TogetherNet is an open-source software that invites groups of 10 or fewer participants to build community archives through practices of consent. Designed around the ethos of data transparency and consent, TogetherNet’s goal is to transform digital rights policies such as the right to be forgotten into an embodied practice through re-imagining software architecture and user experience. This tool and initiative stands on the shoulders of Consentful Tech Zine by Una Lee and Dann Toliver and Design Justice Network Principles — by considering transparency and consent every step of the way, the source code serves as both a technical and moral document that seeks to uncover systems of power and uncertainties embedded in network technologies.
TogetherNet was created through the support of Eyebeam’s Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellowship. Xin Xin is the lead artist of TogetherNet and was a Rapid Response fellow in 2020. Built for people who work under the broad umbrella of art and technology, TogetherNet invites users to contribute, remix, and pluralize the source code and guidelines in an effort to create a truly horizontal tool reflecting the needs of its users. It provides a glimpse into the potential for a new kind of grassroots software development that centers digital rights and community building from the outset. Currently, TogetherNet is focused on finding support to make iterations of the software template with specific communities.
Xin Xin 林心瑜 is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and organizer currently making socially-engaged software that explores the possibilities of reshaping language and power relations. Through mediating, subverting, and innovating modes of social interaction in the digital space, Xin invites participants to relate to one another and experience togetherness in new and unfamiliar ways.
As an artist and designer, their work has been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica, DIS, Gene Siskel Film Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Machine Project. They were an Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow and a Sundance Art of Practice Fellow. As an organizer, Xin co-founded voidLab, a LA-based intersectional feminist collective dedicated to women, trans, and queer folks. They serve on the Processing Foundation board and directed Processing Community Day 2019.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan and raised in Massachusetts, United States. Xin identifies as a cross-cultural, non-binary, anarcho-feminist and will probably always have a genre-nonconforming practice. Xin received their M.F.A from UCLA Design Media Arts and teaches at Parsons School of Design as an Assistant Professor of Interaction and Media Design.
Hacking the Crystal Ball: Art, Technology, and Sovereignty
1 – 3PM EDT on Thursday, December 1, 2022
Hosted by Xin Xin 林心瑜 in conversation with Lee Tzu Tung 李紫彤, and SU
Remote via Zoom: FREE with RSVP to [email protected]
Accessibility: Mandarin/Taiwanese to English translation, ASL and Cart Services
In light of Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive military exercises over the island and adjacent countries, and the US aim to maintain its island chain strategy by turning Taiwan into a weapons depot, the visibility of the Taiwanese crisis is re-emerging on the international stage. Facing ongoing economical and informational warfares, and probable military warfare, what kinds of artistic projects can be imagined to propose new narratives and structures of sovereignty? How can we learn from Indigenous, queer, and feminist movements in Taiwan to articulate a more equitable future from the bottom-up?
