Paper short abstract:

Inspired by community hackspaces, European cultural institutions are opening shared machine shops. This paper explores user experiences at both hackspaces and institutional spaces, asking whether power, access and ownership are challenged or reinforced when introducing new commons-based practices.

Paper long abstract:

As traditional funding routes decline, today's cultural institutions evolve from cultural custodian to innovator, facilitating radical new experiences in commodified, austerity-driven battlegrounds for public attention (Falk and Dierking 2000; Housen 1987; Kelly 2001). These innovations include opening 'shared machine shops' (makerspaces, fablabs and digital studios) on-site, inspired by community hackspaces and featuring free lo-fi and hi-fi tools, from 3D printers to projectors. Perceptions of *pre-institutional hackspaces* have varied. They are described as emancipatory, testing experimental configurations of power (Maxigas 2014) and innovatory, seeding new relationships between human and non-human actors (Kera 2012). They are also characterized as contradictory, capitulating to neoliberal powers they attempt to subvert (Smith 2014; Troxler and Maxigas 2014), and meritocratic, unwelcoming to minorities (Toupin 2014). How might *institutional* spaces compare? This paper seeks to explore whether interactions of power, access and ownership are challenged or reinforced due to the introduction of commons-based practices on-site (Benkler 2006). Referring to geographer Doreen Massey's definition of space as a "meeting-up of histories" with ever-constructed interrelations (2005), I start with a historical review of community hackspace experiences throughout the 1990s and 2000s as outlined by scholars like Kelty (2008), Coleman (2013) and Jordan (2008). I then interview users at two newly-opened institutional spaces: the Tate Britain Digital Studio in London and FryskLab, a roaming fablab-library hybrid in the Netherlands. By positioning contemporary shared machine shop findings within a deeper community genealogy, I hope to ultimately extend Massey's "meeting-up of histories" by exploring how interactions may coalesce as spaces evolve.