http://softwarestudies.projects.cavi.au.dk/index.php/*.exe_%28ver0.2%29
Executions: conversations on code, practice & politics (version 0.2)

Apple downloadable african emojis
https://framapic.org/wlT0CiwT3MeJ/LMCp8KVNuCZc.png
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/25/388945510/african-emoji-ceo-apple-missed-the-whole-point-with-its-diverse-emojis
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-african-emoji-company

Firefox os emojis
http://www.enola.be/muziek/live/26862:full-of-hell-the-body-8-april-2015-magasin-4

http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/modifying.workshop

"This event investigates the cultural, material and political  implications of execution. Software permeates our environment. We  co-exist in an increasingly datafied present in which algorithms and abstract coded processes execute across different scales, materialising  and operating at the micro and macro levels of our actions. The aim of this event is to explore the concept of execution in the form of artisitic and critical practice. How can we understand the affective, embodied, performative, programmed processes of execution in the world today? By gathering together researchers working with diverse artistic practices, we hope to encourage a critical curiosity and engagement with the theme of execution."

07/03/2016

General idea of what we want to do in Malmo:

We can only understand what Bodies are Possible when we have an understanding of the historical, cultural restraining devices (carcan) that exist. What is the agency of software in the tension between 'carcan' and the 'possible'. 

In the 2000 networked technologies as a potential, an universal space to become. Examples such as Unicode arrive now, because we are in a 'crisping' moment - beyond modern and post-modern ideas of potential. By imagining that difference does not exist, everything became possible (Free Software!). The possibles that are not so possible.

Fifteen years later, it is clear that this is in fact not true. Racism and sexism remain -- in order to become, we need to understand that we are mutliple; for this representation is a first step or even on-line representations are to a way to make visible what can not be changed in the physical. The bankrupcy of the idea that anything is possible because tech is neutral means the need for a re-introduction of what it means to say 'everyone'. The emoji's are an example of this.

The shift in global presence (india, china, japan BRICS...) is only now arriving in software (Japanese are not yellow!) It is interesting at this critical moment to look at this, how this happens in culture and arrives in technology.

Urgency to re-introduce difference. This can make space for the multiplicity of the existing, so that another type of possible becomes possible.

Differences between languages being present in Unicode and skincolors in Unicode http://freeze.sh/_/2015/conversations/unicodes Availability (usability?) of characters vs. emoji -- language vs represenation of emotions; to add a translation of the 'physical'

Resolution of the possible
Definition of possible
Patching multiplicity

prepare a readinglist as one way to be prepared for gender and race as a subject
give participants a general understanding on how software/code/protocol 'enacts' certain politics (even when 'non-political') in the case of Unicode we could also look at specification vs implementation
get a sense (hands-on) of how language changes the way you understand your place in software (ie MakeHuman language file)

For now, workshop based on working from (suddenly not sure it should be both. let's see on 9th if we can choose one of them)



Examples we bring



A title for the talk + workshop

A date to work together on it: 9th of april

A reading list:


Part of a longer research, Possible Bodies --- includes contributions by Martino Morandi, Xavier Gorgol, Adva Zakai, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, Peggy Pierrot, Phil Langley, ...

Team proposed for .exe:

Peggy Pierrot (Brussels)
Works on projects linking information, media, activism, radio art and technology. Runs a publishing house, Venus Negra, publishing on popular cultures, Black Atlantic, music and science fiction. A sociologist by training, she holds a postgraduate degree in multimedia engineering. She worked as a journalist (Transfert.net, Le Monde diplomatique, Minorités.org) and editorial/technical webmaster in media and non-profit projects. She runs writing workshops and contributes to a long-running column entitled "L'Auberge des retoqués" plus a collection of short stories. She also lectures on african-american and caribbean litterature and culture, science-fiction or related topics.

Roel Roscam Abbing (Rotterdam)
Roel Roscam Abbing (1990, NL) is an artist and researcher with strong  interest for the issues and cultures surrounding networked computation.  In an often collaborative practice he has worked on projects about the  internet's infrastructure, DIY techniques and wireless community  networks. 
http://roelof.info

Femke Snelting (Brussels)
http://snelting.domainepublic.net/

(Jara Rocha) (Barcelona)
Jara Rocha is a cultural mediator, developing educational and research programs at Bau School of Design in Barcelona, Spain. She works with the materialities of infrastructures and queering practices, linking both formal and non-formal ways of attending to interface cultures.
http://jararocha.blogspot.be/

Modifiers, sliders and options

Genderneutral vs Gender Options
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/can-design-be-genderless/?utm_source=Eye+on+Design+newsletter&utm_campaign=35f7b221cd-Eye_on_Design_47&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6a9dfd84e5-35f7b221cd-26403689

Demo fuer alle / Gender Frei Stuttgart

http://constantvzw.org/site/Software-as-a-Critique.html?id_evenement=1920

Consequences of the parametric in software. Stories, exercises, experiments with modifiers, sliders, options and their politics. Granularity, space of possibilities.

Bugreport: The ecology of bugreporting doesn't 'allow' certain types of critique. bugreport is designed to deal with the particular / productive / efficient.

MakeHuman sliders (race, gender)

Phil Langley: It is inherant in the act of making a parametric model that you shouldn't just have a bunch of discrete variables, they would always interoperate. The sliders in the interface are always discrete on the screen so you don't see these relationships.

The signature feature of the MakeHuman interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a split second, the surprising proposal to list “gender” as a continuous parameter, promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that not yet materialized? But the uncomfortable and yet familiar presence of physical and cultural properties projected to the same horizontal scale soon shatters that promise. The interface suggests that the technique of simply interpolating parameters labeled 'Gender', 'Age', 'Muscle', 'Weight', 'Height', 'Proportions', 'Caucasian', 'African' and 'Asian' suffices to make any representation of the human body. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who can only blindly guess the outcomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by handling the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between 'Gender' to 'Weight' for example, or to decide on race and 'Proportions' through a similar gesture. Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual and visual language hint at the trouble of maintaining the one-dimensionality of this 3D world-view: 'Gender' (not 'Sex')and 'Weight' are labeled as singular but 'Proportions' is plural; 'Age' is not expressed as 'Young' nor 'Old', while race is made finite in its intra-iterations by naming a limited set of options for mixture.

Further inspection reveals that even the promise of continuity and separation is based on a trick. The actual math at work reveals an extremely limited topology based on a closed system of interconnected parameters, tightening the space of these bodies through assumptions of what they are supposed to be. This risky structuration is based on reduced humanist categories of “proportionality” and “normality”. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination would look the same, but software can make it happen. The sliders provide a machinic imagination for utilitarianised (supposedly human) compositors, conveniently covering up how they function through a mix of technical and cultural normativities.Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, they evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world. The point is not to "fix" these problems, quite the contrary. We experimented with replacing default values with random numbers, and other ways to intervene with the inner workings of the tool. But only when we started rewriting the interface, we could see it behave differently. By renaming labels, replacing them with questions and more playful descriptions, by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the generative process of making possible bodies.


Unicode modifiers (race, diversified families)

universal encoding, the universality of language is called in question.

Unicode has no interface, no letters, it does not prescribe fonts, it allocates memory addresses to some meaning with a suggestion of a form to represent it. Putting everything in a large address space, starting from what is there already. including it with as less translation as possible. Layering of obvious and less obvious policy. You can see it as a cross section of how linguistic symbols are organized in software through time.

Unicode

Unicode Emoji

Emoji

Unicode modifiers in action:
    the 'family' emojis are comprimised of the different emojis plus modifiers. In the whatsapp V 2.12.451 the family emoji can be deleted only in steps, showing the composition of the specific emoji:
http://stuff2233.club/~arra/modifier.gif (each frame show me pressing delete once)

Fitzpatrick, T.B. (1988) The validity and practicality of sun reactive skin types I through VI. Arch Dermatol 124; 869-871.
http://www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/RadiationProtection/FitzpatrickSkinType.pdf

Modifiers
469
U+1F441 
U+200D 
U+1F5E8 eye withe speech bubble => is it possible to combine and modify it with other modifiers

links not yet explored

Two days with the shadowy emoji overlords
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/dec/08/uif618-your-ascii-goodbye/
"For instance, with the release of emoji skin color modifiers in 2014,  the world was offered five new tones ranging from dark brown to pink.  The default skin tone was then set to be an inhuman yellow, “similar to Homer Simpson or John Boehner,” noted Davis at the conference. The world now had a Black Santa. But when Instagram released its Emoji Hashtags, allowing search by emoji for the first time ever, it decided to keep all skin tones separate. A search for # pulls up different results than #. The result? A racially segregated Instagram."

"Bitmojis: The avatars of conversation"
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/feb/25/bitmojis-the-avatars-of-conversation/

Emoji history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Engineering inclusivity
http://patch.codes/talks/hello-my-name-is/
https://github.com/patch/i18n-testing

Summary of 2017 proposal for customizable emoji's
http://blog.emojipedia.org/custom-emoji-a-summary/

"Unicode is on the verge of racism, scheduled for mid-2015"
http://tbishop.info/unicoderacism/
"One reason the proposed Unicode code points have names with “Fitzpatrick” instead of “skin” is a requirement expressed by some members of the International Standards Organization that the word “skin” (the “S” word) not be used in character names, to avoid being offensive."

"Racialized emoji insert race into texts and tweets where it never would have arisen before."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/10/how-apples-new-multicultural-emojis-are-more-racist-than-before/?tid=pm_opinions_pop_b

Afroji proposal
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14229-afroji.pdf

Diverse Emoji pre-Unicode update
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/12/prweb12414634.htm

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/8/10937830/dumpling-emoji-may-become-official-thanks-to-kickstarter
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/the-fbi-vs-apple-debate-just-got-less-white/
https://www.change.org/p/apple-and-google-support-equality-make-diverse-emojis

Not yet processed FS

http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/humanizing-interface/
http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/social-media-and-academic-surveillance-the-ethics-of-digital-bodies
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/31-race-swap-experiment/transcript/
http://livestream.com/accounts/8366892/events/4291886/player?width=960&height=540&autoPlay=true&mute=false

Fonts on the unicode website 
"Noto Color Emoji","Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",Times,Symbola,Aegyptus,Code2000,Code2001,Code2002,Musica,serif,LastResort;

Planning

Thursday
evening/late afternoon: 25m presentation
framework: Medea
After -- a discussion

Susan Schuppli: has been working with Parisi - logics of algorithms. Two court cases, comparing the two. One full of tech protocols, the other un-computational. Which data can can come in and what not. From one reality to another.

Friday
Half a day or one day workshop, two strands: one through modifiers (Unicode) the other through rewriting the MakeHuman interface. Not split over two groups? Talking through the doing. Discussion. Different types of students.

Saturday
Work, discuss. Masterclass: what are we working with, thinking of. Respondents. Feedback. Intimate. Participants from Friday might join.

Sunday
(group has a workshop for a book on Sunday morning)



How to use Emojis:

    Fonts