Websites for Conviviality
Kære Computer,
I made a little website for the series of events I'm doing with SOFTER this spring. SOFTER is a feminist network for 3D design, code, arts and hardware by Ida Lissner and Nicole Jonasson. I have been a big fan of theirs ever since I stumbled over their pink, bubbly and inclusive universe a few years ago. So when they opened their new Lab here in cph, I was delighted to teach there.
I made a creative coding workshop with p5.js for absolute beginners. The site is a very simple html and css project with a tutorial and lots of links for all the courses and educators that inspired me. I had fun adding a little p5.js sketch as a background to each page, and overall just loved the process of making this.
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I have been fascinated for a while now about how teaching/learning resources can be beautiful. I feel like have spent enough time looking at ugly tutorials or blogs. No offense, fellow nerds, but I need this to be beautiful! I need the information to be cute. I need to delight in the hand-coded and whimsical web. Making a site that gives me joy, is a way to keep finding delight in learning and teaching. And that in itself is enough! Seeing other people enjoy it, is icing on the cake. I love how low the stakes are. No one needs this website. No one asked for it. I'm making it simply because I want to, and because It feels good to add to the the convivial web.
A few years ago, I made a book club session with the artist Natalia Tikhonova as part of the Calculation Art project online residency program, where we read the book ‘Tools for conviviality’ by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. In the book from (1973), Illich writes that the nature of modern ‘tools’, from machines to schools, has the effect of making people dependent and undermine their own natural abilities. He suggest that we instead create what he called “convivial tools”. These are tools that encourage people to think for themselves and be more socially engaged.
"Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision."
This book is one of those kinds of works that are quoted over and over. In a culture obsessed with the negative and dystopian sci-fi views on technology, it stands out because it proposes positive solutions to tech-problems, and encourages to look constructively at the mess we've made of our modern world.
The proposition is that we need to share and help each other create systems that are transparent and in return strengthen our ability to learn and build things. It also urges to rethink a system centers the idea that technology must advance, machines have to take over and that infinite growth and revenue increase is not only possible, but the main purpose of it all.
I did the book club with Tina & Johanne way back in 2021. A quaint time before the internet was taken over by social media platforms that promote Stochastic Parrot content, and most of our monopoly-tech-infrastructure-providers decided we need more nuclear power plants to fuel the fascist Precrime surveilance machines. A simpler time!
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What does this have to do with a tiny p5.js tutorial website? At the book club, we all agreed that although convivial tools sound great, its difficult to think of what a truly convivial tool really is. Unlike in 2021, these days, the answer to that question seems much more intuitive to me. In my eyes, beautiful, accessible, free and community-based education in programming IS a convivial tool!
I love the movement towards the tiny, handmade web. Particularly the part that builds and shares tools that encourages other people to learn how to code and, in return continue to add to it. I'm deeply inspired by people who build a praxis around teaching and building learning resources, such as Laurel Schwulst, Chia Amisola, Mindy Seu, Taeyoon Choi, Rachel Uwa. And so this is something I will probably keep doing. Building little cute sites with learning material. Websites for Conviviality.
♡ Nynne
P.S. Thank you so much for writing in my guestbook! Speaking about the small web, reading messgaes in here makes me so incredibly happy. Thank you!