Relearn
Relearning relearn
Relearn is a collective learning experiment with as many teachers as it has participants. It is motivated by the possibility to displace parameters of/for research, studying and learning. Read more about Relearn.
Relearn is a summerschool which welcomes persons, artists, students, teachers from all backgrounds and disciplines. Participants will gather to learn from and teach to each other, beyond the traditional paradigms of education. Relearn researches convivial, experimental and deviant methods and means in the fields of design, computing and education, challenging the normal roles and separations in them (teacher/student, developer/user, art/life…).
Free, Libre and Open Source Software plays a fundamental role at Relearn, as it facilitates a different approach to the tools we commonly use in our practices and lives. For instance, it can allow us to understand the influence that tools themselves exert on the way they are used, or the different social relations and economies that are formed between who creates and uses them. Such a questioning approach to technology feels urgent, in a time in which more and more social, political and personal issues are addressed by solely technological means.
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Right now there is so very much to relearn. We can't assume that we will be able to travel, cross borders, be together indoors, all things that were a given in the previous editions of Relearn. Read more about the 2021 edition.
This year, the material conditions of public moments of gathering such as Relearn come under scrutiny: the amount of energy, fuel, safety measures, etc. to make it possible with people coming from different places for a short amount of time.
This is why we are thinking of this edition in terms of focusing on our local, Rotterdam. We do not see this as a turn towards some purely localist vision. We still wish to summon the best of what Relearn can offer: an transnationalist perspective and a chance to experience new and old ideas. We aim to explore the importance of self-organisation and the use of experimental tools to build alternative systems and economies within the urban fabric of Rotterdam. We will be focusing on the materialities of the everyday — e.g. even the most modest of actions, such as purchasing or disposing of any of the trillions of plastic objects causes them to circulate through the twenty-first century and thousands of years into the future.
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The what and the why of the Anarchive
Our "anarchive" can be defined in many ways. An autonomous place for the Relearn community to dialogue without words. As the traces of our collective thinking-out-loud. A collective warm up exercise familiar to the materialities of the everyday group chat. A clutter of information that is not the documentation of a past activity but of something that evokes the not yet known. An unhierarchical accumulation of images, documents and links to spark the tracks that perhaps will run through Relearn.
How does it work?
The anarchive can be experienced as a group chat: it is open for anyone to join, without registration and accessible through a regular web browser. It is a place to meet other relearners and share thoughts, images, PDFs, texts etc.
However, it is also a place to meet and interact with our friendly logbot. The logbot is a project which was created within the context of Varia as a way to support our modes of organisation and our need for on-the-fly archiving. It is Python program, written and maintained by Varia members, which sits in our group chats when invited and acts as a helpful co-anarchivist. This mode of ad-hoc digital archiving between friends is something we want to bring to the process of documenting our experience at Relearn this year.
The logbot responds by name and takes as input your submissions for the Relearn anarchive. It can also guide you in the ways of working with the anarchive using a special @help message. Once the logbot accepts a submission it will then make them public on a generated static web page: vvvvvvaria.org/logs/relearn-2021-anarchive.
How to contribute
If you are thinking through the loose ends of Relearn 2021 then please become a fellow anarchivist! You can visit the group chat via relearn2021.vvvvvvaria.org, choose a username and then it is possible to upload texts, documents, images etc and chat with other relearners. Once you close the browser window, you will be "logged out". This is more temporary mode of interacting with the archive.
It is also possible to log into the chat in a more permanent manner. The group chat is hosted on a server located in Varia and uses community-run open source chat software. You can create an account and login using a client on your computer or phone. To learn more about how to do that, see this getting started guide. If you would like to have a Varia server account, please let us know and we can facilitate that.