HAK.io Workshop 2: your climate story
In this SWISPy blog we show and tell the story of HAK.io workshop 2 at Science Gallery Bengaluru. Our workshops are happening as Carbon Mediators prepare for the exhibition opening later in 2023. The upcoming exhibition-season CARBON asks: How do we understand carbon beyond the catch phrases and contradictions? Why does it behave the way it does—the elemental basis for life but equally a gas capable of suffocating life?
When the Gallery and exhibition opens, SWISP Lab will return to SGB to co-facilitate HAK.io workshops with the SGB Mediators for young people and school groups inside Carbon. The SWISP ‘hacking’ as method was initially co-designed and tested with the Science Gallery Melbourne youth steering committee Sci-Curious as a practice-based approach for collaborative and creative problem solving in 2020.
HAK.io stands for Hacking the Anthropocene Kit dot input output.
The mobile ‘Hacking the Anthropocene’ kits (HAK) build upon Bauhaus activity cards and Fluxus movement. These HAK.io’s are being re-hacked with Carbon mediators then, once redesigned, will be used in a series of hackathons in cultural and educational institutions across the Science Gallery Network.
The artefacts from HAK.io (iteratively hacking the HAK) are being incorporated into a metaverse environment in Mozilla – designed by digital artist-in-residence, Yvette Walker. Our Hubs site operates as a digital site for two-way interdisciplinary knowledge exchange in and across the Science Gallery Network.
Each SWISP hackathon that takes place is centred around a selection of materials in a mobile hackathon kit called HAK.io co-designed by SWISP Directors, Kate and Sarah with designer in residence, Jennifer Thy and Learning with the Land PhD candidate, Cassandra Truong.
Participants in SWISP HAKs work in a round robin style creative collaboration that offers time for feedback and iterative prototyping. We believe in design justice principles that are “feminist, antiracist spaces that are not only truly inclusive, but also organized to explicitly challenge, rather than tacitly reproduce, oppressive systems” (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Artefacts from each hackathon are adapted for reparative in(ter)ventions and curated in our Mozilla Hubs metaverse environment as immersive experience and will form the centre of the SWISP intercultural climate futures curriculum. The base metaverse has been developed (see below) as a hack on CLIMATE ART AND DIGITAL ACTIVISMS METAVERSE; the earlier iteration designed by Dr Neda Sajadi.
Back to the Climate Story – why start here? Everyone has a climate story. These 6 examples demonstrate a climate story from the SGB Carbon Mediators. What is your climate story?
That place, moment, timestamp when the climate emergency, catastrophe, crises, and, and, and…becomes part of your life narrative is often easy to recall. Telling it and sharing it ensures that we preface these impactful stories, often not only our own but those of communities and families who have encountered drought, floods and fires front on or stories of these encounters that have shifted how we exist in and with the world.
To share climate stories in HAKs we use an event timeline and participants locate the moment or moments of their stories using a post-it-note to locate their story in relation to the times of others. In this workshop we place our bodies across the timeline in the workshop room and share the stories for each other, carefully listening to the feltness of each story. The power of this is felt by everyone, because “stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 207).
With these stories as data (Bleakley, 2005), we move through a process of storying the stories (McCormack, 2004), thinking with lingering ideas and sensorial resonations/reverberations. As a collective wondering of climate impact we stay with the idea that we often move in and out of stories, across people, contexts and continents (Phillips & Bunda, 2018) and wonder about whose stories we tell, and those we choose to remember. A discussion of the stories we choose to (re)tell or those that need to be heard kept us connected, as well as whose stories we are losing when choosing to share another.
To capture the feltness, we turned toward the hundreds and hundreds otherwise (Anderson et al, 2022). With 11 Carbon Mediators, we worked on a 10 word contribution. Each Mediator located 10 words from the climate storying and posted them up on the climate data wall (see below).
After the exhaustive listing was co-created on the whiteboard we took these individual but collective ideas for a walk toward climate, and wrote an individual or collective response of 100 words in length.
From HAK method 5 to HAK method 2 we took our stories from the hundreds and hundreds otherwise into an Emoji micro story (see HAK.io emoji blog for a deeper dive). Inside each hacking kit we have sticker packs co-designed by SWISP with Jennifer Thy to create and or carefully code (Carl DiSilvo). These sticker packs and emojis include images and keywords from the Science Gallery Youth Symposium Hot and Bothered Report. Taking the Emoji Stories internet games back onto paper and out of the phone/computer we hack a digital youth narrative and activate a way of communicating in visual shorthand.
Emojis are More than just cute pictures, these digital icons are a lingua franca for the digital age.
Digital flash/micro fiction, also called micro fiction, is a complete story with emojis. As a form of writing it is characterised by its creation and experience being on a digital platform, but what if you go low-fi?
Want to know more? See HAK.io emoji blog
Protest badges and tiny activisms: a relational aesthetic.
This HAK method is an opportunity for participants to speculate and imagine wonderings, fears, insecurities based on ‘Justice/s, Future/s, Activism/s’ and Sense |Think | Wonder | Fear/Hope responses and literally turn them in to badges of honour. Protest badges as tiny activisms have helped countless people to express their views and beliefs. Just as Fluxus artists rejected traditional principles of crafts(wo)manship, permanency of the art object and the notion of the artist as specialist, SWISP uses low-fi activist principles in its HAKs. Fluxus artists viewed art not as a finite object but as a time-based experience, employing performance and theatrical experiments, and were interested like SWISP in the transformative potential of art through collaboration.
“A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space”.
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998).
In effect, badges are a facilitator for artists, and allow the badge art as information to be exchanged between the artist and the publics as the artist moves between sites. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world. Badges are a personal sign/symbol that people can wear to empower them through displaying their beliefs, allegiances and preferences that would otherwise remain unknown. SWISP has found them to be an effective way to make a direct statement about what matters at that moment in time through a participatory and relational practice.
Fin. But wait there’s more… food.
After each HAK workshop with the Carbon Mediators, we have shared a meal together. One of the things missed by us all during the pandemic and WFH, was sharing a meal at work and talking about the big ideas that have stayed with us. South Indian food is complex, but delicate and features gentle flavours, hot chilis and good conversation about food (at least that’s the case for eating with SGB Mediators).
Food has played a significant role in our teaching and research for many years as a place for stories of nourishment, fun, connection and transformation shared over food bonding. So it is only fitting that after each HAK workshop we have connected over a Southern Indian buffet for the Mediator team.
References
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Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Sites: Hackerspaces, Fablabs, Hackathons, and DiscoTechs. In Design Justice (1st ed.). https://designjustice.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/yvwnnz7b
Durcan, S. (2022). HOT AND BOTHERED, It’s Too Hot, But It’s Not Too Late. Science Gallery International Report
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