Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
As part of transmediale 2015: CAPTURE ALL, unMonastery has been invited to initiate a gathering and regrouping of its respective networks, collaborators and allies in the city of Berlin, with a view towards forging new friendships. Following from the first iteration of unMonastery, prototyped in the ancient city of Matera between January and October 2014, The Global unMonastery Summit will signal a moment of reflection, reexamination and public presentation of its efforts to date.
The summit will unfold as a trilogy woven by infrastructure space and distributed across multiple sites, with: a gathering at The Apartment, a public programme in The Foyer of transmediale and The Network, an offline network intended to connect both sites and support the localised release of The unMonastery Bios, a toolkit designed for replicating unMonastery. This composition of spaces will be used to host public workshops, informal gatherings and open dinners, disseminate the unMonastery designs and further develop the project as it continues to scale.
Each component of the summit has been designed to offer alternative forms of engagement in the unMonastery’s work through intimate discussions, remote collaboration, and participatory workshops.
The Apartment
The Apartment - The Global unMonastery Summit Central to this year’s summit will be the communal apartment of the unMonasterians, utilised in the run up to the opening of transmediale as a laboratory and development space for a more nomadic iteration of unMonastic life, with unMonks living together for an intensive but short period of time in accordance with a set of predetermined, experimental vows. The apartment itself will serve as a meeting place and informal workshop venue for two weeks; hosting dinners, conference calls with international initiatives and transforming the kitchen into a biohack lab in collaboration with Brian Degger and Rüdiger Trojok (Hackteria). Anyone will be welcome to turn up and get involved.
The Foyer
Located in the foyer of transmediale, our public programme for the Summit seeks to facilitate a space for a broad base of ideas that function as catalysts for the thinking that underpin the development of the unMonastery concept. Workshops, discussions and presentations will serve as a platform for an ecosystem of initiatives, organisations and individuals who share similar objectives and trajectories. Confirmed collaborators include: Matthew Trivett (Near Now), Vinay Gupta (Ethereum), Jay Springett (#STACKTIVISM), Hackteria, European Alternatives, Islington Mill, EdgeRyders, Matera2019 and Enclosures of New Athens.
Offline Mesh Network
The offline mesh network will be built during the first days of the Global Summit and serve as an openly accessible repository of documentation and a means of linking The Apartment and The Foyer in information space. The network will host a simple interface for the launch of the special, localised release for the Alpha version of the unMonastery Bios and the unMonastery Guild Ledger – a trust-based listing for global resource sharing.
“We talked of a Treasury of Wisdom, Rebooting Democracy, Resiliency Hubs, Transparent Budgeting, Creative Extinction, a Society of Inclusive Civil Survivalists. Among our slogans were indeed Collapsonomics, State in a Box, unCivilization, The Age of Crisis. It seemed to me that someone was finally addressing the Dark Arts of confronting the ghosts that haunt us.” – Bembo Davies (reflections on a weekend spent at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg 2012, that saw the birthing of the unMonastery concept)
unMonastery is a radical response to present and future systemic crises aimed at supporting appropriate technological initiatives and living experiments. Providing a physical space for a distributed network of hackers, artists, and social innovators, the unMonastery aims to establish a network of spaces throughout the world, which can work together autonomously to prototype new solutions to common problems.
Drawing on the history of Monasticism, the unMonastery project seeks to develop a new communal, protocolised approach to the development of a global community which together is capable of moving in unison over the next century. Built in collaboration with EdgeRyders LBG and the city of Matera over the course of 18 months, the project seeks to challenge existing dependency chains and economic fictions.
The first unMonastery opened its doors February 2014 in Matera, Italy for a period of seven months and provided abundant raw material in documentation, methods and commentary. So to avoid reinventing the wheel and reliving our slowly dawning understandings and mistakes, from this documentation we have amassed a core knowledge base that painstakingly evaluates aspects of our work and turns it into a workable, reusable toolkit; The unMonastery BIOS.
For transmediale 2015 there was a localised release of the Alpha version of The unMonastery BIOS, as freely downloadable material available through the unMonastery offline network for those attending transmediale. This session served as an introduction to the unMonastery concept, its progress, its future and the components of The unMonastery BIOS, led by Ben Vickers, first unAbbott of the unMonastery, and the unMonasterians.
