Domains, Publics and Access

An online collection of projects that offer different forms of access for the general public to the domains of art, science, culture, economics, politics and technology.

Cataloging, preserving and documenting the current forms of access.

open access, open content, open goverment, open science, open design, open education, open spectrum, citizen jornalism, citizen science, collaborative economy, sharing economy, commons, coops, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrencies, DIY, makers, 3D printing, free software, free culture, community currencies, solidarity economy, future, grassroots media, p2p, pirate, tactical media, tactical urbanism, private, public…

Collecting

Domains, publics and access is an ongoing research project in media archaeology of the present been developed in Mexico by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and the Alumnos47 Foundation since 2015. The core of the research is a wiki where we collect projects that offer access for the general public to the domains of art, culture, science, economics, politics and technology.

The Collection is dedicated to cataloguing, preserving and documenting projects that propose or investigate general access to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services previously restricted mainly to specialists and professionals. Combining the mass media with heterogeneous social practices the projects question the vertical and centralized management of access by public and private institutions historically associated with art, science, culture, economics, politics and technology such as museums, galleries, libraries, archives, publishers, laboratories, universities, companies, banks, hospitals, governments, political parties, factories, etc.

Projects that experiment with more horizontal and decentralized management models appear on the web associated with recent terms such as open access, open data, open content, open education, open government, open design, open spectrum, open science, cryptocurrencies, citizen journalism, citizen science, collaborative economy, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, free software, free culture, p2p, tactical urbanism ... These new terms coexist with old terms such as commons, public domain, time banks, grassroots media, solidarity economy, community currencies, cryptography, cooperatives, tactical media, DIY or piracy. All of them constitute the vocabulary of current forms of access, keywords of a vanishing present.

The Collection brings together projects that have emerged in different countries from the second half of the 20th century to the present day, with special attention to those developed in Mexico where the research began. The only condition is that the projects should be associated with the vocabulary of current forms of access counting on the participation of the general public in all domains of social activity. The collection includes, equally, projects launched by public and private institutions and different actors of civil society, since the questioning of the vertical and centralized management of access by institutions historically associated with the various domains is taking place inside and outside of them. In this way the Collection deals with the contemporary coexistence and hybridization between new and old models of access management that present different degrees of centralization and decentralization, verticality and horizontality.