Ten days ago, I have sent this message to the bricolabs mailing list:
Hey Bricos
It took me a while to read all the messages of the last
month or so, and maybe even more time to try to breath
and understand all that. What follows is a long and
confusing email, aiming more at answering questions
I have to myself. Skip at your will.
It has been little more than half year since the week
I met Rob then Bronac and something happened...
a document was written and forwarded to some people.
Soon Jaromil and Matt were bringing valuable
contributions, we were borrowing the name Bricolabs
from the guys at Estilingue, and what really impressed
me: a number of great people have shown interest
in taking part on Bricolabs, whatever that was.
And what does it mean to take part on Bricolabs?
In march I was in Salvador for the DesCentro meeting.
DesCentro is an open research infrastructure we are
struggling to establish simultaneously in different localities
of Brasil, one of the results of our interaction with the
Waag-Sarai platform. I remember trying to explain
Bricolabs to a group of people, and someone replied
"porra velho, mais uma rede?" (fuck man, yet another
network?). It seems that a lot of things we do become
de-centralized, self-organized entities. MetaReciclagem
has become one. DesCentro needed a lot of therapy to
avoid becoming "only" a network. Talking about another
network, in our context, could easily be understood as
a joke. Well, it's not.
And what is it that we are proposing here?
There is this interest on generic infrastructures, sure.
Then, is farming included or not? My personal opinion
is that yes, it could be, as long as we find the focus,
what connects everything we want to call Bricolabs.
What is the concept? Open (software, hardware, content)
loop? Appropriation, autonomy, collaborative management?
Coming back to MetaReciclagem, I can see parallels of
what we do with computers and what people do in
the fields of sustainable, DIY power generation, or
reusing water or fair trade. But then again, I might be
addicted to dispersion, and those parallels could be too
loose to think of coherence. And that's another point.
Do the idea of Bricolabs have the need to think of "we"?
I don't mean to get too de-constructive here, but I rather
enjoy the rasta "I and I" form. Maybe Bricolabs are not
meant to become an identity, but rather an open place
for things to happen. That might sound obvious, but I
don't think so. Maybe Bricolabs already exist, and this
name is only a way to map them. Maybe we don't
even need a wiki, but an aggregator instead: people
post about bricolabs in their own infrastructures, and
bricolabs.net only collects and organizes those posts.
David's comment on an "absent centre" seems to make
sense anyway.
Maybe things only get clear once we start doing more
things together. He might not agree, but one of Stalker's
most valuable contributions to MetaReciclagem in the
last 5 years was sending the rules of Calvinball to
the mailing list. Have you seen that?
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Nook/2990/cb_rules.htm
From that and the discussions that followed we have
formulated the definition of MetaReciclagem as a
"collective game whose goal is to define its goals".
I believe Bricolabs does not seem to be only about
specific subjects, but as Rob reminded, people who know
each other and have relationships and histories together.
Some people in this list are my good friends. That
might be more important to me than the others, but
I think it is a key factor. I'm not here only because I
share a conceptual interest with other people.
Anyway, just trying to reprocess what has been coming
through my head when I think of "bricolabs".
