The questions you raise are excellent! We want to enrich and further build a community in Bergen. There already some small groups, and we would love to get in touch with them and with individuals. We need to reach out and to share our ideas of how such a space could look like.

Like you say, we are facing a chicken-egg problem of a sort, where while we have no permanent space it is difficult to find us and to understand what we are working on.

We currently get permission by the Piksel festival to use the Piksel Hut for meetings and workshops. If you are subscribed to our mailing list you are going to receive invitations to both.

(If this repeats something you have all been conversing about earlier then i apologize for wasting your time.)
Whilst the article manages to present the tools to use for communication once people are associated with the project there seems to be a glaring hole called awareness-building. What are the groups that need to become aware of such a project, and how to get ahold of them?

Where can the greatest number of potential tinkerers be reached with the smallest use of funds and resources? The internet is so fragmented and based on word to mouth that finding people who might be interested yet remains unaware is difficult.

Therefore, the much dreaded physical presence! Where? How?
Will wander about the topic again later.

One thing that makes the new wave of hacking, making, and tinkering we’ve been experiencing so great, is that you don’t work in your isolated workshop alone, but rather you are part of a worldwide community and have a plethora of manuals and tutorials at your fingertips — thanks to the Internet, of course. For hackish DIY projects, documentation cannot be overstressed. This is why tools that let you document with a low barrier like wikis or blogs are not merely “nice to have” for a volunteer hackerspace, they are absolutely needed from the very start of the project.

Good luck in Bergen!

I, and we all on the panel, pledge for the scene(s) being candid to criticism, and for trying actively to remove more or less subtle ways to exclude non-white, non-male, non-ablebodied, not-rich/middleclass people.

And the ASCII-man was not naked. Which again follows the standards as everywhere else, be it advertisement on showering or adult pictures and movies.

I argue that art should not be uncriticized. That art does not happen outside of society. In a “nerds who dig ASCII nudes”-bubble.

I never said it was porn. That was something that someone else brought into the discussion. Although I don’t see why we shouldn’t allow people to call it that.

When there is just a nude, this is probably not a problem. But hacker spaces don’t fall out of a social reality where women are being given less opportunities (jobs, payment, learning) than men, where women are being harassed in more or less subtle ways. This is not something that you want to talk about in public, but surveys and studies, as well as personal empiry show that.

Also, I disagree with your putting the history of feminist ideas upside down, and inside out. It was not feminists who went all puritan on the men. The feminists actually laid ideological grounds for what was called the “sexual revolution” in the 70s and 80s. But when it happened, feminists argued against double standards and whom this “revolution” actually was for. And although I don’t agree with neither Dworkin or Alice Schwarzer in their PorNo-campaign, I still think that their analysis of mainstream hetero porn is pretty valid in some point.

However, I have never heard of feminists calling themselves sex-negative. Thats what they are being called by others. If you call yourself a feminist for a while, you will experience how antifeminists try to divide and conquer, how feminists are stalked and/or shamed into silence. It is very important to know that by making me responsible for those reactions, you are blaming med for something that I have no influence on: The enduring persistance of anti-feminists and haters in their ability to not-listen, and to not think.

I claim the right to be amongst hackers, maybe even call myself that, and still won’t let you force me to be pro-porn or sex-positive just to fit your likings or to make everybody comfortable. Its okay for other women* or men* to get on stage and be exactly that, but it should also be okay to question the uncritical reception of it. Without being called all those names that feminists have been called for the last 130 years or more. Aren’t we better than that?

And, seriously, “take away porn”? Taking away the privilege to decide on your own what is hot enough for everybody, what is consented on to show in a shared or public space, yes.

When you look at your writing yourself closer, you could realize that you follow a few of the routines that I want to criticize. You phantasize about what a (to you) archetype lesbian would find attractive or suitable in certain environments, and put that as a standard against my points telling me in consequence of my arguments LGBTQ people would be excluded, although you don’t really know squat about my sexual, relationship or gender identity preferences. Don’t you see that this is patronizing at best, and trying to undermine what I would think about this? Are lesbians supposed to have the same beauty standards as the heterosexist mainstream? Who defines what is a woman, and what women* who like women* should like about them. What, how and where and in what company they want to look at naked women* or not?

For starters, I agree with the perception of the installation as a piece of art. I also tend to think that ASCII art hardly fulfills the definition of pornography. And I even agree that putting naked ASCII women there is excluding. However, the exclusion can (and actually was) easily be fixed by putting an ASCII image of a naked man next to it.

I did a bit of RTFM on the topic of the perception of pornography in feminism. And one unavoidably comes across people like Andrea Dworkin and, in Germany, Alice Schwarzer, when doing so. And Dworkin writes stuff like “Pornography can only develop in a society that is viciously male-supremacist, one in which rape and prostitution are not only well-established but systematically practiced and ideologically endorsed.” She goes on and compares porn production to concentration camps. Alice Schwarzer runs a campaign against pornography. This is what’s meant by the term “sex-negative feminism”. They completely fail to realize that while pornography can be sexist, this is not automatically so, and that pornography can be a completely healthy expression of human sexuality.

Unfortunately, both Dworkin and Schwarzer had a heavy influence on the perception of the feminist movement. Any handwaving argument to the existing literature could be easily mistaken for supporting them. I believe you actually don’t, but you’ll have to communicate that point, in order to pick up your audience where it is. They are, to put it into simple terms, afraid that you want to take away their porn.

Oh, and by the way, the argument “there should be no naked women because it is not a boys room” implies that only boys look at naked girls. This excludes gay boys and lesbian or bisexual girls, not to speak of people identifying as both or neither.