Adventures in local knowledge production, Innsbruck 2005

Industrialism and modernism, as we have known them, appear to move to China and thus media has told us our future welfare is based on hyped mantras of “knowledge society”, “research and development” and “creative industries”. But what are the movements traced on street level, the new forms of occupation in the public domain? What happens if we try to map these mostly unseen connections of micro-politics and knowledge production, trying to identify their archetypes, hubs and channels? Roomservices has produced a small atlas that might work as a tool for seeing these aspects of the city, a naïve intervention to reveal hidden networks and communities that form the dynamics of a city.

“Adventures in local knowledge production” work has been made during the artist in residency period at Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen in Innsbruck. Alternative knowledge production atlas is prepared as a toolbox that reveals the layers of knowledge production in Innsbruck within the form of a booklet and series of cards. Knowledge production atlas of Innsbruck looks on networks and places and the lines that are connecting the first two on basis of production type, medium and transparency. Cards are show¬ing the three types/levels of local knowledge production in Inns¬bruck and their subtypes under each title. Archetypes, Hubs and Channels are the three main categories we have identified in this field of action. Each group and their sub-groups have rooted from 2-3 examples from Innsbruck but they could easily be in Istanbul, Malmo or any other city. The basic idea to prepare it in the form of cards is to enable additions while thinking about different cities and making the toolbox more open to change, re-interpretation, re-naming or re-classification tool and more for inspiration than instruction.

When mapping this low- and mid-level knowledge production we focused on the serious hobbyists, spare time specialists and profes¬sional amateurs who rigorously practice their interests and live for their generative sideline activities. There are an increasing number of people who spend as much time on a hobby or an interest as they spend to their livelihood employment or even live on what was once their hobby (midnight programmers, clans of professional computer players as well as eBay pickers to name some active on internet.

This work is a second part of an artistic research series on alternative localities which was started in Dale-Norway (NKD, June 2005) in form of an audio tour, which aims to represent cities in alternative ways. As their nature of being artistic research these series open possibilities of cross disciplinary connections and unconventional transgressions in our perception of the city.

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Adventures in local knowledge production, Innsbruck atlas
Screen versions of local knowledge production material
booklet -
cards -
eForm -

‘When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.'
Buckminster Fuller