This Thursday 11th March, we will explore the practices of Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak who are members of Pirate Care. We will get to know the knowledge resources they create, the software they develop, the exhibitions they make. This conversation will look at the relationship between care, contemporary activism and commons. We will learn more about self-organisation, tactics for civil disobedience and care practices against discrimination. Further, we will inquire into how digital resources can be used for solidarity. We will ask, what does it mean to build a network which is technologically-enabled and driven by the commons? Can technological advancement go hand in hand with social justice? Is it possible to turn tools of surveillance into tools of care?
“In our talk, we will present the practices behind our Pirate Care project — the knowledge resources we create, the software we develop, the exhibitions we make. Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, practitioners and scholars who stand against the criminalisation of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. We wish to map and connect disobedient collective practices of care emerging in response to the neoliberal “crisis of care” — a convergence of processes that include austerity, welfare cuts, the rollback of reproductive rights and criminalisation of migration.
Our aim is to foster collective learning processes from the situated knowledges of these practices and together with the practitioners of pirate care we have been working on a collaboratively-written Pirate Care Syllabus. In creating syllabi as knowledge resources for the social justice movements, we are building on our practice of amateur librarianship and custodianship for knowledge commons we have developed while working our the Memory of the World shadow library.
We espouse a technopolitical stance where struggles over the digital domain are primarily understood as struggles over resources and redistribution. As well as, to a certain degree, struggles for autonomy from the ebb-and-flow dynamic imposed on our social world by the big tech platforms, to which end we have been developing the technological framework Sandpoints. It’s a tool that can be equally used in collective learning, publishing and exhibiting and is home to our Pirate Care Syllabus, as well as projects of other groups.”
Marcell Mars is a research fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on Foreshadowed Libraries. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual property and unevenness of technoscience. He authored two short volumes: The Hard Matter of Abstraction—A Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction and Shit Tech for A Shitty World. Together with Marcell Mars he co-edited ‘Public Library’ and ‘Guerrilla Open Access’.