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Visit People's Park Plinth

Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc) 2004

14/09/2004
Helen Varley Jamieson

Belgrade, Friday 16 July 2004, 7.15pm: 45 minutes before show time and the internet connection has gone down. As I mentally prepare to cancel the performance, Donna identifies the problem and organises women to rip up cables, bypass the router and improvise a long line to the stage. Suddenly, we’re back online and the fifth performance of swim by avatarbodycollision begins only ten minutes late. I perform the opening routine, plug in my laptop and there are my fellow Colliders, performing on stage in Belgrade from London, Helsinki and New Zealand.

This drama unfolded at the end of the Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc), and the women who came to our rescue were the tutors and participants of the event. Organised by the Gender Changers together this year with local women’s activists Zene na Delu (Women at Work), the aim of /etc is to provide a fun and supportive environment for women to exchange technical skills, explore the innards of the hardware and learn the hows and whys of open source software. Workshops ranged from Linux basics to juggling, Perl to cyberformance, and security issues to screen-printing – all taking place within a carnival atmosphere.

Because I was performing, assisting with another performance and teaching a workshop, I wasn’t able to participate in as many of the workshops as I wanted – but just being in the environment was inspiring. All around me were women discussing the intricacies of wireless networks, pouring through screens of code, sticking little screwdrivers into the open guts of computers and generally having a good time doing it. They came from all over Europe as well as many local women; all the tutors were voluntary and many were using their holidays to participate.

So who are these Gender Changers? A gender changer is an adaptor that connects ports and plugs. Not surprisingly, ports and plugs with pins that stick out are called male, and with holes are called female. When you want to join male-male or female-female, you simply bring a gender changer into the picture and ta-da, gender becomes fluid (if only it were so easy in real life… ). The founders of Gender Changers were amazed by the sexualisation of computer parts and decided to adopt the name. For the group, a Gender Changer is someone who addresses the imbalance of computer knowledge and skills between men and women. Since 1999, the Gender Changers have been “encourag(ing) women to crash computers and to put it all back together again. Preferably with an improved installation” from Amsterdam to London, Toronto, Philadelphia, Athens and now Belgrade.

The philosophy of the Gender Changers is one of sharing and facilitating learning in a self-directed, hands-on environment: less lecturing and more DIY practical experimentation. The structure of the week was very open, in keeping with the carnival theme. Instead of a fixed schedule determined beforehand, the programme was finalised the day before it all began. Everything that was scheduled took place at more or less the scheduled time, and as more people arrived during the week, further workshops were offered and slotted in. An HTML workshop was taught online by a tutor in Canada using IRC, and the software I was teaching, UpStage, was used on the final day to give an online presentation about the whole event for friends and family afar.

Daily warm-ups, juggling workshops and the “Pippi Kalora HubDub session” as well as an evening programme of performance and socialising ensured that there was plenty of activity AFK. Some women worked during the week on a large collage, replicating the /etc logo with computer ephemera and other objects. Most of us managed to screenprint a t-shirt and even a rabbit got involved in the leathercraft workshop.

The venue was Rex Cultural Centre, the main site for new media events in Belgrade. Its big hall was designated a women-only space, with most of the workshops happening there and a couple spilling over into the smaller CybeRex. As well as Avatar Body Collision’s performance of swim, local performers Act Women presented their satirical infomercial “Transkuhinski Raj”. Long evenings were spent in kafanas over dinner and there was a bit of late-night lurking around fountains in city parks with bottles of beer.

The first Eclectic Tech Carnival took place in Pula, Croatia in 2002, last year it happened in Athens, Greece, and already plans are afoot for /etc 2005 in a location to be announced. Each event has been organised by local women inspired by the previous /etc, and by the desire to create a positive space for women to learn about and play with computers. As long as this grass-roots desire exists, there will be an /etc. What drives /etc, and what brought the internet back from the dead for our performance of “swim”, is this spirit of co-operation, sharing and of getting on and doing what needs to be done.