i P a d (Michael Murtaugh’s melted version for Prototyping Futures) I am enjoying Household Words, an associative analysis of ‘common-sensical’ words such as Sucker, Bloomers, and Bombshell. In her last chapter, Cyber, Stephanie A. Smith refers to On the road to intimacy, a 1992 whitepaper calling for the development of ‘personal digital assistants’. The [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
For the 5th edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, OSP proposed to replace the paint splash by an abstract drawing of three squares forming a flag and also the letter M.1 The splash had been in use since 2006 and some community members felt alienated by the proposal. On 10/10/2009 AL explained on the CREATE-mailinglist: “The [...]
After an inspiring first Co-position session at Baltan Laboratories we are impatient to see what we can do next. In the trunk a To-Do-list, a wishlist and lots of notes:
http://lgru.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/21
http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/lab/wiki…
Digital lay-outing tools are path dependent in their way of mimicking the past processes of 600 years of moveable type (and maybe even beyond). Often practice proceeds without extensive critical reflection by practitioners themselves. Practice is spoken of in a ‘living language’ that addresses day-to-day actions and gestures. To re-dream lay-out practice from scratch, we start with developing a vocabulary of lay-out in order to better understand relations between workflow, material and (…)
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Libre Graphics Research Unit
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Workshop,
Vocabulary,
Free, Libre and Open Source software,
lay-out
A late report from I Don’t Know! — an artistic conference on knowledge production [18/09/2011] Arriving for the second day of the conference, I am welcomed by EVC with a cheerful: “We are very curious what you’ll do. When we received your proposal we really did not know what to expect!”. At that point I [...]
Exercise for next week: “From the phrase Don’t read, a line extends horizontally and then angles diagonally downward to the word Take, from which extend three short lines that connect the words paper, rods, blocks to the rest of the phrase. To the right of this cluster is the phrase, set them out, color, build” [...]
On 5 October the Co-position team will travel from Amsterdam, Brussels and Porto to meet in Eindhoven (NL) at Baltan Laboratories. Co-position is the title of the thread at the Libre Graphics Research Unit focusing on digital tools for lay-out. This particular compartment of the (Libre) graphics toolbox is very much defined through historical practices [...]
With SARMA (‘an artistic and discursive laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation in the field of dance and beyond’) AL + SV are developing an on-line archive for oral histories, a branch of the Active Archives platform. How to imagine a software together? KVDB responded with this astute sketch.
Question: “But what would be the real advantage of developing free software tools, if soon proprietary ones will offer you the same ‘hackability’ (through APIs for example), or what if they would even be more flexible?” Answer: “More interesting fricti…
Tools shape orient practice Practice shapes orients tools We are imagining the future of Constant this afternoon. At some point, we discuss Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, a book by Sara Ahmed we like. She uses queer both in the sen…