next-Iterations broadcasting event & publication presentation

Over the past three years, Iterations has been a beautiful ride through the landscape of artistic collaboration. Now, there is a publication. We invite you to discover the many new starting points it offers during next-Iterations, a two-day contemplative, playfully experimental and festive online event.

Join Sunday 17 May for a programme with contributions ranging from live radio transmissions to body exercises, talks, soundscapes and visual interventions.

next-Iterations starts at 13:00 with an introduction to the publication by editors-designers Jara Rocha and Manetta Berends.

Too early for a lazy weekend start-up? Come and co-inquire feminist infrastructures of support with Spideralex between 15:15 and 16:00, or partake in networked sonic spell-casting with Kym Ward at 16:30.

Did intensive listening make you thirsty? Join us at 18:15 in the IRC-BAR for ’collaborative’ cocktails prepared by the Rica Rickson collective.
Doesn’t fit your schedule? At all times you can pick up the
next-Iterations audio-stream from the website https://iterations.space/live and enjoy it in your preferred (off-screen?) environment.

Did the project Iterations escape your attention and now you are curious what it was all about? The organisers compact flashbacks, details, intentions and outcomes in a Pandipodium summary review on Monday 18 May between 13:30-14:15.

+ info: http://constantvzw.org/site/next-Iterations.html?lang=en

Ageing companions / Geprogrammeerde veroudering / Les cyborgs vieillissants

Ageing companions explores the interconnected ageing of bodies and technologies.

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. The ageing processes of biological and technological merge and it is not always so clear whether we are faced with physical or programmed obsolescence.

The worksession takes place from 17 until 23 June 2018 in the kunstenwerkplaats and gemeenschapscentrum De Pianofabriek, Brussels.

+ info: http://constantvzw.org/site/-Ageing-companions-.html

testeo de texteo del sur: una ficción política

primera aproximación a la posibilidad de estudiar de forma más detenida y compleja el sur como ficción política. La materia base para atender a su comportamiento es la del lenguajeo, ya sea en composición textualizada, oral o en código ejecutable:

The term “South” brings a not-only geographically located nor a strictly territorial problematic: it invokes an ontological, constitutive and transversal construct, a structural management of life. Better said: South is infrastructural, if we consider any apparatus (Agamben) to be infrastructural once it affects semiotic-material flows at a certain scale and under a certain regime of standardisation. 

(...)

Politics magnetizes around the conditions of possibilities. A politics of the possible implies to understand that its very key objective is the transformation of desire by accessible means. Fictional works are powerful techniques to widen desire in the shape of “the possible”. Fictions jump over the given – “the probable” – as imaginations that are expanded, projected, constructed, diffracted and cared-about. Often they function as proposals, other times as ready-to-go scripts and usually as hands-on instructables. They offer worldviews that might operate as blueprints for the immediate. And they can be quite affordable, too. Taking and applying fiction for affecting the conditions of possibility as a plan risks to be understood as a mere “goodist” proposal, almost naïve or only tactical. Quite differently, political fictions are at the fundament of the shared world we build on a daily basis. The Modern Project is one of the most evident and sophisticated fictions: operating collectively, unfolding along all its variations of techno-scientific and socio-cultural components. Political fictions have a leading role at the composition and adaptation of the possible in terms of their all-scale, all-durabilities, all-tangibility gradients of materiality, subjectivities and collectivities.

Texto completo, elaborado en el marco del Phd Workshop "Machine Research" organizado por Aarhus University, Constant y Transmediale: https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/jara-rocha/ 

MONDOTHEQUE::UN LIVRE IRRADIANT / A RADIATING BOOK / EEN IRRADIËREND BOEK

In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as a mix between documentation center, conference venue and educational display. "The Mundaneum is an Idea, an Institution, a Method, a Body of workmaterials and collections, a Building, a Network." (Paul Otlet, Monde)

In 2013 a band of artists, archivists and activists set out to unravel the many implications of a statement that routinely compared the Mundaneum to "Google on paper". Under the moniker Mondotheque they organised discussions, reflections and workshops in various locations. A Semantic MediaWiki functioned as a platform for writing, editing and bookdesign. The publication of Mondotheque::a radiating book creates a moment, an incision into this collaborative process. It is an invitation into the entanglements of knowledge infrastructures, geo-politics and local histories.

 24-25sept
+ info: http://www.mondotheque.be
  

Software as a Critique

What: Software as a Critique (Discussion)
Where: LAG
1e, Schinkelstraat 14-16, 1075 TX Amsterdam
When: Sunday 14 February 14:00-18:00

A discussion introduced by software cases like Pattern for Python, Faircoin Wallet, MakeHuman, The Unicode Standards.

With: Kym Ward, Aymeric Mansoux, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, Femke Snelting, Dick Reckard.


Due to the importance and ubiquity of software in our lives, it is urgent to recognise and deal with the political and social elements that are translated into the technical domain and vice versa. Looking from the technical side, code often replicates existing
social constructions, reinforcing existing hegemonies or mirroring cultural patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Conversely, technological elements have their own political agency, beyond conventional parliamentary politics, aiming for example towards efficiency, quantification, transparency.

In this afternoon meeting, we will start by looking at the interactions between technical and non-technical aspects of specific pieces of software that raise political or ethical issues. We’ll be looking at questions like: What happens when you translate a body into a 3D mesh? What variety of people are involved in crypto-currencies, and how do their different political views transfer into decentralised banking systems? Who decides how we get to choose our gender from drop-down menus, and who benefits from a multiplicity of options? What is at stake in the challenge of a machine that writes poetry?

After considering how such questions translate in potential and existing software practices, we’d like to discuss whether they could inform a kind of critique that is not confined to the spaces of artistic or academic discourse. Can these approaches and methodologies create a space of critique inside software-centered communities that is not segregated from its productive practices?

Please find more information following the link below:


http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Software-as-a-Critique.html

TONGUES IN THE MAKING

Acaba de publicarse el libro del proyecto de archivo de oralidad "Parlez-vous Saint-Gillois?".

Info gral. del proyecto, y expo/acciones relacionadas:
http://www.constantvzw.org/site/-Parlez-vous-Saint-Gillois,187-.html?lang=en

La publicación se puede descargar completa y libremente aquí: 

http://parlezvous1060.be/media/publication.pdf

Y el proyecto se puede visitar/escuchar/leer aquí: 

http://parlezvous1060.be/p/info/

Participé con una contribución textual: Tongues in the making (pág. 89)

REROAM worksessions

(at Relearn Summerschool - Variable - Schaerbeek - BXL - 6-11 june 2014 )

Chairs attached to a school fence, signifying the school is en toma [occupied] (Chile, 2011)

What would it mean to design a school in terms of a nomadic learning   situation? Probably we need to think differently about its physical   characteristics as well as its location and access to pedagogical resources. Then: what is a pedagogical resource? What is the meaning of   "learning infrastructure"? What would an itinerant educational object   look like, and how would it be produced and shared? Do educational   objects actually "learn"? How?

Reroam  proposes daily exercises, a collection of present models, experiences  and theories that examine the physical situations  where learning  happens. Thinking through conviviality and discomfort, we  look for  spaces that would facilitate disensus.Taking our bodies into  account,  we will take a moment every day to speculate together about  ways that  we could make re-learning situations physical.

Prepared by: Catherine Lenoble, Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting

+info: http://relearn.be/ 
(+ soon on schedule)

Relearn 2014 (Variable, BXL)

Relearn is a summerschool with as many teachers as it has participants. It is about sharing and trying Free Culture practices, and is entirely done with Free, Libre and Open Source software. Relearn takes place in Variable, a collectively run F/LOSS Arts Lab in Brussels. It starts from the idea that tools are increasingly mediated by software and the algorithmic and legal dynamics that constraint and shape its use. Reconnecting to the physical and digital material of those tools is a means of (re)asserting ownership and ensuring active participation in the future of our work practices.

Relearn starts on Sunday July 6 at 11:00 and ends Friday 11 July at 19:00
It takes place in Variable, Rue Gallait 80, Brussels.

+info: http://relearn.be/
+references: http://relearn.be/r/pedagogy::references
+schedule: http://osp.constantvzw.org:9999/p/summer-school-2014-schedule

Are you being served? / On s'occupe de vous? / Wordt u al geholpen?

de hoy al domingo, en BXL > Festival Verbindingen / Jonctions 14

A feminist review of experimental (mesh - cloud - autonomous - DIY) server technologies 

"To stay connected across multiple devices, we have come to expect unlimited access, provided by companies that traffic large amounts of data as a result. The necessary infrastructure that is put in place effects our understanding of place, both virtually and physically and it has become increasingly difficult to be intimate with the technologies that we feel familiar with. We started to wonder about what would make current networking technologies into hospitable habitats for critique, as space for artists and solidarity, teaching and learning.

What does it mean to serve and to host? What should server technology of today be about? How to re-appropriate networks for creative experiment? How to invert, detour, parasite and deflate web 3.0 notions of ’service’?"

+ Programa para descarga: http://constantvzw.org/vj14/documents/