This session invites participants to think about networked sociability online. Inspired by the Fediverse * and science-fiction, the participants will have to speculate on the mediation of online sociability by setting its conditions, configuration and actions.
* The Fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.
This online session will alternate moments of connection and disconnect, collective reading, practical experiments and disconnected discoveries.
24 February 2021, 11:00 - 17:00
Wendy Van Wynsberghe + Elodie Mugrefya
Speculating on networked interdependencies and relationality
28 April 2021
Femke Snelting + Seda Gürses
Obfuscation: Hiding trees among the forest
SCHEDULE
10.00 - 12.00 part I
15.00 - 17.00 part II
31 March 2021
VARIA
Minimal Viable Learning
03 Februari 2021, 11:00 - 16:00
Monday Readings: (Martino Morandi + Jara Rocha)
Screen No Deal
What we learn and how we learn are closely related.
Now that digital learning seems to have become a new norm, it is important to be able to read and understand the digital tools and to let artistic knowledge play a role in this.
These close reading sessions inspect and question our existing digital infrastructures.
Participation to the sessions is open for artists, designers, thinkers and doers, administrators, teachers and students interested in technology.
Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures
4 sessions on digital tools and learning in artistic contexts.
Description
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Integrating a critical and creative attitude towards the tools for digital education that we use in KASK is crucial in order to bring them closer together to desirable practices of teaching art and design. Claiming the digital space for artistic-educational applications starts with an analysis of its (digital) materiality, daring to play and speculate with it in order to formulate artistic forward-looking proposals.
This project takes its own digital infrastructure as a starting point for close-reading sessions. We start from the needs and requirements within the artistic KASK community. Infrastructure is both technical and ethical, legal and speculative, economic and political: it consists of cables and servers, social environments, laws and regulations, licenses and relations between human beings and other beings. The sessions make connections between the various infrastructural aspects.
Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures starts from an F/LOSS perspective. (Free Libre Open Source Software) Participants get acquainted with F/LOSS software and methods.
The sessions are for artists, designers, thinkers and doers, administrators, teachers and students interested in technology.
Book by sending an email to: peter@constantvzw.org.
This project is a collaboration with Constant association for Art and Media working at the intersection of art and technology.
Context
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Design, like other artistic disciplines, has more and more to do with digital contexts. Teachers and students most likely touch a networked computer somewhere in the artistic process. For Autonomous Design it is important to reflect on the material side: what does a network consist of, what are the consequences of its use? (ecological, social, political, etc. ...) This enables us to think like creative minds about technology, how to influence it, to co-determine it, to hack it, and to make it ourselves.
Design and art have a social role to play in formulating new imaginations and it is urgent to set out new orientations for the technology we want. The sessions help students to position themselves autonomously in relation to the tools we use, and it can inspire us to conceptualize and design new tools, deal with (infra)structures, digital behaviors and ways of making.
The project is also relevant for KASK because it brings in and promotes knowledge of alternative digital practices in the training. This trajectory enables us to get acquainted with F/LOSS practices and develop them together. It is urgent that we (teaching staff, administrative and technical staff and students) work on our understanding of the politics and operation of the tools and infrastructures we use on a daily basis.
During this session, we will explore minimal viable forms of learning with Etherpad. Etherpad is a collaborative text editor that is often used within the practices of Varia members and their peer networks. During this day, we will focus on exploring and rediscovering principles of calm technology and minimal computing, while stretching both the software and our understandings of what online pedagogical places could be.
About
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Varia is a collective-space in Rotterdam working with/through/around everyday technology. The group of Varia members includes artists, designers, programmers, educators and cultural workers, involved in techo-social practices in the cultural field. Within Varia, we try to make space for conceiving technology in its social context. The latter has been an important ground for us to work with forms of collective infrastructures, free software tools and technofeminist practices.
1:
Sessions are English spoken
Register by sending an email to: peter@constantvzw.org
Monday Readings: Screen No Deal
Monday Readings are a series of convivial situations to research our technological and infrastructural inter-dependencies. They bring our everyday technical encounters in conversation with theoretical and political thinking, by close-reading technologies as if they were texts, and viceversa.
This session will create a moment to unfold the different layers of the collective experience of a "Screen New Deal", a term proposed by Naomi Klein to describe the recent period in which videoconferencing and rectangularised communication became the new norm for all aspects of everyday life. In particular we will discuss what this meant and means for the realm of education, how certain software platforms silently creep in new forms of pedagogy, what critiques and potential alternatives were brought as forms of resistance to this new problematic default.
ONLINE SESSION
https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/mar-gkt-ueh-7wq
The session is subdivided in two parts: first a practical exercise that will take place in and on video-conferencing platforms, then a reading of short texts that explore the same techno-political densities that have been experienced hands-on in the first part of the day.
Timing
11.00 - 13.00 part 1
14.00 - 16.00 part 2
Bio's
Martino Morandi wrote this bio text on a QWERTY keyboard on a Lenovo laptop on a seat of a Trenord train moving on the italian RFI rails, running on electricity from state hydro-electric power plants on the Alps. He researches the tangle of and our entanglements with these elements and is interested in the politics of our interactions with technology at different scales, from power plants to bio texts.
Jara Rocha works through the situated and complex forms of distribution of the technological with a trans*feminist sensibility. With a curious confidence in transtextual logistics and a clear tendency to profanate modes, tends to be found in tasks of remediation, action-research and in(ter)dependent curatorship. Main areas of study have to do with the semiotic materialities of political urgencies. Always together with companions, they work on projects like The Underground Division: an emerging research on the co-constitution of 3D imaginations and the so-called body of the earth, Volumetric Regimes on patriarchocolonial turbocapitalist volumetrics, Naturoculturas son disturbios (a monthly program at a community radio in Barcelona) or Vibes & Leaks on mediated embodiments of voices.
http://jararocha.blogspot.com/
Minimalism is for us a departure point to make space for other possible forms of technologically mediated learning. In the last months, learning, with all its communal and convivial aspects, turned into an online-only endeavour. This sudden transition didn’t leave much room to make a judicious choice of modes of interaction, communication tools, utilised services and platforms. Within educational organisations, we witness a double movement: on the one hand, a centralisation of all activities by means of the software suite (e.g. Microsoft Teams); on the other hand, the standardisation of a maximalist mode of communication meant to replicate class interactions (e.g. videocalls).
How can minimal technologies maximise a learning experience?
What could 'minimum' 'viable' 'learning' be?
Expect: |__MAGICWORDS__|, padtiquettes and collective reading of texts speaking about /minimal computing/ and /viable learning/.
2:
3:
4:
During this session, Seda Guerses and Femke Snelting will share concrete cases, readings, art-projects and hands-on exercises to explore how obfuscation strategies might evade surveillance, protect privacy and improve security. But could it also be a way to protest, contest, resist and sabotage the increasing grasp that technology has on managing our daily lives?
The pandemic condition intensified our dependency on technologies that survey, extract and optimize data-flows. This changes social, workplace, political, health and educational spheres where technical systems have become central and inescapable. Whether you book your jury via Eventbrite, join an on-line class in Zoom, get notified by your Coronalert app, chat with your colleagues in MS-Teams or work for Deliveroo, the digital expands into the physical to govern both the human and the more-than-human.
Obfuscation methods render data more ambiguous, difficult to exploit and interpret, less useful. They rely on the addition of gibberish, meaningless data; they pollute, add noise, randomize. Obfuscation invokes an intuitive form of protection: it distorts that which is visible to render it less (or in)visible. It hides the trees among the forest.
ONLINE SESSION
https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/elo-mkk-2je
Timing
Wednesday 24th February
11h00-11h50 : Introduction to the Fediverse and speculation practices (connected)
11h50-12h30 : Reading an excerpt of science fiction (disconnected)
12h30-13h30 : BREAK
13h30-15h00 : Collective writing exercise (disconnected)
15h00-16h00 : Discussing the results (connected)
The session will be guided by Elodie Mugrefya and Wendy Van Wynsberghe, both members of Constant.
ONLINE SESSION
https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/rdi-ft-minimal-viable-learning
Seda Guerses
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is a member of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, TU Delft in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems, and also a member of Constant. Her work focuses on privacy enhancing and protective optimization technologies (PETs and POTs), privacy engineering, as well as questions around software infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science. http://vous-etes-ici.net
Femke Snelting
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works as an artist and researcher, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software. In various constellations, she explores how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. Femke is member of Constant, and collaborates as/in Possible Bodies and The Underground Division. http://snelting.domainepublic.net
With Helen Pritchard and Miriyam Aouragh, Seda and Femke initiated The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists. Together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. http://titipi.org
ONLINE SESSION
https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/elo-mkk-2je