Extended program

Printable program: vj13_EN.pdf

See also: Schedule / Participants / Locations

Situated reporters on-line: Wendy Tai (Hong Kong) and Karin Spaink (Amsterdam).

Activities marked * not available on-line.

Wednesday 30 November

11:00-13:00 Formal practice for the Commons
Discussion in Barcelona, response in Constant Variable.

In many countries, the world of higher education is on fire. Following the logic of the neocapitalistic paradigm and the idea of privatization, people have been putting fences around the commons declaring “this is mine”, excluding users, consumers and students by demanding entering fees and credits in order to have access to a space that should remain common. The intellectual property law is supporting and protecting corporations and institutions in order to manage creative flows of knowledge and ideas as scarce products that can be traded at the competitive market place. The legal exclusion is often executed by technical devices that we may understand as electronic fences for controlling the regulation of social access of the once common space. Formal practice for the Commons explore the practices, strategies and protocols trying to open breaches in the fences and reclaim a common space for knowledge production and sharing.

An online conversation with the team of Academy Commons based on a series of interviews made with Marina Garces (Espai en Blanc), Ignacio Labastida (Creative Commons), Montse Romani and the Fakultaet Null’s project.

13:00-14:00 Lunch*

14:00-18:00 GML-recorder
Documentation session in Constant Variable

Documentation session. In response to a challenge set by Evan Roth, Muharrem Yildirim proposed a device “that can unobtrusively record graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city”. We will collaboratively construct and document the device. We are looking for people that are interested in the device and like to hack electronics, write documentation, take pictures, make diagrams.

With: Muharrem Yildirim, Wendy Van Wynsberghe, Evan Roth.

Please let us know if you plan to join.

Thursday 1 December

10:00-18:00 Funzie Fonzie Readingmachine°
Worksession in Constant Variable and on-line

Initiated by Michael Korntheuer, the neighbours of Hackerspace Brussels constructed a DIY-bookscanner. During VJ13 the machine will be hosted in Constant Variable. It will be operated through Fonzie, a speculative software developed by Pierre Marchand, that converts physical to digital reading.
The reading process of the machine can be watched, understood, read, rewritten, changed and endlessly executed. This worksession explores the artistic potential of the different elements in the transmission from the physical book to the digital object: the code, the fonts, the training data, the book and the digitally born text.
Starting point is George Orwell’s text Books vs Cigarettes. You’re warmly invited to bring your own books!

10:00-13:00 Software tour: OCR, scanning, print-to-font, pdf
13:00-14:00 Lunch*
14:00-18:00 Writing exercises

With: Pierre Marchand, An Mertens, Catherine Lenoble, John Haltiwanger, Michael Korntheuer, CIS India.

Please let us know if you plan to join.

°Homage to Singer by Paul Van Ostaijen

20:00 Interactive opening*
Constant Variable

Inter-active introduction to V/J13 and vernissage of the on-line exhibition. Content + cocktails!

21:00 By Data We Mean
Presentation of V/J12 e-publication in Constant Variable

Presentation of an on-line edition of texts, images and reflections that followed from the previous edition of Jonctions/Verbindingen 12: By Data We Mean.

This publication collects the different texts that were produced for the lectures and presentation of VJ12. It also constitutes a platform for experiments. What becomes possible when texts are released under a free license? What happens when two texts apparently very different from each other, but with many points of contact at a second reading, are brought together, mixed, smashed, and suddenly acquire a completely different form and meaning? Isn’t every text ambiguous and being open to different interpretations? And how can the grey literature surrounding textual production influences the process of reading and decoding it?

With: Donatella Portoghese, Alex Leray, Stephanie Villayphiou, Nicolas Malevé.

Friday 2 December

10:00-18:00 EU in the making, an insider’s view through Parltrack and Pippilongstrings.
Worksession in Constant Variable

The European Union is producing laws that have a strong impact on our digital lives and their protocols. Monitoring the legal process in the making is of capital importance. This programme is an invitation to discover, use and discuss two tools Parltrack and Pippilongstrings. Parltrack aims to improve the transparency of legislative processes. By combining dossiers, MEPs, vote results and committee agendas into a unique database, it allows the tracking of dossiers. Pippilongstrings purpose is to identify strings of text that occur many times in the treaties, the acquis communautaire and in ECJ case law. Pippilongstrings assumes that such strings carry meaning. Like particular genes express the function of a protein, the law has its particular DNA sequences which express principles without which the law would not be regular, or predictable.
The morning session will be dedicated to the installation and documentation of pippilongstrings with its developer, Stefan Marsiske (familiarity with the Linux system is required).
The afternoon session will consist on discussions about the different uses of Parltrack and Pippilongstrings in the context of the EU. How these tools did and will help to detect problems and elaborate a political response to the many threats against a free digital culture. With Stefan Marsiske and Erik Josefsson.

10:00-13:00 Software run-through*
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-18:00 Round-table: Contexts for Pippilongstrings

With: Stefan Marsiske, Erik Josefsson and others.

Please let us know if you plan to join.

20:00 Graffiti Markup Language
Presentation in Recyclart

Evan Roth discusses Graffiti Markup Language (GML), a universal, XML-based, open file format designed to store graffiti motion data, and the results of ongoing collaborations between graffiti writers and computer hackers. He will also highlight the benefits of an open source learning and development model from his perspective as an artist, giving examples of his work that embodies principles such as “lazy like a fox” and “release early and often (and with rap music)”. In the context of Lick My Typo.

Also: launch of a publication based on conversations between Constant and Evan Roth about the collaborative powers of the GML-standard, contact points between hacker- and graffiti-cultures and the granularity of gesture.

With: Evan Roth

http://www.recyclart.info/nl/agenda/nl/0212

Saturday 3 December

10:30-18:00 Desktop D’Amis
Touring various locations in Brussels and on-line

Four visits to works that are hosted by ‘friends of Constant’. These digital works exist in a social, technical, economic context. They can be enjoyed on multi-purpose personal computers. Machines that are closely connected to the work, play, interests and where-abouts of its owners.

10:30-12:00 Renovas + La boutique de quartier + Kër-Thiossane
Verboekhovenplein 9 Place Verboekhoven
Online meeting with Senegalese filmmakers of the film Routines de Rencontres Dakar.

12:30-14:00 Zumba
Huart Hamoirlaan 24 Avenue Huart Hamoir

14:30-16:00 De Geslepen Potloden + Planapress
Vooruitgangsstraat 409 Rue de Progress
Paperstream of comics sent from “Planapress” publishers in Porto
follow uploaded drawings here: http://drawingloop.planapress.org/

16:30-18:00 Myriam Van Imschoot (Sarma) + Nathaniel Stern
Louis Bertrandlaan 104 Avenue Louis Bertrand
Online meeting with Nataniel Stern about compressionist photography.

20:00-23:00 ProtoFest
Constant Variable

An avalanche of small, short, quick presentations of and by people, projects, protocols and prototypes.

With: Objscrnotations (An Mertens), The Kissing Protocol – subject to change (Wendy Van Wynsberghe), Routines de rencontres (Peter Westenberg), pippi longstrings (Stephan Marsiske), Our reading machine, The GML-recorder (Muharrem Yildiz), Repetita Iuvant (Laura Macchine), e-traces (Michel Cleempoel) and more.

Sunday 4 December

11:00-19:30 If You Need Anything, Just Whistle
Seminar, on-line + Constant Variable

This seminar includes presentations, lectures, performances and a filmscreening. You can follow the programme on-line or join us in Constant Variable.

11:00 Welcome (Femke Snelting)
You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow!

11:30 A situated report (Karin Spaink, Amsterdam)
Writer and activist Karin Spaink followed Prototypes for Transmission from her home in Amsterdam. She will narrate through that experience and reflects on the internet as a place for different types of transmission.

12:30 Lecture: The Whistled Language of Gomera (Sonia Matos, Edinburgh)
Sonia will present her research conducted in the island of La Gomera. Focusing specifically on the study of whistled vowels by both local inhabitants and linguists her presentation will explore the realms of embodied knowledge, representation and the sensory paradoxes that underlie our experience of the phenomenal world around us.

13:30 Lecture/performance + Lunch: Exiled Cuisine (Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico City)
Cookbook files are open when there’s a chance of working. The work is not technological in that nothing of this has not been done before. The literature that feeds into this has been contentionally written in the shall we say mmh street. The public space of technical forums is related in some way to network protocols. It could be good that these HTML files be exported into cookbooks. I don’t like it when these books are sold. A standard regime of the kitchen is easier for the exiled to understand.

16:00 Film-screening: Because We Are Visual (Olivia Rochette, Gerard-Jan Claes; introduced by Pauline David)*
In Because We Are Visual Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes immerse themselves into the world of public video journals. The Internet and its online communities are said to bring people closer together and to connect them. Yet it seems that the virtual world confronts these so-called vloggers more than ever with their own loneliness. By means of visual material gathered from online sources, the cineastes create a unique poetic realm in which thoughts and worries merge together.

17:00 Tea + snacks*

17:30 Lecture: The Archive Team (Jason Scott, New York)
Over the last 20 years, a lot of culture, life and experience has moved online. Millions of new users, billions of web pages made by those millions, and untold amounts of creative work has landed on webpages and services providing space for them. But along with this flood of incoming life has come a host of shutdowns, shutoffs and surprise losses that have wiped huge amounts of works, especially from the 1990s. Not everyone is taking this lying down, and a rogue band of archivists, programmes, writers and loudmouths named The Archive Team have mounted an assault against this forced forgetting. Team mascot Jason Scott will tour us through the history of Archive Team, some highlights of projects, and what any person with a computer and an internet connection can do to help.

18:30 2 Performances: Angry Women (Anne Laforet, Annie Abrahams, Antye Greie, Bérénice Belpaire, Hedva Eltanani, Hortense Gauthier, Ienke Kastelein, Jule Chateauvert, Laurence Moletta, Laurie Bellanca, Lucille Calmel, Martina Ruhsam, Olga P Massanet, Pascale Barret and Simona Polvani, various locations)
After two performances where 24 women of different nationalities, using their mother tongue, said their anger in front of their webcams at home until there was none left, the next step in the Angry Women research project is a series of two sessions of exactly 12 minutes. The limited time, the experience of the first performance and the fact that this time the ladies will use a single language per performance (One performance will be in English, the other in French), will make this a completely different experiment concerned female anger and networked collaboration and group dynamics. http://www.bram.org/angry/

The first Angry Women performances are now shown as an installation in the show Training for a Better World at the CRAC in Sète http://crac.languedocroussillon.fr/exposition_fiche/121/3169-en-cours.htm

19:30 Soup*

20:30 Concert Helena Gough*
Each new sound-space is created by taking everything possible from the tiniest element, working to make something from nearly nothing. This reduction in means yields a density and richness of results.

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