March 2016 - February 2017

  • January

  • 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 (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • 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 (…)

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

  • 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 (…)

  • November

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Thursday 3rd November we will start from Uncertainty Detected, a supervised machine learning script (using Python and Scikit Learn) that predicts uncertain sentences in scientific papers. By looking at (…)

  • A presentation / discussion at feminist art center La Centrale in Montreal (CA) of two projects around hybrid languages that Constant has organised over the past years in Brussels. Peter Westenberg will be presenting practices, policies, desires, complexities, and potential of the Brussels (…)

  • In this workshop organized by Luiza Crosman, a group of participants will visit the office of Constant, association for art and media. An Mertens and Femke Snelting will present the organisation, the space and some of its tools. Afterwards, the group will be free to investigate the space, (…)

  • 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 (…)

  • During one week Constant will show her books in the framework of the exhibition ’TYPE.CODE’ in La Maison du Livre in Saint-GIlles. These books are published by Constant, made with 100% Free and Open Source and published under open content licenses. This is why they deserve the hallmark ’Book (…)

  • There are several fablabs/makerspaces/hackerspaces active in Brussels. Every lab is different with regards to its infrastructure, machines, resources and availability of materials. Some of these labs have made their own version of Peggy, a piece of display furniture. All Peggy’s are based on the (…)

  • Contribution to Reading Rooms, a series of evenings dedicated to the act of collective reading organised by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
    This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format (…)

  • Algolit organises a first dive in neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Amongst others, we’ll build a neural-net dedicated computer / XMPP bots.
    Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.

  • As a contribution to the a.pass event The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting and Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver propose a day long session, aimed at aligning the a.pass computing infrastructure with the ambitions and aspirations summoned by the commons.
    Tech giants currently (…)

  • December

  • Constant started its worksession DiVersions with an afternoon in the Royal Museum for Art and History. Inspired by the way versions are embedded in the daily practice of software-development, we explored tools and infrastructures that invite different and divergent histories
    The program (…)

  • The collective Libre Objet will present variations of Peggy, exhibition furniture for Fablabs and Maker-Hacker-spaces.
    During the month of October, a series of labs in Belgium was asked to produce their own version of Peggy. Each working with different equipment and materials, Peggy naturally (…)

  • On October 5th, the design collective LibreObjet published plans for a new piece of display furniture called Peggy for Fablab/Maker-Hacker-spaces. Often the lab/space is used for its infrastructure, but the objects and projects themselves stay transitory or invisible for other users. The Peggy (…)

  • In the light of the versions of the display furniture (for fablabs/hackerspaces) called Peggy, we will have a talk about ’Objects in Common’, Free/Libre/Open Design (with LibreObjet and Entropie). Also on the agenda: the deconstruction of Wally, an open source knitting machine.
    Opening at (…)

  • Algolit organises a second dive in neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Amongst others, we will put a neural-net dedicated computer to work!
    Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.

  • From October 2015 until December 2016 a worksession, an exhibition and lots more ran under the header of Objects in Common. The fablab and maker culture, conversion of digital objects to the physical realm, and the issues that come along (from geopolitical to licensing to infrastructure) were (…)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Participants choose how to get into the topic, through reading, tutorials, code experiments, alone or in company... Impressions and experiences are shared throughout the day. (…)

  • For the first Constant_V of 2017, Pascale Barret installs a selection of artworks in the window of Constant: a catalogue and a rice wine experimentation developed during her last residency at TEMI in South Korea.
    Spending this residency between wild and urban life, mountains with shamans, city (…)

  • Data-driven systems do not arrive from nowhere, into the world like magic. Like all technologies their development and deployment follows particular historical trajectories and continuities which are influenced by larger forces. In contrast, most of the research on ’social impact’ has drawn (…)

  • As a contribution to a symposium on design research organised by the department of design at the Hamburg University, Femke introduces the Technogalactic Software Observatory (TSO), a temporary study center, poetic training camp and walk-in clinic that Constant will open in the World Trade Center (…)

  • February 2017

  • In the framework of Transmediale, Michael Murtaugh, Sarah Garcin and An Mertens presented how publishing activities – collective writing, editing and lay-out – lead to a pdf or a printed brochure as a reminder that digital creation can also exist without the cloud.
    In recent years Constant (…)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We will follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html ). Please make (…)

  • As a preparation for and critical evaluation of a proposal by the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) for an Internet of Things Inspector, participants from Constant, Dyne:BXL, COSIC Leuven and others gather in WTC25 to test out the testbed with their camera’s, (…)

  • "This is a book of translations - because translation permits dissemination - of certain selected texts which seem ti us to pose important questions, and which enable us to conceptualise our actions and our position in the future, in technology, in society, and in the network. Questions such as: (…)