The Berlin Sandbox was the second of a series of labs that started in Toronto in October 2011 and will travel to cities like Montreal, New York and Mexico City in 2012. The project aims to reflect on the challenges arising from collaboration among diverse individuals - artists, activists etc.- at a moment when new movements with a heterogeneous composition are re-shaping the political landscape (indignados, occupy, anonymous, etc...) and different technological practices come to expand the potential of radical media, hacktivism and activism.
 
The Sandbox Project integrates traditional verbal modes of debate with relational exercises. This is done to dislocate habituated patterns for thinking and speaking and to establish a space of experimentation and mutual trust. Each lab picks up from where the previous one left (in our case the concept of care and nourishment among individuals and groups) to relay the encounters from city to city. In the context of Transmediale, we drew on open source principles like interoperability, but also on the concepts of ecology, collaboration and dialogue to create some starting points for our interactions.
 
The activities were guided by three broad questions:
1. How can we learn to thrive on difference without having to erase it? Here, the emphasis is on the learning process rather that on a found solution.
2. What does it mean to think in/compatibility and social interoperability of activist practices, and how can technology provide more than a static interface?
3. How can we rethink and expand the meaning and function of collaboration?
 
These questions were addressed and complicated by participants as they drew from the tools available in the sandbox (short texts, objects that they'd brought, bricolage material) and connected with others literally, with their bodies, and during the discussions and exercises. We had 4 hours of intense engagement and collaboration, where we co-developed a performance that involved the audience of Cafe' Global and turned the venue into a space for 'social interoperability'. As common themes emerged during the lab, trust and trust-building were incorporated into the subsequent public performance, luring the audience into the sandbox for a final discussion. This included sharing food and seeds at the start of the performance to make people comfortable and to create continuity with the discussion about nourishing communities that took place in Toronto. Then we gradually moved from a performance where the audience was invited to lend us items, documents, money, even ideas...to a Silent Siamese Twins frisbee match (with players tied together and writing their ideas about collaboration on a frisbee). A series of planned phone interventions reverse-engineered the randomized Telekommunisten R15N phone system installed at transmediale. Here, mysterious callers from the Sandbox gave tasks to the audience, encouraging them to overcome their reluctance towards face-to-face communication and to trust unknown individuals.
 
Following these phases, we finally sat with the audience in the sandbox and planned a hypothetical artivist action. Together with the discussions during the lab, the debate that ensued was the most important and exciting part of the event. Indeed, Sandbox events lay an emphasis on the exchange among participants, rather than on a performative outcome. This is where people are invited to think outside of their regular frames of reference, opening up moments of cross-contamination and creation that would not emerge in more traditional structures for discussions, like panels or round tables.
 
There was a lot of talk about what constitutes a healthy basis for dialogue and collaboration. Picking up the threads from the previous lab, many people talked about the problem of building, and especially regaining trust among or within groups, once problems and incompatibilities start emerging. We approached this issue from multiple angles, posing questions about how to think about structures for accountability and to develop a vocabulary that helps us address unacknowledged power relations, safe spaces, vulnerability, consensus and how personal and personality problems may affect the dynamics of collaboration.
 
We did not expect to find solutions to such issues. However, we did build the basis to continue posing questions and enlarging the network of people connected by a common inquiry. Lab participants were especially enthusiastic about undoing traditional interfaces of collaboration and alliance and physically occupy a participatory space, which is all too often entrusted to online platforms. We hope that all the great threads that are emerging during the different labs will finally contribute to weave an alternative and more open narrative about the role and modes of working together as artists and activists, and that people will be able to follow up on the inquiry started with us at Transmediale in their daily work and play.
 
Thank you to all the wonderful Sandbox participants for their willingness to be open, vulnerable and collaborative.
 
Please, check our blog regularly as we populate it with the material from upcoming labs, we add new locations and incorporate new ideas, strategies of collaborations and discussion. Feel free to drop us a note, write comments, add suggestions or simply stay in touch.
 
You can find us at http://www.sandboxproject.wordpress.com
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