Timeline

Resident Yin Aiwen: ReUnion Network in Transmediale 2020 and Trust - European Stack residency

Jan.28, 19:00-21:00, Trust (Kluckstraße 25, 10785 Berlin)Lecture title: Call of Duty: Designing for an Ethics of Care (old title: Rethinking Network Through Care)
ReUnion project collaborators Genevieve Costello and Aiwen Yin discuss the social value of care.
Costello will begin with a brief analysis of care in contemporary capitalism and the importance of changing the intimate relational systems that simultaneously choke care as a resource and render it invisible as the world’s most pervasive dirty job.
A longer conversation between Costello and Yin will follow, contextualizing their approach to these conditions with mechanism design. In the ReUnion system, rationality is prompted to be interrelational, care-based, and situated, rather than a reductive justice housed inside atomized individuals. They will move between different scales of ReUnion’s design functions and the dependent flow of values within the system logic. By situating these decisions within a larger social context, they consider the possible effects of revaluing care in an embodied socio-economics premised in a shared orientation of the differences of our commonality, the need for care.
    Jan.29, 14:30-15:30, Transmediale Student Forum, HKW Workshop title: Reimagine family, Redistributing CareHost: Yin Aiwen, Genevieve Costello   ReUnion is a design initiative that explores the future concept of family. By creating a platform that allows people to autonomously design their relationships, ReUnion searches for a more inclusive environment to experiment with types of relationships and ways of organizing life. Their contribution to the Student Forum will be a data design workshop that uses subjective parameters to map our interpersonal relations and consider its effects on fundamentally changing our social systems.   Feb. 1, 11:00-12:30, Transmediale E2E symposium, Roter Salon @Volksbühne BerlinRound table title: Commoning P2P CareSpeakers: Yin Aiwen, Genevieve Costello, Mi You   ReUnion Network is a social welfare system that helps people organize bottom-up support networks through long-term P2P care agreements. Driven by the question: “What would society look like if it had a dominant ideology of decentralization?”,  ReUnion looks to interpersonal relationships as base units to create a commons-oriented approach for socio-economic organization. While the resource of care continues to be rendered in crisis, it is also a form of labor that we do every day, one that demands qualitative effort within trusted relationships. We take care as our driving force and break the perceived boundaries of productive and reproductive labor. In doing so, ReUnion hopes to build an ecology of practices between complex and interdependent entities for the repletion of care. In this round table, the core team members will share perspectives and visions behind ReUnion’s pursuit in “Commoning by P2P Care”.      ReUnion Bio
ReUnion Network is a social welfare system that helps people organize bottom-up support networks through long-term P2P care agreements. Driven by the question: “What would society look like if it had a dominant ideology of decentralization?”,  ReUnion looks to interpersonal relationships as base units to create a commons-oriented approach for socio-economic organization. While the resource of care continues to be rendered in crisis, it is also a form of labor that we do every day, one that demands qualitative effort within trusted relationships. We take care as our driving force and complicate the perceived boundaries of productive and reproductive labor. In doing so, ReUnion hopes to build an ecology of practices between complex and interdependent entities for the repletion of care.   More info: reunionnetwork.org

Aiwen Bio
Yin Aiwen is a practicing designer, theorist and strategist, who uses writing, speculative design and time-based art to examine the social impact of planetary communication technologies. She advocates for relationship-focused design as a strategy to redesign, re-engineer and reimagine the relationship between technology and society. She initiated ReUnion Network in 2017 and has been leading the development of the project since.    More info: https://cargocollective.com/yinaiwen

Genevieve Bio
Genevieve Costello is a cultural researcher and artist. She is currently working on her PhD project, "Communities of Care for Technofeminist Futures" at Royal Holloway, University of London and collaborates as part of ReUnion Network. She lives and works in Hackney, London.   More info: https://genevievecostello.net   Mi Bio Mi You is a lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and Aalto University, Helsinki. Her work spins between the ancient and futuristic. With the Silk Road and Eurasia as a figuration, she has curated a number of festivals and exhibitions across Eurasia. Her interests in technology and futures inform her curation on projects exploration “actionable speculations” such as the recent show Sci-(no)-fiction, and You's social engagements such as at the political NGO Common Action Forum. 

Project made possible with the support of the Mondriaan Fund, the Netherlands.