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1. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   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)
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   Monday 26 February: Encoding + compression (with Martino Morandi)
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   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.
2. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   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.

    

   [caption id="attachment_7199" align="alignleft" width="320"] A.Audsley[/caption][caption id="attachment_7202" align="alignleft" width="150"] 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.
3. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   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.
4. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   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.
5. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   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.
6. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   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.
7. reading session
   research center
   Boundaries do not sit still
   Streaming media on demand, content-delivery, broadcast
   05 January 2018
   posted by: Femke Snelting
   Monday Readings
   Szenne Artlab, Anneessensstraat 2
   16 June 2018
   case of: Lilia Mestre
   
   Parallel Parasite
   

   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.

   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

   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.