http://titipi.org/infrastructural-publishing.html
A multi-headed webpage brings together a growing list of publications on infrastructuring otherwise. The page is hosted and asynchronously maintained by a network of networks that includes Anarchaserver (Calafou), Constant (Brussels), Infrastructural Manœuvres (Amsterdam/Brussels), KASK (Ghent), The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (London/Brussels), Varia (Rotterdam) and XPUB (Rotterdam).
Thursday 18 March 18:00-20:00
A hands-on conversation on the ongoing techno-political transformations in (remote) learning environments. How to infrastructure otherwise in more just and solidary ways? On de-schooling, interdependent learning and The bundle theory of the student-user. With Martino Morandi, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting.
In the context of the series Commoning Education/Educating the Commons organised by Station of Commons.
Second version of a digital and printed publication with new and reworked contributions by among others Rahel Aima, Anaïs Berck, Gert Biesta, Z. Blace, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Cristina Cochior, Sarah Kaerts, Anne Laforet, Phil Langley, Marie Lécrivain, Nicolas Malevé, Elodie Mugrefya, Zoumana Meïté, Mia Melvær, Martino Morandi, Michael Murtaugh, Colm o’Neill, Hari Prasad Adhikari-Sacré, Kris Rutten, Amir Sarabadani, Femke Snelting, Saskia Willaert.
DiVersions engages with the potential of on-line cultural heritage for welcoming various forms of collaboration, allowing conflicts to show up, and make space for other narratives. In dialogue with cultural institutions and their collections, the project experimented with digitized and digital heritage to open up databases, metadata, catalogs and digital infrastructures for other imaginations.
DiVersions is initiated by Constant and developed in partnership with: UGent – Department of Educational Studies, Werkplaats immaterieel erfgoed, meemoo – Vlaams Instituut voor het Archief – Expertisecentrum Digitaal Erfgoed, RoSa – Kenniscentrum voor gender en feminisme.
Editorial team: Constant (Elodie Mugrefya, Femke Snelting)
Wiki-to-print publication designed and developed with Open Source Publishing (Sara Magnan + Gijs de Heij)
Printed copies: 10 euro (excl. shipping). To order, send an e-mail to info@constantvzw.org
A conversation about current and future technological infrastructures for solidarity. Elodie Mugrefya, Femke Snelting, Wendy Van Wynsberghe of Constant, speak with media anthropologist and activist Miriyam Aouragh about the relations between political activism and technological criticism. How to organise for social change on-line when Tech Giants profit from our interactions?
In the context of (Staying) in the Movement and following from the panel discussion Revolution and Solidarity This Time organised by De Wereld Morgen and moderated by Omar Jabary Salamenca and Joachim El Yacoub on 13 January.
This reader is an evolving companion to Collective Conditions, a worksession held in November 2019 in Brussels. Whether you prefer to read, watch or listen, this reader offers different lines of thinking for non-divisive ways of doing “complex collectivity”. It contains materials from trans*feminist collectives on ally-ship, non-violent communication, score-making, anti-colonial and intersectional activism, but also ways of doing developed within Free Culture and Free, Libre and Open Source software. The reader was recently updated by Loren Britton, Peter Hermans and Constant.
Download compiled PDF: http://constantvzw.org/collectiveconditions/reader.pdf
On-line version: https://constantvzw.org/wefts/ccreader.en.html
To order a printed copy (5 euros excl. delivery), send an email to: donatella@constantvzw.org
A letter to everyone facing on-line teaching. Let’s learn together how to do technology differently!
What happens to artistic research when it is made public? As a contribution to the ongoing conversations in a.pass on the dynamics of publishing generated by technologies of artistic research, Zone Public (re)considers the conditions for dissemination of these specific forms of knowledge production. It activates the tension between research-as-process versus the crystallisation that publishing requires. It wants to open up the exhibitionary regimes which seem to articulate -our- current artistic research practices and the infrastructures of knowledge production that -we- are both using and possibly used by.
Four public sessions will take place on Thursday nights between February and March; dates, times, places and guests to be announced on apass.be.
Zone Public is co-curated by Pierre Rubio (a.pass), Peggy Pierrot (erg) and Femke Snelting (Constant).
A guided tour through the history and changing practice of URLs.
Sunday 8 December 14:00-17:00 in WIELS, Brussels
With Martino Morandi
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), also known as web addresses, specify the location of a resource on a computer network. This once ubiquitous technology for routing between digitally interconnected spaces on the World Wide Web is rapidly being moved out of sight. While URLs are being conveniently replaced by QR codes, URL shorteners and optimized browser interfaces, we started to wonder about the politics of this obfuscation.
This interactive lecture addresses the notions of ‘Uniformity’, ‘Resourcefulness’ and ‘Location’ through hands-on exercises and collective reading. Together with the participants, we will try to experience the many ways URLs are changing, and to interpret what this tell us about today’s networked economies.
Please bring your laptops!
In the framework of the exhibition Open Skies. Guided tour in English.
As a contribution to Right the right (a three day event on the crisis in copyright), Constant is invited to report on Authors of the future. During this studyday, we tried to make a start with re-imagining copyleft as a decolonial, feminist and collective practice. Right the Right asks if “the assertions of intellectual property rights will decide what music is created and who can listen to it? How are power relations distributed in times of platform economics and streaming services? How could protective and utilization models be redesigned in the interest of art and the public? What rights and regulations make sense in a globalized world?”
Join us for the festive opening of Collective Conditions, a worksession which experiments with the generative potential of socio-technical protocols such as codes of conduct, complaints procedures, bug reports and copyleft licenses. For one week, a group of 35 artists, activists, theorists and performers from different places in the world will explore complex collectivities otherwise. ‘Complex collectivities’ are collectives where participants with radically different needs, backgrounds and agencies come together. This ‘complex collectivity’ can be self-chosen, or be the result of structural forces such as laws, racism, technology, wars, austerity, queerphobia and ecological conditions.
The session is hosted by Ateliers Mommen, the last of the 19th-century cité des artistes still active in Brussels. Ateliers Mommen is a collectively run space where artists live and work together but also can interract and exchange with their public and neighbourhood.
At this worksession opening, delicious vegetarian snacks will be served and the bar is open. We’ll present the Collective Conditions workbook and discuss the questions that lead up to this session. Environmental conditions are set by artist Loren Britton, who made tables and pillows for the space that we will be working in. Loren wants to offer these objects as opportunities to play with the room, create directional flows with the tables and to consider metaphors around way finding and orientation as ways to imagine what collaboration can be.
Collective Conditions is part of Iterations, a long-term artistic research into the future of collaborative practice in a digital context.
Welcome!
Collective Conditions is a worksession which experiments with the generative potential of codes of conduct, complaints procedures, bug reports and copyleft licenses. We understand these socio-technical protocols as artistic and activist media and are curious about the role they can play in the (different) imagination of complex collectivities.
By ‘complex collectivity’ we mean, for example, non-normative human constellations, or collectives where participants with radically different needs, backgrounds and agencies come together. ‘Complex collectivity’ can be self-chosen, or be the result of structural forces such as laws, racism, technology, wars, austerity, queerphobia and ecological conditions.
ATTENTION: launch postponed due to a SEU!
Broadcast Sunday 23 June from 21:00 until a bit after midnight. Place and frequency to be announced. If you bring a used cassette tape, we will make you a magnetically enhanced copy on the spot.
With The Bitflipping Mixtape, The Flipping (de)Ontologi(ci)sts set out to answer a simple, burning question: What is happening in the forbidden zone? The result was nothing short of a revelation. Finally turning all Truth Tables, The (de)Ontologi(ci)sts burrow into the past and future of Ageing Companions, a worksession that explored the interconnected ageing of bodies and technologies, to bring you this coercive statement towards Non-Coercive Computing. The Bitflipping Mixtape is a soundtrack for the summer solstice, emerging exactly one year after having observed the impact of cosmic rays on a chamber saturated with ethanol fumes. It’s a rich and messy mélange of real real new new wave, particles and particles, carrying a luminous sheen and a bittersweet undercurrent. Instead of constructing a playlist around catchy hooks and brisk 16-bar verses, the tracks revel in pregnant pauses, stop frequently to insert a BUT-gate, flip lines several times, and generally falter and stumble blindly across the middle ground of the tape’s lush production, which is characterized by thick, buzzsaw bass lines, glittering arpeggiated synths, and juicy vieillissant harmonies.
Contribution to a symposium organised by Q-02 werkplaats in collaboration with Melissa E. Logan (University of Craft Action Thought / Chicks on Speed). With Christian von Borries, Prodromos Tsiavos, Melissa E. Logan, ooooo, Yoni Van Den Eede.
“The one-day symposium and reflection day From Split Sheets to the Streets: how we credit, share and collect for intellectual property today and tomorrow will examine the worlds of intellectual property and ownership of music – beginning from the present and extending into models for the future. It aims at dissecting and reconstructing ideas of copyright, the distribution and monetisation of intellectual property, and at analysing formats for appropriation. It brings together experts from diverse sides of the copyright universe from practical publishing to sharing culture thinkers, artists and philosophers.”
View online (including recording): http://www.q-o2.be/en/event/from-split-sheets-to-the-streets/
Presentation at the FLAT Art Book Fair of Torino:
Books deserve their hallmark “with an Attitude” when they are made with Free, Libre and Open Source Software and published under an open content license by Constant. This Brussels’ based association for art and media, collaborated with different designers to experiment the interrelation between tools, design and content. After almost ten years, the catalog now includes e-books, manuals, software-releases, workbooks, pamphlets, theory collections, literary works and a cookbook. Whether through bespoke publishing platforms, custom-made fonts and collaborative editing … each of these books plays differently with its conditions for sharing.
For five days, Alex Zakkas and Kurt Tichy joined the ranks of various human and machinic agents already watching over the Brussels’ Muntplein. How do different flows and different forms of power intersect on this square? Starting from their observations, Constant hosts an evening discussing surveillance methodologies and the ways in which they change as a result of technological developments. What is the relationship between preemption, prehension, and prediction? In what way are public data streams manipulated in order to prevent/stimulate/anticipate certain courses of events?
With guests Dennis Pohl and Inigo Wilkins we will reflect on the problems of the neoliberal politics of surveillance and, more generally, on the notions of control, randomness, and unpredictability and how they differ across physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Moderation: Femke Snelting.
An evening the context of The new local and part of Precarious Pavilions, curated by Michiel Vandevelde and produced in collaboration with the Kaaitheater and its program CITY:LAND.
11 October 2018, Brussels
http://thenewlocal.org/
The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation gathers methods from the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory, a worksession that took place in June 2017. It was collectively edited by Carlin Wing, Martino Morandi, Peggy Pierrot, Anita Burato, Christoph Haag, Michael Murtaugh, Femke Snelting, Seda Gürses and designed by Christoph Haag.
“The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation is the obsessive fantasy of optimization turned on its head and stuck to the ceiling of a self-reflecting elevator. It is the ultimate book, with almost 300 pages of dos and don’ts, of forgotten histories and un-inevitable futures, of mindful agile actions and improvisational service architectures, of any and all things that you can and cannot imagine needing in a techno-galaxy.” ☆☆☆☆☆☆
Books 5,— and/or download at http://www.books.constantvzw.org/nl/home/tgso
Launching XPPL: Xperimental Potential Pirate Library, Xperimental Private-Public Liaison, Xperimental Pretentious Performative Labor, Xperimental Platform for Potential Legality, Xperimental Post-Public Library.
XPPL was developed in the context of Interfacing the law, a collaboration between Constant and the Experimental Publishing program in Rotterdam. The project experiments with and openly discusses shadow libraries, piratical text collections and other forms of disobedient sharing.
XPPL interfaces and infrastructure by: Alex, Tash, Joca, Alice, Zalán, Angelika. With a guest contribution by Dubravka Sekulic.
“XPPL is a space for potential pirate librarianship aimed at people who are studying the field of media culture, or as we like to call them: knowledge comrades. This library gathers all the books and articles floating around on PZI shelves and our hard drives and memory sticks, so that they can be shared. As a web interface, it hosts a curated catalogue of books and articles, and instances for uploading and downloading. It starts at XPUB, but can go anywhere we want it to.”
https://issue.xpub.nl/06/
View on-line: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/index.php?title=Interfacing_the_law_(2018)
TRANS // BORDER takes the work of Nathalie Magnan as its point of departure and looks at the relevance of her work through the creations and research of a number of artists, scientists, (h)acktivists and students who are continuing to cultivate the territories she was exploring.
As a contribution to the track Frontières et technologies et Rencontres Zelig, Femke proposed a collective exploration of three-dimensional biomedical images.
View online: http://nathaliemagnan.net/transborder
Call closes: 18 April 2018
The lifecycles of different species are linked via electronic circuits with limited lifespan: accessories that measure biorhythms or monitor the growth-rate of specimens; interactive medical implants, networked pacemakers or wireless defibrillators are an everyday reality. As minerals, plants, animals, people and machines wear out, the technologies they carry and/or are part of, age as well. Their batteries might be empty, their computer chips break down or remote monitors can no longer handle the latest update. The ageing processes of biological and technological merge and it is not always so clear whether we are faced with physical or programmed obsolescence.
In the context of the series Close Encounters, Nicolas Malevé and Femke Snelting and a.pass researcher Pierre Rubio will discuss the long history of Active Archives. Active Archives started in 2006 as a Constant project concerned with digital archive practices of cultural institutions. The project is currently activated by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé in the context of SICV.
Close Encounters is the name of a series of presentations and public conversations organized by the a.pass Research Centre. These light and irregular events are designed to take time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research or a specific point in a research trajectory. What to study? What to research? What to practice?
“Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.” Active Archives manifesto, 2006
