Boundaries do not sit still

research center

1 January-30 April 2018

Research centre 18/I curated by Femke Snelting

nasa-20_o_o

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.

As an ‘external guest’ invited into the research center from January until April 2018, I would like to turn Barad’s parental advisory into an invitation to experiment, speculate and reflect on the intra-actions through which in- and exclusionary boundaries are performed in a.pass itself.

Boundaries do not sit still follows from a long interest in the interdependent relations between technology and practice, resulting in a series of projects and questions that have been invited into dialogue with a.pass at several occasions.

How do digital tools and artistic research co-construct each other? How are gestures, discourses and behaviours shaped, oriented, communicated and defined through the (digital) apparatuses at work? How is research articulated and in what way are its boundaries enacted through software, infrastructures and devices?

These questions will be addressed in mentorings, informal meetings within/around a.pass and in research activities related to The Possible Bodies inventory. In addition, the research centre will host five Monday Readings (with Martino Morandi, Seda Guerses and Sina Seifee).

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.

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.

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.

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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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.
Read more..

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.

Open Call