Conditions for the work

lecture, performative publishing, research center

Close Encounters series Conditions for the work

5-5 May 2018 / a.pass, 4th floor

Sofia Caesar / Femke Snelting

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Image: detail of Spaghetti plot, vinyl on wall, Sofia Caesar, 2018. Photo: Gilles Ribero

Saturday May 5 2018, 15h-18h @ a.pass , 4th floor

For this episode of Close encounters, Sofia Caesar and Femke Snelting have invited each other for an afternoon of conversation about contracts as propositions and elements as conditions. Both are involved in related but very different practices that they will present and bring into discussion with each other and the public.

Sofia shares two recent works, Worker leaves the factory (Conditions for the work) a permanent installation at PAV, Turin (IT), and the video Excess Lines to talk about her artistic methods that involve re-enacting found footage produced by car manufacturer FIAT in the last 100 years, appropriating techniques of motion analysis, and creating open structures for the re-writing of contracts.

Femke discusses her work with the Codes of conduct in the context of Free/Libre and Open Source software communities. Codes of Conduct address on- and off-line behaviour of community members, acknowledge the possibility of harassment explicitly or euphemistically and provide guidelines in case something happens. These self-regulating practice function in an environment that is particularly sensitive to the ways words can be made flesh, both as code and as law.

Close Encounters is a series of presentations and public conversations organized by the a.pass Research Centre. They take place whenever (associated) researchers feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. These informal events are designed to take the time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. Even if free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, the format is a dialog that expands the presented research. The Close Encounters get a closer look at things while trying to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research: What to study? What to research? What to practice?

Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and is currently curator of the Research Centre at a.pass.

https:///www.apass.be/who-is-a-pass/?user=42

Sofia Caesar is an artist and choreographer. Her works rearrange the power relations present in structures that act on the body, such as architecture, language, surveillance, or the camera. Her propositions, performances, installations, videos, and sculptures take us to the surreal, impossible, and complex layers of our relation to the language that surround us. Her oeuvre is developed in search of moments in which the body exceeds the forces that attempt to control it. Caesar’s poetic and political strength lies in how she reveals that structures can be both controlling and generative, on the one hand tools of violence and power, and on the other the very means for the creation of new structures for the body. Caesar has participated in exhibitions and residencies in institutions such as A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam (NL), Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin (IT); La Maudite, Paris (FR); SFMOMA, San Francisco (USA); Casamata, Parque Lage, Capacete, Oi Futuro RJ, Galeria A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro (BR); CCBNB-BR, Fortaleza (BR); Tomie Othake, São Paulo (BR), and others. She holds an MFA from the School of Missing Studies, Sandberg Instituut, in Amsterdam (NL).

http://sofiacaesar.net

lecture, performative publishing, research center

Close Encounters series Semiotics of the Uncanny

21 October 2017 / a.pass 4th floor studio

Dr. Dalila Honorato / Isabel Burr Raty

Photo by Erik Peacock - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Semiotics of the Uncanny will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior. Hybrid Art contributes to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creates new alternative technological materials and objects for empowerment and resistance against high-tech capitalist imperialism.
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lecture, performative publishing, research center

Close Encounters Series

21 October 2017

Close Encounters is the name of a series of presentations and public conversations organized by the a.pass Research Centre, which takes place when researchers are invited, or feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. The series is curated by the associate researchers and the current research curator Pierre Rubio.
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research center

Possible Bodies

1 January 2018 / a.pass, 3rd floor

tomography

Possible Bodies is a disobedient action-research project that Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting have been developing since 2015. The project works with the concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that ‘bodies’ are, in the context of technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning. This collective research becomes especially urgent because through those performative and representational practices, intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface.

research center

Boundaries do not sit still

1 January-30 April 2018

Research centre 18/I curated by Femke Snelting

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In Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, feminist theorist Karen Barad examines how apparatuses stabilize and destabilize boundaries. “Apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted.” she writes.

reading session, research center

Monday Readings

15 January-16 April 2018

Reading across technical tools and theoretical devices

Keyboard

In cultural institutions like a.pass, digital tools are used for communication, archiving, administration and production. These computational infrastructures depend more often than not on the services of tech giants and are put to use without too much space for reflection on how they actually work. If we want to bring technology within reach of interrogation and critique, how to break the spell of those paralysing regimes? How to shift the relationship from efficiency to curiosity; from scarcity to multiplicity and from solution to possibility?

reading session, research center

Monday Readings Text processing

15 January 2018 / a.pass, 3rd floor

characters, language and code

FORMAT

This first Monday Reading will be dedicated to text processing. We will discuss concepts such as What You See Is What You Get (WISYWYG), the virtues of ascii, what the differences are between writing, language, code, formatting and markup, and how our keyboards perform.

lecture, performative publishing, research center

Close Encounters series A conversation-on-exhibition

25 January 2018 / Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080

Marcelo Rezende / Adrijana Gvozdenović

Adrijana Gvozdenović, "Who is Adrian Lister? or Уметник работник роботник", publication, 2016

Marcelo Rezende and Adrijana Gvozdenović share their stories and experiences about their (critical) practice of exhibition making. How can you produce meaning and experience that matters? Why do we still believe in reality?
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lecture, performative publishing, research center

Close Encounters series A dialogue on Active Archives

27 January 2018 / Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080

Nicolas Malevé / Femke Snelting

Active Archives

As a case study and exemplary project/practice, Nicolas Malevé, Femke Snelting and Pierre Rubio will discuss the long history of Active Archive. What can the different iterations of Active Archives tell us about the condition of engaged artists-researchers-archivists? What were the historical conditions that stimulated its genesis? And after all these years -punctuated by profound technological, cultural and institutional changes- how is its evolution and relevance today?
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reading session, research center

Monday Readings Local server

5 February 2018 / a.pass, 3rd floor

Servers and hosts

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In the lexicon of networks, any computer connected to the Internet is called a host. This means that all computers have the ability to host content. But in the current paradigm of the Internet, some hosts are designated to be serving (servers), and other hosts are to be served (clients).

reading session, research center

Monday Readings Encoding and compression

26 February 2018 / a.pass, 3rd floor

Monday Readings

compression artifact

“Codecs perform encoding and decoding on a data stream or signal, usually in the interest of compressing video, speech, or music. […] Software such as codecs poses several analytical problems. Firstly they are monstrously complicated. […] Second, at a phenomenological level, they deeply influence the very texture, flow and materiality of sounds and images. […]

reading session, research center

Monday Readings Keycards

19 March 2018 / a.pass, 3rd floor

Movement, security, smartness

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For this Monday Reading we will follow the path of the keycard system that opens the outside doors at a.pass. What does it mean when opening a door becomes part of a data-flow?

reading session, research center

Monday Readings Databases

16 April 2018 / a.pass, 3rd floor

Stickyness, stopping points, consistency, routines, mnemosyne

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This Monday Reading prepared with Sina Seifee will be dedicated to the intricate structures of the ubiquitous database. Browsing the tables and rows of this very website, we will try to graps the affordances and limits of organising the world as a collection of digital data.

reading session, research center

Monday Readings Streaming media

16 June 2018 / Szenne Artlab, Anneessensstraat 2

on demand, content-delivery, broadcast

dennenprocessierups

This extra edition of the Monday reading actually takes place on a Saturday in Szenne artlab. In the context of Parallel-parasite, a residency of the a.pass Research Center, we will focus on the shape-shifting nature of streaming media. After sessions on text processing, local servers and key cards, we will continue with an exploration of streaming, a coverall term for the dominant way that audio and visual content is being delivered on the Internet today. We will read into the different technical protocols that are regulating those flows, and the diverging economies that software like Torrent trackers and companies like Youtube, Netflix construct. By considering how the continuous experience of streaming relies on various politics of separation, re-ordering discrete elements on delivery, we will observe how the production, sharing and consumption of media is radically changing. Session organised with Martino Morandi.

lecture, performative publishing, research center

Close Encounters series Zones of disobedience

6-6 February 2020 / ISELP & a.pass

Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma

When institutions have come to embody their own institutional critique, when participatory art becomes the new weapon of the established normalising order, and when attempts to further develop forms of artistic resistance are almost instantly liquefied in the commodifying reason of the market, a series of questions arise: Is it still possible to disobey? What could the forms of disobedient work be today? What new strategies should be invented in this context? How can one give the public the incentive to transgress its fears, inhibitions and limitations? Having these questions as a starting point, “Zones of Disobedience” opens up a space for discussion, reflection and debate. It presents examples from the past and the present and from across the spheres of the artistic and the political in order to problematise sets of relationships, conceptual frameworks and behaviors. These have to do with ideas about monuments, myths and experiences of the city as space but also as a site of memory, of belonging and of envisioning a future. “Zones of Disobedience” offers an evening of contestation, blurred limits, shifts and negotiations.
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