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Monday Readings

For cultural institutions like a.pass and many kindred spirit organisations, it seems there is potential for other relations to making, distribution and communication with digital tools. But how to break the spell of the paralysing computational regime? How to shift that relationship from efficiency to curiosity; from scarcity to multiplicity and from solution to possibility?

The ‘Monday Readings’ are five one day sessions that bring specific tool-situations apparent in a.pass in conversation with theoretical and political thinking on articulation and the perfomance of boundaries. The Monday Readings  are opportunities to collectively ‘read’ into daily tools for internal communication, file-sharing and networked documents used within a.pass. The Monday Readings are an attempt to develop further connection between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-critique, active archives and collaborative on-line work.

The sessions are prepared in collaboration with Sina Seifee, Seda Guerses and Martino Morandi, who are each in different ways interested in reading across technical tools and theoretical instruments. Texts and tools are made available from January onwards in an on-line repository to which we will gradually add documentation of the sessions.

D A T E S

Monday 15 January 
Text processing
Martino [+ Jara, Seda, Pierre R]
10:00-13:00
14:00-17:00

Monday 5 February
Local server
Martino [+ Seda, Pierre R]
10:00-13:00
14:00-17:00

Monday 26 February
Encoding + compression
Martino [+ Jara, Pierre R]
10:00-13:00
14:00-17:00

Monday 19 March
Key cards
Seda [+ Martino, Pierre R]
10:00-13:00
14:00-17:00

Monday 16 April
t.b.c.
Sina [+ Martino, Seda, Pierre R]
10:00-13:00
14:00-17:00


T O O L S
Text processing
WYSIWG, ascii, html, writing/language/code, markup, keyboards

Local server
Archiving, local networks, maintenance, infrastructure

Encoding + compression
Video/sound, efficiency, translation, files, containers

Key cards
Access, movement, security, smartness

Rigging (?)
Solidity/flexibility, grammar, system/situations

P E O P L E

Seda Guerses (Brussels) 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 (Brussels) is an independent researcher working in the liminal spaces between art and academia. His practice inhabits the interface between art, technology and politics, and is always rooted in theory and do-it-yourself and hackers practice. Currently he investigates the many ways internetworked communication technology functions, developing methodologies and experiments to share his research with a diverse group.

Jara Rocha (Barcelona) is a mediator/curator teaching projects at Bau Design College of Barcelona. She is co-inventor of Possible Bodies project (WKV, Schloss Solitude, Hangar, a.pass, Constant) and participates in The Darmstadt Delegation. Jara often works with the materialities of present cultures (infrastructures, text logistics, body inscriptions) and tests non-formal ways of learning in collective situations like Euraca Seminar, Objetologías, or Relearn Summerschool.

Sina Seifee (Brussels) is an interdisciplinary artist working in the field of computer art, writing, drawing and performance.

Femke Snelting (Brussels) 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.

T E X T S

https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/eGmApCmrlAWSA2l

[2 texts per session, one of them to close-read]

Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell, Bernard Dionysius Geogheghan - The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique (2017) https://www.academia.edu/34600648/The_Smartness_Mandate_Notes_toward_a_Critique
Karen Barad - Posthuman performativity + Getting Real (2001)
Giorgo Agamben - What is an apparatus? (2009)
Simondon - On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958/1969 -- translated 2014)
Simondon of the desert https://vimeo.com/156520798
Adrian Mckenzie - Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (2006)
Donna Haraway - Staying with the trouble (2016)
Isabelle Stengers

Diffractive reading: "Reading Agamben through Barad"

-----

On Thursday 25 November 2016, at The Artist Commoner: Public Meeting [1], a.pass publicly read the following mythological Statement of commitment:
“a.pass commits to aligning its computational infrastructure with the radical subjectivities that are summoned by the commons. Today a.pass celebrates the continued transition of its tools, platforms, communications and digital archives into adventurous ways of adminstering, making and performing digital protocols together. In a.pass, computational devices have been unstated for too long so it is urgent to name and consider them, and to develop sensitivies to their material presences. We understand that this might mean a conversion from Google Docs to radically different ways of producing spreadsheets, schedules and documents, of performing the task. We are aware that someones have to take care of this process. And sustain it. On Friday 25 November 2016 we celebrate the opportunity, and the beginning of a transition towards new infrastructures of people, tools, protocols, platforms, and practices.” [2]

As a response to the observation that tech giants currently dominate all forms of digital communication, from cloud-storage to production tools and archiving systems, Kate Rich, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver and myself organised a day of conversations with a.pass staff. For cultural institutions like a.pass and many kindred spirit organisations, it seems there is potential for other relations to making, distribution and communication. But how to break the spell of this paralysing digital regime? How to shift that relationship from efficiency to curiosity; from scarcity to multiplicity and from solution to possibility?
For this reason I would like to experiment with a series of ‘Monday Readings’, five one day sessions that bring specific tool-situations apparent in a.pass in conversation with theoretical and political thinking on articulation and the perfomance of boundaries. This small suite of non-spectacular activities are opportunities to collectively ‘read’ into daily tools for internal communication, file-sharing and networked documents useful to a.pass.

The Monday Readings are an attempt to develop further connection between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-critique, active archives and collaborative on-line work.  
The sessions are prepared in collaboration with invited guests, who are all interested in different ways to read across technical tools and theoretical instruments. Tools will be selected in discussion with Steven Jouwersma (technical support). Texts and tools are made available from January onwards in an on-line repository to which we will gradually add documentation of the sessions. This material forms the basis of a small edition that I would like to produce and distribute in fall 2018. The sessions will be first of all oriented towards the associated researchers and staff, but are open to block participants and other interested readers.  
        
[1] https://apass.be/common-conference/
[2] http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.transition