WHO's WHO and WHAT's WHAT Rasa Alksnyte Agustina Andreoletti When I read the description of this workshop, the idea of interfaces and entanglement came to my mind. Interfaces not in term of screen based human interaction, but related to the phenomenon of interface as the one in charge of erasing the virtual opacity of the limits. This definition associated more to biology than to computer sciences, displays how the boundary becomes an osmotic membrane, and points to a change affecting the notion of limitation. Machines are in a permanent relationship with the environment, in a continual process of becoming, as a result of internal and external forces. This means the collaboration between software and thequalities of the hardware extend beyond themselves along the relation presented. It is a becoming, a process of interaction where several becomings exchange. Machines, in this way, are alive, and dynamic not because they are controlled by spirit, but because the material of which they are composed continue to circulate, that forecast their dissolution or ensure their regeneration. In this way, I feel Promiscuous Pipelines is a way to approach the topic. The pipes do not link, nor do they represent relations between different software, or between the software and the environment. They are rather paths along which things steadily come into being. Thus when the concept of entanglement appears, it is intended to be not a network of links but a meshwork of interwoven pipes of growth and movement. The parts existing in the entanglement have an evolutive organisation; contributing their own variations to produce uniquely defined arrangements or local assemblages. The key point here is that no software overdetermines all the others. Rather, each instead contributes differences in its own way; creating a kind of rhizomatic structure. Hide at the centre of the entanglement, I'm interested in fluidity in code and material. In this field, I am trying to develop further the idea of biological concepts in the machine environment, especially symbiotic relation between human and machine (and between machine-machine). Bibliotecha Zeljko Blace (b.1976, (Capljina, Bosnia&Herzegovina >Zagreb, Croatia > Berlin, Germany) ....(in+)consistently working (in-)between fields of contemporary culture, media technologies and community sport - cross-pollinating queer, media and social practices. Worked as artist, activist, athlete, researcher, reporter, producer, designer, curator, critic, editor ... Željko was a co-founder, coordinator and curator of Multimedia Institute and its net.culture club MaMa (1999-2004). He instigated work in QueerSport as co-founder and president of qSPORT – LGBTQ sport and culture organization in Zagreb (2006 - ), as an activist and artist researcher dealing with tensions arising between sport norm and queer expressions. Was a esearcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastrich (2008-2009), researcher/artist-in-residence at PatchingZone.net and artistic researcher at PhD Arts. Now works on community art/education project in Ghent (Timelab.org) & Brussels (ConstantVzw.org & Beursschouwburg.be), as well as its itterations in Lille and Paris. He works internationally with May17 IDAHOT, FAREnet (football activism) and baQlava - trans-local network of Balkan, Caucasus and Middle East sexual and gender discrimination activists. Currently preparing a large scale project on Contesting/Contexting SPORT in summer 2016 with a newly found collective in nGbK.de from artists&activists who work in/with sport in criticaly and creativly. http://zeljko.blace.name/ http://www.QueerSport.info/ During PromiscousPipelines he is developing conceptual framework, media and techical resources for [[QueerOS]] to surface in diverse incarnations. bolwerK 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 collaborations and for inspiring internal and external group dynamics concerning relevant issues. bolwerK believes that art is the ideal context for thoughts and reflection. Art creates a meta-layer, a framework for questioning social, economical, cultural and political issues and values. Social environments are created, not for streamlining ideas, but in order to formulate shared/common questions and hence feed a sense of communality. The idea is to each time again create a toolkit in collaboration in order to externalize these questions and by doing so to reinforce the group and the individual. 'Open source' is a philosophy not a pragmatic methodology to externalize these questions. www.ooooo.be The Botopera In the context of the 2015 Public Domain Day, The Botopera featured Fats Waller, Nikola Tesla, Beatrix Potter and Sergei Rachmaninov; four artists who died in 1943, and whose works entered the public domain on 1st January 2014. These authors were reanimated in the form of a "chatbot": a small software program that automatically intervenes in a chat conversation pretending to be human. The bots enter in dialogue with each other and with visitors who join them in their online room. The bots produce images, sound and text. http://botopera.activearchives.org Constant Constant is a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant works in-between media and art and is interested in the culture and ethics of the World Wide Web. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism are important threads running through the activities of Constant. Constant organizes workshops, print-parties, walks and ‘Verbindingen/Jonctions’-meetings on a regular basis for a public that’s into experiments, discussions and all kinds of exchanges. Marthe Van Dessel (Antwerp, BE) Marthe Van Dessel is an activist and performer who creates interfaces, devices & protocols to instigate our urban and institutional hardware. She engages in the administrative, cultural, 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. Etherpash FoAM FoAM is a network of transdisciplinary labs for speculative culture. It is inhabited by people with diverse skills and interests – from arts, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cooking, design and gardening. It is a generalists’ community of practice working at the interstices of contrasting disciplines and worldviews. Guided by our motto “grow your own worlds,” we study and prototype possible futures, while remaining firmly rooted in cultural traditions. We speculate about the future by modelling it in artistic experiments that allow alternative perspectives to emerge. By conducting these experiments in the public sphere, we invite conversations and participation of people from diverse walks of life. Nik Gaffney Christoph Haag (Augsburg, DE) Christoph Haag studied design at the Department of Hybrid Space/Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Approaching graphic design from the commandline and the commandline from a design perspective, he is currently extending usage into programming. Lives and works in Augsburg, Germany Gottfried Haider (Amsterdam, NL) The theme fits my interest as both an artist and an educator well. I've grown up in the midst of a great public interest in Linux & FLOSS around the end of the 90ies, which made me go into building my own distribution all the way from sources (the Linux from Scratch project). I've dealt with the recursive nature of software and this quest for purity ("bootstrapping") later in a machinima work, where the code of a game is perpetually recompiled while the game itself is running: https://vimeo.com/10877197 Part of my other work is in the field of tool building: I've co-created the "Content-Manipulation System" Hotglue together with Danja Vasiliev - very much on the other side of the spectrum vs the pipes, where accessibility and ease of use was our driving motivation. I am also involved in the Processing project, which tries to build a bridge between code and the visual arts (pedagogy), again by hiding some of the underlying mechanisms that make the system tick in favor of a GUI. I am currently working on making Processing work on the Raspberry Pi (and similar ARM-based mini computers), to make this kind of code-based work more affordable for students, artists and designers. Gijs de Heij Maja Kuzmanovic Anne Laforet (Strassbourg, FR) Pierre Marchand (Bruxelles) An Mertens (Brussels, BE) Michael Murtaugh (US/NL/BE) Member of Constant + part of the Botopera team; teaching at the Piet Zwart Institute Media Design, Rotterdam (https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/ ). Microraptor Microraptor gui is a framework/approach for creating graphical user interfaces, that interleaves registering event callbacks with procedural drawing code backed by CSS. This gives some efficiency and flexibility not found in traditional scene-graph/widget hierarchy approaches; flexibility useful for custom canvases/controls in graphical applications. Martino Morandi pippin / Øyvind Kolås Live coding of UIs with C, cairo and CSS, Øyvind Kolås has experimented with writing digital media tools and UIs for a couple of decades, some of his results have found use in different libre graphics libraries and applications. He is investigating new approaches to model, combine and interact with digital media. % GRAFT: QueerOS, system The Queer Operating System as a paradigm, looks into queering of normative systems, unpacking of different social, political, economical and aesthetic codes that normalize trough technology. Roel Roscam Abbing Eleanor Saitta Is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality. http://dymaxion.org Femke Snelting (NL/BE) Investigating interrelations between digital tools and creative practice, Femke develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, an association for arts and media active in Brussels since 1997. The collective work of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine daily life. Constant generates amongst others performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational experiments. Femke co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and coordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit. She teaches at The Piet Zwart Institute (Media Design and Communication, Rotterdam, NL), a.pass and erg (Brussels, BE). Sophie Toupin (Montreal) The research I am working on at the moment, and which might be of interest to the worksession theme is about Anti-Colonial Hacking. More specifically, it is the case study of an autonomous encrypted communication network developed during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. In the 1980s, freedom fighters and hackers from South Africa built an encrypted communication network that allowed activists in South Africa and prisoners in Robben Island to communicate with the senior leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) based in Lusaka, Zambia. The autonomous encrypted communication network which has been understudied was set up to attempt to launch a people's war to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa. The ingenuousness of the communication system is such that it used an assemblage of technologies and pipes (!) including computers, tape recorders, the telephone system, pagers, etc. to adapt to the difficult context on the ground whether it was about surveillance of the police state or the lack of electricity. This case study sheds light on one of the most exciting, but untold story of anti-colonial hacking making obvious the connections between the social, the technical and the physical worlds. A part from wanting to continue to work on this project and share it with others, I am also interested in theorizing the concept of “pipes” to shed new light on its meanings. That's how i envisage the bulk of my contribution to the worksession: It will be at the conceptual level. As I will be spending one month in Europe (I am based in Montreal), from August 12 to September 14, the worksession will be a great opportunity to work with, share, learn and contribute towards an understanding of promiscuous pipes. Sophie Toupin's work explores the linkages between technology, feminism and activism through ethnographic studies and projects. She is a co-founder of FemHack a mobile feminist hacklab in Montreal and the TransHackFeminist convergence. Sophie works for Media@McGill, a hub for research and scholarship on media, technology and culture at McGill University in Montreal. Her current research focuses on feminist peer production and, anti-colonial hacking and feminist, queer+ trans hacker culture. Simon Yuill (Glasgow) is an artist, writer and programmer based in Glasgow. His work includes the use of interview and research processes, film, publishing, and custom software systems. He was the inaugural winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award (Berlin, 2008), has been a Research Resident at the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam, 2005), an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow with the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick (2013), and is currently an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow with the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College (London). % GRAFT: Unitary Networking, mesh Unitary Networking is a speculative approach to communications infrastructure, trying to establish a link between urban technology and communication technology and reflecting on the way they form networks of power. In practice, the starting point of the project is an electronic messaging system running on a wireless mesh network, composed of both fixed and moving nodes. The messages propagate through the network when the devices come in contact with each other. It is a non-hierarchical network, where every node receives, relays and broadcasts messages. The users of the network can send or receive messages by using the webbrowser of their smartphone or computer. The messages can be received and sent at any time, but are only synchronized when other fixed or moving nodes are encountered. % GRAFT: Wænd, projection Wænd is a platform for subjective and collaborative spatial publication. With Wænd you can create your map from scratch, publish a territorial representation from your very personal point of view, and collaborate on existing maps. Pierre lives and works in Brussels as an artist and software developer. He is experienced in the graphics free software community as co-developer packages as Scribus and Fontmatrix. As a member of the Open Source Publishing team experiments with new languages and forms. He also designs maps, websites and various custom-based software for artists. Initiator of Lazy Landscape, self initiated research on web development taking shape as an online coding platform. http://www.atelier-cartographique.be/june18.html Wendy Van Wynsberghe