Impressions from The Libre Graphics Meeting 2016

Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 gathered about 150 participants from all over the world during 4 days at the forum hall and auditorium of Westminster University in London. The program made clear how strongly the developer/maker/user spaces are merging into one collective space where programming, design, creation and use come together. The ongoing exhibition, ' Libre Graphics Culture and Practice', in which members of the Libre Graphics Community show posters, drawings, publications, pictures, videos, games and other artwork, functions as a proof for this 'new' dimension.

Impressions
Going to LGM is like a gathering in the biological farm that delivers your daily portions of fruit and vegetables. For each plant and fruit you can learn where it is growing, who had the idea to try it out, who found the right seeds, who took care of it and how the fruits have been recolted. The growers are also cooks, and the visitors have their own ecologies back home. Questions are formulated from informed backgrounds, exchanges take place. Each year the gathering is organised in another physical place that resonates with its ecology in the meetings. 
Lectures, workshops and meetings at LGM are multilayered and multidisciplinary. For each software and hardware you get insight in the choices that determine the processes and the results, each one of them taken in function of a context and specific priorities. Questions are answered and influence on their turn the development. For some projects mentioned here, I returned my questions to the makers, afterwards via mail. Of each of them I got very clear, generous and extensive answers, mostly overnight. 
If this has to be a journalistic article that fits a magazine, which is what was asked for during LGM, it is far too long and personal. Here is my priority that informed this choice: I wanted to represent somehow the richness of LGM, and how each visitor walks through the event following lectures of specific interest, meeting people, missing workshops because of fruitful conversations. What follows is a selection of presentations that touched me somehow, being a media artist and author. I did not assist to all the lectures. The collection is as much an invitation to pick & recompose, as to add & rewrite with your own comments.  


Community space for Cultures and Practices
The architecture of the location and the schedule, including large lunch breaks and free space for lightning talks, allowed for an interesting flow of people in a collective space, as such embodiying the merge of culture and practice. Smaller and larger meetings, conversations and exchanges of all sorts, around tables, in sofas, on comfortable cushions on the staircase, in separate rooms or on the grass outside were happening in parallel to the auditorium where all presentations took place. Witnessing the gathering of people in this open space sharing the same FLOSS philosophy and collaborating physically and virtually over the years, is a source of inspiration, enthusiasm and motivation. Of course, this collective space is as much coloured by potential as it is by friction, questions and sometimes even frustration, which favours the exchanges and conversations, 'the best, biggest thing that Free Software has to offer its user'.
Next to updates from the softwares we daily use - Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus...-, I got inspired by new ideas and applications of F/LOSS graphic tools, exchanged on practises and confirmed emerging questions in the field, got an glimpse of the latest developments. I like to remember this edition as one of hybrids: hybrids in creations, in the use of tools, in worksflows and in peer-networking.

Creations
Several physical experience oriented installations with low tresholds for participation were presented throughout LMG, mostly on the first day. Where these projects show an exciting fluidity between the physical and the digital, all of them raised interesting questions on accessibility, be it hardware, software or the data they play with and generate.

After the state of the arts of LGM, where all major software platforms presented their latest changes – such as GIMP, Inkscape – Roman Miletitch introduced us to Flippaper http://papertronics.github.io/, a pinball machine that turns every event into a drawing. Flippaper allows you to simultaneously be a game designer, a drawing artist and a player. As a designer you draw on paper, as a player you are interacting with software. Playing turns into a drawingprocess, drawing literally becomes a game. The code recently has being opensourced, but as much as the player is desinging the game, thre is no direct interaction with the code from her side. A question from the audience pointed out the interest of opensourcing the hardware, which is not on the agenda for now. The machine itself is not easy to transport, and it would have been great to have a portable model in a playcorner of the venue. Maybe something for next year?

Hackers & Designers http://hackersanddesigners.nl had set up their Karaoke Zine http://wiki.hackersanddesigners.nl/mediawiki/images/thumb/d/d2/Zinefest-momentary-zine.jpg/600px-Zinefest-momentary-zine.jpg for the workshop on 'Momentary e-zines'. Following Bruce Sterling's statement that "Every event is a magazine", with a microphone connected to a speech-to-text software, a screen that displays the speaker's sentences and a receipt printer, you could create your own ezine while talking in the mic, inserting automatically searched images based on your last utterance, at every break. The command 'print' would launch the creation of the ezine. The videoscreen on which you see how the algorithm interprets your pronounciation is a funny way to interact with the software. But when the audience discovered that we were interacting with Google's api and that every word we pronounces was feeding their database, an interesting discussion was initiated on functionalities of software, whether to create your own tools, bend existing tools in an artistic way or compromise on commercial tools. Next to the software, it also raised the question on the trainingdata the software uses to run and the new data it generates. It is a question that was clearly emerging in many LGM conversations: why do non-informed people would rather trust you when you state all data is managed by Google, than when you tell them the data they generate is hosted on your own server. And why not start implementing alternative solutions?

A focus on easy public interaction to see the algorithm at work is also at the core of the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/, an installation by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé in a vitrine in a busy Brussels' street. Using OpenCV as face recognition software, the software tracks down faces in live recorded images, and replaces them with faces from images it recognises in large art databases created by Asger Jorn and Guttorm Guttomsgaard. The perspective of the algorithm shows us faces in walls, on cars, and in other unexpected places, especially at night, and turns the urban landscape into one large wall for illicite poster sticking. To follow the riddle of the previous examples, every event in this installation does not become a poster or a magazine, but a possible frame in the algorithmically generated film. Central is the installation is the database, and more essential, the images it contains. These artists' databases are not publicly available. It confirms the latest thread: what is the vlaue of F/LOSS code if you don't have enough qualitative data at your disposal to run it properly? How can you generate alternative data? And what about, in this case, the newly generated images that combine fragments of the copyrighted images with fragments of our bodies? 

The glocal community of LGM has already generated gigabytes of data! The building of The LGM (video) archive http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/lgm2016.videoarchive of the previous editions was presented in a workshop by Michael Murtaugh and generated a lively discussion on peer-to-peer platforms for archiving, tools for using and rewriting the archive, and ways of sharing the material. Infrastructure rarely is an official topic of discussion, but it seems that this could become different in the future. Imagine for the next edition of LGM in Rio de Janeiro: a local network, a collective server where all kinds of data is collected during the event, an opening talk in which the Terms of Use of these data is discussed, and the erasure of the collective hard disk once everyone has taken their own copy home...?


Tools & workflows
Collective tools for hybrid publishing filled up on an important part of the program. Collectiveness can be understood in terms of platforms (The Publication Station http://publicationstation.wdka.hro.nl/wiki, Ping https://github.com/sarahgarcin/ping-v2, The Sausage Machine http://www.publishinglab.nl/resources/hybrid-publishing-tool-the-sausage-machine/, html2print http://osp.kitchen/tools/html2print/#project-detail-files) or in terms of sharing the sources, the code and the research (How I stopped to Learn Programming and Love the Bash http://www.lafkon.net/, Objects in Common http://www.graficaliebre.com/index.php/hacemos/diseno-y-comunicacion/objetos-comunes). The hybridness of the publishing profession is aiming towards the integration of the flux of writing into on and offline publications, as well as to the different forms in which one can publish, be it a pdf, epub, tablet, phone, computer, a Raspberry Pi http://www.metamute.org/shop or all of these at once. This affects the publishing workflow to a great extend. All of the different approaches are wonderful in some aspects and struggling with others. Flexibility, user friendliness and ressources are only a few challenges that were mentioned.

The Publishing Lab http://www.publishinglab.nl/, presented by Inte Gloerich and Léna Robin, calls itself a 'hybrid publisher' and also a lab. Their work draws on the INC publication 'From Print to Ebooks – a Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts' http://networkcultures.org/digitalpublishing/publication/, 'an effort by a number of researchers and practitioners engaged in various forms of contemporary cross-media publishing'.The toolkit makes use of Markdown https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ (as a markup language), Pandoc http://pandoc.org/ (as converter software), Makefiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makefile (for specifying transformation rules) and Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29 (for distributed version control). The Lab researches for solutions that can bend Markdown in order to have more flexibility in design. One of the outcomes isThe Sausage Machine http://hpt.publishinglab.nl/, developed by Gottfried Haider. His aim was to lower the threshold for a larger audience when it comes to a F/LOSS hybrid publishing flow. As he states, the web interface is mainly a showcase of Markdown and a way to upload source texts. Once you have your "seed" Markdown text in the textfield, and a template you want to start with, the "Log into GitHub" button creates a publishing project with all files you selected. On GitHub only, no choice is left here. Whenever one pushes a change to GitHub, the Sausage Machine automatically goes to work, and turnsthe updated Markdown document into all output formats the Makefile specifies (e.g. EPUB & PDF). It then pushes those output files back into the Git repository. All this is done in 10 minutes without the necessity to set up and maintain the software on your machine, or the ability to use the terminal. Compared to the commercial approaches, this one inverts the usual power dynamics: rather than submitting text, and merely selecting a template of which the actual execution black-boxed, the Sausage Machine
 instead allows you to submit instructions that a server executes for you. 

Another online project in the making is the promising 'Ping (Ping is Not Googledocs)' https://github.com/sarahgarcin/ping-v2, an initiative by Sarah Garcin (Gui collective http://www.g-u-i.net) and Victor Lebeau. Itemerged out of a student project from the idea to optimize Etherpad. After having spent time on studying the Etherpad-code, they decided to start from scratch and are now looking for collaborators. Ping wants to be a platform for collaborative notetaking and publishing based on node.js. Multiple authors will have clear authorship in each of the individual versions of the text, timestamps can be inserted, as well as images and comments to images. Realtime editing can be done using Markdown and the tool will allow for export to pdf or html.

Lorenz Schori is also looking for collaboration, of a very different nature though. His project SpreadFlow http://spreadflow.io/ was developed for the Swiss newspaper WOZ Die Wochenzeitung. SpreadFlow is a metadata extraction and processing engine. Its main purpose is to support file based media production workflows by observing changes to text and media files in real-time. Information gathered through this process can be used to transform and recombine content, e.g., in order to prepare it for different publishing channels, like html (for the newspaper app), Thumbor and OpenCV (to process the images), pdf and xml (to fit the Swiss mediadatabases). In order to document his project, he's looking for someone who is willing to share some production data (i.e. texts, layouts, images) which would allow him to provide tutorials. These commented examples will be an invitation to others to tinker with the software.

Open Source publishing http://osp.kitchen/ is working the exact way round, from html to print http://osp.kitchen/tools/html2print/. The approach is very exciting as you work straight in the browser. You can go back and forth between code and visual manipulation thanks to the element inspector. And that exciting aspect is at the same time the Achilles heel of the project. Because browsers change all the time to updated versions, the project asks for intense management. But once it all works, it is a beauty that is as they say 'new to print production'. Indeed, you can combine collaborative editing throughout editors like Etherpad, and go back-and-forth between hand and code manipulations.

The most accessible project in this series – and that is because I used to be an intensive wiki user – is Beyond Social http://beyond-social.org/, presented by André Castro from Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. The project was developed as part of The Publication Station, their research lab on all forms of publishing, exploring the different possible connections between the source and the output. Beyond Social is a web magazine, but it is also a collaborative online editorial space for documenting, reflecting, and building upon existing work. He magazine consists of two spaces: “a wiki http://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page was established as the editorial space, while the website http://beyond-social.org/ turned into an appealing and carefully crafted outlet for the content originated on the wiki. Connecting these two spaces is the wiki's API – a programming interface, which allows other applications to be built upon it – and a series of scripts https://gitlab.com/Castro0o/beyond-social pull content from the wiki and integrate it on the website.” You can read the entire article on the make process here http://beyond-social.org/articles/Making_Beyond_Social.html. And it is worth just comparing the 'about'-pages, on the wiki and the web, to enjoy the 'seeming' simplicity of the idea. As part of his presentation André also presented the refurbished Master in Experimental Publishing https://xpub.pzimediadesign.nl/ that starts at PZI from September onwards. Knowing the team and their expertise more exciting hybrid publishing projects will see the light soon. Looking forward!

Afterword
* A big thank you to the local volunteers, and mainly Larisa Blazic and Phil Langley, who made this edition of LMG possible!
* The exhibition 'Libre Graphics, Culture and Practice' is on view till 22nd May 2016 in London Gallery West, The Forum, Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, Watfoard Road, Harrow, HA1 3TP
https://www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/libre-graphics-culture-and-practice