“You should have been there. It was great!”. “It is so ugly!” Questions of representation and boundaries of collectives especially surfaced during the “thing” on controversial issues in the Malmö festival blogging intervention. The format of the “parliament of things” itself turned out to be a controversial thing. Historically, we gather to thing because we are concerned, not because we are a consensus community. We have different stakes and interests but also a willingness to find “fair” and “practical” ways to settle controversies. In this particular thing we wanted the participants to elicit and highlight controversial issues sparked by the Malmö festival blogging experiment. What rather became controversial issues were questions of representation and participation, while our intention was that “representatives” in the common thing could be stakeholders such as persons, media, and objects. This did not seem to have been communicated well. For example the excellent performance of the poster “You should have been there. It was great!”, or the aesthetic (?) comment “It is so ugly” on the power of the participating whiteboard are striking examples. Both participated in interesting ways, as did the “non-committed” video from one of the “groups”.
Any comments on the power of the whiteboard? Views on who the participants were? More general comments on the power of the non-human participants? Or on the calling to the thing? Ideas about if and how to reorganize another thing on controversial issues (also as research approach)? And then there is of course the question of which things you want to participate in? Does this mean to commit oneself to belong to a certain community? Does it mean taking part in “task-oriented decision-making” or more generally some kind of “closure” on controversial issues? The thing is open!
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