This is an old revision of the document!
ACEcy
The Project
The idea is to build a transparent modular structure, that will serve as a temporary makerspace, a durational interactive public art installation (!), or a haven for techies, artists, and idlers of all sorts. This will run on the principles of radical inclusion, gifting, de-commodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, “Leaving No Trace,” participation, and immediacy. This was initially developed by hack66 in response to a call by the Burning Man Global Arts Grants (a call focusing on experimental & participatory public space projects) and is now taking place with the support of ARTos and the RoC Cultural Services.
Location: The Home for Cooperation has agreed to let us use a plot of land next to their premises which makes it easy to unite forces with the Lefkosia Hackerspace, and it also makes a great place to host a party!
Come join us!
Live doc here: http://pad.hack66.info/p/acecy
Catch up with the project development and join the discussion here [is this current?]:
https://www.loomio.org/g/g9RhdY3U/acecy-for-burning-man-arts
News
[13/10/2015] We found some money & are going ahead!
[28/03/2015] Got word from Burning Man Grant eh \
[20/01/2015] Going for a making-platform rather than a full-blown junkyard per se (a matter of realism). Also H4C may be able to grant us a location. More soon.
[23/12/2014] Burning Man Arts is interested in funding this! Full proposal due Feb 1st, 2015.
Documents
pad: http://pad.hack66.info/p/acecy
Application Draft (Please feel free to contribute): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HFzfB74b7b_B8_0aW74D9h4T6KfSUaEyjlM17X3QRJY/edit
Initial Concept
Part of hack66's Hackware Needed series
This picks up from the Functional Hardware Exchange Party v.1 which brought Loizos G. into the fold, kickstarted the mobile lab, and brought us into a new chapter of brainstorming around Ace's junkyard in SF.
Let's see now..
Preliminary brief
The project / durational interactive public art-work brings together a community of artists and techies in Nicosia, the divided capital of the island of Cyprus, to construct and creatively exploit a junkyard in the spirit of Bill Kennedy's ACE Junkyard, between April 2015 and April 2016.
Preliminary project description
The goal is to create a durational interactive art-installation in the form of a large, open, and openly managed space to collect junk and to work on all sorts of hardware. Its primary physical manifestation will be an actual junkyard to hold within it the potential for other unexpected manifestations, projects and works by the community. We visualise this as a haven for techies, artists, and idlers of all sorts, coming to share tools and resources and to learn from each other. As a type of “social sculpture,” this can be something especially powerful at a time when the country is hitting a deep financial crisis, and a lot of people are driven to innovation, or to creative madness, out of sheer need. The idea is to use the funds to gather equipment that would allow for tech projects and art-pieces (no distinguishing line from us here) to come together out of junk. Ideally we’d be able to find a space on the Buffer Zone in a location with easy access for people on both sides of the island. The junkyard would be managed by the hack66.info community, a hackerspace - innovation centre hybrid in the South in collaboration with the Lefkosia Hackerspace in the North. On the side of the arts the project will develop in collaboration with ARTosFoundation.org and ReAphrodite.org. ACEcy would follow an open, do-ocratic, modified consensus process. We would start working on the junkyard in April 2015 and keep it going till April 2016, organising events on art and technology, creative hardware recycling, and hardware freedom along the way.
More
This project is proposed as one great piece of art, as a curated arts program and series of events, as a public-art project, a community-building project, a large-scale interactive installation, and a social sculpture, all at once. It brings together artists and technologists around the idea of hardware freedom and uses the organisational formats of do-ocracy and modified consensus to allow further projects and collaborations to develop. It aims to create an environment, that of a junkyard, with its own distinct and potentially transgressive aesthetics, an aesthetics that stays open with regard to further creative possibilities.
This is a project about the commons, and at the same time an experiment in participation that builds on a number of intersections: the coming together of two nascent Cypriot hackerspaces (hack66 and Lefkosia Hackerspace, based on either side of the divided island), the coming together of art and technology as distinct but connected fields of creativity, and the coming together of a local artistic and technological reality and the greater, distant, but ideologically akin context of Burning Man, and the openness it promotes.
