CONTEXT
<http://w139.nl/en/>
Idiotic Code: On Resistant Usership
Amsterdam
7th November 2015
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EDIT NOTES:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/idioticcode

VIEW NOTES:
http://www.ooooo.be/etherhtml/index.php?link=pad.constantvzw.org/p/idioticcode&STYLE&BTN&customcss=//www.ooooo.be/resistiveribbon/css/resistive.css

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REFERENCES:
- http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/groups/docc-2013-video-dialogs/forum/topic/race-lisa-nakamura-and-maria-fernandez/
- We want to create space to think, develop, share thought, share conversation and discussion about what it could mean to be a resistant user of technologies. 
"How to unthink something you don't know you're thinking?" [5]m

1) Resistant user of totalitarian technology:
How can we develop an "idiotic" code, which escapes the logic of a surveilling, controlling and disciplinary system (global and state capitalism)?
2) How can we imagine a resistant use of identitarian technologies, such as race, gender or sexuality?

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      loooooooololol l
bolwerK, 
hosted by Marthe Van Dessel
Atelier de 'Resistive ribbons '
A resistive ribbon is a tactile and multi-handed user-interface developed by J. Taelman, the creature behind Axoloti. In a late afternoon, we combine a box, your old magnetic video tape and copper with some speculative introduction in basic electronics.  By creating a potentiometer with conductive contact, we get  aware of the socio-political implications of technology and our resistances.

http://www.ooooo.be/resistiveribbons
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TECH LIST:

- 2 tables
- some chairs
- sissors
- extra cutters
- extra tape 
- pieces of wood
- extra soldering devices ( i have 6)
- if you have mangetic tape from 8 mm films,  some vhs, ...
- some table lamps (light)

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INTR0 20 min
SETUP 5 min
RESISTIVE RIBBON 45 min + 45 min
SHOWCASE  30 min
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Hello welocome,
I am marthe van dessel, I am your host  
'Atelier de resistive ribbons' 

<:~$sudo host>
this is a performative event

<open book : This book is a classroom>
< fold book over laptop > < hand it out>

<p 46.>
http://www.hit-studio.co.uk/this-book-is-a-classroom/
Lectures » With With: Everything but an Artist Talk » bolwerK
http://www.withwith.ch/lectures/with-with-everything-but-an-artist-talk/bolwerk/
Performative Event: Screensavers, sleep mode, hibernate, standby or off.

DUMP TIME
<:~$sudo hwclock>


We are here to make a resisitive ribbon in praxis 
(putting theory, a lesson, skills into action)

I propose to go in praxis together, not as individuals, but as bolwerK, a collective body  without a identity, an entity in praxis.

< what is bolwerK>


Why a resistive ribbon? 
Idiotic Code: On Resistant Usership


Ribbons
Litterally and ethymologically the word ribbon comes from Middle English ribban or riban from Old French ruban

<kilim>
Impressions of warp-faced  plain weave bands dating back to 6000 B.C. were  excavated from the Turkish archaeological site of Çatal Hüyük. While  their purpose was primarily functional, some evidence suggests that  bands also could be used for more flirtatious and decorative purposes. Silk,  velvet, cotton, and jute and of synthetic materials, such as polyester,  nylon and polyproylene. 
Ribbon is used for innumerable useful,  ornamental and symbolic purposes.

<https://books.google.be/books?id=mf88HKKYEbQC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=Leiden+in+1620+riot+loom&source=bl&ots=fQUBVNYFyg&sig=FTDazpP9e8jOBchy4Kx2kCDGnfs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAmoVChMI0cbw-8uuyAIVzDkaCh1DIAPo#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Relation ribbon-loom / production mode ~ social relations: Similar   looms were at work in Leiden  in 1620, where their use gave rise to so  much discontent and rioting on  the part of the weavers that the  states-general had to prohibit their use. The prohibition was renewed  at various intervals throughout the century, and in the same interval    the use of the ribbon loom was  interdicted in most of the principal    industrial centres of Europe. In the seventeenth century, almost all over Europe, there were revolts  against the ribbon loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and braid.  The    ribbon loom was invented in Germany.  An Italian abbé, named  Lancellotti, in a work published at Venice in the year 1636, but   written  in 1579, says: "about fifty years ago, Anton Müller, of  Danzig,  saw in  that town a very ingenious machine, which weaves four  to six  pieces at  once. But the town council, being afraid that the  invention  might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, had the  machine  destroyed,  and the inventor secretly strangled or drowned."  In Leyden,  this  machine did not come into use until 1629.  At first  there were  riots  among the braid workers, so that there, too, the town  council  was  compelled to prohibit its use. 

<http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx49.htm>
<MACHINERY AND LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY: struggle between the worker and the machine ~ MARX>

Time  and experience were needed before the workers could learn to distinguish between machinery itself and the use of machinery by capital; and until they could come to direct their attacks, not   against  the material instruments of production, but against the   particular   social form in which these instruments are used. . .
http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx49.htm

<industrial loom>
<DIY ribbon Loom; http://historicweaving.com/wordpress/designing-an-inkle-style-ribbon-loom/>

<Quality control is important to any manufacturing process and the ribbon  industry makes no exception. An operator consistently monitors a  ribbon loom to make sure that the quality of the ribbon produced is to  the  highest of standards.
http://ribbons.com/ribbon/>



Symbolic ribbons

Functional Ribbons
 <https://www.google.be/search?q=hamsting+streches&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=4ywWVsWKJ4q-aKuKnOAP>
(Donna genderchangers)
hamsting stretches

 Ribbon cutting as a ceremony.
http://hyperallergic.com/199269/art-protest-groups-join-forces-for-guerrilla-ribbon-cutting-of-new-whitney-museum/

Ribbon dancing as a ritual
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k4IOswQBGk
My PhD research is about studying the brain blood vessel dynamics during exercise. I used a ballet, modern and Chinese classical dance mix to  present my PhD research. There are three kinds of vessels in the brain: artery, vein, and capillary.  These vessels support the nutrients and  oxygen needs of the brain.
http://gonzolabs.org/dance/

<Dance My phd : Anne Golderg:  The Negotiation Of Contributions in Public Wikis>
https://vimeo.com/14401061

Technical ribbons 
Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half the width and the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most machines allowed  switching between colors, which was useful for bookkeeping entries where negative amounts had to be in red.  Inked  fabric ribbons with "carbon film" ribbons that had a dry black or  colored powder on a clear plastic tape. A side effect of this technology was that the text typed on the machine could be easily read  from the used ribbon, raising issues where the machines were used for  preparing classified documents (ribbons had to be accounted for to  ensure that typists did not carry them from the  facility).

From Jacquard with punch cards to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage from calculation to computation. Alan Turing, ... Zuse introduces coil which get's magnetized and switches a relay + the binary scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY99brM8qAA#t=3m35s


<Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture  Paperback  – August 20, 1998 >

Plant presents an intelligent, provocative and accessible investigation  of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and, in particular, information technology. She argues that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution.

From the early computers to the vernacular internet.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AetzK1FbGHI#t=4m53s>
Recently  for the preparation of 'Streamin Egos' a project of Ghoette institute in collaboration with  the KASK, Lucille Clamel, use the term 'vernacular' and trying to understand I stumbeled on a nice video which introduces us to vernacluar web. As O.O. was mentioning the 'user' she makes a clear statement why users should exist and what that actually means.
Vernacular Web

<site of the event>
She brought us back to the web of the nineties, when the digital highway was still under construction ( I refer to the site of this event) and users where developping the web from within. Presences/articulations involved some existenitial and philosophical position towards the medium and hence the representation of the self/organization,...). Now most 'users' mere see it as communication tool without a reflection on the medium, nor the infrastructure/resources it needs.

<image facebook servers>

<image Sysadmin United>

Sysadmin united. J.A. said it on a specific event, CCC, ChaosComputer Club. In august is was on the Chaos communication camp, which is once 4 year held, it gathers 4000 people around technology, politics, ... sysadmins, hackers, activists, ..   install their work & living space four 4 days and self organize the communal infrastructure and rescources.

I was supposed to settle in the queerrfeminst villages but got more attracted by the hacking with care (http://workingstill-stillworking.net/hacking-with-care/) which was a part of la quadrature du net. 
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/who-are-we La Quadrature du Net is a non-profit association that defends the rights and freedom of citizens on the Internet. More specifically, it  advocates for the adaptation of French and European legislation to th  founding principles of the Internet, most notably the free  circulation of knowledge.As such, La Quadrature du Net engages in  public-policy  debates concerning, for instance, freedom of expression, copyright, regulation of telecommunications and online privacy. Inaddition to its advocacy work, the group also aims to foster a  better  understanding of  legislative processes among citizens. Through  the  dissemination of  specific and pertinent information and tools, La Quadrature du Net  hopes to encourage citizen participation in public debates on rights and freedom in the digital age.

<imge anarchaserver>

Users united! Last year on the Transhackfeminist festival in Calafou, I joined  'Anarachaserver': http://anarchaserver.org/mediawiki/index.php/Anarcha_section, a virtual machine 
while discussing with maxigas, another sysadmin, we analyzed demilitarization of technology after the Cold War

<people computer company>
People's Computer Company Newsletter #1  (October 1972)
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html

Lee  Felsenstein was the engineer for the Community Memory  project, one of  the earliest attempts to place networked computer  terminals in public  places to facilitate social interactions among  individuals, in the era  before the commercial Internet. he was inspired by  Tools for Conviviality (1973) was published only two years after Deschooling Society.   In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously   applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic  elites in  industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments  for the  reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen.

 < http://monoskop.org/File:Illich_Ivan_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf>

Welcome to Monoskop, a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities.    
The book that brought Ivan Illich to public attention was Deschooling Society  (1971), a radical critical discourse on education as practised in   "modern" economies. Giving examples of what he regards as the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education, Illich posited  self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations, in  fluid informal arrangements:

<Unleashing the Collective Phantom (Resistance to Networked Individualism)>
A magazine I consult regulary and actively read MeTA MUTE:
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/unleashing-collective-phantom-resistance-to-networked-individualism


ASCII ribbons
()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail 
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   - against proprietary attachments
no html, no proprietary attchments:  https://web.archive.org/web/20060209123049/http://asciiribbon.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060209123049/http://asciiribbon.org/


<What is resistance?>
It has the symbol Ohm
It  measure of the difficulty to pass an electric current through that conductor

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Can somebody play a song/sound, of their device ? brain skull sound device > 
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body resistance
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=6793
The technical documents are mostly referred to in cases of electrocution 

- measure each body resistance
<image: when we strike and it rains: hard boven hart>
 If we are wet or standing in water, we become a much better conductor, thereby offering less resistance.

<Body bio-electronic orgone>
In this case i just refre to Willem Reich's  bio-electronic orgone > https://archive.org/details/opgone# who as the frist to discover the skins resistance. Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter. It could allegedly coalesce to create organization  on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units—called "bions" in  orgone theory—to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even  galaxies.
https://archive.org/details/opgone#
http://www.rogermwilcox.com/reich/bioelectrical.html

<Animal Magnetism by Mesmer>
"Modern philosophy has admitted a plenum or universal principle of fluid matter, which occupies all space; and that as all bodies moving in the  world, abound with pores, this fluid matter introduces itself through  the interstices and returns backwards and forwards, flowing through one  body by the currents which issue therefrom to another, as in a magnet,  which produces that phenomenon which we call Animal Magnetism.

<image electromagnetic spectrum>

Important  Magnetic Materials have a resistance....magnetic > the earth is a  big magnet > macro- micro: partciles, crystals, atoms, domains
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFAOXdXZ5TM

MAGNETIC TAPE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQx6cJFgMNY
In the NATO alphabet  it would be Mike - Alpha....Ihad to study it for an exam at the bipt, Belgian institute of Post and Telecommunication. I followed a course of Amateur radio, you get a licence to operate a radio station to send over UHF and VHF message in the electromagnetic spectrum. Basic electronics, antenna's  (de)modulators, SSTV, an old protocol to send line by line image through, old modems, used to the same principle to send data over the 'telephone network" The whole 'hobby is made more accessible by SDR, software defined radio. you don't need a hardware setup > popularization. My call name is 0N3MCR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQx6cJFgMNY
A type of (usually) acrylic tape with a fine coating of magnetically  sensitive material on one side, used for recording audio and other  data..  

What is Acrylic > acryl
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/acryl
(song), by English band The Courteeners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYhKXSNb7lw
(chemistry) 


<image video tapes>
Standarization + protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war
Anarchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZgqGTxL9cA: resistance drops the tension


Ohm's law
basic circuits

Kirchoff's law
complex systems

MAKE RIBBON CONTROLLER
- choose object
- cut 8 mm magnetic tape 
e.g 11 cm magnetic tape
- cut conductive tape + 5 cm
e.g 16 cm
- make 2 holes 
-stick conductive tape on object
- cover conductive tape at the ends with insulation tape 
- cover the rest of the conductive tape, sparing out max 6 mm (use the perforated holes as a reference)
- cut 2 small pieces of conductive tape
- stick small pieces of conductive tape (in opposite direction) above the perforated holes 
- double check conductive side of the magnetic tape
- load up the static electricity (wool is the best) of the plastic cover
- stick the magnetic tape to the plastic cover 
- position the magnetic tape + plastic cover on the perforated holes (rremeber where they are)


CHECK VULNERABILITIES
- measure the resitance between ground /aen B (1=infinite) > no contact
- measure the resitance of the ribbon: should smal value as in the beginning.

potentiometer.
A potentiometer is a variable resistor that slows down the amount of electricity that flows through it.

PREPARE FOR AXOLOTI
- cut wires ( back for gound, red for VDD, 2 different collors for the outt A en B) lengt of your heart to your hand
- strip the ends
- heat the sodlering iron
- melt some thin on the tip of the soldering iron and apply heat on the end of the wire
- wrap wires around a pencil to keep them nicely together
- position the resistors on the board (after calculating the correct value)
- solder them to the conductive taps
- put some heat shrink on one the resistor
- solder the resistors together + the red wire (VVD)
- solder the color wires OutA en OutB  on conductive taps
- solder the black wire to the conductive tap for GROUND
- cut some heat shrink and put it around the wire
- cut 4 header pins
- solder the wires VDD (red) - GND (black) - OUT A - OUT B


CONNECT TO AXOLOTI

Axoloti
Neoteny means that a creature can reach maturity without going through  metamorphosis. In less extreme cases, it’s simply exhibiting juvenile traits after reaching adulthood. Axolotls are a great example of neoteny because as they grow bigger, they never mature.
It’s not unusual for amphibians to be able to regenerate, but axolotls  take it to the next level. On top of being able to regenerate limbs, the  animal can also rebuild their jaws, spines, and even brains without any scarring. 




< some playlist exemples>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxXVSBN2-Bw#t=6m06s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mFMLxMdEss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlaqpdOY4Xc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSDPzwa1YFE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWk9hhp_O_A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meJQCDUSGNc




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INFO

bio
Marthe Van Dessel  is an activist and performer who creates interfaces, devices & protocols to instigate our urban and institutional hardware & software. She engages in the administrative, cultural, socio-political dimension of personal and collective identities. By triggering intersubjective alliances she confronts the 'self & other' to the commons, co-authorship and the redistribution into the public domain.

bolwerK is a non-exclusive and temporal constellation that has been initiating, mediating, facilitating, curating and appropriating local  and   international projects since 1998. Its 'open' network is the basis  for   collaboration on relevant issues. Social environments are  created, not   for streamlining ideas, but in order to formulate  shared/common   questions and hence feed a sense of communality.  'Open  source' is a   philosophy not a pragmatic methodology to expand these  questions into  practice. For the past ten years collaborations have given bolwerK the right to exist as a in between of arts and culture agents,  socio-cultural organizations, alternative initiatives  and a growing  potential of active thinkers, artists and citizens.
http://www.ooooo.be