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Text processing characters, language and code
05 January 2018
posted by: Femke Snelting

Monday Readings

a.pass, 3rd floor

15 January 2018

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.

As a way to map the long-term legacies that are implied in each of our keystrokes, we will play with a Teletype Model 33, one of the most widespread computer interfaces in the 1960s.

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vintagecomputer.net[/caption]

The Monday Readings are five one day sessions that bring habitual tool-situations in conversation with theoretical and political thinking. They are intimate collective situations on the articulation of technique and the performance of boundaries, reading across technical tools and theoretical devices. The Mondays attempt to develop further connections between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-a-critique, active archives and techno-galactic software observation.

Each session starts with an exploration of day-to-day tools and technologies: text processing, file compression, on-line communication, security or digital archiving. This tool-reading is followed by a discussion and collective reading of one or two related texts.

Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

Schedule

10:00-13:00: Reading tools
14:00-17:00: Reading texts

If possible, bring a laptop. Sessions take place in a.pass on the 3rd floor. Participation is free.

Local server Servers and hosts
05 January 2018
posted by: Femke Snelting

Monday Readings

a.pass, 3rd floor

05 February 2018

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). For most activities on the Internet (email, web pages, social media applications and so on ...) users act as clients to servers, delegating more and more of their content to the "cloud". To understand the implications of this "delegation of hosting", we will look together at different computers that act as servers, talk about where they are located, who maintains them, and why this all matters. Followed by a collective reading of texts by Muriel Combes and Invisible Committee.

The Monday Readings are five one day sessions that bring habitual tool-situations in conversation with theoretical and political thinking. They are intimate collective situations on the articulation of technique and the performance of boundaries, reading across technical tools and theoretical devices. The Mondays attempt to develop further connections between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-a-critique, active archives and techno-galactic software observation.

Each session starts with an exploration of day-to-day tools and technologies: text processing, file compression, on-line communication, security or digital archiving. This tool-reading is followed by a discussion and collective reading of related texts.

Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

Schedule

10:00-13:00: Reading tools
14:00-17:00: Reading texts

If possible, bring a laptop. Sessions take place in a.pass on the 3rd floor. Participation is free.

Encoding and compression Monday Readings
05 January 2018
posted by: Femke Snelting

Monday Readings

a.pass, 3rd floor

26 February 2018

"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. [...] Third from the perspective of political economy, codecs structure contemporary media economies and culture in important ways. [...] Despite or perhaps because of their convoluted obscurity, codecs catalyze new relations between people, things, spaces and times in events and forms." Adrian Mckenzie, "Codecs" in: Matthew Fuller (eds), Software Studies, a lexicon (2008)

The third Monday Reading starts with poking holes in different image and video-files. From there we will try put the vocabulary of encoding and compression (Codec, Container, Compression, Interpolation, Interlacing, Artifact, Bitstream, Sampling, Conversion, ...) together with some of the key terms in the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon (Allagmatics, Transduction, Analogy, Individuation, Cybernetics, ...). How do structures make operations appear, and vice versa?

The Monday Readings are five one day sessions that bring habitual tool-situations in conversation with theoretical and political thinking. They are intimate collective situations on the articulation of technique and the performance of boundaries, reading across technical tools and theoretical devices. The Mondays attempt to develop further connections between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-a-critique, active archives and techno-galactic software observation.

Each session starts with an exploration of day-to-day tools and technologies: text processing, file compression, on-line communication, security or digital archiving. This tool-reading is followed by a discussion and collective reading of one or two related texts.

Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

Schedule

10:00-13:00: Reading tools
14:00-17:00: Reading texts

If possible, bring a laptop. Sessions take place in a.pass on the 3rd floor. Participation is free.

Keycards Movement, security, smartness
05 January 2018
posted by: Femke Snelting

Monday Readings

a.pass, 3rd floor

19 March 2018

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?

The Monday Readings are five one day sessions that bring habitual tool-situations in conversation with theoretical and political thinking. They are intimate collective situations on the articulation of technique and the performance of boundaries, reading across technical tools and theoretical devices. The Mondays attempt to develop further connections between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-a-critique, active archives and techno-galactic software observation.

Each session starts with an exploration of day-to-day tools and technologies: text processing, file compression, on-line communication, security or digital archiving. This tool-reading is followed by a discussion and collective reading of one or two related texts.

Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

Schedule

10:00-13:00: Reading tools
14:00-17:00: Reading texts

If possible, bring a laptop. Sessions take place in a.pass on the 3rd floor. Participation is free.

Databases Stickyness, stopping points, consistency, routines, mnemosyne
05 January 2018
posted by: Femke Snelting

Monday Readings

a.pass, 3rd floor

16 April 2018

case of: Sina Seifee

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.

Image: Mark Manders, Two Interconnected Houses (2010)

The Monday Readings are five one day sessions that bring habitual tool-situations in conversation with theoretical and political thinking. They are intimate collective situations on the articulation of technique and the performance of boundaries, reading across technical tools and theoretical devices. The Mondays attempt to develop further connections between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-a-critique, active archives and techno-galactic software observation.

Each session starts with an exploration of day-to-day tools and technologies: text processing, file compression, on-line communication, security or digital archiving. This tool-reading is followed by a discussion and collective reading of one or two related texts.

Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

Schedule

10:00-13:00: Reading tools
14:00-17:00: Reading texts

If possible, bring a laptop. Sessions take place in a.pass on the 3rd floor. Participation is free.

Schedule

11:00-13:00: Reading tools
13:00-14:00: Lunch
14:00-16:00: Reading texts

If possible, bring a laptop. Participation is free.

Monday Readings

Monday Readings Reading across technical tools and theoretical devices
29 December 2017
posted by: Femke Snelting

15 January 2018

16 April 2018

case of: Sina Seifee

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?

Sessions are hosted by Seda Guerses, Martino Morandi, Sina Seifee and Femke Snelting.

Dates

Monday 15 January: Text processing (with Martino Morandi)
Read more on this session...

Monday 5 February: Local server (with Martino Morandi)
Read more on this session...

Monday 26 February: Encoding + compression (with Martino Morandi)
Read more on this session...

Monday 19 March: Key cards (with Seda Guerses)

Monday 16 April: Databases (with Sina Seifee)

These events can be attended for free

Hosts

Seda Guerses studies conceptions of privacy and surveillance in online social networks, requirements engineering, privacy enhancing technologies and identity management systems. Recently, she started two new research projects. The first focuses on the implications of current cybersecurity research and development on technical solutions for privacy. The second looks at paradigmatic changes in software engineering practices with the shift from shrink wrap software to services and agile programming.

Martino Morandi wrote this bio text on a QWERTY keyboard on a Lenovo laptop on a seat of a Trenord train moving on the italian RFI rails, running on electricity from state hydro-electric power plants on the Alps. He researches the tangle of and our entanglements with these elements and is interested in the politics involved in our interactions with technology at different scales, from power plants to bio texts.

Sina Seifee researches as artist in the fields of narrative, performance and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in apass.

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. 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.

Feminist Benjamin Reading Group 01 June 2017
posted by: Lilia Mestre

Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda

Walter Benjamin's work could be described as an extremely precise and sensible/sensitive analysis of modernity. Or, more precisely, of the procedures through which modernity is affecting modes of life and of communication and, essentially, of relating to the world. In his "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" for example, Benjamin describes a practice of an intense “listening”, a mode of extreme attentiveness and generosity towards every-thing that surrounded him, as the precondition for any form of language. And in "The Storyteller", he views storytelling as a way of voicing such experiences of listening to and of experiencing the world. Yet storytelling makes use of almost everything that the modern individual is not or has not, most notably time and the ability to listen. In this mode of communication, the story resonates on multiple levels of meaning without ever assuming the position of an objective truth. In other words, storytelling creates personal narratives where truth and fiction are as much intertwined as the subject of the narration with its object.

Guided by a desire to take a closer look into Benjamin's work, we propose the feminist reading group.

What does it mean to read as a feminist? The question may seem odd, or even trivial, but it engages the very ground of our work as artists and thinkers. Indeed, how is our reflection oriented, if not by the very way in which we turn to the text? And yet, when we think about methodologies and epistemologies, we rarely interrogate the practice of reading itself. This is all the more surprising that feminists tend to engage with texts by seeking to counter and denounce what phallocentrism wishes to leave unseen. These oppositional readings are crucial: without them, the insidious fallacies and the fatal acts of bad faith cannot be undone and proliferate unhampered. Yet they also run the risk of turning feminism into a mode of thinking that does nothing but to say “no,” one that destroys but rarely creates, and one that produces its own form of alienation. We want to propose another form of feminist reading: instead of the critical, distrustful distance, we suggest that closeness and intimacy may form an equally powerful approach. In this reading group, we examine what feminist thinking can become when it takes the shape of a lover’s response to a text’s seduction, and when refutation and penetration are replaced by a mode of reading that is founded in an ethics of proximity.

The structure of the reading group is open. There are no experts. We choose, read and unfold the texts together and according to the interest and individual focus of the participants.

Meetings from 17:00-20:00 at a.pass studio, 4th floor

Next meetings & readings: 20.06 / 04.07 / 18.07 / 08.08

For further information about the texts please contact: marialena.pouskouri@gmail.com

http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/the-dimensions-of-difference

Book Club #9 Language as Magic and the Language of Things Book Club Series / Caroline Godart & Marialena Marouda
03 March 2017
posted by: Pierre Rubio

a.pass

17 March 2017

Bookclub #9

Close Reading Session with Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda

Language as Magic and the Language of Things

Walter Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”

“To whom does the lamp communicate itself? The mountain? The fox?”

In the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Benjamin proposes a language metaphysics that extends to every thing. Every thing has a language: objects, animals, human beings but also immaterial things, like the Arts or Technology. For Benjamin language is therefore a medium going very much beyond human language and the communication through words. One could say language is the way in which some thing – indeed every thing – communicates itself to the world.

During this morning session we will read Benjamin’s text on the metaphysics of language by using the method of the feminist close reading. By encountering the text in such a way we will try to unfold concepts such as the magic in language and the language of things.

Caroline Godart holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Cinema Studies from Rutgers University (USA), where she studied under the direction of Elizabeth Grosz. She is now an Assistant Professor of Communication, Germanic Languages and Cultural Studies at IHECS (Institut des Hautes Études des Communications Sociales, Brussels) and a Scientific Collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her first book, The Dimensions of Difference, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. It explores the question of difference, and in particular of sexual difference, through three axes (space, time, and embodiment), which are approached both as aesthetic devices and as philosophical concepts in the works of Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson.

Marialena Marouda works in the fields of performance art and choreography. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York, USA (B.A., 2004) and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany (M.A., 2011). Marialena Marouda’s work is focused primarily on the development of performance exercises, self-invented practices for relating to and for inhabiting spaces. The experimentation with walking, listening and storytelling as relational spatial practices forms the basis of her work.

Friday 17th from 10am to 2pm

@ a.pass 4th floor

participation to the costs : 5 euros

Book Club #5 Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound Book Club Series / Peggy Pierrot
09 February 2017
posted by: Pierre Rubio

a.pass

16 February 2017

Book Club #5 Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound

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

Book Club #2 Black Atlantic & Speculative Fiction Book Club Series
29 January 2017
posted by: Pierre Rubio

26 January 2017

Reading session introducing Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic in relation with afro-american SF and in particular Octavia Butler's.

Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge Book Club Series / Sina Seifee
29 January 2017
posted by: Pierre Rubio

a.pass

02 February 2017

09 February 2017

Which version of "realism" are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a 'point of view' is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading sessions we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'.

This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations.

We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.

From 9.30am to 1pm both days.

Talk