25.10.2019
Present: Julie, David, Cristina, Natacha, Hans, Guillaume, Michael, Nicolas, An, Wendy, Femke, Martino, David

Personal introductions, responses and reflections

Martino: met Otlet via Mondotheque, always had double feelings. Glad to have Julie's mail and Elodie's text. 

Dennis: Re-reading Otlet is relevant; reconsider legacies

Julie: Has been working on archives and categories. Influence of colonialism, racism looking at that for a few years now. Was upset when reading Afrique aux noirs. Frustrating to be told that great humanist are great while they are white suprematists.

David: Algolit sessions participant. Did not participate in Mons. Surprise to discover AaN -- its ideas are still very present in Europe, Belgium. Idea of displacing people still current. 

Cristina: interest in archives and power. Machine learning systems. Biases + datasets. Attended lots of algolit sessions. Was part of dataworkers expo. Did talk about some of the issues. Otlet is not the only problematic figure. Francis Galton: father of statistics and eugenics.
Not easy to express a position within a group dynamic. 
we wanted to critize the universalism embedded in algorithmic models & being in the space (Mundaneum)
How to do it to a space dedicated to bring hommage.
Find a way to do that/have emerge it in a sensitive but still outspoken way.

Natacha: contact via Mondotheque, and Google and the powers organising around it. Did not really know about it.
Encounter with La Fontaine, started to make a timeline, trying to understand what was happening here - industry economy... interested on local versus global issues.
The way mundaneum was structured was all about European benevolent power. Felt stuck. Lots of information; difficult to sort out/through what was going on. It was difficult to talk about it (the making of the book) got in the way, it became too complex and I felt frustrated to not have the context to put simple words on it. I entered in conflict and left the project.
African populations have been reclaiming sacred objects that are in Musea here, not back yet
Happy that we are here.

Hans: interested in how ML is reproducing bias in society. 
hiding it, by omitting a lot of things
racist roots everywhere, likes that Elodie pointed to Kant
NEVER discussed that text she mentions during his philosophy studies
All the big names in statistics were doing Darwinistic research, embedded in their research
Otlet as a typical example.
works in peace movement, humanitarian intervention thinking, military reuses colonization techniques
with a humanitarian layer.

Guillaume
part of the Data Workers exhibition and Algolit
piece on surveillance technology, Portrait parlé de Bertillon
Grateful for Elodie's text. 

Michael: was part of the first moves in the Mondotheque project. Exciting to see the conversation starting. Embarassing to see how we focus was on one thing, and we missed another. Talking about violence, but in an abstract way. Never thinking about colonial violence. It is a slow process to come to terms. Working with Antje van Wichelen, a slow realization. Reading algorithmics of oppression by Safiya Noble . How Google works with race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_of_Oppression
surprisingly new theme but exciting to take that on. It was missing from what I contributed to Mondotheque.

Nicolas: member of Constant, involved in Algolit & Mondotheque
visit last century to Mundaneum, abandoned archive
it was a cemetery of archive. What a shame, we thought. Maybe this was a good thing. Relation with taxonomy, archives: a curiosity ... working on imagenet, similar problems.
back and forth between interest/intellectual adventure thinking on classification/differences and the violence of these systems, continuity of racism, class, gender issues that are embedded in this
There is always an alarmbell ringing.
Is classification inheritantly (??) bad?

Wendy: visiting the expo :-) and also wanting to listen in.

An: initiated expo in Mundaneum. Interest in tradition of Otlet and his legacy on data structuring; as well as perspectives of the algorithms that do not work.
help from the Gutenberg volunteer project to proofread the Afrique aux Noirs
there was not enough time to read the texts, there was only the enthusiasm of having made a book public
Thank you Elodie and Julie. Eye-opener for someone working on datasets/machine learning. Why did we not focus on this?
media art scene is far too white to deal with these issues. "Spirit of the time" argument is not an excuse.  (as in Herge discussion on Tintin au Congo).
can we make a white suprematism detection classifier?

Femke
visit of Mundaneum, touched by situation, super rich work paralyzed for many reasons
there was no conversation around it, no understanding of who this figure was
since discovering Afrique aux Noirs, bothered by being unable to talk about relation between classification and racism.
took time to be able to phrase it, to put it into words
no means, no time...
when this work of Paul Otlet was added to the public domain, someone published this text without contextualisation, which is how Femke encountered it
we missed many alarm bells
find a way to produce an erratum/bug report that we can slip into the publications we made, to refer to when talking about Otlet
So far only small apologetic reference to racism in Otlet is biographic work of Alex Wright.
happy elodie wrote this article because it opens a long work to start to address the relations and see how we can develop a practice that shows a link between colonialism and computation
non-coercive computing; doing technology in another way
with best intentions we reproduce power relationships we wanted to break
Otlet became prism to look at many things
what this figure was, was very important to show what was happening to public institutions in Belgium, rel to Google, interconnected links. it is painful that we missed talking about racism.
universalism - utopianism - colonialism: can we find these connections also in his drawings...
dreading to open the file on otlet as it's been so many years that her work on this spanned

'erratum'?
Martino: against throwing away
the erratum in Otlet is not that we were not critical. it is a critical book on classification & figure of Otlet
our blind spot, because of the group that took on this project. It needed some other perspective. It needed even more perspectives. Relation between colonialism, enlightenment and modernism. (brought in through the reference to Kant)
scientific racism and its problems. It needs some complexification.
needs flipping and rewriting

Natacha: different scientisms -- modernism liberating despite its racism.
there were many contextualisations and accusations of scientific racism even at the time at which the texts were written
relation to slavery. Critique of it has been surpressed.
La Fontaine was focused on the communities

Femke: what do we want to do / do we want to do something in response to the texts that were brought in today?

- Making a list of texts to read, to think about these issues. A start: https://diversions.constantvzw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Resources

Not to drive this stuff / defining large concepts such as capitalist extraction; but instead find historical or contemporary examples where these converge
colonial heritage is active today. 
how to stop from writing further these colonial texts, but instead deconstructing them
'better showing than hiding the problem'

Julie: it's good that the text was there, but it was surprising that it had not been contextualised since it had been under people's nose all the time
no content warning
did the matter not matter at all?

Femke: similar to Elodie's argument about the silence

An: we are doing dialogue, inclusion, learning and unlearning. Shocking to discover this blind spot. How to write an erratum also addressing well-intended people (!)
maybe we could call it 'omissum'? :-))) 
Would like to understand better where it comes from. Also for others dealing with heritage.

Hans: White privilege in work. How easy to miss something, needing someone else to tell you. Can we can do sth with that.

Dennis: there is no innocence (white innocence?)
one is so bound to the Western knowledge production system that it puts you ina system where by definition it ignores the 

Galton case -- inherent racism in the material, gathering more stories. Topic was there. Deciding for one focus, and not another. What do you prioritize. 

Hans: that is whiteness

Julie: it is not a surprise there are blindspots. It would be a miracle if it was not there.

Wendy: maybe make an effort to add abolitionist authors to gutenberg (Karma). Dubois?

Cristina: Abolitionist tech (see Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology). W. E. B. Du Bois

Difficult to find non-european authors. 

Michael: Resisting erratum. It is actually encouraging to have a new set of critical tools to address the blind spot. Fearful it would stop these discussions.

Julie: the ommissum could discuss blindspot and invisibilisation. To invite people to think a bit more.

Michael: an erratum usually fixes mistakes

Femke: it doesn't negate the work. Bugreport, annotation, ...

An: likes 'blindspot'

Dennis: friendship of the work. no one knows who are the" broad friends of the museum" at tervuren.

Martino: Blindspot seems to take away responsibility

An: would like to not go through guilt.
wants to learn and be confronted with things; error induces a guilt feeling

Femke: wants to take responsibility

Michael: it is not personal, it is bigger. there were other voices who were they

Cristina: it was generative

Omissum as an annotation to existing work that is already there (around Otlet), and also as an invitation/call for other work.

[we decide to split up in two groups: one group to discuss Mise en Valeur et Omission, the other to work on a bibliography]

Discussing biblio: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/omission-biblio

Discussing text:

Framing question -- contribution to the expo, and also co-creating curatorial frame of expo
Omissum could have been there already
Elodie arrived in team of Constant in February 2019, wanting to make bridge between rethink different epimistologies & technologies
Publication for DiVersions: email of An passed by, Afrique aux Noirs on Gutenberg, decided to work on it: invitation to Elodie from her expertise and as member of Constant
A way for her to look at these projects, how they function
text allows to look forward, DiVersions publication is already part of that
If we would not do an Omissum means we would let her do the work/outsource.
In writing omissum we can refer to this text

Nicolas:
Feeling that the text makes the argument to try block 

It must have been non-obvious to be asked to write this text
Does Elo inherit this project, by becoming a colleague.

There is something rich/moving ... 
Otlet established in Belgium? Or established by the project? Exciting and difficult in text
The text is therefore difficult ... can you align Otlet with Kant? He is more fragile; so question if it is stabilizing/doing too much honour to the figure; makes him more univocal; consolidate him.
Making the figure monolithic is maybe not helping; shortcuts.

How the conflation of capitalism, classification and colonialism/racism align ... is maybe more dimensional?

Cristina:
2 romanian authors -- a philosopher and a historian of religions - both had relations to fascist regime
debate: critics say we need this figure because Romanian literature is not enough present out there
while other authors are cirtizized for not allowing these figures (?) in canon?
What counts as heritage
Canonization through critique.

An:
Celine, collaboration. Discussed a lot. Famous because of anti-semitism. It was central to his work.

With Otlet, a bit harder? Is racism not that central to his work? How do you connect the racism to the work of classificiation. How to trace it in the work of Otlet?
Classification + racism are not the same. 
Classification has discriminatory effects, but if you concentrate on classification and you may not see it.

Hans:
There is colonial pedagogy in the work. Humanistic language and its dark side. Ignorance and dark-sides. 
First text is relatively progressive. Racist nevertheless.
Development cooperation still very close to Afrique aux noirs. So it means also looking at current versions of blindspots, their heritage and their reproduction.

oppression of thinking the world like this.
progress thinking.

Otlet as a figure to study this.

Femke:
Different operations in text
- Refusal of 'man of his time': if we are people of our time, what does it mean for the general discourse? how are we setting ourselves apart from this?
Main discourse now gives a lot of space to racism, gender discrimination, white dominance
- Monde is his magnus opus, it is his understanding of his work
Otlet himself connects his life's work with white supremacy, it is to take serious
the systems he proposes are playful & multidimensional in a world that has less imagination for this
- useful simplification after we did work on complexifying this figure

it is not about Otlet? but about when classification crosses a boundary.
Connection to 'now' when zuckerberg goes into politics. The messiness. How to work with imperfect figures.
How to use these problematics to discuss what is happening today.

An: this text is also a reminder to Constant/the work we did. How the figure can or cannot be discussed. 
-> call: you cannot be silent

where does the thinking about classification and colonialism cross work we are involved in (active archives, mondotheque, algolit.) wanting to do more than acknowledging a blindspot. Wanting to do more.
trigger the desire to do something with it, in a way we have not doen it yet
how to approach it? 

if you say let's break with the enlightment/Kant, how can you then do a critique of Kant?
works in DiVersions are working with existing systems (not an actual critique)
how can you devleop a framework that goes along with that practise

Cristina: fascination should be scrutinized more as a motivation. 
is a motivation for a lot of artists. real life costs. How to balance conciousness with fascination.

Michael: gathering different responses. Tips and tricks to avoid how to fall into these repetitions. Not try to unify. 

[it is 17:00 and An needs to leave so the internet connection left as well; discussion continued]