Future Tools grew out of a long interest in the relation between tools and practice. The blog runs parallel to activities at the Libre Graphics Research Unit that are developed in collaboration with Medialab Prado, WORM, Piksel and others.
This year I could only make it for a few days to LGM, but I am glad I came. First of all to meet friends and colleagues, to find out how they and their projects have been. I enjoyed getting hold of a fresh issue of Libre Graphics Magazine for example; The Physical, the Digital [...]
Her colleagues often repeated that ‘there is no perfect solution to a design problem’. Rebecca was pretty sure she had read it somewhere within the context of computer science or learning technology but after looking all over, she still had not found a solid source for the idea. After posting her question to the mailinglist, [...]
Q: I found these scissors here. Did you make them? A: No, I did not make them. Q: But who did? A: I do not know. Q: I found these scissors. Did you do this? A: No, they are not mine. Q: They are not yours? I was told that you did make them. A: [...]
A first harvest of future tools that were brought to the surface at the Co-position Research Meeting: Colorfont The days of monochrome digital typography are over. Inspired by art-deco hand-drawn lettering experiments, Manufactura Independente came up with colorfont.js. This javascript library makes it easier to create multi-colored typography for the web. It was further developed [...]
PH works on a teaser for the next LGRU Research Meeting. Launch at FOSDEM next weekend.
A group from Chicago visited Constant Variable last week. One student explains his mother is a publisher and that she compiled an on-line glossary of terms used in her mixed practice of printing, publishing and writing. It is stunning. For example, under W: word spacing: The amount of space between each word in typeset text. [...]
Bravo was the first WYSIWYG editor (…) Previous editors rarely made any attempt to match the display to the printed page; this meant that users could not check whether they had formatted the document correctly, except by printing it out.1 Newman, W. (2012). Design case study: The Bravo text editor. Interactions, 19(1), 75-80
A conversation with Tom Lechner We discovered the work of Tom Lechner at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. Tom traveled from Portland, US to present Laidout, an amazing tool that he made to produce his own comic books and also to work on three dimensional mathematical objects. His software interests us for several [...]
In an intense discussion about ‘the interface of the future’, John Lilly (then CEO Mozilla Corporation, now working for another company); Aza Raskin (then Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs, now running his own company) and Dan Mills (then Lead Developer of Weave, now leading the Account Manager project at Mozilla Labs) debate what [...]
‘Dilettante expertise’ as a way to make practice meet theory: Expertise is the classical foundation of all geekdom, whether it is encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, of the Star Trek universe or the registers of an 8-bit controller. Dilettantism is the unavoidable condition of drawing the bigger picture. It can end up badly like with the [...]
Constant is a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab working from Brussels since 1997. The artistic and activist practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life.
Did it ever occur to you to wave at a surveillance camera? Or rather, at the person who is watching you at that moment in the control room? And how would it feel if that person would wave back and you would somehow be able to see or hear that? By using surveillance cameras and the free motion tracking software objscrs the artists of !CoLAPseKoDe explore spaces in which innocent mouvements can have consequences. Visitors are invited to move between these spaces and by doing so, play with (…)
As part of the Open House event, Constant Variable will open its doors to the public from 17 to 19 May between 14 and 18h. This artistic laboratory behind the facade of a beautiful mansion in the street Gallait in Schaerbeek will surprise visitors with posters sibilants, rap’s experimental area and a recipe that turns the contents of your bag letters. Come and discover what connects libre fonts to beats, open hardware to the subversion of video surveillance software, and a 21st century urban (…)
On Saturday 12th May performer Delphine Auby returns to the heart of Schaerbeek to shout messages of the inhabitants at Cage aux Ours/Berenkuil. Ten days previously to the shout, she will deposit mailboxes on the square, inviting people to post their messages for the neighbourhood, as well as a small nomad writing desk to help people write. At La Cage aux Ours she will get the company of the students of the Institut Technique Cardinal Mercier, who will construct the mailboxes for her, (…)
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Langue Schaerbeekoise / Schaarbeekse Taal
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Performance,
Language,
slow practices,
triangle of authorship
The Piet Zwart Institute Master in Media Design and Communication department launches its new publication with Mute publishing: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl… on privacy, surveillance and our shadowy data-double. It includes contributions from: Birgit Bachler, Seda Guerses, Inge Hoonte, Men in Grey, Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev, Michelle Teran, Steve Rushton, Discrete Dialogue Network, Amy Suo Wu and Constant member Nicolas (…)
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Yoogle!
The best part of May, Femke will be in residence at Medialab Prado (Madrid) to work on projects, presentations and texts in the context of the Libre Graphics Research Unit. She will report on her adventures at http://blogs.lgru.net/ft
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Libre Graphics Research Unit
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Body and software,
Conditions of work,
Residency,
triangle of authorship
The work at the Libre Graphics Research Unit (LGRU) is now almost halfway. Since June 2011, the Unit functions as a traveling lab where new ideas for creative tools are developed. LGRU is an initiative of four European media-labs actively engaged in Free/Libre and Open Source Software and Free Culture. At the annual international Libre Graphics Meeting in Vienna, Marcos Garcia (Medialab Prado) and Femke Snelting (Constant) will give a presentation of methods and ideas that have been (…)
Ten artists lead us to experience sound perceptions in the form of walks, discussions, experiments & workshops around the topic of Seeing Sound. Soundlab: auratory starts on May the 14th at Constant Variable. It’s the beginning of two weeks of lectures and walks: First week: 14th – 18th May: 14 -17h every day: Walking, listening, talking. On different locations throughout Brussels: Constant Variable, Nadine & Pianofabriek. Second week 21st – 23rd May: Ant Hampton Workshop @ (…)
OSP (Open Source Publishing) is an interdisciplinary and international design collective. OSP tests the possibilities and realities of doing design, illustration, cartography and typography using a wide range of Free, Libre and Open Source Software tools.
The next Osp Public Meet will take place on Monday the 23rd. For this third edition, we will try to precise our exhibitionist experiment of talking internal affairs in public. Here below are the few code lines of the new version. Thank you Sarah Magnan…
So on my way to the Visual Culture codebase today I happened upon a rabbit hole that was too inviting not to descend into: (Note that all names in this email are new to me as of today). In response to a new LaTeX users questions about ‘best pract…
How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we bring together canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand in more interesting ways? Variable house fills progre…
How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we bring together canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand in more interesting ways? These are the questions dev…
How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we bring together canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand in more interesting ways? These are the questions dev…
This Monday 20th of February Our first public OSP-meet was a success and we are expanding on the formula. Instead of just discussing the work of OSP, we invite you to bring on the table any graphic design project that involves or has been produced with…
Ana and Ricardo, our friends from Manufacturaindependente, have join us at Variable house for a February residency busy with the preparation of the LGRU Co-position research meeting. In the beehive, maybe a pre-workshop about Colorfonts?
Encore une histoire de “et-icien”/”ou-icien” et encore une nouvelle raison de faire de la cuisine dans OSP! Bernard Vaudour -Faguet, “Histoire des cuisinières électriques et des ordinateurs”
January 30th Finally a moment of meeting with you for 9000 km of drawings, tools, stories. Interested in the libre? Curious about our practice? OSP studio welcomes you for a first public session at Variable. 18h30 – Welcoming Presentation and dis…
A conversation with Tom Lechner We discovered the work of Tom Lechner at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. Tom has traveled from Portland, US to present Laidout, an amazing tool that he made to produce his own comic books and also to work on…
Les Samedies (Femmes et Logiciels Libres) rassemble un groupe de femmes très différentes qui ont en commun le désir d’être maîtresses (ou du moins avoir la possibilité de l’être) des outils et donc des normes qui définissent notre travail avec la machine.
De Geuzen is a foundation for multi-visual research and the collaborative identity of Riek Sijbring, Femke Snelting and Renée Turner. Since 1996 they have employed a variety of tactics to explore female identity, narratives of the archive and media image ecologies. Exhibitions, workshops and online projects operate as thematic framing devices to investigate and test ideas collectively with different publics.
A sad time for media arts practices and history – from Laurie Anderson’s classic, “At the Shrink’s: a fake hologram” (1977) to the more recent net art collection of which The Anxiety Monitor was a part of. This chapter in our rich history clo…
2-5 June 2011
http://www.oddstream.org
Layered on-line maps for Mappamundi at the Museu Colecção Berardo (Lisbon, January 2011). Also on display: The Dress of Jeanne Terwen-de Loos and The Dress of Here, There and Other Dislocations.
Workshop with students from the typography masters at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule, Kiel (DE)
Workshop in the context of Open Code vs. Military Culture / Israel Digital Artlab Holon (November 2010)
De Geuzen @ STUK
Leuven (B)
04/05 – 06/06 2010
9-14 February 2010
De Geuzen participates in Artefact Festival, Leuven (Belgium) with a new version of the Global Anxiety Monitor
Art’s Birthday is an annual event first proposed by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou. Read more…
Read more about our adventures with electricity, LED’s, typography and skill sharing.
Performed @ The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice (Bergen, Norway) View archived project.
[Merz Akademie Stuttgart] Dealing with database forms, filing-cabinets and Resource Description Frameworks, archivists carefully prepare objects before they can enter the archive. This talk knits together snapshots of archival work, zooming in on the specialist tools that support such a process of fitting, the serial micro-decisions which ultimately define any collection.
Imposition plays a key-role in a pre-press workflow. Working with the constraints of paper size, creep and standard folding plans, imposing is also an act of imagination, a fantasy about the potential of a digital object to become physical and vice versa.
Antwoord op de vragen van Mandy Cobussen (ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Arnhem)
Texts performed and added to on various occasions since 2007
Add some Anarchist Feminism to your YouTube comments (Firefox Greasemonkey userscript)
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and create derivative works of. 9. We can analyze your application. We can remove any ad for any purpose, including Connect sites. * Payment Terms: These guidelines outline the policies that apply to users. 5. If any portion of this Statement must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston, only sixteen miles off, was always disagreeable”
Developed with Michael Murtaugh for De Geuzen Feed: project.
Download scripts: /files/playlist.zip
Project New Media Pathway, Merz Akademie, Stuttgart
October 2009 – January 2010
Workshop with design students at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart (29-05 → 03-06)
Catalogue text for Kate Rich’s exhibition Feral Trade in HTTP gallery.
Python script running through Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
Download script: /files/isabella.zip
Een performatieve lezing die aan de hand van kookboeken, manuals en magische formules de parallel tussen code en recepten onderzoekt.