Digital Discomfort: Read-Write-Chaos

 Date: Friday, 19 January 2024 [NEW DATE]

Time: 13:00 - 18:00 (free dinner for participants)

Location: Varia, (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

Note: this session will be held in English

Participation: is limited, to join please send an email to info@varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject.

 

The Digital Discomfort Working Group proposes a one-day gathering to collectivelly engage with the questions and praxis of discomfort aesthetics as a potential form of contemporary (techno)political resistance.

As a tentative situation, we propose read-write-chaos as a method, in order to provide ourselves and others with a spacetime for attending to the emisions, erasures, receptions and recursions of a multiplicity of computationally mundane inscriptions, semiotics and poethics. Digital Discomfort can be understood in many ways (geopolitically, somatically, informatically), but on this occasion we propose to stay close to the aesthetic component of it. Or in other words: to explore discomfort as a queer aesthetics with potential of performing resistance, underwhelmedness and resilience. It is perhaps capable of adding up to what circulates as sensible matter as well as what gets to be experienced by means of friction, slowness, fun difficulty and/or surprising obliqueness in a too linear, too seamless, tending-to-flattenness digital everyday. Read-write chaotic struggle for awlessness might emerge in the midst of spreadsheets, in the making of complex diagrams, in the mess of collective text annotation or in the middle of mumbling discussions.

Cared for by Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, the open-ended research on Digital Discomfort learns, dialogues, and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with what science and technology scholar and ecofeminist Donna Haraway calls the “informatics of domination,” and what could be referred to as “totalitarian innovation.” From within and beyond specific (infra)structures, CfDD’s drive is to operate as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic research on, across, and despite the techno-colonial establishment of BigTech. CfDD undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study non-Eurocentric/white origins of computational paradigms and to propose instead trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures, and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility in the online structures we inhabit. With “Digital Discomfort, CfDD continue their collective study of cultures and practices of computation and invites other reflections, grammars, and actions that contribute to a plurality of inter-dependent, anti-colonial, trans*feminist, anti-ableist, and environmentally just worldmaking practices of computation.

This event will take place on location at Varia and English will be the main language of operation. To sign up, please send an email to info[at]varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject header and please indicate if you have any needs to access the events that are not addressed on this page: https://varia.zone/en/pages/accessibility.html or any dietary restrictions.

Booklaunch | Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence

"Volumetric Regimes makes an essential contribution to the ways in which we must rethink matter politically and ecologically. As the book unfolds, ontological questions of intensities, dimensions, and substance are denaturalised as mere properties of matter that can be measured, modified, and thus computed, which today are exemplified by 3D modelling and parametric design, but are shown to be part of processional life-worlds that relational and mutually informed and informing. Not the partitioning of bodies, particles, datapoints, and spaces as techno-capital and techno-science would have it but a material enmeshment that brings the volumetric into presence otherwise."  – Susan Schuppli

“This radical multi-form collective investigation traces the cutting edge of how bodies and subjects are rendered technologically. It proposes multi-dimensional forms of intervention, and claims an experimental horizon of the possible, shattering the mantra of unavoidability.” — Olga Goriunova

 

To download the pdf and/or order a paper copy on-line: 

http://data-browser.net/db08.html

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/volumetric-regimes/ 

Six years of trans*feminist disobedient action-research on 3D technologies, paradigms and procedures culminated in Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press 2022, DATA-browser series, eds. Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa). Compiled by Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha), the publication brings together diverse materials on the political, aesthetic, computational and relational regimes in which volumes are calculated. The book foregrounds technological practices that invite widenings of what is possible. With contributions by Sophie Boiron, Maria Dada, Pierre Huyghebaert, Phil Langley, Nicolas Malevé, Romi Ron Morrison, Simone C. Niquille, Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Sina Seifee, Femke Snelting and Kym Ward.

Tuesday 4 October 20:00 – 22:00 @ Varia, Rotterdam (NL)
https://varia.zone/booklaunch-volumetric-regimes.html

The event at Varia celebrates the wiki-to-print paper edition designed and developed by Manetta Berends. It is a special moment in an ongoing multi-local launch, made up of playful contributions, informal responses and interactive formats proposed by comrades in the making of technosciences otherwise.

The evening starts with a performative introduction by the editors, followed by an intervention by designer, artist and researcher Alex Zakkas in conversation with Manetta Berends.

Books will be sold at the event at a reduced price.
All materials have also been published on a dedicated wiki: https://volumetricregimes.xyz/

Volumetric Regimes is produced with support from London South Bank University and Liverpool John Moores University.

(pic by Varia https://varia.zone/archive/2022-10-04-Volumetric-Regimes-booklaunch/)

A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (+radio broadcast)

 

A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) is a collaborative project formed around intersectional feminist, ecological servers. Understanding servers as computers that host space and services for communities around them, this project exists inside, and in between, roaming servers and different networks. Our decentralized programme will occur in 5 locations (The Netherlands, Belgium, Romania, Greece, Austria) with the collaboration of 6 partners (Varia, LURK, Constant, HYPHA, Feminist Hack Meetings, and ESC).

In the first session, hosted in Varia, we will focus on tools and methods to make space for understanding what feminist publishing infrastructures could be. During the weekend of March 26 and 27, we will be experimenting with publishing infrastructures. The tools and methods that will emerge can later be used for further knowledge sharing as the project moves location and the programme evolves.

The session in Varia will kick-off with a public radio broadcast on the evening of Wednesday the 23rd of March. For this broadcast, we will be joined by two practitioners who have been working on and around feminist and activist servers: Spideralex and Danae Tapia. 

+ info at Varia's site <3 https://varia.zone/en/atnofs-varia.html 

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

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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.

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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)
  

Relearn curved. First curl: Rotterdam/Varia

For the Rotterdam control point on the Relearn curve, we propose to together attend to a subject zone (*) where different digital network practices intersect. This subject zone can morph into multiple directions throughout the session. Our specific interest is in how publishing formats (**) operate with/on/through this zone.

* There are many questions in the air when we start to speak about digital infrastructures, hosters, servers, services, networks and their technical realities. Instead of picking one and diving deeper, we thought it would be more interesting to present a range and explore different vocabularies, protocols, technologies, infrastructures. We invite you to join Relearn to stretch this zone, starting from or moving towards:

• ▝   digital interdependencies
• ▘   affective infrastructures
• ▝   homebrew networks
• ▗   networked entanglements
• ▖   feminist servers
• ▖   federated networks
• ▝   and-and-networks
• ▚   digital autonomy
• ▖   transitional infrastructures
• ▞   digital selves-organisations
• ▖   so-and-sovereignty networks
• ▝   out-of-the-cloud thinking
• ▚   …

** We’re curious about learning through publishing formats. The different publishing formats serve as an invitation to embed ourselves within the subject zone of digital networks. How can these formats be our morphable lenses, that we use to relearn digital networks? Starting from or moving towards:

• ▝   multiple readers
• ▖   cross-readings created through algorithms
• ▞   logbooks
• ▝   syllabi
• ▚   documentation
• ▖   annotations
• ▝   cookbooks
• ▖   tutorials
• ▚   README
• ▖   bug reports
• ▗   link dumps
• ▝   scores
• ▖   …

Many sub-trajectories can emerge from here during the days, without the need of taking the same path or agreeing about vocabularies or geometries altogether.

+ info: http://relearn.be/2019/
+: http://varia.zone/