Toolkit of Care

The Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated existent inequalities worldwide making it crystal clear that the cultural sector, which is very often described as precarious work, also concerns, to some substantial extent, voluntarily, subsidiary, or otherwise informal/nonregistered forms of labour; accordingly, support funds more often than not fail reach those who are in actual need of them. Arts are suffering in certain countries where governments provide minimal, if any at all, financial support to creative practitioners and NGOs. More than just affecting the cultural production of these particular countries, there are international ramifications in that the rest of the world is also denied easy access to creative/technological advances and innovation that still take place in the former in academic or other contexts. 

Given that expertise of sorts is necessarily disseminated in a an empirical/hands-on and research-through-practice/design fashion, important knowledge about certain arts/crafts and techno-scientific synergies thereof are bound to remain secluded: local practitioners have limited opportunity to travel outside their countries and to an important extent only aliens that have somehow secured own funding can be invited in. Accordingly, research in the post-pandemic world could end up relying exclusively on national politics and the specifics of available funding, rather than on local needs and the collective pursue of international goals and global innovation. It is, then, especially relevant and timely to form critical networks of care within the creative industry of support existent and future communities of practice. 

To address this issue, an interdisciplinary group of creative practitioners, academics, researchers, and arts organisations that specialise in media technologies and have considerable experience in the production and dissemination of this kind of knowledge across Europe and internationally, have come together to form a “critical network of care”. Accordingly, actors in this network collaborate to share their collective expertise and technical knowledge and to develop knowledge and methodologies of care, particularly supporting under-represented countries, young researchers, radical thinkers and radical "thingers", and misrepresented individuals coming from "off-centers" of all sorts.

Under these premises, this collection hosts research articles, essays, reviews, reports, case studies, data, and policy papers with respect to the following indicative (but not exclusive) topics: 

• Experimental/Radical/Speculative Arts, Crafts, and Design
• Do-It-With-Others / Do-It-Yourself
• Care in Visual & Performing Arts
• Analysis, Theory, and Politics of Care
• Care and Radical Politics
• Curatorial Practice as a form of Care
• Media Archives / Anarchives / Data
• Off-centers & Media Arts
• Workshopping / 4E Education
• Self Care / Health Care / Family Care for Artists
• Arts & the Non-Proviledged Other
• Care for radical 'thingers' and 'thinkers'
• Art beyong Commodity
• Art Therapy
• Social Accessibility & Inclusiveness / Accessibility HCI
• Pandemic/Crisis Aesthetics

The Collection has been developed by the Toolkit of Care COST Action network (CA21102) but is open to submissions from Horizon projects. It also features scholarly output from the various conferences, short-term scientific missions, meetings, and training schools realised in the context of the former. Most specifically, certain articles should be seen in respect of the Non- Machines Conference, Improvising Care Training School, RadioTopia training School, and the Toolkit of Care Conference, as below. 

Non-machines: Playground of perspectives Collection

Collection advisors: Marinos Koutsomichalis (Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus), Eric Lewis (McGill University, Canada)