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Christoph Brunner: Concatenated Commons and Operational Aesthetics
Concatenated Commons and Operational Aesthetics
(p. 241 – 269)

Christoph Brunner

Concatenated Commons and Operational Aesthetics

PDF, 29 pages

  • copyright
  • art
  • digital culture
  • authorship
  • aesthetics

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Christoph Brunner

is Assistant Professor for Cultural Theory at the Institute for Philosophy and Art Studies, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. There, he directs the ArchipelagoLab for Transversal Practices, where students and researchers experiment with different formats and forms of collaboration between art, theory and activism. The Lab hosts artists in residence, conducts the Activist Sense Workshop and Lecture Series, hosts self-organized student reading groups, screenings and performances. Christoph’s research revolves around the intersections between media, affect, and aesthetic politics. He focuses on contemporary social movements and their use of aesthetic techniques and strategies. The question of translocal modes of networking and organization, the use of embodied and affective forms of knowledge, and relational conceptions of subjectivity define guiding lines of this research.
Other texts by Christoph Brunner for DIAPHANES
Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.

 
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a ‘double character.’ They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the ‘commons.’ In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a ‘thinking tool’—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.