November 2015 - October 2016

  • November

  • Constant member An Mertens will participate in this round table around the idea of the commons in artistic and digital creation. This encounter is organised by ScriptaLinea, a network of writing collectifs, in the framework of the Festival des Arts Numériques. Other guests are Nicolas Pettiaux (…)

  • fiction : Catherine Lenoble / design : Open Source Publishing
    Anna K is a hybrid literary creation, inspired by the life and work of British writer Anna Kavan (1901–1968). It brings together a fiction, Anna K, to be published by HYX editions in 2016; an online creation, kavan.land, (…)

  • EU policy
    Constant is pleased to host the 3rd Big Fat Brussels Meeting. In 2013 some interested wikimedians decided to meet every year for a weekend in Brussels to constitute an EU Policy Advocacy group.
    This year they will meet to "translate" Wikimedia Foundation’s Big 5 into a EU policy (…)

  • December

  • Constant member An Mertens will give a workshop and a lecture at Consonni, a producer of contemporary art, located in Bilbao since 1997. This event is part of the programme LaPublika, a series of activities concerning the way artistic practices construct the public sphere.
    On LaPublika: We (…)

  • In Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. "It is of some use (…)

  • Libre Graphics Meeting 2016: Other Dimensions
    The eleventh annual international Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 will take place from Friday 15th until Monday 18th April 2016 in London, UK. This yearly event is an occasion for teams and individual contributors/artists involved in Libre Graphics to (…)

  • Constant member An Mertens will present a series of algoliterary works for the audience of Passaporta. Writer Diane Meur will present how she uses the internet for her work. Author Annelies Verbeke will talk about how "”and why"” she presents herself on the web. A bilingual evening with hosts (…)

  • Bookswapping & Copy-party
    In the framework of ANNA K exhibition in the Vitrine of Constant
    and to celebrate the anniversary of Anna Kavan’s death (05/12/1968),
    Catherine Lenoble invites you for a guided tour in Kavanland. A journey
    that will drive you from a physical library to a (…)

  • The Constant office will be closed from 25th December 2015 till 3rd January 2016.
    To all of you who read and follow us somewhere on this planet: *°*°**°*° O U R *°*°* B E S T *°*°* W I S H E S °*°* F O R °**°* 2 0 1 6 °°*°*°*

  • January 2016

  • The exhibition Spreekt U Sint-Gillis? / Parlez-vous Saint-Gillois? presents the project with the same name that Constant organised between 2013 and 2015 in the framework of the neighbourhood contract Bosnie, around the Rue de Bosnie in low Saint-Gilles. The exhibition presents extra-ordinary (…)

  • Together with visual artist Clara Thomine, the writer Catherine Lenoble is invited to talk about Anna Kavan and other heroines during the first workshop of the series Just for the record.
    Just for the record investigates how gender is represented in new media and writing/publishing tools like (…)

  • Copyright is an important tool that allows to protect the creation and distribution of creative works. But Public Domain is also essential because it makes free access to these works possible. Every year on the first of January, the copyrights of thousands of works expire and these works enter (…)

  • Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is the annual event that brings together developers, contributors and users of free and open source software for graphic design, desktop publishing, 3D modeling, animation, and all manner of visual arts.
    LGM promotes discussions amongst software developers, users, (…)

  • The archive activists Michael Murtaugh, Nicolas Malevé and Ellef Prestsæter together present the installation The Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism. During the opening, which will be held on Wednesday, January 27, 2016 at 18:00 at Constant, you will have the opportunity to (…)

  • February

  • When is an object ’common’ and what does it mean to have it ’in common’? Designing and making objects under Open Content licenses can produce, reproduce or block a myriad of possible relations. Your geopolitical situation, the resources you have available and your daily requirements change the (…)

  • Constant members Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé share their archive activism experiences during the panel discussion at Transmediale, Berlin. ’Archive, Curate, Educate: Active Media Arts’ will be moderated by Jussi Parikka and host also Anne-Marie Duguet, Oliver Grau and Joasia Krysa. The (…)

  • A discussion introduced by software cases like Pattern for Python, Faircoin Wallet, MakeHuman, The Unicode Standards.
    With: Kym Ward, Aymeric Mansoux, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, Femke Snelting, Dick Reckard.
    Due to the importance and ubiquity of software in our lives, it is urgent to (…)

  • The Struggle over the Future of ’Pirate’ Libraries and Universal Access to Knowledge
    A discussion with Balázs Bodó, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Femke Snelting
    Elsevier, the largest academic publisher in the world, whose 37% profit margin benefits from the public funding of science and (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-littérature, free code and text.
    On Tuesday 23rd February 2016 (10-18h) Gijs De Heij will lead a hands-on workshop on building libraries of ’wordclips’, or rather, dictionaries based on fragments of movies. We’ll rewrap textual content (…)

  • Just For The Record is a project addressing how gender is represented in new media and writing/publishing tools like Wikipedia, and what influence this has on the way history is recorded.
    Just For The Record organizes its second event, Gender Redirect, a day bringing attention to gender (…)

  • March

  • Possible bodies is the workingtitle for a collaborative work on ways 3D-software conditions imaginations of gender. Looking at the practice of 3D-modelling, scanning and printing, we are concerned with the specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity that appear through (…)

  • In collaboration with Medialab Prado Constant organises the worksession ’Objects in Common’ as the final event in a series that started in 2015 with ’Funcionamientos: Objects in Common and Diverse Bodies’ followed by ’Interactivos? Material Cultures in the digital age’ and ’Grigri Pixel: makers (…)

  • For Contested Tongues, an event by Witte de With Class of ’16, Algolit members Manetta Berends, Gijs de Heij and An Mertens will present a performative lecture in which they will use texts of the ongoing exhibition Para/Fictions read by automated scripts developed during algolit-sessions. (…)

  • To round off the installation The Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism we are glad to invite you to the première of the film Constant Vitrine directed by haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml.
    What happens when a camera, an image database and software for optical face recognition (…)

  • In computation, a ’pipe’ is a method that enables various software modules to connect to each other, where the output of one program is treated as the input for the next program. At the Promiscuous Pipelines worksession that Constant organised with FoAM last summer we used the principle of (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-littérature, free code and text. On Saturday 19th March Olivier Perriquet will demonstrate how to address cognitive exhaustion and detect syntactic style using FreeLing. FreeLing is an open source language analysis tool suite, released (…)

  • An Electromagnetic Walk is an installation comprising a series of everyday objects, each one connected to a headset and a control unit. Manufactured using textile techniques, a fine copper mesh overlaps with the familiar objects creating antennas that can pick up electromagnetic waves present (…)

  • The city counts less trees than humans. Maybe that is the reason why inhabitants cultivate such strong relationships with the trees that are there. During this walk storyteller and nature guide An Mertens invites you to meet some remarkable trees in the neighbourhood Bosnia in St-Gilles.
    You (…)

  • As a contribution to ’elif n°1 : Résistance électronique, stratégie éditoriale et cyberféminisme’, a seminar reserved for students of Ensba Lyon and Esad Saint-Etienne, An Mertens will present a series of linguistic analysis models and how their application resembles a series of tales from the (…)

  • April

  • Constant will be joining the Libre Graphics Meeting in London to gather with developers and users of Free, Libre and Open Source software from all over the world. With a presentation on the Objects in Commons worksession, news from OSP (html2print), the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-litterature, free code and text.
    On Saturday 23rd April 2016 (10-18h) Yann Chevaleyre will give an introduction to machine learning models for text analysis. Yann is professor and researcher at the LIPN laboratory at the University of (…)

  • In 2014, after a public outcry against the perceived lack of diversity in emoji characters available on smartphones, the Unicode Consortium added five "Skin tone modifiers" to the set and considered the issue resolved.
    As a contribution to the event Executions: conversations on code, politics (…)

  • As part of An Electromagnetic Walk, the installation in the window of Constant, the artist Claire Williams invites us to go for a walk in the city in company of the antennas made from everyday objects - a hat, a cane, a glove, an umbrella, a handbag. These objects, knit with conduction wire and (…)

  • May

  • Valery Vermeulen will bring his tools and knowledge to ease your understanding of biofeedback and allow you to parse your brain data. You will discover how to use techniques coming from the domains of biofeedback and psychophysiology in an artistic context.
    Biofeedback and psychophysiology (…)

  • Tracks&Traces is an installation that displays the visual and sound archives gleaned during the workshops of computer generated music that took place in 2015 at the Cultural Centre Jacques Franck. Sweeping the entire musical spectrum, these sound vignettes allow to understand the infinite (…)

  • In the context of the installation Tracks&Traces in the window of Constant, Open Sound Lab will organise a series of workshops during the weekends of the Parcours d’artistes St-Gilles/Forest 2016 for anyone interested in computer generated music.
    Open Sound Lab is an introduction workshop (…)

  • June

  • In the context of the installation Tracks&Traces in the window of Constant, Open Sound Lab will organise a series of workshops during the weekends of the Parcours d’artistes St-Gilles/Forest 2016 for anyone interested in computer generated music.
    Open Sound Lab is an introduction workshop (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Thursday 9th June 2016 (10-18h) we will meet to review the interventions of past sessions, invent some exercises & deepen some of the techniques. Integrating some of the knowledge, that’s what we’ll (…)

  • Constant member An Mertens will take part in Just For the Record, an event dedicated to presentations, discussions and Wikipedia editing, addressing gender issues around the themes of bots, robots and cyborgs.
    PROGRAM 13:00 – introductory presentations of Just For The Record and the gender gap (…)

  • We are very happy to invite you to the launch of the online Cqrrelations publication. Cqrrelations was a worksession of two weeks we organised in deBuren in January 2015. As one year counts for fifty in the world of Cqrrelations, we thought it might be interesting to transform this gathering (…)

  • Constant members Catherine Lenoble and An Mertens will present Algolit at the conference on Poetics of the Algorithms. During this lecture, they will share the latest discussions around automatic writing and reading machines. This comes with an overview of interesting ’algoliterary’ works and (…)

  • Deadline: 12 September
    DiVersions is inspired by the way versions are inscribed in daily software-practice, and explores how parallel to their conventional narrative of collaboration and consensus they can produce divergent histories through supporting difference. This one week session is (…)

  • Exhibition during opening hours of iMAL,
    Tuesday to Friday, 13:00 - 18:00
    check:http://imal.org/

  • A collective installation by: Pascale Barret (BE/FR) Miriam Raggam (AT) Claire Williams (BE/FR) François Zajega (BE) Julien Deswaef (USA/BE) Annie Abrahams (NL/FR) Opening | Vernissage: 23 / 06 / 2016 18:30 – 22:00
    Departing, taking off, leaving, going, fleeing, escaping "¦ where from and (…)

  • July

  • Aarhus University and Transmediale organise a workshop on Machine Research, hosted by Constant in Brussels.
    The workshop aims to engage research and artistic practice that takes into account the new materialist conditions implied by nonhuman techno-ecologies including new ontologies of (…)

  • A sneak-preview of The Radiated Book, an experimental publication by the Mondothèque team, will be hosted in the window of Constant.
    In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as (…)

  • September

  • "I’m the other, the different, the stranger, the supplement, the late-comer, the non-foreseen. Being not an animal, nor man, not god, I don’t take part in the primitive scene, and that’s why one is looking where to fit me. I’m a para-creation, or rather, a re-creation, but of a special nature. (…)

  • Let’s make our own internets! This workshop explores the differences and similarities between the Internet and a bunch of computers connected by cables. The aim is to start a conversation about how to imagine networking beyond conventional global communication infrastructures and the relations (…)

  • Through the lenses of 19th century photographers, the visual artist Antje Van Wichelen dives into the clichés and underlying motives of the Western colonial anthropometric collections and their view on the ’Other’. Using stop-motion methods, manual 16mm film development and printing, stretches (…)

  • Archive activists Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé will present the installation The Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism at the conference SIGNAL#5 during a round table discussing control and safety devices and their impact on urban environments. The installation was shown in (…)

  • In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as a mix between documentation center, conference venue and educational display. "The Mundaneum is an Idea, an Institution, a Method, a (…)

  • October

  • An Mertens will participate in a panel discussion on ’Transdisciplinary experiments’ in the framework of Cultuurforum 2020, organised by the Flemish Governement.
    Other participants in the panel are the following men: Kurt Vanhoutte (UA Theater- en filmwetenschap), Peter Missotten (de (…)

  • On the 5th of October the design collective LibreObjet publishes plans for a new piece of display furniture called Peggy for Fablab/Maker-Hacker-spaces. Take up the fabbing gauntlet and make your own version!
    What is done in a fablab often stays invisible for fellow users, the infrastructure (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Friday 7th October 2016 (10-18h) we will gather around a few algoliterary projects that were developed before and during the Summer. We’ll look into them, discuss & tinker. We’ll also set topics & (…)

  • In the next three weeks you still have a chance to have a look at ’21C/19C. Procedures for Anthropometric Image Reversal’ in the window of Constant. On Friday 21 October, from 16:00 to 18:00, the artist will be present to answer your questions and discuss your ideas for and responses to the (…)

  • Public discussion with presentations by: Geoff Cox, Christian Ulrik Andersen, SÁ¸ren Pold: Machine Research; Sarah Garcin: Publication-Jockey; Kristoffer Gansing, Daphne Dragona: transmediale 2017; An Mertens, Femke Snelting: Constant.
    If you want to join us for a vegetarian buffet afterwards (…)

  • With Antoinette Rouvroy (Université Namur) and Seda Guerses (Leuven University): Histories of big data.
    Two lectures and a conversation in collaboration with VUB, Department of Communication Sciences.
    From 24-26 October, Constant hosts the research/Phd workshop Machine Research in (…)

  • New landscapes are in the making by how we interact with our telephones and computers. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein, an Algolit Extended group reinterpreted part of the novel using contemporary artificial intelligence, ’On Journey with Hovelbot’ in the window (…)