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Title: Workshop: Workshop 2: All Sources Are Broken by Labor Neunzehn |
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Subtitle: a Post-Digital Reading Group (blog report) |
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#Introduction |
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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. 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. They also gave an overview of their practice which includes workshops, such as one about Web Archiving, run in collaboration with Rhizome and focusing on the Web Recorder tool. They presented also the Kamera series, a curatorial program devoted to the moving image in which each day there is a heavy rotation of the same film, thematically introduced by a dedicated publication. Labor Neunzehn is also involved in the curation of art exhibitions, such as “From Field Recording to Data Sonification in Late Capitalism”, which explores ways of presenting sound art. |
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All Sources Are Broken is the name of the platform developed by Labor Neunzehn. <span class='highlight-brown> 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> <span class='highlight-lilc>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</span> <span class='highlight-brown>hypertextuality precedes the advent of the internet and can be found in print as well</span>. ASAB tries to go beyond the dichotomy between paper and pixel and reminds us that reading is itself an act of writing. <span class='highlight-brown>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).</span> |
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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. The user will be able to organize resources to create narratives and print a pdf out of it. |
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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. 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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Report by Silvio Lorusso, May 22, 2019 at 10:09 am. Remixed by the editors |
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#Workshop 3: Surgencies – A Personal Protest Statement |
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##By NXS |
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How do we consume? How do we get influenced? How do we protest? |
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This workshop is aimed at creating a collective lexicon of personal viewpoints towards the influence of the ubiquitous technology around us, by drawing attention to those implementations that are so vowed into our daily lives that they normally go unnoticed. The intangibility and unclarity of where and how exactly digital technology works and affects us, evokes the uncanny feeling of a loss of control, a sense of frustration and anxiety. By investigating and collectively mapping emotional responses to technology and their behavioral implications each participant extracts inspiration for a personal protest statement, that will be published in the directly surrounded public space. |
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The collective ‘research through making’ approach mixes speed and visual and textual assignments with performative elements that require quick responses. They do not allow over-rationalization or over-explanation of implicit constructs but promote the production of associative and subconscious ideas. By exposing the seemingly trivial daily urgencies in life, we can stop asking questions and make strong and profound statements to counter them. |
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Materials and requirements: none. |
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NXS (NL): NXS – standing for nexus (a connection or bond) – is an Amsterdam based research collective that explores ‘the self’ in the age of digital technology. NXS takes the form of a cross-disciplinary platform structure with as its core a biannual publication that extends to exhibitions, art works, public events, and a working lab. It searches for personal viewpoints, experiences, and stories on relevant topics around digital technology, as a way to make them more tangible and more accessible. |
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Title: The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction |
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Subtitle: Presentations and discussions with Janneke Adema & Gary Hall, Axel Andersson, and Lydia Pereira, Moderated by Miriam Rasch. |
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## Introduction |
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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-light 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 blue>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-coral red>places</span>, ~~and futures?~~ |
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### The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction |
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*Janneke Adema & Gary Hall investigate modular publishing from a post-humanities perspective* |
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Janneke Adema and Gary Hall 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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![] (images/02_Notes_Day1andDay2_KimmySpreeuwenberg_Pagina_3kopie.jpg) |
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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-greenish blue> 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? <span class='highlight-greenish blue>A funded experiment, an online book fair where online users get to publish, amateurization of critique</span>, <span class='highlight-coral red>and the last mass mail at the Supermarket art fair (2018) where 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? |
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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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Blog by Maisa Imamović, remixed by the editors. |
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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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#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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<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. <<span class='highlight-grey'>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.</span> 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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<span class='highlight-grey'>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.</span> 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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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-grey'>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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Report by Barbara Dubbeldam, May 28, 2019 at 11:55 am. Remixed by the editors |
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