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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

 

 

Close Encounters @ a.pass End-Communications

This month, two Close Encounters take place during the a.pass End-Communication event, an event dedicated to a.pass researchers presenting their research at the end of the post-masters program.

 

 

Saturday January 27th, 15:00-18:00 @ Manchesterstraat, 17 – 1080 Brussels

 

A DIALOGUE ON ACTIVE ARCHIVES WITH NICOLAS MALEVE AND FEMKE SNELTING

 

 

“Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.”

(Manifesto for an Active Archive, 2006)

 

As a young institute for artistic research, a.pass currently reflects on modes of documenting, archiving, publishing and sharing. These modes should mirror its criticality, singular modes of operation, agonistic environment and ongoing reformulation of tools, practices and research. Moreover, the institute is concerned with a complex equation: how to develop an attitude towards archiving and dissemination that combine a critique of the usual institutional ‘archival reason’, while producing and sharing readable (structured) ‘forms of knowledge’? Or, how to avoid and/or assume commodification, reification and authority while documenting and archiving polymorph artistic research practices and discourses? Ultimately a.pass wants to engage with documenting, archiving and disseminating -independent and experimental artistic research practices- to produce an ecology of text critique and to find inventive modes of co-operation and fair technological practices interlacing politically in non-innocent and least toxic ways. In the context of these current reflections and within the series Close Encounters, Nicolas Malevé and Femke Snelting both invited by a.pass researcher Pierre Rubio will discuss the long history of Active Archive, as a case study and exemplary project/practice.

Active Archives started in 2006 as a Constant project, out of concern with the digital archiving and publishing practices within, and between cultural institutions. The project functions as a context for the development of tools and practices that provide a real possibility for sharing. It creates environments where ‘letting go’ is acknowledged as a necessary and desirable gesture. Active Archives has evolved through different projects/forms, and is currently activated by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé in the context of the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism .

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, topicality and relevance today?

 

 

 

Nicolas Malevé
Visual artist, computer programmer and data activist, who lives and works between Brussels and London. Nicolas Malevé is currently working on a Phd thesis on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University. He is a member of Constant and the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism. In the Active Archives project, with Michael Murtaugh, he is experimenting with techniques to engage with large collections of visual materials and explore different ways to navigate and question them. Nicolas studies the mutation of the archive in a digital context. How the evolution of machine learning influences computer vision when these techniques are applied on large collections of images. And in this context, how it affects the relationship between training data and the design of algorithms. Nicolas researches how these elements question the supremacy of the human eye in the visual field and how the redefinition of the archive implies to take into account a larger amount of agents, human and non-human for the circulation of visual content. These last five years, Nicolas contributed to exhibitions (documenta12, Kassel; Kiasma, Helsinki), research events (“Archive in Motion”, University of Oslo; Document, Fiction et Droit, Fine Arts Academy, Brussels), and has published in publications by MIT Press and Presses Universitaires de Provence.

 

Femke Snelting
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.

 

 





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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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 Conditions for the work

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

Sofia Caesar / Femke Snelting

times_to_reflect_on_16_670
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.
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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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APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

Unfortunately we no longer have applications. Both programs: the Postgraduate as well as Research Center have come to an end due to the decision of the ministry of education to stop financing a.pass. At the moment we look into new plans for the future. More news soon on our website.

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