SPLINT
SPeculative Libre INtersectional Technologies
For about ten years we described the work of Constant as using F/LOSS tools and relating to Free cultures because of the ways they enable room for bringing feminist methodologies and approaches.
Feminist methodologies would stand for a semantic map containing dialogue, frictions, looking at power structures, gender representation, social class, age, looking at what/who is not there, collectivity, sharing, care... Projects such as DiVersions, Collective Conditions, Alchorisma paid attention to the ways different forms of oppression intersect with our modes of doing, talking with/about and understanding cultural heritage, togetherness, technology and 'nature'. By working on such projects, we realised we were missing out on other elements of our complex world. That, for instance, the word feminism struggles in talking about (neo)colonial structures and histories, about more-than-human entities and relationships. It is becoming difficult to still use the word feminism(s) to cover it all. We realise that forms of oppression and exclusion are interconnected. For instance, thinkers like Malcom Ferdinand describes how colonisation and ecosystems destruction are intimately connected. We can see how mineral and data mining are obeying brutal power structures, how anti-capitalist attitudes lead to low-tech and Ubuntu on second-hand computers, how racial and gender violence are scaled-up by algorithmic infrastructures, ... In the context of SPLINT, we're researching, discussing, reflecting on how we can modestely imagine and invent ways to obstruct the intersecting forms of oprressions in relations to technologies.
- prosm: The prosm is a figure we imagined to trouble the smoothness and definition of the optical prism. An optical prism is defined by two identical shapes facing each other with each surfaces flat and polished. The prosm's surfaces are of random number, sizes (so they're rarely identical but it's not entirely impossible) and show various textures; as one surface might have smashed against a coarse matter while one was repetitively polished by grains of sand and another became porous and welcomed different kinds of sedimentation. Because of this variability in textures, size and inclination, there's no consistency in the ways light penetrates (or not) the different surfaces of the prosm. We've imagined the prosm as a device that talks back to the term intersectionality because of its complex structure, variability of effects and not-always visible surfaces.