How can we re-tell narratives of social justice activism and struggles for just technologies in a way that they converge rather than divide? What stories of collective authorship can we produce in those »sneaky moments?«
For The Darmstadt Delegation, the short workshop at the »(Re-)Constructing Authorship« symposium was an occasion to discuss what design artifacts, computational tools, and language devices are available in moments of crisis. The workshop functioned as a prism on our continuous work on the divisions of labor and techno-political practices of delegation that occur in times of crisis [1] . The graph is a snapshot that shows the intersections between the discussion that happened at the workshop and a vocabulary built over time between members of The Darmstadt Delegation.
For the workshop, we asked participants to propose relevant anecdotes for collective analysis. Using »time,« »separation,« and »labor« as orientation devices, we divided ourselves into three groups. »Time« (red font) was used to look at those sneaky moments as a situation of urgency and intensity; the group discussing »separation« (red border) focused on processes of fragmentation happening at those moments. Through the lens of »labor« (pink background) we could zoom in on the way power relations are re-enforced at sneaky moments.
This labyrinthine graph is not a data-visualization, but a thinking device: It is a playful text [2] that is readable but also writable and executable by a number of agents. Lines, colors, and contours act as a semiotic gesturing of thought, generating multiple promiscuous concepts. The image was made with the help of Graphviz, short for Graph Visualization Software [3] . It distributes items diagrammatically and automatically over a surface, attempting to minimise the amount of crossings and scaling to fit. The graph mediates a sneaky kind of thinking that keeps on changing position, re-orients the conversation on purpose, directs the reader, and willingly loses the stream of recognizable, hegemonic, artificial, and collective consciousness.
Activist practice regarding the aspects of »time,« »separation,« and »labor.«