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

1m2 - on (off) extitutions

These past weeks we've been lucky to have Femke Snelting in Madrid. >>> I've had the opportunity to have a couple of very very interesting conversations on interfaces with her, and I think we might be re-taking our informal research on interface criticism and politics from now on.

 So... first (clumsy) notes:


/////// On (off) extitutions // Tactical interfaces

>> Looking at interfaces is key to understand sets of relations (->> systems), as they are the assemblage surfaces that facilitate some connections and not others (some performativities and not others).

Interfaces show us the affordances of the agents they connect to (or not).

.. // How can we build interfaces that have space for political affections, that have / sustain critical affordances?

//// performativity → defined through gesture(s) >> Interface → studied from the performativities that are permitted and/or that emerge from it = “zone of affordances”

.. // Hermeneutics of gesture → analysis of the set of gestures that are applied in each set of relations (system) >> Interface is key to understand sets of relations (->>systems), as they are the assemblage surfaces that facilitate some connections and not others (some performativities and not others) → interfaces show us the affordances of the agents they connect to (or not).

.. // The 'if' way of constructing systems is very much based on: Competences: what you can do / affordances: what you might do possible responses.

 .. // So, interfaces are affordance-spaces that we must study, applying what we'll call “the hermeneutics of gesture”: performative interpretation (based on connecting)

>> Hermeneutics of gesture can/could be applied in “interpretation centres” or “hermeneutic spaces”. Interfaces – mediations – extitutions – hermeneutics

 -------------- Italo Svevo Mediating mediation. Layers of interfaces. If everything is an interface, what should we talk about? rendering practice of mediating why did you not make an auto-ethnography Sciences have strategies of rendering. The problem of rendering. mediating gradients models of governance are needed scale, gradient, ... who defines the protocol -- complex cultural eco-systems experimenting mixing generative mediation

 -------------- How to account for the fact that interfaces are often malleable, respond to gestures and not only orient/suggest/direct/shape them? How to go from interpretation to creation? Can we close the loop of hermeneutics – gestures – interfaces?


.. // Can we think of a form of interface that goes deeper than skin, that is compliant rather then surface, that permeates both human and machine (or institution and audience, or …)?

>>> I'm trying to think of mediation as something that is not independent from the medium that it is operated upon, nor from the operation itself.

.. // Would an 'interrogable' interface be more interesting than one that resists interpretation?

>> What would be the performativity of the interface itself, thinking about it as not a separate/separable element but a space that is intimately interlinked with human bodies, thoughts, imagination? …?