professional and amateur within any endeavour or attainable skill that could be labelled professional. sports but now many pursue amateur activities to professional standards - and it even affects big science.
ofessional amateurs The abstract machine of hacktivims connects at the amateur and professional levels and creates new forms of hybrids. In this chapter we well see examples of this and how new lines are drawn between the works of serious hobbyists and the top strata of the fashion system where the professionals reside. We will explore how interfaces can be constructed between the contrasting positions of professionals and amateurs. By opening these passages between separated fields we will see other forms of coproduction arise, and where the role of the designer is to bridge this gap and experiment with cooperation between these lines and levels, opening new action spaces for the participators. In 2007 I organized two connected transdisciplinary fashion projects, the Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics exhibition and the VakkoVamps projects. Both aimed at showing how fashion production can be a shared practice between hacktivists, consumers and high fashion brands. From my point of view, these lines or levels do not oppose each other in which one “subverts”, “appropriates”, “dominates” or “steals” from the other. My hope was to establish a perspective that offers a shared practice where all participants contribute to further the engagement of the fashionistas and fashion “believers”. What is emphasised here is once again the tuning of lines and the opening of new interfaces between separated fields as a practical way of enhancing collaboration. Yet, this is not a question so much of verbal communication but of including all the senses, and especially of building things and forming “material publics” (Marres 2008). Once again it is a question of symbiogenesis. Here “survival of the fittest” means that of the most symbiotic, not the most competitive. This means that it is not the individual strength of the actor that is counted, but how it interfaces and inter-operates with others, shares forces and rides lines. For fashion this could mean that is not only about building a strong style or brand that stands by itself,
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