**From the Periphery**
What is the value of places usually considered to be peripheries and marginal spaces beyond their potential for exploitation by the urban centre or the mainland (whether for natural resources, tourism, etc.)? How can we look beyond how the periphery can serve the centre, to see how the periphery can lead the centre? Switching perspectives - from mainland to island, centre to margins - we can see the periphery as the leading edge, the advance indicator of change, rather than as the last place to register change, the place to which change is brought.
One way of rethinking or recasting our understanding of Europe’s island periphery is by drawing on postcolonial theories of the global south. In John and Jean Comaroff’s *Theory from South: Or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa*, for example, the authors point out: ‘It is not that people in the global south “lack modernity.” It is that many of them are deprived of the bounty of modernization by the inherent propensity of capital to create edges and undersides in order to feed off them.’
With this in mind, we seek to:
* Connive with nature rather than to dominate or exploit it
* Promote south-south or ‘sideways’ networks as alternatives to north-south (extractive) relationships
* Promote resilience and island autonomy
* Promote ‘epistemological ecologies’ and diversity as an antidote to ‘epistemicide,’ the obliteration of locally adapted ways of knowing and doing (de Sousa Santos)
* Resist the binaries inherent when speaking of island-mainland relationships or centre-periphery relationships
We have conceived of this publication as an archipelago of islands. If you begin by clicking "Begin exploring" below, you will be able to navigate the islands randomly. In this manner you will eventually explore all the intellectual terrain we did around remoteness, STS, peripheries, and islands, but taking a different narrative path each time.
If you wish to visit one island in particular, the fifteen islands are: [[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]].
Enjoy.
Michelle Kasprzak, Julian Hanna, James Auger, Gemma Rodrigues, Mariacristina Sciannamblo (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute), Saoirse Higgins (Glasgow School of Art), Garnet Hertz (Emily Carr University of Art and Design), Deanna Herst (Willem de Kooning Academy)
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[[About this publication->About]]
[[Bibliography->Biblio]]This publication is the result of a booksprint held at <a target="_blank" href="http://m-iti.org">Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute</a> (M-ITI), Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal, held from October 19-21 2017.
The authors are: Michelle Kasprzak, Gemma Rodrigues, Garnet Hertz, Mariacristina Sciannamblo, James Auger, Julian Hanna, Saoirse Higgins, Deanna Herst.
Edited and coordinated by: Michelle Kasprzak
**Dedication: Rest in Power / Selamat Jalan / Goeie Reis to Tommy Surya, VJ Number ONE, Yogyakarta, 1976-2017**
Acknowledgements: This publication and booksprint were made possible by the support of the <a target="_blank" href="http://easst.net">EASST Fund</a> and ARDITI – Agência Regional para o Desenvolvimento e Tecnologia under the scope of the Project M1420-09-5369-000001 – PhD Studentship.
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/easstlogo.png">
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/arditsi.png">
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[[Introduction->Introduction]]**Edgeness**
The boundedness of islands, completely surrounded as they are by water, is frequently offered as their singular, defining feature: the "geographical precision" of their sense of edge (Baldecchino 2005) or their "obstinate separateness" (Edmond and Smith 2003), for example.
The nineteenth century explorer Alfred Russell Wallace saw this characteristic of islands as an advantage for the study of various species. He wrote: "Islands possess many advantages for the study of the laws and phenomena of distribution. As compared with continents, they have a restricted area and definite boundaries and in most cases their biological and geographical boundaries coincide. ...their relations with other lands are often easier to comprehend than those of continents..." (Wallace, 1880). Yet, as the Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant has described, the water that surrounds islands also constitutes a space of flux and connectivity; sea currents, the ebb and flow of tides, and migration have brought people (and their technologies), plants, and animals to islands from other land masses for centuries. The social and ecological environments of islands are always in dialogue with those of more distant places. The sea "does not enclose" but "radiates diversity" (Glissant), and the sea that constitutes an island’s ‘edge’ is indeed a porous, and permeable one. This double-sided quality of islands is embedded in the way Madeira is perceived in the popular imaginary of its inhabitants: for locals, the archipelago is simultaneously ‘the corner of the world’ and a ‘portal’ onto it.
Where Europe’s islands occupy a geographic mid-zone among continents, this dual valency of the edge also as threshold, as both end and beginning, is thrown into sharp relief: making up the outer reaches of ‘fortress Europe,’ Europe’s Mediterranean islands are also an entry point for citizens from Africa and the Middle East, a first line contact zone, a space of mixing and mingling. A space of hope and refuge, as well as desperation and potential alienation.
Geographic ‘edgeness’ of islands--their simultaneous boundedness and openness--tends to support intercultural amalgamations and blending of many types that are distinct from cultural and ‘natural’ formations on the ‘mainland’: botanical, linguistic, architectural, technological, genetic. ‘Creolization’ particular to Orkney, for example, incorporates Norse vocabulary, names, and linguistic forms into English. The sing-song *sotaque* of Madeira is specific to the archipelago, incorporating underlying linguistic structures from Brazilian and African lusophonie that are not used on the mainland. The créole of La Réunion fuses French with Malagasy, Hindi, and Portuguese, among other languages.
The boundaries of islands, though seen as sharp, are also mutable -- and of course, all land boundaries are mutable. For example, The Netherlands is mostly below sea-level and thus nearly every inch has been totally engineered into existence. In a sense, The Netherlands (known in French as "Pays Bas" or colloquially in English as part of the "Low Countries") is the inverse of an island, where a human population has managed with an ingenious series of dikes and other water management measures to keep the sea from where it would normally flow. The Dutch have also produced entirely new real estate where needed, for example the islands Steigereiland, Haveneiland and Rieteilanden, collectively known as IJburg, built in the IJmeer lake on the eastern edge of Amsterdam.
Dutch ingenuity works, but many low-lying places and islands are at risk of disappearance. The Maldives, a fragile archipelago built on coral, is likely to be entirely lost to climate change in the coming decades. Volcanic islands also rise from the sea but they can also sink back at any time. These fragile places can create fragile species. Geirfuglaskr, a volcanic island off the coast of Iceland, was one of the last refuges for the flightless bird, the great auk. In a volcanic eruption in 1830 this island submerged. The surviving great auks moved to a nearby island and were wiped out by humans several years later. Flightless birds like the great auk are emblematic of island endemic species, who are thought to have spent more energy into evolving better legs for running rather than wings for flying.
In terms of technology, the edges can be used for purposes of disrupting the mainland. The emergence of pirate radio stations in the 1960s in UK, for example, were built out of island-like offshore sea forts or ships in international waters, and therefore were able to sidestep UK broadcasting laws. A reaction against BBC Radio not playing rock and pop music, the first British pirate radio station was Radio Caroline, which started broadcasting in 1964 from a ship off the Essex coast. (Chignell 2009)
(link: "Donald Trump on islands")[“Islands... there’s a lot of water.”]
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)
**Frugal Innovation**
Being geographically isolated often translates into a lack of availability of external supplies, commodities and products – if available, these items can take a considerable amount of time to arrive. As a result, ad hoc repair is a way of life. Using a combination of indigenous materials and fragments of available devices, ‘ad-hoc-ism’ thrives in repurposing technologies and artifacts in unexpected ways (Jenks & Silver 1972). This style of repair often involves repurposing or ripping apart a consumer product and using it in ways not officially planned for – blackboxed objects are hacked, modified and improvised in ways clearly outside their initially designed purpose. Souvenirs are made out of old oil cans, shoes are made from old vehicle tires, and plastic soda bottles are fashioned into twine, for example. Ad-hoc design moves beyond the formal models of modernism and the standard flow of consumer products, which are typically built to be sold, used and discarded when they break.
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/brushes.png">
Ernesto Oroza has extensively researched and documented frugal innovation in Cuba, including these homemade paint brushes built using repurposed bottles (2016). Image courtesy Ernesto Oroza.
The island of Cuba stands as an important example of creativity through frugality, with over 50 years of the United States embargoing all exports to the country. This commercial, economic, and financial trade blockade has sprung out an ecosystem of clever reuse and kludges as a result of being marooned from the American economy. A key component of Cuban innovations -- and of creativity in the midst of severely limited resources -- is of radical repurposing of artifacts and creating new objects, not just repairing the broken.
Although the material constraint of an island echoes the constraint found in rural regions or economically disadvantaged areas on non-islands, island innovation with extremely constrained resources are used in literature and popular culture as a case study in self-sufficiency. For example, the story of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719) puts forward an archetype of the self-sufficient individual, where Crusoe lands on a deserted island, making a raft and a shelter from the wrecked repurposed fragments of his ship. Similarly, the castaways on the American TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island tried to readapt mainland solutions, with humorously disjointed results: islands often go against the one-size-fits-all mindset, and mainland ideas and artifacts must be adapted to island terrain, scale and limited resources.
Frugal innovation happens globally -- using a bottle as a candleholder or a large book as a doorstop, for example -- and this type of hacked everyday design in conditions of material constraint goes by several different terms depending on geographic location: ‘kludge’ in America, ‘bodge’ in England, ‘jeitinho’ in Brazil, ‘jua kali’ in Kenya, ‘jugaad’ in India, ‘zizhu’ in China and ‘Systeme D ‘in France. Islands serve as a microcosm of the world, reminding us of the global condition of having limited resources – and that ad hoc repairs, whether on an island or on the mainland, is a raw form of design that stands in contrast to the standardized, commodified and generic.
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[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Remoteness**
At one time, living on a remote island may have been a way to step away from the rest of the world and think clearly away from mainstream modern life (Orkneyinga Saga AD2000). To contemplate remoteness today may more likely be a romantic notion driven by an anathema for the pace of everyday life, speeded up by access to each other via social media and technology (Vodden et al 2015).
In the Global North, the scarcity of remoteness has driven up its value. The isolation of islands, in island writer Bill Holm’s view, answers an important need of the human psyche: "islands are necessary for us to be able to think about what is true at the bottom of our own character; we need to reduce the world for a while, to count it and understand it" (Holm 2001; Deakin 2000). We can observe this desire in, for example, the tourists that come to Orkney in search of the archaeological and historically-rich remoteness of the islands.
The impacts of remoteness also permeate practical aspects of day-to-day life. The ‘on demand’ conveniences of e-commerce are largely absent and availability of other supplies (e.g. tools, medicines) can fluctuate. Planning ahead or making do with [[what you find available->Frugal]] becomes a way of life.
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[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Laboratory**
(link: "Schalansky on island as lab")["For empirical research, every island is a cause for celebration, a natural laboratory." (Schalansky 2010)]
When we think of a laboratory a white-walled, meticulously clean, sterile room probably comes to mind. However, the remote island can also provide the ideal conditions for certain types of technological research and experimentation. The nuclear testing undertaken by the United States on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958 provides a powerful example of 1) how previously inhabited islands were transformed into ‘a facility with controlled conditions’, 2) the stereotypical power relationship between mainland and island, and 3) how the ‘controlled’ nature of the laboratory can be porous or leaky.
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/Operation_Crossroads_Baker_Edit.jpg"> Operation Crossroads. United States Department of Defense [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Bringing [[fiction->Fiction]] to reality is the dream of techno-libertarians. Through concepts like Seasteading and other offshoots of ‘the Californian ideology’, or the more dramatic colonisation of space, places are sought where technological progress can proliferate free from constraining factors imposed by legislation. While freedom from constraints might seem desirable, escaping from constraints can also lead to ambivalent or undesirable futures. How shared or democratic is the unconstrained utopia likely to be? What kind of utopia are non-state actors of movements like Seasteading trying to build?
Through the medium of thousands of experimental floating islands or ‘modular eco-villages’, proponents of Seasteading have expressed the intention to address a set of ‘moral imperatives’, including (in The Seasteading Institute’s own words): "Enrich the poor. Cure the Sick. Feed the Hungry. Clean the atmosphere. Restore the oceans. Live in balance with nature." These all sound like noble aims. The engineering ideas for realising the dream of these voluntary micro-societies are also intriguing. On the other hand, TSI co-founder Wayne Gramlich’s manifesto ‘Seasteading: Homesteading on the High Seas’ (1998) makes no attempt to hide the movement’s core principles: "tax avoidance," Gramlich states, "is my pick as the most powerful motivator for the development of sea surface colonization technology."
It is worth casting a critical eye on techno-libertarianism’s interest in islands. Progress dogma is at the heart of the philosophy, and remains central to Seasteading and similar movements. Joe Quirk, Seasteading’s spokesperson, uses cultish words like ‘seavangelist’ and ‘aquapreneur’. Most libertarian island nations -- from the Principality of Sealand to Scientology’s Freewinds to Reddit Island -- have an overwhelmingly white, male composition. TSI’s sometime evangelist Peter Thiel tries to address the movement’s failure to attract both women and the poorer segments of society in his essay ‘The Education of a Libertarian’, but he ends up blaming both for the failure of democracy: "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron." (Thiel 2009)
"I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years", Thiel says in the opening line of his essay. Techno-libertarianism the way Thiel describes it is a teenage male fantasy island -- no one telling him what to do or how to spend his money. Dismissing democracy, Thiel places hope for the future in "companies like Facebook", which "create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states." Our fate, Thiel concludes, "may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism." While the end of nation states might sound appealing enough, to replace elected governments with the CEOs of private companies is less palatable. This is not true internationalism; it is simply American multinationalism, corporate colonialism. For the many, if not the few, these island utopias may be just as problematic or undesirable as the constrained societies they seek to avoid, and more sinister in some respects.
The problem with the word future, as used by corporations and governments, is that it too often suggests a shared generic place where all inhabitants equally reap the benefits and pleasures of progress. We might ask: whose future? The extreme progress dogma of techno-libertarianism goes head-to-head against decades of warnings about the social impact of technology but worryingly the ruthless laws of extreme capitalism mean that those in power are those who choose all our futures -- they are classic perpetrators of non-ecological thinking. The law and democratic governance are often slow, inefficient, cumbersome -- but the alternatives, for all their promises of freedom, may be worse.
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[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Colony**
Remoteness and peripheral living can be difficult, however there are often resources or strong political imperatives (remote encampments, claiming remote islands, etc as colonizing strategy) which cancel out these issues. Remoteness can also be viewed as a commodity in these times of the Anthropocene.
Schalansky notes that "Islands are regarded as natural colonies, just waiting to be conquered." (Schalansky 2010) To this idea of islands as natural colonies Peter Conrad adds: "The colonizing mind prefers to treat the world as a clean slate, erasing whatever already exists." But Conrad also asks: "Why not adapt to the environment, rather than subduing it?" Is it possible to import knowledge from abroad without imposing a foreign mindset or giving into the colonizing impulse?" (Conrad 2009)
How does this frame of reference relate specifically to those islands that exist on Europe’s periphery (or, ‘peripheral’ islands anywhere)? Some island settlements have developed into vast and powerful metropoles -- for example Manhattan or Mumbai -- but these are not the islands we are concerned with here. De Sousa Santos’s concept of Europe’s "internal colonialisms", as apparent now in the relationship between Europe’s creditor and debtor states, for example, or in the political, cultural and economic ‘soft’ power that Germany exerts over the countries of Eastern Europe. Europe, de Sousa Santos reminds us, is not monolithic.
An interesting take on technology development and computing is provided by Philip, Irani and Dourish who argue that there are no clear distinctions between ‘here’ and ‘there’, where ‘there’ is the colony, the developing word and marginal communities, and ‘here’ is the Western world, which is supposed to ‘import’ its alleged superior knowledge and culture. Additionally, the very spatialization of two different locations implies a relation of subordination, where there is God’s eye view pursued by one part over the other. What they call "postcolonial computing" is, in the first place, a sort of mode of attention to problematize a clear distinction between colonies and metropole as an historical turning point brought about by the post-World War II atomic age, the Bretton Woods era, post-Fordism, neoliberalism, global migration, in which the flows of people, goods, and information across the world necessarily reconfigure the traditional division between the periphery and the center, the colony and the metropole. This reconfiguration should also be intended as far as [[the design and construction of technology->Frugal]] is concerned.
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Frontier / anti-frontier**
Though literally occupying the outer, geographic fringes of the EU (Martinique, the Açores, Réunion), Europe’s peripheral islands do not currently exhibit the typical qualities of a ‘frontier.’ The classic mythos of the frontier is of a wide open space, where (generally, white, male) individuals can test themselves and blaze new trails and imagine new worlds, unconstrained by laws and conventions.
Madeira, as well as many other of Europe’s islands, once constituted key launching pads and landing sites in waves of imperial expansion; the majority of these islands are now better understood as representing the vestiges of empire or the traces of an earlier order. Though many were party to earlier, sordid frontier histories of occupation and violence, Europe’s periphery is no longer necessarily an ‘active’ frontier. The churn of people on island and peripheral settlements creates a kind of instability. As anthropologist Susanne Kuchler has observed, "Small island communities [...] have always been prone to explore life [...] someplace else," (Kuchler 2014) and remote islands such as Madeira are no exception.
In writing about the settling of Madeira, Raj Patel and Jason Moor note that "Early modern [[colonialism->Colony]] used frontiers in an entirely new way. Always before, rising population density in the heartlands had led to the expansion of settlement, followed by commerce. This pattern turned inside out in the two centuries after 1492. Frontiers were to become an organizing principle of metropolitan wealth." (Patel & Moore 2017) The chapter goes on to describe the creation of the sugar industry, rested on the back of slave and cheap labor and required major changes to the island, from deforestation to the constructions of the levadas, a water-management system.
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Ribeira_de_Pena_%283%29.jpg/1024px-Ribeira_de_Pena_%283%29.jpg"> Ribiera da Pena, part of Madeira's levada system. Photo: Joseolgon (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Perspective**
Remote islands and peripheries are often considered far from the geographical centre (the mainland), but also far from the design or technological future. Conversely, however, islands and peripheries may be seen as "advance indicators" or "extreme reproductions of what is future elsewhere" (Baldacchino 2007). In Schalansky’s terms, while islands are often seen as "footnotes to the mainland" they are also "disproportionately more interesting" (Schalansky 2010). Peripheries are also more sensitive: slight shifts in the wind or the tide are felt more quickly and distinctly on the quiet edge than at the busy centre. What happens at the periphery is not behind the curve, from this perspective, but is rather the advance guard, the telling sign of an impending shock or change, the first scratch on the seismograph.
(link: "McLuhan on the idea of the Distant Early Warning System")[“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." (McLuhan 1964)]
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin"))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Mainland - island**
The archipelago as form is sometimes a colonial construction, for example, in the way Indonesia (a group of thousands of islands) was constructed as an artificial unified entity by the Dutch. In the 17th century, the Dutch appointed the island of Java as the administrative center of the Indonesian archipelago, making Java a new remote center of power. Supported by the introduction of Dutch as the national language and the Dutch legal system (which included the concept of written contracts), Java became the mainland-island from which other islands were colonized and managed, until the Indonesian revolution in 1945.
However, as a result of this colonial era, Java still is considered the mainland-island in terms of economy and administration. How could we imagine a post-colonial, decentralized archipelago, a network of islands, and through which or whose perspectives on agency? Could we disrupt traditional binary hierarchies by constructing a distributed /decentralized system?
We might look at the traditional Indonesian concept of ‘gotong royong’ or reciprocity (Koetjaraningrat & Holden, 1961) to explore local models of socio-cultural values as a foundation for a possible networked archipelago. ‘Gotong royong’ originated in the ‘kampongs’ (local villages) as a system for mutual (economical) aid, collaboration and social bonding. Under Dutch occupation, it was employed as a means of control and administration while in the Sukarno era, it regained its original meaning, representing national identity. Despite Indonesia’s local and regional diversity, the spirit of gotong royong is deeply embedded in the cultures of the archipelago’s many islands. In Bali, for example, this kind of mutual aid is used in ‘Subak’, a collective irrigation system.
This collaborative concept of 'gotong royong' is ripe for re-imagining, expanding it from local to interlocal, even inter-insular and including a multitude of local differences. Designing an insular network from the perspective of ‘gotong royong’ implies imagining the archipelago as a distributed participatory and self-supporting system. From this point of view, the island-mainland relationship can be subverted, upended, or transformed. Within the context of an archipelago, relating ‘gotong royong’ to certain current open source and collaborative networked practices could provide us with interesting new insights.
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/imot.png"> *Dedicated to my dearest friend Tommy Surya, VJ Number ONE, co-founder of House of Natural Fiber (HONF), founder of HONF Fablab, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 1976 - October 26 2017. -- Deanna Herst*
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Tourism**
Islands figure in the imaginaries of the metropole as places of escape and sites of primitivist fantasy; they are perceived as locations where time slows down, the natural world appears unspoilt, and social relations are both ‘simpler’ and ‘more authentic.’ As such, time spent on an island becomes an antidote to the pressures of fast-paced, high-tech urban centers. The stock-in-trade or currency of peripheral island tourism depends on their qualities of ‘less developed’ otherness to more developed metropoles. Locally specific traditions are invented and/or commodified, playing to the metropole’s insatiable desire to consume such forms of difference. Typically less foregrounded are aspects of island life that do not support picturesque fantasies of escape or how islands are imbricated within exactly the same global and economic systems as the metropole.
This gulf between the two modes of experiencing an island or exoticised remote location is difficult to bridge. Portraying tourist perceptions of the Caribbean as a paradise emptied out of any kind of real life, Derek Walcott writes: "For tourists, the sunshine cannot be serious ... to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but that seriousness that comes only out of culture with four seasons. So how can there be a people there, in the true sense of the word?" (Walcott, 1992) Writer Lucy Lippard eloquently captures the surface experience many tourists have: "The scene beckons you in, but just so far. This is comforting. You don’t have to go there; no need to climb that mountain, struggle down that slope, get muddy shoes on that trail, stand in the rain for long. The average tourist probably spends a few minutes gazing out into each place s/he will never really see." (Lippard 1999)
(link: "Achille Mbembe on belonging")[“There are many different ways of belonging; nation states enforce one kind of belonging”
(Mbembe 2017)]
Island dwellers have an ambivalent relationship to tourism. The small (sometimes very small) populations common to peripheral islands lead to limited economic and other opportunities, beyond catering to temporary visitors. While incoming folk are understood as important as the principal source of income for many islands, they are also perceived as an intrusion, bane, or even plague (e.g. cruise ship traffic) -- an external blight on an otherwise homogenous, familiar environment. Visitors may also be seen as bringing the risk of contamination, both literal and cultural. Lines and boundaries are often very clearly demarcated, even literally policed between ‘local’ and ‘tourist’ zones (even with their own economies and currencies, as in Castro’s Cuba). Maps may feature select locations and leave others out so that tourists won’t go there. Guides to the islands also show select locations, keeping tourists to a set, prefabricated, artificial path.
On historically isolated or remote islands such as Madeira, outsiders (*estrangeiros* in Portuguese) and *retornados* may experience a reception of tolerance rather than acceptance, whereby true integration is difficult or even discouraged. As a local Madeiran aphoristically phrased it: ‘There are tourists who visit, and tourists who live here.’
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Funchal%2C_Madeira_-_2013-01-07_-_85733483.jpg"> Replica of traditional Madeiran Santana house as pop-up tourist gift shop. Credit: Maximovich Nikolay, (CC-BY-3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Forces**
*...While the brothers spent the night outside in prayers and vigils, the man of God remained sitting inside in the boat. For he knew the kind of island it was, but he did not want to tell them, lest they be terrified.
-Jasconius, The Voyage of St. Brendan.*
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/The_Voyage_of_St._Brandan_by_Edward_Reginald_Frampton%2C_1908%2C_oil_on_canvas_-_Chazen_Museum_of_Art_-_DSC02356.JPG/1023px-The_Voyage_of_St._Brandan_by_Edward_Reginald_Frampton%2C_1908%2C_oil_on_canvas_-_Chazen_Museum_of_Art_-_DSC02356.JPG"> The Voyage of St. Brendan by Edward Reginald Frampton, 1908, oil on canvas (via Wikimedia Commons)
Weather systems around islands have an enormous impact on how everyday life is conducted. Islands such as Papay (Papa Westray is 1 mile wide and 4 miles long) in Orkney are directly affected by the weather systems that sweep over it. Winds can be so strong that sea spray blows across the island from one coast to the other. Special northern clouds such as noctilucent clouds appear and disappear, and the aurora (or ’merry dancers’ as they are called in Orkney), stretch across the massive open skies in the winter. The island geography and particular global position creates a microclimate, and this in turn influences how islanders act and operate within their environment. Islanders are used to using and adapting the materials around them for building, protecting and nurturing their land and surrounding sea. Orkney has fertile land for farming, clean and rich seas for fishing and sandstone for walls, roofs and floors. The way that islanders interact and operate within their environment is ‘bespoke’ to their island in order to survive and thrive within the particular set of parameters and tools.
<img src="http://michelle.kasprzak.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/southwickview.jpg"> South Wick Beach, view to the Holm, Papa Westray. August 2016, © Saoirse Higgins
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Fiction**
The island as laboratory is a well-used trope in fiction, and encompasses dubious experiments (The Island of Dr. Moreau), spectacular experiments (Jurassic Park), and social experiments (Lord of the Flies, Blue Lagoon, Battle Royale). The approach works because on an island different rule sets or notions of normality exist -- rules of law, ethics, civilisation, expectations and even evolution. The remote Galapagos Islands were fundamental to Darwin's development of the theory of evolution through his observation that finches had adapted, in numerous ways, to very specific local conditions. Darwin called the Galapagos Islands "a little world within itself". The 'insulated species' he found there -- the tortoises and finches -- give us an analogy for tailoring bespoke solutions to island-specific challenges; to see the island as a whole, as an independent, unique, self-contained site, and adapting to its particular logic or ecosystem.
Exaggerating the contained nature of island evolution leads to another fictional trope -- the lost island populated by mythical or extinct beasts, leading to stories like Arthur Conan Doyle's *The Lost World* and Edgar Rice Burroughs' *The Land that Time Forgot*, as well as films like King Kong. Perhaps the most successful film from the lost island genre, Jurassic Park, combines all of these distinct storylines. Set on the fictional islet of Isla Nublar, a billionaire philanthropist employs genetic scientists to create a park of cloned dinosaurs. The island becomes the ideal living laboratory and numerous organisms, extinct for millions of years, are resurrected by the latest developments in genetic technology. As with [[Bikini Atoll->Lab]], however, the 'controlled' conditions were not controlled enough -- and the novel becomes a classic cautionary tale (as in Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*) of how things can go wrong when the development of technology is unconstrained.
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Infrastructure**
(link: "Susan Leigh Star on infrastructure")["One person’s infrastructure is another person’s barrier" (Star, 1999).]
Infrastructure is normally invisible until something happens when it ‘reappears’ under conditions of failure and breakdown (Jackson 2016). In the quote above, Susan Leigh Star is describing infrastructure which is set up in a certain way, which works for some dominant parts of the community but hardly serves all. It is in the nature of maintenance and repair to provide this opportunity for retrospection: at that point we can restore attention to this disconnect between dominant voices and those who are less heard.
Jackson believes that devices and infrastructures should be designed to consider repair or be ‘repair friendly’. He proposes an alternative way of knowing, which considers breakdown and repair as facts, not exceptions to ordinary life. For example, infrastructure on Papay in Orkney relies on a set of committees that deal with the island’s functionality and operations. Issues are discussed and agreed on, and then implemented. Islanders multi-task to keep the island going. There is a set routine of weekly events throughout the year that keeps everybody on track and the island functioning well. This requires dedication, hard work and collaboration of a centre core of islanders that focus on the ongoing tasks.
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/IMG_5016.jpg">
Island community lyme grass planting as sea defense, South Wick beach, Papay Westray, Orkney. © Saoirse Higgins 2016.
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Autonomy**
The legal status of Europe’s islands are heterogeneous and often ambiguous, all incorporated into the systems and bureaucracies of the European Union to differing degrees. Examples of Europe’s peripheral islands range from the Autonomous Regions of Madeira and the Açores, to the Overseas Departments of Martinique and La Réunion and the British Overseas Territories of the BVI and Bermuda, to ‘micro’ islands such as the semi-fictitious ‘Principality of Pontinha’, a fragment of the Madeiran coast claimed by an owner who now refers to himself as a Prince.
Some of these islands operate outside of EU tax regimes, the customs union, and common policy. In others that fall under EU law, regulations established in the metropole may go unenforced in these island peripheries, distant from both the technocrats would enforce them and from the ‘soft power’ that might otherwise encourage self-policing. Indeed, regulations created and promulgated far from the locus of implementation often trigger local resentment: In Madeira, for example, there have been traditional crops/industries (bananas, fishing, sugar, etc) which have been negatively impacted by EU regulation. EU membership has complicated and disrupted these old ways of life -- our bananas are too small to be sold outside Portugal by EU regulations, the traditional fishing boats are the wrong size. Islands -- as well as the idea of islands -- appear to frequently inspire a ‘go it alone’ style of business and politics. When this works well, it promotes decentralized, bottom-up decision-making, infrastructures, and policies. Its less-savory manifestations include the visions of libertarian [[sea-steaders->Lab]].
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Network**
Islands are not only physical spaces located at the periphery or at center of the world. Due to their geography, islands have fostered the emergence of myths, legends and imaginaries informed by topics like remoteness, purity, asylum, experimentation, and regeneration. In this respect, islands are also [[metaphors->Fiction]], namely a rhetoric and imaginative transfer medium to convey meanings and advance claims.
As a metaphor that enables us to step out of the mainstream thinking about technology – characterized by the rhetorics of speed, efficiency, slickness, networks, and grandness – thinking with an island framework can be a way to slow down this triumphalism in order to focus on what is left out or behind. It is also a way to examine who is erased and made invisible in overconnected networks, a turn that Susan Leigh Star phrased as “seeing the spaces between” (Star 1995). In discussing this mode of attention, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2015) makes a comparison between networks and ecologies by drawing on Star’s thinking. Both networks and ecologies refer to particular ways of relating, the former functioning according to an extension logic, whereas the latter working in *cyclic interdependent ways*. Ecology brings attention to what holds relations together rather than to the dynamic whereby they expand. Therefore they “cannot avoid ethical and political thinking of consequences of world-destruction and, as a corollary, of the possibilities of regeneration and renewal”.
In this respect, it becomes arduous to define what islands convey as metaphor with the logic of networking; rather, following de la Bellacasa and Star, to think about islands as an ecology means to think of holding together resilient relationships as the main drive as well as to unveil what is hidden in spaces between.
Moreover, the contrast between network/ecology should not become another binary, but it is a comparison that helps to think about implications and potential consequences of technological development. In a time of environmental breakdown, global warming, energy crisis and so forth, island thinking can provide an alternative approach to deal with and design sociotechnical infrastructures by looking after values and resources provided by spaces between.
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier", "Origin",))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)**Origin**
<img src="http://media1.kasprzak.ca/Widder.jpg"> Image courtesy Elaine Charwat
"Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is the founding father of modern scientific classification. Linnaeus thought that all species originated from a single island, the only piece of dry land in the primeval sea. This original Island contained everything in a nutshell - all habitats (ranging from alpine to tropical) and the "parents" of all living things. It was the Garden of Eden, the [[ark before the deluge->Perspective]], it was the "egg" from which all life sprang. Linnaeus's coat of arms has an egg at its centre, surrounded by water - "ex ovo omnia", from the egg, from the Island, all life is born." (Elaine Charwat, Linnaeus scholar, ØY festival November 2017, Papay)
[[(link-goto: "Continue exploring", (either: "Edgeness", "Remoteness", "Lab", "Perspective", "Tourism", "Network", "Mainland", "Autonomy", "Forces", "Fiction", "Infrastructure", "Colony", "Frugal", "Frontier"))]]
[[About this publication->About]]
[[Introduction->Introduction]]
The islands:
[[Forces->Forces]], [[Fiction->Fiction]], [[Edgeness->Edgeness]], [[Remoteness->Remoteness]], [[Lab->Lab]], [[Perspective->Perspective]], [[Tourism->Tourism]], [[Network->Network]], [[Mainland->Mainland]], [[Autonomy->Autonomy]], [[Infrastructure->Infrastructure]], [[Colony->Colony]], [[Frugal->Frugal]], [[Frontier->Frontier]], and [[Origin->Origin]]
So far you have visited: (history:)Anon, (AD2000) 1981, Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, Penguin Classics.
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