this is because the cross-level and cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas is severely neglected. For example, in the Holo Project proposal, it was mentioned that Tribe Against Machine had undertaken a curatorial project for the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute (NTCRI) and organized "Having Friends in the Future," which proposed a three-month "online residency" to encourage participants from different countries to absorb Taiwan's local culture and produce physical works in the form of online exchanges, but was ultimately criticized by the center for not producing satisfactory physical works.

Of course, online activities are not the best way to spend time together, but we can also cite some other good examples, such as the often mentioned "nongkrong" in Indonesian collective culture, which originally means a gathering of people sitting together on the roadside, meaning "spending time together without doing anything". This year's Documenta 15, for example, received similar criticism about the low quality of the exhibition's work. There are more examples of this in Hackteria co-founder Marc Dusseiller's collaborations with Indonesian collectives, such as Hlab14 (2014); Marc has often brought artists from different countries to Lifepatch or invited artists to Switzerland for these "do-nothings", sometimes short-term workshops, sometimes even just to spend time together, all of which involve a high degree of cultural exchange and conceptual exchange and are in line with the nature of art. Marc also expresses his humor in his series of stickers: "Make Friends Not Art".

Art doesn't have to be associated with politics because it automatically changes society. It reflects what is happening, or norms or failed standards happening in that time. If you follow an artist from the past, for example, how do you know his philosophy, his life, his journey? It is from the art because you see the progress. For example, Monet, Van Gogh, you know the whole story from their art, the progress. You learn something from that person, the individual person, the change in his mind from this art. So it's all about the artist, the person, not the art, the artist is just a tool to understand the artist's mind. So imagine this kind of knowledge or how to appreciate someone and how to make some become artists or recipients, both have the same approach on things the society changes. Because it levels up the understanding and appreciation of things. So that's the true purpose of art, not money right? ----Rully Shabara

An artist is not a lead. An artist is not something revealed in society, it should be the same as any other profession. You have to treat art like that in that context, otherwise it's dangerous. Because they say they want to change society, but they just want to build up this funding, it's very different. But if you did treat art just for wanting to make money, just give the money, support them. This is how you support young artists who are still on the journey finding themselves. Support them! Because they will build the infrastructure of industry for these people so they can be part of the scene, get money, and then if they are serious with their art, they keep developing and they can understand what the essence of art is. That means you have to remove the hierarchy in art. In this industry, artists or curators, or whoever, should be treated as any other profession. ----Rully Shabara

There are also some parts of the interview that are purely about the basics of how people get along, but they are also important. These are about the organizers' mindset and concept of organizing a community, or the definition and depiction of an ideal community. These are more important than technical or strategic thinking, because they are about people, and community is all about people. Sometimes these descriptions of relationships are more like expressions, and if the wrong energy is poured into a wrongly designed expression, then no amount of energy will help.

It starts from the personal level, if it doesn't start from the personal, there's no point. Being part of a community is not a monolith. It's not that everybody has to behave a certain way, that is totally not what it means to build community. Building community is about surrounding yourself with people who understand you and share a vision. We do everything ourselves as well, that's why we were killing ourselves, because we don't want to ask people to do things for nothing, so we do it for nothing. We do everything ourselves. It's about wanting to be surrounded by people who understand what it means to be independent, who share a vision of what the world can be like, taking responsibility for yourself and then maybe learning from this community that you can share some responsibility, and contribute. But it's not about being selfless. Community is not about being selfless. There's no such thing as selflessness. Selfishness is at the core of the human condition. Everything we do is for ourselves. ----Stephanie Pan

Another frequently cited phenomenon is the declining energy of communities, which is probably a classic phenomenon. This aging is often related to the aging of participants and key figures in the community, which is inevitable. Perhaps this is also related to the openness of the community and the open recruitment level.

A lot of people also left a bit from the earlier phase, they had all the things in life like they were new, but became a mother and you know more interested in being a mother than a cultural global network organizer. Pei Wen Liu was from the very beginning, very active when she organized the event in Taiwan, she organized the HackteriaLab in Switzerland, organized Hackteria Lab in Indonesia as an example, she lives in Switzerland. And like Urs in the meantime, he is very focused with his company GaudiLabs on developing this because it's his full job now. So he has a bit less time to structurally shape the global Hackteria network. So we lost a bit of organization structure. We wanted to keep it open but then the more people leave because there are other more important things to do so. ----Marc Dusseiller

There are no "chapters" or "brands" like the e-Textile network in Hackteria, like the New York and Taiwan camps, which have been running for more than two years after Camp Paillard in France. The e-Textile Spring Break in New York is currently in its third year (2022). This kind of club-like situation is a bit like the brand marketing in Fablab, as mentioned by Ted Hung at Fablab Taipei. Of course Fablab and e-Textile Camp are two completely different things, but they are somewhat similar in terms of the split replication, except that the e-Textile network is mostly based on a community sentiment, while Fablab's decentralized operation is based on the recognition of the idea and the economic benefits of the brand.

Fablab is actually a recognition of an idea, for example, if you agree with the two things of decentralized manufacturing and digital knowledge sharing, then basically it is the value that Fablab is promoting, in fact, it does not have a very strict establishment specification, it is not mandatory very strong, like in France there are labs that specialize in doing agriculture, like Jonathan Minchin they are also doing agriculture-related, the role of these labs in each country is completely different. ----Ted Hung

You don't design products, you design systems. And your interventions as a creative person, or a biologist, or an engineer should somehow improve the health of that system of the habitat, or yourself or your community, or all three at the same time. ----Jonathan Minchin

OPEN CALL

In interviews, organizers are often clear about why they need to use open calls and when they don't, as these relate to the openness of their organizations. For example, Mika Satomi doesn't see e-Textile Summer Camp as a community, and she decided from the beginning that e-Textile Summer Camp is exclusive and that only a select group of people were to be invited, which has led to some problems, including over-repetition in the annual workshops and sample books, leading to criticisms because of that. She has only ever chosen to do one fully open and fee-based event in 2017, the last year of the program. She also mentioned the benefit of the exclusionary groups in that it is relatively inexpensive to organize things with the same group of people every year because you don't have to reacquaint yourself with the administrative work with a group of people, and it's really a strong family feeling that everyone has been back on the same land for years and years, and everyone is familiar with the same places and old faces, and there is no substitute for that.

E-Textile summer camp is not a community in that sense, because you cannot just come, you have to be invited. It's not publicly open per se because Ijust can't accommodate 100 people if 100 people wanted to come here. And because of the style of the event, it cannot grow bigger. And these are also the questions that came or critique that I received. It's exclusive because, on one hand I said everyone who came could come back since that was kind of important for me, to have this feeling that you could come back. ----Mika Satomi

In an interview with Modern Body Festival, it was mentioned that the open call for their surprisingly successful second event received over 800 entries, a great success because people saw the list of artists and their work in the first closed beta version, and the popularity of these artists and their great work became the cornerstone of the event's visibility; another reason was that they offered the entrants a considerable fee. So they did almost no additional publicity for the event. But since they spent all the money on the artists and the festival itself, the event hardly made any profit and they were only able to maintain their basic livelihood and staff costs. They also mentioned their resentment at the fact that many open calls do not offer monetary compensation for artists.

The first edition was basically in a shoestring budget, we had a tiny amount of money. It was all people we knew, and that were in our network. But all were really, really great artists, really great work, so I think that also helped. When we did the open call people could refer, they looked at the previous edition. They were like, ‘Oh, this looks really cool. I want to be part of it’. And we made it clear we're going to pay people. That's also important. ----Stelio Manousakis

In the first part of the I.N.S.E.C.T camp, an open call was used to recruit experts with specialized skills for some of the work in the camp, where the impact on the community was not the same as the example above. The open call was used as a tool to strengthen the capacity of the community to work. This camp has a strong thematic focus on biomaterials and multispecies symbiosis. This effective appeal may have come from the originality and contemporary nature of the topic, which quickly brought together the "right" people. This was also the case with Marc and Andy in 2007, when together they strongly opposed iGEM's approach to genetic design courses, thus launching the Hackteria open source bioart platform and the Synthetic Biology for Artists & Designers book, at a time when almost no one had ever introduced biosynthetic content to the field of art and design, and thus leading to a series of subsequent waves of bioart.

Part 1 was specifically about making a facade twin for the OME, an experimental building that belongs to the HBBE at Newcastle University. And we wanted to include 3D printing with clay and experimenting with mycelium and textiles to make an installation that would somehow interact with the local insects. So for that ten-days of workshops, we had an open call for applications and then selected nine participants. And we created a rough program for the ten days that we would have. We selected the participants according to the expertise we needed for the work, so some of them had experience with mycelium, clay 3D printing, monitoring, or parametric design. ----Svenja Keune

So we talked about wiki, making like do it yourself, laboratories for genetic engineering and combining machines and robots with living systems, this open source approach too, also working as artists with biology with Andy Gracie and Yashas Shetty. We thought this IGEM is bullshit, because it's just fucking students and engineers, there's no artists, there’s no critical elements, there's no anthropologists, there's also very western influence. It's a very American-based and kind of mindset there. ----Marc Dusseiller

FUNDING & SUSTAINABILITY

In this section, we talk about the use of funds by organizations. The only organizations that have a more positive idea about the profit model are Fabricademy, Fablab, and Rully from Senyawa, or perhaps they have a more positive breakthrough on what constitutes an industry. In general, they use a decentralized franchise system or a similar mindset, which may be a model for other independent organizations to follow. Besides them, other organizations use grants to support their own systems.

Of course I can't tell you that it is a profitable business at the moment, but it can make enough money for it to survive, and it can give us at least something to continue working on it. I cannot work on it full time, it doesn't give me a full-time salary, but it can give me a part-time salary. It can give the three of us a salary, from the student fees. So afterwards we have the labs and each lab is actually trying to find funds for being able to offer the program in their location. ----Anastasia Pistofidou

So what we did is, we had the album and then the stems file of each track of each sound of each instrument, and gave them to anyone who wanted it. What happened was, The New York Times called it a “music experiment” in their headline, because this was the first time in the music industry that one album was released by 44, exactly 44 labels all over the world, released independently to create a localized version of this album. So this album exists in 44 different cities in different countries, but they are all different, the packaging is different, the cover design is different, and each album has curated its own remixes. ----Rully Shabara

Hackteria launched a campaign to celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2019, "HlabX," an attempt to expand or maintain the network internationally by combining events from old and new festivals in what might be seen as a struggle for sustainability. The campaign was blocked by the epidemic, and many activities, including those in Taiwan and Okinawa, were thwarted. While the epidemic was the main obstacle, organizers also cited a lack of funding and an aging community, which combined to make it difficult to identify the main causes of the network's decline. The low participation rate due to the online format of the event does not mean that friendships and networks are failing, but it may be partly a pessimistic view of the organizers due to lack of human resources.

When I was doing, let's say these activities in 2019, it was also the ten year anniversary of Hackteria, so we were thinking, you know, a lot of activities. We tried to get money here and there and hope to do activities all over the planet and also in Switzerland, but we were not so successful to raise money for the ten year anniversary program. This was a bit of the idea that we also bring some of the old school people together with me, or more like a retreat and really think of what the next ten years will bring. In the end we couldn't raise money to really organize it. We had some money which you were also involved in the program, which is for finding new partners.The idea was also to expand the network and you and Toru joined this network and started to do activities in Taiwan in Okinawa, and also continued the collaboration with our Indonesian friends. But somehow this event that we were hoping for was like a retreat with also some of the old school members of the network, you know, bring them all together - small, like ten people, and really think about how to develop it for the next ten years, but this never happened. ----Marc Dusseiller

Some of the interviewees distanced themselves from grants from centers and institutions or government, such as Rully Shabara, Mika Satomi, and Marc Dusseiller, because they wanted their programs to remain open and sustainable. They all mentioned the difference between money-based and motivation-based programs, and when the grants ran out, the activities stopped. Rully also gave a detailed definition of the difference between the arts and the arts industry in relation to the industry issue in the interview. These definitions and distinctions are not part of the basic premise of these interviews, but perhaps in the potential future industrial platform that was mentioned in one of the interviews, it is not to distinguish between art and art industry, it is not to compromise on money and still have sustainability.

And we also were thinking, should we, as Hackteria, apply for big funding for three years in the early days, 2011? We said we don't want big funding now, we don't want some university to take it over and say all this is us, we wanted to keep this with more freedom, so it is a network that can grow. Because if me and Andy go for a €500,000 grant to get within the university, then it just becomes this university project where me and Andy are there, and it cannot grow the network, so we didn't, we intentionally did not try to get some big grant, although at that time it was really hard. We might even have been successful. We were really pioneering with this stuff, but we on purpose didn't want to go for a grant because we didn't know how it would develop in the future and we wanted to leave it open, for people to join and maybe develop something we cannot even imagine. ----Marc Dusseiller

If you want to be an artist in the industry, that's a different thing. Because the industry and infrastructure is all built to make money, for whoever is involved in every step of that process. Not just the artist, everyone; the venue, the gallery, would get money from this industry. So it's a whole different topic to talk about. But in essence, art is just this. Originally the industry or the existence of the industry is supposed to help the original purpose of art, right? But that means you have to realize in that context, an artist is not a lead. An artist is not something revealed in society, it should be the same as any other profession. You have to treat art like that in that context, otherwise it's dangerous. Because they say they want to change society, but they just want to build up this funding, it's very different. ----Rully Shabara

So one of my intentions was to do it without strings attached because when applying for all these fundings, you always have to promise something and it's a lot of work to get the money, and also when the funding goes away, you can't continue. This is a very typical situation, so I didn't want the summer camp to depend on funding. I also didn't want to spend too much time applying for them, so one of the frameworks was to do it without having any external money coming in, and at the same time, to keep it affordable for everyone. ----Mika Satomi

Finally, and probably here I am addressing one of your main concerns, that of funding and resources to implement these events. It is also a question of who the beneficiaries of these events are. This brings us to the role of artists into a community. It is an old debate intimately connected to the role of the arts in society. It goes hand in hand with what are the arts. In which ways are the arts different from techniques, for example. What is the relationship between arts, techniques, and sciences? The arts tend to be marginalized. Or more precisely, the experimental aspects of arts tend to be marginalized. It might have to do with the fear of the new, of an unknown future, as it might have to do with the recalls of a traumatic past. Being speculative and not immediately implementable, the arts offer that space to inquire the “what ifs”? ----Tincuta Heinzel

INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE

In the interviews, it was mentioned to the interviewees that one of the reasons for the failure of the Holo Project had to do with the establishment of the study, but there was no specific reference to the content of international collaboration. The interviewees only responded to a vague question of "speculative development of an international collaborative industry", which was a somewhat unsuccessful and negative frame of questions, and a reluctant questioning with a weak understanding of the art industry, but the responses can still be used as a general reference. In some of the interviews, more specific examples were presented for discussion, such as the "Tribe Against Machine" workshop that invited 14 international artists to collaborate with a local tribe, and the "Having Friends in the Future" online camp. Overall, the questions designed were a bit of a failure, but interviewees still did their best to supplement their responses in this area.

Let's say that here sits a person from Mexico, and then he has a certain opinion or a certain understanding, or certain knowledge. But this person does not represent Mexico. Or you know I'm Japanese. I grew up in Japan, but I don't represent Japan or Japanese people. What I say is still my personal opinion and my personal understanding. I'm just an individual. There's a lot of things I don't know, or that I misunderstand.So in that sense you have to be careful because this argument tends to underestimate people from your own country, or from your local region. These people also have completely different ideas and opinions and experience than you do. But if you're somehow evaluating more for a person who came from much farther distance, I don't know if that is healthy in that sense. I mean this is just a bit of a counter argument to the idea of international collaborations to think about, it doesn't negate it, but I think it's important to think about it when promoting international trans-disciplinary collaborations. ----Mika Satomi

One of the more effective responses in this section is Rully's answer to the question of colonization, in the case of an interview about the IBP project, an Australian government-funded instrument-making project in Indonesia, in which a cross-country grant occurred, or more precisely, an art project funded by one country that happened in a different country, but the interview didn’t go in-depth to provide an evaluation of the art project. This discussion occurred as a result of an interview with Rully about the balance of power that arises between international artists and local indigenous communities in the Tribe Against Machine project.

"There is a great anxiety within Tribe Against Machine, when we deal with the collaboration between technological arts and traditional culture, we encounter certain myths that seem to be about class struggle, which is about power, and we have been seeking to achieve a certain balance without success. In these collaborations between new media and older culture, it is always technocracy that prevails, not only in the class of the collaboration, but also in the impact of the activities on the participants. These problems are not only in the level of cooperation, but also in the impact of the activities on the participants, which tend to be technocratic power struggles. While technocracy is not entirely negative, we must ask these questions.”

Once you really know the value of a tradition…You don't want to exploit it…by understanding the value and the power in your work, just the value, then you will know in my work, I will have to be able to reflect that. And they will look at it like, “Wow, you use the same value as us.” That’s what’s more important. Then there is no exploitation happening there because what is spread is only the value. Nobody has been exploited, the value is spread even more. It’s not about the individual, the individual is just a carrier of the culture. That's why my focus of all my art only focuses on two things, voice and language. Language is not only verbal. Expression is just the language, the language itself, the verbal itself, the expression, you know? Accent, behavior, etc? But when you learn the language, you will easily understand it better because you know because you are practicing and using it. People want shortcuts to understand other people's traditions, and they say they think they understand a lot of traditions but they don’t. They just learn the academic version of that tradition. And shortcuts are actually very capitalist thinking. ----Rully Shabara

In addition, Tincuta Heinzel, one of the participants of the Tribe Against Machine, made a proposal for global and local collaboration, arguing for the need to clarify the properties and geopolitics of these local facilities and to take geopolitics into account, as geopolitical differences are inherent, which may also affect the need and difficulty of global collaboration.

One of the big questions of the Tribe Against Machine summer camp was how to connect the “local cultural identity” and its tensions (and there were plenty, for as long as I could understand) with the present days and the future of the local and global community. And it is always a question if it is about one or several communities. The camp was an invitation to think about what unites us and not what brings us apart, even though those aspects are similarly important and do not need to be neglected. The relationship we are maintaining with each other might be the key here. ----Tincuta Heinzel

CONCLUSION

All of the camps and activities explored in this study constitute a network of sorts, a network broadly defined as all of the objects touched in this interview, including interviewees, festivals, summer camps, international workshops, foundations, artists, scientists, collectives, art collectives, and so on. The network is also a knowledge base that does not yet have an access interface, at least not in Taiwan; it is composed of a group of artists, hackers, scientists, and event organizers with strong curiosity and experience, it is not just a digital, lifeless website backend with a bunch of data. This database is about open source hardware, agri-digital manufacturing, tech wear, e-textile, agriculture, biotech art channel, and it is also an alliance about camps.

What is an "access interface"? It should be a social organization or media technology that allows anyone to easily access these resources and extract useful knowledge from them. In addition to that, there should be no language, conceptual or cultural barriers in the access process. Until such an interface is made, this network won't mean anything to anyone. There may be two ways to construct this interface. One is to invite more people to participate in these activities by holding physical camps, and the other is to create more convenient links on the Internet through digital tools. An alliance such as a physical camp may be an effective way, such as Feral.Labs.Network and Rewilding Culture, both being camps that support open source culture, or DESIGN+POSTHUMANISM NETWORK that supports multi-species design. You can search ongoing or upcoming related activities on these websites that may match your interests. Most of these networks rely on EU subsidies, so their sustainability has also been criticized, but judging from the current situation of the organizers interviewed for this project, this network has spawned two events this year, such as ROŠA in Indonesia and also I.N.S.E.C.T in Denmark, so it is a network that is still growing.

The creation of this interface involves the issue of international collaboration, whether using the term "collaboration" or "exchange", which involves transnational affairs, so geographical differences become the most critical condition in this topic. For example, it may involve cultural differences, price differences, political differences, language barriers, etc., which are all factors that lead to xenophobia and closure, so some interviewees also raised some counter-views. Why cross-country? This is not a necessary thing. Some interviewees also said that internationalism is a natural built-in attribute, and that they may not have even considered the question of "are we international”? These differences in consideration may also stem from Taiwan's geography, where we are on a small island and we have to go through the airport to get anywhere, whereas people from mainland Europe can easily travel to another country by bus. So the question of "how to connect more with other countries and art networks" may not be an international one. But that doesn't mean we're not welcome. I think if we can come up with a concrete approach and actually make it happen, all the interviewees would be happy to participate in building this interface, as long as the motivation is positive and includes creative ideas on how to create a better industry platform.

Perhaps we can look at the geographic gap, the distance between communities, as a resource that will allow us to start building the infrastructure that will allow us to enter a "what is planetary ecology? industry. Planetary ecology can be a more complex relationship of ecologies such as climate change, agriculture, cultural preservation, human rights, etc. All these future concerns provide us with more motivation to create a relevant future art industry. I'm not saying we should live for anxiety, but perhaps it's just a reasonable inference about how to bring us together (the international communities involved in the interview) based on existing resources, and a specific topic would be a good place to start. What's more, we already have the infrastructure in place; members of the e-textile camp have been invited to Taiwan for two consecutive years and we've been in touch; Hackteria and Lifepatch have just completed ROŠA, there are many here that are related to ROMI's digital farming initiative; the Taiwan camp was part of HlabX, although it was also discontinued due to the pandemic; and the H.Om.E project from Tribe Against Machine has also initially linked the textile database of Taiwan's Atayal collaborators to the Mapuche culture of Chilean textile art curators through art experiments. These results have been made possible by a cross-national network, which allows us to generate interesting topics at any time, depending on the horizon and the breadth of the network.

But these exchanges have to be based on “people”, even if this is an open discussion about creating an "international platform," and the organizers are mostly "people-oriented," that is, people-based, everything is about how to promote a better environment, but it has to be about people. Whatever we want to do, we do it together because you want to do it and I want to do it. This kind of discussion comes up again and again in interviews, and no one answers the questions in the interviews from a capital or resource cost perspective. So it's all based on people, the network is made up of human relationships, I like you because I agree with you, so I want to do things with you. Getting along is a resource, and we need more of these real face-to-face places to do things together. These camps are often stronger than institutional contracts, I think, because the revolutionary feelings that form here are long-lasting when you eat and live with people who share your vision and your vision in extraordinary moments. To use the terminology of art, this has to do with "making friends, not art" or "the process of getting along is the production of work". This is a more radical approach to how art and society interact, a non-utilitarian manifesto, getting along is the work, because it is all about how to make society better.

The possibility of a mix of the several operating models for camps mentioned by the interviewees still exists, but this did not happen, such as Fablab's decentralized model, the classical type such as Fabricademy, which could have been adopted by Hackteria; in Marc Dusseiller's interview he mentioned that at the time they had a community definition problem, which was about who was a member of Hackteria, and this affected their network expansion, and ultimately this matter was not clearly addressed. This may be a kind of resistance of the organizers to systematize an otherwise organic network, but all in all, they did not end up developing a system like Fablab, even though they had the same decentralized and decentralized idea. Perhaps the independent organizer has many values that he wants to protect that cannot be brought into a systematic framework, or perhaps it is a matter of contradiction between anti-utilitarianism and funding anxiety, or perhaps there is a disagreement among some organizers about the longer-term consequences of a larger system, which makes them prefer a smaller, more self-controlled organization to one that would be more sustainable. This has led them to prefer a smaller, more self-directed organization to a system that can help communities become more sustainable. "We need money to do things, but that's not a prerequisite." These organizers organize events or associations, and these actions are in themselves a reaction to some kind of utilitarianism; to talk about money in a utilitarian system is to erase the very point of these organizations. I don't think there needs to be a "who's successful and who's not" debate here. None of the interviewees had great financial success, but there was talk of "the need for a better machine (industry)" and the perception that art is often marginalized, especially in the field of experimental technology and art. In short, even though this is a field survey about creating the industry of the future, to some extent the industry may be a mindset rather than a system. This separates us from the pure industry, because we are not entrepreneurs, we produce ideas and not other things.