Sunday 29/11
11:00-21:00 Conference
11:00-20:00 Reference Rooms
This years edition of the festival proposes three threads to be unravelled and interwoven. The first, Shades of Grey Literature is an invitation to discover, play and worry about the numerous documents, commentaries and traces which organise electronic communication in the background. A mass of anonymous documents (licenses, conditions, specifications, guidelines and standards) secures the uninterrupted flow of information. Ubiquitous Grey literature radiates out from the margins and regulates the relationship between machines and humans. As it frames the way humans relate through networks too, who has the right to see, read, write or execute?
The second, The life and nature of data is an exploration of the question: What is data? To who or what is it handed over or where does it come from? Each electronic transaction leaves a trace of raw data, but raw for one, is like petrol for another: profiling of users is done in the interest of marketeers and advertisers, for state surveillance or to control the workplace; different practices all based on the extraction of information from data. In the form of games, statistical manipulation and discussion, V/J12 tries to decode and put its finger on the issues that weigh on the registrations that are stored in logs and databases. While doing so, we carefully approach that strange species called ’data’, always ready to mutate, multiply and never loyal to its origins.
The third thread, Performative Instructions looks at codes and norms that put themselves or others in motion. We will look at how users and developers exchange information through bug reports and error messages and confront issues of responsibility and authority at work in the various chains of command that are put in place through manuals, recipes, forms and other types of instructions.