To visit the site, please go to: http://www.intuitioncommons.com/
My newest artwork, Intuition Commons, works through many of my pedagogical interests within a single active work, which is simultaneously an object, event, experience, database archive of knowledge and overall artistic enterprise.
Intuition Commons is an online space meant to disrupt prevailing information legitimization systems and offer the democratic possibilities of knowledge sharing that the internet promises. It draws on and responds to my experiences facilitating the Vancouver chapter of the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. This work engages with a form of crossover critique that is found in both information and media literacy studies, an interdisciplinary approach that is modeled in the BMS program in which I teach. The Intuition Commons site critiques and produces a new space of knowing, fusing my disciplinary practice of production and digital interfaces by using technology to find a critical venue to enact social justice and activist values. The site also gives form to information gained by experience—and thus embodies my own pedagogical methods, as it works to make visible ways of understanding that are gained through interaction, collaboration, mentorship and community.
Intuition Commons asks artists and cultural professionals to contribute memories, moments, even creative gestures, that attest to the ways that a female artist, curator or writer has influenced their work. The site collects these moments and displays them in an intersecting map, articulating the connections by which intuitive, affective and tacit ways of knowing—ways that are sometimes overlooked, or aren’t allowed as validation in systems of dominant ideologies—create lasting impressions on future work and processes. I seek to humanize data by confronting the nature of knowledge in the post-industrial age. Jane Gilbert argues that we need to cultivate approaches that; develop new knowledge and production –not consumption-of knowledge, develop multi-modal literacy –beyond text, foreground relationships, connections and interactions, emphasize difference and diversity and help active knowledge building (4).
To interact with the Intuition Commons online interface, please visit www.intuitioncommons.com, which will activate the database for you to explore or contribute. A screen shot of the main page is below. The site was launched in July 2018, and this coming fall will be expanded in a physical installation at the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, in an immersive display that will reveal user interaction and participant behaviours highlighted as paths and circulated narratives through the online database material.
Supported by $70,000 in grants from CreativeBC, BC Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts, technical service was provided by UBC alumnus Frank Hangler of Plot + Scatter, a local interactive data agency.
The Intuition Commons aims to facilitate a space to archive female influences in creative practice that lie outside of conventional citations. The project invites creative contributions that articulate or address the intuitive, affective or tacit links with female-identified artists that have informed creative output and ways of being in the world.
Perspectives, accounts, and memories may differ, and so you are encouraged to contribute your own versions, your own records, creating a rhizomatic web of links — visual connections and nuanced and overlapping stories that demonstrate the complexity of relationships we have with knowing.
Intuition Commons is an artistic work by Christine D’Onofrio, developed in partnership with Plot + Scatter. An installation of the work, featuring sound by Scott Catolico, will be exhibited at the Belkin Art Gallery as a part of Beginning with the 70s: Collective Acts, curated by Lorna Brown.
The project would not have been possible without the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, and developed with the participation of Creative BC and the British Columbia Arts Council.