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Peggy Pierrot /0


    • postgraduate program
    • block 2023/I
    • The ingredients of fear Day of study
      11 January 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Peggy Pierrot
    • 27 January 2023
    • 27 January 2023
    • Horror stories tell us a lot about our embodied cognition, our ways of seeing, thinking and feeling the world. Without being too functionalist, these literary, comic or cinematographic stories and kids tales are staging fundamental needs linked to our survival: to be able to anticipate danger, to remain on the lookout, to defend oneself, to find resources, to eat, to protect one's own - in short, to find adequate responses to the conditions of existence that have been ours since the dawn of humanity. At the root of anxiety and fear: is there someone following me? Is the Other a friend or a foe ? Can I trust this person? Will I recover from this unknown weird diseases? Can i trust new sciences ? Is there such thing as pure evil ? Will I be able to survive in inhuman or violent conditions? Have I chosen my home well? What is this shadow that follows me? 

      11am - 5pm @ a.pass

      We will talk about otherness, cognition, emotions. Our dichotomous view of our bodies has made us relegate the question of fear and disgust for the unknown to unloved genres that titillate our deepest human physical side. What are we looking for in genre stories? What themes and situations activate and titillate our anxieties? What is staged in a good horror story? 

      Peggy Pierrot teaches media theory and narration at ERG in Brussels. At fifty years old she decided to assume what she has always been: a fan. Of literature, comics and film sub-genres (thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romcom…), strategy and role playing games, technical devices of all kinds, and music. She talks about it, writes about it and thinks about it, a lot. 

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/I
    • Zone Public 20 December 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • curated by Femke Snelting & Peggy Pierrot & Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Brussels
    • 16 January 2020
    • 27 March 2020
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • Zone Public

       

       

      Zone Public contributes to an ongoing conversation on the dynamics of publishing generated by technologies of artistic research. From January 2020 onwards, within the a.pass platform for artistic research practices -where its agents continuously re-examine and re-imagine this special form of knowledge production, specifying over and over again its generative nature and deploying its potential-  a three month series of readings, mediations and compilations is oriented by the postgraduate program and its participants to (re)consider the forms and conditions for disseminating artistic research.

       

      In the context of a.pass, the field of artistic research is one to be embodied but also to be explored, discussed and ultimately transversally invented. Instead of a discipline, a.pass considers artistic research as an inclusive library of heterogeneous, impermanent, precarious yet rigorous constructions and affirms that only as a non-discipline, un-discipline or de-discipline can artistic research create the conditions for multiple sites of intersection between society, academia and art. Methodological conflicts, critical discursive inventiveness and continuous experimentation with tentative sub-categories, all are generatively interconnected through hybrid artistic and research practices. Thus, Zone Public wants to closely observe and document the sources, contexts, dynamics, compositions and especially the modes of publicness of the multiple and diverse art and research projects conducted in the post graduate program. The different participatory dispositifs initiated by Zone Public are situated in this specific context, where artistic research is modulated as a topological object to articulate the ways in which artistic practice, theory, history and other disciplines intersect and combine in unique ways in each artistic research projects and trajects. 

       

      Nevertheless, to consider these diverse artistic researches as singular assemblages, as effects but also as proposals for new combinations implies navigating a space where the separation between what is discrete and continuous is reduced. Thinking/doing, writing/publishing, researching/performing, speculating/archiving, containing/executing, exploring/presenting, disagreeing/collaborating, emancipating/determining… Zone Public wants to question these polarities and tries to articulate a relational material that supports, binds and maintains both the discrete and the continuous scales of a non-uniform zone of artistic research in tension with its publicness.

       

      Especially, Zone Public invites to (re)consider the conditions for dissemination of the specific forms of knowledge that artistic research does produce/process/practice. It activates the interrelation between research-as-process versus the crystallisation that publishing requires, and wants to open up the exhibitionary regimes which seem to articulate current artistic research practices and the infrastructures of knowledge production that its agents are both using and possibly used by.

       

      What happens to research when it is made public? How to deal with the apparent dichotomy between research and publicness? What are the ways to manage the (im)possible task of (re)presenting something as hybrid and liquid as a research process? How to produce legible forms out of unformed research matters? How to understand publishing beyond legitimisation and validation? What relations emerge from the determining norms of institutional or academic forms of publication? What to expect from the transfer of research to audiences and what would be, for both agents, useful to know? What could be the definitions and practices of spectatorship for artistic research? What could a public for artistic research be?

       

      Tuned through an ensemble of co-curated proposals designed and coordinated by Femke Snelting, Peggy Pierrot and Pierre Rubio in discussion with the a.pass actors, Zone Public is set up as a collective situation to reflect upon the conditions for making research public, as a space, and time, for together reconsidering academic and/or artistic (internalised) standards of communication and to get to terms with their implications. Therefore, Zone Public is also an occasion to share, invent and consider experimental, performative and/or speculative forms of publishing and exhibiting.

       

      Zone Public is co-curated by three cultural workers. Each of them arrive with distinct but related practices and approaches to the problems of publishing and they assume each of the participants will arrive with theirs. Pierre is interested in modes of knowing, forms of culture and processes of collective individuation specific to artistic research; Femke brings tools from new-materialist feminisms to the tensions between publicness and ongoingness; Peggy questions how publishing can be defined in other ways than by utilitarianism or fetishisation of the legitimacy ideology and dominant modes of (re)presentation and recognition.

       

       

      Zone Public is organised around four dispositifs. Each of them allows another entry into 'the problems of publishing' and is proposed as an invitation to be appropriated and developed.

       

      1. Multipolar Book Club (Researching / Reading / Discussing)
      Every Thursday morning, a time to read and discuss together. The texts to work with are reflecting upon questions of concretisation and individuation, around intersectional relations between cybernetic control systems and structures of knowledge oppression, on the problems of the public, on entanglements and how to cut, and on usefulness and anti-utilitarianism. 
      When: Thursdays 10h00-14h00

       

      2. A Becoming Library (Researching / Contributing / Compiling)
      On Friday afternoon, time to work on concrete experiments of research-publishing. On the program: making on-line publications, editing photocopied fanzines, reprinting materials and programing small radio-capsules. What knowledge would be really useful to publish, and for whom? This collection of publishing experiments will form a growing 'library' of content and forms that matter. The group will contextualise and reflect upon this 'becoming library' through the practice of 'compilation'. Compiling is a term borrowed from collective software-development and it is used to describe a practice of iteratively and temporarily bringing together of resources and references to form a running program. Rather than formatting itself according to preformatted templates of art-publishing, artist books, or academic publishing, can one think the infrastructure of referencing and distribution in ways that work performatively with and not against the intricacies of artistic research? 
      When: Fridays 14h00-18h00

       

      3. The Bermuda Radio Show (Researching / Questioning / Positioning)
      The Bermuda Radio Show is a series of triangular audio recorded conversations. They are occasions to reflect on the issues with ‘making-public’ in relation to artistic research projects conducted at the moment in a.pass. Each project producing possibly its specific form of and matter for interviews.
      When: flexible between Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings or at other possible times.

       

      4. Close Encounters (Researching / Curating / Hosting)
      On some Thursday evenings, a series of presentations and public conversations that was proposed in the context of the a.pass research center in 2018. (See: https:///www.apass.be/close-encounters/ ). Close Encounters are light and irregular events to take time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. The events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, but the format is always a dialog with one or more guests; all are invited to expand on their research or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. For Zone Public, the Close Encounters series will invite guests that have relevant practices with regards to (infrastructures of) publishing and/or making-public and/or art and research publicness. 
      When: most of the time on Thursdays 18h00-21h00

       

       

      here more information about the block of which "Zone Public" is a part

       


      Femke Snelting - Zone Public co-curator
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminisms 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. With Jara Rocha she currently 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. Apart from mentoring at a.pass, Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

       

       

      Peggy Pierrot - Zone Public co-curator
      Peggy Pierrot lives and works in Brussels. She works mainly with different associations and educational or research structures. Her most favourite tools are human sciences and free softwares. Since there are "profound links between gesture and speech, between expressible thought and the creative activity of the hand ", she is currently working at the Ecole of Recherche Graphique (ERG) both as a technical and logistical assistant and as a teacher in Media and Communication Theory. She is also involved in the master's program Récits et expérimentation - Narration spéculative. (Storytelling and experimentation - Speculative Fabulation) She gives lectures and workshops on Afro-Atlantic cultures and literatures, science fiction, media and technology and has an active practice in radio.

       

       

      Pierre Rubio - Zone Public co-curator
      Pierre Rubio works as artist, independent researcher and dramaturge. At large and through different forms, his work questions modes of individuation to explore contemporary production of subjectivity in/through the arts. What is real for an artist? is his main research question. Pierre was a dancer and choreographer for a long time, holds a master degree in the arts combining theatre & communication at the campus of Aix-Marseille University (France) and dance & choreography at the campus of Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers (France). Pierre is currently a core member, co-curator and mentor in a.pass - a platform for artistic research practices.

    •  

       

      Now if six turned out to be nine,
      I don't mind, I don't mind (…)
      Alright, 'cause I got my own world to look through,
      And I ain't gonna copy you.

      - J.Hendrix

       

      Stimulating the audio nerve directly
      You wanna come flex with me?

      - The Spaceape

       

       

      In this Book Club, we drown together in an ocean of sound and words.

      We listen to echoes of submarine writings. We vibrate to the whale’s praise chants. We embrace syncretic marginal cults. We embark on a slave/space/ship for a time travel into modern cultures.

      1492. Knowledge Freedom/Culture Born Wisdom.

      We build or we destroy.

      We find our way through popular cultures and music. Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digtised compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rhythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes?

      We learn about the Know-Ledge.

      What kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic?

      To mediate our comprehension of the unsubtitled tracks, we'll intensively use texts by Kodo Eshun, David Toop, Peter Lamborn Wilson, S. H. Fernando Jr. and others, hoping we’ll finally kiss the sky.

      We draw an intensive rear view mirror tour in theory, music, politics, visual arts and mysticism.

      Positive – Energy – Always – Creates – Elevation. (PEACE)

       

      We end the session with Zoé Whitley on the “ afrofuturistic transnational geographies”, a framework of thoughts and aspirations called Afro Futurism, today, in 2017.

      Partly reading together, this session will also be a time for listening and thinking together.

       

       

      Peggy Pierrot lives in Brussels and is involved in projects linking information, media, activism, radio art and technology.

      A sociologist by training, she holds a postgraduate degree in multimedia engineering. Peggy worked as a journalist (Transfert.net, Le Monde diplomatique, Minorités.org) and as editorial/technical webmaster in media and non-profit projects. She lectures on African-American and Caribbean literature and culture, science-fiction, information society or related topics. She collaborates with erg (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), and she is a tutor in les Ateliers des Horizons in Grenoble (France), a new multidisciplinary professional training located at the boundaries of the art(s) and societ(y)ies.

       

       

      Date

      Thursday February 16th

      from 9.30am to 1.30pm

      (as the session will be quite (con)densed, please be on time!)

       

      Location 

      a pass / Studio 4th floor

      rue Delaunoystraat, 58-60

      1080 Brussels

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • Modifying the universal 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Peggy Pierrot / Femke Snelting
    • a.pass
    • 30 June 2016
    • 30 June 2016
    • case of: Femke Snelting
    • Modifying the universal

      In 2015, after a public outcry against the perceived lack of diversity in emoji characters available on smartphones, the Unicode Consortium added five “Skin tone modifiers” to the set and considered the issue resolved.

      As an input to MOVING RESEARCH Femke will host a one day workshop, starting from the emoji modifiers case. We will discuss how and why mainstream communication infrastructures promote universalist values and at the same time provide means for separating users along fault lines of race, gender and age. While the “modifiers” function within the universalist belief-system of Unicode, they start to function as encoded means for segregation instead of a response to the increasing complexity of cross-device and cross-cultural computing, a situation that demands a re-imagination of compatibility in terms of difference.

      The workshop will be an occasion to discuss more generally what infrastructures of participation we can imagine that not only represent multiplicity but allow us to materialise it, beyond the Modern regime of universality. What universal(izing) assumptions creep into our own research and how could they be challenged? What tactics can we imagine for developing systems that are politically, aesthetically and ethically truly generative?

      Modifying the Universal is developed in the context of Possible Bodies, an ongoing collaboration between artists, programmers, performers and activists that are concerned with the specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity that (re)-appear through renderings of the virtual.

       



      Biographies

      Peggy Pierrot works on projects linking information, media, activism, radio art and technology. She runs a publishing house, Venus Negra, publishing on popular cultures, Black Atlantic, music and science fiction. A sociologist by training, she holds a postgraduate degree in multimedia engineering. Peggy worked as a journalist (Transfert.net, Le Monde diplomatique, Minorités.org) and as editorial/technical webmaster in media and non-profit projects. She lectures on African-American and Caribbean literature and culture, science-fiction or related topics.

      Femke Snelting investigates interrelations between digital tools and creative practice, and develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, an association for arts and media active in Brussels since 1997. The collective work of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine daily life. Femke co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and coordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit.





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