Cables, waves, hard drives and tattoos

 ... or how to trace the post-photographic image across networks

The project Critical Tracing and The Post-Photographic Image explores how images move across infrastructures. In this context, we propose a two-days workshop to approach the digital image as a transactional device that we can use to trace the infrastructure through which it circulates. This hybrid workshop will be hosted by the MediaDock at the Lucerne School of Art and Design and on a Telegram channel. It will take place on the 23rd and 24th of November 2021.

Guest speakers and tracers:
Irene Amerini, Anaïs Bloch, Marloes de Valk, Andrew Dewdney, Maurice Haedo, Geoff and Stephanie Hobbis, Sam Mercer, Nicolas Nova, Jara Rocha, Nestor Siré, Katrina Sluis, Gaia Tedone, Tiberio Uricchio, Mushon Zer Aviv.

The workshop is the second of a series developed as part of the project 'Critical Tracing and the Post-Photographic Image' supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Lucerne School of Art and Design. It originates from the collaborative work between Gaia Tedone, Nicolas Malevé and Nestor Siré and is inspired by Siré's longterm research on the 'Cuban Paquete Semanal'.

In 20th century photographic history and criticism the notion of trace has consistently been associated with the medium's mechanical reproducibility and its indexical relationship to reality. Yet, with the ubiquitous adoption of digital technology, photography has moved away from the singularity of the analogue medium towards a networked technology with a computational structure. Hence the question arises: How can the concept of trace and the act of tracing be reframed to account for images' algorithmic structure and their circulatory patterns amongst different contexts of reception? What are the aesthetic and political implications of foregrounding such notions when rethinking parameters of production, dissemination and interpretation of networked images?

Once images ceased to be perceived primarily as visual surfaces but as a vectors of relations, the notion of infrastructure gains importance, as an essential concept for framing image practices as inseparable from their materiality. Our objective is to study how infrastructure permeates our concepts and ideas about the post-photographic image. We believe that infrastructure cannot be taken for granted and tracing requires different strategies according to the materialities through which images circulate under different geopolitical and socio-technical conditions. As such, our aim is to explore and complicate the idea that 'every act of seeing an image or reading a text on the Internet is registered and becomes traceable' (Groys, 2016:185).

In this two days workshop, we propose a transdisciplinary dialogue between ethnography, computer science, network activism, media and cultural studies in order to explore different methodologies of tracing/tracking images, patterns of circulation and various forms of 'invisibility'. To do this, we will learn about computer forensics and scrutinize the traces of image circulation via jpegs uploaded on social media. We will follow transactional networks of advertising and their ramifications. We will reflect on the problem of translating images from online to offline economies. We will follow their paths from websites to hard drives and USB keys, from cables to waves. And their financial adventures from personal credit cards to Pesos. Along the way, as we will move through infrastructures, we will pay attention to errors and glitches and the impressive work of maintenance of ad hoc infrastructures. We will trace the map of the knowledges emerging from the activities supporting image movements where shops become laboratories and where pocket infrastructures provide new patterns of connectivity.

During this hybrid workshop gathering participants from Europe, Israel and Latin America, presentations will take place both online and on site. The channel of choice will be Telegram for the remote presentations as well as to broadcast on site presentations. During the workshop, we have also planned hands-on moments of collaborative diagramming to reflect together on the relations between infrastructure and image circulation in a context of digital asymmetry.

Schedule

Day 1, Tuesday November 23
Themes: the networked image, tracing

10:00 – 10.15: Welcome and Introduction.
10.15 – 11.00: Mushon Zer-Aviv, AdNauseam – Obfuscation as a Privacy Counter-Measure, Remote Presentation + Q&A
11.00 – 11.15: Break
11.15 – 12.00: This image is Not Available in Your Country; glitches, errant t-shirts and the potential of an empty inbox, Gaia Tedone, On site Presentation + Q&A
12.00 – 12.45: Remote response by Katrina Sluis and Q&A
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
14:00 – 14:45: Tracing the Networked Image, Andrew Dewdney, Remote Presentation + Q&A
14:45 – 15:30: Research/Creation : A visual exploration of digital repair practices, Anaïs Bloch, On site Presentation + Q&A
15:30 – 15:45: Break
15.45 – 16:45: Tracing Session [Hybrid]
16.45 – 17.30: Presentation + Q&A by Nestor Siré on the recent developments of the Sección Arte in El Paquete Semanal, Remote Presentation
17.30 - 18.00: Collective discussion & Wrap up, Hybrid
7:00 Pm: Dinner

Day 2, Wednesday November 24
Themes: digital divide, infrastructure, network

10:00 – 10.15: Summary of Day 1 & Introduction to Day 2.
10:15 – 11.00: Learning to trace imperceptible features in social media images, by Irene Amerini and Tiberio Uricchio, Remote Presentation + Q&A
11.00 – 11.45: The Girl with the Tribal Tattoo Jpeg: Stories from the Bush Internet , Geoff and Stephanie Hobbis, On Site Presentation + Q&A
11.45 – 12.00: Break
12.00 – 12.45: My store is a laboratory: smartphone repairers and their knowledge, by Nicolas Nova, Remote Presentation + Q&A
13.00 – 14.00: Lunch
14:00 – 15:30: Tracing Session
15:30 – 15:45: Break
15.45 – 16:45: Nestor Siré and collaborators, prototyping session, remote
16.45 – 17.30: Collective discussion, presentation of the tracings & Wrap up [hybrid, in Lucerne + Telegram]

The choice to use Telegram has been made to circumnavigate problems of connectivity with Cuba and to explore creative and social responses to instant messaging apps. Please download the latest update of the Telegram app ahead of the event. You can decide to follow the talk from either your phone or computer desktop. Just click on the above link to join the channel at the time of the event. If you don’t have Telegram, you can download the app for free here: https://telegram.org

+ info: http://functionariesofthecamera.net/packaging-across-networks/

Conversation at the CSNI, about the Industrial Continuum of 3D

 The Center for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) is hosting a conversation about "The Industrial continuum of 3D":

 

Join us on Wednesday 3rd November 2021 at 14.00 (online) for our next research event hosted by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting) in conversation with Martino Morandi.

The industrial continuum of 3D is a sociotechnical figuration and phenomenon that can be observed when volumetric techniques and technologies flow between diverse industries such as biomedical imaging, wild life conservation, border patrolling and Hollywood computer graphics. Its fluency is based on an intricate paradox: the continuum moves smoothly between distinct, different or even mutually exclusive fields of application, but leaves very little space for radical experiments and the resulting combinations are all but surprising. This conversation featuring Martino Morandi is an attempt to show how the consistent contradiction is established, to see the way power gathers around it, to get closer to what drives the circulation of industrial 3D and to describe what settles as a result. What possible techniques, paradigms and procedures for ‘computing otherwise’ can be activated around the representation of space-time, and which other worldings might be imagined?

Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence (Open Humanities Press, DATA-browser series) proposes an intersectional inquiry into volumetrics which foregrounds procedural, theoretical and infrastructural practices that provide with a widening of the possible. The publication brings together diverse materials from a rich and ongoing conversation between artists, software developers and theorists on the political, aesthetic and relational regimes in which volumes are calculated. http://volumetricregimes.xyz

Join us online at:
https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/csn-qck-1ci-zd6

+ info: https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/?p=5957

Autour de l'intelligence humaine, végétale et artificielle

Un point de vue trans*féministe sur "Une maison d'édition
algolittéraire : créer du lien avec les arbres"

Conférences dans le cadre du projet de recherche 'Une Maison d'édition algolittéraire: créer du lien avec les arbres'

 
Avec le soutien du FRArt

 
Lundi 25 octobre de 14h à 18h
ESA Saint-Luc Bruxelles, Place Louis Morichar 30, 1060 Bruxelles

 
Deux conférences se feront en anglais et deux en français.
Dans la mesure du possible, on fournira des textes traduits des conférences.

 
Un point de vue trans*féministe sur "Une maison d'édition
algolittéraire : créer du lien avec les arbres" [EN]
Jara Rocha réfléchit et marmonne. Ielles présenteront le projet de recherche d'Anaïs Berck, pour lequel ce séminaire tente de donner un contexte plus large. Ielles le feront d'une manière critique trans*féministe, en proposant des réflexions et des questions qui peuvent aider à faire avancer la recherche. Attendez-vous à des connexions
inhabituelles, des associations surprenantes, des idées asynchroniques et des visions du monde obliques.

+ info https://algoliterarypublishing.net/pdfs/seminar_st_luc_description_FR_EN.pdf

https://algoliterarypublishing.net/ 

Foro diversidades, conversa con Marcos García y Jesús Rey

 (conversa sobre mediación, ciencia ciudadana e innovación social)

Ada Lovelace Day: Volumetric Regimes [Madrid]

Volumetric Regimes

Ada Lovelace Day feat. Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting, Jara Rocha)

 

Sábado, 9 de octubre de 16:00 a 21:00h

 

 

[ENG]

What is going on with 3D!? This question, both modest and enormous, triggered six years of trans*feminist research that are about to be published as "Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence" (Possible Bodies, Eds.; forthcoming at Open Humanities Press). The research trajectory was provoked by an intuitive but collective concern about the way 3D computing quite routinely seems to render racist, sexist, ableist, speciest and ageist worlds. Asking about what is up with 3D is especially urgent when observing its application in border-patrol devices, for climate prediction modeling, in advanced biomedical imaging or throughout the gamify-all approach of overarching industries, from education to logistics.

Trans*feminist research (including feminist technosciences) is neither busy with the celebration of the merits of so-called women* nor with the reproduction of binary categorizations. It is rather about radical interdependence, mutual affection and solidary transdisciplinarity. For this edition of Ada Lovelace Day we therefore invited a gang of local thinkers-doers to respond to, re-interpret, critique, remix and problematize materials from "Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence". The event proposes a spacetime of intimacy with the project and its publication, as read through the specific sensibilities of known and unknown comrades in the making of technosciences otherwise. It will include playful contributions, informal responses and interactive formats proposed by Carmen Romero Bachiller, Marta Echaves, Blanca Pujals and Alejandra López Gabrielidis.

*"Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM."

http://volumetricregimes.xyz

 

[inscriptions & + info: https://www.medialab-prado.es/actividades/ada-lovelace-day-volumetric-regimes]

 

[CAST]

¿Qué está pasando con el 3D? Esta pregunta, tan modesta como enorme, desencadenó seis años de una investigación trans*feminista que están a punto de publicarse como "Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence" (Possible Bodies, Eds.; de próxima aparición en Open Humanities Press). La trayectoria de la investigación fue provocada por una preocupación intuitiva pero colectiva sobre el modo en que la computación en 3D parece presentar y representar de forma rutinaria mundos racistas, sexistas, capacitistas, especistas y edadistas. Preguntarse qué pasa con el 3D es especialmente urgente cuando se observa su aplicación en dispositivos de patrullaje fronterizo, para el modelado de predicciones climáticas, en la obtención de imágenes biomédicas avanzadas o en todo el enfoque de gamificación de los procesos industriales en general, aplicado desde la educación hasta la logística.

La investigación trans*feminista (incluidas las tecnociencias feministas) no se ocupa de celebrar los méritos de las llamadas mujeres* ni de reproducir las categorizaciones binarias. Por ello, en esta edición del Ada Lovelace Day se ha invitado a un grupo de pensadoras locales a responder, reinterpretar, criticar, remezclar y problematizar los materiales de esta publicación. El evento plantea un espacio-tiempo de intimidad con el proyecto y su publicación, que será leída a través de las sensibilidades específicas de compañeras conocidas y por conocer en el hacer de las tecnociencias de otra manera. Así, contará con aportaciones experimentales, respuestas informales y formatos interactivos de Marta Echaves, investigadora y comisaria independiente; Alejandra López Gabrielidis, filósofa especializada en arte y tecnologías digitales; la arquitecta, investigadora espacial y escritora Blanca Pujals, y Carmen Romero Bachiller, doctora en Sociología y profesora en la UCM. Cada una de ellas mantendrá un debate posterior con les comisaries, Jara Rocha y Femke Snelting.

La publicación “Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence” surge de Possible Bodies, un proyecto colaborativo sobre la intersección entre la investigación artística y académica que se inició en 2016 para explorar las entidades concretas, y al mismo tiempo complejas y ficticias, de los llamados "cuerpos" en el contexto de la computación 3D. La investigación se centra en las genealogías de cómo los cuerpos y las tecnologías se han constituido mutuamente. La publicación reúne diversos materiales de una conversación en curso entre artistas, desarrolladores de software y teóricos que trabajan con técnicas y tecnologías para detectar, rastrear, imprimir, modelar y renderizar volúmenes.

ADA LOVELACE DAY

Reconocida como la primera programadora de la historia, Ada Augusta Byron King dedujo la capacidad de los ordenadores para ir más allá de los simples cálculos de números, lo que conocemos en la actualidad como “software”. El Día de Ada Lovelace (ALD) es una celebración internacional de los logros de las mujeres en ciencia, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas (STEM). Su objetivo es aumentar el perfil de las mujeres en STEM y, al hacerlo, crear nuevos modelos que animen a más niñas a seguir estas carreras y apoyar a las mujeres que ya trabajan en estos campos.

Registro en vídeo del evento completo (a cargo de Raúl):

 

Fotos del evento (a cargo de Lúcas):

flic.kr/p/2mzAcb8

Programa
16:00 Bienvenida y contextualización Volumetric Regimes (Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting)
16:30 Intervención de Alejandra López Gabrielidis
17:30 Intervención de Carmen Romero Bachiller
18:30 Descanso
19:00 Intervención de Marta Echaves
20:00 Intervención de Blanca Pujals
21:00 Fin

http://volumetricregimes.xyz

[+ info: https://www.medialab-prado.es/actividades/ada-lovelace-day-volumetric-regimes]

In the mouth of a polar bear: The undead feeling of the world

by Cassandra Troyan and Helen Pritchard

commissioned by DONE 5 (Foto Colectania)

PROJECT'S WEBSITE: http://theantimenagerie.net/2021_In_the_mouth_of_a_polar_bear/

In this artistic research project Helen Pritchard and Cassandra Troyan engage with the production of transpecies animacy in the domains of edu-tainment, policing, and the military industrial complex. They interrogate the capacities of “legged robots designed to be used by the military, industrial, mining, energy, public safety and last-mile delivery” by Ghost Robotics, to animatronic spy animals made to look believable in natural history BBC programming, “Spy in the Wild”. All violent scenes dependent on visualizing technologies of feeling the world through aggressive sensing, scanning and surveillance.

Posing as either helpful or harmless machines, such as the Boston Dynamics dogs that can pick up your laundry, to more-than-animate soldier combatants dancing to tracks such a “Do You Love Me”. These robots are often posed as feeling the world, although not through embodiment, but with undead visual practices. In their physicality, they are a spy, spirit, or wraith –– witness to the world they sense and scan, yet beyond and removed from the consequences of its material realities. A viewer is constantly left with the place where a face should be looking back at you, or to look into the eyes of an animal expecting recognition only to see a camera lens or computational sensor returning your gaze.

Through the para-fictional scenarios explored in these viral video poems they investigate how transpecies storytelling and visual sensing technologies if not countered otherwise can be imploded as a mode for structuring the racist western imaginary of militaristic carceral imperialist fantasy. Using the visual and sonic principals of clickbait trauma-porn against itself, they reject a negative world-building project by instead approaching these techniques from a perspective of queer decolonial solidarity –– seeking to ultimately abolish the category of the species, along with the injurious technologies that could name, sense, and scan it as well.

[presentación y conversación online el 30.09.21 a las 19h CEST | última actividad de la 5ª edición de DONE] 

+ info: https://done.fotocolectania.org/edicion5/en/creation/in-the-mouth-of-a-polar-bear-the-undead-feeling-of-the-world/#DONE

>>> RECORDING OF THE EVENT >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1-6zkgr9lw

 

 

III Seminario internacional de prácticas transescriturales. Cuerpos húmedos, cuerpos meca-digitales: error en el sistema

 22 - 30 SEPTIEMBRE 2021
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS DE LA INFORMACIÓN

VIR BLANCO, WOLFGANG BONGERS, OLALLA CASTRO, ANTONIO DIÉGUEZ,
ALEJANDRA LÓPEZ, VALERIA MUSSIO, LUCAS RAMADA, BLANCA REGO,
JARA ROCHA, AMADÍS ROSS, SOFÍA SÁNCHEZ, LAURO ZAVALA

Lectoescrituras volumétricas // Jara Rocha 

Esta sesión está planteada como una zona de lectoescritura desde y con el inventario de Possible Bodies, un proyecto de investigación-acción desobediente que se pregunta por la mutua constitución entre los llamados cuerpos y las técnicas, tecnologías, infraestructuras y/o protocolos con los que van siendo, específicamente en el ámbito de la volumetría (esto es: en el continuum industrial de la producción de volúmenes a partir de técnicas de medición). Así, la propuesta consiste en (grupalmente) practicar la lectoescritura en el inventario de Possible Bodies, partiendo de interfaces, renders, bug reports o readmes ahí recolectados; y en tomar esa lectoescritura como una praxis en sintonía con aquella condición de mutua constitución, que disiente ante un reparto de lo sensible, la agencia y lo tecnológico demasiado probable (optimización, productividad, eficacia, individualización, extracción, explotación, exclusión) y se ocupa de identificar formas transversales, oblicuas, periféricas, inauditas o latentes para el ensanchamiento de los posibles. https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/

Read & Repair - Digital Solidarity feat. peripheral literatures

general info: http://varia.zone/en/rr-digital-solidarity-2.html

Every last Sunday of the month the Varia Library and the Rotterdam Electronica Depot hold Read & Repair events. Due to current circumstances, most of them have been in an online format. We invite you to visit our online space, make yourself comfortable, read or repair some things together, and share thoughts and ideas.

In 2021 our Read & Repair sessions will be paired, we will take two months to explore one theme. During August and September 2021, we will be exploring the theme Digital Solidarity. In a time where everything points to the further consolidation and accelerated normalization of the Big Tech industry (Zoom, Facebook groups, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc.), we need collective digital alternative practices. How can we develop mutual aid strategies and social closeness through alternative digital infrastructures in times of physical distancing, remote working or care giving?

On Sunday 26th September we have a READ with Jara Rocha followed by a REPAIR with Yoana Buzova.

READ

---

Date: Sunday, 26th September 2021

Time: 11:00-13:00 CEST

Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

NOTE: This reading session will be held in English.

---

The text selection and our reading choreography in September was made by Jara Rocha.

Of all the greyzones of our readwrite worldings, bibliographic self-defence constitutes a specially powerful one. Both because of the fierce gestures of erasure and silencing that certain recursive presences and absences signal at, and because of the extremely lovely evidences of community building and care thereby performed. Self-defence, resistance, counter-weighting and mutual support operations of immense technopolitical value keep taking place at what can be termed "peripheral literature areas" such as bibliographies, footnotes, indexes, acknowledgement pages, colophons, library metadata and side annotations, where trans*feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, queer, crip, antispeciest, antifa and atiageist solidarities take very tangible and specific forms.

On this Read session, we'll spend time with materials collected from such zones, to identify stories behind or below them, and to perhaps also extend them with our very situated manners to provide ourselves with the bibliographic solidarities that are urgent and precious to us as a latent "we" that exists across them.

Fragments will be read from these bodies of text:

• Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
• Dionne Brand, Blue Clerk
• (plus a collection of scattered hegemonic bibliographies)
  

Fellowship | for Situated Practice | on Spectral Infrastructures | for Digital Discomfort

Happy to announce that this week I'm starting a 10-month fellowship at BAK, with a cohort of 18 amazing artist-researchers, joining the Cell for Digital Discomfort with dear companions Cristina Cochior and Karl Moubarak.

A CELL FOR DIGITAL DISCOMFORT

'Digital Discomfort' is a mode of dealing with, resisting, attending to and intervening into the sneaky moments of techno-capitalist innovation, linear solutionism and seamless operation. The Cell For Digital Discomfort (CFDD) wants to stay with this unease for all too comfortable modes of infrastructural becoming as a starting point for collectively exploring and experimenting ways to refuse compliance with the informatics of domination. We want to provide ourselves with spacetimes for a praxis of ongoing transdisciplinary critique of technical infrastructurations and the entangled ways they world worlds.

The urgency for the work of the CFDD is produced by the contemporary stage of global digitisation, from an infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-connectivity, flow-management, planetary computing (which touches both material and spectral aspects of infrastructure). This results in an increase and intensification of economized forms of accounting responsibilities and their impact (eg.: carbon trade, immunity certificate, platform capitalism) which also causes a delegation of labour, of care, of response-abilites, of imagination, of damage.

The tensions that are produced necessitate a scale leap of problematics: the meso scales of the subject -- or even the municipality -- is often not accountable for the massive/turbo scale of the planetary computing of financial capitalism, the geological damage of climate change, etc. Also on the micro scale: quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms that get exposed to environmental transformations derived from ecocidal practices, turbo speed of high-speed trading and so forth, and the slow violence of an emergent point of no return.

In order to work on this, we have decided to focus the research on a cut through the technopolitical complexity of 'discomfort'. We would like to use the opportunity of the Fellowship to bring that framework in a more explicit conversation with crip techno-science, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, queer struggles and environmental justice. We are interested in developing practices that would go towards something like 'solidary discomfort'.

This means to exchange with agents that might have radically different sensibilities for what digital comfort and discomfort might mean (and to do so by means of conversations, collective practice, experiments of displacement, remediation, etc); to study the particular discomfort that haunts digital infrastructures (reading tools and texts through one another, to identify mutual affections); to extend the Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomfort with additional vectors, and anti-solutionist technologies and techniques (documenting, collecting, testing and trying, remixing, developing digital/conceptual prototypes, disseminating, partially repairing).

The tensors we identify and through whose inbetweens we would like to orient ourselves include (but are not limited to):

• Comfort-Discomfort

• Hostipital-Hospitable

• Parasite-Host

• Dependent-Independent-Interdependent

• Inclusive-Exclusive

• Unpleasant-Pleasant

• Desirable-Needed

• Welcoming-Hostile

• Awkward-Confident

• Antagonistic-Affirmative

• Seamless-Broken

• Accessible-Inaccessible

• Open-Closed

• Repair-Abolish

• Non-extractive-Extractive

• Solidary-Walled

• Caretaking/Maintenance-Stabilising/Fixing

• Continuing-Forking/Derivating

• Free-Open

• Macro-Meso-Micro

• Infra-Supra

• Turbo-Chronic-Slow

• Welfare-Goodliving

• Present-Latent-Absent

• Damaging-Damaged

• Situated-Planetary

• Foreground-Backround

• Fungible-Durable

• Inheritance/Legacy-Invention/Innovation

• Horizontal-Hierarchical

• Mundane-Universal

The work of CFDD would involve a thickening analysis of radical interdependencies (mutual constitutions of practices and tools, solidary networks, technical self-defence) and the articulation of a shift on accountability (what counts, what matters, what is read as a matter of fact/concern/care). Such analytics implies practically and conceptually engaging in the ontoepistemological shift of what has been termed as the "crisis of presence".

 

+ info about the BAK Felloship for Situated Practice and Spectral Infrastructures: https://www.bakonline.org/fellowship/2021-2022/

+ info about my work on/from the Cell: https://www.bakonline.org/person/jara-rocha/

conversa con Oskoff Noish en Ars Electronica Gardens

charlando a partir del proyecto MMM [ Fluorescent Markov Beat ] de Óscar <3

+info: https://arselectronicagardenbarcelona.org/en/activities-canodrom/

 

Ontología asimétrica de un sótano que fue cronotopo

Compartir las zonas de más intensidad en mi experiencia en Medialab Prado entre 2009 y 2012 podría implicar dispositivos de anclaje muy diversos: metodológicos, temáticos o cronológicos. Pero prefiero usar una herramienta que articuló a su manera un momento muy significativo del laboratorio: el lenguaje de patrones desarrollado por Christopher Alexander
y su equipo, publicado en 19773. Este volumen, que es uno de los primeros experimentos editoriales de índole hipertextual, ha sido de referencia y casi hasta de culto en ese viraje que Fred Turner denomina «de la contracultura a la cibercultura» y que hace que resuene de forma deslocalizada en las formas contemporáneas que va ocupando y desocupando lo que desde 1995 se llamó «la ideología californiana» (una paradójica combinación de fuerzas de la contracultura utópica de la vuelta al campo y antibelicista de los sesenta y setenta, por un lado, y del neoliberalismo de determinismo tecnológico que cristalizó en Silicon Valley, por otro). Toda una genealogía de puntiagudas
prácticas y personalidades en las que se yuxtaponen n/hombres como Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller o Stewart Brand hasta llegar a la amalgama de innovación totalitaria de los GAFAM & friends del presente.

Texto completo aquí: https://www.medialab-prado.es/sites/default/files/multimedia/documentos/2021-07/Ontolog%C3%ADa%20asim%C3%A9trica%20de%20un%20s%C3%B3tano%20que%20fue%20cronotopo.pdf

Publicación completa aquí: https://www.medialab-prado.es/sites/default/files/multimedia/documentos/2021-06/Laboratorios_ciudadanos._Una_aproximacion_a_Medialab_Prado_ESP.pdf

 

Kingdom Dysphoria @ Biofriction

 

   Note: Kingdom dysphoria is an invented transposition of the term ‘gender dysphoria’, which describes the distress and violence caused by binary sex assignment. Kingdom dysphoria would be the harm caused on all living and non-living entities as a result of the assignment of fixed categories, taxonomies, species and kingdoms.


    This workshop can be understood as a situation to inquire into the moment in which the biopolitics and the necropolitics based on life and nonlife is being reformed. Working from the understanding of biology ‘as a field of discourse beyond the living world itself' (Elizabeth Povinelli), we want to actively engage with the spacetime of continuities between the bios, geos and mythos (Sylvia Wynter) as apparatuses of knowledge production and world production.


    To start with, we propose to look back at the 19th century, the moment when the microscopic gaze and miniaturization practices were introduced within Western Science and society , and to unravel their relation to the separation between the geos and bios. During this period, the new access to the microscope outside the science lab, and its availability to non-scientists, generated a practice of looking at tiny things. As people learned to see themselves surrounded by the micro, this access to the world propelled the invention of classification and standards of taxonomic/kingdom separations, which silently informed and became embedded within organizations of life. As this was in some ways a violence enabled by the 19th century version of DIY BIO, we think it is important to understand its continuations in contemporary bioart, biohacking and (free) software development. It was also a historical period of immense information sharing via bio-informatics, which has many affinities with technoscientific practices in the 21st Century that define the separation life and nonlife, and who gets to ‘have a life’.


    Hidden in plain sight, the timescale of the geo did not fit the taxonomic efforts of modern fixations, and as we learned with Elizabeth Povinelli and Kathryn Yusoff, the very ontologies and politics embedded in the geos are those of colonial exploitation of bodies and resources.


    At a macro scale, the geos calls for an attention to matter that is almost still, that inform about the latent damages on the planet. And perhaps at a meso scale, that of the mundane studying with at-hand devices, the mythos needs to be unwritten and rewritten. As speciest, racist and ableist forces switch scales too smoothly, we convoke methods for a trans*feminist f(r)iction to fight what could be named “kingdom dysphoria”.


    Kingdom dysphoria is yet another condition that calls for trans*feminist studying and practice, for letting go of technoscientific binarisms and to problematize exteriorities that are provoked by the cuts of modern apparatuses.


    During the workshop, we propose to engage with scanning practices across scales. We will move between electron scanning microscope practices to meso and macro applications of LIDAR (remote sensing). We want to think of scanning as a mode of time travelling through organic compounds which make visible/stabilize for a moment a computational escape velocity that might switch between so-called kingdoms and beyond (from the vegetal to the animal to the mineral). In this way, we can start building a shared understanding of the mutual affections and transitions of the living and the inert matter at the micro scale. Putting a phenomenology of the mundane and the day-to-day in dialogue with a situated criticism of computational technologies for bio-engineering, this workshop might be a groupal attempt to see what it would mean to switch scales and domains with a queer and anti-colonial politics.
  

+ info about the Biofriction Summer Program: https://hangar.org/es/activitats-recerca-i-transferencia-de-coneixements/biofriction-summer-program/

Packaging Across Networks

 

Online workshop held on a Telegram channel
July 7&8, 4pm – 7pm CET
An experiment in networked tracing, instigated by Nicolas Malevé, Nestor Siré, Gaia Tedone

Guest speakers and tracers: Cristina Cochior, Marloes de Valk, Maurice Haedo, Swati Janu, Steffen Köhn, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas, Sam Mercer, Jara Rocha, Luis Rodil-Fernandez, Winnie Soon.

Please join us for a two-days online workshop to reflect and speculate on the poetics and politics of divergent networked infrastructures.

The framework of the Packaging Across Networks Workshop is Nestor Siré’s long-term research on the 'Cuban Paquete Semanal' – a one-terabyte collection of media that is aggregated weekly in Cuba on a physical hard drive and is distributed through a pirate network of distribution via in-person digital copying. In this context we are reflecting upon the material conditions of different networked infrastructures and how they force us to rethink a series of assumptions about the circulations of images and content and create different networked economies.

Over the course of two days of focused exchange, we aim to open up reflections on online and offline networks, informal channels of content circulation, and collaborative practices under conditions of socio-technical asymmetry. Through a set of presentations, discussions and a tracing exercise, we will attempt to articulate the tensions arising when online networked content is disseminated in offline networks as well as the conditions in which these offline networks may resurface online. We will address the social and economic dynamics that subtend these forms of networking. The context of the American embargo against Cuba will serve as a point of reference for this discussion that will extend to other contexts such as Khirkee, South Delhi.

The tracing exercises, which will be conducted at the hands of invited participants–tracers aided by open source software, aims to visualize the various questions and concepts introduced in the presentations and to offer a map for moments of shared analysis and speculation. Focused attention will be directed towards the near future of Siré's project: to find the relevant form of presence of the Art Section of El Paquete in an online environment. We want to collectively discuss which form this can take, which strategies can be imagined, what kinds of alliances need to be built and which trajectories must be enabled. 

The choice to use Telegram has been made to circumnavigate problems of connectivity with Cuba and to explore creative and social responses to instant messaging apps. Please download the latest update of the Telegram app ahead of the event. You can decide to follow the talk from either your phone or computer desktop. Just click on the above link to join the channel at the time of the event. If you don’t have Telegram, you can download the app for free here: https://telegram.org

The workshop is developed as part of the collaborative project 'Critical Tracing and the Post-Photographic Image’ supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Lucerne School of Art and Design. 

+ info and full programme: http://functionariesofthecamera.net/packaging-across-networks/

 

Caring Assemblies, Porto Design Bienale

in conversation with Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente (Manufactura Independente):

 

Caring assemblies. Designing for better futures is an online and physical public program that aims to question the violence and exclusions of design practices and speculate on how to build better futures at different scales, from molecules to the territories, through four conversations and a speculative fiction workshop. Organised by Bartlebooth, it is a Satellite Activity of the Porto Design Biennale.

+info about the event's context: https://portodesignbiennale.pt/en/events/caring-assemblies?edition=2021

+ better futures: https://betterfutures.bartlebooth.org/

The Hmm

 

https://thehmm.nl/event/the-hmm-online-events/

Tecnocronopolíticas: agencias turbo, lentas y latentes

Cuarta sesión de El Vector en el Canódromo.

¿Cabe habitar la pregunta por la tecnopolítica en tanto que cronopolítica?

El procesado computacional de operaciones de todo tipo está anclado a una serie de asunciones con respecto a la dimensión temporal. Tales asunciones provocan la precariedad relacional que algunes han denominado crisis de la presencia. O dicho de otro modo: si al hablar de tecnología desatendemos la participación de una multiplicidad de manifestaciones --a menudo tensionadas-- del tiempo, estamos partiendo de una desatención radical a la potencia transformadora de uno de los vectores fundamentales en torno a los que se organiza la log(íst)ica de la existencia.

En esta sesión polirrítmica de El Vector, nos interesa prestar atención a la dimensión temporal con respecto a las composiciones semiótico-materiales (es decir, tecnológicas) que hacen al mundo emerger, suceder y sostenerse de determinadas maneras, y ciertamente no de otras. De este modo, cuestiones como "lo nuevo" en relación a lo tecnológico evidenciarán una contingencia tecnopolítica muy clara, y señalarán una tendencia a la innovación totalitaria en el ámbito de las experiencias más mundanas. El totalitarismo también anida en la lógica lineal del tiempo, asociada a la idea de progreso. Prestar atención a las temporalidades supone activar una sensibilidad cronopolítica ante la convergencia de velocidades o durabilidades. Las operaciones a velocidad inhumana de la hipercomputación, que le es propia al turbocapitalismo de plataformas, son coetáneas al implacable pero no progresivo advenimiento de la sexta extinción masiva. Los desplazamientos de escalas de tiempo (micro-meso-macro) convocan los matices de las teorías del antropoceno/plantacionceno/capitaloceno o, en general, a las conversaciones públicas activadas desde por ejemplo los estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, las humanidades medioambientales y/o el pensamiento crítico. En general, todas son zonas de indagación que toman en consideración la escala geológica de afección macro, condicionada por la industrialización y comercialización patriarcocolonial a escalas meso y micro. Y aunque la computación cuántica asimila efectiva y eficazmente la no linealidad de la dimensión temporal, su implementación industrial es tremendamente consecuente con el legado de las premisas del Proyecto Moderno. Los dispositivos culturales de la Modernidad aún condicionan (desplegando una violencia lenta demasiado cotidiana) las proyecciones lineales "hacia adelante" y "hacia atrás" en las formas celebradas por disciplinas tan dispares como el diseño especulativo, la ingeniería inversa o la arqueología de los medios.

Gracias a sensibilidades propias de las tecnociencias trans*feministas, la lucha anticolonial, los señalamientos desde la militancia anti-edadista, tullida o neurodivergente, la solidaridad interespecies y las prácticas queer (por nombrar solo algunas), podemos desvincular los valores desarollistas, progresistas, antropo-euro-andro-cis-centrados e Historicistas universalizantes de las conceptualizaciones sociotécnicas que urge tener. De este modo, podremos darnos el tiempo para detectar, observar y problematizar con qué protocolos, infraestructuras, dispositivos, técnicas, tecnologías y/o herramientas se co-constituyen nuestros modos de existencia.

Kris De Decker, desde la escritura y manufactura de la web solar de Low Tech Magazine en Masnou, puede ser considerado como un trabajador del tiempo fuera de quicio. La condición de "baja" tecnología es una condición siempre relacional, dado que dependiendo del espaciotiempo de enunciación, el estándar socioeconómico de alta tecnología estará colocado en un punto diferente. De Decker se alinea con la sospecha de que, a menudo, posibilidades interesantes emergen cuando se combinan tecnologías socialmente leídas como antiguas, con materiales o conocimientos más recientes; o cuando se aplican conocimientos tradicionales a tecnologías contemporáneas. La suya es una práctica emancipadora en medio de lo que Donna Haraway denomina informática de la dominación. Ante el monocultivo de los tiempos propios del turbocapitalismo más feroz, que afectan técnicamente a ámbitos tan dispares como el doméstico, el educativo, el de la administración pública, el del urbanismo o el de los movimientos sociales, urge probar velocidades más oportunas que nos permitan entender de qué latencias, implicaciones e interrupciones dependen las formas rígidas de agencia que en el día a día articula nuestro ser-con dispositivos.

 

Registro de la sesión: 

 

Crianza transfeminista

Charla organizada por L'Etnográfica en Coopolis, Can Batlló

Conversa con Andrea Soto Calderón

Arte, tecnología, feminismos y cultura libre

en Arts Libris 2021

Viernes 18.06.21 de 16h a 17h

Este diálogo parte de un conjunto de trabajos de edición en que ha colaborado Jara Rocha para, desde esas experiencias, poder reflexionar en torno a los dispositivos y sus implicaciones en la elaboración de situaciones de lectoescritura, circulación material de lenguajes y condiciones de posibilidad más allá de los objetos y procesos editoriales privativos.

https://artslibris.cat/artslibris-barcelona-2021/

Registro audiovisual de la sesión:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT3o9l0KN8

Naturoculturas son disturbios #5

  feat. Ona Bros con #BetaBlastoCuirLove <3

 

https://dublab.es/shows/naturoculturas/14-06-21

Bienal de la Ciencia: Un viaje alucinante

miércoles

09.06.2021

a las 21.30h en el Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona

entrada gratis

¿Cuáles son los límites de la ciencia médica? Hasta donde podemos imaginar las aplicaciones de las nanotecnologías en la salud? Sería realmente posible llegar a miniaturizar seres vivos o los objetos inanimados? ¿Qué podemos pensar del vuelco de las dimensiones y magnitudes que se nos muestra en la película? De qué manera este viaje fantástico al que nos invita este film u otros de ciencia ficción nos ayudan a prefigurar el imaginario de lo que aún está por venir?

Participantes: Jara Rocha, Víctor Franco Puntas.

Moderador: Jordi Sánchez Navarro.

 +info: https://www.biennalciutaticiencia.barcelona/es/programa/cineforum-viaje-alucinante

Sinking Alloyances + Planetary Burial

 

Sinking Alloyances + Planetary Burial is the ninth entry to the ROCK REPO – an ongoing enquiry into computational, mineral time and matter.

Artist collective The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting) have created a new audiovisual installation (3D renderings, models, sound and text) presented at the newly transformed Eco Gallery at Wat Tyler Country Park.

Planetary estuary environments are recognised for their capacities to capture and store carbon, known as carbon sequestering. Quantified, measured and commodified as sinks for so-called ‘bluecarbon’, saltmarshes are rendered back into the flows of carbon trade.

This new artwork meditates on what it means to compute the volumes of carbon that are ‘buried’; the microbiomes and topologies, held together by root lattices of cordgrass in estuaries and mangroves across the world. Showing the liveliness and abundance of estuaries that is in excess of capture.

View on-line: http://ddivision.xyz/rockrepo/sinking/ (allow your browser to play sound).

Sound: Shadow Graphs, Katrina Burch aka Yoneda Lemma feat. Ultrasonic Dreams (2020), commissioned by Metal for the Estuary Festival 2021.

+ info about Estuary Festival 2021: https://www.estuaryfestival.com/

Bavemelieke Remnaceruno

 

Taller a cargo de Jara Rocha y txe

Jueves 27 de mayo de 2021, de 17 a 19 h

Sesión de atención oblicua con, desde y a través de Makebelieve Neuromancer.

Poniendo en circulación resonancias de primera y segunda fila en el entorno de la exposición y usando el formato de club efímero (cineclub, club de lectura, club de radioafición) como metodología de encuentro, observamos e invitamos a la materia y la semiótica a transformarse con dispositivos ajenos a los de la exposición, preguntándonos juntes qué repertorios se provocan con Makebelieve Neuromancer cuando comparten club con otras tecnologías de la atención.

Para ello, se invita a las personas que asistan a traer un objeto propio suscitado por la exposición. 

 Seguido de proyección "Pirate Boys" y coloquio con Pol Merchan: https://lacapella.barcelona/es/proyeccion-del-cortometraje-pirate-boys-de-pol-merchan-y-coloquio-virtual-con-el-artista

Aforo limitado, personas queer preferencia, con inscripción previa en: lacapella@bcn.cat

 https://lacapella.barcelona/es/bavemelieke-remnaceruno

From de-schooling to re-instruction: a couple of scenes of techno-political transformation in learning environments

 

'The de-schooling movement — advanced by Ivan Illich and others in the 1970s⁵ — argued for reducing the hegemony of formal instruction in education, aiming for an empowerment of diffused and emancipated forms of learning throughout society that could depart the normative and oppressive forms of top-to-bottom pedagogy of schooling institutions. Part of the analysis consisted in how normative social arrangements and institutional pedagogy form a reproductive loop informing and reinforcing each other, which works by keeping formal schooling as the fundamental site for learning. The constructive part of the proposal, which included computer-aided “learning webs” as possible informal arrangements for self-directed education, ironically clashes with the harsh reality of the large and centralized computationalist⁶ empires that relegate informal and self-directed exchanges to the periphery of the Internet. Moreover, the social arrangements and extractive behaviors that these giants enact are entering the reproductive loop described above via their privative infrastructures and commercial apparatuses, with their pedagogy-disguised-as-a-service. This outright *re-instruction of education is ongoing, business as usual, but it is not inevitable nor unopposed.

As this re-instruction of learning environments carries dangers and damages, as well as openings and possibilities in multiple forms, we felt the need to reflect on, and tackle this complexity in the form of different “scenes”, attending closely to their different aspects and agents. Describing is one step. Problematizing is another. Indicating simultaneous potentialities is hopefully a third one. Because when things get mixed, when vibration takes place and unhinging occur, there is always a potential to try otherwise and actively engage in a re-arrangement in other terms and by differentiated means, with more just, politicized and solidary forces.'

 

Full text, in L'Internationale Online: https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1064_from_de_schooling_to_re_instruction_a_couple_of_scenes_of_techno_political_transformation_in_learning_environments/

The Relearning Series:  https://constantvzw.org/wefts/relearningseries.en.html

Tecnológicamente diversas / Seminario erro(re)tik / Tabakalera

Desviado (desde el error) y radical (desde la raíz) 

Desviado porque es un espacio en el que se propone generar aprendizaje a partir del error. Se quiere poner el foco en modos de hacer abiertos a lo que no esperábamos que sucediera, y alejarnos de pensar las prácticas educativas como totalitarias, absolutas e impenetrables. Porque desde esos otros lugares es más posible señalar la norma: eso que no se ve pero que nos disciplina con toda su violencia.

Radical porque se quieren generar cambios desde la raíz. Cambios que puedan afectar no sólo a los programas sino también a las estructuras de la institución cultural, y que permitan pensar radicalmente sobre nociones como el cuidado, lo comunitario, o la participación. Que nos fuercen a salir de los espacios de confort para ocupar-visibilizar-señalar otros lugares: los no amables, los no centrales, los que desde la norma no se quieren ver. Los que tienen toda la capacidad de resistencia.

erro(re)tik es una reflexión de largo recorrido que repiensa términos como diversidad, cuidados, comunidad, o inclusión. Se materializa en 3 líneas de trabajo: un proceso de mediación y comunidad bajo los ejes de salud mental, cuidados y diversidad; una serie de formaciones que afectan al equipo, los programas y los modos de trabajo de Tabakalera; y dos programas públicos como este que presentamos y que tendrá lugar entre el 12 y 15 de mayo de 2021.

Taller "Tecnológicamente diversas"

¿Qué supone afirmar que las tecnologías afectan a nuestras prácticas, pero nuestras prácticas también afectan a las tecnologías? ¿Qué espacios, tiempos, sensibilidades, memorias e invenciones participan en esos afectos de dos (o al menos dos) direcciones? ¿Cómo recortan o amplían esa zona de afectos condiciones -a menudo decididas desde lugares ajenos- como la usabilidad, la accesibilidad, la legibilidad, la comodidad, la universalidad o la obsolescencia? ¿Qué supone auto-legitimarnos para una participación radical en los afectos diversos con, a través y a pesar de las tecnologías que marcan cómo pasa el día a día para cualquiera?

En este taller pondremos sobre la mesa elementos muy dispares, desde manifiestos hasta anécdotas, pasando por fallos, errores, grietas y reparaciones. Con ellos, compartiremos visual, sonora, textual y oralmente experiencias y especulaciones; juntes y atentes: hacia adelante, hacia atrás, hacia adentro y hacia los lados de las tecnologías con las que somos.

+ info: https://www.tabakalera.eus/es/erroretik-seminario-desviado

Regímenes del volumen [conferencia]

05.05.2021 16:00h UY (= 21h CEST)

[Presentación a cargo de Jara Rocha, de una investigación colaborativa al cuidado tanto de Jara Rocha como de Femke Snelting, en la que también participan muchxs otrxs]

La computación del 3D ha co-evolucionado históricamente con las tecnociencias modernas y se ha alineado con los regímenes de optimización, normalización y de orden mundial hegemónico. Los legados y las proyecciones del desarrollo industrial dejan huellas de ese imaginario y cuentan las historias de una tensión muy viva entre «lo probable» y «lo posible». Definida como el conjunto de técnicas de medición del volumen, la volumetría (re)produce y acentúa con demasiada agilidad lo probable, y este proceso se intensifica en el ámbito tecnocrático de la hipercomputación contemporánea. La ubicuidad de las operaciones eficientes es profundamente perjudicial por el modo en que gradualmente agota el mundo y lo despoja de toda posibilidad de compromiso, interporosidad y potencia vitalista, solidaria e inventiva. «Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence« es el esfuerzo de Jara Rocha y Femke Snelting para proponer una investigación interseccional urgente sobre la volumetría, poniendo en primer plano las prácticas procedimentales, teóricas, estéticas y de infraestructura que proveen con una ampliación de lo posible.

Volumetric Regimes surge de Possible Bodies, un proyecto de colaboración en la intersección entre la investigación artística y la para-académica. El proyecto se inició en 2016 para explorar las entidades muy concretas y al mismo tiempo complejas y ficticias que suponen los llamados «cuerpos» en el contexto de la computación 3D. Esta investigación ha reunido diversos materiales en una conversación continua entre artistas, desarrolladorxs de software y teóriquxs que trabajan con técnicas y tecnologías para detectar, rastrear, imprimir, modelar y renderizar volúmenes.

Jara Rocha trabaja a través de las situadas y complejas formas de distribución de lo tecnológico con una sensibilidad antifa y trans*feminista. Con una curiosa confianza en la logística transtextual y una clara tendencia a la profanación de los modos, suele encontrarse en tareas de remediación, investigación-acción y comisariado in(ter)dependiente. Las principales áreas de estudio tienen que ver con las materialidades semióticas de las urgencias políticas.

Femke Snelting desarrolla proyectos en la intersección del diseño, los feminismos y el software libre. En varias constelaciones, explora cómo las herramientas y las prácticas digitales puedenco-construirse mutuamente. Femke es miembro de Constant, asociación de arte y medios con sede en Bruselas, y colabora con Possible Bodies, The Underground Division y The Institute for Technology in The Public Interest.

+ info e inscripciones: http://faptek.com/conferencia/volumetric-regimes/

>>>> ...o incluso aquí <<<<