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kimmy_v4_20May/MDs28May/All Sources Are Broken.md

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+Title: Workshop: All Sources Are Broken by Labor Neunzehn
+Subtitle: a Post-Digital Reading Group
+
+Remix of a blogpost by Silvio Lorusso and debris of pictures, complemented with a dispersed editors' note.
+
+*Labor Neunzehn is run by Valentina Besegher and Alessandro Massobrio. It is an artist-run space located in Berlin and multi-disciplinarily engaged in expanded cinema, modern music, publishing, and the critical reflection in media art.*
+
+During the workshop participants dive into ASAB, a web-based application and an artist experiment about books, hyperlinks obsolescence, and reading strategies developed by Labor Neunzehn. The project considers how hypertext and print already coexist (as opposed to one superseding the other), through a navigable archive of collected reference material that visitors can both navigate and shape themselves.
+
+![Participants during workshop All Sources are Broken](images/ALAB_01.jpg)
+
+Alessandro and Valentina introduced the workshop by highlighting the relationship between post-structuralism and post-digital. All Sources Are Broken is the name of the platform developed by Labor Neunzehn.  ASAB allows users to create cross-references between so-called old and new media. Users are asked to select short passages of a book mentioning media items such as movies, documents, websites and pictures, but also public figures and places. In this way the original book is 'exploded'. <span class='highlight-lilac'>The tool fosters the exploration of new strategies of learning and reading. ASAB is not meant to be understood as a full-fledged 'product' or 'service', but more as an experimental instrument to rethink publishing.</span> This is why the tool doesn’t incorporate automatized shortcuts such as looking for the excerpt in a database or giving a list of preselected choices: ASAB encourages slow reading.
+
+![Screenshot from interface of ASAB](images/ALAB_Schermafbeelding01.jpg)
+
+To introduce ASAB, Alessandro and Valentina showed us Starfire, a 1993 commercial from Sun Microsystems. The futuristic commercial is particularly relevant because is mentioned in Remediation, a book by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, one of the books we were asked to work with. The other two were Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and Media and Participation by Nico Carpentier. These books were chosen to demonstrate that hypertextuality precedes the advent of the internet and can be found in print as well. ASAB tries to go beyond the dichotomy between paper and pixel and reminds us that reading is itself an act of writing. The tool comes from the realization that it is common to include hyperlinks in printed books but these hyperlinks are often broken. ASAB comes in help by connecting pieces of text in the book to media item online, which are defined OMS (online media sources).
+
+**Dispersed editor’s note: <span class='highlight-applegreen'>While urgency may seem to call for a fast publishing process up front, after the publication is issued starts the trajectory of the afterlife, which preferably stretches out over a long time. Keeping a publication urgent over the course of weeks, months, years, or even decades (as in the examples that were used in the workshop) asks for dedication and thus: a slowing down.</span> Slow reading, continuous remediation, following inter- and hypertextual tracks throughout literary history, offering up a book to participatory investigation: they all partake in the afterlife of the publication - its urgency as it spreads out over time.**
+
+Alessandro and Valentina are currently developing a new functionality for ASAB consisting in turning the surface of the website into a canvas. <span class='highlight-green'>The user will be able to organize resources to create narratives and print a pdf out of it.</span>
+The project can be seen as a form or re-archiving that relates to techniques of preservation such as DOI (Digital Object identifier) or crawlers. <span class='highlight-blue'>ASAB is participatory: multiple users can contribute to enrich the archive. Its interface tries to go against the general 'shopping mall' feel of the contemporary web.
+After the participants tested ASAB, there was a discussion on new functionalities to implement and on the possible direction the project might take. While some of them enjoyed the experimental approach of the tool, some saw the potential of turning it into a service or into a software that can be locally installed.

kimmy_v4_20May/MDs28May/The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction.md

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+Title: The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction
+Date: May 28, 2019 at 11:55 am
+
+Remix of a blogpost by Maisa Imamović and debris of notes, pictures and audio, complemented with a dispersed editors' note.
+
+*What promises does <span class='highlight-lilac'>modular, non-linear publishing</span> hold for writing and reading, research and collaboration? What <span class='highlight-blue'> potentialities of collectivity, collaboration</span>, and commons can <span class='highlight-lilac'>hybrid publishing processes</span> set free? How would that challenge existing roles and practices? Modularity in form and process, after proving itself in software development, has conquered the world at large. It fits the dynamics of the market and allows us to communicate in bits and pieces, fierce, hyped-up, and snappy. Efficient medium, efficient messages.*
+
+*But modularity and non-linearity also contain a notion of critique. They can challenge myths of origin and originality, <span class='highlight-green'>authoritarian authorship, single-voiced narratives, hero perspectives</span>, and <span class='highlight-cornflower'>definitive truths</span>. They can inspire a Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction: <span class='highlight-orange'>publications holding grains of knowledge and experience of various kinds and species, which can be laid out in different ways and directions. How would these forge meaningful connections and complex relations between contents, people, </span><span class='highlight-coralred'>places</span>, and futures?*
+
+![The carrier bag theory of non-fiction. --> Ursula le Guin. Human evolution transposed to writing. They do not focus on hero's, focus on process & relationships; non-linearity. New & urgent ways of knowledge production. The form influences the message of urgent publishing.](images/01_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_2.jpg)
+
+### The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction
+*Janneke Adema is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Post-digital Cultures at Coventry University. In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. Gary Hall is Professor of Media in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Post-digital Cultures and its research studio The Post Office, which brings together media theorists, practitioners, activists, and artists.*
+
+![Publishing of practice instead of something that reports on the practice](images/03_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_3kopie.jpg)
+![](images/08_notes-all-Miriam-Rasch5.jpg)
+
+![Photo collage screenshot by Miriam Rasch](images/photo-collage-screenshot-Miriam.jpg)
+
+Janneke Adema and Gary Hall investigate modular publishing from a post-humanities perspective. They criticize what publishing does rather than what it is. According to them, <span class='highlight-lilac'>culture which is remixed and made modular in digital environments creates new forms of communication.</span>
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/01_Manovich_modularity_01.m4a" type="audio/mpeg">
+Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>Manovich's understanding of modularity.</p>
+
+![critique on modular publishing which emphasizes the object/the book --> Lev Manovich. He relates it to the object not being bound. Culture is 'made' modular. Remixing becomes possible. Standardization for possibilities of sharing & moving around content of cultural objects. 'Helping' cultural bits move around more easily. --> Aligns to capitalism, defying it as bound, finished compartments. --> emphasizes stability still. -> does not see cultural objects as themselves being fluid and complex but as something becoming modular through new media. --> capitalism/commodity, book as marketable object. -> how we *do* scholarly work.](images/02_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_3.jpg)
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/01_Manovich_modularity_02.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>Tara McPherson's critique on modular thinking.</p>
+
+What’s important to remember is that not all analogue objects can be translated to digital forms. Doing so mirrors lack of appreciation for books, for example. It’s like putting trees, minerals, and shops in one-and that’s all. It’s a commodity.
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/01_Manovich_modularity_03.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>A lack of appreciation of fluidity.</p>
+
+They argue that in order to re-invent performing a book, one needs to embrace everything what is given with the book, and focus on these questions. <span class='highlight-green'> Where should we cut them? Who is making decisions? Who moderates the decisions? What’s kept/ what’s preserved in the process?</span>
+
+![But: is cutting up always possible? and wanted? seeing the world as discrete (Tara McPherson) holding back complexity. Is digital publishing even possible like this? --> commodification of culture.](images/07_notes-all-Miriam-Rasch5.jpg)
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/01_Manovich_modularity_04.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>What boundaries do we take responsibility for?</p>
+
+**Dispersed editor’s note: "It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality." This is a quote from "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction", by science fiction author Ursula Le Guin. Her concept refers back to something called the carrier bag theory of human evolution. Human evolution, according to this theory, has much more to thank to the carrier bag - the container in which you can put apples, berries, pretty little stones (in Le Guin’s words: "A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient") and to the people gathering and carrying all these things, than to mammoth-slayers and their spears, who’ve always gotten all the attention. <span class='highlight-green'>Transposed to writing, this focus on the gatherers rather than the hunters calls for different kinds of story and storytelling. Carrier bag works do not focus on the hero and on time unfolding in a linear and progressive fashion, ending in a grande finale, whether it’s triumph or apocalypse.</span> <span class='highlight-orange'>Rather, they focus on multiple relationships and voices, on process.</span> <span class='highlight-lilac'> How could such carrier bags look like beyond the science fiction genre, e.g. in research publishing? That calls for experimentations, tools, concepts, and collaborations. New imaginations of publications, incorporating different voices and delivering different reading experiences. An urgency in publishing will need to address the form and make-up of the contents as well, and start up discussions on the post-digital, on post-humanities, and on the undercommons as new modes of knowledge sharing.</span>**
+
+### Pervasive Labour Union zine
+![Permissiveness of the format of the zine.](images/Lidia_01_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_3kopie.jpg)
+*Lydia Pereira presents Pervasive Labour Union Zine which brings together personal rants, academic texts, poetry, photo montages, collages, drawings, etc. addressing topics such as Terms of Service, Advertisement or Pervasiveness. Each issue attempts to establish an interconnecting discourse around these topics.*
+
+Lidia Pereira’s graduation project, touching upon the topic of labour on social platforms which later becomes a product designed by social experiences, questions why we are not organizing. According to her, it’s because we don’t consider it work. <span class='highlight-cornflower'>Her project is an attempt to create a medium where there is discourse, instead of a definite conclusion(s). Perhaps even a platform for changing minds?</span> <span class='highlight-lilac'>That’s how she came up with a zine, as a research medium for her research to continue growing.</span>
+![Who is involved in producing. It takes more people to publish. --> multi-voiced: is this reflected in the arguments?](images/Lidia_02_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_3kopie.jpg)
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/Lidia_02.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>Arriving at conclusions, or maybe not.</p>
+
+During the discussion the following questions were raised: Why do old formats persist? Who has the privilege to own the new platforms? What is the future of archive?
+
+![](images/Lidia_03_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_3.jpg)
+
+### Post-digital Publishing and the Return of Locality
+*Axel Andersson investigates the role of locality for contemporary Publishing.*
+
+![Tweet of Axel Andersson at Urgent Publishing by Institute of Network Cultures](images/Axel_ScreenShot2019-12-05at09.37.06.jpg)
+
+Then Axel, oh Axel Andersson, who was asked not to give an academic ted talk, did not mind sharing a B&W image of him, in which he is thinking about Smithson; a fact which opened up his presentation of thoughts on topics of locality and post-digital publishing. As his position of being a critic was challenged by extinction, he was faced with having to experiment his way forward and think what might be wrong with media that critique doesn’t work?
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/Axel_01.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>The dead end of critiques?</p>
+
+<span class='highlight-green'>A funded experiment, an online book fair where online users get to publish, amateurization of critique</span>, and the last mass mail at the Supermarket art fair (2018) where <span class='highlight-coralred'>a critical journal written by the visitors is printed on spot, are projects that call for further thinking about how to be in the context?</span>
+
+![Expanding the editorial practice literally in the space, making visible. Place(one story)/site (fractured stories). The story of a place - locality.](images/Axel_01_notes-all-Miriam-Rasch5.jpg)
+
+<span class='highlight-coralred'>The context in this case, can be further defined as not a place, but physicality which has locality…In other words: How to expand public/private spheres?</span>
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/Axel_03.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>What does it mean to be of a place?</p>

kimmy_v4_20May/MDs28May/Workshop_SayItAintSo.md

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+Title: Workshop: Say It Ain’t So
+Subtitle: A simple Speech-To-Text experiment with serious implications
+Date: May 28, 2019 at 11:55 am
+
+#Introduction
+*“Say It Ain’t So”, a workshop organised by artist Amy Pickles and designer and researcher Cristina Cochior. The topic is speech to text processing, including technical aspects of speech recognition software such as the open source engine PocketSphinx, and issues of visibility and invisibility.*
+
+Remix of a report by Barbara Dubbeldam and debris of pictures and audio, complemented with a dispersed editors' note.
+
+![Photo taken by Institute of Network Cultures](images/SIAS_01.jpg)
+
+<span class='highlight-pink'>The workshop is in response to an urgent need to raise awareness to digital discrimination arising from voice technology developments.</pink> This is illustrated in a speech_recognition_interview between Amy and, as it turns out, all of us, collectively reading out lines from a script. It doesn’t go well for Amy; she is rejected due to data drawn from not just what she said, but also how she said it. Her fate is sealed by low percentages of the things that matter, such as confident delivery and use of predetermined key words.
+
+In contrast with the perception that discrete parts of language are mostly stable, speech recordings contain more dynamic, complex elements than we imagine. Speech to text uses a ‘bag of words‘ model; utterances are sliced into basic units of language and indexed by frequency. More frequent combinations are matched with corresponding equivalents from sourced dictionaries; speech to text and vice-versa. This is illustrated in a quick demonstration of PocketSphinx transcription with mixed results; either rendering (relatively) faithfully or producing comical phrases that barely resemble natural language, especially when confronted with accents.
+
+**Dispersed editor’s note: The question who gets to speak and who will be heard is given immediate and literal relevance in this workshop based on audio, speech recognition, and recording. <span class='highlight-pink'>As with so many potential surveillance technologies, speech recognition software poses the issue of not wanting to be discriminated by it, e.g. on basis of accent, but also wanting to steer clear of easy targeting. How can such technology be appropriated? What strategies of obfuscation do our voices offer? The multitude of different voices together form a strong tapestry - or perhaps a carrier bag - that escapes the automated categorisation of the software.</span>**
+
+<span class='highlight-orange'>Writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction” suggests that the first tool was a bag (rather than a weapon), with contents that allowed us to form narratives through powerful relational qualities</span>. In this workshop, spread out on a carpet, are a collection of plastic bags filled with printed texts. <span class='highlight-pink'>We are invited to record ourselves reading from them in groups, either obscuring or emphasizing elements. Most adopt tactics of sabotage and subterfuge, such as broken syllables, speaking continuously, using languages other than English, etcetera. Some aim for clarity; text to speech, exploiting acoustics or carefully pronouncing certain words.</span>
+The workshop wraps up with listening to recordings from the morning, and reading printed transcriptions. Each transcription contains a list of phonemes next to eerily accurate but semantically unrelated matches. We record parts of the transcriptions and assign them as phone ringtones to play during the plenary session, with comedic effect.
+
+<audio controls>
+  <source src="images/SIAS_audio-SayItAintSo-workshop.m4a"
+  type="audio/mpeg">
+  Your browser does not support the audio element
+</audio>
+<p class='caption'>Recording of group reading.</p>
+
+<span class='highlight-pink'>It’s easy to laugh at the mess made of what comes so naturally to us; language. But there are more serious implications, as we see in a screening of a video of academic Halcyon Lawrence, who maintains that homophony is engrained, and confronting accent bias is a crucial part of ensuring access to technology. The hallmark of algorithmic natural language applications is invisibility, relying on a participant’s lack of awareness of the process. However, invisibility is also a result of these applications, in their ability to discriminate between the contents of the bags of words they employ, and so hide differences; discarding what is considered to be indistinct.</span>