Public Workshops

conversation, research center

Close Encounters series Conditions for the work

5 May 2018 / a.pass, 4th floor

Sofia Caesar / Femke Snelting

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.

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 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.

forum, recent past

Kate Rich Critical Administration

30 January-3 February 2018 / a.pass 4th floor

Shaking down the entrepreneur

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This workshop takes place in the devastated landscape of the Creative Economy. Dipping cautiously into realms of business and economics (in which artists are generally and probably wilfully unschooled), we will take a pigeon’s-eye view (scrappy, opportunistic, only occasionally vicious) of worn-out tropes such as entrepreneurialism, human capital and cultural enterprise.

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?

forum, recent past

Nicolas Galeazzi pattern language for conditioning practices

19 January-23 March 2018

weekly meetings

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In order to explore MAKING / CONDITIONS we will try to create a Pattern Language for conditioning practices in the arts. With reference to the same named concept, proposed by the architect and philosopher Christopher Alexander in the late 1970's, we will investigate the patterns that help us to cretate the conditions for our artistic research through this very same research practices.
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excursion

Sven Dehens Untitled Excursion

27 October 2017

Critical voicing, reading, enactment of Alien (1979). Process of audio-visual documentation. Generation of a subtext to the script.

excursion

Hoda Siahtiri If the past is really passed?!

25 October 2017

An introduction to co-experincing the others’ trauma

The city of Brussels is holding a part of my past. I will take you to one of the most historical places of Brussels. Please bring headphones if you have. It would be nice to have a piece of paper and pen. thanks.

excursion

Marialena Marouda Flemish Marine Institue: Marine Station Ostend (MSO)

17 November 2017

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The excursion is a first encounter with the Flemish Marine Institute and its work. It includes a tour of the Marine Station and the Research Vessel Simon Stervin in the port of Ostend. Our guide will be André Cattrijsee, who is the “research infrastructure manager” of the FMI.

During this excursion, I propose for us to focus our attention on how the ocean is studied in a scientific context. What kind of language is used to describe it? And what kinds of instruments are used to measure it? What are the categories that result from those measurements? And what kind of ocean is produced as a result? As a score for this excursion, I therefore propose to shift slightly the way we listen and experience this tour of a marine research institution. Instead of simply following the content of what is said, could we also discern the knowledge dispositive within which this tour takes place? And how does this dispositive affect, finally, the “object” of its study?

excursion

Eszter Némethi War-/-Lace and Vertigo

3 November 2017

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An excursion is a military term to describe a short entry to enemy territory without formal announcement of war. This excursion is an invitation to explore the ways in which spaces and materials can become instructions and how this relates to participation in complex systems. What is the the agency of things, participants and also the host. Can we listen to things in order to decipher their fictions? And can we remain complicated to each other? You will visit the Kantcentrum in Brugge and the NATO Headquarters in Evere . I will do my best to host you. You will be largely following instructions, reading, making, observing, walking and looking for gaps. You will then return to a playground for discussion at a.pass. I will make you dinner.

excursion

Luisa Filiitz A collection of Impressions

2 November 2017

Coming together in a place. Where and how do our perceptions, according to the surrounding/the place and the situation where we are, manifest themselves? Where and how can we locate them in our body? How is our intuitive reaction? Linked together in groups, we would then — following a score-proposal — try out how everybody`s own intuitional desire of where and how he/she wants to move is affecting the movement of the others in the group as well as their movement is affecting each one. Afterwards everybody is invited to create a zine in any form – according to ones wish – trying to remember the different impressions and the thoughts, feelings, that they provoked.

excursion

Leo Kay The time it takes to think

1 November 2017

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How can we think together? How can we make Space for deep reflection on complex issues? How can we come close enough without intruding? How can we engage in group dialogue and take the time that is needed to think before producing more, contributing more to the system we are locked within?
A day of observing, listening, walking, kneading, thinking, talking and baking, as we navigate a critical socio/political issue that effects us all and will continue to affect us in the forceable future.

excursion

Elen Braga The masters meeting: A Journey to the unpromised land and the magic balls

31 October 2017

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“- You shine through my atmosphere. And when you show up, my mountains move like bushes in the wind, and the rocks are scattered on all sides. I hear you. I hear an amazing bang like a storm to come. I hear the noise of thunder, the voice of demons, the winds, the monsters. The whole earth rises, dilating like the waves of the sea and my surface breaks down. My own ground seems to subside and… we need to find another ground to walk by: the unpromised land and the magics balls… “

excursion

Shervin Kianersi For to Know Nothing Is Nothing

30 October 2017

Imagine natural daylight, the best kind of light to see things clearly. Then imagine the light getting brighter and brighter, until it becomes so blindingly white that you are filled with anxiety. The information overload that we experience in our everyday lives is similar to that blinding light. Its origins date to the early 90s, when computer networks attained critical speeds and scales. Today, each of us yearns to be informed 24/7. The dictatorship of information creates in us a desire for round-the-clock information. We have become the organic components of an integrated global data and information system. Yet this yearning we feel is about our search for the Real, which a never-ending stream of information, that informs us only of the reality of facts, can neither satisfy nor fulfil. Because information is always directed at you. Information informs but is no guarantee of getting any closer to the truth. In fact, information sometimes operates as an obstacle to the truth. Instead, what if we started to filter out what we could of the information, in order to better understand the truth? What if we ignored information about the given facts and instead tried learn about something or someone for ourselves?

excursion

Geert Vaes La Flandre Profonde / Into The Heart Of Flanders

26 October 2017

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‘Het Gezin Van Paemel’ (The Family Van Paemel) by Cyriel Buysse is a 114-year old theatre piece that’s still showing the flemish what it means to be flemish. The excursion will bring us to an amateur theatre company rehearsing the piece. Why are they, and with them lots of other amateur companies, still so interested in this piece? Why am I? My questioning will be mainly about one scene in particular: the son who goes to tell his father he’s leaving for America. An America he only knows through stories, an America that personifies a better life. How is this flemish identity created (the I) by the staying and the leaving? And how is America (the other) created? And isn’t all emigrating originating in ‘The America of the Soul’? How is this construction of I a mask/conditioning? How is history as a re-construction keeping all these notions in place? How will I go from here to using masks again? And how will I finally get out of Flanders?

excursion

Pia Louwerens From I to we

24 October 2017

Excavating reality together, at home

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“From I to we” serves as an introduction into my practice inside its subjective core: my own home. After a performance the audience is invited to rewrite the script, rewarded with a warm meal cooked by the artist herself.

excursion

Eleanor Weber The World Today All In The Mind

23 October 2017

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“…a 100% probability of nothing happening, and that’s often when it’s more interesting…”
– Peter Ryan, ABC Senior Business Correspondent, 2 October 2017

On Monday 23 October 2017, several todays, today. An instruction-based, public yet solo, listening & reading exercise, derived from radiowaves. Thinking about the public mind and testing what is produced from chance and structure. How language functions on different registers, at once, in time, and beyond us.

excursion, research

Uninvited Research II Excursions

IMG_7032 Kopie

In the course of the upcoming two weeks the a.pass researchers of this block will each propose an excursion coming out of their current research focus. You are cordially invited to join. Please sign up on the a.pass main page on the detail page for each of the proposals.

26. Okt

Eleanor Weber

The World Today / All In The Mind

““…a 100% probability of nothing happening, and that’s often when it’s more interesting…”
– Peter Ryan, ABC Senior Business Correspondent, 2 October 2017
On Monday 23 October 2017, several todays, today. An instruction-based, public yet solo, listening & reading exercise, derived from radiowaves. Thinking about the public mind and testing what is produced from chance and structure. How language functions on different registers, at once, in time, and beyond us.
//// Please bring ID for library registration, a smartphone/laptop (with charger) and head/earphones. “

research center, talk

Close Encounters series A dialogue on Active Archives

27 January 2018 / Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080

Nicolas Malevé / Femke Snelting / Pierre Rubio

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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research center, talk

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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workshop

Sina Seifee Little Fables of Practice Workshop

24-25 July 2017 / a.pass 4th floor

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In this two days workshop I like to propose the notion of keyword seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices. We will (re)animate our keywords as fables, which are operational metaphors that shape subjects and objects of knowledge. How can we participate in (re)shaping our objects of knowledge in terms of little fables?
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workshop

Jennifer Lacey Dance Workshop

10 July-14 June 2017

jennifer lacey " american realness"

The base line of dance is perhaps understood as the body but mostly it is bodies ( minds implied) together someplace, deciding to work in a certain way . The how of the work, the process, is something that is always to be reinvented and renegotiated. Each dispositif of dance making already contains a nascent content, one that will inevitably be more influential than any idea or concept in the production of the form. So, in imagining how to design the making of a dance, the translation of the concept or content into a thing-which-can-be-done is a crucial, poetic and political task. The base line of dance is perhaps understood as the body but mostly it is bodies ( minds implied) together someplace, deciding to work in a certain way . The how of the work, the process, is something that is always to be reinvented and renegotiated. Each dispositif of dance making already contains a nascent content, one that will inevitably be more influential than any idea or concept in the production of the form. So, in imagining how to design the making of a dance, the translation of the concept or content into a thing-which-can-be-done is a crucial, poetic and political task.
Read more..

block information

Settlement 11 Collective Schedule

Day 4

11:00 Play-ground Eszter Nemethi 13:00 Planning a.pass block III/2017 Vladimir Miller 15:00 Dialoge with Alex Arteaga 17:00 Feminist Benjamin Reading Group Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda
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master class, seminar

a.pass seminar and master classes: The Document Transformed + Book Launch Juan Dominguez

22-24 June 2017 / La Bellone, Brussels

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Curated by Sofia Caesar and Lilia Mestre, the public program “The Document Transformed” invites four practitioners that offer very distinct questions, methods, and proposals to problems related to documentation. Join Femke Snelting, Olga de Soto, Vincent Meessen, and Agency (Kobe Matthys), and others, for three days of presentations, screenings, performances and conversations. How does the document affect practices, bodies, histories, and experiences? The event brings together practices that not only give sight to the power relations engendered by apparatuses of documentation, but also move towards the transformation of the systems in which we produce history, law, art, and the body. Held in the context of The Problem of the Score, block curated by Lilia Mestre in the a.pass post-master research program and supported by a.pass.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone – Brussels

To inscribe to the master-classes please send an email to production@apass.be

JUNE 22-23-24 @ LA BELLONE
Rue de Flandre 46
Brussels

Detailed program:

atelier, block information, recent past

Lilia Mestre The Medium Score

Thinking making together apart

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The proposal for this block follows on previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing.

If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of our relation with the world, then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen phenomenological relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?

research

Vladimir Miller SETTLEMENT (11)

artistic research environment

III-4.Vladimir Miller settlement 7 BW

During the days of May 22nd – June 4th 2017 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called SETTLEMENT. In the course of these 14 days we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass SETTLEMENT and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at a.pass will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process. The schedule for these two week will be developed on site by its participants and shared online here:

Settlement 11 Collective Schedule

lecture, talk

Book Club #6 A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY

9 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Laurence Rassel

The Laurence Rassel Show

The a.pass Book Club welcomes “what if” expert-consultant Laurence Rassel. Long ago she diagnosed the vacuity of artistic practices when its formats of knowledge-production are not ‘situated’ in an ecology of art that encompasses social and psychological factors. Paradoxically she considers fiction, science-fiction, narratives and role plays as paramount tools to achieve that goal. Laurence Rassel will address the notion of ‘Radical Hospitality’ by revisiting Stitch and Split, and some of the curatorial operating principles and practices she developed in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona as an engaged feminist curator.
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lecture, talk

Book Club #7 Politics of Speculative fabulation

10 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Fabrizio Terranova

Dr Marboeuf

"We need new types of narratives and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made and experienced." In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis - Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble” and present the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.
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seminar

BOOK CLUB #8 ACCELERA.PASS

16 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Michiel Vandevelde & Wouter De Raeve curated by Seba Hendrickx

Malign Velocities

In 2013 the Accelerationist Manifesto by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams emerged, aiming to question the traditional Left and to demarcate a renewed relation with capitalism, while its provocative aura generated a whirlwind of pros and cons. During this seminar we will not merely read excerpts of the manifesto. By means of a genealogy of the concept, we'll try to frame this tendency within the larger philosophical evolutions of the past decennia and nuance its “accelerating” characteristic.
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reading session, talk

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

16 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Peggy Pierrot

George Clinton emerges from Parliament-Funkadelic's Mothership on June 4, 1977, at the Coliseum in Los Angeles

Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digitized compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes? and what kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic ? We’ll build or we’ll destroy. We’ll learn about the Know-Ledge.
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reading session

Book Club #2 Black Atlantic & Speculative Fiction

26 January 2017

Book Club Series

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

Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

2-9 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Sina Seifee

Reading Sessions of Donna Haraway's 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.
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workshop

Myriam Van Imschoot TELESCOPING THE INTERVIEW

7-10 February 2017

three day intensive

Myriam Van Imschoot will pass on her discoveries within her interest in the interview, the doors that led over time to appreciating speech for what it offers beyond meaning: significant aberrations, iterations, flux and rupture, modulation, and not in the least, different alterations of subjectivity. This three day intensive will combine artist talk, screenings, voice improvisations, score explorations, and other tele-scopic incursions into artistic practice and research.
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reading session, talk

Book Club #1 COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT

19 January 2017 / a.pass

BOOK CLUB SERIES / Sol Archer

Data and Geordi as Holmes and Watson, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Starting with Darko Suvin's ideas of Cognitive Estrangement, we will look at some of the mechanisms and functions of science fiction, and consider how the imagining of alternative realities operates is a critical gesture with which to view consensus reality
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workshop

Helena Dietrich The Tea Party

14-15 March 2017 / a.pass

in search for an elastic alien self

We will use clothing like a pharmakon: what pollutes us can also clean us! By triggering the optical unconscious we can transform sensuously a commoditised visual world into a psychological cleansing process from cultural inherited aesthetics. Acknowledging the ability of three-dimensional images and materials as determinations of our perception of self is already an attempt to empower ourselves at changing our/the reality. Not only in words but also in materialising this reality into visible and tangible new object-beings.
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workshop

Alice Chauchat worlding from this world

27 February-3 March 2017 / a.pass

this is not wishful thinking, it is speculating utopia from what is already there

Rather than lamenting the scarcity of agreeable situations in our present, we will wilfully engage in expanding through the force of our imagination these maybe fragile, uncertain, easily disposable snippets of communal life which are also part of the world as we know it. Taking these as sufficient evidence for the existence of a world we want to inhabit, we will turn the logic of exception into a logic of rule, and run the risk of building monstrous worlds. At least these might be differently interesting monstrosities.
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