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For Familiars

For Familiars

For Familiars

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Welcome to The Community of Practice!

We meet once a month

every 4th of the month

at 4pm GMT/BST

on Zoom

The Community of Practice meeting is very much at the core of the organizing that we do. This meeting is can be attended by anybody, whether you have practiced the Hologram protocol or are thinking about trying it out.

What happens: It is an easy, peer-facilitated get together that takes an hour to an hour and half during which we go around, ask questions, bring out stuckness and issues we have run into during and around the practice, get to know each other, hack and re-assemble the Hologram protocol. The meeting usually takes place in English, although many of us are not native speakers.


MORE ABOUT THE COMMUNITY OF HOLOGRAM PRACTICIONERS

The idea of The Hologram has been slowly germinating since 2016. In the spring of 2020, we had our first free public course and since then, the community of people practicing, learning, and teaching the Hologram has been growing even more. Many brilliant people are involved in our constant figuring out what the protocol of asking for help does over time. The idea has spread so far, we don’t know where it ends. This feels good. (More on our pasts and futures below…)

[A screenshot of video call – a grid of fifteen tiny rectangle windows showing what is captured on people’s computer cameras. The windows are showing strange, colorful images of people, many captured mid motion, all of them dressed up quite unusually, as if in disguise. Some are wearing masks or hats and sunglasses, many are using virtual backgrounds so they would appear as if on the beach, at sunset, or in the space.]

Who is a Familiar

If you have attended a Hologram Course, participated in a Minimum Viable Hologram, or are using the Hologram practice in your life, we consider you Familiar. All Familiars are invited to a monthly online peer-led meeting where we discuss the Hologram practice in our lives.

Communications Channels

We are currently using Telegram to keep in touch with each other, plus a newsletter for bigger announcements.

When you join our Telegram, you can introduce yourself or just watch, you can chat with others, post related events, put out calls for Triangle members or volunteer to be in somebody’s hologram, answer to calls for facilitators and organizers, and find hologrammers in your area.

If you have trouble joining or if you want to get in touch with Hologram organizers, email us at cooperativespecies@gmail.com.

[A photograph of a group of six people, standing in regular distances apart from each other behind an old couch placed on a frozen lake. Everybody is wearing all black clothes with big winter jackets with hoods and hats. The place where the people’s faces would be is taken up by a source of light. Some are looking at the viewer, some look at each other.]

The pasts and the futures

The Hologram started as a mythoreal project. Since then, we have been planning collective wishes for futures outside the deadly isolation of capitalism and making them come to life in surprising ways. You can read some of it in the 2020 book The Hologram: Feminist Peer-to-Peer Health for a Postpandemic Future. Or you can listen to an 8 minute recording of Cassie Thornton recounting the origin of the Hologram protocol (recorded in Berlin, Feb 2022) here.

The Hologram before the Pandemic

If you are curious about the work we have done in the past years, you can listen to Cassie talking about what happened in 2020, and to Cassie and Magda J. Härtelova recount the spring, summer, fall, and winter of 2021.

2020
early 2021
spring 2021
summer 2021
fall 2021
late 2021

We are also part of the Open Collective initiative providing communities, groups, and collectives the support to be transparent. You can visit our profile there and in our Updates read about all the things we have done, and see what we are planning, the state of our accounting, who is supporting us financially, and what our goals are for the future.

[A simple white drawing on a black background depicting thirteen hand-drawn circles or blobs of various sizes spread apart. The largest circles is connected with a full line to three smaller circles. Each of these circles is then connected to three more circles with a dotted line.]

How we organize our work

If you have practiced the Hologram protocol, you have become a Familiar. Remembering how to be a cooperative species again isn’t easy though, all of us run into barriers, questions, and crossroads. That’s why we meet monthly for our Community of Practice meetings, to remember we are not alone in this. CoPrac meetings are facilitated by two volunteering Familiars.

After you are part of the community for a while, you might want to facilitate Hologram experiences for others -to learn through passing on the protocol and seeing how others practice it. You can become a facilitator of Minimum Viable Hologram, a two hours-long mutual aid style session, in which a Familiar walks four people interested in The Hologram through the protocol and helps them try it out. These facilitators self-organize in an MVH Facilitation Working Group, supported by a dedicated Administrix.

In 2023, we have launched our biggest experiment to move us to a fully decentralized collectivity – United Groundskeepers of Hologram (UGH). UGH is an assembly of all who organize with/in The Hologram – teach free public courses, run research projects, develop tools, bring the protocol to their communities, etc. This Assembly supports each others projects and re-distributes the knowledge, resources, and instincts that flow through The Hologram. UGH is currently administred by Magdalena J. Härtelova. You can learn more about its Rolling Call for Projects here.

[A screenshot of a video call between two people – two rectangular windows next to each other showing what is captured by people’s computer camera. On the left side is a person with a cheery you-can-do-it expression with their fists raised playfully in front o them. We can recognize the person in the right window from the very first image on this website page of the group video. They are the person who is effectively disappearing into their virtual background, which is an image of at-night Earth from outer space. All we can see from the person is a bright shining light from where their face might be positioned.]