October 2012 - September 2013

  • September

  • For one month between April and June 2013 the Constant Variable residency studio will be open for artists who want to work on a F/LOSS-project. Constant Variable offers a free living & working space in exchange for a presentation of your work(-in-progress), bits and bites, artworks under (…)

  • October

  • The exhibition ’Rendez-vous à la cage’ gives an overview of the actions that have taken place in the framework of the neighborhood contract ’Navez-Portaels’ that took place between 2009 and 2012. Constant organised the project De Schaarbeekse Taal that will be integrated in the exhibition.

  • In october Constant member Peter Westenberg will take part in the residency programme Creative Politics organised by Laboratório de Criação Digital
    The objective of this residency is to question and creatively intervene in politics. It is intended to question the role of politicians, but also (…)

  • Right before the local elections, on 12th and 13th October Z33 and FoAM organise a 2 day workshop, led by Heath Bunting and An Mertens. During this workshop you learn how you can create a legal identity for trees. With your guardianship they will be able to gain a voice in society, first (…)

  • At this autumn Code Tasting, we’ll try out Graphical Shell, a prototype
    developed by Pierre Marchand in the context of the Libre Graphics
    Research Unit. His proposal links the ’tick’ of a program to the rhythm of design
    through motioned histories, streaming and messaging. The idea behind the (…)

  • The reNUM textile, sound and digital map, based on the stories from the Breil neighbourhood (Nantes) could be seen and listened to during this event.
    See: http://www.renum.net/leblog/?p=743 &
    http://conference2012.artilect.fr/

  • Interview avec An Mertens dans Jardin Public sur Radio Panik, 18-19h, le 18 octobre 2012

  • Interview avec An Mertens sur Vivacité, Journal Parlé 7h45, le 19 octobre 2012

  • Interview with An Mertens on Radio 2 Vlaams-Brabant, 19 October 2012, 18h

  • The book Woorden uit de Berenkuil/Words from La Cage aux Ours will be festively launched in Passaporta, where we are hosted by Entrez Lire. There will beinhabitants reading fragments of the book, writer-performer Milady Renoir performing the fiction she wrote based on the words and slammer Maky, (…)

  • Interview with An Mertens on TV Brussel, 22 October 2012, News 18u

  • Interview avec Clémentine Delahaut sur le Journal Parlé de Télé-Bruxelles, 22 octobre 2012

  • Interview avec Clémentine Delahaut sur la publication ’Mots de la Cage aux Ours’ dans la Dernière Heure, 22 octobre 2012

  • Report booklaunch Passaporta, Het Nieuwsblad, 22 October 2012

  • Interview avec An Mertens dans la Capitale, 23 octobre 2012

  • Portrait of Cage aux Ours, Knack, 24 October 2012.

  • Reportage leaving Schaarbeek to go to the booklaunch in Passaporta, Brussel Deze Week, 24 October 2012

  • Medialab-Prado and The Libre Graphics Research Unit are seeking for projects to be collaboratively developed during a two-weeks workshop to be held in Madrid, 15-27 April, 2013. We are interested in your ideas for tools to design, edit, draw and write together. This edition focuses on (…)

  • November

  • ’How do you do’ is a low treshold meeting during which makers explain ’the making of’ succesful digital and technological projects.
    Peter Westenberg wil lead one session about Active Archives and one about Variable.

  • During this session, upon request of some participants, we’ll have a look at the different options available toward video treatment, for loop playing/mixing as well as video effects, with the libraries like Gem, PDP, gridflow, and gstreamer bindings. Having some abstractions at hand will also be (…)

  • NO ARCHIVE!
    #OP_HUMAN_CARGO - OPERATION HUMAN CARGO, RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRADICAL REAL TIME,
    !Mediengruppe Bitnik will be coming to Variable for a work residency for
    the whole month of November.
    They are currently interested in questions of (collective) identity, non-archiving, real (…)

  • Constant member Wendy Van Wynsberghe was part of this radio series on copyright and free licenses.
    You can re-listen to the broadcasting here:
    http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Les-droits-d-auteur-a-la-hauteur
    http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Brevette-bien-qui-brevettera-le
    or here (…)

  • Art house Z33 in Hasselt celebratesits 10th anniversary with you during a thirty-three-hour festive weekend.
    For Z33 Celebrates! PeterWestenberg will bring an exercise in invisibility. In times of excessive video surveillance, how can you find ways to stay out of the picture? Take part in the (…)

  • Your copier, scanner or mobile phone is broken and your local thrift store has kindly referred you to the dump? Don’t worry, inside these machines you can find all kinds of treasure, such as little motors, a lens, microphones or a little amplifier! In this workshop you will learn how to (…)

  • Your copier, scanner or mobile phone is broken and your local thrift store has kindly referred you to the dump? Don’t worry, inside these machines you can find all kinds of treasure, such as little motors, a lens, microphones or a little amplifier! In this workshop you will learn how to (…)

  • Constant members Peter Westenberg and An Mertens are invited to give a lecture about the project of La Langue Schaerbeekoise/De Schaarbeekse Taal for the students Master in the Social Work of the University of Gent, in the framework of the class ’Culture Studies’.

  • Your copier, scanner or mobile phone is broken and your local thrift store has kindly referred you to the dump? Don’t worry, inside these machines you can find all kinds of treasure, such as little motors, a lens, microphones or a little amplifier! In this workshop you will learn how to (…)

  • Constant member Wendy Van Wynsberghe was part of this radio series on copyright and free licenses.
    You can re-listen to the broadcasting here:
    http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Les-droits-d-auteur-a-la-hauteur
    http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Brevette-bien-qui-brevettera-le
    or here (…)

  • Constant members An Mertens and Wendy Van Wynsberghe will present the e-traces project and Yoogle! at the conference For Your Eyes Only, organised in the framework of the EMSOC-project.
    The objective of the conference is to bring together young and senior academics, representatives from public (…)

  • December

  • *Invitation*
    *Relaunch of CC-BE on 8 December @ iMAL!*
    Creative Commons is celebrating it’s tenth birthday this year. For this occasion there will be events all over the globe between December 7th and 16th and Belgium is taking part in the festivities. Creative Commons Belgium is (…)

  • The launch of the publication WJ-SPOTS #2 edited by Anne Roquigny will take place in Paris at La Gaité Lyrique (Digital art Center) during the Mal au Pixel Festival. It includes a text of Constant member Nicolas Malevé, a follow-up to his presentation in Imal on the Future of the Internet.

  • Neokinok.tv is a collective co-ordinated by artist Daniel Miracle who works in the field of experimental audiovisuals and television. From 1998 onwards Neokinok.tv has worked with streaming, temporary UHF and VHF channels, analogue channels, social participation, alternative internet access. (…)

  • During this session, we’ll have a look at different techniques and methods to "detect and react" to some conditions, in order to have an interactive behavior of a patch.
    As it is a need to be able to separate some interesting moments in a sensor/recording, we’ll see different ways that we can (…)

  • Blender worksession with focus on using Blender as render engine.

  • January 2013

  • Our best wishes for 2013 to everyone who reads this message, supports us, inspires us, works with us!
    Our wishes are enriched by the impressive wealth of knowledge, information and beauty that today, like every year on this day, becomes freely available to humankind. Every year on New Year’s (…)

  • The Libre Graphics Meeting will take place 10-13 April in Madrid. The event welcomes your contribution and is looking for in-depth presentations on Libre Graphics technologies, showcases of excellent work made using Libre Graphics tools and new ideas for future approaches, tools and standards. (…)

  • Since march 2012 Jonathan & Yves Poliart started a workshop called « open
    sound lab » , a sound workshop devoted to the teenagers of the « Variable »
    neighborhood in Schaerbeek with no software or music practice.
    The idea is to give some tools to build instrumentals using only three (…)

  • Constant members Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé present a project that investigates the vast body of material generated by Finnish artist, nuclear scientist, futurologist and technology pioneer of the 1960s Erkki Kurenniemi. Entitled ’Data Radio: Erkki Kurenniemi (in 2048),the project is a (…)

  • Diverse collection of press articles on the group exhibition Systemics #1: Certain Peculiar Things And Ideas, Often Failed (Or, On Humans, Machines And Running Algorithms) in Århus Kunstbygning, Denmark in which Constant is represented with the work Dataradio on the legicy of Erkki Kureniemmi. (…)

  • Article about the Assange work conceived in Variable during Bitnik residency in november2012:
    "Two Swiss artists have used GPS tracking and live webcam to follow the progress of a parcel intended to reach Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
    Domagoj Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf have posted (…)

  • Post parcel travels to Julian Assange Article by Ine Poppe Appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 18 january.
    text in dutch, translation below:
    On January 16, at 12.30, the Swiss art group Bitnik sends a box by mail to the Internet activist Julian Assange. The box contains a mobile phone and a (…)

  • The Patching Circles are open workshop session to learn and share about the pure-data software and other.
    During this session, we’ll see how we can stream sound video and datas from and to pure-data. we’ll look specially how to connect to an Icecast server (streaming audio-video).
    The (…)

  • February

  • Monthly meeting on using Blender as a render engine for Python. The packages BPY and BGE provide api’s for the modelling and game-engine functions of Blender that can be scripted using the programming language Python.
    registration compulsory !
    please send a mail to: frankiezafe@gmail.com

  • Arab, Turkish, Berber, Dutch, Brussels, Swahili, Polish"¦ these are only few of the languages that colour the shared French language in the area around La Cage aux Ours/Place Verboeckhoven. The dictionary of La Langue Schaerbeekoise/De Schaarbeekse Taal shows the influences of the many (…)

  • Join this informal moment to taste some of the work that is being done in the collective studio’s in Variable. Between 17:00 - 19:00 there are micro presentations, drinks, chats.
    Variable Loop takes place every first thursday of the month,
    between 17h and 19h, with flexible extensions after 19h.

  • The artistic dictionary ’Mots de la Cage aux Ours/Woorden uit de Berenkuil’ will be presented in the Bibliothèque Sésame in presence of the makers and slammer Maky. Maky who spent his adolescence around La Cage aux Ours will improvise with rythm and rhyme on a series of words the audience (…)

  • *//*The Patching Circles are open workshop session to learn and share about the pure-data software and other.
    This session will make us a loop, permitting us to revisit sound processing techniques as well as exploring more the RaspberryPi, with the presentation of the ongoing project of Pierre (…)

  • If we consider typographic and cartographic objects as "spatial arrangement of texts and other graphical elements", than their design is essentially the work of organising collisions. In a conventional design practice, many systems are at work to prevent accidents from happening. Tension is (…)

  • March

  • Monthly meeting on using Blender as a render engine for Python. The packages BPY and BGE provide api’s for the modelling and game-engine functions of Blender that can be scripted using the programming language Python.
    registration compulsory ! please send a mail to: frankiezafe[AT]gmail.com

  • In the framework of the Data Radio project, Michael and Nicolas organize a live listening session of the Kurenniemi audiocassette’s archive. They will be joined by Yves Poliart and other guests.

  • This meeting about the 3D-animation tool Blender is an open discussion between participants in which we talk about the desires for the content to be treated in the upcoming series of Blender workshops Blender.
    Infos and reservations: send a mail to collignon.d-AT-skynet.be

  • Join this informal moment to taste some of the work that is being done in the collective studios in Variable. Between 17:00 - 19:00 there are micro presentations, drinks, chats: barcamp style.
    Variable Loop takes place every first Thursday of the month.

  • *//*The Patching Circles are open workshop sessions to learn and share about the pure-data software and other.
    Nicolas d’Alessandro will come to present us his approach to speech synthesis, working on an analog model of a voice flux filtered by organs, different from classical analytical (…)

  • An afternoon focussing on Public Domain works and the problems of institutional digitisation. As the event will be in French and Dutch, please read the full program there.
    A collaboration with CRIDS Namur and the Royal Library of Belgium.

  • Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé, members of Constant will share their enthusiasm for Kurenniemi’s practice that involves various experiments in audio recording, diaristic practice and playful vocal exercises.
    They will present an exercise of live annotation of Dataradio’s audiostream and (…)

  • As part of Systemics #1 programme, Kunsthal Aarhus hosts a public seminar on the issues of experiencing, remembering and curating sound art/sound archives. Members of Constant, Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé will present their work on the Data Radio.
    Participants include: Constant (…)

  • The Marginalia project developed by Aimar Arriola articulates a proposal of critical reactivation of the Pepe Espaliú Library: http://www.eremuak.net/0303marginalia.
    Various collectives are invited to contribute and Equipo Re proposed to connect the Espaliu archive with its investigation (…)

  • An afternoon of short presentations and discussion with Diana McCarthy, Reni Hofmueller, Seda Guerses and Femke Snelting

  • At the occasion of the open days of the Ecole de Recherche Graphique, students, teachers and guests invite you to a demoparty of brief interventions around Open Source and digital practices.
    Connecting graphics, sound, video, radio and fablabs, the presentations show how education at the school (…)

  • Monthly meeting on using Blender as a render engine for Python. The packages BPY and BGE provide api’s for the modelling and game-engine functions of Blender that can be scripted using the programming language Python.
    registration compulsory ! please send a mail to: frankiezafe[AT]gmail.com

  • April

  • Join this informal moment to taste some of the work that is being done in the collective studios in Variable. Between 17:00 - 19:00 there are micro presentations, drinks, chats: barcamp style.
    On the programme: Knitic presents their Open Source Knitting machine at the end of their residency. (…)

  • Constant members Peter Westenberg and An Mertens were invited to discuss La Langue Schaerbeekoise/De Schaarbeekse Taal, the language of ’Escarbeque’ in the Spanish speaking community of Brussels, in the research group Euraca. Euraca is part of 404: school not found, and looks into the political (…)

  • The yearly Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) gathers users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source software for creative work. LGM is a self-organised event, put together by designers, artists, free culture activists and software developers because they want to make their Libre Graphics toolbox (…)

  • *20 April 2013*
    *EN :* *//*The Patching Circles are open workshop session to learn and share about the pure-data software and other.
    /_Workshop: 13h - 19h_/
    This time, apart from Easter eggs and digital bunny stories, there won’t be any specific focus on the circle. Come up with your (…)

  • May

  • Interview avec Clémentine Delahaut dans la Dernière Heure, 22 octobre 2012 Interview avec Clémentine Delahaut sur le Journal Parlé de Télé-Bruxelles, 22 octobre 2012 Interview avec An Mertens dans la Capitale, 23 octobre 2012 Interview dans Jardin Public sur Radio Panik, le 18 octobre 2012 (…)

  • Join this informal moment to taste some of the work that is being done in the collective studios in Variable. Between 17:00 - 19:00 there are micro presentations, drinks, chats: barcamp style.
    Variable Loop takes place every first Thursday of the month.

  • An afternoon of digital creations of all kinds and free workshops!

  • Ellentriek goes textile: liberating knitting machines
    In the eighties and nineties electronic knitting machines were readily available. But it was never a simple task to knit an image, a drawing, photograph, text you designed yourself with it. You could buy premade images on floppies of punch (…)

  • From 22 to 23 May the Libre Graphics Research Unit gathers in Porto and this meeting concludes the two year project. Hosted by associate partner Manufactura Independente in Maus Habito we will present and discuss all work that was developed in the context of the Research Unit: The Piksels and (…)

  • From 22 May until 31 May, The Libre Graphics Research Unit presents Books with an attitude, an exhibition of printed books made with Libre digital tools. This exhibition includes Libre bookdesign and typography from all over Europe, demonstrating how content, aesthetics and Libre tools can play (…)

  • Constant member An Mertens is invited to draw a subjective history of i-literature for an audience of librarians and teachers of creative writing in Nantes. The conference will be followed by a hands-on workshop, ’Writing a collaborative fiction’. This program is part of [lire+écrire]numérique, (…)

  • Mz. Baltazar’s Laboratory is a feminist hackerspace and an artist collective based in Vienna. They work with open source technology and philosophy, in a women only space, operating a non-­" hierachic teaching and informal learning context. The lab offers women space to appropriate electronics (…)

  • June

  • Eleven Orderings is a proposal by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé to revisit the collection of documents of the Norwegian artist Guttorm Guttormsgaard, some 25 000 items collected throughout his life and housed in a former dairy in Blaker near Oslo.
    Eleven Orderings will be shown in the (…)

  • The Archive in Motion investigates the ways in which archival concepts and practices have been transformed under the impact of the radical changes in writing and recording technologies. Archive in Motion is a research project of the University of Oslo.
    The workshop given by Michael Murtaugh (…)

  • A series of ultrashort presentations about experimental projects developed in the studios of ’Variable’ in Schaerbeek. You’re welcome to discover the high quality creations, the artists and designers and their technologies.
    Variable is a collective artist workspace in Schaerbeek. It houses (…)

  • Eleven Orderings is a proposal by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé to revisit the collection of documents of the Norwegian artist Guttorm Guttormsgaard, some 25 000 items collected throughout his life and housed in a former dairy in Blaker near Oslo.
    Eleven Orderings will be shown in the (…)

  • Eleven Orderings is a proposal by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé to revisit the collection of documents of the Norwegian artist Guttorm Guttormsgaard, some 25 000 items collected throughout his life and housed in a former dairy in Blaker near Oslo.
    Eleven Orderings will be shown in the (…)

  • Shared Digital Futures is a conference that explores the impact of digital network technologies for cultural production. With Tools for a Read-Write World Femke will contribute to the panel New collective authorship.
    To develop and produce shareable content, many different practices are (…)

  • A presentation of the project Erkki Kurenniemi (In 2048) in the framework of Archives of Software Art, an event organized by Jussi Parikka and Burak Arikan. The presentation will take as a point of departure the rich set of documents collected and created by Erkki Kurenniemi and introduce to the (…)

  • The Patching Circles are open workshop sessions to learn and share about the pure-data software and other. During this session we’ll look at different tools available to use puredata with a mobile platform with iOS or Android. Artist and programmer Yacine Sebti will come to share his experience (…)

  • July

  • The studiobuilding VARIABLE opens its doors every first thursday of the month for ’LOOP’, an informal moment for everyone who would like to meet the artists, taste the work, see the studio-space. This Thursday there will be ao a performative intervention of LiveObjectTheatreRemix by the artists (…)

  • Femke Snelting presents Tools for a read-write world (Interactivos?’13) at the Open Design Conference in Barcelona
    "Interactivos? is a hybrid between an intense collaborative prototyping workshop, a seminar and a showcase. For a period of two weeks artists, designers, developers and educators (…)

  • An Mertens will present the F/LOSS Arts Lab Variable at the yearly Free Software Meeting LSM/RMML. From 6th till 11th of July this institution of the Libre Software world, the LSM invites all Libre Software enthusiasts to meet in a relaxed setting to share and find out more about Libre Software: (…)

  • A meeting between residents: Olivier Heinry and An Mertens, members of the working group around algorithm and literature Algolit and Olatz Otalora and Daniela Brill, members of the collective Grapa, invite you to their dinner table presentation in Variable for multiple exchanges around spam (…)

  • August

  • The first encounter in the series of Splinterfields is organised by nadine, an artistic organisation that moves within constantly changing artistic practices through continuous questioning of itself. nadine encourages alternative research formats for artists and collectives to work with. (…)

  • The design caravan Open Source Publishing invites you for a design education experiment this summer "” from 26 until 30 August 2013
    By and large, graphic design students bring a laptop to school, and create their work using digital software tools. This hard- and software represents a (…)

  • Constant Variable celebrates her second anniversary !
    Therefore we’re happy to invite you to celebrate this together on Thursday 5th September, during this special edition of the Variable Loop !, our monthly dates for ultrashort presentations and exchanges with the artists who made them in the (…)

  • The second encounter in the series of Splinterfields is organised by FoAM, a cultural laboratory reimagining possible futures at the interstices of art, science, nature and everyday life. FoAM is a dynamic entity that can change shape and scale as required. We can be a transdisciplinary (…)

  • Tot later is a novel by Constant member An Mertens.
    Version 2.0 will be launched in a festive way at Ateliers Mommen on Saturday 14th September. This edition is the commercial follow-up of the author’s cut CIAO/Tot Later 1.0 published by Constant.
    You’re very welcome to join the party!

  • Software Freedom Day is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software. This event is organised by the Brussels Hackerspaces (UrLab & Hsbxl). Constant member Wendy Van Wynsberghe will facilitate a conversation about free/libre. She will also present a version of an existing open (…)

  • A day of creativity and entertainment with DIY workshops, exhibition, DIY cinema, kidzone..
    Constant member Wendy Van Wynsberghe will show an interactive installation, with open hardware & conductive textile fabricated by master knitter Claire Williams.

  • I Share Therefore I am is an exhibition organised by esc medien kunst labor in the context of Steirischer Herbst, examining how digital technologies impact interpersonal relationships and communication. Femke contributes with a performative lecture on Free Software for distributed work, looking (…)

  • The Death of the Authors, 1941 edition will be part of the virtual gallery in the exhibition "Les littératures numériques d’hier à demain", organised by the Electronic Literature Organisation in the framework of their event ’Locating the text’ in Paris.

  • Monthly workshop focusing on Blender + Python. We have been quite chaotic the last months due to too much work and a too nice summer. But we’re back and start this academic year with a workshop programmed on the 27th of September.
    The main purpose of these workshops is to manipulate Blender (…)

  • As a new season begins, we’ll restart on a good basis. For the newcomers or the veterans, some small exercises on the basis of Pure-data are never lost, and the opportunity to (re)discover the subtleties of the pd language, it’s openness and versatility.
    Come over with your questions, (…)