varia.website/content/pages/about.en.md

Title: about Slug: about lang: en

About

Varia is a Rotterdam based initiative, which started in 2017 from the need to open up their members' practices and organise ad-hoc public or semi-public moments among different configurations; at its core it aims at developing critical understandings of the technologies that surround us. Varia experiments with tools for building physical and digital infrastructures in a collective way.

Our ways of being together as a collective-space are mediated through the following documents: our Code of Conduct which describes shared values and expected behaviour, a collective statement which contextualizes our situation, and membership guidelines where you can read about our membership model.

Varia has five main missions:

• To form and maintain a network of practitioners through which we can support each other’s practice.

• To provide a space for long-term, sustainable, critical, artistic, hands-on, dialogical learning about everyday technology, where we demystify the complexities of technical objects and find ways to adapt them to the needs of different communities.

• To strengthen solidarity between local and international networks by working together with artists, musicians, designers, technologists, theorists, activists and other practitioners that share a mission similar to Varia’s and to provide space, resources and methods to these networks.

• To formulate critical attitudes and transform them into action by explicitly engaging with technologies which do not rely on exploitative business models and which promote non-discriminatory standpoints.

• To move away from the ideological dichotomies that inform the adoption and use of technology, such as “old” versus “new” media, “low” versus “high” tech, “smart” versus “dumb” devices. We focus instead on notions like conditions, frugality, accessibility, transformability, and public interest.

Address

Gouwstraat 3
3082 BA
Rotterdam (Charlois)

info@varia.zone

Have a look at the accessibility outline of the space of Varia.

Mailing List

You can subscribe to our mailing list to be kept up to date with what's going on.

Chat

Some of us lurk #varia on the IRC Freenode network.

RSS

Another way to stay in touch with Varia is by subscribing to our RSS feeds.