Kong Jian (Space) by Grapefruit Experiment

“Kong Jian,” meaning “space” in Mandarin Chinese, explores a translingual machine-made space and the voices within it.

Source materials were drawn from FeministOnlineSpaces.com; Re:Humanities 2012 at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, & Swarthmore Colleges; Women Social Justice Documentary Symposium at Smith College; and Google Translate.

You can stream the audio and download it as an uncompressed file:

http://soundcloud.com/wendyfhsu/kong-jian

I also uploaded to the Grapefruit Experiment’s Bandcamp page. On this page, one could choose to download the song based on their preferred compressed format listed below:

* MP3 320 – 12.3MB
* FLAC – 55.1MB
* MP3 VBR (V0) – 15.3MB
* AAC – 12.5MB
* Ogg Vorbis – 10.1MB
* ALAC – 56.6MB

http://grapefruitexperiment.bandcamp.com/track/kong-jian

First Stop: Feminist Montreal

On Friday, October 12, I will lead a workshop with fifteen or so students from Concordia University. After looking at this blog, and the many lists, concepts, and places it points to, I will ask these participants:

What makes a, this, any space feminist?

(feel free to consider: the room where we meet, the school you attend, the town or place you reside in, a private space, the place you call home, the Internet, or any of my three, preliminary attempts: LFYT, PerpiTube, or this blog itself.

Now make some media and add your voice to the discourse by:

1)   Responding to/on PerpiTube by making a response video on/about YouTube

2)   Responding to/on LFYT by making a texteo

3)   Writing and then posting to this blog

(Online users feel free to join at any time and when you do drop me a line to be sure I see it, lost as it otherwise might so easily become).

When our work is done, I will create a map to the Montreal (and Internet) efforts here and then on the new (not yet but soon to be published web-site).

And finally, the Montreal group will create a prompt for the next stop: UCLA (on November 4).

My Most Recent Attempts: PerpiTube and LFYT

Over the summer of 2011, I collaborated with artist, educator, and activist Pato Hebert, to produce an online art show about and on YouTube as well as in a live gallery space at Pitzer College. Many of my ideas about the kinds of online spaces I’d like to inhabit, build, and interact in were experimented with and modeled in this project, PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces.

For the past five years I’ve been thinking, teaching, and writing about YouTube, which culminated in my video-book, Learning from YouTube. This process of naming, building, inhabiting feminist online spaces came from a sort of auto-critique about the space I ended up building in response to and critique of YouTube.

These are the Rules and Regulations

I’m curious about what architectural and community structures as well as norms of behavior produce the possibility for feminist interactions online. I’ve been working on this primarily with my students at USC (during Spring 2011) and Pitzer (during Fall 2011).

On my blog, I’ve been refining these norms in three key posts:

• Mid-Term Reflections (March 2011)
• Wrap Up Reflections (May 2011)
• and current thoughts on Feminist Norms Online that currently look like this (a work in progress)

So here are the Rules And Regulations:

I’d like to begin with one important parameter for each of these conditions: while each must be present for a site to create possibilities for feminism, none can be fixed, immutable, or inaccessible. instead, each of the principles listed below must  be linked to a transparent method that allows them to be open to question, debate, change, and participate in their ongoing construction:

• rules of engagement: clearly stated, and principled.
• warranted users with a visible connection to their lived bodies: anonymity breeds hate; the loss of the body erases the politics of identity, place, and society
• hierarchies as needed: leaders, mentors, organizers, builders are needed
• shared authoring: yet every user is allowed the full authority of her voice
• shared language: a common vocabulary, connected to a feminist analysis or positionality (or from other political movements) allows for facility of conversation, as well as a sence of community
• shared political beliefs: a common set of beliefs about the world, and how it might change, are the foundation for change.
• collaboration: users should encounter  possibilities to do things together
• respect: is a baseline for interaction
• process: discussions about how things are done, how things feel, how things could be better experientially are understood as central to the workings and content of the site

Welcome: An Invitation

FeministOnlineSpaces is the blog arm of a larger project I am currently researching, teaching, talking about and otherwise building-towards. It will soon become an in-process website that at once houses my recent online media production that aims to bring some of the norms, ideas, structures, legacies, and practices of offline feminist space to the Internet, as well as the media production of a building community.

I will be speaking about the project at (at minimum) ten sites around the US and Canada this year, and will be asking my audience to participate in the thinking about and construction of the new website. Their/your media  and conversation will create both the content and ideas about structure and norms for the site.

Of course, you too, dear reader, can participate as well. Your participation is of particular relevance because I have these two founding goals:

• move Internet practices from COMMENTING to CONNECTION

• move Internet practices from RECEPTION or USE to PRODUCTION or COLLABORATION

Stay tuned for the url. My designer/collaborator Simone Bouyer will be setting up the shell in the near future.