Sharing Knowledge in the Arts: Learning from pioneering open access experiments

Founded in 1994 in Basel, “THEswissTHING” provided a Bulletin Board System (BBS), website, and a media lab for artists and cultural producers. Inspired by sharing culture, they sought to reframe artistic practice outside the institutional art world and approach it as infrastructural labor.

The Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF project "Sharing Knowledge in the Arts" (2023-2027), which is based at the HGK Basel, analyses what we can learn from such this experiment to design novel research infrastructures in and for the arts. We aim at a) analyzing “THEswissTHING” as a bottom-up initiative for sharing knowledge to understand how ethical issues of sharing were negotiated in this context and b) learning from those insights for current Open Research Data (ORD) publishing practices.

The project’s team combines art history, design research, and media studies expertise and collaborates with digital preservation experts, digital humanities scholars, and audio-visual producers. We draw on research on artistic knowledge practices and critical infrastructure studies, such as the investigation of research infrastructures and experimentation with open access and open research data.

The findings aim to produce reflexive feedback between digital preservation, scholarship, and design around sociotechnical imaginaries of accessibility and openness in sharing knowledge in the arts.

The team of the SNSF project "Sharing Knowledge in the Arts" includes: Lucie Kolb, Stefanie Bräuer, Lara Kothe, Eva Weinmayr and Philipp Messner

Partners: Barbara Strebel, THEswissTHING; Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome, New Museum; Lozana Rossenova, Open Science Lab, TIB Hannover; Gary Hall, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University; Andreas Weber, point de vue; Tobias Hodel, University of Bern, Walter Benjamin Kolleg, Digital Humanities

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