Introducing: BLATT 3000

Workspaces Software (Participio)
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Hello dear Edgeryders community!

I would love to introduce BLATT 3000 to you, a collective I am part of which resonates with a few things I’ve been stumbling upon in this forum. BLATT 3000 put up a “self-curated” festival named HOFFNUNG 3000 in Berlin and the software we built to realize this is getting a rewrite right now to be used by others.

BLATT 3000 is a collective experimenting with collaborative, decentralized and self-organizing systems. BLATT 3000 works with these systems to critically engage in artistic practices and production and to create a community of practictioners in the process of these experimentations. BLATT 3000 takes action in the form of festivals, publications, workshops and research, utilising technology to enact non-commercial and non-hierarchical models of organizing. BLATT 3000 was founded on the idea of exchanging questions around music, art, theory and equality. BLATT 3000 opposes hierarchical ways of organizing and believes in open, collaborative and responsive models of communication and organization.

In 2016 we initiated a first self-curated festival VERANTWORTUNG 3000 (or GitHub - adzialocha/verantwortung3000: Platform for self curated festivals) in Brandenburg. In 2017, BLATT 3000 has tackled those questions of collaboration and self-organization through the festival HOFFNUNG 3000 which was based on a hackable platform (GitHub - adzialocha/hoffnung3000: Platform for decentralized, anonymized, self-curated festivals) where participants and audience members shared resources, organized events and themselves and curated their own festival, which was simultaneously realized in Berlin. HOFFNUNG 3000 was a “working” festival, inviting participants to experiment and discuss inside and outside these environments. All participants were anonymized through animal avatars – also to challenge ideas of quality, equality and curation.

You can watch this little “tutorial” video to understand better what the HOFFNUNG 3000 platform offers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux2R9jwEIgw - some features are:

  • Offer / share / use resources in “Der Markt”
  • Create / offer and use places everywhere in the city (via GPS position, address or virtually)
  • Create events at places with resources (can be made public in a calendar or only privately), people get automatically informed if you requested their resources
  • Users can be anonymized through animal avatars :crocodile:
  • Internal messaging (can be anonymous)
  • Document the festival through the participants (mobile or stationary) webcams into a large .gif Stream
  • Random meetings: Meet random people at a random place

During the last (fantastic!) C35C3 (Chaos Communication Congress 2018) and meetings with Hugi at Blivande Huset, I realized how the “old” HOFFNUNG 3000 platform is still of interest for other initiatives and collectives, even though BLATT 3000 is already working on the next frameworks (utilizing peer to peer network protocols for truly decentralized architecture). It’s software design was already thought as something to be used by others, but time worked against us, so some things got hard-coded in the last steps and turned out to be more BLATT 3000-specific :confused: Refactoring / reworking the HOFFNUNG 3000 software would enable more people to use it for theire own purposes.

Hugi kindly offered support with Participio to make this rewrite possible, which can be generally boiled down into two goals:

  1. Make HOFFNUNG 3000 easier to use and more customizable for other communities to be used for their own festivals / gatherings etc.
  2. Document the software well and improve its setup, so it will be rather easy to deploy your own HOFFNUNG 3000 instance without much programming knowledge

I will write in another thread about the more technical reasonings and proceedings to reach these goals :slight_smile: the development started already!

Happy to hear any feedback or thoughts on this,

All best,
Andreas

ps.
if you are interested, this is a little radio documentary about BLATT 3000 and the HOFFNUNG 3000 festival which was presented by Lakre Radio: Stream A Portrait of BLATT 3000 by The Lake Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

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Hello @adz, welcome. I am Alberto, one of the old timers here.

Your introduction is clear. However, accessing the Blatt 3000 website I find only some enigmatic text:

Identical impala	Beer
Kleptomaniac kakapo	Source code

What am I looking at? :confused:

I am on a train and have no headphones with me, so cannot listen to the text documentary. Did the software come out of the festival or vice versa? I am sure @hugi told you how the Borderland group decided to build some tools to make organizing the festival easier. That effort lately merged into #participio. Is it the same for you? Or did you start from the tech, from things that would be made possible if you only had that piece of tech?

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Welcome @adz! I’m looking forward to the release, I’ve already got an application in mind!

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:wave:

It is the list of all issues we published and their containing articles with authors and titles :slight_smile: in the last issue (#9) about HOFFNUNG 3000, they were anonymized with animal avatars (as we also did it during the festival), some articles are actually generated by a Machine Learning Algorithm trained on all BLATT 3000 texts.

The page is surely not the best when it comes to explaining things, its content is temporary as our sever went down with all the past texts …

The software came before the festival, as a part of a long process of thinking and discussing what we want to experiment with.

Our background is more of an artistic / theoretical one (we started with a group of musicians, composers and students) and technology plays only one part in this. We love to question, play with and experiment with frameworks in general (we see Universities, Curation, Funding, Art, Technology and so on as frameworks) so in this sense we are not necessarily interested in making things “easier” through technology, but rather put ourselves in a (partly technological, strange) environment where we can discuss and experiment with.

So maybe we didn’t “start” from tech, as it was a very interweaved process of many thoughts from all angles but surely we use tech to realize some of these thoughts (Anonymity, self-organization). Also we develop new software for everything we do, so this is also maybe interesting to highlight.

I guess the BLATT 3000 “festivals” are hardly festivals, maybe they are more something like art projects in themselves :smile: (to make things even more confusing). :blush:

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Noted, thanks for the explanations and keep up the good work!

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I’ve started a thread here to write about the technical updates of the HOFFNUNG 3000 platform rework: Rework: HOFFNUNG 3000

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Thanks! Excited!