Guest post by mcww (memeclassworldwide): One cool thing I’m learning (on the internet) – workshop recap

Your eyes are on the brink of falling shut as your face is illuminated by a rectangular screen floating like a ghost in an otherwise dark room.

Here you are, soaking up knowledge like a sponge, while others sleep. 

Not because of a grindset – that would rather include early morning activities than revenge procrastination at night. No, you are here, because the exchange between the knowledgeable and the knowledge-hungry is mediated asynchronously through digital means. YouTube nightschool, baby!

Bildunterschrift: Screenshot, Common.Garden Youtube-Nightschool Documentation, mcww 2024

Tutorials are watched by people who want to learn, but also by people who wish to be entertained or find joy in seeing things fail. A “how to” does not necessarily have to succeed. Tutorials surround us as they are the “go to solution” for many situations; when you wonder how to tie your shoes, how to draw a cat eye sharp enough to kill a man, how to build a house or how to remove your ex from a photo. But even in their omnipresence, we rarely perceive tutorials and the platforms on which they are distributed as tools. If we do, we often forget to ask ourselves whether these tools could also be limiting. Austrian social philosopher Ivan Illich would argue that this lack of awareness is due to our imagination of tools being distorted by the industrial norm. Through this distortion, we are rendered unable to recognise a “good”, or in Illich’s terms a “convivial”, tool. A tool is of convivial quality when it leaves agency to the user and does not impose a dependency on institutions and monopols. Convivial tools also allow communities to work together. 

Based on this theoretical stance, we took a critical look at tutorials as a digital form of knowledge transfer in our workshop „One cool thing I’m learning (on the internet)“. In said workshop, which took place both at HEK and online on Discord, we encouraged the participants to develop tutorials themselves – in a form that is relevant to their own community and interests. Simultaneously, we collectively collected convivial tools and different examples of tutorials, as knowledge can be transferred neatly in various forms such as lists, artworks, audiobooks, archives and libraries.

Bildunterschrift: Screenshot Common.Garden Tool Box documentation and photo documentation of workshop, mcww 2024

It seemed important to us to extend our horizons beyond the typical video tutorial format. In group discussions, we tried to investigate how the concept of conviviality could be transferred onto our own projects, which at times left us with more questions than answers. However, it surely left us curious.

If you want to wander with us – we’ve planted our workshop material in a common.garden (here). Maybe you will help those seeds grow: when you fall through the various rabbit holes in our gardens you may come across our lovely participants’ (Ben, Elena, Dja, Maddalena and Henrietta) tutorials, PDFs with our categorisations, some of our favourite tutorials and tools we found. You will also come across excerpts from an impulse lecture held by Bernhard Garnicnig during one of our sessions. He references Mary Douglas’ book “How Institutions Think”, allowing us to think of the link between tutorials, tools and institutions and how they shape what is learned, remembered and forgotten. Institutions and their tools often become “naturalised”, meaning they are perceived as inherently normal or unquestionable. They become a certainty, like the sun that will rise tomorrow morning.
But as David Hume has taught us, this certainty just seems to be one, it could all change, things that have been one way don’t logically persist to be the same forever, so why not make use of this!

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Who are we?

memeclassworldwide (mcww) is a collective project by the artists Ramona Kortyka (she/her), Jennifer Merlyn Scherler (they/them), Mateusz Dworczyk (he/him) and Juan Blanco (he/him). Our work originally began in the form of an institutional-critical meme account (mcww.memes, 2018 – 2022) and turned into an autonomous class for internet practice at the art university in Kiel (DE) in 2019. 

The internet serves us as a reference space to reflect on post-digital phenomena and their range of aesthetic, social and political dimensions. We enjoy self-organised collective knowledge exchange practices and want joy and fun to be part of it.

We organise workshops, hold lectures, write texts and make exhibitions in various contexts.