Offline.Wiki: Post-Trauma Messages
– Gray Area Festival Workshop
Post-Trauma Messages is an intimate workshop collecting and disseminating survivors’ self-care and re-empowering activism actions within a radical network.
Activism can be one of the ways to empower survivors and take part in their self-care and recovery process. It can represent resilience, healing, and a reclamation of agency. In this year’s Gray Area Festival, we invite survivors and advocators to share their activism experiences: their self-care routine under structural and societal pressure, their freedom-fighting tactics, and the censored materials representing the voice of the repressed.
The tangible and digital outcomes of the workshop will be recorded and stored in a sculptural flash drive by the participants. These messages will then be sent out from San Francisco to our first radical bookstore network, Kwago, in the Philippines. The workshop intends to start a chain of radical safe spots that distribute copies of activism knowledge, building a worldwide healing alliance against authoritarian powers.
This workshop is part of the Gray Area Festival 2023: Plural Prototypes and the C/Change Initiative.
Marking Gray Area’s 15th anniversary, this year’s Gray Area Festival highlights in-progress cultural experiments from our Creative Research and Development Labs, Cultural Incubator, and Education programs in collaboration with community and industry partners.
C/Change is a joint initiative by Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Gray Area, exploring ways emerging technologies can shape and support digital cultural exchange.
Course Logistics
Dates
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Location
Gray Area
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco
Time
5pm – 7pm
Cost
$10 for a 2hr hands-on workshop (Limited to 10 students)
We also offer Diversity Scholarships, find out more and apply here.
Experience level: Beginner
Course Requirements:
The workshop will mainly share experiences between survivors, advocators, and activists.
We highly encourage participation from people who are interested in the intersection of activism and healing to join the workshop.
For participants, please ensure you bring your computer or tablet and a personal story that you consider has been censored.
Course Outline
Introduction to the Workshop
- What’s our relation with Post-Trauma Messages?
- Demonstrating Offline.Wiki flash drive sculpture, files, and delivering prototypes.
Sharing Experiences, Self Care, Censored Materials
USB Sculpture Making
- Storing Messages
- Delivering the Post-Trauma Message USB to our first radical bookstore.
Education Goals
The Post-Trauma Messages workshop intends to distribute copies of activism knowledge within the radical network around the world.
About the Project
Offline.Wiki
Offline.Wiki is a decentralized platform that disseminates copies of an offline wiki to radical bookstores around the world. The project builds on the legacy of sneakernet, a method of sharing digital files through delivering flash drives from one place to another, bypassing “man-in-the-middle attack” and packet-sniffing. Available via a USB stick, the offline wiki will be delivered as an interactive browser-based experience, and will feature a curated collection of software learning resources for activists to incorporate into both on and off the street actions. Offline.Wiki celebrates radical bookstores’ capacity as durable counterspaces for activists to convene in, identify struggles, and organize movements for social change.
