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

relearn 2015 - call for porposals

Relearn starts from FLOSS culture and practices as a way to address the production processes and frameworks involving technology and culture, in the beginning in the field of graphic design, and in the second edition expanding to production and education in broader terms. A proposal for this third edition is to continue by focusing on technology as such.

Questioning what it consists of, how it 'functions', and challenging the traditional narratives on it. In this moment in which any social, political and personal problem seems to be approached with a technological solution, it feels urgent to rework the assumptions and conceptions we have of technology.

To give an idea of this kind of perspective, there were some interesting questions resulting from past events, as the following: What's the difference between 'tech' and 'technology'? How does a file system relate to an office? Can anything digital be 'immaterial', when it sits in data-centers or it moves over infrastructures? What happens when computing becomes 'invisible'? Are interface-design, packaging and blackboxing similar processes, how do they influence our relation to an object? How do user-friendliness and efficiency determine the way software and devices are developed? 

Hopefully this way of thinking about tools, networks and infrastructures can influence the summer school tracks, offering transversal elements to connect some points in the different worksessions, in relation to one's own practices and tools.

call for proposals. 
NOW. HERE:  

http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/relearn_2015_proposals


+ info: http://relearn.be/r/about.html 

exquisite corpse -- unfolded

Steph Alarcon, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Tamsyn Gilbert, Seda Gurses, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting and Sophie Toubin collaborate to examine feminism, technology and the digital.

[extract from New Critical's exquisite corpse:]

In order to better understand the materialities of our (digital) present world-making, a speculative crossing of four topological vectors is proposed here for a (sintetic though) multilayered approach to the processes of social (often soft) mattering we are involved in.

Our ethic, politic, erotic and aesthetic systems, also from a technological point of view, are strongly affected by a dense repertory of gestures and agencies upon which we (humans) have only a tiny aprehension margin. This is why it might be interesting to first, when talking about these complex systems, declare a suspension of hierarchical cartesian judgement and storytelling (based on the subject-object dychotomy) and perhaps try to apply what ANT scholars have named the “principle of radical symmetry”. This will help on two fronts: 1) test de-anthropocentrified ontologies and 2) get away of essentialist approaches to somatic entities.

Also, and attending to the call of the Invisible Committee to think beyond civil liberties and go deep into the logistic composition of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic equipments for life, a close look at infrastructures functioning can help us learn more about governance of the material world. Notions of scale and standarization in this vector are plausibly issues to deal with if an idea of autonomous shaping and caring of infrastructures is brough upon the table.

In realtion to infrastructures, there is a third tensor that clearly operates when dealing with power relations (in gender, class, race or species): that of the reproductive economies. Historically invisible, the tactics for sustainability, resilience and ultimate survival of communities are displayed by crucial agents who/which set up the basic conditions of possibility for life in its more radical materiality. Following that line of thought: how about talking about reproductive technologies in a wider sense?

Soft power is a key concept to understand relationality in our present ecosystems. This is why the notion of extitution brought up by Serres in Atlas can help in going beyond the inside-outside structuring of  institutions and perhaps test a connected-disconnected logic. Daniel López insightfully proposes to think of this vector in terms of processes of extitutionalization. This shift could be useful get rid of pre-established forms (strong identities, social organizations, geopolitical foldings, etc.).

What implications would it have to articulate this vectors in an applied-to-case/situtated manner? Would it help in challenging the imposed hegemonic regulation of social matters? Can we start practicing critical and active dispossession in relation to technologies?

Now, what would be the best way to identify and put into practice the potential in each of these topological vectors and their crossings? How can we both aprehend and be dispossessed from present semiotic-material establishment to unfold other common-world-making possibilities?

[the whole text can be accessed here: http://www.newcriticals.com/exquisite-corpse/print ]

THF!

T H Ffeminist 
convergencia trans 
gente de todos los géneros 
disentir socialmente 
piratas guerrilla punto 
eclectic tech carnival
genderhacking

Calafou
del 4 al 11 de agosto


+ info aquí + aquí + aquí

difráctate

 difráctate.

UKI game level one @ Piksel.no

La semana que viene presentaremos UKI game level one [infect the city] en Piksel (Bergen, Noruega). Esta parte del proyecto transmedia IKU/UKI, empezó a desarrollarse en Medialab-Prado, y continuó en el SummerLab de LABoral (y posterior residencia).

Shu Lea Cheang estará simultaneamente presentando la performance de UKI en La Internacional Cuir (MNCARS), comisariada por Beatriz Preciado.

+info: http://www.u-k-i.co/

Gender Changer

(Buscando una imagen para el grupo de género y tecnología de Medialab-Prado).