March 31 — unReport
Katalin Hausel
Following the initiative of Mat (Nottingham), and supporting the consensus that we need to allow more insight into the activities of the closely collaborating unMonastery network, here is my first weekly report — from Lausanne.
I never thought I would work so much in writing. I prefer making things by hand but in the unMonastery making tends to take the form of writing, reading and discussion (mostly in writing). There is something exhilarating in this mode of production though, like process-based art, one never knows where an idea, text or re-edit will lead. I went to visit a Buddhist Monastery on Mont Pélerin last week, and my guide, Reynald, told me that they partially support themselves by selling the books they write. I can see the unMonastery becoming a Big Data age knowledge distillery, a half automated half intuitive sense-making factory of obsessively kept records.
Collaboration is reaching new, unprecedented heights — James (Athens) and I are practicing telepathy. Researching Liquid Organisation, I made a remark on Slack about kanban, and it turned out he was talking about lean production with someone in Athens. What ‘customer’, ‘production’, ‘push’, ‘pull’, or even the term ‘lean’ can mean in an unMonastery context remains to be seen, but a new working group is launched to find out.
As Kei (London) and I were revisiting the BIOS Game again for an application, and having started to collect data for the Atlas with Luisa (Athens), the amount of work to be done revealed itself to be enormous. My anxieties, fuelled by obsessive compulsive tendencies are gathering momentum. I try to find comfort in the concept of the 200 year plan. We have time. Which reminds me, Bembo (Bergen) and I never got to work properly on the Declaration of the Invisible Stakeholders. Now that ADDMA in Athens is requesting the unMonastery definition of social entrepreneurship, we probably have to rethink the stakeholders list in the Stakeholders Handbook, and extract an even clearer vision for what we do. Although possibly lean, unMonastery may turn out to be both its own product and its own customer. Time for us to unpack the WE, in Stakeholders Handbook, Volume 2. ?
Almost forgot about the preSummit Org working group. The definitive highlight of the last few days was the one hour Bembo (Bergen) and I spent yesterday on making preparatory plans for the preSummit: blood purification, de-scheduling, preverbal work, cultivating the WE. Naps, circles, laptop fasting. A refreshing break from institutional reality — the worst news of the week came the same day, that there is no appropriate department at Pro Helvetia to submit our application (which was asking for funds to support the development of the BIOS game). Theirs is an outdated and rigid structural view of cultural production, even within the not exactly cutting edge and experimental circles of institutional art support. The advice: keep submitting it to other departments, maybe someone else can fit it into their particular container. I was considering to offer the game for them as a toolkit for re-generating connection with reality. Imagine you are not given a box to inhabit, but you build one from scratch… first, how will you make decisions?
