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Title: Workshop: All Sources Are Broken by Labor Neunzehn |
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Subtitle: a Post-Digital Reading Group |
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Remix of a blogpost by Silvio Lorusso and debris of pictures. |
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*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.* |
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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. |
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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. |
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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). |
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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> |
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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. |
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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. |
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Title: The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction |
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Date: May 28, 2019 at 11:55 am |
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Remix of a blogpost by Maisa Imamović and debris of notes, pictures, and audio. |
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*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.* |
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*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?* |
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### The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction. |
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*Janneke Adema is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital 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 Postdigital Cultures and its research studio The Post Office, which brings together media theorists, practitioners, activists, and artists.* |
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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> |
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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. |
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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> |
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### Pervasive Labour Union zine. |
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*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.* |
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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> |
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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? |
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### Post-digital Publishing and the Return of Locality. |
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*Axel Andersson investigates the role of locality for contemporary Publishing.* |
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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? |
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<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> |
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<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> |
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Title: Workshop: Say It Ain’t So |
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Subtitle: A simple Speech-To-Text experiment with serious implications |
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Date: May 28, 2019 at 11:55 am |
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#Introduction |
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*“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.* |
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Remix of a report by Barbara Dubbeldam and debris of pictures, and audio. |
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<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. |
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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. |
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<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> |
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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. |
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<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> |
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