Category Archives: News

WORM open

October 31, 2011 bar, event, LGRU, News, Rotterdam, space

Shifted entrance

Café tables move sideways over hydraulic rails

Office workstations

Recuperated Boeing panels

Last Friday, WORM opened it’s new location in the center of Rotterdam.

It was nice to see lots of people show up to celebrate this event, to see their new book- and recordshop back in such good shape and to discover forms of architectural re-use we only dreamt of, until now.

The first LGRU-research meeting will be hosted by WORM in this excellent space from 7-10 December, 2010.

Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Proposal for a ‘table practice’ at the conference Don’t Know!, this Saturday 17 September:

The Graffiti Markup Language1 is a standard for describing graffiti practice. By making graffiti motion data freely available, GML allows anyone to transfer, compare and interrogate the work of individual writers. The standard is developed by artist Evan Roth2 with the help of a community of graffiti artists, animators, jugglers and coders. But how to capture a writers' movement outside the controlled environment of the studio or laboratory? For this reason, Evan challenged the GML-community to develop a 'Field Recorder' that "unobtrusively records graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer's normal practice in the city".

In a session inspired by the tradition of the BoF3 I propose to start from a collective close reading of the challenge itself4. From there, I would like to think through ways a body practice can be captured, it's data stored, analysed, communicated and eventually re-played.

Duration: 2.5 hours

Pornographic drawings

Dominique Somers (in cooperation with Dirk Belmans): Pornographic Drawings, 2010. Drawings made by tracking the eye movements of a person while he is watching a porn movie

White Glove Tracking

Evan Roth: White Glove Tracking, 2007 (on going)

Pierre Bismuth: Following the right hand of …, 2010 (ongoing)

  1. http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com
  2. http://evan-roth.com
  3. BoFs are informal and adhoc table practices current in computing conferences. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) uses the term to describe initial meetings of members interested in a particular issue to be worked into a future standard.
  4. http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/challenges/gml-field-recorder-challenge

Co-position from scratch

Mark Twains’ design for the title page and dedication of The Surviving Innocent (or: Following the Equator). Image: All rights reserved, The Shapell Foundation

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 of printing and heavy with the terminology of movable type. On the one hand tied to the needs of the publishing industry and on the other to pre-press requirements, it is a type of software that is also production driven and oriented on conventional workflows. What if it would be inspired by altogether different practices?

When the Co-position team bravely took up the challenge to rethink lay-out tools from scratch, they realised that they needed to reinvent its vocabulary first. This is what they will make a start with in Eindhoven.

Below is the workshop description so far; more details about how to participate etc. will be published on the website of Baltan Laboratories soon.

Collective co-positioning (a toolbased workshop)

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 medium.

For this workshop we ask participants to bring “spatial arrangement of texts and other graphical elements” they have made or would have liked to have made. These posters, lay-outs, designs can be completely various, trivial, unfinished or imaginary. We’ll work together to analyse these arrangements, their spatial relationships very precisely and find the more broad criteria as possible to describe them. This operation will be the start of a methodology of classification and create the missing vocabulary needed to build the first phase of the Co-position project.

In the evening, we’ll present Co-position in the larger context of the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a collaboration between Medialab Prado (ES), WORM (NL), Piksel (NO), Constant (BE) and others. The Unit is a two year project bringing artists, designers and Free, Libre and Open Source Software developers around the same table to exchange ideas and share experiences about digital tools and future artistic practice.

With:

John Haltiwanger works in programming languages, new media theory, and typographic design software, John strives for a balance between the practical, the aesthetic, and the boundary-breaking. http://drippingdigital.com/blog

Pierre Huyghebaert explores several practices around graphic design, he currently drives the studio Speculoos. Pierre is interested in using free sofware to re-learn to work in other ways and collaboratively on cartography, type design, web interface, schematic illustration, book design and teaching these practices. Along participating in OSP, he articulate residential spaces and narratives through the artists temporary alliance Potential Estate and develop collaborative and subjective mapping with Towards and others Brussels urban projects.

Ana Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente run a libre graphics & design research studio based in Porto, actively engaged with design, typography, independent publishing and software culture. Developing innovative design software such as Shoebot and Batch Commander, and co-edit Libre Graphics Magazine. Involved in building up and maintaining Hacklaviva, a hackerspace in the center of Porto. Manufactura Independente brings their expertise in publishing with F/LOSS, generative design plus the development of typographic systems to LGRU. They will host a research meeting in Porto (PT), and participate in research meetings and the Future Tools conference.

and FS :-)